Association Of Catholic Bloggers

A long time ago, some folks were — apparently — living happily in the Rhône River Valley. Whether or not they were happy there, we've found evidence that they stayed near what we call the Grotte Mandrin for 50,000 years. And that they somehow managed to keep newcomers from disturbing their solitude: and isolation. Idyllic as that may seem, keeping themselves free from what my culture called miscegenation may explain why Neanderthals aren't part of today's world. Not as identifiable individuals, at any rate. Neanderthals: Finding a New Page From Their Story Recognizing the Homo Neanderthalensis Type Specimen: Eventually The Vanished Neanderthals: Still an Enigma Living Happily in the Middle Rhône River Valley Many Questions, Still Finding Answers Point, Counterpoint, Neanderthals, the Campbells, and Me European, Yes; Biased, Yes; "Anglo-Teutonic", No Familiarity, Forensic Reconstructions, and Another Piece of the Puzzle Muscles, Mammals, and Much...

Scientists have found gene groups we have in common with nearly all animals: thousands of them, from code library that's more than half a billion years old. I'll be talking about that this week, plus why I see no problem with studying this vast and ancient universe. Still Learning Life's Long Story Bilateral Symmetry and Oh, Look! It's a — Thing Bilaterians: 700,000,000 Years of Building on the Basics Ancient Genes, Rewritten Gene Duplication: Let the Modding Begin! Faith and Reason, Science and Religion "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth" Four Centuries in Europe: the Black Death, Wars, and a Label A King, the Age of Enlightenment, and a Few Good Ideas English Politics and All-too-Familiar Attitudes Using my Brain, Admiring God's Universe More at A Catholic Citizen in America . (Discovery: bilaterians, animals with right and left sides, get thousands of gene groups from our last common ancestor. Plus why science and faith get along.)

Wood generally doesn't last long if left out in the open. That's why finding interlocking logs near the Kalambo River is such a big deal. Well, part of the reason. They've been submerged, it that's the right word, in wet sediment. For something like a half-million years. Which makes them part of the oldest known wooden structure. Ancient Builders on the Kalambo River Luminescence Dating and Carbon 14: a Nerdish Digression Finally Finding Kalambo Falls Cavemen, Labels, and Me Lincoln Logs Long Before Lincoln This Doesn't Change Everything : But It's a Big Deal 'Friends, Romans, Hominins...' Good News, Bad News, and (Slowly) Changing Attitudes We're Learning More at A Catholic Citizen in America . (The Kalambo River structure: interlocking logs that are a half-million years old. New data leads to rethinking old assumptions about "humans".)

When I saw "epic importance" and "fossils" in the same headline, I figured whatever'd been found would be at least somewhat out of the ordinary. I've learned to take journalistic puffery with at least a few grains of salt. But this time, the fossils really were something important: exceptionally well-preserved samples from a 470,000,000 year old biome. "Epic Importance", Fabulous Fossils, and a Calamitous Crisis Down a Rabbit Hole — — And Out again Welcome to the Cabrières Biota Lobsters Do It, Maybe Trilobites Did It Lobopodians and Other Seriously Weird Critters Cabrières Biota Fossils: What's the Big Deal? Heraclitus and Life in a Changing World Ordovician Climate and Getting a Grip Two Biota and Increasing Diversity Gradual Cooling, Occasional Meteor Showers, and an Ice Age Living in a Vast and Ancient Universe ... More at A Catholic Citizen in America . (Almost 400 fossils will show how life worked in a polar bio...

Headlines about Tyrannosaurus rex, scientists, and "what we thought we knew" being wrong started showing up in my news feed last week. It's been a while since I talked about dinosaurs, and I found Nicholas R. Longrich and Evan T. Saitta's research paper: a pre-publication copy, at any rate. So this week I thought I'd talk about T. rex, Nanotyrannus, and what they'd learned. That's what I thought. Here's what I wound up with, after diving down delightfully diverse rabbit holes: Tyrannosaurus, Nanotyrannus: New Study, Old Debate T. Rex, Tyrant King Lizard; something else; and King Kong Trix the Tyrannosaur Takes a Walk 'What is Wrong With This Picture?' A Hodgepodge of Oddments A Skull, a Caption, and As-Yet-Unsolved Puzzles Best Supporting Monster? T. Hawkins, H. P. Lovecraft: and a Little Science Great Western Seaway: From Hadrosaurs to Prairie Chickens "...There is a Great Deal We Do Not Know...." Growth Rates...

Betelgeuse, the bright red star in Orion's right shoulder, is a semiregular variable star, with small periods of 185 days and 2,100 days and a main period of around 400 days. It will explode at any moment, and we're right next door. If I had any sense, from one viewpoint, I'd talk about the ozone hole, denounce forever chemicals and promote a 'Save the Panda' fund I'd set up. Or maybe indulge in free association inspired by Revelation and Gematria, and slip in hints that your only hope is to give me money. Yeah. That kind of trouble I don't need. Besides, I suspect the weird mix of numerology and Bible trivia that infested 'Christian' radio during my youth is no longer in vogue. 1 So instead, I'll look at the last two times Betelgeuse was newsworthy. Then I'll talk about cosmic scale, stars and whatever else comes to mind. Headlines! Science Distances, Safe and Otherwise Estimates and an Example Looking Ahead, Looking Back ...

...[A BBC News article] reminded me that it’s been some time since I talked about evolution and how Age of Enlightenment aristocrats viewed different species. And why I don't see a point in complaining about how this universe works.... More at A Catholic Citizen in America . (Some of the oldest stone tools made by humans, assuming Paranthropus is human. Looking at the human family tree, changing assumptions, and accepting what we are learning.)

