ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 325

First Blue Moon Total Lunar Eclipse in 150 Years Coming This Month

By Joe Rao

The first eclipse of 2018 will be a lunar one that comes at the very end of the month, on Jan. 31.

It will be a total eclipse that involves the second full moon of the month, popularly referred to as a Blue Moon. Such a skywatching event hasn’t happened for more than 150 years.

The eclipse will take place during the middle of the night, and the Pacific Ocean will be turned toward the moon at the time. Central and eastern Asia, Indonesia, New Zealand and most of Australia will get a fine view of this moon show in the evening sky. Heading farther west into western Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the eclipse will already be underway as the moon rises.

 

To the east, Alaska, Hawaii and northwestern Canada will see the eclipse from start to finish. Moonset will intervene for the rest of North and Central America, however.  

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Deep learning sharpens views of cells and genes

By Amy Maxmen

Eyes are said to be the window to the soul — but researchers at Google see them as indicators of a person’s health. The technology giant is using deep learning to predict a person’s blood pressure, age and smoking status by analysing a photograph of their retina. Google’s computers glean clues from the arrangement of blood vessels — and a preliminary study suggests that the machines can use this information to predict whether someone is at risk of an impending heart attack.

The research relied on a convolutional neural network, a type of deep-learning algorithm that is transforming how biologists analyse images. Scientists are using the approach to find mutations in genomes and predict variations in the layout of single cells. Google’s approach, described in a preprint in August (R. Poplin et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.09843; 2017), is part of a wave of new deep-learning applications that are making image processing easier and more versatile — and could even identify overlooked biological phenomena.

“It was unrealistic to apply machine learning to many areas of biology before,” says Philip Nelson, a director of engineering at Google Research in Mountain View, California. “Now you can — but even more exciting, machines can now see things that humans might not have seen before.”

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From Trump’s evangelicals to witches to Roy Moore: how religion shaped 2017

By Tara Isabella Burton

When it comes to religious issues in America, 2017 has been remarkable. Donald Trump, one of the most counterintuitively evangelical-backed presidential candidates in history, winning the white evangelical vote 4-1 despite being a twice-divorced, foul-mouthed billionaire New Yorker who’s bragged about his ability to sexually accost women and has been accused of sexual misconduct by several women. He took office in January, faith communities — from Christian evangelicals to Muslims to the spiritual but not religious — have been reckoning with the aftermath ever since.

In my first year at Vox, I’ve covered a range of religion stories — from witches casting spells against Trump to controversial debates over the alt-right at the annual Southern Baptist Convention conference. In that time, I’ve noticed a few distinct, related patterns emerging. Most notably, Christian nationalism is getting stronger — even as that nationalism has both caused divisions within the evangelical community and led to wider politico-religious divisions in America, cleaving white evangelicals, from, well, everybody else.

If we take away any lessons from the narratives of American religion in 2017, they should be these.

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America’s 100 Largest Churches Are All Anti-Gay and Mostly Led By White Men

By Sarahbeth Caplin

Writing for Religion News Service, Jonathan Merritt makes a not-so-stunning observation that evangelical churches are lacking in three critical areas of diversity: sexuality, race, and gender.

Merritt’s findings come from a project called Church Clarity, an organization that reports evangelical churches’ stances (or lack thereof) on LGBT equality. (We posted about them a couple of months ago when they launched.) Their most significant report yet reveals troubling, yet unsurprising, data about America’s 100 largest churches.

For starters, none of them are overtly LGBTQ-affirming:

None of [America’s megachurches] have policies affirming same-sex people and relationships. This staggering statistic will doubtlessly provide firepower to conservative Christians who claim that LGBTQ+ affirmation is a slippery slope to liberalism and a congregation killer.

And yet the data also provides progressives a counterargument. According to CC’s analysis, a paltry 35% of these mega-churches have clear LGBTQ+ policies, and 54% actually hide their positions (e.g. sermons and blogposts) deep inside their websites. This seems to indicate that many non-affirming mega-churches are not as boldly opposed as one might assume, and some of these large congregations may be currently reconsidering their positions and policies.

For a community that prides itself on having ownership of The Truth, the lack of clarity about this is intriguing. If churches feel strongly about their stance on homosexuality, why not own it? The fact that it’s deliberately hidden suggests that there’s underlying shame about their beliefs.

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Life Driven Purpose, pg 151

“Even if the spirit does exist in some unknowable way – in spite of my impertinence in asking for a definition – what do believers mean when they say it is “outside” of nature? Exactly where is that? If a spirit is outside of nature, it still must be somewhere, in a region “beyond.” And that is a still a place. Something might indeed be outside our own observable universe in the wider cosmos, but how can anything be outside of nature? Universes within the multiverse would certainly be outside of each other, but they would still be part of the natural cosmos. If we don’t have a coherent definition of “outside of nature,” then it is meaningless to suggest that that is where the spirit or supernatural exists. ”

-Dan Barker, Life Driven Purpose, pg 151

Book Review: “Sharing Reality – How to Bring Secularism and Science to an Evolving Religious World”

By Matt Lowry

Many of you know that for some time now I’ve been particularly interested in how we skeptics (i.e. those of use who take an evidence-based view of the world) can engage those of a non-skeptical mindset. In fact, I’ve been explicit about this in past musings wherein I discuss how to have meaningful dialogue with creationists or self-declared ghost hunters. Now I am happy to report that there is a book out – Sharing Reality by Jeff T. Haley and Dale McGowan – which tackles exactly this topic in great detail.

