Evolution in humans is commonly thought to have essentially stopped in recent times. But there are plenty of examples that the human race is still evolving, including our brains, and there are even signs that our evolution may be accelerating.

Shrinking brains

Comprehensive scans of the human genome reveal that hundreds of our genes show evidence of changes during the past 10,000 years of human evolution.

“We know the brain has been evolving in human populations quite recently,” said paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Surprisingly, based on skull measurements, the human brain appears to have been shrinking over the last 5,000 or so years.

“When it comes to recent evolutionary changes, we currently maybe have the least specific details with regard the brain, but we do know from archaeological data that pretty much everywhere we can measure — Europe, China, South Africa, Australia — that brains have shrunk about 150 cubic centimeters, off a mean of about 1,350. That’s roughly 10 percent,” Hawks said.

“As to why is it shrinking, perhaps in big societies, as opposed to hunter-gatherer lifestyles, we can rely on other people for more things, can specialize our behavior to a greater extent, and maybe not need our brains as much,” he added.

Mutations against malaria

In contrast to our limited but growing knowledge regarding the modern evolution of the human brain, the best example we see of evolution of humans in recent history is linked with malaria, Hawks said. Since the disease often targets humans early in life, there was a strong pressure to evolve defenses from malaria — any genetic factor that confers resistance against it would give descendents a chance to have offspring, while those without such protection were more likely to not reproduce.

There are lots of examples of defenses against malaria. Sickle cell anemia is the best known —the disorder deforms red blood cells into sickle shapes, which can impair blood flow, thus damaging tissues, this malformation also prevents the malaria parasite from infesting blood cells.

“Although sickle cell is best known in Africa, there is also an India-Pakistan variant of it that seems to have evolved separately,” Hawks explained. “Both variants have evolved very recently, in the last three or four thousand years, and in that time have risen to as much as 10 to 15 percent of the populations. That’s pretty rapid change.”

Food and drink

Lactose tolerance is another recent example of a recent evolutionary change.

Most of the world remains lactose intolerant, unable to digest the complex milk sugar lactose as adults, but the evolution of lactose tolerance perhaps some 7,500 years ago in Europe enabled people there to take advantage of non-human milk, a highly nutritious food source one can sustainably procure instead of slaughtering animals.

Other evolutionary changes linked with diet appear to deal with genes conferring protection against type II diabetes.

“When you develop agricultural diets, you might need adaptations to survive on them, the way the digestive systems are regulated,” Hawks said.

Is our evolution accelerating?

There are signs that human evolution may not only be continuing, but that its rate has even accelerated in recent times. Hawks and his colleagues have found evidence of rapid change, with a host of new mutations originating in the last 40,000 years.

So what might explain this apparent acceleration?

“The ecology of humans has been changing,” Hawks said. “The biggest changes have to do with agriculture and its consequences — dealing with a new subsistence pattern that caused people to rely on foods that were never very important before, a radical shift from hunter-gatherer diets. For instance, agricultural populations tend to have more copies of a gene for salivary amylase, which helps them digest starch.”

Before we begin with what I discovered, let’s take a look at what Scientologists believe…first of all, you all might have heard this story.
“Xenu, the ruler of the Galactic Confederacy, brought billions of frozen people to Earth 75 million years ago, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs, creating swarms of disembodied alien soulds known as Body Thetans.”
Not convinced yet? Hmmm, you might after we discover a little bit about the chronology of the universe, according to Scientology.

- 70 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion (70 septemvigintillion) years ago: The Story of Creation Implants
- 5.9 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion to 40.7 trillion trillion trillion trillion years ago: The Glade Implants are implanted.
- 40.7 trillion trillion trillion trillion to about 83 trillion trillion trillion years ago: The Bear Goals are implanted
- 110,000 trillion trillion years ago or earlier to 390 trillion trillion years ago: The Invisible Picture Goals implants are implanted by an unknown alien race
- 390 trillion trillion years ago to 370 trillion trillion years ago: The Black Thetan Goals are implanted
- 4 quadrillion years ago: Thetans enter the present universe and experience Incident I

I’m sorry, I can’t continue…I feel like I’m writing a science-fiction novel. Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera_in_Scientology_doctrine

Let’s go straight to what I discovered on scientology.org…which you all should visit.
First of all, everything from now on in quotations are direct words from the website.

