ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 437

A Desert Lizard That Drinks From Sand

By Ed Yong

It’s early morning in the Australian desert, and a squat, palm-sized lizard called the thorny devil is having a drink. It hasn’t rained for weeks, and there’s no water in sight. The lizard’s body is still and its head is raised. And yet, through almost no effort, it is quenching its thirst.Its secret lies in its extraordinary skin. Between the intimidating and ostentatious spikes, there’s a subtle network of microscopic grooves. These can yank water out of moist sand, drawing the fluid up against the pull of gravity, across the lizard’s body, and into its waiting mouth. All it needs to do is to stand in the right spot and without flexing a muscle, it can drink with its skin.

Though long known to Aboriginal Australians, the lizard was first described by Western zoologists in 1841. Its fearsome appearance earned it sinister names—the thorny devil, or Moloch horridus. In truth, the creature eats only ants, and otherwise moves slowly and placidly. “They’re like Swiss people—very relaxed,” says Philippe Comanns, from RWTH Aachen University.

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The Different Stakes of Male and Female Birth Control

By Julie Beck

In the past couple decades, scientists have been slowly moving toward developing birth control for men. A recent clinical trial of an injectable hormone contraceptive for men showed super promising results: It was 96 percent effective at preventing pregnancy, which it did by lowering sperm counts. Unfortunately, the trial was discontinued early by an independent committee, which determined that the side effects were such that “the risks to the study participants outweighed the potential benefits.”

The side effects in question? “Mood changes, depression, pain at the injection site, and increased libido.”

Hm. Hmmmmmmmm. Hm. Let’s review some of the possible side effects of currently available birth-control options for women, shall we? Here’s just a sampling.

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The Need to Validate Vocational Interests

By Ashley Lamb-Sinclair

At a recent conference, I listened to a university president boast about a program she had developed in partnership with several local high schools. She told the story of one teenager who lived in a rural area and worked full time on his family’s farm in addition to attending high school. The university president explained that the young man had little promise for attending college because of his circumstances. But through the dual-credit program, he was able to gain college credit while still in high school, which gave him the confidence to seek an associate’s degree in agriculture and return home to work on his family farm. I listened as she proudly told this young man’s story and the audience cheered for both of them, and all I could think was: What an extraordinary waste of time.

It may be shocking for a veteran high-school teacher to feel that a student gaining any kind of degree is a waste of time, but considering that 44 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed, and many employers such as Deloitte are now completely ditching college degrees as a requirement altogether, it is becoming increasingly difficult to sell the same old story—working hard to make good grades to go to college to get a good job—to millennials. When I think of the young agriculture student in the aforementioned anecdote, my heart hurts for him because I believe the system misled him. I wonder if he acquired any college debt during this journey, why he didn’t feel the need to continue on to attain a bachelor’s degree, and why it was necessary for a young man who grew up on a family farm to learn about agriculture miles away in a community-college classroom. I would feel a bit better if he wanted to be a teacher, or photographer, or engineer, and that’s why he went to college, but he didn’t. He went to learn something he probably already knew, but chances are no one had ever validated his expertise, and no one had ever found a way for his secondary education to be integrated into the work he loved.

Obviously, the counterargument here is the largely touted maxim that people with college degrees make more money than those without them, which is statistically true. But this idea is misleading: Crushing student-loan debt increases yearly and ethnicity, class, and gender factor into salary levels, regardless of education. And low-income kids can become “targets for diploma mills that load them up with debt, but not a lot of prospects.” Additionally, the average American worker will spend 90,000 to 125,000 hours working during the course of a lifetime, as Bill Burnett and Dave Evans write in Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, so the greatest portion of a person’s life is often spent at work. Although it is easy to proclaim to students coming of age that “you will make more money if you get a degree,” it is much more difficult to shed light on the intricacies of such a claim. I believe students should hear the whole story and more than one traditional path should be laid out before them.

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How Ancient Humans Reached Remote South Pacific Islands

By Nicholas St. Fleur

Some 3,400 years ago, before the Iron Age or the rise of Ancient Greece, people on the Solomon Islands left their white sandy shores for the cerulean seas of the South Pacific. Their adventures brought humanity to the most remote reaches of Oceania, like the tropical islands of Hawaii, Tonga and Fiji.

“The first ones were traveling into the unknown,” said Alvaro Montenegro, a geographer and climatologist from Ohio State University. “They would leave the coast, and it would disappear behind them.”

Archaeological evidence suggests that after setting sail from the Solomon Islands, people crossed more than 2,000 miles of open ocean to colonize islands like Tonga and Samoa. But after 300 years of island hopping, they halted their expansion for 2,000 years more before continuing — a period known as the Long Pause that represents an intriguing puzzle for researchers of the cultures of the South Pacific.

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Attempting to learn German

by Richard Dawkins

I like to think of my life as governed by rational decisions, but I have to admit that my attempt to learn German in my quixotic seventies is governed more by emotion—an emotion that might strike some as positively irrational. I don’t specifically need German for my life or my work. No, my motive is almost akin to penance: a personal atonement, however futile, for the pathos-ridden arrogance of my nation. Brexit has made me ashamed to be English. I’m ashamed of the England of Farage and his xenophobic yobs—and of Cameron whose cowardly opportunism gave them their head. I’m ashamed to be English, not British: I’d be proud to be Scottish or Irish today.

