ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 257
September 12, 2018
Gene Mutation Made Our Ancestors Better Long Distance Runners
By Mark Barna
Humans aren’t as strong as lions, can’t run as fast as cheetahs and don’t see as well as owls. But there is one thing we are pretty good at: endurance running.
Between 2 and 3 million years ago, our African ancestors adapted to a climate period that caused forests to thin and arid savannahs to expand. Changes to their biology and skeletal structure enabled them to run longer distances, offering a survival advantage in hunting prey, scientists say.
It is believed our ancestors back then engaged in persistence hunting, where animals are chased across open expanses until they’re exhausted and easily killed. This was also the time when hominids were likely eating more meat, which has been linked to increasing brain size.
But a missing piece in the puzzle of this transformation of hominids into meat-eating, spear-carrying endurance runners has been lack of genetic and molecular evidence. A paper published Sept. 12 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B offers a step in that direction.
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Call for atheism to be included in religious education
By Harriet Sherwood
Religious education in schools needs a major overhaul to reflect an increasingly diverse world and should include the study of atheism, agnosticism and secularism, a two-year investigation has concluded.
The subject should be renamed Religion and Worldviews to equip young people with respect and empathy for different faiths and viewpoints, says the Commission on Religious Education in a report published on Sunday.
Content “must reflect the complex, diverse and plural nature of worldviews”, drawing from “a range of religious, philosophical, spiritual and other approaches to life, including different traditions within Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism, non-religious worldviews and concepts including humanism, secularism, atheism and agnosticism”.
All pupils in publicly funded schools should study the subject up to year 11, the report says, but it falls short of recommending the abolition of the right of parents to withdraw children from religious education. It comes three weeks after figures showed the number of pupils taking religious studies at A-level this year had fallen by 22% compared with 2017, and two days after new data suggested more than half the population has no religion.
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GOP Legislator Sentenced to 220 Months in Jail for Bible School Kickback Scheme
By Hemant Mehta
Former Arkansas State Senator Johnathan Woods has been sentenced to 220 months in prison for a fraud scheme that involved another Republican legislator and the president of a conservative Christian college.
Beginning in January of 2013, Woods and State Rep. Micah Neal gave $600,000 in taxpayer money to two non-profits in the state in exchange for bribes. One of those groups was Ecclesia College in the northwest part of the state. The small Bible school received the bulk of that money… but only because they agreed to give the politicians a healthy kickback.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Arkansas:
The evidence further showed that Woods and Neal received bribes from officials at both non-profits, including Oren Paris III, 50, of Springdale, Arkansas, who was the president of a college. Woods initially facilitated $200,000 of GIF money to the college and later, together with Neal, directed another $200,000 to the college, all in exchange for kickbacks. To pay and conceal the kickbacks to Woods and Neal, Paris paid a portion of the [General Improvement Funds] to a consulting company controlled by Randell G. Shelton Jr., 39, of Alma, Arkansas. Shelton then kept a portion of the money and paid the other portion to Woods and Neal. Paris also bribed Woods by hiring Woods’s friend to an administrative position at the college.
That’s… a lot of ethical and legal violations. You’ve got a Holy Trinity of Establishment Clause violations, bribery, and fraud.
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September 11, 2018
The search for alien life needs a new space telescope, astronomers say
By Loren Grush
If NASA truly wants to get serious in the search for life off of Earth, scientists argue that the space agency should launch a new, large telescope into space — one capable of directly capturing the images of planets outside our Solar System. Such technology doesn’t fully exist at the moment. But astronomers say it’s our best bet to find another Earth, one that could host biological organisms.
This mission concept is the top recommendation in a new report compiled by members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The academy was tasked by Congress to come up with the best strategy for studying and exploring exoplanets, worlds that are located outside the Solar System. And after gathering input from experts in the field, the National Academies came up with seven recommendations, with the telescope at the top of the list.
It’s an aspirational request, given the harsh realities that NASA has faced while trying to build its next big space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST. It was originally envisioned to cost $1 billion, and to launch in 2007. This past June, NASA conceded that the entire project would run $9.66 billion, and the telescope wouldn’t launch until 2021 at the earliest. And the type of telescope that this report recommends would require new technologies that haven’t been tested out in space yet, which might make the vehicle even more complex and more expensive than JWST.
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Seven states launch investigations in wake of Pennsylvania clergy sex abuse report
By Jack Jenkins
Last month, after Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro unveiled a bombshell 1,300-page grand jury report detailing the alleged sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children in his state by hundreds of Catholic priests, American Catholics called for more investigations into church documents. Some even demanded the federal government step in.
