ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 322

Nearly 700,000 Americans Have Been Subjected To Conversion Therapy, Report Finds

By Curtis M. Wong

Despite widespread opposition from medical and mental health organizations, tens of thousands of LGBTQ youth in the U.S. will be subjected to anti-gay “conversion therapy” during their lifetime, a new report estimates.

Released this month by the Williams Institute at University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, the report estimates that 698,000 LGBTQ Americans between the ages of 18 and 59 have undergone conversion therapy at some point in their lives. About 350,000 of those received that treatment as adolescents.

The report also estimates that 20,000 LGBTQ youths currently between the ages of 13 and 17 will be subjected to conversion therapy from a licensed health care professional before they turn 18. An additional 57,000 will be subjected to the controversial practice from a religious or spiritual adviser before age 18.

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Milwaukee proves that private school vouchers don’t make much of a difference: report

By Charlie May

Private school voucher programs have been a controversial topic for years, and the concept is traditionally most popular amongst conservatives. President Donald Trump’s administration plans to overhaul the nation’s education system to push school-choice programs. But a recent analysis shows that “vouchers worked best when enrollment from voucher students was kept low.”

Milwaukee is home to the nation’s pioneer school vouchers program, which began nearly 30 years ago. The Wall Street Journal looked at the successes and failures of the programs.

The WSJ analysis showed that the differences in performance of students from public and private schools is far more marginal than one may have thought and what’s often been advertised by Republicans.

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OPEN DISCUSSION – FEBRUARY 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 – NOVEMBER 2017

OPEN DISCUSSION – DECEMBER 2017

OPEN DISCUSSION – JANUARY 2018

Last Night Proved We Need More Scientists In Public Office

By Shaughnessy Naughton

Watching the State of the Union last night made me think of my favorite State of the Union moment. In 2015, President Obama took the stage and  roasted climate deniers in Congress, stating “I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists. Well I’m not a scientist either but you know what? I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA and NOAA and at our major universities and the best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate.”

What a stark difference a few years make.

Last night was a resounding reaffirmation that we no longer have a leader who listens to the voices of scientists. American scientists and their work have been undermined since day one by the Trump Administration, with the enthusiastic support of a Congress led by GOP representatives as hostile to evidence-based policy making as the President. Of course these attacks didn’t begin with the Trump Administration, but the scope of damage done in just one year makes it clear to me that we need more scientists in Congress, and why the work electing scientists to public office that we’re doing at 314 Action is more important than ever.

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How warp-speed evolution is transforming ecology

By Rachael Lallensack

It took Timothy Farkas less than a week to catch and relocate 1,500 stick insects in the Santa Ynez mountains in southern California. His main tool was an actual stick.

“It feels kind of brutish,” says Farkas. “You just pick a stick up off the ground and beat the crap out of a bush.” That low-tech approach dislodged hordes of stick insects that the team easily plucked off the dirt.

On this hillside outside Santa Barbara, there are two kinds of bush that the stick insect (Timema cristinae) inhabits. The creature comes in two corresponding colorations: green and striped. Farkas and his fellow ecologists knew that the stick insects had evolved to blend in with their surroundings. But the researchers wanted to see whether they could turn this relationship around, so that an evolved trait — camouflage — would affect the organism’s ecology.

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GA Lawmaker Sponsors Bill Allowing High School Coaches to Pray with Students

By Hemant Mehta

A Georgia legislator wants to make it legal for high school football coaches to pray with students.

It comes in response to a situation late last year, when East Coweta High School’s football coach John Small was caught praying along with his team, an act which is illegal since it can be interpreted as religious coercion. District administrators eventually told the Freedom From Religion Foundation that they would put a stop to Small’s actions.

Now, State Sen. Michael Williams has sponsored SB 361, the “Coach Small Religious Protection Act,” so that coaches can pray with their students without punishment. It’s a bill that would be dead on arrival if it passes since it violates the Constitution.

