ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 369

POINT OF VIEW: New curriculum-challenge law hides non-science agenda

By Bertha Vazquez

As a science teacher in Miami-Dade, I am disheartened by Florida’s CS/HB 989. This law extends citizens’ right to challenge what’s taught in their local schools. It may sound very democratic, but it is written to disguise a non-scientific agenda.

It is a good thing that we are raised in this country thinking we should respect alternative points of view, but science is different.

Science is based on the scientific method. Scientists question, observe, experiment and share their results with other scientists, over and over and over again. After years, decades, and even centuries of arduous trial and error, an idea achieves scientific consensus and makes its way into our science textbooks.

This amazing process gives us modern medicine and iPhones and put a man on the Moon. It’s a beautiful, wonderful way of gaining and sharing knowledge, but it’s not easy and often messy.

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Pakistan’s secret atheists

By Mobeen Azhar

Omar, named after one of Islam’s most revered caliphs, has rejected the faith of his forefathers. He is one of the founding members of an online group – a meeting point for the atheists of Pakistan.

But even there he must stay on his guard. Members use fake identities.

“You have to be careful who you are befriending,” he says.

One man contacted Omar to say he had visited his Facebook profile and printed out pictures of him with his family. “You cannot be safe,” Omar says.

In Pakistan, posting about atheism online can have serious consequences.

Under a recently passed cyber-crime law, it is now illegal to post content online – even in a private forum – that could be deemed blasphemous.

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I’m a skeptic, and I love the flat-Earth movement

By Craig A. Foster

The Denver Post recently featured an article about Coloradans who believe that the Earth is flat. As if that wasn’t surprising enough, some members of this community also believe that they are the recipients of flat-Earth prejudice, which I will now term “terrashapism.”

I don’t believe the Earth is flat; given my background, this is not surprising. I am a psychology professor who studies pseudoscience. I lecture about the fallibility of human intuition and the corresponding need for empiricism. I am a member of the National Center for Science Education. I am also a member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a local group called Colorado Skeptics. Skeptics generally doubt claims that lack legitimate evidence, but support claims that do.

Accordingly, one might think that I would have nothing positive to say about the flat Earthers who meet just over my horizon. Not so. I love the flat Earth movement. As far as I’m concerned, flat Earthers are welcome to deflate the global Earth faster than New England Patriots footballs. To me, the flat-Earth movement isn’t a threat to scientific sensibility. That threat is already alive and well. Instead, the flat-Earth movement exposes the contradictions that many people create when they disparage flat Earthers, but tolerate or actively support other forms of pseudoscience.

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See Juno Probe’s Amazing Up-Close Views of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

By Mike Wall

You can now feast your eyes on the first up-close photos of Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot ever taken.

On Monday night (July 10), NASA’s Juno spacecraft zoomed just 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers) above the mammoth storm’s cloud tops — closer than any probe had gotten before.

“For generations, people from all over the world and all walks of life have marveled over the Great Red Spot,” Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement before the flyby. “Now we are finally going to see what this storm looks like up close and personal.”

The images that the probe’s JunoCam instrument snapped during the close encounter have come down to Earth, NASA announced today (July 12), and the agency is urging anyone who’s interested to have a go at processing the photos. You can do so on the mission’s JunoCam page.

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Engineered cell therapy for cancer gets thumbs up from FDA advisers

By Heidi Ledford

External advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have thrown their support behind a therapy that genetically engineers a patient’s own immune cells to target and destroy cancers.

In a unanimous vote on 12 July, the panel determined that the benefits of CAR-T therapy outweigh its risks. The vote comes as the agency considers whether to issue its first approval of a CAR-T therapy, for a drug called tisagenlecleucel, manufactured by Novartis of Basel, Switzerland.

The FDA is not obligated to follow the recommendations of its advisers, but it often does.

Novartis is seeking approval to use tisagenlecleucel to treat children and young adults who have a form of leukaemia called acute B-cell lymphoblastic leukaemia, and who have not responded sufficiently to previous treatment or have relapsed since that treatment. In the United States, about 15% of children and young adults with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia relapse.

