"What message are we sending to our children when they come away saying, 'I'm an ape with less hair?'" asks the church pastor, Patrick Gray.

The Christian war against science education will never end in Idiot America's Bible Belt.

From a Georgia TV news website at Church wants evolution theory out of science classes: "What message are we sending to our children when they come away saying, 'I'm an ape with less hair?'" asks the church pastor, Patrick Gray.

The message biology teachers are sending is people are apes with less hair. So what? What could possibly be wrong with telling the truth?

Apparently the truth threatens Patrick Gray, a Georgia preacher man whose career depends on the denial of basic scientific facts. Georgia, by the way, is famous for their Christian thugs who harass and threaten biology teachers. Please see These cowardly Christian assholes harassed, threatened, and yelled at an elderly female biology teacher.

Patrick Gray is just a worthless professional moron so who cares about his cowardly fear of science. Unfortunately the TV news website reports there is a worse problem, a science denier (Bob Staples) from the same church who is on a state committee that is working to develop science standards for education.

Why is this uneducated moron on a government committee that makes decisions about science curriculums? Actually this is normal for Idiot America. Perhaps this is why Americans are famous for their total ignorance and irrational fear of science. Thanks to the Christian scum who infest our country most of our students are learning virtually nothing about evolution, the most important and most interesting fact of science. Our students learn how to hate science because our teachers are either incompetent or they fear harassment from Christian thugs.

Bob Staples (the science denier on a state science committee) said "You cannot read Genesis 1 and 2 and also agree with evolution. They are contrary to each other. They are contradictory."

You are correct about that, Mr. Staples. If Christians want to grow up and accept reality, they have to throw out their worthless holy book. So what?

The Christian war against science education is out of control. There is a solution but wimps will call it too extreme.  Just kill all the Christians (about 80% of America's population).

A less violent alternative would be to fire all Christian science teachers. Then no matter what idiots decide about science curriculums, at least the science teachers would be competent.

The science denier wrote in a letter to his state board science committee "Presenting evolution as fact should be concern to all Georgians. That evolution is not a fact of science and shouldn't be taught."

Way to go Mr. god-soaked Bob Staples, you just insulted the integrity and hard work of every biologist in the world. I often wonder how do assholes like you sleep at night. If the news website allowed comments I would have asked Staples why did the molecular biologists who work for the best encyclopedia in the world (the Encyclopedia Britannica) write  "There is probably no other notion in any field of science that has been as extensively tested and as thoroughly corroborated as the evolutionary origin of living organisms."

Here's another gem from the Georgia news website: "The crime rate, child abuse, divorce. All of these things rose from a period following the implementation of teaching Darwinian Theory," Staples said.

This is true. Ever since I finished reading The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll, Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne, and The Greatest Show on Earth, The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins, I've been robbing banks and abusing children.

A pro-science Christian reading this post might complain "This is not fair. The science deniers are extremists. We moderate Christians love evolution."

Your problem, moderate Christians, is there's nothing moderate about worshipping the magic Jeebus man who by the way was a science denier just like America's Christian Taliban. Also I noticed you morons don't actually accept evolution. Instead you pollute science with your magic fairy to invent, guide, or use evolution. Sorry but your supernatural magic is not a mechanism of evolution so you're no less insane than the Bible thumpers who are trying to destroy America's science education. You are part of the problem so why don't you grow up and throw out your idiotic Jeebus death cult.

Light pollution kills baby sea turtles. Stupid assholes don't care.

Please see my other two posts about endangered sea turtles at Idiots destroy 100 eggs from an endangered leatherback sea turtle. They belong in prison. and at Every human ape has the moral responsibility to do everything possible to save species threatened with extinction.

Palm Beach County, a bit north of where I live near the southeast Florida coast, already bans lights facing the beach during sea turtle hatching season (May 1st to October 31st). They now plan to force everyone within a few miles from the shore to dim their lights. After baby sea turtles hatch they are attracted to the light of the moon over the ocean so they crawl to the sea where they will spend the rest of their lives. Out of 100 eggs there will be only about one sea turtle which will survive to become an adult.

If the baby sea turtles see lights from the human ape species they will crawl inland instead of to the ocean and they will die, all 100 of them. The hotels and condos by the beach now turn off their lights but this hasn't been good enough. There is too much light pollution from miles away so now Palm Beach County and hopefully other counties will put an end to these unnecessary lights. The turtles will then be able to find their way to the ocean and even the human residents will benefit from being able to see many more stars at night.

Of course there are some fucking assholes who don't mind wiping out an entire species so they are not inconvenienced by less light. These subhumans need to be tortured and killed.

The rest of the post is a copy and paste job from a May 28, 2012 Fort Lauderdale, Florida newspaper at Saving sea turtles could mean lowered lights — miles from shore.

Saving sea turtles could mean lowered lights — miles from shore

May 28, 2012|By Andy Reid and Susannah Bryan, Sun Sentinel

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Dimming the lights along the coastline hasn't been enough to save endangered sea turtles, so now plans are afoot to lower the lights at everything from car dealerships to football stadiums miles from shore in Palm Beach County.

The proposed dim zone could stretch all the way to Interstate 95 in some areas and encompass Mizner Park, downtown Boca Raton and several car dealerships along Federal Highway.

Some think it's a worthy adjustment for a good cause. Others think its nuts.

The Maroone Nissan dealership off Federal Highway in Delray Beach keeps its parking lot lights on through dawn, said Christopher McCray, general manager.

"There's no dim switch," he said. "Everyone knows that what keeps the criminals away is keeping the place lit up like a Christmas tree."

Sky glow is a growing problem in Broward County as well, particularly in downtown Fort Lauderdale and Port Everglades, said Richard WhiteCloud, head of Sea Turtle Oversight Protection, a group of volunteers that protect nests in Broward.

