ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 362

KKK Celebrates Heather Heyer’s Murder, Promises More Violence

By Michael Stone

Prominent Ku Klux Klan leader says “I’m glad that girl died” during the Virginia protest, promises more violence in the future.

Justin Moore, the Grand Dragon for the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, said he was glad Heyer was killed in a cowardly attack by fellow white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr., according to a report from WBTV.

Speaking with WBTV, the KKK leader declared:

I’m sorta glad that them people got hit and I’m glad that girl died. They were a bunch of Communists out there protesting against somebody’s freedom of speech, so it doesn’t bother me that they got hurt at all.

I think we’re going to see more stuff like this happening at white nationalist events.

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Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs?

By Philip J. Senter

Mainstream geologists and biologists accept the abundant physical evidence that the Earth is billions of years old; that all organisms are evolutionary descendants of a common ancestor; and that non-avian dinosaurs became extinct sixty-five million years ago (e.g., Gradstein et al. 2004; Prothero 2007). In contrast, young-Earth creationist (YEC) authors have long maintained that the Genesis account of creation and the biblical timeline are literally correct, placing the creation of the Earth and all types of organisms at approximately 6,000 years ago. A corollary of this position is that dinosaurs and humans were created on the same day and must therefore have encountered each other. The claim that dragon legends are based on such encounters has long been a 
mainstay of YEC literature, and in 1977, biochemist and YEC author Duane Gish took this concept up a notch in his children’s book Dinosaurs, Those Terrible Lizards, by positing that dinosaurs breathed fire. Other YEC authors followed suit (see references below), and dinosaurs now breathe fire in seventh-grade biology textbooks from BJU Press (Batdorf and Porch 2013; Lacy 2013).

In support of the idea that a real animal can produce fire, Gish (1977) cited the defense mechanism of bombardier beetles (Brachinus spp.), which spray a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone into the faces of would-be predators. Chemical catalysts cause the mixture to reach a scalding 100º C (Aneshansley et al. 1969). Subsequent YEC authors followed Gish’s lead and added imaginary details such as sparks or explosions or flame (Phillips 1994; Hamp 2000; Isaacs 2010; Paul 2010). In reality, the beetles merely spray hot liquid—which scalds but does not produce flame—and therefore provide no biological precedent for organic fire production.

Some YEC authors have cited bioluminescent animals and electric eels as biological precedent for fire production (Morris 1984; Petersen 1986; Morris 1988; Niermann 1994; Morris 1999; DeYoung 2000; Petersen 2002). However, the processes that produce bioluminescence (Haddock et al. 2010) and bioelectrogenesis (Pough et al. 2013) are chemically unrelated to combustion and generate little or no thermal energy. These processes are therefore irrelevant to fire production and provide no biological precedent for it.

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US federal department is censoring use of term ‘climate change’, emails reveal

By Oliver Milman

Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead.

A series of emails obtained by the Guardian between staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a USDA unit that oversees farmers’ land conservation, show that the incoming Trump administration has had a stark impact on the language used by some federal employees around climate change.

A missive from Bianca Moebius-Clune, director of soil health, lists terms that should be avoided by staff and those that should replace them. “Climate change” is in the “avoid” category, to be replaced by “weather extremes”. Instead of “climate change adaption”, staff are asked to use “resilience to weather extremes”.

The primary cause of human-driven climate change is also targeted, with the term “reduce greenhouse gases” blacklisted in favor of “build soil organic matter, increase nutrient use efficiency”. Meanwhile, “sequester carbon” is ruled out and replaced by “build soil organic matter”.

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Alternative Medicine Kills Cancer Patients, Study Finds

By Ross Pomeroy

Chiropractic, homeopathy, acupuncture, juice diets, and other forms of unproven alternative medicine cannot cure cancer, no matter what some quacks might claim. Unfortunately, vulnerable cancer patients turn to these charlatans every year rather than visit real doctors, hoping for a miracle treatment to purge them of their monstrous disease.

But as a new study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute makes painfully clear, as a treatment for cancer, alternative medicine does not cure; it kills.

A team of scientists from Yale University perused the National Cancer Database, a collection of 34 million records of cancer patients along with their treatments and outcomes, to identify patients who elected to forgo conventional cancer treatments like chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery in favor of alternative medicine. They found 280 subjects diagnosed with nonmetastatic breast, prostate, lung, or colorectal cancer in 2004 who used alternative medicine (defined in the database as “other-unproven: cancer treatments administered by non- medical personnel”) and matched them with 560 control subjects who received conventional treatment. The researchers then tracked subjects’ outcomes over time. 

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The story of The Selfish Gene

Michael Rodgers, my editor for a number of my books, published his inside story in the latest issue of LOGOS.

Click here to download and read it in full.

