ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 330

Rio’s Pentecostal mayor takes on the capital of Carnival

By Anthony Faiola and Anna Jean Kaiser

RIO DE JANEIRO — The mayor of this sultry metropolis slashed funding for Carnival, the city’s gay pride parade and a procession honoring an Afro-Brazilian goddess. Mayor Marcelo Crivella, a Pentecostal Christian, calls the moves fiscal prudence. But Rio’s liberals see a thinly veiled crusade to impose God’s law from city hall.

As political polarization intensifies in the United States, Latin America’s largest nation is locked in its own escalating culture wars, with the rise of an increasingly powerful religious right.

Evangelical politicians such as Crivella — a 60-year-old bishop and former gospel singer who once claimed that homosexuality could result from botched abortions — are finding enormous success in Brazil. Their rise comes as conservative Protestant faiths make massive inroads in this predominantly Catholic country and as corruption scandals taint traditional political parties, causing more Brazilians to vote outside the box. 

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Antarctic Microbes Can Survive on Air Alone

By Stephanie Pappas

Talk about an extreme diet. Antarctic microbes are capable of surviving on air, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.

Soil microbes that live in polar deserts must contend with extremely dry conditions, nutrient-poor dirt and 24-hour darkness for half the year. Now, a genetic study of some of these microscopic survivors reveals that they pull it off by gleaning trace gases right out of thin air.

“This new understanding about how life can still exist in physically extreme and nutrient-starved environments like Antarctica opens up the possibility of atmospheric gases supporting life on other planets,” study leader Belinda Ferrari, a microbiologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said in a statement.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Tiny sea creatures upend notion of how animals’ nervous systems evolved

By Amy Maxmen

A study of some of the world’s most obscure marine life suggests that the central nervous system evolved independently several times — not just once, as previously thought1.

The invertebrates in question belong to families scattered throughout the animal evolutionary tree, and they display a diversity of central nerve cord architectures. The creatures also activate genes involved with nervous system development in other, well-studied animals — but they often do it in non-neural ways, report the authors of the paper, published on 13 December in Nature.

“This puts a stake in the heart of the idea of an ancestor with a central nerve cord,” says Greg Wray, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “That opens up a lot of questions we don’t have answers to — like, if central nerve cords evolved independently in different lineages, why do they have so many similarities?”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Roy Moore Longs for Theocracy in Non-Concession Speech

By Hemant Mehta

Last night, Roy Moore reiterated that he wasn’t conceding his Senate race in Alabama to Democrat Doug Jones just yet before reminding us why he had no business ever going to Congress even before the molestation scandal came to light.

Moore sounded like a retiring pop star singing his greatest hits, hitting on his campaign platform of We’re Not Fundamentalist Christian Enough.

Today, we no longer recognize the universal truth that God is the author of our life and liberty.

Abortion, sodomy, and materialism have taken the place of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

…

We have stopped prayer in our schools.

We have killed over 60 million of our unborn children.

We have redefined marriage and destroyed the basis of family, which is the building block of our Country.

…

We have even begun to recognize the right of a man to claim to be a woman, and vice versa.

…

Immorality sweeps over our land.

Speaking of immorality, nowhere in that video was there an apology to the women who accused him of molestation and general creepiness.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

You Don’t Need to Take an Oath on a Bible, or Any Religious Text

By Jonah Engel Bromwich

It was an odd footnote to the Alabama Senate race Tuesday night.

In an interview on CNN, hours before the Republican candidate Roy S. Moore would go on to lose the election, his spokesman asserted that elected officials in the United States were required to take the oath of office on a Christian Bible.

The spokesman, Ted Crockett, used the argument to justify Mr. Moore’s position that Muslim politicians should not be allowed in Congress.

The comments capped off a 10-minute interview in which Mr. Crockett discussed the allegations of sexual abuse against Mr. Moore and reiterated the candidate’s contention that homosexual acts should “probably” be illegal.

“You have to swear on a Bible to be an elected official in the United States of America,” Mr. Crockett said.

The CNN anchor Jake Tapper responded: “You don’t actually have to swear on a Christian Bible. You can swear on anything, really. I don’t know if you knew that.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

The GOP tax plan would blow a hole in American science

By Julia Belluz

If you thought the Republican tax plan was just about huge tax cuts for the wealthy, think again. It’s also a major attack on science.

To understand why, let’s step back a bit. The scientific enterprise in America heavily relies on grad students. They do mostly invisible work in thousands of labs and research institutions across the US, on everything from basic research about human cells to clinical research on how to cure cancer. Their contributions are essential to running studies.

In exchange for that labor during their training, the federal government gives them a break on their taxes.

Very simply, grad students get their tuition and other school fees waived while they’re teaching or researching. When tax season rolls around, they’re exempted from having to pay taxes on that money (which never hits their pockets).

But under the House version of the tax bill, these waivers would become taxable income. “This means that MIT graduate students would be responsible for paying taxes on an $80,000 annual salary, when we actually earn $33,000 a year,” explained one MIT grad student, Erin Rousseau, in an op-ed in the New York Times. “That’s an increase of our tax burden by at least $10,000 annually.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Once a Long Shot, Democrat Doug Jones Wins Alabama Senate Race

By Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Doug Jones, a Democratic former prosecutor who mounted a seemingly quixotic Senate campaign in the face of Republican dominance here, defeated his scandal-scarred opponent, Roy S. Moore, after a brutal campaign marked by accusations of sexual abuse and child molestation against the Republican.

