ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 365

Fox News Segment on White House Bible Study Foiled by Atheist Armed with Facts

By Hemant Mehta

With White House staffers and Cabinet officials participating in weekly Bible studiesrun by a man who doesn’t think mothers belong in Congress — and nothing else whatsoever about the President to talk about — Fox & Friends brought on Freedom From Religion Foundation attorney Andrew Seidel yesterday to discuss the infusion of Christianity in the government.

Unfortunately for the host and the other guest, Andrew actually knew what he was talking about.

He brought up two main criticisms of the Bible study: (1) We don’t know if it’s legal. There may be coercion of staffers. There may be taxpayer-funded resources being used at these meetings. We just don’t know enough. But FFRF has filed a request for information. (2) It sends the wrong message. What you do in private is your business, but the government is suggesting there’s value to gain from reading the Bible. And that, Andrew noted, could be a problem:

… It can’t be considered proper or in keeping with American values for government officials to get together on taxpayer time to study a book that condones slavery and the subjugation of women and the eternal torture and torment of people who don’t believe like you. So even if it doesn’t violate the Constitution directly, it certainly violates that core principle of American government, the separation of state and church.

Even the host muttered an audible “Wow” to all that.

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Chop Off This Worm’s Head and It Can Still Detect Light

By Joanna Klein

The planarian flatworm is a smooshed noodle of an organism that can be found all over the planet. It has a triangular head occupied by a rather primitive version of a brain and two black dots for eyes. You can chop off this head, and it will grow back in about a week — eyes, brain and all. And you can hack away at the critter until all that’s left is a tiny speck of worm dust — and the thing will still grow back.

But now this peculiar creature, famous for its regenerative abilities (like when some grew two heads in space), may have another unforeseen idiosyncrasy: It not only reacts to light after decapitation, but it gradually recoups an ability to see finer aspects of light as its eyes and brain grow back. And despite lacking the machinery to see colors, the worm somehow creates a workaround, essentially converting “this rainbow colored world to a grayscale,” said Akash Gulyani a multidisciplinary scientist at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in Bangalore, India, who led the study.

His team’s findings, published last week in Science Advances, could offer new opportunities for studying how animals recover after injuries and reveal additional details about function to the story of how animal eyes evolved.

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Trump’s transgender military ban isn’t going over very well with Americans

By E. A. Crunden

Far more U.S. citizens think transgender service members should be allowed in the army than do not, according to a new survey.

When asked if they agreed with the statement, “transgender people should be allowed to serve in the military,” 58 percent of respondents concurred, a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll revealed on Friday. Only 27 percent said transgender people should not be allowed to serve, with the rest responding that they “don’t know.” Those who identified themselves as Democrats were predominately in favor of transgender people serving, with 83 percent in favor. Republicans were more evenly split, with 32 percent in favor and almost 20 percent less decisive (49 percent were opposed).

Coming on the heels of President Donald Trump’s decision to ban transgender people from the military, the poll is a stark indicator that the policy move is far from representative of public opinion. It also reinforces the wave of backlash that emerged immediately following Trump’s announcement.

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Ohio Charter School Accused of Preaching Creationism to Students

By Hemant Mehta

The Ohio Distance & Electronic Learning Academy, a “non-sectarian” online charter school that receives taxpayer funding, apparently teaches Creationism to students.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation recently sent a letter to the school’s superintendent Dr. David Bowlin explaining the concerns and asking him to put a stop to it.

… the school’s biology classes include a unit on “biogenesis” that teaches the biblical view of creation. The class readings for this unit reportedly include young earth creationist Walter Brown’s book “In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,” a book promoted exclusively by Brown’s own religious ministry, the Center for Scientific Creation.

Teaching creationism or any of its offshoots, such as intelligent design, in a public school is unlawful, because creationism is not based in fact, FFRF reminds the Academy.

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National Review pronounces the death of New Atheism

By Jerry Coyne

 National Review, founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley, Jr., was a widely read magazine—probably the most important such organ for American conservatives. It has an online version, and I really should be reading it (all of us should read at least one site or magazine that opposes our own philosophy); it came to my attention only when it took out after me for my views on infant euthanasia.

Now, in a section called “The Corner”, which Wikipedia characterizes as representing “a select group of the site’s editors and affiliated writers”, there’s an interesting atheist-bashing piece,”What ever happened to the New Atheists?“, that makes three points, two of them half right and one dead wrong. Total evaluation: 1/3, or 33%, correct. Here are their points (in bold) and below them my responses; the article’s quotes are indented in my discussion:

1.) New Atheism is dead since it’s been rejected by both ends of the political spectrum.

