ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 336

Before He Was Tapped By Donald Trump, Controversial Judicial Nominee Brett J. Talley Investigated Paranormal Activity

By Gideon Resnick and Sam Stein

Brett J. Talley, nominated by President Donald Trump to the Federal District Court in Montgomery, Alabama, has never tried a case, is married to a White House lawyer, and has been dubbed as unqualified by the American Bar Association.

He also has a fervent interest in investigating and writing about paranormal activities.

On his questionnaire for the Senate Judiciary Committee, a copy of which was provided to The Daily Beast, Talley says that he was part of The Tuscaloosa Paranormal Research Group from 2009-2010. The group, according to its website, searches for the truth “of the paranormal existence” in addition to helping “those who may be living with paranormal activity that can be disruptive and/or traumatic.”

David Higdon, the group’s founder and later a co-author with Talley told The Daily Beast that he couldn’t remember specific cases they may have worked on together.

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Where Is The Next Carl Sagan?

By Erin Biba

In 1954, a study published by Princeton and Dartmouth researchers asked their students to watch a recording of a football game between the two schools and count infractions. The Princeton students reported twice as many violations against Princeton as Dartmouth students did. In a 2003 study, Yale researchers asked people to evaluate proposed (fictional) policies about welfare reform, with political parties’ endorsements clearly stated. They found that their subjects sided with their political parties regardless of their personal ideologies or the policies’ content. A study by a different group in 2011 asked people to identify whether certain scientists (highly trained and at well-respected institutions) were credible experts on global warming, disposal of nuclear waste, and gun control. Subjects largely favored the scientists whose conclusions matched their own values; the facts were irrelevant.

People distort facts by putting them through a personal lens.This behavior is called “selective perception”—the way that otherwise rational people distort facts by putting them through a personal lens of social influence and wind up with a worldview that often alters reality. Selective perception affects all our beliefs, and it’s a major stumbling block for science communication.

What divides us, it turns out, isn’t the issues. It’s the social and political contexts that color how we see the issues. Take nuclear power, for example. In the U.S., we argue about it; in France, the public couldn’t care less. (The U.S.’s power is about 20 percent nuclear; France’s is 78 percent.) Look at nearly any science issue and nations hold different opinions. We fight about gun control, climate change, and HPV vaccination. In Europe, these controversies don’t hold a candle to debates about GMO foods and mad cow disease. Scientific subjects become politically polarized because the public interprets even the most rigorously assembled facts based on the beliefs of their social groups, says Dan Kahan, a Yale professor of law and psychology who ran the 2011 science-expert study.

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Roy Moore allegations prompt reflections on fundamentalist culture in which some Christian men date teens

By Julie Zauzmer

When Roy Moore, then 34 years old, asked 17-year-old Debbie Wesson Gibson whether she would date him, Gibson asked her mother what she would think.

According to The Washington Post’s investigation into Moore’s alleged pursuit of teenage girls, which was published Thursday, Gibson’s mother replied, “I’d say you were the luckiest girl in the world.”

That attitude of encouraging teenage girls to date older men, rather than shielding girls from men’s advances, sounded familiar to some people who read the Post story that has shaken Moore’s bid for the U.S. Senate.

“It’s not so uncommon that people would necessarily look at it askance,” said Nicholas Syrett, a University of Kansas professor who recently published a book on child marriage in America. “The South has a much longer history of allowing minors to marry, and obviously there’s some courtship or dating — whatever you want to call it — leading up to that.”

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Huffman is an ungodly rare thing in Congress: a nonbeliever

By Joe Garofoli

Rep. Jared Huffman recently did something radical for a member of Congress: The San Rafael Democrat revealed publicly that he doesn’t believe in God.

To put that in context, coming out as a nonbeliever is more rare than coming out as a nonheterosexual — there are seven LGBTQ members in the reality-challenged zone known as “Congress.”

These days, 91 percent of legislators identify as Christian. That makes Congress “about as Christian today as it was in the early 1960s,” according to a Pew Research study done earlier this year, and unlike the America of 2017, where 70 percent of people are Christian and 23 percent are, to use the clinical term, “unaffiliated.” Former East Bay Rep. Pete Stark is believed to be the only other out nonbeliever in congressional history.

Huffman wants to be clear he doesn’t hate religion — far from it. He was tapped to be a leader in the offshoot of Mormonism he grew up in, and eventually left. His wife and kids regularly attend Catholic Mass. After Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., was shot during practice for a congressional baseball game in June, Huffman joined other Democrats in a prayer for their wounded colleague. He said he is somewhat envious of the community that many religious people enjoy through their shared bonds.

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Exoplanet hunters rethink search for alien life

By Alexandra Witze

Steve Desch can see the future of exoplanet research, and it’s not pretty. Imagine, he says, that astronomers use NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to scour the atmosphere of an Earth-mass world for signs of life. Then imagine that they chase hints of atmospheric oxygen for years — before realizing that those were false positives produced by geological activity instead of living things.

Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University in Tempe, and other planet hunters met from 13-17 November in Laramie, Wyoming, to plot better ways to scout for life beyond Earth. Many are starting to argue that habitability — having liquid water on a planet’s surface — is not the factor that should guide exoplanet exploration. Instead, the scientists say, the field should focus on the chances of detecting alien life, should it exist.

“Planets can be habitable and not have life with any impact,” Desch told researchers at the meeting.

It turns out that water worlds are some of the worst places to look for living things. One study presented at the meeting shows how a planet covered in oceans could be starved of phosphorus, a nutrient without which earthly life cannot thrive. Other work concludes that a planet swamped in even deeper water would be geologically dead, lacking any of the planetary processes that nurture life on Earth.

