ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 363

Goldfish go months without oxygen by making alcohol inside cells

By Rachel Baxter

Goldfish and their wild crucian carp relatives can survive for five months without breathing oxygen – and now we know how. The fish have evolved a set of enzymes that, when oxygen levels drop, ultimately helps convert carbohydrates into alcohol that can then be released through the gills.

For most animals – including humans – a lack of oxygen can be fatal within minutes. We can metabolise carbohydrates without oxygen, but the process generates toxic lactic acid that quickly builds up in our bodies.

On the face of it, this should pose a big problem for crucian carp. They live in ponds and lakes in northern Europe and Asia that freeze over in winter, so the fish have to survive for months without oxygen until the ice melts in spring.

But the carp – and their close relative the goldfish – have developed a workaround. When they metabolise carbohydrates anaerobically, the end product is not lactic acid but alcohol, which is easier to remove from their bodies.

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Secular Invocation in Orlando Gives Thanks to the “Thankless”

By Hemant Mehta

Yesterday afternoon, David Williamson delivered a secular invocation during a meeting of the Orlando City Council in Florida. There was no mention of God, yet I think even religious people would be hard-pressed to find fault with anything he said:

Good afternoon Mr. Mayor, Commissioners, and Staff.

I was thrilled to learn you proclaimed yesterday Equality Florida Day in celebration of their two decades of social justice work on behalf of LGBTQ Floridians. Congratulations to the volunteers, staff and my fellow supporters of Equality Florida, and to everyone in the city who has made concerted efforts toward full equality. For it is ONLY when we are treated equally by our government, by public charities, and by public accommodations, that we can truly achieve a greatness that can be measured by all.

It’s my honor today to join the city with its continuing efforts at inclusion by offering a secular invocation.

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5 Transgender Service Members Sue Trump Over Military Ban

By Charlie Savage

WASHINGTON — Five transgender people serving in the United States military sued President Trump and top Pentagon officials on Wednesday, asking that transgender troops be allowed to stay in the military.

The lawsuit was filed in response to Mr. Trump’s ban abruptly announcedlast month on Twitter.

The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit under pseudonyms — “Jane Doe” Nos. 1-5 — in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The case was organized by two rights groups, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, or GLAD.

Other rights groups — like Lambda, Outserve and the American Civil Liberties Union — have also said they are preparing lawsuits but are holding off until the Trump administration takes a step to put the ban into effect, such as issuing formal guidance to the military or beginning the process of changing military rules.

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Richard Dawkins Offers Advice for Donald Trump, and Other Wisdom

By John Horgan

Richard Dawkins, the biologist and author, is complicated. I reached this conclusion in 2005 when I participated in a fellowship for journalists organized by the pro-religion Templeton Foundation. Ten of us spent several weeks at the University of Cambridge listening to 18 scientists and philosophers point out areas where science and religion converge. Alone among the speakers, Dawkins argued, in his usual uncompromising fashion, that science and religion are incompatible. But in his informal interactions with me and other fellows, Dawkins was open-minded and a good listener. Over drinks one evening, a Christian journalist described witnessing an episode of faith healing. Instead of dismissing the story outright, Dawkins pressed for details. He seemed to find the story fascinating. His curiosity, at least for a moment, trumped his skepticism.

I mention this episode because it is illustrative of the thinking on display in Dawkins’s newest book, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist. It consists of essays written over the last several decades on, among other things, altruism, group selection, extraterrestrials, punctuated equilibrium, animal suffering, eugenics, essentialism, tortoises, dinosaurs, 9/11, the problem of evil, the internet, his father and Christopher Hitchens. The book showcases Dawkins’s dual talents. He is a ferocious polemicist, a defender of reason and enemy of superstition. He is also an extraordinarily talented explicator and celebrator of biology. He makes complex concepts, like kin selection, pop into focus in a way that imparts a jolt of pleasure. His best writings are suffused with the wide-ranging curiosity that he revealed at the fellowship in Cambridge.

I posed some questions to Dawkins about the importance of scientific reasoning, the problems of AI and consciousness, and President Donald Trump.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

At the Templeton meeting, you described yourself as an agnostic, because you cannot be certain that God does not exist, correct?

This is a semantic matter. Some people define atheism as a positive conviction that there are no gods and agnosticism as allowing for the possibility, however slight. In this sense I am agnostic, as any scientist would be. But only in the same way I am agnostic about leprechauns and fairies. Other people define agnosticism as the belief that the existence of gods is as probable as their nonexistence. In this sense I am certainly not agnostic. Not only are gods unnecessary for explaining anything, they are overwhelmingly improbable. I rather like the phrase of a friend who calls himself a “tooth fairy agnostic”—his belief in gods is as strong as his belief in the tooth fairy. So is mine. We live our lives on the assumption that there are no gods, fairies, hobgoblins, ghosts, zombies, poltergeists or any supernatural entities. Actually, it is not at all clear what supernatural could even mean, other than something which science does not (yet) understand.

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No, North Korea (probably) won’t nuke the US territory of Guam

By Debora MacKenzie

“Fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” That’s what US President Donald Trump vowed on 8 August to unleash on North Korea if it made “any more threats” to the US.