Brexit is the obvious recent manifestation of both the arrogance of the English and its ignominious unjustifiability, but it has shown itself for longer in our attitude to the learning of languages. Insofar as we teach languages at school, we treat them like Latin, with no expectation that, having mastered gerunds and the subjunctive, there’s any need to end up actually having a conversation with Johnny Foreigner.

As I remarked in a previous contribution to Prospect, a trip to Amsterdam or Stockholm or even—as I recently discovered, Budapest or Prague—should fill us English monoglots with shame. I suggested that a step in the right direction would be to persude our broacast news media to abolish voice-over translations and replace them with subtitles. In the same vein, I am now watching DVDs of German films. Films like the epic saga Heimat or the deeply moving Das Leben der Anderen are no hardship, but highly enjoyable. I still need the English subtitles, but while reading them I’m making a strenuous effort to pick out as many German words as I can. The idea is to let the language wash through me, to tune my ear to it so that I learn in what’s left, at my age, of the effortless facility of the child brain.

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When It Comes to Success, Age Really Is Just a Number

By Benedict Carey

The question hangs over the career of every ambitious soul: Is there still time to make a mark?

Charles Darwin was 29 when he came up with his theory of natural selection. Einstein had his annus mirabilis at age 26; Marie Curie made big discoveries about radiation in her late 20s. Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in E flat: 8 years old.

For years, scientists who study achievement have noted that in many fields the most electrifying work comes earlier in life rather than later. After all, younger people can devote their life to a project in a way that more senior people cannot, and young stars attract support, mentors and prestigious appointments.

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How Ebola Adapted to Us

By Ed Yong

In December 2013, in a small village in Guinea, the Ebola virus left its traditional host—probably a bat—and infected a young boy. That leap triggered what became the largest Ebola outbreak in history. At first, the virus stayed within Guinea’s borders and, as in every previous epidemic, affected just a few hundred people. But in the spring of 2014, that gentle simmer came to a disastrous boil. Cases skyrocketed as the virus spread to Sierra Leone, Liberia, and other countries. By the time it was finally brought to heel in 2016, more than 28,000 people had been infected and 11,000 of them were dead.

The unprecedented scale of the outbreak gave the virus ample opportunities to adapt to its new human hosts—and it took advantage of them. Two independent teams of scientists have shown that in early 2014, Ebola virus picked up a mutation called A82V, which made it worse at infecting bat cells, but better at infecting human ones. And once viruses with that mutation appeared, they quickly took over. They were the ones that spread beyond Guinea, the ones responsible for the vast majority of cases, the ones that landed in a Texan emergency room.

Both groups emphasize that the mutation may not have caused the virus’s exponential spread. “Its appearance coincided with the virus taking off, but others factors were probably more important, like the movement of infected people into urban areas and lack of proper burials,” says Jonathan Ball from the University of Nottingham, who led one of the teams. “If we hadn’t seen that mutation, there would probably still have been a big outbreak.”

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What Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ and Other Earworm Songs Have in Common

By Joanna Klein

You should stop reading this now. No really, just don’t. You’re still reading. O.K., you asked for it:

“Rah rah ah-ah-ah!/ Ro mah ro-mah-mah!/ Gaga ooh-la-la!”

There’s your “Bad Romance.” Like the “ugly” “disease” Lady Gaga sings about wanting in this song, an earworm has likely just lodged itself deep inside the auditory cortex of your brain. There it will sit, sucking up your precious brain energy, for the next hour, day, month or even a whole year. ( I had Hall and Oates’ “Maneater” in my head for most of 2005.)

You are not alone.

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The Cognitive Benefits of Being a Man-Child

By Jessa Gamble

In a time when college graduates return to live under their parents’ roofs and top careers require years of internships and graduate degrees, the age of adulthood is receding, practically into the 30s. Adolescence, loosely defined as the period between puberty and financial independence, now lasts about 15 years, twice as long as it did in the 1950s.

Part of this is due to the declining age of puberty in both males and females, but most of that extension appears in the 20s, when an increasing number of young people are still dependent on their parents. There is some concern that all of this dependence could lead to a lasting immaturity and failure to take on responsibility.

But according to developmental researchers, there is one lasting gift that extended adolescence can bestow, and it resides in the brain. “Neurobiological capital” is built through a protracted period of learning capacity in the brain, and it is a privilege that comes to those lucky enough to enjoy intellectually stimulating environments in late adolescence. Far from a contributor to emotional immaturity, the trend toward an adolescence that extends into the mid-20s is an opportunity to create a lifelong brain-based advantage.

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The Average American Melts 645 Square Feet of Arctic Ice Every Year

By Robinson Meyer

Who is to blame for climate change?

Of course, we all are. If you’ve lived on Earth for even a couple of years, then greenhouse gases—emitted by you or for your benefit—have in some small part helped cause warming temperatures, rising sea levels, and mass extinctions.

It’s that “in some small part” that’s the rub, though. Global warming is a global phenomenon, with millions of victims and billions of culprits. At that kind of scale, how much of that melting ice cap are you responsible for, really?

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