ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 313

Chaffetz: Florida school shooting survivors ‘need a belief in God and Jesus Christ’

By Rebecca Savransky

Former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said he thinks the survivors of the Florida high school shooting who returned to school Wednesday need a “belief in God and Jesus Christ,” noting that he thinks it “would help” and that the survivors need “something more.”

During an interview on Fox News, Chaffetz was asked about what it meant for lawmakers to take a pause from their day to reflect and honor the life of the late evangelist Billy Graham.

Chaffetz said he was “proud” to see people honoring Graham, adding that Graham impacted millions of lives.

“We need more good news, more good message, more of the good word reaching out to America,” Chaffetz said on Fox News.

“I think of those kids who went back to school today after that horrific shooting, and they need something more. They need a belief in God and Jesus Christ. I think that would help. And this is a historic moment.”

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Supporters, opponents of ‘In God We Trust’ display square off at Wentzville City Hall

By Nassim Benchaabane

WENTZVILLE • Dozens of people packed Wentzville City Hall on Wednesday night to rally behind a display of “In God We Trust” in the City Council chambers.

But their show of support didn’t stop several opponents of the motto’s display from voicing their opposition to the council.

The motto has been on display in large letters on the council dais since the building opened in November.

Mayor Nick Guccione said the display was paid for with private funds, as were decals with the motto that are on city police cars and at the police station.

Guccione said the local Rotary Club paid for the decals and the local Kiwanis Club paid for the sign in city hall. He said the board had discussed and voted on the sign and had sought legal counsel before putting the lettering up.

He said it was not an issue until he recognized the sign and the group’s funding for it at a public meeting a few weeks ago, when he claims opponents heard of the sign and took to social media.

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Colossal family tree reveals environment’s influence on lifespan

By Erika Check Hayden

Did you forget your mother’s birthday this year? Brace yourself: your family tree may now include the birthdays of 13 million people.

Computational biologist Yaniv Erlich of Columbia University in New York City and his colleagues have used crowdsourced data to make a family tree that links 13 million people. The ancestry chart, described today in Science1, is believed to be the largest verified resource of its kind — spanning an average of 11 generations.

Erlich’s team analysed the birth and death dates of the people in this tree, and calculated whether individuals were more likely to have died at similar ages if they were closely related. The group concludes that heredity explains only about 16% of the difference in lifespans for these individuals. Most of the differences were down to other factors, such as where and how people lived.

“This is a real tour de force,” says genetic epidemiologist Braxton Mitchell of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. “This is a great example of using large, publicly available data sets to do interesting research.”

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Appeals Court Says (Again) Giant Christian Cross in Bladensburg, MD is Illegal

By Hemant Mehta

Late last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled 2-1 that a giant Christian cross in Prince George’s County, Maryland was unconstitutional.

The Christian groups representing the other side then asked the entire Fourth Circuit to reconsider the case. Today, the Court ruled 8-6 against rehearing the case, which means the earlier ruling stands.

It’s another loss for the Christian Right and another victory for church/state separation.

By way of background, this case involved a World War I memorial known as “Peace Cross.” It’s a 40-foot Christian symbol on public property, maintained by the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission, that’s been up since 1925. The American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center began urging the local government to take it down in 2012.

When that didn’t happen, the AHA filed a lawsuit in 2014. The subsequent legal battle for the AHA involved a setback at the district level, pushback from conservatives, and an appeal that was opposed by 26 attorneys general from across the nation.

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Why Scientists Love to Study Dogs (and Often Ignore Cats)

By James Gorman

Recently someone (my boss, actually) mentioned to me that I wrote more articles about dogs than I did about cats and asked why.

My first thought, naturally, was that it had nothing to do with the fact that I have owned numerous dogs and no cats, but rather reflected the amount of research done by scientists on the animals.

After all, I’ll write about any interesting findings, and I like cats just fine, even if I am a dog person. Two of my adult children have cats, and I would hate for them to think I was paying them insufficient attention. (Hello Bailey! Hello Tawny! — Those are the cats, not the children.)

But I figured I should do some reporting, so I emailed Elinor Karlsson at the Broad Institute and the University of Massachusetts. She is a geneticist who owns three cats, but does much of her research on dogs — the perfect unbiased observer. Her research, by the way, is about dog genomes. She gets dog DNA from owners who send in their pets’ saliva samples.