“Scientologists represent a tremendously varied cross-section of society, from Norweigan fishermen, Brazilian soccer players, to Japanese businessmen, Greek artists and Italian educators.”

“They are ethical, active, educated, successful and drug-free (none at all use illegal street drugs).”

“…they underscore the fact that Scientology helps people lead better lives.”

52.5% of Scientologists were introduced to Scientology through a friend or relative, with another 18% through a personality test.

29.2% of Scientologists have been in Scientology for 1-5 years, while 21.3% have 11-15 years, 20.6% have 6-10 years, and 13% have 16-20 years in Scientology.

27.3% of Scientologists have a Protestant religious background, while 26% were Catholics and 23.8% report having no religous background.

80% of Scientologists report they were not married prior to Scientology, while 20% say they were. 53% are now married, while 47% aren’t.
So, looking for a bride? Go Scientology!

Also, most Scientologists have children, with only 2.8% having no children, and 37.8% have two children. So, I guess we can thank Scientology for keeping our species going.

Also, 74.5% of Scientologists reported being ill less often since they began Scientology, while 3.8% report ill more often, and 19.5% of Scientologists’ health stayed the same. So, if you’re one of those people with frequent illness, think about Scientology…magical healing with auditing or whatever.

80% of Scientologists are bove the U.S. National Average in income, and 98.1% report that they are not on welfare. But of course, Scientologists forget to tell you that you have to be rich to pay all for all of their bullshit… And if not, they must give you money or something, shit. Income problems? Try Scientology.

Okay, what I’m trying to get at here is that Scientology is completely stupid…one of the dumbest I’ve seen yet. Not really with their beliefs (which are really out there), but with they way they try to sell their religion.

Also, the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, was a science fiction author! Come on!

Source: Yahoo News
DALLAS (Reuters Life!) – British scientist Richard Dawkins asks readers to imagine they are a teacher of Roman history whose attention is constantly distracted by a movement that claims the Roman Empire never existed.

“Instead of devoting your full attention to the noble vocation of classical scholar and teacher, you are forced to divert your time and energy to a rear-guard defense of the proposition that the Romans existed at all,” he writes in “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.”

His new book lays out the case for evolution, which most scientists regard as a fact, but which is rejected on religious grounds by many Christians especially in America.

Many Muslims also don’t accept it.

Dawkins’ book is the most recent to take aim at “creationism” and its latest incarnation, the “intelligent design” movement, which maintains that the complexity of life can only be explained by a designer.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the British naturalist who made the case for evolution by natural selection, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his masterpiece “On the Origin of Species.”

Dawkins presents the evidence for evolution: the fossil record and the geographical distribution of species. There are also many examples in nature of “unintelligent” design.

During a tour to promote the book Dawkins spoke to Reuters about evolution and its discontents.

Q: You note that tellingly, not a single fossil that has been unearthed contradicts evolution, yet the history that is written all over living animals is so conclusive that no fossil is needed to “prove” evolution. Can you elaborate on this point?

A: “It is a very telling point I think that no fossils have been found in the wrong place … A good scientific theory is one which is falsifiable, which has not been falsified. The point about this is that it would be very easy to falsify it by finding a fossil human, say, from 600 million years ago in the rocks. All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place.”

Q: What, for you, is the strongest piece of evidence for evolution?

A: “I think that the strongest piece of all is the distribution of genes as molecular biologists see them around the animal and plant kingdoms. For a start it’s a very, very convenient fact that every living creature that’s ever been looked at has the same genetic code. We all have DNA.”

