ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 408

Necessity of Secularism, pg 104

“And what is this point of view we share in common with others? It’s what many ethicists refer to as a common morality. The common morality is composed of those core moral norms that have been accepted across cultures. For humans to live together in peace and prosper, we need to follow norms such as do not kill, do not steal, do not inflict pain gratuitously, tell the truth, keep you commitments, reciprocate acts of kindness, and so forth. The number of core norms is small, but they govern most of the transactions we have with other humans. This is why we see these norms in all functioning human societies, past and present. “[I]njunctions against violence, deceit, and betrayal … are familiar in every society and every legal system. They have been voiced in works as different as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Icelandic Edda, and the Bhagavad-Gita.” Any community in which these norms were lacking could not survive for long. We cannot live together in peace without these core moral norms. This shared core of moral norms represents the common heritage of civilized human society.”

–Ron Lindsay, The Necessity of Secularism, pg 104

Discuss!

What Can Be Gleaned From Trump’s Allegations of Wiretapping

By Charlie Savage

President Trump’s claim on Twitter early Saturday that he had “just found out” that “President Obama was tapping my phones in October,” an accusation for which he offered no evidence, has set off another spasm surrounding his young administration. On Sunday, Mr. Trump’s spokesman said the administration was asking Congress to investigate the president’s allegation.

There is ample reason for caution because Mr. Trump has a history of making attention-grabbing and politically explosive claims that have no basis in fact. As things stand, a plausible explanation is that Mr. Trump was merely riffing off a March 3 article on the alt-right website Breitbart.com. It laid out a theory circulating in some conservative circles that President Barack Obama sought to sabotage Mr. Trump through surveillance.

The episode has heightened interest in several related surveillance issues.

Can a president order the wiretapping of an American?

Not legally. There are two lawful ways that allow government officials to target people in the United States for surveillance and to collect the contents of their phone calls and emails: criminal wiretaps, called “Title III” warrants, and national security wiretaps, called Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, orders. Both types of wiretapping are ordered by federal judges, after applications from the Justice Department.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

DNA could store all of the world’s data in one room

By Robert Service

Humanity has a data storage problem: More data were created in the past 2 years than in all of preceding history. And that torrent of information may soon outstrip the ability of hard drives to capture it. Now, researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks. But whether the technology takes off may depend on its cost.

DNA has many advantages for storing digital data. It’s ultracompact, and it can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place. And as long as human societies are reading and writing DNA, they will be able to decode it. “DNA won’t degrade over time like cassette tapes and CDs, and it won’t become obsolete,” says Yaniv Erlich, a computer scientist at Columbia University. And unlike other high-density approaches, such as manipulating individual atoms on a surface, new technologies can write and read large amounts of DNA at a time, allowing it to be scaled up.

Scientists have been storing digital data in DNA since 2012. That was when Harvard University geneticists George Church, Sri Kosuri, and colleagues encoded a 52,000-word book in thousands of snippets of DNA, using strands of DNA’s four-letter alphabet of A, G, T, and C to encode the 0s and 1s of the digitized file. Their particular encoding scheme was relatively inefficient, however, and could store only 1.28 petabytes per gram of DNA. Other approaches have done better. But none has been able to store more than half of what researchers think DNA can actually handle, about 1.8 bits of data per nucleotide of DNA. (The number isn’t 2 bits because of rare, but inevitable, DNA writing and reading errors.)

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

How Does the Public’s View of Science Go So Wrong?

By Tom Nichols

Do Americans hate science? They certainly seem to hate it more than they used to, as they rage against experts in every field. This is more than a traditional American distaste for eggheads and intellectuals. Americans, increasingly, are acting (and voting) on myths and misinformation about science, and placing themselves at significant risk. In Texas, for example, “personal-belief exemptions” among parents refusing to vaccinate their children increased from 2,314 in the 2003-2004 school year to 44,716 in 2015-2016. Although these parents were, they say, galvanized by the election of Donald Trump—America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic—this reflexive dismissal of science long predates the 2016 election, even if it has intensified in the last few years.

Of course, Americans don’t really hate science: they rely on it every day in ways they don’t even notice. From tens of thousands of safe and effective over-the-counter drugs to the directions on a car’s GPS system, Americans trust the work of experts on a daily basis. Rather, it is more accurate to say that the American public distrusts scientists, rather than science itself. Scientists, however, should be consoled by the fact that they are disdained not for their work, but for being part of an undifferentiated mass of “experts” whom a fair number of Americans now view as, at best, a suspect political class, and, at worst, as an enemy.

In one sense, this attack on the defenders of established knowledge was inevitable. It is not only fueled by an obvious culprit—the internet—but also by the unintended side effects of otherwise positive social changes. Universal education and increased social mobility, among other changes, have thrown America’s experts and citizens into direct contact after nearly two centuries in which they lived segregated lives and rarely interacted with each other. And yet the result has not been a greater respect for knowledge, but the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else. To understand this, and to think about solutions, requires a deeper look at causes. Both the professional community and the public it serves bear some responsibility for our parlous condition.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

DNA clues to why woolly mammoth died out

By Helen Briggs

The last woolly mammoths to walk the Earth were so wracked with genetic disease that they lost their sense of smell, shunned company, and had a strange shiny coat.

