ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 419

Fishing for Clues to Solve Namibia’s Fairy Circle Mystery

By Nicholas St. Fleur

With its bone-dry grasslands and oppressive heat, the middle of the Namib Desert may seem like a strange place to go fishing. Yet there Jennifer Guyton and Tyler Coverdale were, standing in a sea of orange sand and brittle yellow grass with their 30-foot carp pole.

But the two Princeton graduate students weren’t trying to catch some sort of desert-dwelling dogfish or a literal “sand shark.” That would be absurd. Instead, they had swapped the hook with a camera so they could investigate the scenery around something much more scientifically sensible: fairy circles.

That is what scientists call the mysterious bald spots speckled across Namibia’s grasslands. The rings are six feet to 115 feet wide and are regularly spaced out in a hexagon or honeycomb pattern. As their ethereal name would imply, fairy circles have long bewildered researchers as to their origins. But a new study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature that Ms. Guyton and Mr. Coverdale were involved in seeks to offer some insights into how the enchanting landscapes may have formed.

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Scientists pinpoint the exact age of the Moon — and it’s older than we thought

By Loren Grush

Scientists say they have figured out the most precise age for the Moon than ever before, thanks to samples of lunar rocks gathered during NASA’s Apollo 14 mission. Analysis of the rocks pinpoint the Moon’s creation to 4.51 billion years ago, just 60 million years after the Solar System first formed.

This suggested age makes the Moon a lot older than some recent estimates, which claim our lunar neighbor is 4.3 or 4.4 billion years old. If the results are accurate, it means the giant impact that created the Moon must have occurred fairly early on in the Solar System’s history. The Moon is thought to have formed from the leftover debris of a high-speed collision between Earth and a smaller planet-like object called Theia — and the timing of this event is important for figuring out when life formed here on Earth, too. Our planet would have been completely wiped out by the giant impact, so life could not have started forming on Earth until after the planet became whole again in the wake of the collision. So knowing the Moon’s age gives us a good idea of when the Earth started to become a suitable place to live.

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Elitist Atheist Warren A. Smith Makes A-List-Who’s Who in Hell

By Frank DiGiacomo

Warren Allen Smith stood in his cramped Greenwich Village studio apartment and recalled the time he scared the heck out of Gore Vidal.

It was 1995, Mr. Smith said, and Mr. Vidal was making an appearance at Barnes & Noble on Union Square. After waiting in line to meet the author of Myra Breckenridge and Live from Golgotha , Mr. Smith made his move.

“I went up to him and said, ‘Hey, you and I are in love with the same man!’ And I was serious.” Mr. Smith, who says he’s 77 though his book has him born in 1921, crinkled his eyes and flashed a sly smile. He wore stylish neo-retro half-rim glasses and, from the neck up, looked like a well-kept Buck Henry. Neck down, he was channeling Ed Grimley, his dark work pants riding high on a reddish-orange, plaid-patterned work shirt. Hanging from a bookshelf behind him was a sash that read “Stonewall Veteran.” Next to the window was a telescope pointed, he had said earlier, at the Archives building, where Monica Lewinsky now lives.

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I’m a slacker Muslim. But Donald Trump has us atheists nervous

By Sohaila Abdulali

On a recent return to New York after a short trip to India, I waltzed through immigration with my nice blue US passport. It says “Abdulali”, but nobody seemed to care. Will that be different next time I come back home?

The incoming administration has previously proposed a Muslim registry. I’m not from one of the so-called “high-risk countries”, but the name Abdulali suddenly feels like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter – am I now supposed to justify myself every time I come home? Will I feel the old familiar pre-citizenship nerves and do my best to grovel and look harmless when the officer appraises me before I escape thankfully to baggage claim? What about my Pakistani cousins who might want to visit?

This feeling of nervousness is unpleasantly familiar. In 1992, India suddenly changed after a mosque was destroyed, and ethnic riots swept the country. The nice man I bought flowers from at the Delhi market near my flat asked me in all seriousness why I didn’t go “back” to Pakistan – a place that might not even have let me in as a tourist while I had an Indian passport. I was indignant, and then heartbroken. At least there was comfort in the thought that this could never happen in the US, my adopted home.

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How a Washington ‘war on science’ could imperil my career

By Sarah Whitlock

PITTSBURGH – I meet science skeptics everywhere.