Q: Are you aware of a single serious biologist – who has peer-reviewed papers in recognized journals — who embraces intelligent design or who questions evolution?

A: “No. Not a single one.”

Q: We have been seeing various mutations of flu strains in recent years. Is this evolution in action, or evolution before our very eyes?

A: “It is. It’s before our very eyes and it is very fast. And it is because these micro-organisms have a very short life cycle. So it is very impressive evidence. It doesn’t impress creationists very much because they say, ‘oh well, it’s still a virus.’ And for them that’s just the same kind of creature. What they want is to see it turn into a hippopotamus.”

Q: In 1959, the American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote: “… 100 years after the publication of Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species,’ mankind has lived so long under the brilliant light of evolutionary science that we tend to take its insights for granted.” Why, 150 years later, do you think as polls suggest that 44 percent of Americans still reject evolution out of hand?

A: “I would like to think it is just plain ignorance because ignorance is something we can do something about … But there are times when … it’s a kind of willful desire not to learn. It’s a kind of pre-emption, of childhood indoctrination. Children are told that the Bible, or the Koran, is literally true, so if anybody comes along and tells you anything to the contrary, shut your ears and scream because you don’t want to hear it. It’s the devil talking. It’s very, very hard to get through that barrier.”

Please comment!

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/danl-ohs093009.php

LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, October 1, 2009—A Los Alamos National Laboratory geologist is part of an international research team responsible for discovering the oldest nearly intact skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, who lived 4.4 million years ago. The discovery reveals the biology of the first stage of human evolution better than anything seen to date.

The 17-year investigation into the discovery of the extremely fragile remains of the small “ground ape,” found in the Afar region of Ethiopia, is described today in a special issue of the journal Science, which includes 11 papers about the discovery. Nearly 15 scientists from 10 different countries were responsible for the 1994 discovery, including Los Alamos geologist Giday WoldeGabriel, who led the field geology investigations and sampling of ancient lavas and ashes that were used to determine the age of the fossilized remains.

The fossil, nicknamed “Ardi,” is the earliest skeleton known from the human branch of the primate family tree. The branch includes Homo sapiens as well as species closer to humans than to chimpanzees and bonobos. The discoveries provide new insights about how hominids—the family of “great apes” comprising humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans—may have emerged from an ancestral ape.

Until the discovery of Ardi, the earliest well-known stage of human evolution was Australopithecus, the small-brained, fully bipedal “ape man” that lived between 4 million and 1 million years ago. The most famous Australopithecus fossil is the 3.2-million-year-old “Lucy,” found in 1974 about 45 miles north of where Ardi would later be discovered. Ardi’s skeleton and associated Ardipithecus ramidus remains are older and more primitive than Australopithecus.

After Lucy’s discovery, there was some expectation that when earlier hominid remains were found, they would converge to a chimpanzee-like anatomy, based on the genetic similarity of humans and chimps. The Ardipithecus ramidus fossils do not, however, corroborate this expectation.

Ardi’s skeleton contains enough of the skull, teeth, pelvis, legs, feet, arms, and hands to estimate her body weight and height; that she walked on two legs on the ground, but climbed trees and spent time in them as well; and that she probably was omnivorous. Perhaps surprising, Ardi and her companions did not have limb proportions like chimps or gorillas, but rather like those of extinct apes or even monkeys, and her hands also are not chimpanzee- or gorilla-like, but more closely related to earlier extinct apes.

WoldeGabriel and his colleagues used field and laboratory geological methods to determine the age of the extremely fragile fossils by painstakingly analyzing and dating the stratigraphic markers of ancient lavas, ashes, and sedimentary deposits in which the bones were discovered. He also was able to precisely characterize the environment in which Ardi lived.

