ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 418

Women’s March on Washington Protestors Say Science Is a Driving Force

By Dina Fine Maron

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The day after businessman and reality-TV star Donald Trump was sworn into office as the 45th president of the United States, hundreds of thousands of protestors descended on the nation’s capital allied loosely under the banner of marching for human rights. More than 200 similar marches had also been planned in cities across the country.

The Women’s March on Washington started near the Capitol and brought together a far-flung coalition of individuals and groups. Some of the protestors said they were here to stand in solidarity with efforts to protect the rights of women and their families. Others said they came to register their dismay about the Trump administration’s stance on certain scientific and medical issues—including climate change, reproductive rights and the future of research funding. Some researchers who joined the march said they were alarmed over what might happen to science in general with Trump at the helm.

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Yes, science is political

By Elizabeth Lopatto

Over the past few weeks, we’ve gotten notes from Verge Science readers wondering why news from the incoming Trump administration has seeped into our science coverage. I wasn’t surprised: it’s tempting to believe that science is apolitical. But science and politics are plainly related: science is the pursuit of knowledge, knowledge is power, and power is politics.

The scientific method consists of generating a hypothesis, attempting to disprove the hypothesis through testing, and accumulating those tests to come up with shared knowledge. And that method also contains ideology: our observed, shared world is the real world. This ideology even has a name: empiricism. An incoming president who clearly picks and chooses facts to suit his own version of the world changes the relationship between science and culture, in potentially destructive ways.

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Disappeared: Silencing Pakistan’s activists

By Asad Hashim

Islamabad, Pakistan – On the afternoon of January 7, Ahmed Raza Naseer was sitting with his brother at their shop in a small village just outside the central Pakistani town of Nankana Sahib, when a nondescript man holding a mobile phone to his ear walked in.

He spent some time looking at their wares – mobile phones, mostly – before asking the brothers their names. After they answered, he asked which of them used a particular mobile phone number.

When Ahmed replied that he did, he was told to stand up. The 27-year-old struggled to his feet – he has been afflicted with polio in his right leg since he was a boy.

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Psychologists ask: What makes some smart people so skeptical of science?

By Melissa Healy

In Washington, D.C., revelers and protesters are marking the ascendance of a new president and the populist movement he says he has mobilized.

Some 1,600 miles away in San Antonio, thousands of psychologists from around the world are also marking the dawn of the Trump era by focusing their attention on the thought processes that prompt some people to resist and reject science. Matters for which there is a broad scientific consensus — including man-made climate change, the safety of childhood vaccines and Darwin’s theory of evolution — have been attacked as hoaxes and lies by senior members of the new administration.

Psychologists have come up with a name for this trend: the “anti-enlightenment movement.”

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Father and son accused of rape want ‘only law book that truly matters’ at their trial: The Bible

A father and son accused of raping a teenage girl over a three-year period and keeping her shackled in a basement have made it clear that they don’t have faith in the law or in the people who practice it.

When they face an Ohio jury as they defend themselves against criminal charges that carry long prison sentences, they will rely on one book: The Bible.

Timothy Ciboro and his son, Esten Ciboro, both of Toledo, are each charged with multiple counts of rape. The trial is scheduled to start this week, months after the girl, who is Timothy Ciboro’s stepdaughter, managed to unshackle herself and escape while her alleged abusers were gone, authorities said.

During a hearing Friday, the Ciboros made the unusual request of having access to the Bible, which they plan to cite as they defend themselves in front of a jury. The Bible, Esten Ciboro told a judge, is “the only law book that truly matters,” the Toledo Blade reported.

“There’s a great deal of strategy in Scripture and I use those strategies in everything I do,” Esten Ciboro told the judge, according to the Toledo Blade’s coverage of the hearing. “It’s a vital part of everything I do.”

Timothy Ciboro said he and his son intend to “use God’s holy word to ask questions, questions that we believe are absolutely vital to our case,” the paper reported.

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Coming Out Atheist, pg 11

“Atheists have to come out! Coming out is the most powerful political action we can take! It’s how we change people’s perceptions of us! It’s how we counter the myths and bigotry against us! It’s how we find each other! It’s how we create communities and give each other a safe place to land! It’s how we’re forcing ourselves into a political force to be reckoned with!”

People in the atheist movement have been saying all of this for as long as I’ve been an atheist. Probably for longer. And there’s a reason: It’s all true.”

–Greta Christina, Coming Out Atheist, pg 11

Discuss!

Roe: Can a Play Influence the Abortion Debate?