As a professional high school and college science educator of 20+ years, and as a self-professed skeptic of all things supernatural, I found that Sharing Reality provided something that many of my colleagues have struggled with: a method for effectively communicating science and critical thinking without alienating people who are reachable. Sharing Reality is a must-read for those proponents of science, adherents to an evidence-based worldview, and defenders of secularism, because it provides a road map for how to engage in productive discussions with those who don’t necessarily share that worldview. If we are serious about advancing science, secularism, and evidence-based critical thinking in general (what the authors refer to as “evidism”) beyond our own echo chambers into wider society, then we would be wise to follow the advice contained within Sharing Reality to start engaging people in broader discussions of these issues.

Read the review on Matt’s blog here.

The Best Explanation for Everything in the Universe

By Natalie Wolchover

It’s not easy being a “theory of everything.” A TOE has the very tough job of fitting gravity into the quantum laws of nature in such a way that, on large scales, gravity looks like curves in the fabric of space-time, as Albert Einstein described in his general theory of relativity. Somehow, space-time curvature emerges as the collective effect of quantized units of gravitational energy—particles known as gravitons. But naïve attempts to calculate how gravitons interact result in nonsensical infinities, indicating the need for a deeper understanding of gravity.

String theory (or, more technically, M-theory) is often described as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. But there’s no empirical evidence for it, or for any alternative ideas about how gravity might unify with the rest of the fundamental forces. Why, then, is string/M-theory given the edge over the others?

The theory famously posits that gravitons, as well as electrons, photons, and everything else, are not point particles but rather imperceptibly tiny ribbons of energy, or “strings,” that vibrate in different ways. Interest in string theory soared in the mid-1980s, when physicists realized that it gave mathematically consistent descriptions of quantized gravity. But the five known versions of string theory were all “perturbative,” meaning they broke down in some regimes. Theorists could calculate what happens when two graviton strings collide at high energies, but not when there’s a confluence of gravitons extreme enough to form a black hole.

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Explainer: The Government Bill That Wants to Integrate Homeopathy and Modern Medicine

By The Wire Staff

Five hours into the all-India strike called by the Indian Medical Association (IMA), the Bill they were protesting was sent to a standing committee.

The National Medical Commission Bill, 2017, was introduced in the Lok Sabha by health minister J.P. Nadda on December 29, 2017. It came up for discussion today. But the controversial Bill was swiftly sent off to a standing committee for scrutiny instead.

The Bill attempts to tackle two main things on quality and quantity: Corruption in medical education and shortage of medical professionals.

A product of the NITI Aayog, the Bill was drafted following a scathing standing committee report in 2016 on the corrupt functioning of the Medical Council of India (MCI).

The IMA opposed the Bill, calling it “anti-people and anti-poor”. To protest it, they called a 12-hour all-India strike on Tuesday, which has now been called off.

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Being An Atheist Shows You That Every Minute Is Sacred

By Lianna Brinded

My father died when I was 21, and I was devastated to realize what he’d miss seeing. He’d never see the bulbs he planted that year bloom into flowers. He’d never see me flourish in my career. He’d never walk me down the aisle at my wedding.

As an atheist, I knew that was it. My father wasn’t looking down upon me from some cushy cloud, with harp music in the background. I could take no comfort in belief in an afterlife, or the notion that life on earth is just a journey towards some spiritual payoff in another dimension. I’m pretty convinced that what we do here and now is all that we get.

His death only strengthened my belief—which was also his—that every second, minute, hour, and day is sacred.

From a young age, I knew I was an atheist. Having seen no scientific evidence of a higher celestial being to change my mind, I have remained an atheist to this day.

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Avoiding GMOs isn’t just anti-science. It’s immoral.

By Mitch Daniels

Of the several claims of “anti-science” that clutter our national debates these days, none can be more flagrantly clear than the campaign against modern agricultural technology, most specifically the use of molecular techniques to create genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Here, there are no credibly conflicting studies, no arguments about the validity of computer models, no disruption of an ecosystem nor any adverse human health or even digestive problems, after 5 billion acres have been cultivated cumulatively and trillions of meals consumed.

And yet a concerted, deep-pockets campaign, as relentless as it is baseless, has persuaded a high percentage of Americans and Europeans to avoid GMO products, and to pay premium prices for “non-GMO” or “organic” foods that may in some cases be less safe and less nutritious. Thank goodness the toothpaste makers of the past weren’t cowed so easily; the tubes would have said “No fluoride inside!” and we’d all have many more cavities.

This is the kind of foolishness that rich societies can afford to indulge. But when they attempt to inflict their superstitions on the poor and hungry peoples of the planet, the cost shifts from affordable to dangerous and the debate from scientific to moral.

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