Ardi’s woodland home included fresh-water springs and small patches of fairly dense forest. Palm trees graced the forest edges, and grasslands extended perhaps many kilometers away. Other fossils associated with Ardi included fig and hackenberry trees; land snails; diverse birds, including owls, parrots, and peafowl; small mammals such as shrews, mice, and bats; and other animals such as porcupines, hyenas, bears, pigs, rhinos, elephants, giraffes, two kinds of monkey, and several different types of antelope.

“It is a privilege to have the opportunity to look back in time into the lives of mankind’s oldest relatives,” said WoldeGabriel. “This is a fascinating and important discovery.”

Humans will continue to find more and more evidence, and hopefully one day we will have the answers to both how and why that everyone can accept.

Source: ABC News
The latest battle in the country’s war over religion in public schools has flared up in northwest Georgia. A school system in Catoosa County has suddenly put a stop to a high school football team’s custom — for nearly 10 years, they have raced onto their home field bursting through banners with Bible verses written on them.
The decision not to allow the banners has touched off anger throughout the community. What do you think? Should the school allow the cheerleaders be allowed to display the banners? Or does it infringe on the First Amendment’s separation of school and religion?

Sure, I would get angry if the school displayed religious banners…but, this is America and students should be able to exercise their freedoms, no matter where they are at! Come on, people!
Feel free to comment and let me know what you think, but you must agree…this has nothing to do with the separation of school and religion, it’s just someone trying to stir shit.

Information for this blog post has came from the Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry, which is actually a fair site, and of course from a favorite site of might, the Atheist Empire.

‘Atheism’ comes from the negative ‘a’ which means ‘no’, and ‘theos’ which means ‘god.’ So, ahteism is in the most basic terms ‘no god’.

The basic tenets of atheism, described on carm.org are listed below, but note that these are the basic tenets according to their website..not all atheists believe this. There is no common doctrine that all atheists follow.

1. There is no god or devil.
2. There is no supernatural realm.
3. Miracles cannot occur.
4. There is no such thing as sin as a violation of God’s will.
5. The universe is materialistic and measurable.
6. Man is material.
7. Evolution is a scientific fact. *It pretty much is, Christian folks.
8. Ethics and morals are relative.

“Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.” – Don Hirschberg

Unlike a religion, atheism isn’t organized under a common doctrine, as I wrote above…pretty much the only shared opinion is: there is/are no deity(ies). Also, atheism remains largely unorganized.

From AtheistEmpire.com:

As stated above (Is Atheism a religion?), atheists do not subscribe to a common doctrine (belief system). Beyond that, Satan is part of the Christian belief system. If an atheist were to believe in the Christian doctrine, he would also most likely have to believe in God and therefore would not be an atheist.

A few atheists do side with Satanists because they believe in the Humanistic and anti-Christian parts of the Satanic doctrine. This however is not common and most Satanists are theists.

Atheists are also commonly accused by Christians and other theists as being the workers of Satan (evil) or being guided by Satan (evil). As for as I know, we are acting of our free will.

Also, from AtheistEmpire.com, that I must address:

An argument that only those who believe they are protected by God are true patriots and are brave enough to fight for their country. Simply not true. Sure atheists are smart enough to realize their mortality, but will and do defend their country and their beliefs.

I, for example, am a member of the National Guard…and I knew plenty of atheist and non-religious people while I was in basic training. There are more serving in your Armed Forces than you think. People who believe this are just crazy. Religion has nothing to do with me defending my country, I defend it because it’s a great country. Without it, I’d be an Anglican or something in Europe

Finally,

Atheism has nothing to do with political beliefs. Atheism is part of the Communist and Socialist doctrines, but atheists are not necessarily Communists or Socialists. Many point to the actions of Communist Russia, China and North Korea as examples of what atheists in political power would do. Communism uses an enforced stance of atheism to squash religious decent and instill it’s own supreme dictatorship. Most atheists would not replace God with an all powerful government, that would be hypocritical. There is a strong belief in the values of freedom brought by a secular government.