Earlier that day, North Korea’s military had put the Pacific island of Guam – a US territory that hosts US airbases – on alert with the provocative statement that it was “carefully examining the operational plan for making an enveloping fire at the areas around Guam.”

The exchange has caused many to fear that the US president is pushing the situation towards nuclear war. The reality is much more complicated.

The threat that started the whole affair didn’t come out of nowhere. Every year, Pyongyang protests the annual joint military exercise conducted by the US, South Korea, and Japan, simulating a nuclear strike against North Korea.

Sure enough, shortly before the threat to Guam, a B-1B – an American bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons – had once again flown from Guam to near North Korean airspace.

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Ancient infant ape skull sheds light on the ancestor of all humans and living apes

By Michael Price

Anthropologists have waited decades to find the complete cranium of a Miocene ape from Africa—one that lived in the hazy period before the human lineage split off from the common ancestors we share with chimpanzees some 7 million years ago. Now, scientists in Kenya have found their prize at last: an almost perfectly preserved skull roughly the size of a baseball. The catch? It’s from an infant. That means that although it can give scientists a rough idea of what the common ancestor to all living apes and humans would have looked like, drawing other meaningful conclusions could be challenging.

“This is the sort of thing that the fossil record loves to do to us,” says James Rossie, a biological anthropologist at the State University of New York in Stony Brook who wasn’t involved with the study. “The problem is that we learn from fossils by comparing them to others. When there are no other infant Miocene ape skulls to which to make those comparisons, your hands are tied.”

The remarkably complete skull was discovered in the Turkana Basin of northern Kenya 3 years ago. As the sun sank behind the Napudet Hills west of Lake Turkana, primate paleontologist Isaiah Nengo of De Anza College in Cupertino, California, and his team started walking back to their jeep. Kenyan fossil hunter John Ekusi raced ahead to smoke a cigarette. Suddenly he began circling in place. When Nengo caught up, he saw a dirt-clogged eye socket staring up at him. “There was this skull just sticking out of the ground,” Nengo recalls. “It was incredible because we had been going up and down that path for weeks and never noticed it.”

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Roy Moore’s Latest Campaign Ad for Senate Reminds Alabama Voters He “Fears God”

By Hemant Mehta

Roy Moore, the disgraced Alabama Supreme Court justice who once installed a Ten Commandments monument into the courthouse (without permission, in the middle of the night) and then got suspended (again) for telling judges to ignore the marriage equality ruling, is currently running for the U.S. Senate in an upcoming special election.

He hopes to defeat Republican Sen. Luther Strange in the GOP primary because Strange is apparently too liberal for the state. How dare he pay lip service to the Constitution when the Bible is the only text that matters?

There’s a reason Moore’s called the “Ayatollah of Alabama.”

Moore’s new campaign ad goes all in on Trumpian rhetoric, talking about “draining the swamp,” attacking Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for failing to strip health care from millions of Americans, and (of course) telling everyone he “fears God.” As if that’s a qualification anyone should take seriously.

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Why Christian nationalists love Trump

By Jack Jenkins

This is the first in a series on Christian nationalism and the religious groups supporting Donald Trump. Stay tuned for further entries in the coming weeks.

It was a Saturday, but Donald Trump was already at church.

Technically, he was at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., preparing to address the crowd at a “Celebrate Freedom” concert on Independence Day weekend. But the July 1 event, which was designed to honor veterans, accented its patriotism with a distinctly religious flare: it was hosted by megapastor (and vocal Trump devotee) Rev. Robert Jeffress, and shortly before the president took the podium, a Southern Baptist church choir burst into a rendition of “Make America Great Again”—an original composition based on the president’s campaign slogan.

Trump loved it (he tweeted a music video of the song on July 4), and echoed its sentiment a few minutes later by invoking his go-to ideology when speaking to his base: Christian nationalism.

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Largest ever dinosaur may have been as long as 7 elephants

By New Scientist staff and Press Association

Fossilised bones from six dinosaurs may have belonged to the biggest animal ever to have walked the Earth.

The fossils, which include vertebrae and rib bones, are from six young adult dinosaurs, and were all found in the same Patagonian quarry in Argentina. The species, named Patagotitan mayorum, is thought to have weighed around 62 tonnes and measured more than 35 metres from nose to tail.

If you’re struggling to picture that, it’s about seven elephants, or more than two buses, or half the width of a football pitch, or somewhere between a standard swimming pool and an Olympic pool. That’s longer than Brachiosaurus was, and blue whales are today – both these species reach a maximum of about 30 metres.

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Malaysian Government Official: “We Need to Hunt Down” Atheists

By Hemant Mehta

The other day, I posted about how a picture of atheists at a gathering in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia went viral, leading to a government crackdown. This is a nation that, in theory, celebrates the freedom of religion, but those rules don’t apply to Muslims who leave their faith — and certainly not to Muslims who become atheists. Government officials wanted to know if there were any ex-Muslims in that picture because they could be fined or prosecuted.

It’s only getting worse now.

The government is starting to go after atheists as a whole. Not just ex-Muslims, but anyone who openly denies God’s existence.

Shahidan Kassim, a minister in President Najib Razak‘s Cabinet, said on camera that atheists in the country must be “hunted down,” because their lack of religion amounts to illegal thought crimes.

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