ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 352

ACLU sues Michigan over religious exemptions for adoptions

By Susan Miller

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit Wednesday challenging Michigan’s practice of allowing adoption agencies to spurn potential LGBT parents under the guise of religion.

Religious exemption laws let people, churches and sometimes corporations cite religious beliefs as a reason not to enforce a law — such as declining to marry a same-sex couple or letting state-funded foster agencies refuse to place kids with same-sex couples.

The Michigan adoption law leads to “fewer options for children” when the pool of qualified adopters is diluted because of unreasonable legislation, ACLU lawyer Leslie Cooper said. “There is a desperate need for families. We need more families, not fewer.”

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Proposed NM Science Standards Omit References to Evolution and Global Warming

By Hemant Mehta

New Mexico is on a path to adopt science standards for all public school students that would eliminate mentions of evolution, the age of the Earth, and global warming.

You wouldn’t know it, though, because the state’s Public Education Department based their own curriculum on the Next Generation Science Standards, a 2013 list adopted by 26 states. But New Mexico revised the list to take out the bits they deemed too controversial for children.

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.

…

Another omits the word “evolution” and replaces it with the phrase “biological diversity.”

They’re trying to apply both-sides-ism to science, even when experts are virtually all in consensus on these issues. By suggesting there are alternatives to these accepted theories, state officials are watering down students’ education and suggesting viewpoints that have no credibility among practicing scientists.

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Prepping for Alien Oceans, NASA Goes Deep

By Jennifer Berglund

In late 2012 NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope spotted what appeared to be plumes of water vapor spewing from the frozen surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Another observation last year provided more evidence this was not a fluke. It is likely that below that distant world’s ice is an ocean larger than all of Earth’s combined. This created a frenzy in the astrobiological community—brimming with all that water, could Europa also have the necessary ingredients for life?

Now NASA is gearing up for a robotic mission to this mysterious moon. The Europa Clipper is slated to launch in the early 2020s, equipped with instruments for imaging, sampling and analyzing just what lies within the distant world. NASA scientists have plenty of experience in relaying information from faraway probes back to Earth—but the actual tools for measuring the stuff of life in situ are less familiar, so scientists have turned to our planet’s own deep ocean for answers. “Technologically, we share mutual goals and approaches with deep-ocean scientists,” says Mary Voytek, director of NASA’s Astrobiology Program. “We look to understanding what’s going on here on Earth in order for us to understand what’s going on beyond Earth.”

NASA tasked Peter Girguis, a marine biologist at Harvard University, and his colleagues at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution with developing the ultimate deep-ocean observatory, which they deployed for the first time this August. They want technology that can both elucidate the chemical processes that support life in Earth’s deep ocean as well as detect the ingredients for life on other ocean worlds.

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Researchers unite in quest for ‘standard model’ of the brain

By Alison Abbott

Leading neuroscientists are joining forces to study the brain — in much the same way that physicists team up in mega-projects to hunt for new particles.

The International Brain Lab (IBL), launched on 19 September, combines 21 of the foremost neuroscience laboratories in the United States and Europe into a giant collaboration that will develop theories of how the brain works by focusing on a single behaviour shared by all animals: foraging. The Wellcome Trust in London, and the Simons Foundation in Washington DC have together committed more than US$13 million over five years to kick-start the IBL.

The pilot effort is an attempt to shake up cellular neuroscience, conventionally done by individual labs studying the role of a limited number of brain circuits during simple behaviours. The ‘virtual’ IBL lab will instead ask how a mouse brain, in its entirety, generates complex behaviours in constantly changing environments that mirror natural conditions. 

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Trump judicial nominee said transgender children are part of ‘Satan’s plan’, defended ‘conversion therapy’

By Chris Massie and Andrew Kaczynski

In a pair of 2015 speeches, President Donald Trump’s nominee for a federal judgeship in Texas described transgender children as evidence of “Satan’s plan,” lamented that states were banning conversion therapy and argued that sanctioning same-sex marriage would lead to polygamy and bestiality.

Jeff Mateer, the current first assistant attorney general of Texas, was serving at the time as general counsel of the First Liberty Institute, a religious liberty advocacy group known before 2016 as the Liberty Institute. He faced criticism from LGBT rights groups for his work with the organization, such as opposing the expansion of nondiscrimination protections to LGBT people in the city of Plano. If confirmed by the US Senate, he will serve on the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

In a May 2015 speech, titled “The Church and Homosexuality,” Mateer discussed a Colorado lawsuit in which the parents of a transgender girl sued her school for preventing her from using the bathroom of her choice.

