F Rosa Rubicondior: Creationism
Showing posts with label Creationism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Creationism. Show all posts

Saturday 16 March 2024

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.

Tuesday 22 August 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Urban Great Tits Have Beome Paler Than Their Rural Relatives


European great tit, Parus major.
Urban great tits have paler plumage than their forest-living relatives | Lund University

In an example of how the environment, and in this case probably the availability of different food items, can cause changes on which natural selection can act, a study by an international team or reserchers led by Pablo Salmón of Lund University, Sweden, has shown that great tits, Parus major living in an urban environment have paler breasts than those living in a forest environment.

Although this is probably not an evolutionary change, i.e., a change in the frequency of alleles in the population gene pools, as the cause is probably dietary difference, it illustrates how an environmental change can produce changes in features on which natural selection can act to bring about true evolutionary changes, and so begin the process of allopatric speciation.

Of course, there will be creationists who will misrepresent the scientific fact of evolution, either deliberately, or mendaciously in order to mislead others, who will dismiss this as "not evolution", not for the reason given above but because "they're still great tits/still birds" and haven't grown a new structure or turned into an unrelated taxon.

The research is explained in a Lund University press release:

Saturday 19 August 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Fijian Folk Tale Has Nothing About a Global Flood or The God Who Allegedly Caused It!


Nabukelevu, Kadav, Fiji.
Eruption remembered in riddles and fantastical oral traditions.
A dramatic volcano eruption changed lives in Fiji 2,500 years ago. 100 generations have kept the story alive

2,500 years ago, just 1,500 years after creationists believe the human population of the world had been reduced to just 8 people in a genocidal flood, there was a volcanic eruption on one end of the island of Kadavu in the south of the group of Pacific islands now known as the Fijian Islands.

The people who were already living there, having presumably migrated there from the Middle East in just 1,500 years, remembered the details of the eruption and passed them on, complete with the local gods to whom they attributed the events, not in writing, but encoded in riddles and a symbolic oral tradition which "included fantastic beings flying through the sky, fighting each another furiously and noisily, drinking the ocean dry, and throwing giant spears with force enough to leave massive holes in rocky headlands", according to research by a group of scientists including Professor Patrick Nunn of the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia.

Curiously, if the Bible tales of a global flood had been true, people to whom a local volcanic eruption was such an important event in their history that they remembered it in such an elaborate way, regarded a genocidal global flood as not worth a mention, and the god who allegedly caused it as unworthy of inclusion in their pantheon.

This is the ludicrously unlikely scenario that creationists have to try to rationalise in order to avoid considering that their favourite Bronze Age fairy tales are anything other than literal truths.

The research which has decoded the Fijian oral traditions is the subject of an article by Professor Nunn in The Conversation. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Monday 3 July 2023

Unintelligent Designer News - How Trees Evolved Sub-optimal and Complex Seed Dispersal Mechanisms


A seed survival story: How trees keep ‘friends’ close and ‘enemies’ guessing | Penn State University
Hawes, the fruit of the common hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna, in an English hedgerow in Autumn
Hips (Rosa Canina) and blackberries (Rubus Fruticosus)


© 2023 Rosa Rubicondior

Back in November 2013 (was it really nearly ten years ago?!) I wrote a blog post which anticipated this latest piece of research. It was all about how a symbiotic relationship between birds and flowering plants had evolved in which the plants provide birds with food in exchange for them dispersing their seeds, and how this incidentally led to us evolving colour vision. Now this research by a large international team led by Assistant Professor Tong Qiu, of the College of Agricultural Sciences, Penn State University, has looked at the dynamics of this relationship in which trees need to balance the loss of seeds by consumption and their dispersal by those same consumers, and how this balance can change in years of plenty (mast years) and lean years.

The relationship is complex and sub-optimal, exactly as might be expected of an evolved system, but not of an intelligently designed system, which would be optimized and minimally complex to avoid the unnecessary waste of the naturally evolved system. Climate too plays a part in the complex, especially the occurrence of summer drought.

The research is explained in a Penn State News release:

Saturday 15 April 2023

How Science Works - Looking For Evidence That the Current Consensus May be Wrong or Incomplete

How Science Works

Looking For Evidence That the Current Consensus May be Wrong or Incomplete
The small red dot highlighted inside the white box on this James Webb Space Telescope image is an early galaxy, seen as it looked just 350 million years after the Big Bang.

James Webb Space Telescope Images Challenge Theories of How Universe Evolved | College of Natural Sciences
Science is reasonable uncertainty
Religion is unreasonable certainty.
Images of six candidate massive galaxies, seen 500-800 million years after the Big Bang.
These are more massive that the theory predicts.
Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/I. Labbe
The great strength of science is scientists' willingness to re-examine what they think they know and to change their mind when the evidence changes. Science values truth over certainty, so all scientific knowledge is provisional and contingent on not being falsified.

Religion, by contrast, sells certainty and theists value certainty over truth, more so at the fundamentalist extreme, where intellectual dishonesty and sleights of hand to gain followers are rewarded and admired (as the many extremely wealthy televangelists in the USA, to whom lying is second nature, attest). Intellectually bankrupt creationists prefer a comforting lie to an uncomfortable truth. Scientists, on the other hand, can make their name and gain kudos and scientific respect by successfully challenging the consensus view with convincing evidence and exposed frauds are cast into academic oblivion.

To see this in action, try to get a creationist to accept that a glaring contradiction in the Bible means that one or other verse must be wrong because both mutually exclusive contradictory statements can't both be right.

For example, the contradictory accounts of what Judas did with the 30 pieces of silver, how he died, who bought the 'field of blood' and why was it so-called?

Monday 3 April 2023

Artificial Intelligence - How Good Is It And Will It Upset Creationists With Science?