"They like to make the skyscrapers look good from I-95," WhiteCloud said. "I understand they want the city to be lit up like the Wizard of Oz and Emerald City, but they don't understand the impact."

Jay Goodart, general sales manager at a Toyota dealership on Federal Highway in Deerfield Beach, said it was nice of people to try to save sea turtles, "but business has got to run."

The bright lights at his lot are meant to protect the safety of customers who prefer to shop at night, Goodart said. "It's also for security, so we don't have people [thieves] crawling around the lot at night."

Efforts to save the hatchlings — which are born to follow the moon to the sea, but instead become disoriented by bright lights and follow them inland to their deaths — have already led to lowered lights on beachfronts. Now environmentalists want cities and businesses to lower the lights as far as three to five miles inland.

Palm Beach County is working with cities to change building codes to require that new buildings have lighting fixtures with targeted beams that limit the spillover glow. The next step would be encouraging retrofits of existing lights shining on large parking lots.

Even under ideal circumstances, the turtles' odds for survival are dismal: Only 1 percent of about 1.3 million born on Palm Beach County's shores each year survive.

Once baby turtles break out of their shells, dig out of the sand and emerge onto the beach, their little bodies have a finite amount of energy left to make the trek across the sand, into the surf and out to sea.

Ideally they hatch at night, which helps them avoid raccoons and other predators. If so, they rely on the light from the night sky bouncing off the water to guide them out to sea.

But too often, the man-made glow to the west lures the turtles in the wrong direction, over dunes and into streets. Turtle monitors sometimes arrive in the morning to see tiny turtle tracks leading from the nest, in the opposite direction of the ocean.

Palm Beach County officials expect it to take years to spread the message and push back the urban glow far enough for turtles to be able to focus on the natural nighttime shine off the water. For public outreach, officials plan to use bus signs, brochures, stickers and even temporary tattoos with the message "Dark Skies Save Sea Turtles' Lives."

"We've gone a long way with dealing with direct light on the beach," said Daniel Bates, county environmental director "But we are still getting [turtle] disorientation because of the sky glow behind it."

New Yorkers Lyn and Bruce Rosensweig, in Boca Raton for a wedding, liked the idea of curbing South Florida's urban glow.

"I think it would be good for the turtles, and the people too," Lyn Rosensweig said. "Who wants to see all those lights?"

In addition to a public awareness campaign, local government could consider offering tax-reduction incentives to businesses that take on the additional expense of retrofitting lights to make them more turtle-friendly, said Jennifer Bistyga, who administers Boca Raton coastal projects.

Businesses that take steps to limit "light trespass" could also be recognized with awards or designations acknowledging their environmentally friendly efforts.

"They are not going to make these changes on their own," Bistyga said. "The bottom line is money."

There is no evidence for magical intelligent design creationism.

Hello Bible thumpers and terrorists, this post is for you. I will write about a fantasy shared by both Christians and Muslims. It's a story from the Bible and from the Qur'an. It's currently called magical intelligent design creationism which are code words which mean magical Bible creationism and magical Qur'an creationism. In the rest of this post I will call it magical creation.

The idea called magical creation means that a god fairy waved its magic wand to instantly create every species on earth out of nothing. According to this religious fantasy there has been no development of new species since this mother of all magic tricks.

There's something very interesting about magical creation (beside the fact it's insane). It has no evidence. Not one shred of it. There are absolutely no evidences for magical creation. It's an idea that requires faith, lots of faith.

The Bible thumpers and the suicide bombers like to pretend there's evidence for their magical creation of every creature out of nothing. What they like to do is something like this: "This creature is too complicated to have evolved from an ancient species, therefore it was magically created out of nothing."

They don't understand the power of natural selection over a long period of time. They also don't understand that natural selection is a non-random process for the same reason artificial selection is non-random.

Even if their idea that a creature is too complex to have evolved was true (it's not true) that would not be evidence for their magical creation out of nothing. Evidence against something (whether the evidence is real or imaginary) is not evidence for anything else.

When faced with these obvious facts the terrorists and Bible thumpers will say something ridiculous like "It takes greater faith to believe in evolution than it does in Christ the Creator." A Wisconsin preacher actually said that. Preachers will say anything to defend their worthless careers. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair

The problem with that idea (faith required to accept evolution) is it's wrong to pretend a basic scientific fact like evolution, supported by 150 years of scientific discoveries and overwhelming evidence, is something that requires faith. The magic Jeebus man certainly requires faith but basic facts of science don't require faith.

Christians and Muslims (and members of other science denying cults), your choice is magic or science. Normal people prefer science. You prefer magic. I suggest you have mental problem. You might want to work on getting your disease cured.

Maybe the previous post will help you understand. Please see This is just one of the thousands of evidences for evolution but by itself it completely proves evolution beyond any doubt. There is no evidence for anything that is stronger than endogenous retroviruses in identical chromosomal positions of two different species.

One more thing. If you science deniers ever decide to grow up and accept the massive powerful evidence for evolution you're going to have to throw out your supernatural god. A wimpy atheist will tell you it's possible to accept both religion and science, but as you probably already know, that atheist wimp is a liar. You won't find any dishonesty on this blog. I check my facts and I'm honest about everything. I would never tell Christians or Muslims they can accept 21st century science and still have supernatural fantasies. I would never say that because I have moral values. There can be nothing more important than being honest. A person's reputation depends on it. I might not be perfect, but I make sure nobody can ever accuse me of being a liar.

This is just one of the thousands of evidences for evolution but by itself it completely proves evolution beyond any doubt. There is no evidence for anything that is stronger than endogenous retroviruses in identical chromosomal positions of two different species.