“In Colorado, a public school has been sued because a first grader and I forget the sex, she’s a girl who thinks she’s a boy or a boy who thinks she’s a girl, it’s probably that, a boy who thinks she’s a girl,” Mateer said in a video posted on Vimeo in 2015 and reviewed by CNN’s KFile. “And the school said, ‘Well, she’s not using the girl’s restroom.’ And so she has now sued to have a right to go in. Now, I submit to you, a parent of three children who are now young adults, a first grader really knows what their sexual identity? I mean it just really shows you how Satan’s plan is working and the destruction that’s going on.”

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Marriage Equality Opponents in Australia Have Embarrassingly Bad Arguments

By Hemant Mehta

Australians are debating whether to legalize marriage equality, and just as we saw in our own country, religious people are coming out against it using the worst possible arguments.

Former tennis star and current bigot Margaret Court said back in May that the LGBTQ movement brainwashes children, just like Hitler did. Since that argument didn’t go over so well, she recently tried a new one:

Mrs Court, a Christian minister based in Osborne Park, said the consequences of a Yes vote would be severe.

“It’s not about marriage. It will affect Christian schools, it will affect freedom of speech,” she said.

“There will be no Mother’s Day, there will be no Father’s Day, there will be no Easter, there will be no Christmas.”

I don’t quite get the logic there. If gay people can get married, then Jesus didn’t rise from the dead? Will we not have parents anymore? Will people spend so much money on gay weddings that they have nothing left to spend on Christmas gifts? WHY CAN’T SHE EXPLAIN?!

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The Real Unknown of Climate Change: Our Behavior

By Justin Gillis

As Hurricane Harvey bore down on the Texas coast, few people in that state seemed to understand the nature of the looming danger.

The bulletins warned of rain falling in feet, not inches. Experts pleaded with the public to wake up. J. Marshall Shepherd, head of atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia and a leading voice in American meteorology, wrote ahead of the storm that “the most dangerous aspect of this hurricane may be days of rainfall and associated flooding.”

Now we know how events in Texas turned out.

Dr. Shepherd and his colleagues have spent their careers issuing a larger warning, one that much of the public still chooses to ignore. I speak, of course, about the risks of climate change.

Because of atmospheric emissions from human activity, the ocean waters from which Harvey drew its final burst of strength were much warmer than they ought to have been, most likely contributing to the intensity of the deluge. If the forecasts from our scientists are anywhere close to right, we have seen nothing yet.

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House votes to block DC reproductive health law

By Cristina Marcos

The House voted on Thursday to prevent D.C. from receiving funding to implement a local law making it illegal for employers to discriminate against workers based on reproductive health decisions.

An amendment offered by Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) to a 2018 government-spending package would prohibit the use of funds for the District to implement the law, which bans employers from punishing workers for obtaining contraception, family planning services or abortions.

Palmer’s amendment was adopted on a mostly party-line vote of 214-194. Eleven Republicans joined with all but two Democrats in opposing the effort.

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Turkey is Teaching Students About Evolution and Darwin for the Last Time

By Hemant Mehta

When students in Turkey begin school today, it’ll be the last time they hear the words “evolution” or “Darwin” in the classroom. Next year, those words will be eliminated from all textbooks as a more religious regime takes control of what kids learn in school.

The actual change was made this past June, when the head of the Education Ministry’s curriculum board, Alpaslan Durmuş, said lessons on evolution would only occur in college because it was considered too complicated for high schoolers.

The fundamental idea tying together all of science is somehow too difficult for most teenagers to understand.

I say that with the awareness that evolution is taught in U.S. classrooms, but it doesn’t mean teachers always understand it, or that their students always come away with proper knowledge. But removing it from the curriculum will only make the problem worse. A 2006 article in the journal Science noted that, of 34 countries, acceptance of evolution was lowest in the U.S. (~40%) and Turkey (~27%).

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Neil deGrasse Tyson says it might be ‘too late’ to recover from climate change

By Alexandra King

Scientist and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said Sunday that, in the wake of devastating floods and damage caused by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, climate change had become so severe that the country “might not be able to recover.”

In an interview on CNN’s “GPS,” Tyson got emotional when Fareed Zakaria asked what he made of Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert’s refusal to say whether climate change had been a factor in Hurricanes Harvey or Irma’s strength — despite scientific evidence pointing to the fact that it had made the storms more destructive.

“Fifty inches of rain in Houston!” Tyson exclaimed, adding, “This is a shot across our bow, a hurricane the width of Florida going up the center of Florida!”

“What will it take for people to recognize that a community of scientists are learning objective truths about the natural world and that you can benefit from knowing about it?” he said.

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