ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 413

EPA staff told to prepare for Trump executive orders

By David Shepardson, Timothy Gardner and Richard Valdmanis | WASHINGTON

Staff at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have been told that President Donald Trump is preparing a handful of executive orders to reshape the agency, to be signed once a new administrator is confirmed, two sources who attended the meeting told Reuters on Wednesday.

A senior EPA official who had been briefed by members of the Trump administration mentioned the executive orders at a meeting of staffers in the EPA’s Office of General Counsel on Tuesday, but did not provide details about what the orders would say, said the sources, who asked not to be named.

“It was just a heads-up to expect some executive orders, that’s it,” one of the sources said.

The second source said attendees at the meeting were told Trump would sign between two and five executive orders.

Trump administration officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump has promised to cut U.S. environmental rules – including those ushered in by former President Barack Obama targeting carbon dioxide emissions – as a way to bolster the drilling and coal mining industries, but has vowed to do so without compromising air and water quality.

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Appeals Court Says Michigan County’s Christian-Only Prayers Are Unconstitutional

By Hemant Mehta

The Jackson County Board of Commissioners in Michigan never understood how invocation prayers worked.

They delivered it themselves, which they can’t do. The invocations were always Christian, which constituted government endorsement of religion. And when resident Peter Bormuth (a Pagan) pointed all this out during a 2013 meeting, the Commissioners dismissed his concerns. One of them literally turned his back on Bormuth.

When Bormuth filed a pro se lawsuit (in which he represents himself) against the County, things got worse:

… one of the Commissioners publicly referred to him as a “nitwit.” Another warned against allowing invited guests to give invocations for fear that they would express non-Christian religious beliefs. Still another described the lawsuit as “an attack on Christianity, and… an attack on our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

A magistrate judge eventually said that summary judgment should be granted in Bormuth’s favor… but a District Judge ignored the recommendation and ruled in favor of the County. The case was then kicked up to the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It was 2015 when all this happened.

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U.S. panel gives yellow light to human embryo editing

By Jocelyn Kaiser

Editing the DNA of a human embryo to prevent a disease in a baby could be ethically allowable one day—but only in rare circumstances and with safeguards in place, says a widely anticipated report released today.

The report from an international committee convened by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Academy of Medicine in Washington, D.C., concludes that such a clinical trial “might be permitted, but only following much more research” on risks and benefits, and “only for compelling reasons and under strict oversight.” Those situations could be limited to couples who both have a serious genetic disease and for whom embryo editing is “really the last reasonable option” if they want to have a healthy biological child, says committee co-chair Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Some researchers are pleased with the report, saying it is consistent with previous conclusions that safely altering the DNA of human eggs, sperm, or early embryos—known as germline editing—to create a baby could be possible eventually. “They have closed the door to the vast majority of germline applications and left it open for a very small, well-defined subset. That’s not unreasonable in my opinion,” says genome researcher Eric Lander of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lander was among the organizers of an international summit at NAS in December 2015 who called for more discussion before proceeding with embryo editing.

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More Anti-Vaccine Nonsense from Trump and Kennedy

By Steven Novella

We have an anti-vaccine president. One of my concerns about Trump the candidate was that one of his most consistent positions over the years was blaming vaccines for the alleged autism epidemic (there isn’t one, by the way). Once elected it did not take long for this to manifest as a policy priority. In January Trump met with RFK Jr. to discuss him heading an Orwellian commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity.

At a recent meeting with educators, Trump continued to express his false belief in a “tremendous increase” in autism:

“Have you seen a big increase in the autism with the children?” Trump asked Jane Quenneville, the principle of a Virginia public school that specializes in special education. Quenneville responded that she had.

Trump continued: “So what’s going on with autism? When you look at the tremendous increase, it’s really such an incredible — it’s really a horrible thing to watch, the tremendous amount of increase. Do you have any idea?”

“The autism?” Really?

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Why Humans Prefer to Be the Center of the Universe

By Michael Shermer

Imagine nothing. Go ahead. What do you see? I picture dark empty space devoid of galaxies, stars and planets. But not only would there be no matter, there would be no space or time either. Not even darkness. And no sentient life to observe the nothingness. Just … nothing. Picture that. You can’t.

Here we face the ultimate question: Why is there something rather than nothing? I have compiled several responses from a number of sources, including a 2013 book by John Leslie and Robert Lawrence Kuhn entitled The Mystery of Existence (Wiley-Blackwell) and Lawrence M. Krauss’s 2017 book The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far (Atria Books).

Nothing is nonsensical. It is impossible to conceptualize nothing—not only no space, time, matter, energy, light, darkness or conscious beings to perceive the nothingness but not even nothingness. In this sense, the question is literally inconceivable.