Science stories and topics have been piling up in my 'to do' list for more than a year. This week, I'm catching up on what we're learning about life here on Earth; and developments in the ongoing search for extraterrestrial life..... More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

It's barely over two weeks since scientists at the University of Cologne published what they'd learned about a trilobite's unique eye. Their research vindicated an amateur paleontologist's observations, and very likely will raise more questions than it answers. That's par for the course. Answering a few questions and raising many more, I mean. So is discovering something new. New to us, that is. This trilobite's 'hyper-compound' eye last saw the light of day — or dark of the ocean floor — 390,000,000 years ago. I had fun writing this, and hope you enjoy reading it. Who knew trilobite eyes could be so entrancing? More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

The University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research has learned that more than half of all Americans think evolution is real. Seems that 2016 was the tipping point. That's when my country, on average, decided to step into the late 19th century. Or stopped listening to Bible-thumpers. Or started learning about science. At any rate: More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

Finding stone tools isn't remarkable. Folks have been making, and occasionally losing, tools for a long time. Scientists think folks upgraded their tech to deal with a changing climate. Or maybe someone else who had done so moved in.... More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

We still don't know exactly how birds got their wings. Literally and figuratively. But we're learning more about when and how they started. Scientists in Europe and China found fossils of birds that lived roughly 120,000,000 years ago. Other scientists found genes with some 'feather' instructions in alligators. That's old news. What's new is that one team coaxed alligator embryo scales into growing as something like very simple feathers. Part of a simple feather, anyway. I'll be talking about those birds, alligator feathers, and why discovering something new doesn't upset me. Also a chimp, the French Revolution something Benjamin Franklin said and evolution.... More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

I'm a Christian. I take my faith seriously. That's why I think part of my job is evangelizing. Which doesn't necessarily mean I'm an evangelist. For some folks, an evangelist is someone like Saints Mark , Luke and John . "The Evangelist" often gets added to their name. Saint Matthew is an evangelist, too. So are Saints like Augustine of Hippo , Francis of Assisi , Francis Xavier and Thérèse of Lisieux . 1 "Evangelist" has quite a few meanings. Merriam-Webster says it's a Protestant minister or someone who enthusiastically advocates something. Oxforddictionaries.com adds "...the writer of one of the four Gospels...." I don't know about the 'enthusiastic' part, but I think sharing what I believe is a good idea. More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

Someone left stenciled handprints on Maltravieso Cave wall. Quite a few 'someones,' apparently. Marking a wall can leave adolescent graffiti or murals like Orozco's "Omnisciencia." I think it's a very "human" thing to do. So do scientists. That's why most figured the folks who made cave paintings were like us: Homo Sapiens. That may be so, but it's not what a new analysis shows. If those stencils are as old as the research says they are, we're going to be reevaluating what "human" means. That got me thinking about art, being human, and a new species of bird that really is new. They didn't exist until a few decades back. More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

Scientists figure a comet started breaking up about 12,800 years back. Nothing unusual there. Many comets break up while they're this close to our sun. This time Earth got in the way before the fragments spread out much. Fire rained from the sky, consuming forest and meadow alike. Sounds a bit like Genesis 19:1 , now that I think of it. Except we didn't start building cities until a few millennia later. Or maybe we haven't found our first cities yet. And that's another topic or two.... More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

Which came first? The butterfly or the flower? And how did flowers happen at all? The question hasn't been answered yet, not quite. But scientists are closer to finding answers. Meanwhile, wondering whether chickens or eggs came first gives philosophers something to do. Aristotle came up with an answer. So did Anaximander, who figured thunder and lightning were natural events: not evidence of divine anger issues. I'll talk about those two, beetles, and Orlando Ferguson's flat Earth map. Also butterflies, flowers and why I think pursuing truth and seeking God work together. More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

A nation's schools are returning to traditional values. Whether that's good or bad news depends partly on how you see what we've learned since about 1859. I think we've learned more about how the universe works, and that this is good news. We haven't consistently made good use of the knowledge, but that's our problem. We've made good and bad use of everything we've learned, from using fire to writing blogs. Whether it's good or bad depends on us, not fire or the Internet. And that's another topic. Two scientists studied an ichthyosaur that had been used as a wall decoration. What they learned adds to what we're learning about those critters. I think that's worthwhile. More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

The biggest critters with backbones are living today: baleen whales. Finding the largest of them started getting harder about a century back. We didn't quite drive the blue and fin whales to extinction, happily. We're learning when they got so big, and maybe why. We're also learning more about origins of dinosaurs and the domestic cat. It's not the same origin. One happened around the time we started storing grain, the other 200,000,000 years ago. Give or take a bit. More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

Humanity's current model may be a whole lot older than we thought. A team of scientists say that remains found in Morocco are human, Homo sapiens. The scientists also say these folks lived about 300,000 years ago. If that's confirmed, they were around 100,000 years earlier and about 2,000 miles away from where we thought Homo sapiens showed up. Other scientists say T. rex may not have been fluffy. It looks like the big dinosaur lost its feathers somewhere along the line. More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

Today's world is remarkable for a lack of dinosaurs. Big ones, anyway. Those critters would have been among the first things someone would notice here for upwards of 200,000,000 years. Then, about 66,000,000 years back, something awful happened. The only dinosaurs left are those little tweeting, chirping, and cawing critters we call birds. Ammonites had been around for even longer, but whatever finished the 'thunder lizards' wiped them out, too. We showed up much more recently, and are learning that there's a very great deal of our past, and Earth's, that we don't know. Not yet.... More at A Catholic Citizen in America .