ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 252

South Africa’s largest dinosaur upends theories of how four-legged walking began

By Sarah Wild

Researchers have discovered fossils from South Africa’s largest dinosaur yet — a find that they say changes their understanding of how four-legged walking evolved in this group of animals.

The newly described species, called Ledumahadi mafube, would have weighed about 12 tonnes and is a type of sauropodomorph, a large group of long-necked and long-tailed dinosaurs. In the Southern Sotho language, ledumahadi means giant thunder clap, and mafube means dawn, indicating the species’ relatively early position in their evolutionary lineage. When L. mafube lived around 200 million years ago — during the early Jurassic period — it would have been the largest animal walking on Earth.

Palaeontologist James Kitching first found fossils of L. mafube in 1988 near South Africa’s border with Lesotho. But the bones were left on a shelf for more than a decade and ‘rediscovered’ only in the 2000s in the collections of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Palaeontologists returned to the site in 2010 and completed the excavation last year.

In a study describing the find, published on 27 September in Current Biology1, the researchers argue that this species walked on four legs, which upsets current understanding of how and when this behaviour evolved in the lineage.

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Freedom From Religion Foundation fires back at Roy Moore

By Paul Gattis

The Wisconsin organization that has opposed prayer in public places funded by government is fighting back at Roy Moore’s contention last week that there is nothing illegal about student-led prayer.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation sent a letter to the Foundation for Moral Law, saying that Moore is seeking to “establish Christianity as the paramount law of the land.”

It also outlines what it describes as errors of Moore’s interpretation of law and describes his efforts as “treasonous.” The letter, dated Tuesday, concludes, “We are sorry to see you continue your shameful and ignorant posturing.”

Moore, founder and president emeritus of Foundation for Moral Law as well as a 2017 candidate for U.S. Senate and twice elected as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, released his response to the FFRF in a letter dated Thursday.

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This Radical Religious Freedom Dissent Reveals Kavanaugh’s Views on Sex and Power

By Patricia Miller

At first, in the yonder year of three weeks ago, it seemed that if anything would sink Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination it was his cavalier description of contraceptives as an “abortion-inducing drug” when discussing his dissent from a decision that turned back Priests for Life’s challenge to the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act.

That, of course, was before Christine Blasey Ford made her bombshell allegation that a beer-stupefied Kavanaugh tried to rape her at a party when they were in high school, Deborah Ramirez alleged that Kavanaugh waved his penis in her face at a drunken dorm party at Yale, and Julie Swetnick released a sworn statement asserting that she witnessed Kavanaugh engaging “in abusive and physically aggressive behavior toward girls.

But the two stories aren’t as disconnected as they seem. Both reveal a specific worldview regarding women and sex and exactly who gets to set the rules regarding the policing of such.

While Kavanaugh was happy to repeat the claim of Priests for Life that certain contraceptives are abortifacients in his initial confirmation hearing, the bigger concern is the sweeping power he was willing to confer to religious entities in his dissent from the majority in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit’s ruling.

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Poll: 48% of white evangelicals would support Kavanaugh even if the allegations against him were true

By Tara Isabella Burton

Forty-eight percent of white evangelicals say that embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed even if the allegations of sexual assault against him are true.

Marist asked 1,000 respondents from September 22 to 24 whether they would support Kavanaugh if the allegations by Christine Blasey Ford, who says Kavanaugh assaulted her at a high school party decades ago, were found to be true.

Support for Kavanaugh’s confirmation falls along partisan lines with 12 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of Republicans saying yes. Kavanaugh has consistently denied the allegations, as well as the allegations of at least three other accusers, whose more recent allegations came out too late to be included in the poll.

Aside from the 48 percent who said they would support Kavanaugh’s appointment to the court, 36 percent of white evangelicals say they would not support it, and 16 percent did not have an answer. Mirroring the poll results, many prominent white evangelicals have spoken out in Kavanaugh’s defense, characterizing the allegations against him as part of a liberal plot to waylay his nomination. Jerry Falwell Jr., president of the evangelical Liberty University, sent 300 women Liberty students to Washington, DC, to support Kavanaugh during this week’s Senate confirmation hearings.

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Why Chinese medicine is heading for clinics around the world

By David Cyranoski

Choi Seung-hoon thought he had an impossible assignment. On a grey autumn day in Beijing in 2004, he embarked on a marathon effort to get a couple of dozen representatives from Asian nations to boil down thousands of years of knowledge about traditional Chinese medicine into one tidy classification system.

Because practices vary greatly by region, the doctors spent endless hours in meetings that dragged over years, debating the correct location of acupuncture points and less commonly known concepts such as ‘triple energizer meridian’ syndrome. There were numerous skirmishes between China, Japan, South Korea and other countries as they vied to get their favoured version of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) included in the catalogue. “Each country was concerned how many terms or contents of its own would be selected,” says Choi, then the adviser on traditional medicine for the Manila-based western Pacific office of the World Health Organization (WHO).

But over the next few years, they came to agree on a list of 3,106 terms and then adopted English translations — a key tool for expanding the reach of the practices.