2.) New Atheists are rejected by the Left because they criticize Islam, something that offends Leftist sentiments that favor the underdog and people of color.

3.) New Atheists are rejected by the Right because their arguments against God are silly and superficial.

Let’s take these one by one:

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Question of the Week- 8/2/2017

What’s the best way we can address de-platforming in the course of dialog about difficult or controversial subjects? What are the limits of free speech?

Best answer receives a copy of Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins.

Want to suggest a Question of the Week? E-mail submissions to us at qotw@richarddawkins.net. (Questions only, please. All answers to bimonthly questions are made only in the comments section of the Question of the Week.)

Why astronomers reluctantly announced a possible exomoon discovery

By Davide Castelvecchi

The high-profile quest to spot moons orbiting distant planets has been a series of let-downs, with each hint of an ‘exomoon’ fading under closer inspection. So astronomer David Kipping, at Columbia University in New York City, didn’t want to reveal his team’s detection of another possible exomoon, until they could confirm it using the Hubble Space Telescope.

That plan was abandoned a few days ago, after news of the team’s request for Hubble time rocketed around social media. It culminated in the announcement that “exomoon candidate Kepler-1625 b I” had been observed orbiting a planet 4,000 light years (1,230 parsecs) from Earth, in an arXiv preprint1 posted on 27 July. That paper, reporting the results of a 5-year search for exomoons, was hastily amended to include the exomoon claim.

Kepler-1625 b is a candidate planet that Kepler, NASA’s flagship exoplanet mission, had previously observed. Periodic dips in the host star’s brightness indicated that a massive object was crossing the line of sight from the star to Earth; but the dips were lopsided, suggesting that perhaps instead of one object there were two: a Jupiter-sized planet with a Neptune-sized moon in tow. If this were indeed an ‘exomoon’, it would have been a long-awaited discovery. But it was still a big if.

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Pensacola Taxpayers Have Spent Over $130,000 (So Far) To Defend Giant Cross

By Hemant Mehta

For years now, atheists have been fighting to remove a giant Christian cross from Bayview Park in Pensacola, Florida. A U.S. District Judge ruled in favor of the atheists this past June, but the city has appealed the decision.

The Pensacola News Journal is now reporting how much money this idiotic fight has cost local taxpayers (so far): $131,801.75.

The city spent at least $131,801.75 from the time it was sued in May 2016 to June 2017, when Judge Roger Vinson ordered the cross removed from the city park, according to documents the News Journal obtained through a public records request.

The key point is that the amount is only going up. Pensacola officials are fighting an appeal they will almost certainly lose.

They could’ve removed the cross for virtually nothing. They had plenty of warnings in advance. The lawsuit was a last resort. I don’t know whether it was bad legal advice or faith-based stubbornness, but they chose to fight a battle despite all the precedent being on the other side. It’s absolutely irresponsible. If I were a taxpayer there, I’d be furious.

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Weird ‘Rocks’ at Robotics Test Site Turn Out to Be Dinosaur Fossils

By Mindy Weisberger

What began as a search by university students for a Mars-like landscape in a Canadian park took an unexpected detour into paleontology, when they discovered strange “rocks” that turned out to be dinosaur bones.

Members of the University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team (USST) were visiting Midland Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada, on June 1, to scout locations for an upcoming robotics contest. They needed terrain that closely mimicked the Martian surface, to test prototypes of Mars rovers in a new competition bringing together teams from around North America, USST President Danno Peters, a student studying engineering physics at the University of Saskatchewan, told Live Science in an email.

But the team found something else along the way: unusual-looking rocks embedded in the ground. Upon closer inspection, the “rocks” turned out to be fossils, including what appeared to be a thigh bone and part of a jaw, Peters said.

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New Florida Law Lets Residents Challenge School Textbooks

By Greg Allen

Keith Flaugh is a retired IBM executive living in Naples, Fla., and a man with a mission. He describes it as “getting the school boards to recognize … the garbage that’s in our textbooks.”

Flaugh helped found Florida Citizens’ Alliance, a conservative group that fought unsuccessfully to stop Florida from signing on to Common Core educational standards.

More recently, the group has turned its attention to the books being used in Florida’s schools. A new state law, developed and pushed through by Flaugh’s group, allows parents, and any residents, to challenge the use of textbooks and instructional materials they find objectionable via an independent hearing.

Flaugh finds many objections with the books used by Florida students. Two years ago, members of the alliance did what he calls a “deep dive” into 60 textbooks.

“We found them to be full of political indoctrination, religious indoctrination, revisionist history and distorting our founding values and principles, even a significant quantity of pornography,” he says.

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