ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 378

Pakistan, in a First, Sentences Man to Death Over Blasphemy on Social Media

By Salman Masood

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An antiterrorism court in Pakistan has sentenced a Shiite man to death for committing blasphemy in posts on social media. The man, Taimoor Raza, 30, was found guilty of making derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad, his wives and others on Facebook and WhatsApp.

Mr. Raza was sentenced to death on Saturday by Judge Bashir Ahmed in Punjab Province. It was the first time anyone has been given the death penalty for blasphemy on social media in Pakistan. Mr. Raza can appeal the sentence.

Blasphemy remains a highly contentious issue in Pakistan, where mere allegations of the offense can lead to violence and killings by vigilante mobs. Critics contend that the country’s blasphemy law has been used to settle personal disputes and has worsened interfaith relations.

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Research on lab chimps is over. Why have so few been retired to sanctuaries?

By David Grimm

Hercules and Leo are only 11 years old, but they’ve already come close to retiring twice. The two chimpanzees, born and raised at Louisiana’s New Iberia Research Center, became lab animals at the State University of New York in Stony Brook in 2011. There they shared a three-room enclosure, where scientists inserted small electrodes into their muscles to study the evolution of bipedalism. In 2013, they were the subject of an unusual legal gambit. An animal rights group sued to declare the pair legal persons and retire them to a Florida sanctuary, but the effort failed.

Two years later, Hercules and Leo returned to New Iberia, where they mingled with other chimps in outdoor domes with ladders and ropes. But retirement to a sanctuary, where they could climb real trees and have more room to roam, again seemed imminent: The U.S. government had just effectively ended invasive work on chimpanzees, and many observers expected all lab chimps to move to sanctuaries in short order. Yet today, Hercules and Leo, along with nearly 600 of their kind across the country, remain at research facilities. It’s unclear when—or whether—they’ll leave.

In the past 2 years, only 73 chimps have entered sanctuaries, and the slow pace has heightened tensions between the laboratory and sanctuary communities. There’s plenty of blame to go around. Labs have dragged their feet, sanctuaries haven’t expanded quickly enough, and the government itself didn’t have a concrete plan for retirement, despite setting the process in motion in the first place.

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Your Rabbi? Probably a Democrat. Your Baptist Pastor? Probably a Republican. Your Priest? Who Knows.

By Kevin Quealy

America’s pastors – the men and women a majority of Americans look to for help in finding meaning and purpose in their lives – are even more politically divided than the rest of us, according to a new data setrepresenting the largest compilation of American religious leaders ever assembled.

Like their congregants, religious leaders have sharply dividedthemselves along political lines. Leaders and congregants of Unitarian and African Methodist Episcopal churches are overwhelmingly Democratic, as are those of Reform and Conservative Jewish synagogues. Those of several Evangelical and Baptist churches are overwhelmingly Republican. If religious denominations were states, almost all of them would be considered “Safely Democratic” or “Safely Republican,” with relatively few swing states.

Yet pastors are even more politically divided than the congregants in their denomination: Leaders of more liberal denominations tend to be even more likely to be registered as Democrats, and those of more conservative denominations even more likely to be registered as Republicans.

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US mental-health agency’s push for basic research has slashed support for clinical trials

By Sara Reardon

Roy Perlis is done with clinical research. The psychiatrist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has led about 20 clinical trials on depression and other mood disorders over the past two decades. But he has given up seeking grants from the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) — the world’s biggest funder of mental-health research — since it began promoting a new way to investigate mental illness. The agency urges researchers to study the biological roots of disease, rather than specific disorders.

This shift has been having profound impacts on mental-health research in the United States, but the magnitude of the transformation is only now coming to light. An analysis by Nature suggests that the number of clinical trials funded by the NIMH dropped by 45% between 2009 and 2015 (see ‘Rethinking mental-health studies’). This coincides with the agency’s launch, in 2011, of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) — a framework for research on the mechanisms of mental illness. The NIMH’s roll-out of RDoC included asking researchers to focus more on the biological bases of behaviour — such as brain circuitry and genetics — than on the broader symptoms that clinicians typically use to define and classify mental illness.

The NIMH’s embrace of fundamental research has infuriated many clinical researchers, who see it as an attempt to invalidate their methods — and say that there is scant evidence to support the idea that using RDoC will lead to greater insight or better treatments for mental illness. Many of these researchers also note that NIMH funding for clinical trials has declined steadily over the past decade, adding to the perception that the agency now favours research that uses the RDoC framework.

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Abstinence only, rebranded: Failed right-wing sex-ed policy returns as “sexual risk avoidance”

By Amanda Marcotte

Thrice-married libertine Donald Trump got himself elected president by rallying the religious right vote behind him. The devil’s bargain that Christian conservatives made with Trump is easy enough to understand: They ignore his history of sexual incontinence, including rumors of a literal “pee tape,” and he gives them more power over the sex lives of private individuals, especially young people and women. In office, President Trump has done just that, launching a multitude of attacks on legal abortion and contraception access.

Now it seems as if a third front is opening in the Trumpian war on other people’s sex lives: The return of abstinence-only education, which many Americans believe had died off after President George W. Bush left office. Well, abstinence-only ed is coming back, but this time around, its proponents hope that voters, especially parents, don’t notice the return to the classroom of religious anti-sex propaganda.

