ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 405

Tully Monster Still a Mystery

By Brian Switek

This time last year, two teams of paleontologists announced that they had finally solved one of the most inscrutable mysteries in the history of life on Earth. The Tully Monster – a flat, bug-eyed, nozzle-nosed animal truly worthy of the title Monster – went from a 300 million year old Rorsarch test to a vertebrate, a strange lamprey rather than a pincer-faced invertebrate. Fossil fans sent up a cheer as the unusual critter was welcomed into the fold. But now a different group of researchers has once again raised uncertainty about what, exactly, the Tully Monster is.

Paleontologist Lauren Sallen and colleagues write that the idea Tullimonstrum was a nightmarishly aberrant fish runs into “biological, functional, and taphonomic” challenges. In their view, the Tully Monster is no vertebrate but something more akin to a mollusk, arthropod, or some strange chordate. Disagreement is no surprise when you’re dealing with a species that looks like the star of an early Roger Corman film.

One of the pro-vertebrate studies, published by Thomas Clements and collaborators, concluded that the Tully Monster is one of our family based on its eye. The shape as the eye, as well as two organelles inside it, appeared to align the Tully Monster with vertebrates more than other animals. Sallen and coauthors regard these same characteristics as equivocal, possibly having more to do with convergence than true relationships.

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Scientists Catch Star And Possible Black Hole In A Rapid, Dangerous Dance

By Merrit Kennedy

Scientists have caught sight of a star extremely close to what they think is a black hole, whizzing around it at an extraordinary speed — at least twice an hour. As NASA put it, “This may be the tightest orbital dance ever witnessed for a likely black hole and a companion star.”

The pair is in our galaxy, in an area dense with stars some 14,800 light-years from Earth.

Researchers believe the object is a black hole, although other explanations are possible, Michigan State University’s Arash Bahramian tells The Two-Way. He’s the lead author of a recent paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society detailing the team’s findings.

They’re confident the star caught in the dance is a white dwarf, which is the dense remnant of a star, like our sun, after it has died. The white dwarf is close enough to the black hole that it is “pulling matter from the white dwarf onto itself,” another indicator of how close the pair is, Bahramian says.

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Dawkins’ fabled cooperative gene discovered in microbes

By Phys.org

Geneticists from the Universities of Manchester and Bath are celebrating the discovery of the elusive ‘greenbeard gene’ that helps explain why organisms are more likely to cooperate with some individuals than others

The renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “greenbeard gene” in his 1976 best seller The Selfish Gene.

The greenbeard is a special type of gene that, said Dawkins, could solve the conundrum of how organisms identify and direct selfless behaviour to towards other selfless individuals.

The existence of greenbeard genes once seemed improbable, but work published in Nature Communications by the team of geneticists has identified a gene that causes a whole range of ‘beard colours’ in a social microbe.

The microbes – ‘slime moulds’ – live as single celled organisms, but clump together to form a slug like creature when they run out of food. The newly formed slug can move to help them find new sources of food, but this depends on successful cooperation.

With funding from the Wellcome Trust, NERC and the BBSRC the research team found that slime mould cells are able to decide who they collaborate with. By sequencing their genomes, they discovered that partnership choices are based on a greenbeard gene.

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Scott Pruitt’s office deluged with angry callers after he questions the science of global warming

By Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s phones have been ringing off the hook — literally — since he questioned the link between human activity and climate change.

The calls to Pruitt’s main line, 202-564-4700, reached such a high volume by Friday that agency officials created an impromptu call center, according to three agency employees. The officials asked for anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

By Saturday morning calls went straight to voice mail, which was full and did not accept messages. At least two calls received the message that the line was disconnected, but that appeared to be in error.

EPA spokeswoman Nancy Grantham said in an email that the agency “has logged about 300 calls and emails.”

While constituents sometimes call lawmakers in large numbers to express outrage over contentious policy issues, it is unusual for Americans to target a Cabinet official.

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Coming Out Atheist, pg 217

“This Christian culture in the U.S. military – with its anti-atheist hostility – has practical effects as well, very often in the form of non-believers being given extra work or more onerous work, and Christians being given extra time off or other special privileges. Marine Sergeant Adam Dunigan (date of service: April 1, 2008 – present) says, “I think the most egregious offense that religion perpetrates in the military is that it assets itself (and is thus treated) as an integral part of military life. When I first entered basic training and we were given time off contingent on attending religious service, I was shocked.” Marine Lance Corporal Steffen Camarato (dates of service: June 2006 – June 2010) says, “An atheist in the military? Well, good job, now you get to work on Sunday because you obviously have nothing to do on Sundays right?” Army Warrant Officer Christopher Roberts (date of service: August 2006 – present) says, ” Another side note I found to be very coercive was that all Service Members who were married were allowed to visit with family members during Sunday worship services while those who weren’t religious or those who weren’t married were stuck on work details during that period of time.” And Air Force Staff Sergeant Johnathan Napier (dates of service: September 13, 2005 – August 21, 2011) says, “I also remember going through basic training and being given the option of ‘going to church’ or ‘cleaning.’ That’s not a real option. Of course everyone chooses church… Frankly, I was quite annoyed at how positively I could be viewed as a soldier, but so negatively as an Atheist.”

