ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 184

Did ancient supernovae prompt human ancestors to walk upright?

By the University of Kansas A paper published today in the Journal of Geology makes the case: Supernovae bombarded Earth with cosmic energy starting as many as 8 million years ago, with a peak some 2.6 million years ago, initiating an avalanche of electrons in the lower atmosphere and setting off a chain of events that feasibly …

Scientists Find Possible Traces of ‘Lost’ Stone Age Settlement Beneath the North Sea

By Tom Metcalfe Deep beneath the North Sea, scientists have discovered a fossilized forest that could hold traces of prehistoric early humans who lived there around 10,000 years ago, before the land slipped beneath the waves a few thousand years later. The discovery gives the researchers new hope in their search for “lost” Middle Stone Age …

Did the 2015 Mormon LGBT exclusion policy drive a mass exodus out of the Church?

By Jana Riess and Benjamin Knoll In April, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reversed an unpopular 2015 policy aimed at curbing the participation of LGBT church members and their children (see here for more background). Since the reversal, children of same-sex couples are once again eligible for baptism, and their parents are not subject …

Lawyers for Noah’s Ark theme park are suing its insurance company for rain damage

By Eli Rosenberg and Karen Heller It is one of the world’s classic stories. A gigantic ark is built with the help of a higher power, a symbolic refuge from the depravity of humankind. It is a huge, grandiose structure constructed out of wood and is perhaps larger than anything comparable in the world. Then, …

Pew Research: 41% of Gays/Lesbians/Bisexuals Have No Religious Affiliation

By Hemant Mehta According to a new analysis of the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study — it was so large that they’re still sifting through the data — gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans are far less religious than the nation as a whole. (The survey didn’t have data about transgender people.) … gay, lesbian and bisexual adults …

Trump Administration Proposes Rollback of Transgender Protections

By Abby Goodnough, Erica L. Green, and Margot Sanger-Katz WASHINGTON — The Trump administration formally proposed on Friday to roll back Obama-era civil rights safeguards that had banned discrimination against transgender medical patients and health insurance customers. The Department of Health and Human Services’s proposed regulation would replace a 2016 rule from the Obama administration that …

After All the Handwringing We’re Now Seeing Exactly Why Conservative Christians Supported Trump

By Hollis Phelps & L. Benjamin Rolsky Most of the commentary on the support of right-wing evangelical Christians for Trump has assumed that it is, somehow, out of the ordinary. One of the threads that supposedly runs throughout contemporary evangelicalism is an emphasis on personal piety which, in the public realm, expresses itself morally. Conservative …

Researchers May Have Solved Darwin’s Paradox of How Reefs Are So Productive

By Brian Kahn Cryptobenthic fish may sound weird, but they’re not so different from you and me. They’re vertebrates just like us, though their hearts, bones, and brains are quite tiny. But unlike us, they do two things extremely well. “They’re the masters of premature death,” Simon Brandl, a postdoctoral researcher at Simon Fraser University, …

SpaceX’s 60-Satellite Launch Is Just the Beginning for Ambitious Starlink Project

By Mike Wall Last night (May 23), SpaceX lofted the first five dozen members of its Starlink broadband constellation to low-Earth orbit (LEO) using one of the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rockets. Starlink is designed to provide internet connectivity to people around the world, and it will do so using a truly enormous number of satellites. Starlink …

Let’s Not Forget the Establishment Clause

By Linda Greenhouse I happened to be in Dublin last week when the Alabama Legislature voted to ban abortions. Foreign travel tends to enhance a person’s perception of what’s happening back home, and that was certainly true for me on this trip. It’s almost exactly a year since Irish voters, by an overwhelming two-thirds majority, threw …