“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” – George Bernard Shaw

Call it sick, but I felt good reading the news article below. The churches are getting what they deserve. It brings tears to my eyes imagining poor Christian folks listening to this:

And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend… – JEREMIAH 19:9

Here’s the news article:

Source: APP.COM
NEW YORK
— Organized religion was already in trouble before the fall of 2008. Denominations were stagnating or shrinking, and congregations across faith groups were fretting about their finances.
The Great Recession made things worse.
It’s further drained the financial resources of many congregations, seminaries and religious day schools. Some congregations have disappeared and schools have been closed. In areas hit hardest by the recession, worshippers have moved away to find jobs, leaving those who remain to minister to communities struggling with rising home foreclosures, unemployment and uncertainty.
Religion has a long history of drawing hope out of suffering, but there’s little good news emerging from the recession. Long after the economy improves, the changes made today will have a profound effect on how people practice their faith, where they turn for help in times of stress and how they pass their beliefs to their children.
“In 2010, I think we’re going to see 10 or 15 percent of congregations saying they’re in serious financial trouble,” says David Roozen, a lead researcher for the Faith Communities Today multi-faith survey, which measures congregational health annually. “With around 320,000 or 350,000 congregations, that’s a hell of a lot of them.”
The sense of community that holds together religious groups is broken when large numbers of people move to find work or if a ministry is forced to close.
“I’m really still in the mourning process,” says Eve Fein, former head of the now-shuttered Morasha Jewish Day School in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif.
The school, a center of religious life for students and their parents, had been relying on a sale of some of its property to stay afloat but land values dropped, forcing Morasha to shut down in June.
“I don’t think any of us who were in it have really recovered,” Fein says. “The school was 23 years old. I raised my kids there.”
The news isn’t uniformly bad. Communities in some areas are still moving ahead with plans for new congregations, schools and ministries, religious leaders say.
And many congregations say they found a renewed sense of purpose helping their suffering neighbors. Houses of worship became centers of support for the unemployed. Some congregants increased donations. At RockHarbor church in Costa Mesa, Calif., members responded so generously to word of a budget deficit that the church ended the fiscal year with a surplus.
“We’re all a little dumbfounded,” says Bryan Wilkins, the church business director. “We were hearing lots of stories about people being laid off, struggling financially and losing homes. It’s truly amazing.”
In the Great Depression, one of the bigger impacts was the loss of Jewish religious schools, which are key to continuing the faith from one generation to the next. Jonathan Sarna, a Brandeis University historian and author of “American Judaism,” says enrollment in Jewish schools plummeted in some cities and many young Jews of that period didn’t have a chance to study their religion.
Today, some parents, regardless of faith, can no longer afford the thousands of dollars in tuition it costs to send a child to a religious day school. Church officials fear these parents won’t re-enroll their kids if family finances improve because it might be disruptive once they’ve settled into a new school.
Enrollment in one group of 120 Jewish community day schools is down by about 7 percent this academic year, according to Marc Kramer, executive director of RAVSAK, a network of the schools. A few schools lost as many as 30 percent of their students. Many of the hundreds of other Jewish day schools, which are affiliated with Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements, are also in a financial crunch.
Kramer says 2009-10 will be a “make or break” year for Jewish education, partly because of the additional damage to endowments and donors from Bernard Madoff’s colossal fraud.
Overall, U.S. Jewish groups are estimated to have lost about one-quarter of their wealth.
“It’s going to be painful,” Kramer says. “There will be some losses.”
The Association for Christian Schools International, which represents about 3,800 private schools, says enrollment is down nationally by nearly 5 percent. About 200 Christian schools closed or merged in the last academic year, 50 more than the year before.
At least 80 members of the Association of Theological Schools, which represents graduate schools in North America, have seen their endowments drop by 20 percent or more.
The National Catholic Education Association is still measuring the toll on its schools, but expects grim news from the hardest hit states, after years of declining enrollment.
“Some schools that were on the brink — this whole recession has just intensified that,” says Karen Ristau, president of the association.
Clergy in different communities say worship attendance has increased with people seeking comfort through difficult times, although no one is predicting a nationwide religious revival.
Americans for years have been moving away from belonging to a denomination and toward a general spirituality that may or may not involve regular churchgoing.
The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found more people who call themselves “nondenominational Christians” and rising numbers who say they have no religion at all.