Artificial Intelligence

How Good Is It And Will It Upset Creationists With Science?

AI
I've been playing with the Artificial Intelligence App, Ask AI, available from Google Playstore.

I have to say it is pretty good at retrieving information quickly and accurately and presenting it in a well-written form. The following each took about 5 seconds to generate.

But is it accurate? Judge for yourself. The following was produced in the form of a .png image which I pasted into MS OneNote and extracted the text using OneNote's OCR. The formatting is mine:

Sunday 19 March 2023

Wacky Woo News - The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe
Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Starseeds: psychologists on why some people think they're aliens living on Earth

Cognitive bias
P.T. Barnum, the 'Greatest Showman' and half-owner of Barnum & Bailey Circus reputedly said, "There's a sucker born every minute".

Sometimes though, especially reading the comments of Creationists and religious fundamentalist in the social media, that would seem to be on the conservative side, with tens, or even hundreds, of millions apparently believing in magic and evil demons; that evidence is forged; that scientists are all evil, mad and part of a vast conspiracy; that reality is an illusion, but not to them, and that inerrant knowledge just pops itself into their brain if they have an open mind, so the best expertise comes from pristine ignorance. I've even had a Creationist tell me that Jesus tells him what to believe, curiously, it always coincides with what Ken Ham tells him to believe.

So what is the psychology behind these wackadoodle fantasy beliefs, other than the acute manifestations of clinical psychosis?

Saturday 18 February 2023

Malevolent Designer News: Marburg - Another, Even More Deadly Pandemic in Waiting?

Malevolent Designer News

Marburg
Another, Even More Deadly Pandemic in Waiting?

Marburg viruses
Marburg virus particles
What is Marburg virus and should we be worried?

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently confirmed an outbreak of Marburg disease - in Kie Ntem Province of the West African country of Equatorial Guinea. Marburg disease is a haemorrhagic fever which is frequently fatal in humans. So far, 9 victims have died and a further 16 people are suspected of being infected. 200 contacts of these victims have so far been traced and put into quarantine by the WHO.

Marburg is a filovirus like the related ebola, and has a fatality ratio of 88%. It is highly infectious and easily transmitted. At the moment there is insufficient data to compare its infectivity with that of ebola.
The big concern is that this virus could break out of its endemic stronghold in West Africa and, like the SARS-CoV-2 Virus, become a major pandemic in a world in which health services are already overstretched, still dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, which is far from over.

Embarrassingly for intelligent [sic] design Creationists, it is central to their cult think that all life is the work of their supposed designer deity, which, being omniscient, only ever designs organisms like viruses in the full knowledge of what they will do; de facto it designs them to do exactly what they do. In other words, if Marburg does become a major pandemic, that is exactly what it intended when it designed it.

The following article by Professor C Raina MacIntyre, NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, explains what Marburg is, and discusses whether we should be worried. The article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license and reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here:

Saturday 3 December 2022

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Sadist is Spreading Antimicrobial Resistance

Genomic analysis of sewage from 101 countries reveals global landscape of antimicrobial resistance | Nature Communications
 global map of antimicrobial resistance
During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists realised the value of analysing the sewerage outflow from major population centres to monitor the prevalence of the virus and its variants in the population. This technique can also be used to monitor microbial prevalence and variants such as antimicrobial resistance.

Now a team of researchers at the Danish Technical University (DTU) has used data from these analyses to produce a map of microbial resistance at the level of resistance genes, rather than of resistant species.

From a Creationist perspective, what this is measuring is how well their pestilential malevolence is doing in its arms race against medical science to ensure its pathogens retain their ability to make us sick.

The results of the meta-analysis were surprising in that it showed the same genes were present in different species and in different places, indicating that exchange of genes between species is more frequent and extensive than was previously thought.

From the DTU News release:

Sunday 27 November 2022

Unintelligent Designer News - Podcast Now Available

Well, the live show went okay, despite a slight technical hitch with getting the presentation video to run, which gave more time for debate but, sadly, less time for the video. So here it is for anyone who wants to see the entire thing.


Also, the entire show can be viewed again here:
As I said, my book, "The Malevolent Designer: Exposing the Intelligent Design Hoax", contains many more examples of the things in nature that show there was no intelligence or design in what we can observe.

An illustrated companion book, "The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good", is also available in hardcover, paperback or ebook for Kindle, as are my other books on science and religion.

Thank you for sharing!









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Sunday 20 November 2022

Creationism in Crisis - Confirmation of the Role of Environmental Change in the First Mass Extinction

FSU researchers: Rapid fluctuations in oxygen levels coincided with Earth's first mass extinction - Florida State University News
Fieldwork
Professor Nevin Kozik, PhD, of Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science – National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Florida State University, during fieldwork to investigate how rapid changes in marine oxygen levels may have played a significant role in driving Earth’s first mass extinction.


Fundamental to the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is the idea that environmental change causes evolutionary change, a consequence of which can be extinction, especially when change is too rapid for species to evolve adaptations to it. Environmental change can be very rapid (instantaneous in the case of a meteor strike, for example) but evolutionary change is characteristically very slow, needing many generations to produce a significant adaptation.

So, it's hardly surprising that a period of rapidly fluctuating marine oxygen levels about 443 million years ago, caused Earth's first mass extinction at the same time. Confirmation of that, and so of a prediction of the TOE, has now been produced by a team led by Florida State University (FSU) researchers.