Now law enforcement officials in at least seven states — New York, New Jersey, Nebraska, New Mexico, Florida, Missouri and Illinois — appear to be launching their own inquiries or reviews of Catholic dioceses, often focusing on what Shapiro called secret church files thought to contain decades of allegations of child sex abuse by priests.
On Thursday (Sept. 6), The Associated Press reported that New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood has subpoenaed all eight Roman Catholic dioceses in the state to investigate the church’s handling of sex abuse allegations. New York Archdiocese spokesperson Joseph Zwilling later confirmed to Religion News Service that that diocese has received the subpoena and is “ready and eager to work together with (the attorney general) in the investigation.”
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When and why do people become atheists? New study uncovers important predictors
By Derek Beres
In 2009, Joseph Henrich, a professor in the Psychology and Economics departments at the University of British Columbia (now at Harvard), proposed the idea of Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs). He was looking for a term to signify people that “convey one mental representation but actually believe something else.” At the very least, he continues, they fudge their level of commitment.
Henrich coined this term to make sense of manipulability, especially in regards to religious belief. While his focus was on cultural learning through evolutionary history, extrapolating to apply CREDs to politics doesn’t tax our imagination. In fact, he argues that CREDs are an essential component of tribalism; they help you identify with a group and strengthen in-group bonds. Throughout history, this would have been a very useful device, yet evolutionary biology didn’t foresee the development of societies containing hundreds of millions of people. Our minds might move a million miles an hour but deeply ingrained habits do not.
To make his case, Henrich turned to ritualized theater, such as firewalking and animal sacrifice. Such costly displays, he writes, “transmit higher levels of belief commitment and thereby promote cooperation and success in intergroup or interinstitution competition.” The more audacious a display, the more likely we’ll buy into what’s being sold, even if the seller is focused more on your purchase than the item itself.
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Church in crisis as only 2% of young adults identify as C of E
By Harriet Sherwood
The Church of England is facing a generational catastrophe with only 2% of young adults identifying with it, while seven out of 10 under-24s say they have no religion, research reveals.
C of E affiliation is at a record low among all age groups, and has halved since 2002, according to the British Social Attitudes survey. Far fewer actually attend church services on a regular basis.
Meanwhile, the trend towards a secular society has increased over recent years. The BSA survey found that 52% of people had no religion in 2017 compared with 41% in 2002. However, the proportion last year was slightly down on 2016, when 53% said they had no religious affiliation.
The demographic breakdown in the new data is particularly unwelcome news for the church. Younger people are significantly less likely to identify with the C of E than older age groups, and evidence suggests that people rarely join organised religion in later life. The trend indicates that affiliation with the C of E could become negligible with successive generations.
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Spanish actor faces arrest after ignoring court summons over religious offense claim
By EFE
A Madrid court has issued an arrest warrant for Spanish actor and activist Willy Toledo after he twice failed to show up in court, where he had been summonsed after a lawyers’ association accused him of offending religious sentiments.
The Spanish Association of Christian Lawyers filed a complaint with the public prosecutor after Toledo published a post on Facebook in 2017, in which he expressed his indignation over a court probe into three women in Seville who, in 2014, paraded a large model of a vagina through the city streets, in an imitation of a religious procession, dubbing it the “coño insumiso,” or “Insubordinate pussy.”
On July 5, 2017, Toledo posted a message on Facebook in which he called the judge in charge of that case “possessed by the devil” for not having shelved it. “I shit on God and have enough shit left over to shit on the dogma of the saintliness and virginity of the Virgin Mary. This country is unbearably shameful. I’m disgusted. Go fuck yourselves. Long live the Insubordinate Pussy.”
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September 7, 2018
Kavanaugh Admits He Supports Christian Prayers At Public School Events
By Michael Stone
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh rejects the separation of church and state and supports Christian prayers at public school events.
Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, indicated that if confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice he would support allowing Christian prayers at public school events in a little noticed moment during day 2 of his Supreme Court confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Freedom From Religion Foundation reports that Kavanaugh expressed his support for prayer in public school in an exchange with Sen. John Cornyn during day 2 of his Supreme Court confirmation:
… in an exchange with his old buddy Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, Kavanaugh tacitly expressed his agreement that the landmark 2000 Supreme Court case, Santa Fe v. Doe, was incorrectly decided because it was hostile toward religion.
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