The chart comes from Prediction 4.5: Molecular evidence - Endogenous retroviruses.

This blog already has other posts about ERVs. The best explanations on this blog for this undeniable evidence for the evolutionary relationship between modern human apes and the other modern ape species are at Endogenous Retroviruses make Jeebus cry.

If you're an evolution denier then you're either a Christian Bible thumper or you're a Muslim suicide bomber or you belong to some other idiotic religious cult. You can't deny this extraordinarily powerful evidence for evolution without looking like an idiot. You can't invoke your usual "we science deniers interpret this evidence differently from the biologists". You can't say that because there is only one possible explanation that makes sense. ERVs in identical locations in the chomosomes of more than one species can only mean these ERVs were inherited from a common ancestor species.

If you're a creationist (you prefer magical creation instead of science) and you try to deny this evidence, you are either too cowardly to try to understand it, or you're too lazy to understand it, or you're just plain stupid. Either way you will look like an idiot if you don't accept this as 100% for sure proof we share an ancestor with chimps and all other Great Ape species.

Go ahead and study it creationists. If you don't like being called willfully ignorant then educate yourselves. Study this evidence long enough so even you can understand it. If instead you go running to your favorite professional retard for the magic Jeebus man for their idiotic explanation of ERVs, you will still be willfully ignorant and you will still be an uneducated moron. You will never learn anything if you listen to professional assholes for your Christian death cult or Muslim death cult.

If I sound a bit disrespectful to you science deniers, then try to imagine how much respect you would have for a flat-earther. You would probably think the flat-earther was insane. Well guess what, creationists, every biologist in the world agrees that evolution deniers are equal to flat-earthers. That's your reputation. Are you proud to be an idiot or are you going to grow up, educate yourselves, and face facts?

It's your life to waste. Make a decision. A lifetime of knowing nothing about reality or a lifetime spent learning all you can about it. Your choice. Your disease is your problem, not mine.

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A National Embarrassment

Only one in six Americans accept a form of human evolution that does not invoke divine intervention or guidance.

SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND SOCIETY: THE PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION IN AMERICA

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May 25, 1925 | Tennessee Teacher Is Indicted for Evolution Lessons

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Researchers aim to assemble the tree of life for all 2 million named species. The resulting tree will be digital, downloadable, continuously updated.

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Richard Leakey predicts everyone will accept evolution in the near future because new scientific discoveries will continue to rapidly accelerate. However a quick look at the comments at these two websites, especially the 2nd one, shows that Mr. Leakey might not realize how serious the stupidity problem is here in Idiot America. 

Scientist: Evolution debate will soon be history

Scientist declares creationism will soon be extinct

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I keep finding more and more undeniable evidence for evolution. Please see these two websites:

Our inner fishes

Anatomical clues to human evolution from fish 

The early human embryo looks very similar to the embryo of any other mammal, bird or amphibian – all of which have evolved from fish.

Your eyes start out on the sides of your head, but then move to the middle.

The top lip along with the jaw and palate started life as gill-like structures on your neck. Your nostrils and the middle part of your lip come down from the top of your head. 

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I wrote the following comment at a news website about America's stupidity problem.

"16 percent said they hold to the view that humans de­veloped over millions of years, without God's in­volvement."

This is not a view. It's a basic scientific fact. All creatures, including modern human apes, evolved from a common ancestor. Magic god fairies didn't have anything to do with it. Only 16% of Americans get it right and that's a national disgrace. The problem is religion and in America the problem is the Christian death cult. Obviously the only possible way to improve America's scientific literacy is to first eradicate the magic Jeebus man fantasy. Evolution must be taught starting in the First Grade before the minds of students are destroyed by religious brainwashing. Also, Christians need to be ridiculed relentlessly. They contribute nothing to human progress. Christians just get in the way.

By the way virtually 100% of the world biologists agree people developed from ancient apes without intervention from a fairy's magic wand. The only exceptions are the professional morons who work for Bible colleges. 

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I copied and pasted this poem from a comment at Evolution and Eastern Orthodoxy: 

Richard Harris on May 25, 2012 at 6:40 pm said:

Here’s a Hudibrastic verse on woo,
for superstitious folk like you.

The Christian’s Jehovah, an Almighty God,
is a capricious and cantankerous clod;
and, so far as I can tell,
the Christian often is as well.
Confused by dogma, the god-fearin’ fogey
can’t fathom the nature of that Bible Bogey.

Is it a father, his son, and an apotropaic ghost too?
Well, it should be obvious that’s ridiculous woo.
And Christians claim this god, in its Empyrean lair,
is omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent and fair,
but, with the unresolved problem of theodicy,
their dogma is eristic, Christian idiocy.

The Jew’s Yahweh, that meshuggeneh, the jerk,
set Jews strict rules on when to work,
how to dress, and what to sup or sip,
and giving baby boys the snip.
The myths of Bronze Age, goat-herding nomads,
have them, metaphorically, by the gonads.

The Moslem’s Allah, a fierce desert djinn,
demands under ‘Islam’, literally, ‘Submission’.
Apostasy is treated just like a crime;
they’ll threaten to kill you, to keep you in line,
and if you dare draw Mohammad in a comic cartoon,
there’ll be riots and killings from here to Khartoum.

Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist,
Zoroastrian, Baha’i, Mormon, and Scientologist,
Confucianist, Shintoist, and Taoist too,
Spiritualist, Wiccan, and the New Ager into woo.
Yea, verily, those of each and every religion,
are mired in the miasma of superstition.

The gods from the Bronze Age up to modern times,
and from the Arctic down to tropical climes,
have inspired theology that’s unsubstantiated twaddle,
on what an invisible and silent god’ll
devise as its inscrutable, eschatological plan,
but all the gods were made in the image of man.