The research depends on a fairly recent dating method for marine sediment that measures the proportion of thallium isotopes in the sediment, as explained by Owens, J.D; Neilson S.D; Horner, T.J., et al (2016)[PDF]:

Friday 11 November 2022

Creationism in Crisis - Multiple Origins of Mesopotamian People

Upper Mesopotamia, the fusion center of Neolithic cultures | Gazette Hacettepe -
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Johann Wenzel Peter
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Johann Wenzel Peter (1745-1829), Vatican Museum
Upper Mesopotamia, the fusion center of Neolithic cultures | Gazette Hacettepe

My last blog post dealt with how human cultures evolved by a process which, while maybe not being identical with Darwinian evolution by natural selection, is closely analogous to it, and how it reflected diverse origins in diverse populations affected by wide environmental differences across the range of human habitation.

This is in complete contrast to the narrow culture assumed in the Bible where there is no attempt to explain human cultural origins or even any awareness that it is something to be explained, just as the origin of living creatures and even the Earth itself needed to be explained, albeit with the naïve guesses of people ignorant of science and little or no understanding of biology, geology or cosmology.

This post should disturb Creationists even further because it flies in the face of anything the Bible implies about human origins. Bible literalist Creationists must believe that all humans are derived ultimately from a single couple, magically created in a 'garden' somewhere in the Middle East.

Bible scholars traditionally place this 'Garden of Eden' somewhere in Mesopotamia, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, citing:
The LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

Genesis 2: 9-14:
The problem for Creationists is that a team of Turkish researchers from Hacettepe University and Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey have just shown that the people living in that area between 10,500 and 9,500 years ago had a genetic and cultural makeup that indicates multiple origins from across the 'Fertile Crescent' and that the area was a melting pot and fusion centre, rather than an origin. This conclusion came from an analysis of the DNA extracted from the remains of 13 individuals together with cultural artifacts excavated at Çayönü Hill in the Ergani district of Diyarbakır between 8,500-7,500 BC.

Çayönü Hill, Ergani district of Diyarbakır, Iraq.
As the Hacettepe University news release explains:
Çayönü Hill was first discovered in 1963 by Halet Çambel and Robert J. Braidwood. The excavations that Prof. Dr. Çambel started systematically in 1968 were continued with a break from time to time. During the excavations conducted under the direction of Prof. Dr. Aslı Erim Özdoğan, it was determined that the first settlement in the region started approximately 12,000 years ago and that the region was inhabited until 6,000 years ago. During this long settlement, Çayönü Hill hosted different cultures. Archaeological remains show that the region has a dynamic cultural structure and that the architectural structures have changed over time. In addition, anthropological studies revealed that early examples of various modifications applied to the body, such as artificial skull shaping and trepanation, existed in this culture.

Researchers set out to understand the genetic makeup of people with this dynamic cultural structure. It is known that DNA molecules in human remains exposed to high temperatures due to climatic conditions throughout Mesopotamia are very difficult to preserve. Therefore, in ancient DNA studies carried out to date, the region was only represented by the genome of a single individual from the Boncuklu Tarla excavation site. Dr. Lecturer Füsun Özer stated that under these conditions, Çayönü individuals had a higher level of DNA preservation than expected and continued: “We scanned 33 skeletons from Çayönü Hill, dated between 10,500 and 9,500 years ago, for DNA conservation. Of these, 13 individuals had enough DNA molecules to allow genome analysis. In this region, it was surprising for us to get close to 40 percent success from such old individuals.”

This study, carried out in Upper Mesopotamia, in the northernmost part of the Fertile Crescent, the center of domestication of plants and animals, revealed that the region was a center of attraction during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period, and people from the surrounding geographies mingled in the region. The genetic makeup of the people of the region bears traces from the eastern and western sides of the Fertile Crescent.

The central location of Upper Mesopotamia in Southwest Asia is also reflected in the gene pool of the society. The demographic patterns of the Central Anatolian Neolithic societies in the east and west of the Fertile Crescent, represented by the Zagros Neolithic societies, appear as a mixture in this region.

Dr. Ezgi Altınışık, first-author Human-G Laboratory
Department of Anthropology
Hacettepe University, Beytepe, Ankara, Turkey.
Although genetic diversity is observed to be high, no major change is observed in the genetic structure of the population during the 1,000 years examined. Despite this, the fact that a two-year-old girl is genetically closer to the communities living on the eastern side of the Fertile Crescent reveals that people from outside came to Çayönü and could live in this village. The etching mark found on the parietal bone of this girl presents the first example of the tradition still practiced today. Prof. Dr. Yılmaz Selim Erdal, one of the research team, stated that cauterization as a treatment tool is a common practice in Anatolia, and the Çayönü example is one of the oldest examples of this practice. This specimen, with traces of infection on its inner surface, indicates that it was probably treated with a method including magical-ritual application in order to eliminate the negativities caused by the infection. Erdal stated that, together with the trepanation sample found in Çayönü, these data indicate that Mesopotamia had a very dynamic and somewhat complex cultural dynamic in the Neolithic Age.

Another important finding from the study was to determine kinship relationships in Early Neolithic communities. In the Early Neolithic Period, it was a common tradition to bury the dead in the floors of houses in and around Anatolia. The kinship analyzes [sic] revealed that the individuals buried in the same house in Çayönü were mostly close relatives. Prof. Dr. Mehmet Somel from the Department of Biological Sciences at Middle East Technical University said that they interpreted these results as the social structure of society being organized within the framework of biological kinship. It is seen that this family-centered burial tradition observed in Early Neolithic communities has changed over time, and in some settlements from the Late Neolithic period such as Çatalhöyük, social ties besides biological kinship play a role in burial in the same place.

