ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 422

Belief in conspiracies largely depends on political identity

By Kathy Frankovic

Sometimes it seems that Americans will believe anything.  And what we know as true or not true these days can depend on our political point of view.  But there are many of us who are willing to give at least some credence to the possibility that a claim might be true.

At least that seems to be the case in the latest Economist/YouGov Poll.  One of the most notorious internet rumors of the 2016 presidential campaign, that there was a pedophile ring in the Clinton campaign, with code words embedded in the hacked emails of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, is seen as “probably” or “definitely” true by more than a third of American adults.  The poll was conducted after an armed North Carolina man tried to “self-investigate” the claim by going to the District of Columbia pizza restaurant that was alleged to be the center of the ring earlier this month and found nothing.  But even afterwards only 29% are sure the allegation is “definitely” not true.

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Can a federal government scientist in California convince Trump that climate change is real?

By Chris Megerian

In the two decades since Ben Santer helped write a landmark international report linking global warming and human activity, he’s been criticized by politicians, accused of falsifying his data and rewarded with a dead rat on his doorstep.

He describes it as “background noise,” and he tries to tune it out as he presses forward with his research from a dim office the size of a walk-in closet at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco. But the presidential election could crank up the volume for Santer and his colleagues: As federal government scientists, their new boss will be President-elect Donald Trump, who once described global warming as a hoax.

“Imagine, if you will, that you devoted your entire career to doing one thing. Doing it as well as you possibly can,” Santer said. “And someone comes along and says everything you’ve done is worthless.”

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Coming Out Atheist, pg 43

“What’s more, different ways of coming out don’t just have personal impacts in people’s lives. They have political implications as well. And those will vary from person to person. Some people want their coming out to make a gentler, blending-in, “we’re just like everyone else” statement. Others want their coming out to be more radical, more confrontational, less about merging with the status quo and more about challenging it. As Alex Gabriel of the Godlessness in Theory blog said to me, “Less obvious ways to come out, including as an atheist, are worth considering. How we choose to express our non-belief affects how public life imagines us. Soap operas and primetime dramas show LGBT comings-out predominantly as tearful, fragile confessions. Many queer people’s experience is different; likewise, there are many ways to be an atheist and equally many ways to say you are.”

–Greta Christina, Coming Out Atheist , pg 43

Discuss!

Dawkins’s answer to the Edge question: the genome as palimpsest

By Jerry Coyne

As I posted yesterday, a lot of contributors gave their answers to the 2017 annual Edge Question, “What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known.” (See all responses here.) In the last 24 hours Richard Dawkins has weighed in with his answer, “The genetic book of the dead,” which involves reverse-engineering our DNA sequences to reconstruct the ancestral environments of living species. While Dawkins has discussed this before, most notably in The Ancestor’s Tale, not everyone’s read that book. It’s worth considering that an organism’s genome may be a palimpsest of its ancestry, which in turn reflects in part the environments to which those ancestors are adapted.

You can read Richard’s piece for yourself; I’ll give one brief excerpt:

Given a key, you can reconstruct the lock that it fits. Given an animal, you should be able to reconstruct the environments in which its ancestors survived. A knowledgeable zoologist, handed a previously unknown animal, can reconstruct some of the locks that its keys are equipped to open. Many of these are obvious. Webbed feet indicate an aquatic way of life. Camouflaged animals literally carry on their backs a picture of the environments in which their ancestors evaded predation.

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ISIS Claims Responsibility for Istanbul Nightclub Attack

By Tim Argano

ISTANBUL — The Islamic State issued a rare claim of responsibility on Monday for the New Year’s Day attack on an Istanbul nightclub that killed at least 39 people, describing the gunman who carried out the assault — and who has not been identified or captured — as “a hero soldier of the caliphate.”

The authorities are still searching for the gunman, who killed a police officer guarding the club before going on a shooting rampage with a rapid-fire rifle at the Reina nightclub, leaving 39 dead, but the state news media reported that eight suspects had been detained in connection with the attack.

