ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 269

Insurers Can Send Patients To Religious Hospitals That Restrict Reproductive Care

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Anna Maria Barry-Jester

Last fall, about a month before her Medicaid coverage was scheduled to expire, Darolyn Lee realized that she needed to get her contraceptive implant replaced. Lee, a 37-year-old in Chicago, called the managed care organization in charge of her plan to find out where she should go to get the new implant. She was told that the closest in-network provider was Mercy Hospital and Medical Center, a Catholic hospital about 30 minutes away by bus.

When she got to the hospital for her appointment, the doctor said she couldn’t replace Lee’s birth control, but wouldn’t say why. Instead, she gave Lee a referral card for the hospital’s obstetrics and gynecology department. Lee, assuming that hospital bureaucracy was to blame, made another appointment and returned to the hospital a few weeks later. But when the second doctor walked into the room, she explained that she, too, could not replace the implant. She offered Lee a pap smear instead.

Lee was stunned and angry. Through tears, she asked where she could get her implant replaced. The gynecologist gave her a referral for the county hospital. “I couldn’t say nothing else — I was just upset,” Lee said. “They had wasted my time going to all of these appointments, only to not do anything that I had requested.”

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Push to weaken US Endangered Species Act runs into roadblocks

By Jeremy Rehm

America’s Endangered Species Act — which protects more than 2,000 plant, animal and insect species at risk of extinction — is under renewed attack from Republican politicians. But policy experts say that their efforts face an uphill battle, even though Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress.

On 19 July, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) proposed policy changes that would make it easier to delist species and harder to add new ones, among other things. And in recent weeks, legislators in the US House of Representatives have gone further by introducing around 12 bills aimed at altering the law itself.

Some of the bills wending their way through Congress would roll back protections on species including the Northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) and the American burying beetle (Nicrophorus americanus). Lawmakers say that this is to remove barriers to the activities of businesses such as oil and gas companies. Other bills propose fundamental changes to the law, for example by narrowing the range of habitats deemed necessary for organisms to recover or weakening safeguards for threatened species.

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Humans have depleted the Earth’s natural resources with five months still to go in 2018

By Michael J. Coren

The Earth is finite. Civilization’s appetite, it seems, is infinite. The Global Footprint Network (GFN) has been assessing just how much of the Earth’s resources we use, from water to clean air, and the day each year when our species overshoots the planet’s ability to annually regenerate itself.

Humans have overshot nature’s annual budget starting in the early 1970s, and every year, the overshoot date keeps creeping up. In 2018, its August 1.

Every minute past overshoot day is the equivalent of drawing down capital rather than living off interest. “One year is no longer enough to regenerate humanity’s annual demand on the planet, even using conservative data sets,” states GFN.

To calculate the date, GFN divides the planet’s biocapacity (ecological resources generated each year) by the totality of humanity’s demand on those resources. It uses 15,000 data points collected by the United Nations for each country going back to 1961, which can be categorized into four main factors, says the GFN: how much we consume, how efficiently we make stuff, our population, and nature’s productivity. You can explore the full dataset here.

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Atheist Group Sues WV City Council for Reciting Lord’s Prayer at Meetings

By Hemant Mehta

The Freedom From Religion Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the city of Parkersburg, West Virginia for reciting a Christian prayer at the beginning of all city council meetings. The lawsuit notes that council members say the Lord’s Prayer to open each session and audience members are encouraged to stand.

The plaintiffs include Parkersburg resident and atheist Daryl Cobranchi who attended council meetings but stopped because “the Council treat[ed] him like a second-class citizen” as a result of his dissent over the prayers. Another plaintiff is resident Eric Engle, a self-described “agnostic atheist” who felt “negatively singled out” for similar reasons.

This prayer practice has been going on for years, according to the complaint. The published minutes for the meetings say that the prayer dates back at least to the beginning of 2016, though it probably stretches back longer than that.

And it wasn’t like government officials just said the prayer and moved on.

