ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 383

College Freshmen Are Less Religious Than Ever

By Allen Downey

The number of college students with no religious affiliation has tripled in the last 30 years, from 10 percent in 1986 to 31 percent in 2016, according to data from the CIRP Freshman Survey. Over the same period, the number who attended religious services dropped from 85 percent to 69 percent. These trends provide a shapshot of the current generation of young adults; they also provide a preview of rapid secularization in the U.S. over the next 30 years.

Since 1966 the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) has surveyed incoming college students about their backgrounds, beliefs, and attitudes, including questions about their religious preference and attendance at religious services. In 2016, they surveyed more than 137,000 first-time students at 184 colleges and universities in the U.S.

Figure 1 shows how the number of students whose religious preference is “None” has changed over time. The retreat from religion starts around 1990 and accelerates, averaging almost 1 percentage point per year.

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Fleeting phase of planet formation discovered

By Ramin Skibba

Rocky planets, including Earth, endure violent beginnings. Giant impacts vaporize enormous chunks of protoplanets, surrounding them in a flattened halo of debris. Scientists believe that these disks eventually condense to form planets. Now, improved computer simulations of planet formation suggest that many of these embryonic objects pass through a phase late in their adolescence in which they assume the shape of enormous red blood cells called synestia.

Researchers led by planetary scientist Sarah Stewart at the University of California, Davis, published their description of these huge, spinning clouds of vaporized rock on 22 May in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets1. The finding could help scientists to improve their understanding of planet formation, and lead to better explanations of how Earth’s Moon formed.

“We discovered that there’s a different class of objects where the system is rotating so quickly, and it’s so hot, that there’s no actual boundary between what we used to call the planet and the disk,” Stewart says.

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Texas adoption bill ignores science, parenting experts in favor of dogma

By Heidi Stevens

A gentle reminder.

In case the bill Texas senators passed early Monday — the one allowing publicly funded foster care and adoption agencies to turn away non-Christian, unmarried or gay prospective parents — becomes some sort of ugly trend, it’s worth noting a few of the ways it’s wrongheaded.

There’s the problem of accepting public funding while discriminating against members of the public, of course. (The bill is opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.)

But there’s also the more fundamental, moral problem of denying children access to loving, capable parents.

The science is clear: Children raised by same-sex parents fare just as well as children raised by opposite-sex parents.

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In ‘Enormous Success,’ Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence

By Carl Zimmer

In a significant advance in the study of mental ability, a team of European and American scientists announced on Monday that they had identified 52 genes linked to intelligence in nearly 80,000 people.

These genes do not determine intelligence, however. Their combined influence is minuscule, the researchers said, suggesting that thousands more are likely to be involved and still await discovery. Just as important, intelligence is profoundly shaped by the environment.

Still, the findings could make it possible to begin new experiments into the biological basis of reasoning and problem-solving, experts said. They could even help researchers determine which interventions would be most effective for children struggling to learn.

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The Univ. of Central Florida Now Explicitly Features Resources for Atheists on Its Website

By Hemant Mehta

The University of Central Florida, one of the largest schools in the country with over 65,000 students and 10,000 faculty and staff members, has done something incredibly valuable for people who are not religious: They are making sure that students who are atheists (or part of religious minorities) have access to the same resources available to Christians.

What used to be the school’s page for Campus Faiths and Ministries is now a page dedicated to “Religion and Non-Religion.” It links to both faith-based groups (in case you’re looking for a place to worship) as well as “Humanist and Secular Services.”

Humanist and Secular support services provides resources, advocacy, and pastoral care from a Humanist perspective. Organizations serve students, faculty, and staff seeking community; meaning and purpose; assistance with life challenges; and other inner-life development, enrichment, and support. Resources include a secular student community, a Secular Safe Zone allies network, workshops and other advocacy promoting inclusion for people of all perspectives and worldviews, and connections to local, state, and national Humanist communities and services.

Those resources include contact information for the school’s voluntary Humanist Chaplain, Tee Rogers, in case students want to set up an appointment to discuss personal issues without someone telling them to trust in God to make everything better.

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Goodbye smokestacks: Startup invents zero-emission fossil fuel power

By Robert F. Service

Between the energy hub of Houston, Texas, and the Gulf Coast lies a sprawling petropolis: a sea of refineries and oil storage tanks, power lines, and smokestacks, all dedicated to converting fossil fuels into dollars. They are the reason why the Houston area emits more carbon dioxide (CO2) than anyplace else in the United States.

But here, on the eastern edge of that CO2 hot spot, a new fossil fuel power plant showcases a potential remedy for Houston’s outsized greenhouse gas footprint. The facility looks suspiciously like its forebears, a complex the size of two U.S. football fields, chock-a-block with snaking pipes and pumps. It has a turbine and a combustor. But there is one thing it doesn’t need: smokestacks.