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Jeff Sessions’ Secret Speech to the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Biggest Christian-Right Group You’ve Never Heard Of

By Jay Michaelson

The Justice Department has so far declined to release the transcript of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ secret speech Tuesday night to the Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, but Sessions has already drawn criticism for speaking to the organization, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed an “anti-LGBT hate group.”

But the ADF is no fringe hate group—it is something much worse, a $35 million organization with a global footprint. It has enormous influence within the Trump–Pence inner circle. And together with Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Organization for Marriage, the ADF is leading the movement to redefine “religious liberty” as including the right to discriminate against other people.

Turn over any rock on that path, and you’ll find the ADF crawling there. The repeal of Houston’s equal rights ordinance, successfully branded as a “bathroom bill.” Hobby Lobby.  Religious Freedom Restoration Acts around the country. All of these efforts, and many more like them, were led by individuals with ties to ADF.

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Photo surfaces of evangelical pastors laying hands on Trump in the Oval Office

By Sarah Pulliam Bailey

A group of evangelical leaders met with President Trump on Monday and laid their hands on him as he bowed in prayer while meeting in the Oval Office.

The leaders met with Jennifer Korn, deputy director and liaison from the White House, for a day-long meeting to discuss several issues, including the Affordable Care Act, religious freedom, pending judicial nominees, criminal justice reform and support for Israel. During their visit the leaders paid a visit to the Oval Office where Vice President Pence and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, dropped in.

About 30 leaders received invitations to the White House around a week and a half ago and included many of Trump’s faith advisory council from his campaign, including Florida megachurch pastor Paula White, South Carolina megachurch pastor Mark Burns, former Republican representative Michele Bachmann and Southern Baptist pastors Jack Graham, Ronnie Floyd and Robert Jeffress.

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Trillion-Ton Iceberg Breaks Off Antarctica

By Jeanna Bryner

One of the largest icebergs ever recorded, packing about a trillion tons of ice or enough to fill up two Lake Eries, has just split off from Antarctica, in a much anticipated, though not celebrated, calving event.

A section of the Larsen C ice shelf with an area of 2,240 square miles (5,800 square kilometers) finally broke away some time between July 10 and today (July 12), scientists with the U.K.-based MIDAS Project, an Antarctic research group, reported today.

Scientists discovered the birth of this iceberg in data collected by an instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite, called MODIS, which takes thermal infrared images.

The iceberg was expected, though scientists didn’t know when the crack in the ice sheet would finally release the floating chunk. The rift in the Larsen C ice shelf — the fourth-largest shelf in Antarctica — first showed itself in 2014, but it wasn’t until November 2016 that satellite measurements revealed it had grown to more than 300 feet (91 m) in width and 70 miles (112 km) in length. The most recent measurements from this summer put the rift at 124 miles (200 km) long, with the now-calved iceberg hanging on by a thread; just 3 miles (5 km) of ice connected it with the rest of the ice shelf.

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The Uninhabitable Earth

By David Wallace-Wells

I. ‘Doomsday’

Peering beyond scientific reticence.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.

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Why people think they see ghosts

By Dean Peterson

A 2012 poll shows that 45 percent of Americans say they believe in ghosts. More amazingly, in that same poll, 28 percent of the respondents said that they have personally seen a ghost before.

With such a widespread belief in ghosts, I was curious if there was actually any scientific evidence to fuel these beliefs.

I went to Buffalo, New York, to talk to Joe Nickell, a senior research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and allegedly the world’s only full-time paranormal investigator.

He told me that in his almost 50-year career of investigating all things paranormal, he’s never come across a single shred of evidence that would prove the existence of ghosts.

Instead, he points toward other scientifically explainable reasons for why people may think they’ve seen a ghost, including infrasound, sleep paralysis, and the traumatic grief of losing a loved one.

Watch the video above to learn more about the totally valid reasons you might experience a “ghostly encounter.”

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