The first sign that the Trump administration hoped to ease into the classroom more just-say-no-to-sex messages came in late May, when the White House proposed a budget that would slash nearly every government expenditure but would increase by $277 million spending on abstinence-until-marriage programs. Last week news surfaced that Valerie Huber, the head of a pro-abstinence organization called Ascend, will join the Department of Health and Human Services as chief of staff to the assistant secretary for adolescent health; the position will allow her to push for more support for abstinence-until-marriage programs in schools.

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No, There Wasn’t an Advanced Civilization 12,000 Years Ago

By Michael Shermer

Graham Hancock is an audacious autodidact who believes that long before ancient Mesopotamia, Babylonia and Egypt there existed an even more glorious civilization. One so thoroughly wiped out by a comet strike around 12,000 years ago that nearly all evidence of its existence vanished, leaving only the faintest of traces, including, Hancock thinks, a cryptic warning that such a celestial catastrophe could happen to us. All this is woven into a narrative entitled Magicians of the Gods (Thomas Dunne Books, 2015). I listened to the audio edition read by the author, whose British accent and breathless, revelatory storytelling style are confessedly compelling. But is it true? I’m skeptical.

First, no matter how devastating an extraterrestrial impact might be, are we to believe that after centuries of flourishing every last tool, potsherd, article of clothing, and, presumably from an advanced civilization, writing, metallurgy and other technologies—not to mention trash—was erased? Inconceivable.

Second, Hancock’s impact hypothesis comes from scientists who first proposed it in 2007 as an explanation for the North American megafaunal extinction around that time and has been the subject of vigorous scientific debate. It has not fared well. In addition to the lack of any impact craters determined to have occurred around that time anywhere in the world, the radiocarbon dates of the layer of carbon, soot, charcoal, nanodiamonds, microspherules and iridium, asserted to have been the result of this catastrophic event, vary widely before and after the megafaunal extinction, anywhere from 14,000 to 10,000 years ago. Further, although 37 mammal genera went extinct in North America (while most other species survived and flourished), at the same time 52 mammal genera went extinct in South America, presumably not caused by the impact. These extinctions, in fact, were timed with human arrival, thereby supporting the more widely accepted overhunting hypothesis.

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White House confirms Jerry Falwell Jr. will participate in task force on education reform

By David Edwards

The White House affirmed over the weekend that Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. will participate in a task force on higher education.

In January, the son of televangelist Jerry Falwell revealed to The Chronicle that he would lead a White House group that will look at reforming regulations on higher education.

But it wasn’t until Sunday that the news was partially confirmed by a White House spokesperson — who was authorized to speak on the condition of anonymity.

“We are working on a task force that Jerry Falwell will be involved with,” the White House spokesperson told The Chronicle.

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Curiosity and irritation meet Macron’s effort to lure foreign scientists to France

By Elisabeth Pain

Just a few hours after President Donald Trump announced on 1 June that the United States was withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, French President Emmanuel Macronpledged in a video to “make our planet great again” by intensifying efforts to combat climate change — and inviting U.S. researchers who might be unhappy with Trump to work in France.

The French government followed up on 8 June by unveiling a website aimed at attracting foreign scientists with 4-year grants worth up to €1.5million each.

But while some U.S. researchers say the invitation is intriguing, it has irritated some French scientists, who say the move raises concerns about their nation’s commitment to homegrown science. In particular, some French researchers are disappointed that the new Macron government offered grants to foreign researchers before answering their own recent call to shore up funding for struggling research institutes.

“Instead [of a commitment to stable domestic science funding], we get a fancy website which is more an empty shell than anything else,” says Olivier Berné, an astrophysicist and CNRS researcher at the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse. He helped organize the March for Science in France, as well as a letter from 1,500 scientists to France’s research minister that spelled out 10 funding priorities for the new government.

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To Understand Betsy DeVos’s Educational Views, View Her Education

By Erica L. Green

The students formed a circle around the Rev. Ray Vanderlaan, who draped himself in a Jewish ceremonial prayer shawl to cap his final lesson to graduating seniors in his discipleship seminar at Holland Christian High School.

“We’re sending you out into a broken world, in part because of my generation,” the minister told the students. Referring to God, he exhorted them to “extend his kingdom.”

Mr. Vanderlaan could not have missed his lesson’s echoes of Holland Christian’s most famous graduate, Betsy DeVos, who proclaimed in an audio recording that surfaced in December that her education advocacy would “advance God’s kingdom.” Last month, in her first commencement address as education secretary, Ms. DeVos again reflected her own education when she told graduates at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Fla., that “my generation hasn’t done a great job when it comes to dealing with one another in grace.”

She continued, “You have an opportunity to do better.”

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Watch Live: Comey Testifies Before Senate Intelligence Committee

By Jessica Taylor

Updated at 11:59 a.m. ET

Former FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday morning that he was “confused” and “increasingly concerned” about the “shifting explanations” President Trump gave for his firing just over a month ago.

When Trump fired him, he initially pointed to Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, but then later conceded it was because of his handling of the Russia investigation and claimed Comey was overseeing a demoralized FBI in disarray.

“So it confused me when I saw on television the president saying he actually fired me because of the Russia investigation and learned again from the media that he was telling, privately, other parties that my firing had relieved ‘great pressure’ on the Russia investigation,” Comey said, referring to reporting on Trump’s conversation with Russian officials in the Oval Office the day after the dismissal.

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