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Study finds religious beliefs have an enduring influence on senators’ legislative behavior

By Eric W. Dolan

New research provides evidence that the personal religious beliefs of United States Senators influence their legislative behavior. The study was published in The Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion.

“I became interested in the topic of the influence of religion on politics after moving to the US from Israel. What I found particularly interesting is how the US had seemed like a country in which there is a clear separation of church and state, and yet religious discourse still dominates many aspects of its politics,” said study author Daniel Arnon of Emory University.

“I became curious whether the avenue through which religion entered politics was primarily from the bottom-up — through constituents’ demands and political representation of religious constituents — or whether the mechanism was more top-down — through the religious preferences of the legislators.”

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PA House Passes Bill Creating Two-Year Window for Old Child Sex Abuse Lawsuits

By Hemant Mehta

A bill passed by the Pennsylvania House in a 173-21 vote this week would give victims of child sexual abuse a chance to get justice.

If the State Senate passes it, which isn’t necessarily a given, it would be a welcome legislative response to the state’s recent grand jury report which found more than a thousand victims of sex abuse at the hands of more than 300 Catholic priests over the course of several decades.

Senate Bill 261 would do the following if it’s signed into law:

Get rid of all statutes of limitations on child sexual abuse cases.
Extend the deadline for civil cases against abusers and those supervising them to age 50. (It’s currently 30.)
Create a two-year window for past victims to sue their abusers if they’re currently timed out of the legal system due to a statute of limitations.

That last one is a really big deal, because it would allow victims who are much older today — and who have a much clearer understanding of what happened to them — to sue their abusers. Many of them are speaking out these days but have no legal option available to them because the crimes occurred decades ago. Now, they could do something about it.

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Anti-LGBTQ coalition launches new campaign for adoption discrimination

By Zack Ford

A group of anti-LGBTQ organizations, including several that have been labeled as hate groups, has launched a new campaign in favor of allowing adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples.

The “Keep Kids First” campaign falsely claims that these faith-based agencies are being targeted to the detriment of the kids they purport to serve.

Not only is the new campaign trying to demonize same-sex parents and normalize taxpayer funding of discrimination, it is also trying to rewrite the history of conflicts between civil rights laws and anti-LGBTQ adoption agencies.

“Organizations like the ACLU are trying to force these providers to go against their beliefs and place kids in homes with couples who are in a same-sex relationship,” the site claims.

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The 150-Year Mission to Reforest Puerto Rico

by Vann R. Newkirk II

RÍO PIEDRAS, Puerto Rico—There was a time when all the lushness around here did not exist. The University of Puerto Rico’s botanical garden is arrayed just south of the metropolitan core of San Juan, nestled between the city and a state forest. The variety of plants is stunning—but still far from complete. Just 80 years ago, a moment in the life of forests, only 6 percent of Puerto Rico was covered in trees. Like much of the rest of the Caribbean, colonial deforestation had reshaped and denuded the island, with massive plantations and the timber trade converting almost every square inch of Puerto Rico. Only the decree of the Spanish Crown preserved any of the old-growth forest, a sylvan remnant of El Yunque in the east, that once covered the island. The gradual return of trees to the island has been a growing but still fragile trend.

That trend was put on hold by Hurricane Maria. Even the ancient rainforest of El Yunque faced severe damage from that storm, and smaller secondary forests fared no better. The 155-mile-an-hour winds of the Category 4 hurricane devastated homes, power lines, and tree cover alike. The defoliation was so thorough that it could be measured by aerial photographs taken by nasa, the deep green replaced by the ugly brown of mud and bare bark. The millions of pounds of rotting vegetation that sloughed off into streets and waterways was so thick that it limited travel, overwhelmed municipal trash services, and created public-health problems. A year later, the green has crept back, but the experiment of reforestation is still finding its footing, and the environment is only beginning its recovery.

In a tiny lot adjacent to the botanical gardens in Río Piedras, the seeds of that recovery are being sown. A tree nursery run by the nonprofit Para la Naturaleza features shaded greenhouses full of aspirant seedlings that will one day dominate the canopy, and rows of saplings placed outside to expose them to the elements. One hundred and ninety species of trees representing endemic and native species are on display in boxes and pots throughout the lot, which is one of five nurseries representing different climes across the island. The seedlings are still wispy, and many of the younger saplings might be mistaken for bushes. But the organization’s plan is that these will one day be the mighty anchors of old forests, markers of a new post-Maria order in Puerto Rico.

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Trump administration launches sweeping review of fetal-tissue research

By Sara Reardon

The US government has cancelled its US$15,900 contract with a company that supplies fetal tissue to researchers at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the FDA, is reviewing “all research involving fetal tissue” and “all acquisitions involving human fetal tissue”, it said on 24 September.

The FDA had awarded the one-year contract in July to Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR), a non-profit tissue supplier in Alameda, California. According to the contract, FDA researchers would implant the human fetal tissue provided by the company into mice that lacked immune systems. The goal was to give the animals human-like immune systems, so that FDA researchers could use the mice to evaluate the safety and efficacy of various drugs.

In its statement, the HHS said that it cancelled the contract because it “was not sufficiently assured that the contract included the appropriate protections applicable to fetal tissue research or met all other procurement requirements”.

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