ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 289

In an internal memo, the White House considered whether to simply ‘ignore’ federal climate research

By Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin

White House officials last year weighed whether to simply “ignore” climate studies produced by government scientists or to instead develop “a coherent, fact-based message about climate science,” according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.

The document, drafted Sept. 18 by Michael Catanzaro, President Trump’s special assistant for domestic energy and environmental policy at the time, highlights the dilemma the administration has faced over climate change since Trump took office. Even as Trump’s deputies have worked methodically to uproot policies aimed at curbing the nation’s carbon output, the administration’s agencies continue to produce reports showing that climate change is happening, is human-driven and is a threat to the United States.

Catanzaro, who prepared the memo for a meeting of senior White House and agency officials that took place a couple of days later, asked whether the Trump administration should “consider having a firm position on and a coherent, fact-based message about climate science — specifically, whether, and to what extent, anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are affecting the climate system, and what level of concern that warrants.”

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Five basic things Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wouldn’t — or couldn’t — answer at House hearing

By Valerie Strauss

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos appeared before the House Education Committee on Tuesday to discuss the policies and priorities of the department she leads, but there were some things she just wouldn’t — or couldn’t — say.

DeVos has been running the department for a little more than a year, and the controversy that marked the start of her tenure — her Senate confirmation was secured only after Mike Pence became the first vice president in history to break a tie for a Cabinet nominee — has not dissipated.

There’s more than one reason for this: Critics see her lack of experience with public education as a problem. They also point to her attitude about government — she once said “government sucks” — and her avid support for programs that support privatizing public education.

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Two Lawsuits Aim to Take Down the Arkansas Capitol’s Ten Commandments Monument

By Hemant Mehta

Nearly a month after Arkansas State Sen. Jason Rapert defied warnings from church/state separation activists and installed a stand-alone Ten Commandments monument outside the State Capitol, multiple groups have filed lawsuits against the state.

You can read the entire saga of the monument here. Most relevant is how Rapert tried putting up this monument last June, but a man literally drove into it, shattering it, the day it was erected. While Rapert quickly got to work replacing the Christian display, it also stalled any potential lawsuits.

With the new monument in place (surrounded by four small concrete barriers), it’s time to fight back.

The first lawsuit comes from a coalition of non-theistic groups, including the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the American Humanist Association, the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers, and seven individuals (both religious and nonreligious) who live in the state.

The sole defendant is Secretary of State Mark Martin who allowed all this to happen.

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Question of the Week – 5/23/2018

What music inspires an appreciation for science and reason in you?

Our favorite answer will win a copy of Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins.

Want to suggest a Question of the Week? E-mail submissions to us at qotw@richarddawkins.net. (Questions only, please. All answers to bimonthly questions are made only in the comments section of the Question of the Week.)

 

Scientists Made Snails Remember Something That Never Happened to Them

By Veronique Greenwood

Transferring memories from one living thing to another sounds like the plot of an episode of “Black Mirror.” But it may be more realistic than it sounds — at least for snails.

In a paper published Monday in the journal eNeuro, scientists at the University of California-Los Angeles reported that when they transferred molecules from the brain cells of trained snails to untrained snails, the animals behaved as if they remembered the trained snails’ experiences.

David Glanzman, a professor of neurobiology at U.C.L.A. who is an author of the new paper, has been studying Aplysia californica, a sea snail, and its ability to make long-term memories for years. The snails, which are about five inches long, are a useful organism for studying how memories are formed because their neurons are large and relatively easy to work with.

In experiments by Dr. Glanzman and colleagues, when these snails get a little electric shock, they briefly retract their frilly siphons, which they use for expelling waste. A snail that has been shocked before, however, retracts its siphon for much longer than a new snail recruit.

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Trump’s foreign policy looks a lot like Rapture Christians’ plan to welcome the apocalypse

By Heather Timmons

In 1995, the US Congress voted to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. But until Donald Trump, presidents both Republican and Democratic resisted implementing the move, worried it could set off deadly violence. Yesterday, Trump’s advisors and family members Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner finally inaugurated the new Jerusalem embassy—while the death toll of Palestinian protestors ticked steadily up to over 50, including several children.

Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama all faced pressure from wealthy potential campaign donors to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, but Trump is listening to a voice they were not: evangelical Christians who appear to believe in the “Rapture.” Some, like vice president Mike Pence and secretary of state Mike Pompeo, hold posts inside his cabinet. For Rapture Christians, returning Jerusalem to the Jewish people is a key to the second coming of Christ.

