ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 287

The Sin of Silence

By Joshua Pease

Rachael Denhollander’s college-aged abuser began grooming her when she was 7. Each week, as Denhollander left Sunday school at Westwood Baptist Church in Kalamazoo, Mich., he was there to walk her to her parents’ Bible-study classroom on the other side of the building. He brought Denhollander gifts and asked her parents for her clothing size so he could buy her dresses. He was always a little too eager with a hug. The Denhollanders led one of the church’s ministries out of their home, which meant the man would visit their house regularly, often encouraging Rachael to sit on his lap, they recalled.

The man’s behavior caught the attention of a fellow congregant, who informed Sandy Burdick, a licensed counselor who led the church’s sexual-abuse support group. Burdick says she warned Denhollander’s parents that the man was showing classic signs of grooming behavior. They were worried, but they also feared misreading the situation and falsely accusing an innocent student, according to Camille Moxon, Denhollander’s mom. So they turned to their closest friends, their Bible-study group, for support.

The overwhelming response was: You’re overreacting. One family even told them that their kids could no longer play together, because they didn’t want to be accused next, Moxon says. Hearing this, Denhollander’s parents decided that, unless the college student committed an aggressive, sexual act, there was nothing they could do.

No one knew that, months earlier, he already had.

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How Republicans Are Using The Anti-Abortion Playbook To Undermine Same-Sex Marriage

By Dominic Holden

Just one month after the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, Ryan T. Anderson, a researcher at the Heritage Foundation, turned to the anti-abortion playbook.

“Everything the pro-life movement did needs to be done again, now on this new frontier of marriage,” Anderson wrote in Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling that legalized abortion, Anderson says, “Courageous pro-lifers put their hand to the plow, and today we reap the fruits … More state laws have been enacted protecting unborn babies in the past decade than the previous 30 years combined.”

Three years later, the strategy is in effect and working. By using the same tactics that eroded access to abortion after Roe v. Wade in 1973, Republicans are stockpiling state laws that make married life for gay couples more difficult and unequal.

Kansas Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer signed a law this month that allows taxpayer-funded adoption agencies to reject applicants, including gay couples and divorcees, based on their religious objections. A week before, Oklahoma Republican Gov. Mary Fallin signed a nearly identical law.

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This 240-Million-Year-Old Reptile Is the ‘Mother of All Lizards’

By Mindy Weisberger

HBO’s “Game of Thrones” features a “Mother of Dragons,” but a fossil that’s hundreds of millions of years old was recently identified as the “mother of all lizards” (and snakes, too).

This ancient lizard was the direct ancestor of approximately 10,000 species alive today that have inhabited the planet for more than 240 million years.

Paleontologists initially described the tiny reptile, Megachirella wachtleri,in 2003. But recent scans revealed features in the fossil that were hidden, enabling scientists to identify Megachirella as the oldest known ancestor in the squamate lineage — the reptile group that includes lizards and snakes.

Megachirella, which predates the fossils previously thought to belong to the earliest squamates by around 75 million years, bridged the gap between the oldest known squamates and the estimated origins of this reptile group derived from molecular data, researchers reported in a new study. 

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How Much Can We Know?

By Marcelo Gleiser

“What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” wrote German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was the first to fathom the uncertainty inherent in quantum physics. To those who think of science as a direct path to the truth about the world, this quote must be surprising, perhaps even upsetting. Is Heisenberg saying that our scientific theories are contingent on us as observers? If he is, and we take him seriously, does this mean that what we call scientific truth is nothing but a big illusion?

People will quickly counterstrike with something like: Why do airplanes fly or antibiotics work? Why are we able to build machines that process information with such amazing efficiency? Surely, such inventions and so many others are based on laws of nature that function independently of us. There is order in the universe, and science gradually uncovers this order.

No question about it: There is order in the universe, and much of science is about finding patterns of behavior—from quarks to mammals to galaxies—that we translate into general laws. We strip away unnecessary complications and focus on what is essential, the core properties of the system we are studying. We then build a descriptive narrative of how the system behaves, which, in the best cases, is also predictive.

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NC Proposed Budget Bill Includes Illegal $250,000 Gift to Christian Ministry

By Hemant Mehta

If you glance at page 72 of the budget bill unveiled on Monday and currently under consideration by North Carolina’s legislature, you’ll see a section allotting $250,000 to a group called Cross Trail Outfitters “for purposes of promoting wellness and physical activity.”

That sounds perfectly reasonable (as far as appropriations go, anyway), but a glance at the group’s website reveals its actual mission:

… Cross Trail Outfitters (CTO) is changing that by providing an opportunity to get them outdoors and teach them about our hunting and fishing heritage, while sharing our faith.

We want kids to know that life is different than what they see on TV or in video games. There’s a life out in God’s creation, and CTO is all about “Guiding the next generation to Christ through the outdoors.” We provide hunting and fishing, while ensuring a wholesome and fun environment in which the participants can grow in their knowledge and reverence of God.