Before the stock market tanked last fall, only 19 percent of U.S. congregations described their finances as excellent, down from 31 percent in 2000, according to the 2008 Faith Communities Today poll.  — Organized religion was already in trouble before the fall of 2008. Denominations were stagnating or shrinking, and congregations across faith groups were fretting about their finances.
The Great Recession made things worse.
It’s further drained the financial resources of many congregations, seminaries and religious day schools. Some congregations have disappeared and schools have been closed. In areas hit hardest by the recession, worshippers have moved away to find jobs, leaving those who remain to minister to communities struggling with rising home foreclosures, unemployment and uncertainty.
Religion has a long history of drawing hope out of suffering, but there’s little good news emerging from the recession. Long after the economy improves, the changes made today will have a profound effect on how people practice their faith, where they turn for help in times of stress and how they pass their beliefs to their children.
“In 2010, I think we’re going to see 10 or 15 percent of congregations saying they’re in serious financial trouble,” says David Roozen, a lead researcher for the Faith Communities Today multi-faith survey, which measures congregational health annually. “With around 320,000 or 350,000 congregations, that’s a hell of a lot of them.”
The sense of community that holds together religious groups is broken when large numbers of people move to find work or if a ministry is forced to close.
“I’m really still in the mourning process,” says Eve Fein, former head of the now-shuttered Morasha Jewish Day School in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif.
The school, a center of religious life for students and their parents, had been relying on a sale of some of its property to stay afloat but land values dropped, forcing Morasha to shut down in June.
“I don’t think any of us who were in it have really recovered,” Fein says. “The school was 23 years old. I raised my kids there.”
The news isn’t uniformly bad. Communities in some areas are still moving ahead with plans for new congregations, schools and ministries, religious leaders say.
And many congregations say they found a renewed sense of purpose helping their suffering neighbors. Houses of worship became centers of support for the unemployed. Some congregants increased donations. At RockHarbor church in Costa Mesa, Calif., members responded so generously to word of a budget deficit that the church ended the fiscal year with a surplus.
“We’re all a little dumbfounded,” says Bryan Wilkins, the church business director. “We were hearing lots of stories about people being laid off, struggling financially and losing homes. It’s truly amazing.”
In the Great Depression, one of the bigger impacts was the loss of Jewish religious schools, which are key to continuing the faith from one generation to the next. Jonathan Sarna, a Brandeis University historian and author of “American Judaism,” says enrollment in Jewish schools plummeted in some cities and many young Jews of that period didn’t have a chance to study their religion.
Today, some parents, regardless of faith, can no longer afford the thousands of dollars in tuition it costs to send a child to a religious day school. Church officials fear these parents won’t re-enroll their kids if family finances improve because it might be disruptive once they’ve settled into a new school.
Enrollment in one group of 120 Jewish community day schools is down by about 7 percent this academic year, according to Marc Kramer, executive director of RAVSAK, a network of the schools. A few schools lost as many as 30 percent of their students. Many of the hundreds of other Jewish day schools, which are affiliated with Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements, are also in a financial crunch.
Kramer says 2009-10 will be a “make or break” year for Jewish education, partly because of the additional damage to endowments and donors from Bernard Madoff’s colossal fraud.
Overall, U.S. Jewish groups are estimated to have lost about one-quarter of their wealth.
“It’s going to be painful,” Kramer says. “There will be some losses.”
The Association for Christian Schools International, which represents about 3,800 private schools, says enrollment is down nationally by nearly 5 percent. About 200 Christian schools closed or merged in the last academic year, 50 more than the year before.
At least 80 members of the Association of Theological Schools, which represents graduate schools in North America, have seen their endowments drop by 20 percent or more.
The National Catholic Education Association is still measuring the toll on its schools, but expects grim news from the hardest hit states, after years of declining enrollment.
“Some schools that were on the brink — this whole recession has just intensified that,” says Karen Ristau, president of the association.
Clergy in different communities say worship attendance has increased with people seeking comfort through difficult times, although no one is predicting a nationwide religious revival.
Americans for years have been moving away from belonging to a denomination and toward a general spirituality that may or may not involve regular churchgoing.
The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found more people who call themselves “nondenominational Christians” and rising numbers who say they have no religion at all.
Before the stock market tanked last fall, only 19 percent of U.S. congregations described their finances as excellent, down from 31 percent in 2000, according to the 2008 Faith Communities Today poll.