Robert Jeffress, a pastor who preaches the Rapture, delivered the new embassy’s opening prayer. Jeffress has previously said that Mormons are heretics, Jews fated to hell, Islam promotes pedophilia, and homosexuals are filthy. He prayed, “We thank you everyday that you have given us a president who boldly stands on the right side of history, and more importantly on the right side of you, oh God, when it comes to Israel.”

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GOP lawmaker says rocks falling into ocean to blame for rising sea levels

By Avery Anapol

A Republican lawmaker on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee said Thursday that rocks from the White Cliffs of Dover and the California coastline, as well as silt from rivers tumbling into the ocean, are contributing to high sea levels globally.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) made the comment during a hearing on technology and the changing climate, which largely turned into a Q&A on the basics of climate research.

Climate scientist Philip Duffy testified before the panel, addressing lawmakers’ questions about climate change, according to E&E News.

“The rate of global sea-level rise has accelerated and is now four times faster than it was 100 years ago,” Duffy told the panel.

Brooks said that erosion played a factor in that.

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Godless choir mixes fellowship with a full-throated defense of atheism

By Heather Adams

LOS ANGELES — Eight years ago, Amanda MacLean enrolled for a singing course at Santiago Canyon College, a community college where she worked in Orange, Calif. All students were required to sing together as a choir. She was surprised when she found that the mandatory sessions not only included hymns but performances at religious events.

After singing at the City of Orange’s Christmas tree lighting three years in a row, she couldn’t stand it anymore. She went online to find herself an atheist choir.

“I knew there had to be nonbelievers out there who felt like I did, who had no place to sing without being forced to sing about Jesus,” said MacLean, now 40 and an administrative assistant at the J. Paul Getty Museum here. “I actually thought atheist choirs were a thing.”

They were and they weren’t. MacLean’s search led her to Bobbie Kirkhart, whose home near Dodger Stadium in Angelino Heights is familiarly known as Heretic House. In 2001, Kirkhart had co-founded the Voices of Reason with a fellow nonbeliever named Michael Jordan. Three years later, after Jordan’s death, Voices of Reason had disbanded.

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Longtime gay-rights opponent Tony Perkins named to U.S. religious freedom panel

by Julie Moreau

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appointed Family Research Council President Tony Perkins — a longtime opponent of LGBTQ rights — to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

“From my post at USCIRF, I look forward to doing all that I can to ensure that our government is the single biggest defender of religious freedom internationally,” Perkins said in a statement released Tuesday. “It is my hope that through the work of USCIRF, the world will become one step closer to recognizing the vital role religious freedom and the defense of religious minorities play in peace, security and human flourishing.”

USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan commission created by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA) that is “dedicated to defending the universal right to freedom of religion or belief abroad.” Its nine volunteer members — three chosen by the president, two by the president’s party and four by the opposing party — serve renewable one- or two-year terms.

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Chinese satellite launch kicks off ambitious mission to Moon’s far side

By Davide Castelvecchi

China has taken its first major step in a groundbreaking lunar mission. On 21 May, a probe launched from Xichang Satellite Launch Centre to head beyond the Moon, where it will lie ready to act as a communications station for the Chang’e-4 lunar lander. The nation hopes that the lander will, later this year, become the first craft to touch down on the far side of the Moon.

The relay probe, named Queqiao and designed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also carries two pioneering radio-astronomy experiments. Both are proof-of-principle missions designed to test technologies for exploring a period in cosmic history known as the dark ages. These first few hundred million years of the Universe’s existence, before galaxies and stars began to form, are all but impossible to study from Earth. But the spectrum of radiation from this age — when matter was distributed nearly uniformly across space as a thin, cold haze — could reveal information about the distribution of ordinary matter compared with dark matter in the Universe.

The first experiment is the Netherlands-China Low-Frequency Explorer (NCLE). It will remain attached to Queqiao, which will linger around ‘Earth-Moon L2’ — a gravitational resting point about 60,000 kilometres beyond the Moon that tracks the Moon’s orbit around Earth (see ‘Far-side satellite’). The Dutch-built NCLE experiment will try to exploit the relative quiet there to measure radio waves with frequencies between about 1 megahertz and 80 megahertz, coming from the Solar System, the Galaxy and beyond. Much of this frequency band is blocked by Earth’s atmosphere, but cosmologists expect it to contain information from the dark ages. Around the upper end of this band also fall the ‘cosmic- dawn’ signals from the first stars, which lit up around 200 million years after the Big Bang and were apparently detected for the first time earlier this year. Other experiments are trying to replicate those results — but the NCLE is testing technologies for identifying lower-frequency signatures from the dark ages.)

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