So, why should yours be the one true faith,
in a magic, phantasmagorical wraith?
Belief, without evidence, is just plain crazy,
ignorant, stupid, or thoughtlessly lazy.
When evolution happens, it’s due to Natural Selection,
so life derives no purpose, at a theistic god’s direction.

The evidence is we have just this one life,
with all its pleasures, challenges, toil, and strife.
As social beings we evolved our moral sensibility
to combat selfishness, lust, and venality.
Religion misunderstands, and so invokes the supernatural,
while Humanism strives to promote the good and rational.

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I wrote this comment which may or may not be censored at Evolution and Eastern Orthodoxy:

Christians who accept evolution seem to forget their magic Jeebus man was a creationist. If evolution is true then Jeebus was a know-nothing idiot. Pro-science Christians should ask themselves why do they want to worship an uneducated moron.

I suggest the best way to deal with the religious implications of evolution is throw out religions. Like the poem says, all religious fantasies are ridiculous woo. Everything is much simpler when the woo is thrown out.

"Only two kinds of people have ever tried to convert me: Christian fundamentalists and new atheists."

Fundies try to convert. Atheists only ask that you grow up. Throw out the childish stuff including the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, and the magic god fairy.

New atheists? The word atheist doesn't need any adjectives.

I suggest you should listen to atheists instead of complaining about them.

You wrote about their "astounding philosophical naïveté".

That's interesting. Do you expect non-religious people to waste their time studying your bullshit? That would be like studying astrology. A normal person doesn't have to know everything about bullshit to be able to identify it as bullshit.

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Sam Harris wrote, "It is rather more noble to help people purely out of concern for their suffering than it is to help them because you think the Creator of the Universe wants you to do it, or will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it. [The] problem with this linkage between religious and morality is that it gives people bad reasons to help other human beings when good reasons are available.

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Christianity is a denial of reality.

Christians, this post is a hopeless attempt to convince you you're wrong about everything.

Every Christian fantasy could not possibly be real. For example, dead people can't be resurrected even if they pretend to be related to a deity. The dead stay dead, especially if they have been decomposing for three days.

People can't perform miracles, also known as magic tricks, because magic is not real. Even preachers like Jeebus can't do magic stuff. Jeebus, by the way, was not a god or a son of a god. That idea is so batshit crazy it's ridiculous I have to tell you it's just a fantasy.

Christians, your most idiotic fantasy, which you share with all other religious cults, is your idea that there is a supernatural master of the universe, a creature with unlimited magical powers. None of you Christians know where it's hiding and what it looks like. Nobody has ever seen it and of course it has not one shred of evidence.

Gods were invented to solve scientific problems. Thanks to the hard work of thousands of scientists we now know these scientific questions can be answered without invoking supernatural magic. In any case invoking a magical god to solve a problem is a childish lazy excuse to not think. Scientists never invoke magic and you shouldn't do that either. If you want to live in the 21st century you have to throw out your god fantasy.

What you Christians need to do is ask yourselves is magic real. If your answer is no then you have to throw out your Christian death cult. If you think magic is real then you have a serious psychological problem that might be incurable.

If you're a Christian and you're still reading this you might be thinking "Hey, wait a minute. I can't throw out my belief in a magical heaven. There's got to be something more than just this one life."

Christians, you need to realize your heaven fantasy is obviously nothing more than wishful thinking. That's all heaven has, your wish that it was true. There's no nice way to say this, Christians. Anyone who believes their magical soul gets magically sent to a magical heaven is being both childish and cowardly.

Christians, I'm asking you to grow up and face facts. You are nothing more than animals. Just like any other animal when you drop dead that's the end of you. You no longer exist. This is called reality. You might not like reality but you can't wish reality will go away.

Christians, if you do decide to grow up I suggest you will be many times better off. If you become an atheist you will experience for the first time in your life what it's like to be totally free.

Hello Christians. In this post I write about some facts you have to face if you want to live in the 21st century instead of the Dark Ages.

Christians, I know you are interested in the truth. I'm interested in the same thing. This is why I love science, especially evolutionary biology.

Sorry Christians, but if you ever want to accept reality instead of your supernatural fantasies, you're going to have to face some facts you may not like. Not to worry because you will eventually figure out reality is many times more interesting than the fantasy world you live in now.

"The religious imagination is paltry and petty compared to the awesome reality." -- PZ Myers 

Before we face those facts, Christians, you need to understand the tremendous scientific progress of the last decade. Scientists have pretty much figured out everything, and they did not have to invoke supernatural magic to explain any of it. Your god of the gaps has run out of hiding places.

They know how this solar system formed including our planet and our moon. The moon is the most interesting story. When the Earth was still young, less than a half billion years old, a rather big rock about the size of Mars smashed into it. The debris from this mother of all collisions circled our planet eventually forming our moon, and very gradually, a few centimeters every year for four billion years, the distance between the moon and the earth gradually increased to where it is now.

The young earth was also bombarded by countless comets. Our young solar system was a chaotic mess, but partly thanks to our gigantic vacuum cleaner called Jupiter, most of the stuff flying all over the place has already been cleaned up. We still get hit with the occasional huge asteroid. For example about 65 million years ago the dinosaurs who ruled the earth were wiped out by an asteroid that landed near southeastern Mexico. They found the crater under the Gulf of Mexico. (I'm not looking these facts up but it should all be mostly correct, look it up if you're interested.)

With the dinosaurs out of the way our small mammal ancestors who used to be hiding under the ground or at the tops of trees now had the whole planet to themselves and they evolved to fill all the new niches. Eventually only 200 thousand years ago one branch of the tree of life developed into modern human apes, and guess what, Christians, the god you believe in didn't have anything to do with it.