Let me hear what you all have to think about this terrible issue!
Note I am being completely sarcastic, I think it’s great…

Evolutionary biologists have long wondered if history can run backward. Is it possible for the proteins in our bodies to return to the old shapes and jobs they had millions of years ago?
Examining the evolution of one protein, a team of scientists declares the answer is no, saying new mutations make it practically impossible for evolution to reverse direction. “They burn the bridge that evolution just crossed,” said Joseph W. Thornton, a biology professor at the University of Oregon and co-author of a paper on the team’s findings in the current issue of Nature.
The Belgian biologist Louis Dollo was the first scientist to ponder reverse evolution. “An organism never returns to its former state,” he declared in 1905, a statement later dubbed Dollo’s law.
To see if he was right, biologists have reconstructed evolutionary history. In 2003, for example, a team of scientists studied wings on stick insects. They found that the insects’ common ancestor had wings, but some of its descendants lost them. Later, some of those flightless insects evolved wings again.
Yet this study did not necessarily refute Dollo’s law. The stick insects may indeed have evolved a new set of wings, but it is not clear whether this change appeared as reverse evolution at the molecular level. Did the insects go back to the exact original biochemistry for building wings, or find a new route, essentially evolving new proteins?
Dr. Thornton and his colleagues took a close look at the possibility of reverse evolution at this molecular level. They studied a protein called a glucocorticoid receptor that helps humans and most other vertebrates cope with stress by grabbing a hormone called cortisol and then switching on stress-defense genes.
By comparing the receptor to related proteins, the scientists reconstructed its history. Some 450 million years ago, it started out with a different shape that allowed it to grab tightly to other hormones, but only weakly to cortisol. Over the next 40 million years, the receptor changed shape, so that it became very sensitive to cortisol but could no longer grab other hormones.
During those 40 million years, Dr. Thornton found, the receptor changed in 37 spots, only 2 of which made the receptor sensitive to cortisol. Another 5 prevented it from grabbing other hormones. When he made these 7 changes to the ancestral receptor, it behaved just like a new glucocorticoid receptor.
Dr. Thornton reasoned that if he carried out the reverse operation, he could turn a new glucocorticoid receptor into an ancestral one. So he and his colleagues reversed these key mutations to their old form.
To Dr. Thornton’s surprise, the experiment failed. “All we got was a completely dead receptor,” he said.
To figure out why they could go forward but not backward, Dr. Thornton and his colleagues looked closely again at the old and new receptors. They discovered five additional mutations that were crucial to the transition. If they reversed these five mutations as well, the new receptor behaved like an old one.
Based on these results, Dr. Thornton and his colleagues concluded that the evolution of the receptor unfolded in two chapters. In the first, the receptor acquired the seven key mutations that made it sensitive to cortisol and not to other hormones. In the second, it acquired the five extra mutations, which Dr. Thornton called “restrictive” mutations.
These restrictive mutations may have fine-tuned how the receptor grabbed cortisol. Or they may have had no effect at all. In either case, these five mutations added twists and tails to the receptor. When Dr. Thornton tried to return the receptor to its original form, these twists and tails got in the way.
Dr. Thornton argues that once the restrictive mutations evolved, they made it practically impossible for the receptor to evolve back to its original form. The five key mutations could not be reversed first, because the receptor would be rendered useless. Nor could the seven restrictive mutations be reversed first. Those mutations had little effect on how the receptor grabbed hormones. So there was no way that natural selection could favor individuals with reversed mutations.
For now it is an open question whether other proteins have an equally hard time evolving backward. But Dr. Thornton suspects they do.
“I would never say evolution is never reversible,” Dr. Thornton said. But he thinks it can only go backward when the evolution of the trait is simple, like when a single mutation is involved. When new traits are produced by several mutations that influence one another, he argues, that complexity shuts off reverse evolution. “We know that kind of complexity is very common,” he said.
If this molecular Dollo’s law holds up, Dr. Thornton believes it says something important about the course of evolutionary history. Natural selection can achieve many things, but it is hemmed in. Even harmless, random mutations can block its path.
“The biology we ended up with was not inevitable,” he said. “It was just one roll of the evolutionary dice.”