Finally, researchers sought to analyze how Upper Mesopotamian peoples influenced surrounding communities in later periods. Archaeological studies indicated that Upper Mesopotamia culturally influenced Anatolia during the Late Neolithic period. Genetic analyzes [sic] also revealed that some of the ancestors of people who lived in Central Anatolia (Çatalhöyük) and Marmara (Barcın Höyük) 1,000 years after Çayönü came from Upper Mesopotamia. This shows that people of relatively distant geographies interact not only with the exchange of ideas from afar, but also with human movement.
Fig. 1. Spatiotemporal distribution of the samples and the population structure of Neolithic Southwest Asia.
(A) Timeline of ancient Southwest Asian individuals used in the analyses. Colored horizontal bars at the bottom represent the subperiods of the Neolithic Era in Southwest Asia. (B) The map shows EP and Neolithic populations from Southwest Asia. Shaded areas mark PPN period cultural zones (referred to as the Aceramic period in C Anatolia). (C) Çayönü building types and their approximate dates of use, considered as evidence for Çayönü’s cultural openness and ingenuity. Modified from (112). (D) The first two dimensions of the MDS plot of genetic distances. The MDS summarizes the genetic distance matrix among ancient genomes calculated as (1 − outgroup f3) values. Outgroup f3-statistics were calculated as f3(Yoruba; individual1, individual2). The labels represent the following sites: Anatolia EP: Pınarbaşı; Anatolia PPN: Boncuklu and Aşıklı Höyük; Anatolia PN: Çatalhöyük and Barcın Höyük; Levant EP: Natufian; Levant PPN: Ain’ Ghazal, Kfar HaHoresh, Motza, and Ba’ja; C Zagros N (Central Zagros Neolithic): Ganj Dareh, Tepe Abdul, and Wezmeh Cave; S Caucasus EP (South Caucasus EP): Kotias and Satsurblia. See note S5 for a definition of “Anatolia.” PPNA, Pre-pottery Neolithic A; PPNB, Pre-pottery Neolithic B; PPNC, Pre-pottery Neolithic C.

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
Details are given in the abstract to the team's open access paper publish in Science Advances:
Abstract

Upper Mesopotamia played a key role in the Neolithic Transition in Southwest Asia through marked innovations in symbolism, technology, and diet. We present 13 ancient genomes (c. 8500 to 7500 cal BCE) from Pre-Pottery Neolithic Çayönü in the Tigris basin together with bioarchaeological and material culture data. Our findings reveal that Çayönü was a genetically diverse population, carrying mixed ancestry from western and eastern Fertile Crescent, and that the community received immigrants. Our results further suggest that the community was organized along biological family lines. We document bodily interventions such as head shaping and cauterization among the individuals examined, reflecting Çayönü’s cultural ingenuity. Last, we identify Upper Mesopotamia as the likely source of eastern gene flow into Neolithic Anatolia, in line with material culture evidence. We hypothesize that Upper Mesopotamia’s cultural dynamism during the Neolithic Transition was the product not only of its fertile lands but also of its interregional demographic connections.

It probably wasn't the intention of the researchers to refute the Bible so comprehensively, yet they did so, simply by revealing the truth, as is so often the case with scientific discoveries.

Not only was there never a founding couple (as though that idea ever carried any merit) but the people in the area at the time in which the tale was set had multiple origins from much earlier populations and cultures. Of course, the Bible's authors were entirely ignorant of the facts and the evolutionary history of the people about whom they wrote, and simply made up stories to explain the unknown - and of course, as with so much else, got it hopelessly wrong.

And of course, without Adam and Eve, there was no original sin, no need for salvation and redemption and no need for Jesus, and yet the hideous superstition of vicarious redemption through a human blood sacrifice, and the need to be reconciled with an irascible god to avoid eternal torture, is still used by parasitic priests and imams to control and terrorise ignorant and superstitious people and to justify their demand to be allowed to make laws governing the rest of us and run society in their interest.

Religion teaches us not the think.
Science teaches us how to think.

Thank you for sharing!









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Tuesday 8 November 2022

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence is Trying to Increase Suffering With its Monkeypox Virus

Monkeypox mutations cause virus to spread rapidly, evade drugs and vaccines, MU study finds // University of Missouri
Monkey pox virus particles

Creationists insist that all organisms are the work of their beloved creator god, without whom nothing exists and without whom nothing can evolve because changes in the genome require its intervention. Being omniscient, of course, Creationism's creator knows exactly what its modifications to organisms such as viruses will do, and creates them for that purpose.

So, what creationists would have us believe is that their beloved creator, or divine malevolence, as it should be called, based on its long history of creating pathogens and other parasites designed to make its creation suffer – if you believe Creationists - is that, fresh from its stunning success with the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic still raging across the world, it modified another nasty little virus to increase the suffering still further.

The virus in question is the Orthopox virus that caused the outbreak of Monkeypox, currently giving cause for concern to medical authorities throughout the world.

Orthopox viruses are a family of double-stranded DNA viruses which include variola (smallpox), cowpox and vaccinia. However, it is not ancestral to nor a descendant of variola. Until recently, following its identification as a disease of West African monkeys in 1965, it had been a low-level disease in humans, endemic to West Africa and the Congo Basin, with symptoms similar to, but not as severe as, smallpox. Then is suddenly mutated, broke out of its enclave in West Africa and has now infected more than 77,000 people in more than 100 countries worldwide.

A team of researchers at the University of Missouri have identified the specific mutations in the monkeypox virus that contribute to its continued infectiousness. Or as a Creationist must believe, the specific modifications their divine malevolence made to it to make it more infectious and better able to evade antiviral drugs and vaccinations, so more people would suffer from it.