So what does that make us? This is one of the most important facts you Christians will have to face. Obviously we are just animals, just one small twig on the vast tree of life. There's nothing special about us. In our niche a larger brain made our survival possible. Our closest non-human cousins, the chimpanzee apes, evolved just as much as we did, but instead of a larger brain they developed massive strength. The weakest chimp could beat the heck out of the strongest human. And those chimps are not so different from us. They are altruistic and it's interesting that tests have shown their short-term memory is superior to ours.

Also interesting is the fact that the brains of dolphins are equal in size and quality to our brains. They are extremely intelligent animals but we have the advantage of living on land and we have hands.

My point is we are just apes. We are an extremely successful species, but we should never forget where we came from and how we got here. It's wrong to pretend we're special.

What are you going to do with these facts, Christians? Are you going to become mentally disturbed, or are you going to love learning everything you possibly can about the history of life? I suggest to get started you should listen to and/or read the best radio speech ever made about evolution by a biologist at Brown University in Rhode Island at If there's anything that might make Christians understand why denying evolution is a waste of a life, it is this speech by Ken Miller. 

Lots of luck Christians. And remember what's important. The truth. Do you want to find it or not?

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The living fossils of brain evolution

The living fossils of brain evolution

May 23, 2012
Enlarge

Ancestor (left) and descendant (right). The image shows a reconstruction of the common ancestor of all living mammals (Hadrocodium wui) from the Early Jurassic, which has the size of a paper clip. Right, a model of a human brain. In terms of brain organisation, the mouse (centre) is probably a “living fossil”. The diagrams to the right show a mixed (right) and a modular ordered structure of nerve cells in the cortex. Credit: MPIDS

(Phys.org) -- In the course of its evolution, the architecture of the mouse brain may have barely changed. Similar to the tiny ancestors of modern mammals that lived about 80 million years ago, nerve cells in the mouse visual cortex are densely packed in a small area of ​​the brain. However, during the subsequent evolution of larger brains the architecture of the cerebral cortex was radically restructured. This is the conclusion of an international team of researchers led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, the University of Göttingen and the Bernstein Center Göttingen. The brains of larger mammals, such as humans, however, have a completely different structure to those of mice. Processes of self-organisation led to the emergence of modules in which neurons conjointly are responsible for specific tasks.

Humans are considerably larger than almost all of their ancestors. Our great-great-great-grandparents were on average about 10 centimetres shorter than us. Going further back in time, the difference increases impressively. The ancestors of humans, and modern mammals in general, that lived 80 million years ago all weighed less than 100 grams and were usually only a few centimetres in size. Ecological niches that would have allowed a larger body were occupied by dinosaurs. Only the great extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago allowed our ancestors a “growth spurt” of historical dimensions. Within just a few million years mammals evolved that were more than 100 times as large as their Mesozoic ancestors.

A well-known international team of scientists led by Max Planck researchers reports in the journal Science that this growth spurt probably led to a fundamental reshaping of neural circuits in the brain. Scientists from the Goethe University in Frankfurt and their international partners hwere also involved in the study. As the researchers discovered, neural circuits in the visual cortex of the brain, corresponding to the smallest details, developed independently in different lineages. Computer simulations and mathematical calculations show that this correspondence reflects basic laws of self-organisation of large-scale neuronal networks. The researchers point towards the existence of “living fossils of brain development”. This refers to species which preserved our ancestors’ neuronal circuits’ architecture until today. Among them, amazingly, is also one of the closest relatives of primates: the mouse.

An essential aspect of human evolution was the enlargement of the brain and especially of the cerebral cortex, whose tasks include conscious perception, decision making, and many memory processes. This brain area in humans – as in many other mammals – is divided into modules in which groups of neurons are interconnected in dense networks and contribute to  common tasks, such as the perception of a certain hue. The paper, which has been published in Science, analyses the evolution of what is known as orientation columns, modules of the visual cortex that build the basis of the perception of form.

Hundreds of these modules, which typically have a size of about one millimetre, are located side by side within the visual cortex. The new study shows that this spatial orientation precisely follows geometric rules. Surprisingly, the same laws have evolved independently in separate lineages that led to the development of big brains and even in animals that differ greatly from each other in brain size. The new results thus refute a competing hypothesis that assumes strong dependencies of geometrical properties and brain size. It suggests that during a substantial period of ​​the evolutionary enlargement of the brain only the number of modules increased. The laws of their arrangement, however, remained unchanged.

The authors point out that these laws cannot apply for the entire phylogeny. Wolfgang Keil, first author of the study explains: “In our Mesozoic ancestors, these rules of brain architecture must have reached their limits. Their brains were so tiny that not even a single module would have fitted in the cerebral cortex.” Thus, the researchers consider it to be likely that our ancestors had a fundamentally different architecture of their visual cortex.

In fact, all living mammals that are lighter than 100 grams seem to lack orientation columns completely. In mice, for example, nerve cells that process different tasks in the visual cortex are seemingly randomly mixed. Whether our brain architecture originates from a mixed or an even stranger brain organisation can only be deduced after further investigations, the researchers argue. An important task for future studies will be an investigation of laws that govern small brains. “In fact, there are many dark continents in terms of the architecture of the visual cortex in the different lineages of mammals,” says Fred Wolf, head of the study at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience. The scientists hope that their work will encourage colleagues around the world to help resolve this fundamental mystery of our origins. 

More information: Wolfgang Keil, et al. Response to Comment on “Universality in the Evolution of Orientation Columns in the Visual Cortex.” Science 27 April 2012: Vol. 336 no. 6080 p. 413 DOI: 10.1126/science.1206416 

Journal reference: Science

Provided by Max Planck Society

Do liberal atheists disgrace atheism?

From the point of view of Christians, I would say most definitely liberal atheists disgrace atheism.