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Does West Virginia’s “Christian Heritage Week” Violate Church/State Separation?

By David G. McAfee

From now until next Saturday, West Virginia is honoring “Christian Heritage Week,” where the state government promotes Christian lessons, songs, and prayers… and raises valid concerns about church/state separation.

The ACLU of West Virginia has called on this to be the last Christian Heritage Week by sending a letter to the state’s governor. The group said on Thursday that the courts have “been clear” that “no religion should have the appearance of having special privilege, favor or endorsement from the government.”

“Christian Heritage Week” certainly violates the idea that no religion will be given special favor. People of other faiths including Muslims, Jews, indigenous religions and even those who proclaim no religion have all made substantial contributions to the growth and development of West Virginia. Yet no other religion is singled out to celebrate their history or heritage; this gives the appearance of favoring one religion over others. It is similarly troubling that “Christian Heritage Week” routinely falls on the week of Thanksgiving — because it entangles a national, secular holiday with a celebration of a particular religion.

This is exactly right. Every year, for 26 years, West Virginia has proclaimed “Christian Heritage Week” to overlap with Thanksgiving, in essence trying to hijack the holiday for a particular faith. That’s not a coincidence.

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Why evangelicals are again backing a Republican despite allegations of sexual misconduct

By Astead W. Herndon

WASHINGTON — Allegations that Roy Moore sexually assaulted teenage girls decades ago have turned many Republicans against their party’s Senate candidate in Alabama, but one bloc of conservative leaders is standing by their man: evangelicals.

It is the latest example of a shift in attitude among Christian conservatives, who polls show are increasingly willing to overlook sexual misbehavior if a political leader is firmly committed to opposing abortion, gay marriage, and transgender rights.

In today’s hyperpartisan environment, ideology trumps personal transgressions for these religious leaders, who years ago called on President Clinton to resign over his liaisons with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Now, conservative evangelicals have rallied to the defense of Moore, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who once defied court orders and kept a memorial of the Ten Commandments in the state judicial building. To his evangelical supporters, Moore is a victim of a media witch hunt.

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Immortality in Space for “Johnny B. Goode”

By CBS

When Chuck Berry sang “Go, go Johnny go!” in 1958, could he have ever imagined how far his rock and roll hit would really go? “Johnny B. Goode” is now some 13 billion miles from Earth, traveling at 38,000 mph aboard NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe. The guitar anthem shares space on a Golden Record alongside Mozart and Louis Armstrong, part of a cultural snapshot intended for any extraterrestrials who might someday find the spacecraft. Anderson Cooper reports on the Voyager space probes as they continue beaming back data 40 years after their launch. The story will be broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday, Nov. 19 7:30 p.m., ET/7:00 p.m. PT.

Why send “Johnny B. Goode” into space? Ann Druyan, the creative director of the team astronomer Carl Sagan assembled to make the Golden Record in the 1970s, tells Cooper the music embodied the mission. “To me, ‘Johnny B. Goode,’ rock and roll, was the music of motion, of moving, getting to someplace you’ve never been before and the odds are against you,” says Druyan. “But you want to go. That was Voyager.”

The Voyagers were launched 40 years ago, and they’re still going. No man-made objects have ever traveled so long and so far while continuing to function. The twin crafts were launched separately in 1977. Their mission was only supposed to last four years. The images the Voyagers captured of Jupiter in 1979 were the sharpest scientists had ever seen. The probes continued on, collecting data and images from the farthest planets in our solar system — Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — and their distinctive moons. The data gave scientists a new perspective on the workings and diversity of far-away worlds they had only seen through telescopes. The Voyagers are still beaming scientific data back to Earth.

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Biology’s beloved amphibian — the axolotl — is racing towards extinction

By Erik Vance

When biologist Luis Zambrano began his career in the late 1990s, he pictured himself working miles from civilization, maybe discovering new species in some hidden corner of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Instead, in 2003, he found himself counting amphibians in the polluted, murky canals of Mexico City’s Xochimilco district. The job had its advantages: he was working minutes from his home and studying the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), a national icon in Mexico and arguably the world’s most recognizable salamander. But in that first year, Zambrano couldn’t wait for it to be over.

“Let me tell you, I hated the project at the beginning,” he says. For one thing, “I couldn’t catch anything”.

Over time, however, he did catch some axolotls. What he found surprised him — and changed the course of his career. In 1998, the first robust study to count axolotls estimated that there were about 6,000 of them per square kilometre in Xochimilco1. Zambrano — who now is a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City — discovered in 2000 that the number had dropped to about 1,000 animals per square kilometre. By 2008, it was down to 100; today, thanks to pollution and invasive predators, there are fewer than 35 animals per square kilometre1. 

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Puppy Love: Owning a Dog Linked to Better Heart Health

By Samantha Mathewson

Good news for dog owners: Man’s best friend may help lower a person’s risk of heart disease, a new study from Sweden finds.

In the study, the researchers looked at the relationship between dog ownership and cardiovascular health. The results suggest that dog owners have a lower risk of heart disease because the four-legged friends provide social support and boost their owners’ physical activity.

Owning a pet dog may be particularly beneficial for people who live alone, the study found.

“A very interesting finding in our study was that dog ownership was especially prominent as a protective factor in persons living alone, which is a group reported previously to be at higher risk of cardiovascular disease and death than those living in a multi-person household,” lead study author Mwenya Mubanga, a doctoral student in the Department of Medical Sciences at Uppsala University in Sweden, said in a statement.

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