The upset delivered an unimagined victory for Democrats and shaved Republicans’ unstable Senate majority to a single seat.

Mr. Jones’s victory could have significant consequences on the national level, snarling Republicans’ legislative agenda in Washington and opening, for the first time, a realistic but still difficult path for Democrats to capture the Senate next year. It amounted to a stinging snub of President Trump, who broke with much of his party and fully embraced Mr. Moore’s candidacy, seeking to rally support for him in the closing days of the campaign.

Amid thunderous applause from his supporters at a downtown hotel, Mr. Jones held up his victory as a message to Washington from voters fed up with political warfare. For once, he said, Alabama had declined to take “the wrong fork” at a political crossroads.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Americans Say Religious Aspects of Christmas Are Declining in Public Life

By Pew Research Center

As long-simmering debates continue over how American society should commemorate the Christmas holiday, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that most U.S. adults believe the religious aspects of Christmas are emphasized less now than in the past – even as relatively few Americans are bothered by this trend. In addition, a declining majority says religious displays such as nativity scenes should be allowed on government property. And compared with five years ago, a growing share of Americans say it does not matter to them how they are greeted in stores and businesses during the holiday season – whether with “merry Christmas” or a less-religious greeting like “happy holidays.”

Not only are some of the more religious aspects of Christmas less prominent in the public sphere, but there are signs that they are on the wane in Americans’ private lives and personal beliefs as well. For instance, there has been a noticeable decline in the percentage of U.S. adults who say they believe that biblical elements of the Christmas story – that Jesus was born to a virgin, for example – reflect historical events that actually occurred. And although most Americans still say they mark the occasion as a religious holiday, there has been a slight drop in recent years in the share who say they do this.

Currently, 55% of U.S. adults say they celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, including 46% who see it as more of a religious holiday than a cultural holiday and 9% who celebrate Christmas as both a religious and a cultural occasion. In 2013, 59% of Americans said they celebrated Christmas as a religious holiday, including 51% who saw it as more religious than cultural and 7% who marked the day as both a religious and a cultural holiday.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Tasmanian tiger genome offers clues to its extinction

By Ewen Callaway

The last known thylacine, a marsupial predator that once ranged from New Guinea to Tasmania, died on 7 September 1936 in a zoo in Hobart, Australia. The species’ complete genome, reported on 11 December in Nature Ecology and Evolution, offers clues to its decline and its uncanny resemblance to members of the distantly related dog family1.

“They were this bizarre and singular species. There was nothing else like them in the world at the time,” says Charles Feigin, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of Melbourne, Australia, who was involved in the sequencing effort. “They look just like a dog or wolf, but they’re a marsupial.”

People have been nothing but bad news for the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger. The species’ range throughout Australasia shrivelled as early hunter-gatherers expanded across the region, and the introduction by humans of the dingo (Canis lupus dingo) to Australia several thousand years ago reduced numbers still further, leaving an isolated thylacine population clinging on only in Tasmania. European colonists in the nineteenth century saw the predators as a threat to their sheep, and paid a bounty of £1 per carcass. Thylacines were on the cusp of extinction in the wild when the rewards were ended in 1909, leading zoos to pay handsomely for the last few individuals.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Do Superstitious Rituals Work?

By Stuart Vyse

Let us stipulate that there is no magic. Sleight-of-hand, deception, illusion, and conjuring, yes, but no “real” magic. On this, most science-minded people agree. But when it comes to superstition, there has always been an additional, less obvious question. Of course, superstitions do not have a magical effect on the world, but do they have psychological benefits? Could superstitions make difficult situations easier to handle? Furthermore, if they have an emotional or psychological benefit, could they also produce better performance in situations where skill is involved? The psychological benefits of superstitions—if they exist—would not be expected to change your luck at the roulette wheel, but perhaps an actor’s pre-performance ritual could reduce anxiety, allowing for better acting.

Despite several decades of research on superstition, these questions remained unanswered for many years. Most researchers assumed superstitions were irrational and focused their attentions on discovering why people were superstitious. It was often assumed that there might be some direct psychological benefits of superstition, but these were rarely studied.

Then in 2010 there was a great advance—or so it seemed. Researchers at the University of Cologne in Germany conducted the now famous golf ball study (Damisch et al. 2010). Participants were given a putter and asked to hit a golf ball into a cup on the carpet of a laboratory. Half the participants were handed a ball and told, “This ball has been lucky today.” The other half were told “This is your ball.” As it turned out, more than 80 percent of the German participants reported believing in the concept of good luck, and when the results were tallied, the researchers discovered that participants in the lucky ball group sank significantly more of their putts than the other group. Furthermore, Damisch et al. replicated this result with different tasks and several different luck-activating superstitions. Of course, there still was no magic, but these studies seemed to have demonstrated that believing in luck gave participants the confidence to perform better than they otherwise would. A phenomenon long speculated to be a possibility had finally been demonstrated in a laboratory setting.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.