Why would Christians who are interested in things like having a family want to listen to liberal atheists who think disgusting ideas like abortion and same-sex marriage are wonderful? Why should a Christian trust liberal atheists who think out-of-control government spending and raising taxes to pay for it is good for the economy? Why shouldn't a Christian complain about liberal atheists who ridicule the Magic Jeebus Man while tolerating the terrorist organization called Islam?

Christians should know most atheists are not liberals. It might seem like most atheists are liberals but that is only because liberals are crybabies who make a lot of noise. It's more likely the majority of American atheists are economic conservatives who want to limit the size of government and who respect the idea of having families. While they don't think it's right to stick their noses into other people's private lives, they would almost never think it's a good idea to terminate a pregnancy. And they would not be pleased if their son or daughter was only interested in the same sex because like every other normal person they want to be grandparents.

I'm an economic conservative and I'm an atheist. I'm disgusted with liberals who cheer wildly when a politician says he wants to make abortion legal. I agree abortion should be legal but I wouldn't be screaming "kill the fetuses" like liberals like to do. I also don't think we should throw out the dictionary definition of marriage to accommodate a small minority of perverts.

Like most Christian conservatives I don't understand why liberals (both atheist and theist) think it's a good idea to punish success with higher taxes. People who work hard all their lives, live frugally, and save and invest all the money they can, should not be punished just because thanks to their hard work they have become successful and wealthy. If liberals don't think they are being taxed enough I invite them to make a contribution to the United States Treasury.

Christians, there are wacko atheists and there are normal atheists. Please ignore the wackos. They don't matter because most of them, while they might be educated, are just plain stupid.

The normal atheists are just like you Christians. The only difference is we don't have any supernatural beliefs. If you ever want to throw out your magic Jeebus man, that doesn't mean you have to throw out everything else. Your desire to have a family and eventually become great grandparents is good thing. You can keep that and everything else if you ever decide to join us normal atheists here in the 21st century.

There's an unfortunate myth about America's normal people, also known as atheists.

Many Christians think all atheists or virtually all atheists are liberals. This is a terrible misconception but I can almost forgive them for thinking that because the liberal loons make the most noise.

Atheist means one thing and one thing only: not a theist.

Not believing in supernatural bullshit has nothing to do with anything else including politics. There are about 30 million atheists in America and they are, like the rest of the population, just as likely to be economic conservatives as they are to be liberals who know nothing about how capitalism works.

The only difference between America's theist Republicans and America's atheist Republicans is the atheists do not want to make the United States a Christian theocracy, and they will not attack science and science education to defend the magic Jeebus man.

Unfortunately the only political party in America that is for economic conservatism is often also for sticking the dead Jeebus everywhere he doesn't belong including our public schools and our local and federal governments.

Fortunately the 2012 Republican candidate for president is not as god-soaked as the other candidates who could have won the nomination. Mitt Romney is likely to focus on his job as president and not pretend to be a preacher man like for example the brain-dead Rick Santorum.

So please, Christians, please get rid of your misconception that all atheists hate capitalism. At least half of us and perhaps most of us love capitalism. We have contempt for your fantasies, but we are economic conservatives. We know capitalism works best when government gets out of the way.

Christians, to help you understand, please see an excellent blog at THE ATHEIST CONSERVATIVE.

I wrote more about this subject at these six posts:

Capitalism works best when the government gets out the way.

I have some advice for Mr. Romney.

Why do American liberals suck up to Muslim scum?

Everyone should read both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Every day until the American election for president in November 2012 there will be a new Gallup Poll showing who the voters will choose.

How to be wealthy

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This editorial is from today's May 21, 2012 Wall Street Journal.

Bain Capitalism 101

How does a rapacious company get repeat business?

Watching Obama campaign ads or MSNBC, one could easily come to the conclusion that Bain Capital makes money by destroying the companies it owns. So for voters unsure about the business that Mitt Romney founded but still reluctant to trust the financial analysis offered by community organizers, some perspective might be helpful.

The basic Obama-liberal critique goes like this: Bain buys a company, loads it with debt and then sucks out cash before foisting the wounded business upon an unsuspecting buyer or a bankruptcy court. In the risk-taking world of private equity such a scenario can certainly happen, and it's true that Bain likes management fees and dividends as much as the next partnership.

But then how to explain the history of Bain Capital? Mr. Romney started the business in 1984. The company has since bought and sold many businesses and executed thousands of financing transactions.

If Bain's standard operating procedure were to hand the next owner of one of its companies a ticking bankruptcy package, how is Bain still finding buyers nearly three decades later? And who would agree to lend money to a company backed by Bain? Wouldn't word have gotten around by, say, 1987 that Bain's portfolio companies weren't creditworthy?

The liberal critique of private equity assumes that the financial industry is full of saps who have been eager to lose money across the table from Bain for 28 years. This is the same financial industry that the same liberal critics say is full of greedy schemers when it comes to padding their own pay or ripping off consumers. But financiers can't be both knaves and diabolical geniuses at the same time.

Learning about Bain successes like Staples or Gartner or Steel Dynamics confirms the logical conclusion that Bain had to be creating value along the way—for investors, for lenders, and that means for workers too.

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Romney opens new front against Obama, saying schools are failing

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"It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is they are opposing."

The quote about the uneducated morons who deny evolution comes from Richard Dawkins, a British guy who recently published The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Another excellent book about the evidence for evolution is Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne (a biologist at the University of Chicago).

Christian tards and Muslim terrorists refuse to read these books or anything else about evolution, so they know nothing about the science they are denying.

What's their problem?

They have many problems including a complete lack of any curiosity, a cowardly fear of reality, an irrational mistrust of normal people (also known as atheists),  and of course there is their burning stupidity.