Zero-emission fossil fuel power sounds like an oxymoron. But when that 25-megawatt demonstration plant is fired up later this year, it will burn natural gas in pure oxygen. The result: a stream of nearly pure CO2, which can be piped away and stored underground or blasted into depleted oil reservoirs to free more oil, a process called enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Either way, the CO2 will be sequestered from the atmosphere and the climate.

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Light-sensitive E. coli paint a colourful picture

By Adam Levy

To show off the powers of synthetic biology, researchers have engineered a primitive kind of colour vision into bacteria — and got the microbes to paint pictures of what they see.

The genetically modified Escherichia coli can sense red, green and blue (RGB) light, and they respond by producing a pigment of the corresponding colour. Projecting light on to a Petri dish of the bacteria leads them to create colour ‘photographs’, albeit ones with an exposure time of 18 hours.

The RGB-sensitive E. coli make up a toy system that is a stepping stone to more complex biological programming, says Christopher Voigt, who led the study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and has pictures from the experiment hanging on his office wall. The work is published in Nature Chemical Biology1.

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In US, Belief in Creationist View of Humans at New Low

By Art Swift

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The percentage of U.S. adults who believe that God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so — the strict creationist view — has reached a new low. Thirty-eight percent of U.S. adults now accept creationism, while 57% believe in some form of evolution — either God-guided or not — saying man developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life.

This is the first time since 1982 — when Gallup began asking this question using this wording — that belief in God’s direct creation of man has not been the outright most-common response. Overall, roughly three-quarters of Americans believe God was involved in man’s creation — whether that be the creationist view based on the Bible or the view that God guided the evolutionary process, outlined by scientist Charles Darwin and others. Since 1982, agreement with the “secular” viewpoint, meaning humans evolved from lower life forms without any divine intervention, has doubled.

Americans’ Views on Human Creation Related to Education, Religious Preference

Higher education levels are associated with less support for creationism and higher levels of belief in the evolutionary explanation for human origins. Belief in creationism is 21% among those with postgraduate education versus 48% of those with no more than a high school diploma. Agreement with evolution without God’s involvement is 31% among postgrads versus 12% among Americans with a high school education or less.

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Why It’s So Hard to Admit You’re Wrong

By Kristin Wong

Despite your best intentions and efforts, it is inevitable: At some point in your life, you will be wrong.

Mistakes can be hard to digest, so sometimes we double down rather than face them. Our confirmation bias kicks in, causing us to seek out evidence to prove what we already believe. The car you cut off has a small dent in its bumper, which obviously means that it is the other driver’s fault.

Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance — the stress we experience when we hold two contradictory thoughts, beliefs, opinions or attitudes. For example, you might believe you are a kind and fair person, so when you rudely cut someone off, you experience dissonance. To cope with it, you deny your mistake and insist the other driver should have seen you, or you had the right of way even if you didn’t.

“Cognitive dissonance is what we feel when the self-concept — I’m smart, I’m kind, I’m convinced this belief is true — is threatened by evidence that we did something that wasn’t smart, that we did something that hurt another person, that the belief isn’t true,” said Carol Tavris, a co-author of the book “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me).”

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Why astronomers are scrambling to observe the weirdest star in the galaxy this weekend

by Loren Grush

It was early Thursday morning when astronomer Matt Muterspaugh noticed something strange with the star he had been observing for the last year and a half. Telescope data taken from the night before showed that the brightness of the star had dipped significantly. He contacted other astronomers who had also been observing the same star, to let them know what he had seen and to keep an eye on it for any more changes. Then by the following morning, the star had dimmed even more.

That’s when he and the others knew it was time to signal the alarm: the weirdest star in our galaxy was acting weird again. And it was time for everyone to look at this distant celestial body — to figure out what the hell is going on. “As far as I can tell, every telescope that can look at it right now is looking at it right now,” Muterspaugh, a professor at Tennessee State University, tells The Verge.

The star Muterspaugh has been looking at is KIC 8462852, though it’s also known as Tabby’s Star. That’s because Tabetha Boyajian, an astronomer at Louisiana State University, first noticed this strange star a couple years ago after looking through archive data from Kepler — a NASA spacecraft that’s been hunting for planets that exist outside of our Solar System. Boyajian was part of a citizen science project called Planet Hunters, where volunteers can analyze Kepler data to look for planets, and they alerted her to the wonky star. “Our users flagged it to be something really interesting,” Boyajian tells The Verge. “They came to the science team and asked, ‘What is this? That’s not a planet clearly.’”

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