ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 351

What an eight-year-old Neanderthal boy can tell us about how our extinct relatives developed

By Alessandra Potenza

A Neanderthal boy of around eight who died almost 50,000 years ago still has things to tell us: mainly that our extinct human relatives grew up at a pace similar to our own. Knowing that can give us clues to Neanderthal social structure, as well as how our hominid cousins raised their children.

The surprisingly well-preserved specimen, dubbed El Sidrón J1, was found in a Spanish cave of the same name in the 1990s, along with a dozen other family members. His bones — at least the ones we’ve found — are a mix of baby and adult teeth, several vertebrae, ribs, finger bones, leg bones, and parts of his skull. At about eight years of age, when the child died of unknown causes, his body had grown at a similar rate to the body of an eight-year-old modern human. There are just a few peculiar differences: his brain hadn’t stopped growing yet, and the vertebrae in his neck and torso looked like the vertebrae of a four- to six-year-old human kid, according to the new study, published today in Science.

“It provides the most detailed snapshot of development in Neanderthals that we have,” says Chris Kuzawa, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, who did not take part in the study. However, researchers caution that this is just one Neanderthal child — and because every person is different, with different brain sizes and different growth rates, it’s really hard to draw specific conclusions about the entirety of Neanderthals. “This is pulling one person, one Neanderthal individual, from all the people that lived at that time,” Kuzawa tells The Verge. “That’s definitely a big caveat.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Coming Out Atheist pg 19

“How else does coming out help other atheists? Well, coming out changes people’s minds about us. You’re probably familiar with the misinformation and bigotry about atheists: that we have no morality, that we have no meaning or joy in our lives, etc. The single best way to counter these myths is simply to come out: to be living, breathing counter-examples proving that the myths are just flatly wrong. We can make arguments showing that the myths are irrational; we can show research showing that they’re unsubstantiated; and all of that is useful. But ultimately, what changes people’s minds about atheists is simply coming into contact with us: seeing that someone they know, someone they love or respect or just think is a basically decent person, is an atheist.”

–Greta Christina, Coming Out Atheist, pg 19

Discuss!

WHOSE SCIENCE? Critics say proposed NM science standards omit evolution, climate change

By Olivier Uyttebrouck

New Mexico’s Public Education Department unveiled proposed teaching standards this week that critics say would omit references to evolution, rising global temperatures and the age of Earth from the state’s science curriculum.

The standards are based on a science curriculum called the Next Generation Science Standards proposed in 2013 by a consortium of 26 states. But the New Mexico plan contains additions and deletions from the nationwide standards.

Among those changes, the proposal would eliminate a reference to Earth’s “4.6 billion year history” and replaced it with “geologic history” in the middle-school curriculum.

It also omits a reference to a “rise in global temperatures” and replaces it with “fluctuations” in temperature.

Critics call the proposal a “watered-down” version of the national standards that will weaken science education and discourage people and companies that value science education from moving to New Mexico.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

A $200 million gift promotes alternative therapies at a California medical school — and critics recoil

By Usha Lee McFarling

LOS ANGELES — When billionaires Susan and Henry Samueli this week announced a $200 million donation to the University of California, Irvine to launch a new health program dedicated to integrative medicine, they drew a standing ovation and glowing coverage.

But for those who have been watching the steady creep of unproven therapies into mainstream medicine, the announcement didn’t go over quite as well.

“This is ultimately a very bad thing,” said Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale University and longtime critic of alternative therapies.  “It’s putting emphasis and the imprimatur of a university on things that have been discarded as medical fraud for 50 years.”

University of Alberta health law professor Tim Caulfield, who has made his name debunking celebrity health fads, has raised red flags about the adoption of alternative therapies — from “energy healing” to homeopathic bee venom to intravenous mineral infusions — at top medical centers including Duke, Johns Hopkins, and UC San Francisco. The new school at UC Irvine “is more of the same, and I find it very frustrating,” he said. “I worry this legitimizes practices that aren’t valid.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Supreme Court to weigh free speech, discrimination in wedding cake case

By Lydia Wheeler

The Supreme Court has a tough question ahead: Where do you draw the line between free speech and discrimination?

The case headed to the high court in the new term that begins next month centers on Jack Phillips, the owner of the Colorado-based Masterpiece Cakeshop who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Phillips claims he shouldn’t be forced to under the state’s anti-discrimination law and gained a strong ally this week when the Trump administration filed a friend of the court brief on his behalf.

Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall and DOJ attorneys claim there is no clear line between Phillips’s speech and that of his clients when he designs and creates a custom wedding cake.

“He is not merely tolerating someone else’s message on his property; he is giving effect to their message by crafting a unique product with his own two hands,” the administration said in its 41-page brief.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

High-energy cosmic rays come from outside our Galaxy

By Davide Castelvecchi

The Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina finally has solid evidence that the most energetic particles in nature come from sources outside the Milky Way. Scientists have suspected this for decades, but weren’t able to confirm it — until now.

“For the first time, we have proof that the highest-energy cosmic rays are of extragalactic origin,” says Alan Watson, a UK astronomer and co-founder of the observatory. The result comes as a relief to the researchers, after previous claims regarding their origin made ten years ago by the Pierre Auger Collaboration subsequently turned out to be premature.

The international team analysed 12 years’ worth of data, and found that particles in the upper range of energies were more likely to come from a region of the sky outside the Milky Way’s disk. That asymmetry is roughly consistent with the distribution of neighbouring galaxies, the researchers report in the 22 September issue of Science1.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Plan to save Great Barrier Reef from encroaching farm pollution

By Alice Klein

The sky above is grey and drizzly, but the wetlands are still beautiful to behold. Flocks of magpie geese settle on the glassy water, honking and nibbling at bright green tufts of sedge.

I’m at Mungalla Station, a cattle property in far north Queensland. Here, a large-scale conservation project is underway. Its aim: to help save the Great Barrier Reef 20 kilometres away, out at sea.

The Great Barrier Reef is a World Heritage Site, and one that is known to be in dire trouble. The obvious threats are climate change and coral bleaching, both of which could kill swathes of the corals. But another major problem is agricultural run-off. About 10 million tonnes of sludge from farms wash onto the reef each year, smothering the coral, says Mungalla’s director Jacob Cassady.

Cassady is a member of the local Nywaigi people, who took over Mungalla when it was returned to them by the Indigenous Land Corporation in 1999. At that time, the property had been damaged by more than a century of cattle farming. Overgrazing had caused soil erosion, native vegetation had been cleared, and the wetlands along the coast were choked with invasive weeds.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

GOP rep on paying for flood loss: ‘At some point, God is telling you to move’

By Julia Manchester

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) said on Thursday that it’s unreasonable for taxpayers to repeatedly pay for homes that have flooded, suggesting that homeowners move out of at-risk houses.

“We have these repetitive loss properties. So, for example, we have one property outside of Baton Rouge that has a modest home worth about $60,000 that’s flooded over 40 times. The taxpayers have paid almost half a million dollars for it,” Hensarling said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“At some point, God is telling you to move,” he added.

“If all we do is force federal taxpayers to build the same home in the same fashion in the same location and expect a different result, we all know that is the classic definition of insanity,” he continued. 

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Roy Moore Defends His Use of Racist Slurs by Claiming They’re From the Bible. (They’re Not.)

By David Badash

Over the weekend “Judge” Roy Moore referred to Native Americans and Asians as “reds and yellows.” The leading candidate in the runoff race to be the Republican nominee to fill the seat in the U.S. Senate vacated by Jeff Sessions, Moore has a lengthy history of racism, homophobia, and religious extremism.

And Moore tried to defend his use of the racist slurs by taking to Twitter and claiming they’re from the Bible.

They’re not.

“Red, yellow, black and white they are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world. This is the Gospel,” Moore tweeted.

No, it’s not, according to CNN, which notes the phrase he tweeted is a Sunday School hymn. Either way, Moore’s racism is showing.

Moore is a virulently anti-gay activist who once instructed Alabama judges to refuse same-sex couples marriage licenses – after the Supreme Court had ruled so doing was unconstitutional.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

CRISPR used to peer into human embryos’ first days

By Heidi Ledford

Gene-edited human embryos have offered a glimpse into the earliest stages of development, while hinting at the role of a pivotal protein that guides embryo growth.

The first-of-its-kind study stands in contrast to previous research that attempted to fix disease-causing mutations in human embryos, in the hope of eventually preventing genetic disorders. Whereas those studies raised concerns over potential ‘designer babies’, the latest paper describes basic research that aims to understand human embryo development and causes of miscarriage.

Published online today in Nature1, the study relied on CRISPR–Cas9, a gene-editing system that can make precise changes to DNA in the genome. In this case, researchers harnessed CRISPR–Cas9 to disrupt the production of a protein called OCT4 that is important for embryo development.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.