By Sophie Gilbert

Roe, which opened at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage just days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, is a modern kind of history play, a production that considers a crucial issue in American politics. But its playwright, Lisa Loomer, didn’t expect the timing of Roe to be quite so pointed, coinciding with the arrival of a new president opposed to abortion rights and a vacancy on the Supreme Court. “It’s daunting,” Loomer says. “I feel like the play has become accidentally urgent.”

But Roe isn’t a particularly polemical play, or a deliberate attempt to advocate for one side or another. It frames its story around the two women at the center of Roe v. Wade, the 1971 case that enshrined the legal right to have an abortion in American law: Sarah Weddington, the then-26-year-old attorney who argued on behalf of the plaintiff, and Jane Roe, a.k.a. Norma McCorvey, a young Texan woman in her early 20s who wanted to end her pregnancy. The actors who play the two women serve as both narrators and central characters, telling their own, sometimes opposing versions of the roles they played in a landmark judgment, and how it changed their lives. The case itself is dealt with in just a few minutes: Loomer is much more interested in the larger history of abortion in the U.S., and why, after 40-some years, public opinion on the subject is just as divided as ever.

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Would You Give Up Perfect Vision for a Trip to Space?

By Marina Koren

The experience of weightlessness is confusing for human bodies. The eyes tell you you’re gently bobbing up and down, while your inner ear screams that you’re tumbling about, making you nauseous. The fluids in your body, freed from gravity, float upward, causing head congestion. Bones, suddenly useless in holding you up and moving you around, start thinning out. And something strange can happen to your eyeballs: They get squashed, blurring your vision.

About two-thirds of astronauts on the International Space Station report changes in their vision after they come back. Scans show that the backs of their eyeballs somehow get flattened, their retinas wrinkle, and their optic nerves swell after spending a prolonged period of time in microgravity, causing farsightedness. The leading explanation suggests that when bodily fluids rise and pool in astronauts’ torsos and heads, they put pressure on the brain and the back of the eye, causing changes in its shape. Scientists don’t know for sure, so they keeping studying astronauts.

They don’t need the astronauts themselves to study vision changes, though, as a new study from researchers in Texas, published Thursday in the Journal of Physiology, shows. A team at UT Southwestern Medical Center instead tested cancer patients who had a device permanently placed in their heads as part of their treatments. The device, known as an Ommaya reservoir, allows doctors to inject medicine into patients’ cerebrospinal fluid or remove extra liquid. For the Texas researchers, the port allowed them to measure intracranial pressure—the force inside the skull that scientists suspect causes structural changes to the eye and optic nerve in microgravity.

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The Republican Health Care Con

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Republicans say the Affordable Care Act provides health insurance that manages to be both lousy and expensive. Whatever the flaws of these policies, the new Trump administration is trying to pull off a con by offering Americans coverage that is likely to be so much worse that it would barely deserve the name insurance. It would also leave many millions without the medical care they need.

This reality became increasingly clear when President Trump’s choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, testified before a Senate committee last week. He looked pained as he described the terrible predicament of people who earned around $30,000 to $50,000 a year and had to deny “themselves the kind of care that they need” because they had Obamacare policies with deductibles of $6,000 to $12,000. Yet, earlier in the same hearing, Mr. Price extolled the virtues of policies that would be woefully inadequate — policies that cover medical treatment only in catastrophic cases. Such policies often have deductibles of around $14,000 for family coverage. This is simple hypocrisy. Condemn the policy you don’t like, propose something far worse as a replacement and claim that it is much better.

Mr. Price and Mr. Trump have recently said that their goal is to offer health care to many more people than are covered by the current health care law, which has driven the uninsured rate to historic lows. Mr. Trump went so far as to say he would provide “insurance for everybody” — something his press secretary, Sean Spicer, later walked back. But Mr. Price’s testimony and the legislation he introduced in the House, where until recently he was the Budget Committee chairman, show that the new administration will make decent health care less affordable and less accessible for most people. And Mr. Trump was already trying to undo parts of the A.C.A. through an executive order on Friday, just hours after being sworn in.

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What Did Neanderthals Leave to Modern Humans? Some Surprises

By Claudia Dreifus

Geneticists tell us that somewhere between 1 and 5 percent of the genome of modern Europeans and Asians consists of DNA inherited from Neanderthals, our prehistoric cousins.

At Vanderbilt University, John Anthony Capra, an evolutionary genomics professor, has been combining high-powered computation and a medical records databank to learn what a Neanderthal heritage — even a fractional one — might mean for people today.

We spoke for two hours when Dr. Capra, 35, recently passed through New York City. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

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