What do you all think about this? I actually thought it might have been possible, but I will never know, because I won’t live for another million years!

Story by: Annie Rourke
Hartford (WTNH) – A new study shows a growing number of people don’t identify with any religion leaving many to wonder if faith is being put on the back burner.

“In God we trust”…or, do we? It seems when it comes to religion we, as a society, have become a bit skeptical. A new survey out of Trinity College , in Hartford, is sending shock waves across Connecticut and the country.

“It’s a very big change nationally,” said Barry Kosmin of Trinity College.

Kosmin and Ariela Keysar are the lead investigators of the report. They call themselves “nones” — not to be confused with the Catholic sisters. But when asked, “What religion do you follow?” They simply will reply, “None.”

“Every region and state in the country is showing the same trend,” said Kosmin.

Not all of the “nones” are atheists. Many believe in God but don’t believe in the church, the temple or the mosque.

Statistically there’s more men than women, more young people than old. But the “nones” include all races, religions and ethnicities.

Their findings are reflected on these streets.

“I go to church sometimes, like with my grandma or something like that, but other than that, I don’t really go to church,” said Alizea Thomas of Hartford.

Diana Colombo said she’s still religious, and raised her children that way, but it’s not the same as when she was raised.

“I still pray, I still go to mass, I still go to church but I’m not as into it as I was brought up to be,” she said.

Why the change of heart? The shift began back in the 1990′s.

That year, the “nones” were numbered 14-million; now, it’s more than doubled to 34-million.

In prosperous times, attendance at religious services tends to lag. In recession, it picks up again. So the trend has slowed a bit but continued since the 90′s.

“Your next question’s going to be, why in the 1990′s? I’m going to tell you, that will be the next piece of research because nobody really knows,” said Kosmin.

The state with the highest number of “nones” is Vermont and the lowest is Mississippi. There is a large percentage of former Catholics in areas, like New England, where the church scandals hit hard. There was a disproportionate number of Catholics, particularly men, leaving; they didn’t change religions, just decided against them.

Link: http://www.wtnh.com/dpp/news/hartford_cty/news_wtnh_hartford_study_religionless_200909291838_rev1

So what do you think about this rise of “nones”?
The Trinity College study says that the numbers could rise to 1/4 of this nation’s population in 20 years. Remember, not all of these people are atheists, but mainly just irreligious or anti-clerical.

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-nones-0929.artsep29,0,2190531.story?track=rss

To sum it up, this post looks at all of the screwed up stuff that’s happening in America and the world. So keep coming back! and make sure you comment and let your voice be heard!