That’s the verdict of scientists who have analysed ancient DNA of the extinct animals for mutations.

The studies suggest the last mammoths died out after their DNA became riddled with errors.

The knowledge could inform conservation efforts for living animals.

There are fewer than 100 Asiatic cheetahs left in the wild, while the remaining mountain gorilla population is estimated at about 300. The numbers are similar to those of the last woolly mammoths living on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean around 4,000 years ago.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Ancient skulls give clues to China human history

By Paul Rincon

Two skulls found in China shed light on the ancient humans who inhabited the region before our own species arrived.

We know that Europe and western Asia was dominated by the Neanderthals before Homo sapiens displaced them.

But remains belonging to equivalent populations in East and Central Asia have been scarce.

It’s unclear if the finds are linked to the Denisovans, a mysterious human group known only from DNA analysis of a tooth and finger bone from Siberia.

Prof Erik Trinkaus, one of the authors of a study on the remains in Science journal, said it was not possible to say at this stage whether the ancient people from Xuchang were connected to the Denisovans.

“The issue here is the patterns of variation and the population dynamics of ‘archaic’ populations during the later part of the Pleistocene,” Prof Trinkaus, from Washington University in St Louis, told BBC News.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Former EPA scientists to Trump: ‘Evidence does not change when the administration changes’

By Chris Mooney

The Trump administration’s proposal to cut the Environmental Protection Agency is looking dramatic indeed. The plans call for laying off thousands of staff, eliminating entire programs and making deep cuts to the agency’s research office, the Office of Research and Development (ORD), according to recent reporting by The Washington Post.

That’s not to say all of this will happen — or that any of it will. Congress makes the final decisions on funding the government. But it’s a stunning proposal to researchers familiar with the workings of the EPA.

“I think a deep cut would be devastating to the nation’s capacity to do environmental health and ecosystem research,” said Jonathan Samet, a former chair of the agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee who is now a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Grand Jury Discovers Decades of Child Abuse, Hundreds of Victims, in Pennsylvania Diocese

By Rachel Ford

I don’t usually do this, but this is pretty horrifying stuff. So, content warning for rape and child abuse.

A Pennsylvania grand jury investigation into the Pennsylvanian Altoona-Johnstown Diocese has wrapped up, and its findings are gut-wrenching: hundreds of children were sexually abused by Church leaders over the course of decades. More to the point, the Church not only knew about it, but also went so far as to interfere with police investigations in order to hide it.

The most infuriating part of it all? The plan worked:

None of the alleged criminal acts detailed in the report can be prosecuted at this point because many of the alleged abusers have died, the statute of limitations for these crimes has passed, and many of the victims are too “deeply traumatized” to testify in court, according to the Office of the Attorney General.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Embryo Experiments Reveal Earliest Human Development, But Stir Ethical Debate

By Rob Stein

Ali Brivanlou slides open a glass door at the Rockefeller University in New York to show off his latest experiments probing the mysteries of the human embryo.

“As you can see, all my lab is glass — just to make sure there is nothing that happens in some dark rooms that gives people some weird ideas,” says Brivanlou, perhaps only half joking.

Brivanlou knows that some of his research makes some people uncomfortable. That’s one reason he has agreed to give me a look at what’s going on.

His lab and one other discovered how to keep human embryos alive in lab dishes longer than ever before — at least 14 days. That has triggered an international debate about a long-standing convention (one that’s legally binding in some countries, though not in the U.S.) that prohibits studying human embryos that have developed beyond the two-week stage.

Ali Brivanlou’s research team at Rockefeller University in New York was one of two groups internationally that figured out how to keep human embryos alive in lab dishes beyond the 14-day stage of development.

And in other experiments, he’s using human stem cells to create entities that resemble certain aspects of primitive embryos. Though Brivanlou doesn’t think these “embryoids” would be capable of developing into fully formed embryos, their creation has stirred debate about whether embryoids should be subject to the 14-day rule.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Newfound 3.77-billion-year-old fossils could be earliest evidence of life on Earth

By Sarah Kaplan

Tiny, tubular structures uncovered in ancient Canadian rocks could be remnants of some of the earliest life on Earth, scientists say.

The straw-shaped “microfossils,” narrower than the width of a human hair and invisible to the naked eye, are believed to come from ancient microbes, according to a new study in the journal Nature. Scientists debate the age of the specimens, but the authors’ youngest estimate — 3.77 billion years — would make these fossils the oldest ever found.

Claims of ancient fossils are always contentious. Rocks as old as the ones in the new study rarely survive the weathering, erosion, subduction and deformation of our geologically active Earth. Any signs of life in the rocks that do survive are difficult to distinguish, let alone prove. Other researchers in the field expressed skepticism about whether the structures were really fossils, and whether the rocks that contain them are as old as the study authors say.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.