Buses, planes, supermarkets — all are packed with people eager to share their doubts that GMOs are safe and that climate change is real, even more so when they find out I’m a scientist.

For the most part, I’ve shrugged off their skepticism. I’m in my first year as a graduate student in the biomedical sciences in Pittsburgh. I’ve assumed that people who ignore well-established science wouldn’t be in position to influence public policy and make decisions that could affect us all.

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The Necessity of Secularism, pg 93

“Let’s take stock for a moment. We entered into this discussion of revelation because it is through revelation that we are supposedly made aware of God’s commands. If God is to have any direct role to play with respect to morality, either as moral dictator or moral adviser, we would need to be able to receive instructions from him. Our analysis of revelation has established that God effectively has no way to communicate his commands to us. Even if he were to transmit a command through a prophet, we would have no way of confirming this was a divine command. But the situation is even worse that this. What purported revelations we do have from God are inconsistent.”

–Ron Lindsay, The Necessity of Secularism, pg 93

Richard Dawkins and the Need for a New Science Populism

With the publication of The God Delusion in 2006, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins thrust himself to the forefront of the modern atheist movement. That book has since sold over three million copies and been translated into 30 different languages. The Oxford University professor is the embodiment of the concept of the public intellectual, his activities on behalf of science and against religion including best-selling books, celebrated debates, and numerous appearances as either guest or host on myriad television programs. In his professional capacity, he served as Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford and has since promoted that mission via the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and its popular website. Few professors can boast a guest spot on The Simpsons; there, he appeared as a demon version of himself in Ned Flanders’ dream of hell in the 2013 episode, “Black Eyed, Please”.

For Dawkins, science is not something to be confined to universities and laboratories, particularly when much of the work conducted there is dismissed or demeaned by the anti-science lobbies of the religious community. This concern, articulated in his recent memoir, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), has prompted Dawkins to call for a broadening of the image of a scientist to one that can intersect with more accessible fields. His call for a “third culture” furthers Carl Sagan’s desire to articulate the “poetry” of science, to celebrate its awesome wonders as well as its evidentiary minutia (p.5). Writing and rhetoric need to be promoted, argues Dawkins, and wit needs to be central to both; scientists need to emerge from isolation, he posits, with genres such as science fiction literature integrated into science for a more populist presentation of the profession.

For him, the days of just hunkering down to research while the political forces of religion infiltrate, occupy, and control the culture need to come to an end. In his 2002 TED Talk he calls for a “militant atheism” because “rocking the boat is just the right thing to do”.

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Free Speech and Terrorism – Whatever you do, don’t mention Islam!

By Jeffrey Tayler

Whatever you do, decent progressive people, when terrorism comes up, don’t be “Islamophobic” and mention Islam! If Islam comes up anyway, do draw false equivalencies and hobble yourselves, citing Western imperialism as a moral hamartia disqualifying you from taking critical stances about the faith of a beleaguered minority. Studiously ignore freethinkers in that same minority, and, of course, those facing persecution in Muslim-majority countries. And definitely throw ex-Muslims — especially ex-Muslim women — under the bus. After all, they’re inconvenient, defenseless, relatively few in number, and often so harassed and threatened by their own communities that they surely won’t object. Remember, after all, you have the gunmen, machete-wielders, and honor brigades on your side.

In fact, you know that all too well. Might that be why you refuse to recognize Islamist ideology as the cause of much of the world’s present mayhem?

The above is a preamble to my discussion of the proximate cause of today’s essay — an article published by the Washington Post purporting to provide “guidance” in understanding the current plague of terrorism.

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A Metal Ball the Size of Massachusetts That NASA Wants to Explore

By Kenneth Chang

NASA will be heading to a metal world.

The space agency announced on Wednesday that a spacecraft named Psyche would visit an asteroid named Psyche, one of two new missions it will be launching into the solar system in the 2020s.

“For the purpose of simplicity, and out of our initial excitement, we just named our mission directly after what we’re going to visit,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of the Arizona State University school of earth and space exploration, who will serve as the mission’s principal investigator.

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Morocco bans burqa over security concerns

By Harriet Agerholm

Morocco has banned burqas from being made or sold because of security concerns, the country’s media has reported.

Although the government did not issue a formal announcement of the move, reports have emerged of burqa producers and retailers being issued written warnings telling them to stop making and selling the garments.

The ban is understood to apply only to full-face covering burqas. The majority of Muslim women in the country wear headscarves without the veil, or niqab.

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