ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 243

There’s a new record-holder for closest human object to the Sun

By Eric Berger

In August, the Parker Solar Probe rocketed away from Earth aboard a Delta IV Heavy booster. The relatively small, 685kg spacecraft needed to achieve a high speed in order to establish an orbit around the Sun—rather than getting drawn into the star’s massive gravity well never to escape.

According to NASA, the spacecraft is well on its way. The space agency reports that the probe now holds the record for closest approach to the Sun by a human-made object, passing inside the current record of 42.7 million kilometers from the Sun’s surface on Oct. 29, 2018, at about 1:04pm ET (17:04 UTC). The previous record was established in April 1976, by the German-American Helios 2 spacecraft.

“It’s been just 78 days since Parker Solar Probe launched, and we’ve now come closer to our star than any other spacecraft in history,” said Project Manager Andy Driesman, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, in a news release. “It’s a proud moment for the team, though we remain focused on our first solar encounter, which begins on Oct. 31.”

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Pastor removed after interrupting Sessions speech with Bible verse

By Michael Burke

A pastor on Monday was escorted out of a room after interrupting Attorney General Jeff Sessions‘s speech with a Bible verse, while calling on the Trump administration official to repent.

“I was hungry and you did not feed me. I was a stranger and you did not welcome me. I was naked and you did not clothe me. I was a stranger and you did not welcome me,” the pastor said, quoting a Bible verse while Sessions was giving a speech in Boston on religious liberty.

“Brother Jeff, as a fellow United Methodist I call upon you to repent, to care for those in need, to remember that when you do not care for others, you are wounding the body of Christ,” the pastor added, according to video published by CNN and ABC News.

The pastor was then escorted out of the room. Sessions called the pastor’s interruptions an “attack.”

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Kellyanne Conway cites ‘anti-religiosity’ in Pittsburgh shooting

By Devan Cole

Kellyanne Conway cited “anti-religiosity” on Monday in discussing the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Conway’s remarks during a discussion on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” came less than 72 hours after the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. The alleged shooter, Robert Bowers, targeted Jews online and made anti-Semitic comments during the shooting, law enforcement officials said.

“The anti-religiosity in this country that is somehow in vogue and funny, to make fun of anybody of faith. To constantly be making fun of people who expresses religion,” said Conway, who serves as counselor to President Donald Trump.

“The late night comedians. The un-funny people on TV shows. It’s always anti-religious. And remember, these people were gunned down in their place of worship’,” Conway continued. “As were the people in South Carolina several years ago. And they were there because they’re people of faith and it’s that faith that needs to bring us together.”

“This is no time to be driving God out of the public square. No time to be making fun of people.”

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Saudi Arabia is the Worst Country in the World for Atheists, Says Report

By Hemant Mehta

For the seventh straight year, the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) has released its annual “Freedom of Thought Report” describing serious cases of discrimination and persecution against atheists around the world.

This time, they actually ranked every country in the world in terms of discrimination against the non-religious. They looked at how the countries scored in four categories:

Constitution and Government: A bad score would represent “complete tyranny” against freedom of thought, legislation influenced by religion, and non-religious people barred from holding elected office.

Education and Children’s Rights: A bad score would mean religious indoctrination in schools, and religious instruction only coming in “coercive fundamentalist” form.

Family, Community, Society: A bad score means being openly non-religious is “severely persecuted” or met with violence, such violence is essentially permitted by the ruling class, government authorities openly harass or marginalize the non-religious, and non-religious organizations are barred from forming.

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CRISPR Gene Editing Shows Promise for Treating a Fatal Muscle Disease

By Dina Fine Maron

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a life-threatening muscle-wasting illness. Occurring mostly in males, it is the most common type of muscular dystrophy, striking about one in 3,500 boys and causing their muscles to start breaking down in early childhood. It often confines patients to wheelchairs by the time they are teenagers and usually leads to an early death from heart or respiratory failure. There is no cure—but a genetic fix tested in dogs may offer new hope.

The disease is caused by gene mutations that make patients’ muscle cells unable to produce enough dystrophin, a protein that helps muscles absorb shocks and protects them against degradation over time. In a recent study, scientists used a gene-editing technique called CRISPR/Cas9 to pump up muscle protein levels in four dogs suffering from Duchenne. The advance may hasten clinical trials for similar treatments in humans.

The research team, led by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, worked with young beagles bred to have Duchenne. The scientists edited the dogs’ muscle cells to remove a key barrier to higher protein production—a short, problematic segment of protein-coding DNA that occurs in both canines and humans with the illness. Within about two months the dogs were producing greater amounts of dystrophin; levels in skeletal muscle ranged up to 90 percent of normal, depending on the muscle type and dosage used. (Some dogs produced significantly less.) In cardiac muscle, a crucial target for treatment, levels climbed to as high as 92 percent of normal. The U.T. Southwestern researchers, who published their findings in August in Science, report that they did not detect any unintended changes to other regions of the genome—a common concern with gene-editing technology—and there was no evidence the technique made the dogs ill.