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Faith-based healing bill drafted, awaiting consideration

By Kyle Pfannenstiel

BOISE — A bill that would make faith-based healing a criminal offense in Idaho has been drafted and is awaiting consideration for a committee hearing.

Rep. John Gannon, D-Boise, drafted legislation that would remove the exemption from prosecution for parents who don’t seek medical attention for their children due to conflicting religious or spiritual practices. Statutes currently only allow such an exemption for children, which Gannon calls “discriminatory.”

“To say it’s alright to allow children to die from a lack of medical attention by relying on faith healing, but adults must have medical attention is unconscionable,” he said in a press release.

His bill would strike out the exemption involving “the practice of a parent or guardian who chooses for his child treatment by prayer or spiritual means alone.” A 2016 report from a state task force assembled by the governor found that eight children died as a result of religious objections to treatment between 2011 and 2013.

Gannon said in an interview he will try to get the bill heard by the health and welfare committees, but he has not yet filed it for committee hearing. The likelihood it will get a hearing depends on occurrences outside his control — like when Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue testified in committee on a faith-healing bill last session. The Spokesman-Review reported Donahue said in the March 2017 hearing, “In my county alone, I’ve had three deaths in the last four months. … My hands are tied as a law enforcement officer.”

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Question of the Week: 01/30/2018

The music industry recently spent an evening congratulating itself with the Grammy Awards, so let’s consider an imaginary Grammys just for us. If there were an award for the music that best promoted or inspired a love of science and reason, for any time period, who or what do you think should win?

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.)

A New Recipe for Hunting Alien Life

By Lee Billings

Imagine stepping into a time machine, one that could traverse not only billions of years but also countless light years of space, all in search of life in the universe. Where would you find most of it, and what would it look like? The answer—or at least scientists’ best guess—might surprise you.

You might think most life out there would be like what we see on Earth today: grasses, trees and frolicking animals all orbiting yellow stars on watery worlds under blue, oxygen-rich skies. But you would be wrong. Astronomers conducting a galactic census of planets in the Milky Way now suspect most of the universe’s habitable real estate exists on worlds orbiting red dwarf stars, which are smaller but far more numerous than stars like our Sun. In part because of their immense numbers, such stars are in some respects easier for astronomers to study. Consider, for instance, the red dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1, just under 40 light-years away. In 2017 astronomers discovered it is orbited by at least seven temperate Earth-size planets. A plethora of new observatories—chief among them NASA’s multi-billion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope, slated to launch in 2019—could soon begin studying the planets of TRAPPIST-1 and other nearby red-dwarf planets for signs of habitability and life.

In the meantime, no one really knows, of course, what you would see if you visited one of these strange worlds in your planet-hopping time machine, but if they are at all like Earth, chances are you would find a planet dominated by microbes rather than charismatic megafauna. A new study published in the January 24 edition of Science Advances explores what this curious fact might mean for alien-hunting astronomers. Co-authored by David Catling, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Washington in Seattle, the study peers deep into our planet’s history to devise a novel recipe for finding single-celled life on faraway worlds in the not-too-distant future.

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Gen Z Is the Least Christian Generation in American History, Barna Finds

By Samuel Smith

Teenagers today are the most non-Christian generation in American history as only four out of 100 teens hold a true biblical worldview and one out of every eight teens identify as non-heterosexual, a new survey released by one of the nation’s leading evangelical polling firms has found.

The Barna Group announced Tuesday the findings from its new research project, “Gen Z: The Culture, Beliefs and Motivations Shaping the Next Generation,” sponsored by the Georgia-based Impact 360 Institute.

Barna’s research discovered that more teens today who are part of Generation Z (born from 1999 to 2015) identify themselves as agnostic, atheist or not religiously affiliated.

The study indicates that 35 percent of Generation Z teens considered themselves to be atheist, agnostic or not affiliated with any religion. By comparison, only 30 percent of millenials, 30 percent of Generation X and 26 percent of Baby Boomers said the same.

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