Instead of studying evolutionary biology (it's the most interesting branch of science, Christian morons don't know what they're missing) they go way out of their way to know nothing about it. There's no shortage of professional assholes who are willing to help them know nothing. The assholes are called liars for the magic Jeebus man, and they have made a career from spreading lies and misconceptions about evolution for their gullible customers. The professional liars know they can get away with any bullshit because they know their retarded Christian customers will never verify anything. If a professional asshole says "there are no fossils of transitional species" their customers will never bother to google "transitional fossils". They just automatically believe anything that defends the everything-is-magic fantasy world they live in.

This blog has 24 posts about fossils (and many more posts about other much more powerful evidences for evolution) including This is for the Christian assholes who say there are no transitional fossils.

One of the most annoying misconceptions the Bible thumpers and the terrorists have about fossils is their idea that fossils are the only evidence for evolution. Perhaps that's why they spend so much time spreading lies about fossils. What they don't know is there are countless thousands of evidences for evolution from molecular biology that are many times more powerful than fossils, including human chromosome two and endogenous retroviruses.

Even without fossils, we have evidence of human evolution from comparative anatomy, embryology, our vestigial traits, and even biogeography. We've learned of our fishlike embryos, our dead genes, our transitory fetal coat of hair, and our poor design, all testifying to our origins. The fossil record is really the icing on the cake.

-- Jerry Coyne 

But not to worry, Christian tards, there is a professional asshole who is willing to provide you with lies about virtually every scientific discovery.

If there's a paper in one of the big journals that discusses more evidence for evolution, there is a creationist hack somewhere who'll quickly write it up and lie about it.
-- PZ Myers

I wrote in a previous paragraph about Christians (and their terrorist friends) having no curiosity. A person who wasn't totally deranged, if he or she was stupid enough to deny more than 150 years of scientific progress that has made evolution the strongest fact of science, would at least have enough curiosity to find out why all the world's biologists love evolution. Unfortunately for Christians their curiosity was sucked out of them thanks to several years of the child abuse called religious indoctrination. So they never learn anything because they have no desire to learn anything. It's a terrible problem and usually it's incurable. Out of control burning stupidity can't be fixed.

Evolution has one big advantage over the childish idiotic religious alternative called magical intelligent design creationism. That advantage is evidence, tons of it, more powerful than Darwin could have imagined possible. And guess what, here comes another quote. This guy wrote The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution. He is a biologist at the University of Wisconsin.

The denial of evolution requires denial of the bedrock of two centuries of biology and geology. That is quite a feat.
-- Sean B. Carroll 

For all of those who do see the overwhelming evidence of natural selection and life's descent from ancestors, and the immense span of time over which the story of life unfolded, it is, to put it mildly, baffling how so many still do not. It is absolutely astonishing and often infuriating that some take it so far as to deny the immense foundation of evidence and to slander all the human achievement that foundation represents.
-- Sean B. Carroll

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Please see 72% of American high school biology teachers should be fired.

This is the most disgusting pathetic thing I have ever seen. A fucking idiot Christian science denier who teaches science was fired. That should have been the end of it, but in this idiot country he was able to take a small city to court, wasting $900,000 of taxpayer money, even though the Christian asshole lost.

If you're a Christian science teacher you're not qualified to teach science because you're just plain stupid. You should be fired and publicly humiliated, and most certainly you shouldn't be allowed to waste taxpayer money like this worthless piece of shit did.

This story came from a news website in Ohio which was also about theocratic Christian assholes who have been sticking their magic Jeebus man into a city government. To all Christian scum, fuck off and die you brain-dead subhumans.

“We keep kicking God out of everything.”

Mount Vernon is home to John Freshwater, a teacher fired in 2008 for teaching creationism and religion in his middle-school science classroom. Freshwater fought his dismissal, a battle that made national headlines and cost the school district more than $900,000.

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There is more evidence for the idea that Christians are stupid assholes at Can People Who Have Never Heard of Jeebus Be Saved?

"The world really needs more people to tell all the lost people in the world about Jeebus and the amazing good news that he died for sinners so that whoever believes will be saved."

The idiot preacher man expects all non-Christians to be eternally tortured in his magical hell because they weren't stupid enough to belong to the Christian Death Cult. According to the deranged asshole, anyone who doesn't praise his magic Jeebus man deserves the torture.

I might have written this before: Fuck off and die Christian scum.

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Another god-soaked science denier shows off his or her stupidity at God created the universe.

I wrote this comment for the idiot who wants to dumb down science education to accommodate his Jeebus fantasy.

Dorsey Byers wrote "He is right on target about evolution being an unproven theory and should not be taught as fact. I am amazed at the anger these kind of comments stir up in the academic community. Many seem determined to teach this as fact and thank God many teach it as a theory."

These kind of comments provoke anger because they're stupid.

You obviously know nothing about science. You don't even know what a scientific theory is.

Read these quotes and then tell us why you pretend to know more about evolutionary biology than all the biologists in the world. The truth is you know as much about science as your dead magic Jeebus man. At least Jeebus had an excuse to be an uneducated moron. He lived 2,000 years ago.

"There is probably no other notion in any field of science that has been as extensively tested and as thoroughly corroborated as the evolutionary origin of living organisms."
-- Encyclopedia Britannica

"THEORY: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses. The contention that evolution should be taught as a "theory, not as a fact" confuses the common use of these words with the scientific use. In science, theories do not turn into facts through the accumulation of evidence. Rather, theories are the end points of science. They are understandings that develop from extensive observation, experimentation, and creative reflection. They incorporate a large body of scientific facts, laws, tested hypotheses, and logical inferences. In this sense, evolution is one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have."
-- National Academy of Sciences

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This blog has 86 posts about the evidence for evolution.