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Microbes found in one of Earth’s most hostile places, giving hope for life on Mars

By Elizabeth Pennisi

A hardy community of bacteria lives in Chile’s Atacama Desert—one of the driest and most inhospitable places on Earth—where it can survive a decade without water, new research confirms. The work should put to rest the doubts of many scientists, who had suggested that previous evidence of microscopic life in this remote region came from transient microbes. And because the soils in this location closely resemble those on Mars, these desert dwellers may give hope to those seeking life on the Red Planet’s similarly hostile surface.

The work “does a good job of justifying that these organisms really do live there,” says Julie Neilson, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who was not involved with the study. The Atacama Desert may be uninhabitable for us, but for these organisms, “it’s their ecosystem,” she says.

The Atacama Desert stretches for 1000 kilometers along the Pacific coast of Chile, and rainfall can be as low as 8 millimeters per year. There’s so little precipitation that there’s very little weathering, so over time the surface has built up a crusty layer of salts, further discouraging life there. “You can drive for 100 kilometers and not see anything like a blade of grass,” Neilson says. Although she and others have found some bacteria there, many biologists have argued that those microbes are not full-time residents, but were blown in, where they die a slow death.

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Same-Sex-Marriage Flashpoint: Alabama Considers Quitting The Marriage Business

By Debbie Elliott

Couples – gay or straight — looking for a marriage license in Pike County, Ala. won’t get one from local probate judge Wes Allen.

“We have not issued any marriage licenses since Feb. 9, 2015,” Allen says.

That’s when a federal judge struck down Alabama’s ban on same-sex marriage. The state’s then-Chief Justice Roy Moore told local officials they weren’t bound by the federal court ruling. That threw Alabama’s marriage license system into chaos. Some offices closed altogether.

For Allen, the decision came down to his religious beliefs.

“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman and firmly believe that biblical world view,” he says. “And I couldn’t put my signature on a marriage license that I knew not to be marriage.”

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EPA reorganization will merge science office

By Miranda Green

A federal environmental office that works to test the effects of chemical exposure on adults and children is being merged as part of a proposed consolidation at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The National Center for Environmental Research (NCER) will no longer exist as a standalone entity following plans to combine three EPA offices, the agency confirmed to The Hill on Monday.

An EPA spokesperson said that under the planned overhaul, employees currently working at the NCER would be reassigned elsewhere within the department, the EPA said, and the management of NCER’s research grants would continue.

“At the appropriate time, the science staff currently in NCER will be redeployed to the [Office of Research and Development] labs/centers/offices matching their expertise to organizational needs. This reorganization could result in a change of positions or functions. Staff in the affected organizations will retain the grade and career ladder of their position of record,” the spokesperson said.

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OPEN DISCUSSION – MARCH 2018

This thread has been created for open discussion on themes relevant to Reason and Science for which there are not currently any dedicated threads.

Please note it is NOT for general chat, and that all Terms of Use apply as usual.

If you would like to refer back to previous open discussion threads, the three most recent ones can be accessed via the links below (but please continue any discussions from them here rather than on the original threads):

OPEN DISCUSSION – DECEMBER 2017

OPEN DISCUSSION – JANUARY 2018

OPEN DISCUSSION – FEBRUARY 2018

 

There’s a New Theory About the Moon’s Formation, and It Involves Doughnuts

By Brandon Specktor

Once upon a time, about 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth was an unformed doughnut of molten rock called a synestia — and the moon was hidden in the filling.

That’s one possible explanation for the moon’s formation, anyway. And according to a new paper published today (Feb. 28) in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets, it may be the best explanation scientists have so far.

“The new work explains features of the moon that are hard to resolve with current ideas,” study author Sarah Stewart, a professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Davis, said in a statement. “The moon is chemically almost the same as the Earth, but with some differences. This is the first model that can match the pattern of the Moon’s composition.”

The new lunar-creation model revolves around a hypothetical planetary object called a synestia, which Stewart and Simon Lock, a graduate student at Harvard University and co-author of the new study, first described in a paper published last year.

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