The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported on Monday that the gunman might be from Kyrgyzstan or elsewhere in Central Asia. The Russian news agency Interfax quoted Aiymkan Kulukeyeva, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry in Kyrgyzstan, as saying, “According to preliminary information, this information is doubtful, but we are checking all the same.”

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Weak Federal Powers Could Limit Trump’s Climate-Policy Rollback

By Justin Gillis

With Donald J. Trump about to take control of the White House, it would seem a dark time for the renewable energy industry. After all, Mr. Trump has mocked the science of global warming as a Chinese hoax, threatened to kill a global deal on climate change and promised to restore the coal industry to its former glory.

So consider what happened in the middle of December, after investors had had a month to absorb the implications of Mr. Trump’s victory. The federal government opened bidding on a tract of the ocean floor off New York State as a potential site for a huge wind farm.

Up, up and away soared the offers — interest from the bidders was so fevered that the auction went through 33 rounds and spilled over to a second day. In the end, the winning bidder offered the federal Treasury $42 million, more than twice what the government got in August for oil leases — oil leases — in the Gulf of Mexico.

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China Says It Will Shut Down Its Ivory Trade in 2017

By Christopher Joyce

Almost a million elephants roamed Africa 25 years ago. Assessments of their population now vary, but suggest there are fewer than half that many. The main reason for the decline is ivory. Despite a 1989 ban on ivory trade, poachers continue to kill elephants for their tusks.

Now China, the destination for most of that ivory, has announced it will shut down its domestic ivory market.

Wildlife experts had thought that the international ban on ivory trade would slow or even stop the killing of elephants for their tusks. It didn’t…in fact the killing got worse. That’s mostly because the ban didn’t cover OLDER ivory, that is, ivory taken from elephants BEFORE the 1989 ban. So people are still killing elephants but passing off their ivory as old, and therefore legal to trade.

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You’re an Adult. Your Brain, Not So Much.

By Carl Zimmer

Leah H. Somerville, a Harvard neuroscientist, sometimes finds herself in front of an audience of judges. They come to hear her speak about how the brain develops.

It’s a subject on which many legal questions depend. How old does someone have to be to be sentenced to death? When should someone get to vote? Can an 18-year-old give informed consent?

Scientists like Dr. Somerville have learned a great deal in recent years. But the complex picture that’s emerging lacks the bright lines that policy makers would like.

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The CDC’s New Quarantine Rule Could Violate Civil Liberties

By Ed Yong

On August 15th, with little fanfare, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took steps to improve its ability to deal with infectious outbreaks. The agency proposed a new rule that would expand its powers to screen, test, and quarantine people traveling into or within the United States, in the event of a crisis like the historic Ebola outbreak of 2014.

On the face of it, this sounds like a good thing. The threat of infectious diseases is omnipresent and growing. Familiar threats like flu, Ebola, or measles continually rear their heads, often in new guises, while completely new dangers like MERS or SARS can take the world by surprise. When that happens, the CDC must act quickly and decisively—and its new powers will purportedly help it to do so.

But some epidemiologists, lawyers, and health organizations say that the rule, in its current form poses a serious threat to civil liberties, allowing authorities to detain and examine people with little heed to due process and informed consent.

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5 Numbers That Explain Education in 2016

By Emily Deruly

As a writer, I generally favor words over numbers. But sometimes a good number is worth a thousand words. Or something like that. In that spirit, here are five numbers that help explain the state of education in 2016 (with a smattering of words thrown in for good measure).

83

This is the percentage of American high-schoolers who graduated on time during the 2014-15 school year (the most recent year for which there is data available). While 83 percent is a record-high overall graduation rate, the rates for some groups of students, such as blacks and Latinos, are much lower. Although persistent gaps remain, schools and nonprofits are finding creative ways to serve what is an increasingly diverse student body.

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