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Our Tax Dollars Shouldn’t Fund an Anti-LGBTQ “Religious Freedom Task Force”

By David G. McAfee

I’ll say it as simply as possible: The United States shouldn’t promote any particular religion’s agenda, yet that’s exactly what’s happening with the Trump administration’s new “task force.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the creation of the taxpayer-funded “Religious Freedom Task Force” yesterday alongside the Colorado baker who refused to serve a gay couple, Catholic bishops who want to use faith to avoid letting gay couples adopt children at their taxpayer-funded agencies, and members of the anti-LGBTQ legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom. The group seeks to defend those who are fighting for their right to discriminate — against LGBTQ people or anyone else — based on their faith. It’s based on an executive order signed by Donald Trump last May and a subsequent memorandum issued by Sessions in October.

As the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) pointed out, this is only the most recent attack on the LGBTQ community by Trump and his administration for the last 18 months.

“This taxpayer funded task force is yet another example of the Trump-Pence White House and Jeff Sessions sanctioning discrimination against LGBTQ people,” said HRC Legal Director Sarah Warbelow. “Over the last 18 months, Donald Trump, Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions have engaged in a brazen campaign to erode and limit the rights of LGBTQ people in the name of religion. The Attorney General standing shoulder-to-shoulder this morning with anti-LGBTQ extremists tells you everything you need to know about what today’s announcement was really all about.”

The issue isn’t that critics want to get rid of religious freedom. That is important, but that’s not what this administration is truly fighting for with this “task force.” There’s a difference between practicing the religion of your choice — or none at all — and using your religion as a weapon against vulnerable communities.

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A Conversation with Richard Dawkins

The Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (TIES) hosted a special webinar with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and Director of TIES Bertha Vazquez.

Webinar date: 4/1/2018

America’s Ongoing Problem with Evolution

Everyone knows that the United States is not among the top tier… or even middle tier when it comes to understanding and accepting evolution. But why? This talk will briefly explore the “how did we get here?” of evolution acceptance in the United States, before zooming in on one of the most maddening causes (and effects) of poor evolution literacy: misconceptions. Misconceptions about evolution are abundant and pervasive. From thinking individuals evolve, to believing evolution proceeds linearly toward human “perfection,” misconceptions cloud a student’s understanding of biology’s unifying topic, and make it difficult to assess mastery. We will highlight a few common evolution misconceptions and discuss strategies for identifying and—crucially—correcting them.

A Taste for the Beautiful

Learn about sexual selection, mate choice, and animal communication – just in time for Valentine’s Day! Dr. Ryan will discuss the astonishing story of how the female brain drives the evolution of beauty in animals and humans. Michael Ryan will also discuss his new book! Vividly written and filled with fascinating stories, “A Taste for the Beautiful” will change how you think about beauty and attraction.

This is Your Brain On Parasites

A riveting investigation of the myriad ways that parasites control how other creatures—including humans—think, feel, and act. These tiny organisms can only live inside another animal, and as Kathleen McAuliffe reveals, they have many evolutionary motives for manipulating their host’s behavior. Far more often than appreciated, these puppeteers orchestrate the interplay between predator and prey. With astonishing precision, parasites can coax rats to approach cats, spiders to transform the patterns of their webs, and fish to draw the attention of birds that then swoop down to feast on them.

Meeting Naledi- Part 1

In September of 2013 dedicated amateur cavers in South Africa exploring beyond the edges of the well-known Rising Star Cave came across a collection of human looking bones. Over the following months, a remarkable team building effort led to the discovery of the richest early human fossil site on the African continent and the naming of a new species – Homo naledi. In the first of a two part webinar series, TIES teacher John Mead will share his experience getting to know and work with the team and detailing the once in a lifetime experience of how these new fossils were recovered and studied. If you do not know about the greatest human fossil discovery since Lucy, then please join us for John’s presentation. Part Two of this Webinar will focus on how this discovery can impact the study of human evolution in science classrooms.