ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 268

Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate Change Precedent

By Peter Brannen

They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs. Earth’s newest crater was still a smoldering system of hydrothermal vents, roiling under the Gulf of Mexico. In the wake of Armageddon our shell-shocked ancestors meekly negotiated new roles on a planet they inherited quite by accident. Before long, life settled into new rhythms: Earth hosted 50-foot-long boas sliding through steam-bath jungles, birds grew gigantic in imitation of their dearly departed cousins, and mildly modern mammals we might squint to recognize appeared. Within a few million years, loosed from under the iron heel of the vanished giants, they began to experiment. Early whales pranced across a Pakistani archipelago on all fours, testing out life in the water. The first lemur-like primates leapt from the treetops, and hoofed things of all varieties dashed through the forest.

But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica, sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86 degrees Fahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of any sort.

This is what you get in an ancient atmosphere with around 1,000 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. If this number sounds familiar, 1,000 ppm of CO2 is around what humanity is on pace to reach by the end of this century. That should be mildly concerning.

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Some Religious Groups Are Coming Out Against the “Religious Freedom Task Force”

By David G. McAfee

The Trump administration’s taxpayer-funded “Religious Freedom Task Force” is “one-sided” and uses religion as a “sword” to deny vulnerable people basic human rights.

Those aren’t the words of atheists but of religious groups in the U.S.

We first wrote about this issue earlier this week, when we pointed out that a secular country like ours shouldn’t promote any particular religion’s agenda, especially if taxpayers are footing the bill. The new Task Force announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions breaks both of these simple rules and will allow religion to be used to discriminate against anyone they disagree with.

But some of the most vocal opposition to the Task Force, following the lead of secular and LGBTQ groups, is coming from other religious organizations.

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How conservatives have changed the meaning of ‘religious liberty’

By Jonathan Merritt

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday the creation of a religious liberty task force to help protect the right of every American “to believe, worship and exercise their faith in the public square.” At first glance, such an effort sounds innocuous, even laudable. But as with much that this administration does, a closer look reveals a different story.

The concept of religious liberty has always been a core American value, but the phrase has become a rallying cry for conservatives specifically in recent years. President Trump has even made religious liberty a top priority for his administration. In a blink, a historically uncontroversial concept became a point of contention.

Why?

Because in the hands of conservatives, the phrase has morphed in meaning. It’s time we’re honest about what this term once meant, what it now means and which policies it represents.

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Not as many people are flooding into Ark Encounter as projected

By Thomas Novelly

Visitors to the life-sized Noah’s Ark attraction near Northern Kentucky are sinking below the number of projected visitors advertised by the owners of the religious-themed park.

The Ark Encounter sold a little more than 860,000 tickets between July 2017 and June 2018, according to open records obtained by The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes the separation of church and state.

When the park opened in 2016, park officials anticipated 1.4 million to 2.4 million yearly visitors.

A spokesman for the park said the foundation’s figures for ticket sales are accurate but noted that it doesn’t represent how many people actually visited the park.

Ark Encounter spokesman Mark Looy estimated that 1 million guests came to the Ark Encounter last year, and on busy days, between 7,000 and 8,000 people visit the park. He said attendance has been growing since the park opened two years ago. 

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Cuomo Opens Investigation Into Denial of Marriage License to Gay Couple

By Tyler Pager

After a same-sex couple was denied a marriage license in New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has not only opened an investigation into the case, he has offered to officiate the couple’s wedding in Albany.

Dylan Toften and Thomas Hurd sought the license in Root, N.Y., about 50 miles from Albany. But the town’s clerk, Laurel Eriksen, denied the couple’s request. The Human Rights Division is investigating why Ms. Eriksen refused the couple their license.

Mr. Toften wrote on Facebook on Monday that Ms. Eriksen denied the request because she personally objects to same-sex marriage on religious grounds. Ms. Eriksen told Robert Subik, Root’s town attorney, she did not grant the license because the couple had not made an appointment.

Though Ms. Eriksen did mention her personal objection to same-sex marriage to the couple, Mr. Subik said, she did not deny the couple the license because of her personal views. He said people requesting licenses are required to make appointments in advance because Ms. Eriksen is a part-time employee.

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Trump administration says it’s time to stop punishment of anti-gay African countries

By Zack Ford

During the State Department’s Ministerial on International Religious Freedom last week, Mick Mulvaney — President Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget — suggested that the Trump administration would end the practice of punishing African countries for their laws that criminalize homosexuality.

“Our US taxpayer dollars are used to discourage Christian values in other democratic countries,” he said during his remarks to the conference. “It was stunning to me that my government under a previous administration would go to folks in sub-Saharan Africa and say, ‘We know that you have a law against abortion, but if you enforce that law, you’re not going to get any of our money. We know you have a law against gay marriage, but if you enforce that law, we’re not going to give you any money.’ That is a different type of religious persecution that I never expected to see.”

“I never expected to see that as an American Christian,” he added. “There are a lot of people in this government who just want to see things done differently.”

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“Jewish child”? “Muslim child”? “Christian child”?

Cultural Tradition has its place, but that place is not in factual education.

