ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 270

Meeting Naledi- Part 2

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.

OPEN DISCUSSION – AUGUST 2018

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Scientists detect giant underground aquifer on Mars, raising hope of life on the planet

By Loren Grush

Mars hosts a huge underground aquifer of liquid water, according to a group of scientists who say they have found convincing evidence. The underground lake hasn’t been seen directly, but if it’s real, it’s a discovery that substantially increases the likelihood that the Red Planet might host life.

Researchers detected the possible reservoir with the Mars Express Orbiter, a European spacecraft that’s been orbiting Mars since 2003. While scanning the ice cap at Mars’ south pole, the probe’s radar instrument, called MARSIS, detected a feature about a mile underneath the surface that was about 12.4 miles wide. The structure has a radar signature that matches that of buried liquid water here on Earth, leading the team to conclude that there’s a lake under the glacier. The researchers say they’ve ruled out all other possibilities for what they’re seeing.

“I’ve run out of ideas on how to explain this in a way that isn’t water,” Roberto Orosei, a researcher at Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics and lead of the team that found the formation, tells The Verge. “We’ve tried to exhaust every possible alternative, and we think we’ve done it.”

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Court: California school board’s prayers unconstitutional

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A Southern California school board’s policy of opening meetings with a prayer is unconstitutional because the prayers often invoke Christianity, and there are secular ways of accomplishing the board’s goals of solemnizing meetings and showing respect for religious diversity, a U.S. appeals court ruled Wednesday.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that banned the prayers by the Chino Valley Unified School District board of education as a violation of the constitutional requirement that government not establish religion. The district is based in Chino, a city 35 miles east of Los Angeles.

Robert Tyler, an attorney for the school board, said the board was evaluating its next step, but had previously expressed a desire to “take this case as far as they can take it.” He said the 9th Circuit ruling conflicted with a decision last year by another U.S. appeals court and conflated comments made by individual board members during meetings with the prayer policy.

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Evolution, religion, and why it’s not just about lack of scientific reasoning ability

By Jamie Jensen and Seth Bybee

Why reject evolution?

Humans have long wondered and debated the scientific and theological explanations for our world and the life upon it. Scriptural accounts describe the creation as a series of events by a creator resulting in earth’s current diversity (including humans), whereas, science suggests descent with modification from a common ancestor over long periods of time (evolution), resulting in the vast diversity we see today (again, including humans).

Despite overwhelming evidence for evolution, a large portion of the US (and the world) continues to reject the theory. The question becomes why, in the face of so much convincing evidence, do people still not accept evolution as a process that occurs to shape the existence of life on this planet?

Hypotheses about causes of rejection

The research literature demonstrates that religion is a major barrier to the acceptance of the theory of evolution. What is it exactly about ‘religious’ individuals that causes rejection of scientific evidence?

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Sessions announces ‘religious liberty task force’

By Lydia Wheeler

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday that the Department of Justice is creating a “religious liberty task force.”

Sessions said the task force, co-chaired by Associate Attorney General Jesse Panuccio and the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy, Beth Williams, will help the department fully implement the religious liberty guidance it issued last year.

The guidance was a byproduct of President Trump’s executive order directing agencies to respect and protect religious liberty and political speech.

Sessions said on Monday that the task force will “ensure all Justice Department components are upholding that guidance in the cases they bring and defend, the arguments they make in court, the policies and regulations they adopt, and how we conduct our operations.”

The announcement came during the department’s religious liberty summit.

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Why some Christians don’t believe in gun control: They think God handed down the Second Amendment

By Andrew Whitehead, Landon Schnabel, and Samuel Perry

We’re now at a point when Americans are killed or injured in a mass shooting almost every month; by some definitions, almost every day. Despite this, resistance to stricter gun control in the United States remains fierce.

As researchers of religion, we know the power of religious identities and beliefs. And so we wondered: How does Christian nationalism influence Americans’ attitudes toward gun control?

In our newly published and freely available study, the connection between Christian nationalism and gun control attitudes proves stronger than we expected. It turns out that how intensely someone adheres to Christian nationalism is one of the strongest predictors of whether someone supports gun control. One’s political party, religiosity, gender, education or age doesn’t matter.

You could be a mainline Protestant Democratic woman or a highly educated politically liberal man — the more you line up with Christian nationalism, the less likely you are to support gun control.

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Don’t pack your bags for Mars just yet

By Don Lincoln

Water is literally the elixir of life. Without it, no Earthly living organism can survive. It’s the reason that the Sahara and Atacama deserts are barren wastelands.

When humans began exploring our planet, each time they encountered a new island or valley, finding drinkable water was their first order of business. And as we turn our attention to the heavens, imagining a future in which intrepid explorers will search the solar system for places to live, the situation is pretty much the same. Celestial bodies with water will be the first places to be colonized.

Thus, the recent announcement that evidence of a lake of water was discovered on Mars has captured the imagination of anyone who has looked at our interplanetary neighbor and dreamed. If this discovery is verified, the possibility of successful human colonies on Mars has just taken a big step forward.

Media reports on the discovery are everywhere, occasionally with florid claims, prompting new speculation on the likelihood that we’ll discover life on Mars and renewing excitement about future manned missions to the Red Planet. So, which of these stories are reasonable and which are hype?

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Droughts, heatwaves and floods: How to tell when climate change is to blame

By Quirin Schiermeier

The Northern Hemisphere is sweating through another unusually hot summer. Japan has declared its record temperatures a natural disaster. Europe is baking under prolonged heat, with destructive wildfires in Greece and, unusually, the Arctic. And drought-fuelled wildfires are spreading in the western United States.

For Friederike Otto, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford, UK, the past week has been a frenzy, as journalists clamoured for her views on climate change’s role in the summer heat. “It’s been mad,” she says. The usual scientific response is that severe heatwaves will become more frequent because of global warming. But Otto and her colleagues wanted to answer a more particular question: how had climate change influenced this specific heatwave? After three days’ work with computer models, they announced on 27 July that their preliminary analysis for northern Europe suggests that climate change made the heatwave more than twice as likely to occur in many places.

Soon, journalists might be able to get this kind of quick-fire analysis routinely from weather agencies, rather than on an ad hoc basis from academics. With Otto’s help, Germany’s national weather agency is preparing to be the first in the world to offer rapid assessments of global warming’s connection to particular meteorological events. By 2019 or 2020, the agency hopes to post its findings on social media almost instantly, with full public reports following one or two weeks after an event. “We want to quantify the influence of climate change on any atmospheric conditions that might bring extreme weather to Germany or central Europe,” says Paul Becker, vice-president of the weather agency, which is based in Offenbach. “The science is ripe to start doing it”.

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Acts of Faith Pennsylvania Supreme Court approves release of 900-page grand jury report about Catholic clergy sex abuse

By Michelle Boorstein

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Friday that a landmark 900-page grand jury report about child sex abuse by Catholic clergy should be released as soon as Aug. 8 — but with some of the 300 predators’ names temporarily redacted.

A court battle has been underway for weeks over questions of fairness and transparency, with prosecutors and abuse advocates saying the results of an 18-month investigation must be released for justice to be done. Ten news organizations, including the Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., and The Washington Post, joined in a brief urging the release of the grand jury report.

But people named in the report said that they have not had adequate opportunity to protect their reputations and could be severely harmed as a result.

The grand jury report comes after several other explosive ones in Pennsylvania targeting institutional sex abuse — in other Catholic dioceses and at Pennsylvania State, among other places — and is expected to be “sobering” and “rather graphic,” Erie Bishop Lawrence Persico said this month.

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