The University of Missouri news release explains the discovery and how the team made them:

Friday 4 November 2022

Creationism in Crisis - Ancient DNA Reveals a Hidden History of Human Adaptation

Ancient DNA reveals a hidden history of human adaptation
Fig. 1: Geographic and temporal distribution of 1,162 ancient Eurasian samples used in this study
Each human symbol represents a sample, and the colours indicate different populations classified into broad groupings according to archaeological records of material culture and lifestyle (colours indicated at the bottom left-hand side; Supplementary Text 1). Sample ages are represented in the bottom panel in thousand years before present (BP). The green lines depict the generalized migration route of Anatolian EF into Europe ~8.5 ka, where they mixed with WHG (EHG refers to the contemporaneous Eastern Hunter-Gatherers) to create the European Early Farmers (EF). Similarly, the pink arrows represent the generalized movement of Steppe Pastoralists (Steppe; samples east of the Ural Mountains not shown), which resulted in admixture with LF ~5 ka, giving rise to LNBA societies.
Modern genomics and improved extraction techniques meaning more ancient DNA becomes available for analysis is revealing more detail of our evolution as a species as we spread out of Africa and across Eurasia dnd eventually into the Americas.

As an intelligent and technologically advanced species we might have been expected to be able to isolate ourselves from the environmental selection pressures that normally drive evolution, so it's perhaps surprising and maybe a little humbling to discover that there were about 50 period in our history when selection pressures were so intense that a new mutation spread rapidly through the gene pool and quickly reach fixation, with a 'hard sweep' where a formerly rare genetic variation replaces other alleles of the same gene.

The following article by Yassine Souilmi, Genomics and Bioinformatics, Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, University of Adelaide, Christian Huber, Assistant Professor of Biology, Penn State, USA and Ray Tobler, Postdoctoral fellow, Australian National University, explains the research that discovered these intense burst of evolutionary response to environmental factors. It is reprinted under the terms of a Creative Commons lcesne, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original acn be read here:

How Science Works - Discovering the Unexpected History of the First Americans

The Alcobaça archaeological site, in which the skeletal remains of Brazil-12 (northeast Brazil) were unearthed.

Photo credit: Henry Lavalle, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
and Ana Nascimento, Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco)
FAU | Ancient DNA Analysis Unravels the Early Peopling of South America

Despite the claims of Creationist frauds, scientific papers are not, like Creationist articles on Creationist websites, vetted to ensure they simply regurgitates the approved orthodoxy. Indeed, science would stagnate just like Creationism if that were the case. Instead, science progresses by discovering the unorthodox and revealing the unknown.

Sometimes, as in the case of this paper by scientists from Florida Atlantic University in collaboration with researchers from Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA it turns what we think we know on its head and causes us to rethink things. Like deconstructing part of jigsaw puzzle and throwing the pieces into the air.

The research concerns the origins of the native people of South America. The consensus view was that modern humans crossed from Siberia when sea levels were lower, and what is now the Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska, known as Beringia was habitable. From there, they spread south into North America and continued down the Pacific coast, over the Central American isthmus and into South America. Previous genetic studies had seems to support this showing a connection with ancient people from the Altai region of Siberian Central Asia.

However, the genome of two ancient individuals from two different sites in Northern Brazil, at Pedra do Tubarão and Alcobaça, using powerful algorithms and genomic analyses, shows a different story. They show that, not only had there been interbreeding between the ancestors of these people and Neanderthals, but that they also discovered more Denisovan than Neanderthal ancestry in ancient Uruguay and Panama individuals. This is not inconsistent with the Beringia migration theory, of course, but it is the discovery of what happened next, and where this other hominin species DNA came from where the surprise it.

They also found a mysterious and as yet unexplained strong genetic signal linking Australasian (Australia and Papua New Guinea) to an ancient genome from Panama.

Lastly, unexpectedly, they found evidence that there was a northward migration from South America up the Atlantic coast after people had become established east of the Andes.

As the Florida Atlantic University News release explains:
Using DNA from two ancient human individuals unearthed in two different archaeological sites in northeast Brazil – Pedra do Tubarão and Alcobaça – and powerful algorithms and genomic analyses, Florida Atlantic University researchers in collaboration with Emory University have unraveled the deep demographic history of South America at the regional level with some unexpected and surprising results.

Not only do researchers provide new genetic evidence supporting existing archaeological data of the north-to-south migration toward South America, they also have discovered migrations in the opposite direction along the Atlantic coast – for the first time. The work provides the most complete genetic evidence to date for complex ancient Central and South American migration routes.

Among the key findings, researchers also have discovered evidence of Neanderthal ancestry within the genomes of ancient individuals from South America. Neanderthals are an extinct population of archaic humans that ranged across Eurasia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic.

Results of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. (Biological Sciences), suggest that human movements closer to the Atlantic coast eventually linked ancient Uruguay and Panama in a south-to-north migration route – 5,277 kilometers (3,270 miles) apart. This novel migration pattern is estimated to have occurred approximately 1,000 years ago based on the ages of the ancient individuals.

Findings show a distinct relationship among ancient genomes from northeast Brazil, Lagoa Santa (southeast Brazil), Uruguay and Panama. This new model reveals that the settlement of the Atlantic coast occurred only after the peopling of most of the Pacific coast and Andes.

Our study provides key genomic evidence for ancient migration events at the regional scale along South America’s Atlantic coast. These regional events likely derived from migratory waves involving the initial Indigenous peoples of South America near the Pacific coast.

Michael DeGiorgio, Ph.D., co-corresponding author
Associate professor
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
College of Engineering and Computer Science
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA
Researchers also found strong Australasian (Australia and Papua New Guinea) genetic signals in an ancient genome from Panama.

There is an entire Pacific Ocean between Australasia and the Americas, and we still don’t know how these ancestral genomic signals appeared in Central and South America without leaving traces in North America.