By Richard Dawkins

My oft-repeated (some might say too oft) point about the absurdity – indeed wickedness – of labelling children with the religion of their parents (“Would you speak of a ‘Postmodernist child’, or a ‘Gramscian Marxist child’?”) is usually effective. People nearly always get the point immediately, although whether their future consciousness is raised to the point of actually wincing, as I do, whenever they hear ‘Catholic child’ or ‘Muslim child’ is another matter. But there is one counter-argument that I often meet, and it sounds superficially plausible. It is my purpose here to deal with it.

The objectors I am speaking of often invoke the special case of Judaism, but the point can be made more generally. It is ridiculous and wrong, they say, to try to discourage parents from passing on their cultural traditions to their children. Language, accent, styles of dress, diet, mealtime habits, proverbs, poetic allusions, games, non-verbal signals or greetings such as head-shaking or nodding or social kissing, these are all culturally transmitted. Humanity would be the poorer if we lost them. Religion, so it is claimed, is just another member of the list.

I accept much of that and rejoice in the colourfully varying traditions of world cultures. But religion is not just another member of the list. It is completely different. Here’s why.

Religion makes truth claims about the real world.. This sets it apart from other traditions handed down, such as styles of dress and cookery. If a ‘Jewish child’ is labelled by a yarmulke on his head and peyot curls in front of his ears, that seems to me no more sinister than a culturally transmitted preference for cricket or baseball, or a habit of wearing a kilt and sporran rather than trousers (culturally transmitted body-mutilation of children is a very different matter). The problem arises when the ‘Jewish child’ (‘Muslim child’ etc) is assumed to hold, by virtue of his Jewishness (etc), a belief about some factual proposition: a proposition, say, about the age of the world, whose truth depends only upon evidence and is not culturally determined. Such faith-based beliefs about reality all too often actively contradict the evidence and therefore subvert genuine education.

There are legitimate and admirable respects in which people differ from one another by virtue of traditions, handed down through generations. Factual beliefs about the real world should not be among them. When you put it like that, I find it hard to imagine how any person of goodwill and intelligence could seriously disagree. Yet because it is usually not put like that, there are many people, even non-religious people of intelligence and goodwill, who have been duped into confusing the ‘cultural tradition’ side of religion with the ‘factual beliefs’ side. When such confusion flows from the labelling of children it is downright wicked.

Entire yeast genome squeezed into one lone chromosome

By Ewen Callaway

For millions of years, brewer’s yeast and its close relatives have packed their DNA into 16 distinct chromosomes. Now, two teams have used CRISPR gene-editing to stuff all of yeast’s genetic material — save a few non-essential pieces — into just one or two chromosomes. The feat represents the most dramatic restructuring yet of a complex genome and could help scientists understand why organisms split their DNA over chromosomes. And, to the researchers’ surprise, the changes had little effect on most functions of the yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae).

“That was the biggest shocker — that you can just get away with this and yeast seem to shrug its shoulders,” says Jef Boeke, a geneticist at New York University whose team jammed the yeast genome onto a pair of chromosomes1. A China-based group used a different technique to make yeast with one ‘super-chromosome’2. Both teams report their findings in Nature on 1 August.

Genetics 101

Yeast belongs to the eukaryotes, the branch of life that includes humans, plants and animals and whose cells store genetic material in a membrane-bound nucleus. But the number of chromosomes that eukaryotes have varies wildly and seems to have no correlation with the amount of genetic information they possess. In humans, genetic material is spread over 46 chromosomes, whereas male jack jumper ants (Myrmecia pilosula) have just 1. Single-celled brewer’s yeast — whose genome, at 12 million DNA letters long, is hundreds of times shorter than that of humans — boasts 16 chromosomes.

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NASA says nobody—not even Elon Musk—can terraform Mars

By Tim Fernholz

Given recent trends, you may think humans have mastered filling a planet’s atmosphere with carbon dioxide and heating it up.

But scientists using data collected by NASA spacecraft say using this technique to make Mars habitable for humans is far beyond the technology we have today.

The problem is one of supply: There’s simply not enough carbon dioxide on Mars to create an atmosphere that traps heat and gases close to the planetary surface.

The idea of “terraforming” the red planet is to make it more Earth-like by increasing its temperature so that liquid water could exist, rather than freeze, with a greenhouse atmosphere more conducive to life. The vision has long inspired science-fiction authors and putative space explorers. When, in 2016, Elon Musk’s first presented his vision to go to Mars, few missed that images of the planet grew steadily greener as he unveiled the steps in his plan.

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Anti-LGBT hate group linked to new Trump administration ‘task force’

By Nick Duffy

A listed anti-LGBT hate group has been linked to the Trump administration’s new religious freedom task force, which activists fear will be used to undermine equal rights protections.

Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the formation of a “religious freedom task force” at a Religious Liberty Summit hosted by the Justice Department on Monday.

In his speech Sessions affirmed his belief that individuals and business owners should be free to discriminate based on religious beliefs, and announced he is setting up a task force “which will help the department fully implement our religious liberty guidance.”

It has now been alleged that the new body has links to a listed anti-LGBT hate group, Alliance Defending Freedom.

In his speech, Sessions said the panel was the product of “listening sessions… [with] religious groups across America.”

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