So… this is really just a taxpayer-funded quarter-million dollar gift to a Christian ministry.

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Bill requiring display of ‘In God We Trust’ at public schools becomes law

By Wilborn P. Nobles III

Hundreds of public schools in Louisiana will have to display the national motto of “In God We Trust” on their buildings by August 2019, after Gov. John Bel Edwards signed the proposed bill into law last week.

The governor’s signature May 23 means public school authorities must now display the national motto in each building used by a school under its jurisdiction. The law also requires Louisiana’s social studies curriculum to teach students about the motto by the 5th grade, a provision that expands upon the existing law that orders schools to teach students about the U.S flag and other “patriotic customs.”

When the law was initially proposed to Louisiana’s senators in March, State Sen. Regina Barrow, D-Baton Rouge, stressed it would help address “moral decay” in the public school system. She later told lawmakers she believes “this will serve to be an improvement to our schools” because they cannot assume students learn about the “patriotic history and founding of this country” when students are at home.

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‘Reprogrammed’ stem cells approved to mend human hearts for the first time

By David Cyranoski

Scientists in Japan now have permission to treat people who have heart disease with cells produced by a revolutionary reprogramming technique. The study is only the second clinical application of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. These are created by inducing the cells of body tissues such as skin and blood to revert to an embryonic-like state, from which they can develop into other cell types.

On 16 May, Japan’s health ministry gave doctors the green light to take wafer-thin sheets of tissue derived from iPS cells and graft them onto diseased human hearts. The team, led by cardiac surgeon Yoshiki Sawa at Osaka University, says that the tissue sheets can help to regenerate the organ’s muscle when it becomes damaged, a symptom of heart disease that can be caused by a build-up of plaque or by a heart attack.

“It will excite worldwide attention, as many groups are working in the same direction,” says Thomas Eschenhagen, a pharmacologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany and chair of the German Centre for Cardiovascular Research.

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How Did Life Begin?

By Jack Szostak

Is the existence of life on Earth a lucky fluke or an inevitable consequence of the laws of nature? Is it simple for life to emerge on a newly formed planet, or is it the virtually impossible product of a long series of unlikely events? Advances in fields as disparate as astronomy, planetary science and chemistry now hold promise that answers to such profound questions may be around the corner. If life turns out to have emerged multiple times in our galaxy, as scientists are hoping to discover, the path to it cannot be so hard. Moreover, if the route from chemistry to biology proves simple to traverse, the universe could be teeming with life.

The discovery of thousands of exoplanets has sparked a renaissance in origin-of-life studies. In a stunning surprise, almost all the newly discovered solar systems look very different from our own. Does that mean something about our own, very odd, system favors the emergence of life? Detecting signs of life on a planet orbiting a distant star is not going to be easy, but the technology for teasing out subtle “biosignatures” is developing so rapidly that with luck we may see distant life within one or two decades.

To understand how life might begin, we first have to figure out how—and with what ingredients—planets form. A new generation of radio telescopes, notably the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile’s Atacama Desert, has provided beautiful images of protoplanetary disks and maps of their chemical composition. This information is inspiring better models of how planets assemble from the dust and gases of a disk. Within our own solar system, the Rosetta mission has visited a comet, and OSIRIS-REx will visit, and even try to return samples from, an asteroid, which might give us the essential inventory of the materials that came together in our planet.

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Catholic school denies entry to lesbian couple’s children because marriage is “between a man and a woman”

By Bailey Vogt

A Catholic priest denied a lesbian couple’s children from attending his private school due to their homosexual marriage.

The Charlotte Observer reports that the mothers (who wished to remain anonymous) applied to St. Francis Catholic School in Hilton Head Island, S.C., this spring, but subsequently received a rejection email.

When one of the mothers called the priest, Rev. Mike Oenbrink, to question why her children were denied, he told her: “Your children have been denied because you’re homosexual. If we admit your children, it will send a bad message to the other families.”

The two mothers have been married since 2009 and the decision to deny them has apparently created controversy among parents in Hilton Head. However, Rev. Oenbrink refused to apologize for the rejection, saying the application was denied because the two women were married.

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Supreme Court won’t take up challenge to restrictive Arkansas abortion law

By Robert Barnes

The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down a challenge to a restrictive Arkansas law that for now will end the use of medication abortions in the state and could close two of the state’s three abortion clinics.

The law requires doctors who provide medication abortions to have a contract with a second doctor who has hospital admitting privileges. Arkansas contends there can be complications with the procedure, while abortion rights advocates say the law’s objective is to make it more difficult for women to access the two-pill regimen that is used in the first nine weeks of pregnancy.

While Planned Parenthood said it would immediately notify patients that it can no longer offer the procedure in the state, the case is expected to return to a lower court, perhaps for a trial on the law’s benefits and burdens.

“Arkansas is now shamefully responsible for being the first state to ban medication abortion,” Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America said in a statement.

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