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Elusive triangulene created by moving atoms one at a time

By Philip Ball

Researchers at IBM have created an elusive molecule by knocking around atoms using a needle-like microscope tip. The flat, triangular fragment of a mesh of carbon atoms, called triangulene1, is too unstable to be made by conventional chemical synthesis, and could find use in electronics.

This isn’t the first time that atomic manipulation has been used to create unstable molecules that couldn’t be made conventionally — but this one is especially desirable. “Triangulene is the first molecule that we’ve made that chemists have tried hard, and failed, to make already,” says Leo Gross, who led the IBM team at the firm’s laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland.

The creation of triangulene demonstrates a new type of chemical synthesis, says Philip Moriarty, a nanoscientist who specializes in molecular manipulation at the University of Nottingham, UK. In conventional synthesis, chemists react molecules together to build up larger structures. Here, by contrast, atoms on individual molecules were physically manipulated using a microscope.

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Donald Trump’s Administration Marks Need for New Wave of Skepticism

By David G. McAfee

Skepticism has always been important: it helped our ancestors outsmart predators, and it continues to help us avoid other dangerous pitfalls even today. But there is perhaps no time in recent history in which this skeptical mindset is more urgent than now.

I’ve spent my entire adult life promoting skepticism of false claims, so I was excited the first day “fake news” was discussed in mainstream media, but that enthusiasm faded quickly. The reference was in relation to false news stories and propaganda that propelled Donald Trump to the White House, of course, but that didn’t stop him from coopting the phrase and using it to shoot down anything critical of him.

And that’s exactly the problem: Trump, arguably the most powerful man in the world, is promoting false information at a record rate and discrediting investigative journalists at the same time. In essence, he is attempting to become the sole arbiter of “Truth” (or his twisted version of it) in America.

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Can Artificial Intelligence Predict Earthquakes?

By Annie Sneed

Predicting earthquakes is the holy grail of seismology. After all, quakes are deadly precisely because they’re erratic—striking without warning, triggering fires and tsunamis, and sometimes killing hundreds of thousands of people. If scientists could warn the public weeks or months in advance that a large temblor is coming, evacuation and other preparations could save countless lives.

So far, no one has found a reliable way to forecast earthquakes, even though many scientists have tried. Some experts consider it a hopeless endeavor. “You’re viewed as a nutcase if you say you think you’re going to make progress on predicting earthquakes,” says Paul Johnson, a geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. But he is trying anyway, using a powerful tool he thinks could potentially solve this impossible puzzle: artificial intelligence.

Researchers around the world have spent decades studying various phenomena they thought might reliably predict earthquakes: foreshocks, electromagnetic disturbances, changes in groundwater chemistry—even unusual animal behavior. But none of these has consistently worked. Mathematicians and physicists even tried applying machine learning to quake prediction in the 1980s and ’90s, to no avail. “The whole topic is kind of in limbo,” says Chris Scholz, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory.

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First live birth evidence in dinosaur relative

By Paul Rincon

Scientists have uncovered the first evidence of live births in the group of animals that includes dinosaurs, crocodiles and birds.

All examples of this group, known as the Archosauromorpha, lay eggs.

This led some scientists to wonder whether there was something in their biology that prevented live births.

But examination of the fossil remains of a very long-necked, 245 million-year-old marine reptile from China revealed it was carrying an embryo.

Jun Liu, first author of the new study in Nature Communications, told BBC News that the animal would have measured between three and four metres long, with a neck that was about 1.7m long.

The embryo may have been around half a metre long and is positioned inside the rib cage of the adult Dinocephalosaurus fossil, which was discovered in 2008 in Luoping County, Yunnan Province in southern China.

Researchers had to consider whether the smaller animal might have been part of the adult’s last meal. But it’s facing forward, whereas swallowed prey generally face backwards because predators consume the animal head first to help it go down the throat.

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Caught in the Pulpit, pg 91

“Students who enter seminary, like any students who have committed time and tuition payments to specialized, masters level education, are strongly motivated to complete their studies and succeed in their chosen fields. Like all serious scholars, seminary students have a thirst for knowledge and a desire to apply it properly. Most graduate students hope for ultimate financial security and some measure of respect from their community. Seminary students hope for that and more – a special place in society. They will be addressed as “Reverend” or “Father” or “Rabbi”; they will be perceived – among people who share their beliefs and even among some who do not – as representatives of God’s words on Earth. They take their studies seriously, Hoping to use their advanced knowledge to carry out their work. However, as we saw in the previous section, there are surprises in store for those incoming students who expect that their faith will be deepened, and for those graduates who expect that their flocks will appreciate their wisdom.”

–Linda LaScola & Daniel Dennet, Caught in the Pulpit, pg 91

Discuss!