Andre Luiz Campelo dos Santos, Ph.D., first author
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
College of Engineering and Computer Science
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA
To further add to the existing complexity, researchers also detected greater Denisovan than Neanderthal ancestry in ancient Uruguay and Panama individuals. Denisovans are a group of extinct humans first identified from DNA sequences from the tip of finger bone discovered around 2008.

It’s phenomenal that Denisovan ancestry made it all the way to South America. The admixture must have occurred a long time before, perhaps 40,000 years ago. The fact that the Denisovan lineage persisted and its genetic signal made it into an ancient individual from Uruguay that is only 1,500 years old suggests that it was a large admixture event between a population of humans and Denisovans.

John Lindo, Ph.D., co-corresponding author
Assistant professor
Department of Anthropology
Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
Previously at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil, dos Santos and colleagues uncovered the remains of the two ancient humans from northeast Brazil, which date back to at least 1,000 years before present, and sent them to Lindo for DNA extraction and subsequent genomic sequencing and analyses. Raw data were then sent to FAU for computational analysis of the whole genome sequences from northeast Brazil.

This groundbreaking research involved many different fields from archaeology to biological sciences to genomics and data science. Our scientists at Florida Atlantic University in collaboration with Emory University have helped to shed light on an important piece of the Americas puzzle, which could not have been solved without powerful genomic and computational tools and analysis.

Stella Batalama, Ph.D.
Dean, College of Engineering and Computer Science.
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA
Researchers compared the two newly sequenced ancient whole genomes from northeast Brazil with present-day worldwide genomes and other ancient whole genomes from the Americas. As of the publication date of the article, Lindo says that only a dozen or so ancient whole genomes from South America have been sequenced and published, in contrast to hundreds from Europe.

Apart from the occurrence of mass burials in the sites that yielded the samples from northeast Brazil, Uruguay, southeast Brazil and Panama, there is no other evidence in the archaeological record that indicate shared cultural features among them. Importantly, the analyzed ancient individuals from southeast Brazil are about 9,000 years older than those from northeast Brazil, Uruguay and Panama, enough time for expected and noticeable cultural divergence. Moreover, northeast Brazil, Uruguay and Panama, though more similar in age, are located thousands of kilometers apart from each other.


Genetic profile at key sites (left). Migration routes (right)
This research suggests that the people who eventually made it to South America, came from a people who had interbred extensively with Neanderthals and even more so with Denisovans, but how the Australasian DNA got to Panama remains to be discovered. The intriguing thing here is that the Australasians themselves have a high proportion of Denisovan DNA and Denisovans are assumed to have been present over much of east and south-east Asia, including the Altai area of Siberia where the first Denisovan remains were found.

As for the creationist claim that only scientific orthodoxy is permitted in peer-reviewed journals, papers like this that cast considerable doubt on the consensus view and raise so many unanswered questions, give the lie to that claim, but it is typical of Creationists that they accuse others of doing what they themselves do, as though accusing others of their own dishonesty somehow absolves them of responsibility for it.

Creationists who publish through sites like Answers in Genesis, or anyone who receives funding from the ICR or the Deception Discovery Institute, must sign an oath that they will never publish anything which isn't in full accord with a literal interpretation of the Bible in general and Genesis in particular. What ‘peer-review’ there is in Creationist circles is merely checking that the oath has been kept.
As I said at the beginning, if Creationist accusations were true, science would be as stagnant as Creationism, never moving away from the handed-down orthodoxy of cult leaders. But as anyone who knows anything about science will know, science is a dynamic, evolving and expanding body of evidence-based knowledge that is responsible for modern technologies like electricity, radio and telephone communications, computers and modern transport systems as well as medicines, modern buildings, clean water and food production.

Without religion, all we would have is some people with nothing to do on holy days and having to take responsibility for their own beliefs and attitudes with nothing to blame and no excuses to justify their antisocial behaviour; imagine life without science.

Thursday 3 November 2022

Creationism in Crisis - Genes Suggest Humans and All Other Mammals Had Insect-Eating Ancestors

Genes suggest that humans and all other mammals had insect-eating ancestors – Evolution For Skeptics
Atavistic genes and remnant pseudogenes are another major embarrassment for the Creation cult leaders, who must feel very fortunate that their dupes won't know much about them or understand their significance from the point of view of divine creation by an intelligent, omniscient designer, or from the point of view of an evolutionary biologist for that matter.

These pseudogenes are, to anyone who understands them, some of the best evidence, not only for evolution but also against any notion of intelligent design, as I explain in my book, Unintelligent Design: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.
To add to this embarrassment, three scientists led by Christopher A. Emerling of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA and the Institut des Sciences de l’Évolution de Montpellier (ISEM), Université de Montpellier, Montpellier, France published an open access paper in Science Advances in May 2018, in which they reported finding that mammals have remnants of one or more of five gene for digesting the chitin exoskeleton of insects, even those mammals which never eat insects, such as rhinoceroses, tigers, elephants and donkeys.

These pseudogenes are thought to be remnants of the time when the stem mammals were small, insectivores living at the time when dinosaurs were the dominant carnivores and herbivores and the early mammals were small, probably nocturnal to avoid the diurnal dinosaurs, shrew like insectivores with sharp pointed teeth, much like those of shrews and hedgehogs today.

As Christopher Emerling in his blog, Evolution For Skeptics, explains:

Monday 31 October 2022

Creationism in Crisis - The Evolution of Mediterranean Green Lizards

Discovering the unknown processes of the evolutionary history of green lizards in the Mediterranean - Universitat de Barcelona
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Despite the forlorn claims of Creationists that the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is a 'theory in crisis' which will soon be overthrown by their childish notion of magic and the interventions of an unproven, unexplained magical entity which makes chemistry and physics do things they couldn't do without it, in the real grownup world of science, the TOE continues to be the basis for understanding biodiversity, and continues to mesh exactly with what is known of climate change, geographical history and the development of ecosystems and ecological niches. This paper from the University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, illustrates exactly that, and in effect is yet another casual and unintentional refutation of Creationism.