Fighting to breathe in the face of Canada’s wildfire emergency

By Mika McKinnon

t’s stiflingly hot and I’m trapped inside a dome of smoke. I know I’m in a river valley nestled within mountain ranges, but the visibility is cut so low that I can’t see any of the dramatic peaks that dominate landscapes across British Columbia. It’s the worst documented wildfire season since 1958, and smoke is an omnipresent and unwelcome companion.

“We have a very significant fire season unfolding,” says Daniel Perrakis, a fire research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service. It’s the largest area burned since the advent of modern fire-suppression and fire-management techniques, he says. Over 591,000 hectares have burned so far.

I’ve left my coastal home in Vancouver and traveled inland to support evacuations, joining the swarms of volunteers being deployed to help.

Shifting winds and an atmospheric wall of high pressure have funneled smoke into the city of Kamloops, filling the air with an unprecedented 684.5 micrograms of fine material per cubic metre. That’s nearly 70 times more than the World Health Organization’s guidelines for safe exposure limits.

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Why Does a Total Solar Eclipse Move from West to East?

By Paul Sutter

Every day, the same routine. The sun rises in the east. Breakfast. Off to work. Work. Home from work. Dinner. The sun sets in the west. Repeat. It’s a pattern familiar to everyone on Earth. For countless generations, we’ve relied on the regular cycles of the heavens to help demarcate our days.

But a total solar eclipse, like the big one coming to the continental United States on Aug. 21, will break the routine. In addition to the moon completely covering the face of the sun — which, let’s admit, is already pretty spectacular — the event will move in an unfamiliar and possibly disquieting direction: from west to east.

The normal, daily rising and setting of celestial objects isn’t due to their own movement, but rather the rotation of Earth. As our planet spins on its axis, the heavens appear to rise up from the east, arch their way across the sky, and settle into the west.

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Trump expected to roll back LGBT protections in Obamacare

By Nathaniel Weixel

The Trump administration appears poised to roll back ObamaCare’s anti-discrimination protections for transgender patients, a move that has activist groups girding for a fight.

A proposed rule from the Department of Health and Human Services is expected to be released in the coming weeks or months that opponents say would make it easier for doctors and hospitals to deny treatment to transgender patients and women who have had abortions.

The proposed rule is expected to roll back a controversial anti-discrimination provision buried within ObamaCare.

Religious providers say they expect the Trump administration’s rule would merely reinforce their right not to provide treatment that’s against their beliefs.

Advocacy groups like the ACLU and Lambda Legal acknowledge they haven’t seen the proposed rule, but say administration officials have made their plans clear.

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Violent White Nationalist Rally in Charlottesville Leads to State of Emergency

By David G. McAfee

As I’m writing, the “Unite the Right” rally is beginning in Charlottesville. The event is just starting, but already Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has declared a state of emergency in response to violent outbursts.

The rally has also been dubbed an “unlawful assembly.”

The city of Charlottesville has declared Saturday’s gathering at Emancipation Park — site of the scheduled “Unite the Right” rally” of white nationalists and right-wing protesters — an unlawful assembly. Police officers are speaking on bullhorns, directing people to leave the park… City officials also declared a local emergency, which will allow officials to request additional resources, if needed, to respond.

Why all the drama? These are just peaceful protesters, right? No. According to the Washington Post:

Hours before a noon rally was set to begin Saturday, violent skirmishes broke out between bands of white supremacists and counterprotesters who have converged on this college town around the issue of a Confederate statue.

Men in combat gear, some w[e]aring bicycle and motorcycle helmets and carrying clubs and sticks and makeshift shields fought each other in the downtown streets, with little apparent police interference. Both sides sprayed each other with chemical irritants and plastic bottles were hurled through the air.

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Americans are becoming more open to human genome editing, survey finds, but concerns remain

By Jon Cohen

CRISPR, the powerful genome-editing tool, does a molecular tango to cut and modify DNA that is highly nuanced. The same subtlety applies to the public’s views on how best to use genome editing in humans, a new survey of adults in the United States shows.

Earlier surveys of Americans (here and here) have found a reluctance to support human genome editing, with many respondents expressing ethical and other concerns about such intentional tinkering. But the new survey, conducted by social scientists from the University of Wisconsin in Madison (UWM) and Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, found that two-thirds of the 1600 respondents thought genome editing was generally “acceptable.” This held true whether the genome modification was in germline cells, which can be passed on to offspring, or in somatic cells that cannot. But that acceptance was qualified, and colored by religious beliefs and scientific knowledge. There was one thing that almost everyone agreed on, however: They want to be part of the policy discussion about what should and should not be allowed.

The survey, described today in a Policy Forum published by Science, randomly presented people with different vignettes that described genome editing being used in germline or somatic cells to either treat disease or enhance a human with, say, a gene linked to higher IQ or eye color. Although respondents were generally open to the use of editing technologies, acceptance depended strongly on the specific purpose and its impact on future generations. For instance, there was scant support for using genome editing to enhance a germline; just 26% of people found that acceptable and 51% said it was unacceptable. But acceptance jumped to 39% if the enhancement was in somatic cells, and only 35% objected. 

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