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Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooter Identified As Christian Nationalist Robert Bowers

By Michael Stone

Christian Nationalist Robert Bowers yelled “All Jews must die” before opening fire at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing at least eight and injuring many more.

CBS affiliate KDKA TV reports:

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Police say a gunman opened fire at a Pittsburgh Synagogue yelling “All Jews must die.”

KDKA-TV sources say the shooting suspect is Robert Bowers.

Eight people have been killed and a number of others injured after the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill on Saturday.

Sources on Twitter note the first journalist to identify Bowers as the shooter was Nick Monroe.

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Ireland votes to oust ‘medieval’ blasphemy law

By Emma Graham-Harrison

Campaigners in Ireland celebrated the end of a “medieval” ban on blasphemy on Saturday, after voters overwhelmingly backed removing the offence from the constitution in a referendum.

The referendum saw 64.85% vote yes to remove the prohibition on blasphemy, with 35.15% in favour of retaining it. A total of 951,650 people voted for the change, with 515,808 opposing the move. The decision on a turnout of 43.79%, was the latest reflection of seismic social and political changes in Ireland, which the taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, has described as a “quiet revolution”.

“It means that we’ve got rid of a medieval crime from our constitution that should never have been there,” said Michael Nugent, chairperson of Atheist Ireland, which had campaigned for years to have blasphemy taken out of the constitution.

Voters also returned president Michael D. Higgins to office, giving the 77-year-old poet and human rights campaigner another seven-year term by a comfortable margin.

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Stephen Hawking’s Final Paper: How to Escape From a Black Hole

By Dennis Overbye

The cosmologist and pop-science icon Stephen Hawking, who died last March on Einstein’s birthday, spoke out from the grave recently in the form of his last scientific paper. Appropriately for a man on the Other Side, the paper is about how to escape from a black hole.

Cleansed of its abstract mathematics, the paper is an ode to memory, loss and the oldest of human yearnings, the desire for transcendence. As the doomed figure in Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” sings, “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”

Dr. Hawking was the manifestation of perseverance; stricken by Lou Gehrig’s disease, he managed to conquer the universe from a wheelchair. The fate of matter or information caught in a black hole is one that defined his career, and it has become one of the deepest issues in physics.

Black holes are objects so dense that, according to Einstein’s law of general relativity, not even light can escape. In 1974, Dr. Hawking turned these objects, and the rest of physics, inside-out. He discovered, to his surprise, that the random quantum effects that rule the microscopic world would cause black holes to leak and, eventually, explode and disappear.

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New Arizona K-12 science standards recognize evolution

By Lily Altavena

The Arizona State Board of Education approved revised science and history standards on Monday, shrugging off outgoing State Superintendent Diane Douglas’ suggestion to replace all the standards with a set from a conservative college in Michigan.

The science standards include edits recommended by the Arizona Science Teachers Association after an outcry over how the draft standards addressed evolution. Those edits emphasize that “The unity and diversity of organisms, living and extinct, is the result of evolution.”

The revised standards will be used by K-12 public district and charter schools statewide. Their approval received thunderous applause from educators and education advocates sitting in the boardroom.

Douglas’ motion to adopt the Hillsdale standards was met with silence from state board members. Not one seconded her motion and the proposal failed.

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The God Engine

By James Alcock

Whatever its form, religion is powerful and pervasive and, for billions of people, obviously important. Yet, while major religions such as Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism have endured since ancient times, others, despite having enjoyed great appeal for centuries, have disappeared into the history books. No longer does anyone worship Zeus, the supreme god of the ancient Greeks; Marduk, the Babylonian god of creation; Bast, the Egyptian goddess of protection; Jupiter, the supreme god of the Romans; the Incan Apocatequil; or the Aztec Huehueteotl. Those bygone gods were central figures in highly developed theocracies and were as real to their devotees as are today’s deities to contemporary worshippers.

The continuing power of religious belief in all its many contradictory forms suggests that it serves important functions. Indeed, some researchers consider religion to have become culturally important because fear of the deity promoted social solidarity, cooperation, trust, and self-sacrifice. Important behaviors were either mandated or declared taboo by religion, and believers had little choice but to accept that a powerful supernatural being had deemed them so. This social control in turn increased the likelihood of the survival and reproduction of individuals as well as the long-term survival of the group itself. As religion became deeply established within a group, the religious beliefs and rituals taught to young people contributed an important part of their social identities, and their corresponding roles and duties further contributed to the functioning and cohesiveness of the group.

However, the prevailing view in modern psychology is that religious belief developed not because of those functions but rather as the automatic byproduct of brain systems that evolved for everyday cognition. That is, belief in the supernatural is a natural consequence of the way our brains work, a product of a metaphorical “God Engine” that endows it both with significant power over the lives of people and the groups to which they belong and with strong resistance to change. In other words, a number of automatic processes and cognitive biases combine to make supernatural belief the automatic default.

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