If Creationism qualified as a scientific theory, and was taken seriously by scientists working in the field, it would be the real 'theory in crisis', and would have been so ever since Darwin and Wallace explained biodiversity as a process not requiring intelligent agency, back in 1859 - hence the hysteria, disinformation and anti-science rhetoric of its proponents who make a living off the fears and superstitions of ignorant people and need them to stay that way.

In this paper, the scientists set out to reconstruct the evolutionary history of a group of lizards familiar to anyone who has holidayed in the Mediterranean area of Southern Europe and North Africa - the green and wall lizards.

The lizards are from two genera, the Lacerta and Timon. Being biologists the scientists looked at the factors that cause evolutionary diversification - environmental and ecological change and how these dynamic changes related to the genetic and phenotypic changes in the lizards.
As the University of Barcelona news release explains:

Sunday 30 October 2022

Creationism in Crisis - UK's Earliest Modern Humans Came From Two Different Places and Cultures

UK’s oldest human DNA obtained, revealing two distinct Palaeolithic populations | UCL News - UCL – University College London.
Human skull and jaw fragments
Credit: Trustees of the Natural History Museum
Last glaciation in Europe, ~70,000-20,000 year BP

Credit: Wikimedia Commons user Ulamm
It's hard to find a scientific paper these days that doesn't utterly refute the basic dogmas of Creationism. Take for example this paper which deal with the origins of the population of the British Isles at the end of the last Ice Age. There is no intention on the part of the authors to refute the Bible narrative Creationists adhere to, yet they do, simply by revealing the facts.

At the end of the last ice age, what is now the Island of Great Britain was still joined to continental Europe by an area of land, 'Dogger Land', now submerged beneath the North Sea, which stretched across from East Anglia to Holland.

During the glacial maximum, the northern two-thirds of the island and most of Northern Europe was glaciated and so it was repopulated when the ice retreated.

Traditionally, the first anatomically modern humans in Britain were assumed to be hunter-gatherer migrants from Northern Europe who became isolated when sea-level changes inundated Dogger Land and broke through the chalk downs at Dover creating the island of Great Britain, from which Ireland had been separated for hundreds of years. Humans along with the flora and fauna of the island reflects this repopulation over a land bridge from newly-repopulated North-Western Europe, in the immediate post-glacial period when sea-levels were still low enough to allow Dogger Land to be populated.

Fig. 1: Location, genetic ancestry and AMS date of individuals discussed within the text.
Surprisingly though, new research by researchers from University College London (UCL) Institute of Archaeology, the Natural History Museum and the Francis Crick Institute has shown that at least two distinct human populations, with different origins and cultures existed in Britain in the immediate post-glacial period. This conclusion came from an analysis of thee DNA from some of the oldest human remains so far discovered - the remains of an individual found in Gough's Cave, Somerset, England and an individual from Kendrick’s Cave, North Wales, both of whom lived more than 13,500 years ago.

As the UCL news release explains:

Saturday 29 October 2022

Creationism In Crisis - Plate Tectonics Billions of Years Before Creationists believe Earth Existed

Harvard researchers provide stronger proof of plate tectonics billions of years ago – Harvard Gazette
New evidence points to the role of plate tectonics in early Earth’s release of internal heat and the swapping of geomagnetic poles.

Illustration by Alec Brenner
The surprising thing is not so much that Creationists ever existed. Given the power of the Medieval Christian and Islamic religions to coerce the population and force on them simplistic dogma from the ignorant and fearful infancy of our species, and to supress contradicting science, it would have been surprising it they hadn't existed in those days. The really surprising thing is that, despite the massive amount of information which flatly contradicts the childish superstitions and the advanced technological societies in which most of them live, there are actual adults, leading otherwise normal lives, who still believe that childish nonsense.

There really are grown adults who believe Earth was magicked into existence, as is. less than 10,000 years ago!

And these ignorant people exist despite evidence such as this paper, that there were continental movements, known to geologists as plate tectonics, billions of years before they believe Earth was magicked up by a spell from an invisible magician, the existence of which has never been explained, let alone demonstrated with evidence, and the modus operandum which has never been observed.

And, if that wasn't bad enough for the Creation cult, the paper even alludes to the geological clock that has been recording the magnetic reversals of Earth that have occurred 183 times in the last 83 million years and perhaps several hundred times in the past 160 million years, according to NASA.

The scientists led by Harvard geologists, Alec Brenner and Roger Fu, point out that the stability of the early Earth, where basically the same tectonic forces were working as are working still, means the conditions were conducive to the appearance and evolution of self-replicating systems we call life.

As the Harvard Gazette article by Juan Siliezar explains:
New research analyzing pieces of the most ancient rocks on the planet adds some of the sharpest evidence yet that Earth’s crust was pushing and pulling in a manner similar to modern plate tectonics at least 3.25 billion years ago. The study also provides the earliest proof of when the planet’s magnetic north and south poles swapped places. The two results offer clues into how such geological changes may have resulted in an environment more conducive to the development of life on the planet.

The work, described in PNAS and led by Harvard geologists Alec Brenner and Roger Fu, focused on a portion of the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, one of the oldest and most stable pieces of the Earth’s crust. Using novel techniques and equipment, the researchers show that some of the Earth’s earliest surface was moving at a rate of 6.1 centimeters per year and 0.55 degrees every million years.

That speed more than doubles the rate the ancient crust was shown to be moving in a previous study by the same researchers. Both the speed and direction of this latitudinal drift leaves plate tectonics as the most logical and strongest explanation for it.