Here is a list of some of these posts:

Evolution deniers trust the results from paternity testing in humans. The same method is used to determine evolutionary relationships.

Human chromosome 2 and chimpanzee chromosomes 2p & 2q

This is for the Christian assholes who say there are no transitional fossils.

Endogenous Retroviruses make Jeebus cry.

Lanugo makes Jeebus cry.

A challenge for Christian and Muslim science deniers. Explain the existence of lanugo on human ape and whale fetuses.

Christians, meet one of your ancestors. This creature lived during the transition from fish to land animals about 375 million years ago.

Even the most retarded evolution denier should be able to understand this undeniable evidence for evolution.

Undeniable evidence for evolution, explained by the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Why do many whales have legs and pelvic bones separated from the rest of their skeleton? These vestigial organs are powerful evidence for evolution.

Some of the strongest evidence for evolution is the fossil record and the molecular evidence that describe the development of whales.

Evolution deniers can't explain why their god fairy would use its magic wand to create the giraffe's laryngeal nerve 15 feet longer than necessary.

Science deniers, how do you explain Dorudon?

Human embryos: Why does our sequence of development mimic the order of our ancestors (fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal)?

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." -- Thedosius Dobzhansky

Evolution deniers trust the results from paternity testing in humans. The same method is used to determine evolutionary relationships.

Unneeded genes eventually get bumped off by mutations.

It's amazing how much scientific evidence the science deniers have to deny to defend their dead Jeebus.

The ancestor of the Chihuahua is the wolf.

The evolution of the human ape's head and feet

Scientists prove we share an ancestor with chimps. Then professional science deniers lie about the scientific discovery.

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Bible thumpers and terrorists have a lot in common, including the cowardly heaven fantasy that makes terrorism possible, and including the anti-science magical creationism fantasy. You thumpers should be ashamed of yourselves.

The daily suicide bombings will never end. Today (May 21, 2012) there's a story about one Muslim asshole who murdered himself and 96 other Muslims.

A suicide bomber dressed in a Yemeni military uniform detonated himself during rehearsal for a parade on Monday in the capital city of Sanaa. As many as 96 people are reported dead and scores more wounded. 

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Bill Maher is a comedian. He's a liberal so I disagree with him about a lot of stuff, but when he talks about the stupidity of religion he always gets it right.

In Idiot America there is an idiot university called Liberty. Their diplomas are not worth the paper they are written on. They teach the magical creationism fantasy as fact. Their students go in stupid and they come out even more stupid.

Bill Maher said Liberty University is not a real university. He was not the first person to say this. Everyone knows Liberty is a worthless school for god-soaked idiots.

I wrote the following comment at Comedian Jokes That LU Is ‘Not a School,' LU Fires Back:

HumanApe

"We teach the theory of evolution, we teach Biblical creationism." Liberty teaches both science and magic which is pathetic. Bill Maher was not joking when he said Liberty "is not a real school." Educated people have been saying that for a long time. Real universities do not teach magic. http://darwinkilledgod.blogsp​ot.com/

 

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There are wacked out creationists and there are some creationists who are so batshit crazy they need to be forced to wear straitjackets. Here is an example. I wrote the following comment (which most certainly will be censored) at http://keepthefaith.com/profiles/blogs/n6days-org-vigilant-for-the-truth:

"Did dinosaurs turn into birds, or did they go extinct?"

That's a fair question. The answer is one branch of dinosaurs who were already evolving into modern birds did survive the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If you're interested in the details and the latest scientific discoveries about this subject you could google "bird evolution".

"Thus, not only has no one ever seen it take place, no one really knows how it *could* happen."

Biologists have been researching and testing evolution for 150 years and they most certainly do know how it could happen. They understand the mechanisms of evolution (for example natural selection and genetic drift) in extreme detail and they have massive evidence that show these mechanisms work.

"Evolutionism postulates that everything gets better on its own."

Species evolve to become better adapted to a changing environment. In that way they become better. The creatures who have what it takes to survive pass on their genes to the next generation. That's how natural selection works. It's a very simple concept and it has the advantage of being true.

"Did you know that evolutionism runs counter to known *laws* of science?"

Did you know that you don't know what you're talking about. You're obviously not a scientist so you should stop pretending you know more about biology than all the world's biologists.

"And yet every public school in the USA teaches evolution as fact, and as science."

Ask any biologist. Evolution is a basic scientific fact. Unfortunately not every student learns about it because many biology teachers are intimidated by Christians who don't want their children (and everyone else's children) to learn about the science of evolutionary biology which is the most interesting branch of science.
 
“Evolution is a religion.  This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”  (Michael Ruse)

If Ruse really said that he is full of it. It's virtually impossible to find any biologist who would call the foundation of biology (evolution) a religious idea.

"Interestingly, our public schools (and even many private, Christian schools) teach evolutionism and atheism as fact."

In America where I live it would be a violation of the Establishment Clause of our Bill of Rights to teach either theism or atheism in a public school.

Please don't call evolution "evolutionism". Biologists call evolution "evolution" and it's dishonest to call it anything else.

"So if you wanted to give an argument for creation and against evolution, but wanted to do so apart from the Bible, what would you say?  Design!"

You are using "design" as a code word that really means magical creation out of nothing. I suggest calling magic "design" is dishonest.

"Actually, only one is real, and that’s microevolution, also known as adaptation."

Biologists call the whole thing, micro and macro, "evolution". Evolution does not need any adjectives. There is no invisible barrier that prevents a branch on the tree of life to stop evolving before it becomes too different from its ancient ancestors.

"If you’re struggling with evolution, or just want to learn more ways to counter it, come out to our seminars in Chino (Southern California)."

Your time would be better spent learning about what you're denying. It's obvious you know virtually nothing about the evidence and nothing about how natural selection works.

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