–Greta Christina, Coming Out Atheist, pg 217

Discuss!

Atheists at risk of dying out due to belief in contraception, study claims

By Rachel Hosie

A new study has suggested that atheism is doomed because religious people have higher rates of reproduction.

Due to their lack of belief in contraception, religious believers are having more children than atheists, which could ultimately result in the end of atheism, the study suggests.

The findings fly in the face of popular discourse – and scientists’ predictions – which implies fewer and fewer people are religious nowadays.

But the new research claims religion is actually at no risk of dying out and the reverse is in fact the case.

Scientists from the US and Malaysia studied over 4,000 students, asking them about their religious beliefs and how many siblings they had.

They found that Malaysian atheists had 1.5 fewer siblings than the average.

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Indonesia’s Sentencing of ‘Son of God’ Adds to Alarm Over Crackdown

By Jon Emont

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Back in his days as a badminton coach with the Indonesian national team, Ahmad Mushaddeq traveled the world on the state’s dime. But after he became the spiritual leader of a back-to-the-land organic farming movement on the island of Borneo, regarded by his followers as the messiah who succeeded Muhammad, the government locked him up for the second time on charges of blasphemy.

This week, an Indonesian court sentenced him to a five-year prison term, and gave two other leading figures of Milah Abraham, the religious sect he established, prison terms as well. The sentences, delivered on Tuesday, were the latest in a continuing crackdown on new religious movements across Indonesia that has alarmed human rights groups.

“The verdict is another indicator of rising discrimination against religious minorities in Indonesia,” said Andreas Harsono, the Indonesia representative for Human Rights Watch. He called for a review of state institutions that “facilitate such discrimination, including the blasphemy law office.”

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How Humans Invented Numbers—And How Numbers Reshaped Our World

By Lorraine Boissoneault

Once you learn numbers, it’s hard to unwrap your brain from their embrace. They seem natural, innate, something all humans are born with. But when University of Miami associate professor Caleb Everett and other anthropologists worked with the indigenous Amazonian people known as the Pirahã, they realized the members of the tribe had no word used consistently to identify any quantity, not even one.

Intrigued, the researchers developed further tests for the Pirahã adults, who were all mentally and biologically healthy. The anthropologists lined up a row of batteries on a table and asked the Pirahã participants to place the same number in a parallel row on the other side. When one, two or three batteries were presented, the task was accomplished without any difficulty. But as soon as the initial line included four or more batteries, the Pirahã began to make mistakes. As the number of batteries in the line increased, so did their errors.

The researchers realized something extraordinary: the Pirahã’s lack of numbers meant they couldn’t distinguish exactly between quantities above three. As Everett writes in his new book, Numbers and the Making of Us, “Mathematical concepts are not wired into the human condition. They are learned, acquired through cultural and linguistic transmission. And if they are learned rather than inherited genetically, then it follows that they are not a component of the human mental hardware but are very much a part of our mental software—the feature of an app we ourselves have developed.”

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Could Southern Baptist Russell Moore lose his job? Churches threaten to pull funds after months of Trump controversy

By Sarah Pulliam Bailey

Concern is mounting among evangelicals that Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s policy arm, could lose his job following months of backlash over his critiques of President Trump and religious leaders who publicly supported the Republican candidate. Any such move could be explosive for the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, which has been divided over politics, theology and, perhaps most starkly, race.

More than 100 of the denomination’s 46,000 churches have threatened to cut off financial support for the SBC’s umbrella fund, according to Frank Page, president of the executive committee. The committee is studying whether the churches are acting out of displeasure with Moore because it has received more threats to funding over him than over any other “personality issue” in recent memory, said Page, who will meet with Moore today.

Moore, who heads the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and has been relatively quiet since the election, declined to comment for this article. Page declined to discuss the plan for Monday’s meeting, but he indicated that he would not rule out the possibility that he could ask Moore to resign. He said he hopes Moore and his opposition will agree to pursue efforts toward reconciliation.

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The quest to crystallize time

By Elizabeth Gibney

Christopher Monroe spends his life poking at atoms with light. He arranges them into rings and chains and then massages them with lasers to explore their properties and make basic quantum computers. Last year, he decided to try something seemingly impossible: to create a time crystal.

The name sounds like a prop from Doctor Who, but it has roots in actual physics. Time crystals are hypothetical structures that pulse without requiring any energy — like a ticking clock that never needs winding. The pattern repeats in time in much the same way that the atoms of a crystal repeat in space. The idea was so challenging that when Nobel prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek proposed the provocative concept1 in 2012, other researchers quickly proved there was no way to create time crystals.

But there was a loophole — and researchers in a separate branch of physics found a way to exploit the gap. Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, and his team used chains of atoms they had constructed for other purposes to make a version of a time crystal2 (see ‘How to create a time crystal’). “I would say it sort of fell in our laps,” says Monroe.

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