“There’s a lot of work that seems to suggest that early in Earth’s history plate tectonics wasn’t actually the dominant way in which the planet’s internal heat gets released, as it is today, through the shifting of plates,” said Brenner, a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a member of Harvard’s Paleomagnetics Lab. “This evidence lets us much more confidently rule out explanations that don’t involve plate tectonics.”
Geologists Alec Brenner and Roger Fu, focused on a portion of the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, one of the oldest and most stable pieces of the Earth’s crust.
Photo by Roger Fu
For example, the researchers can now argue against phenomena called “true polar wander” and “stagnant lid tectonics,” which both can cause the Earth’s surface to shift but aren’t part of modern-style plate tectonics. The results lean more toward plate tectonic motion because the newly discovered higher rate of speed is inconsistent with aspects of the other two processes.

In the paper, the scientists also describe what’s believed to be the oldest evidence of when Earth reversed its geomagnetic fields, meaning the magnetic North and South Pole flipped locations. This type of flip-flop is a common occurrence in Earth’s geologic history, with the poles reversing 183 times in the last 83 million years and perhaps several hundred times in the past 160 million years, according to NASA.

The reversal tells a great deal about the planet’s magnetic field 3.2 billion years ago. Key among the implications is that the magnetic field was likely stable and strong enough to keep solar winds from eroding the atmosphere. This insight, combined with the results on plate tectonics, offers clues to the conditions under which the earliest forms of life developed.

It paints this picture of an early Earth that was already really geodynamically mature. It had a lot of the same sorts of dynamic processes that result in an Earth that has essentially more stable environmental and surface conditions, making it more feasible for life to evolve and develop.

Alec R. Brenner lead author
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Today, the Earth’s outer shell consists of about 15 shifting blocks of crust, or plates, which hold the planet’s continents and oceans. Over eons the plates drifted into each other and apart, forming new continents and mountains and exposing new rocks to the atmosphere, which led to chemical reactions that stabilized Earth’s surface temperature over billions of years.

Evidence of when plate tectonics started is hard to come by because the oldest pieces of crust are thrust into the interior mantle, never to resurface. Only 5 percent of all rocks on Earth are older than 2.5 billion years old, and no rock is older than about 4 billion years.

Finally being able to reliably read these very ancient rocks opens up so many possibilities for observing a time period that often is known more through theory than solid data. Ultimately, we have a good shot at reconstructing not just when tectonic plates started moving, but also how their motions — and therefore the deep-seated Earth interior processes that drive them — have changed through time.

Professor Roger R. Fu,
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. USA
Overall, the study adds to growing research that shows that tectonic movement occurred relatively early in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history and that early forms of life came about in a more moderate environment. In 2018, members of the project revisited the Pilbara Craton, which stretches about 300 miles across. They drilled into the primordial and thick slab of crust there to collect samples that, back in Cambridge, were analyzed for their magnetic history.

Using magnetometers, demagnetizing equipment, and the Quantum Diamond Microscope — which images the magnetic fields of a sample and precisely identifies the nature of the magnetized particles — the researchers created a suite of new techniques for determining the age and way the samples became magnetized. This allows the researchers to determine how, when, and in which direction the crust shifted as well as the magnetic influence coming from Earth’s geomagnetic poles.

The Quantum Diamond Microscope was developed in a collaboration between Harvard researchers in the Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) and of Physics.

For future studies, Fu and Brenner plan to keep their focus on the Pilbara Craton while also looking beyond it to other ancient crusts around the world. They hope to find older evidence of modern-like plate motion and when the Earth’s magnetic poles flipped.
In the abstract to their published open access paper in PNAS, the scientists say:
Significance

The modern Earth is geologically dynamic. Convection in its rocky mantle drives plate tectonics that reshapes its surface, and currents inside its metallic core generate a strong planetary magnetic field. However, it is uncertain whether these processes had begun to shape Earth in its deep past. Our measurements of magnetic signals preserved in 3.25-billion-year-old rocks provide the earliest quantitative evidence of both rapidly moving crust—a hallmark of plate tectonics—and a stable ancient magnetic field that episodically alternated polarity. These observations suggest that the early Earth was remarkably geologically mature from its surface to its deep interior, potentially contributing to stable surface conditions for the evolution of early life.

Abstract

The paleomagnetic record is an archive of Earth’s geophysical history, informing reconstructions of ancient plate motions and probing the core via the geodynamo. We report a robust 3.25-billion-year-old (Ga) paleomagnetic pole from the East Pilbara Craton, Western Australia. Together with previous results from the East Pilbara between 3.34 and 3.18 Ga, this pole enables the oldest reconstruction of time-resolved lithospheric motions, documenting 160 My of both latitudinal drift and rotation at rates of at least 0.55°/My. Motions of this style, rate, and duration are difficult to reconcile with true polar wander or stagnant-lid geodynamics, arguing strongly for mobile-lid geodynamics by 3.25 Ga. Additionally, this pole includes the oldest documented geomagnetic reversal, reflecting a stably dipolar, core-generated Archean dynamo.

Just another example there of how Creationism is refuted quite incidentally, simply by revealing the real world evidence with which it is of course entirely inconsistent simply because the people who made up the origin myths in the Bronze Age were entirely ignorant of the science. Incidentally, it's also an example of the way different strands of evidence mesh so neatly to support the idea that life originated on Earth several billion years ago, just as you would expect if the current theories were correct.

Even more amazing than the fact the otherwise normal people believe the childish Bronze Age Creation myths despite this sort of refutation, is that these same people are prepared to perform the most idiotic mental gymnastics to dismiss them, as though being ignorant of scientific evidence is something to take great pride in, because their mummies and daddies were also ignorant of them.

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