ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 480

The Canon Is Sexist, Racist, Colonialist, and Totally Gross. Yes, You Have to Read It Anyway.

By Katy Waldman

Hello, Yale students. It’s me, a random internet writer. I have some unfortunate news for you, but first, let me step back and catch everybody up.

Recently, the requirements for the Yale English major have come under fire. To fulfill the major as it currently stands, a student must take either the two-part “major English poets” sequence—which spans Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, and Eliot—or four equivalent courses on the same dead white men. Inspired in part by articles in the Yale Daily News and Down magazine, Elis have crafted a petition exhorting the college to “decolonize” its English curriculum. Their demands: abolish the major English poets cycle and revise the remaining requirements “to deliberately include literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity.” “It is your responsibility as educators to listen to student voices,” the letter concludes. “We have spoken. We are speaking. Pay attention.”

This is great, and I applaud your commitment to inclusivity and diversity (as well as your command of rhythm and anaphora.) Rethinking the major’s prerequisites to reflect a wider array of perspectives, gifts, and experiences is an awesome idea. Also, you’ve pointed elsewhere to some deplorable statistics: Of 98 English faculty members, only seven identify as nonwhite, and none identify as Hispanic or indigenous. Yale urgently needs to address the homogeny of its professorship, both for students’ sake and its own.

Here’s the thing, though. If you want to become well-versed in English literature, you’re going to have to hold your nose and read a lot of white male poets. Like, a lot. More than eight.

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Flores fossil discovery provides clues to ‘hobbit’ ancestors

By Ian Sample

More than a decade ago, researchers in a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores unearthed the bones of an ancient race of tiny humans. Now, in sandstone laid down by a stream 700,000 years ago, they have found what appear to be the creatures’ ancestors.

The new fossils are not extensive. A partial lower jaw and six teeth, belonging to at least one adult and two children, are all researchers have. But the importance of the remains outweighs their number. They suggest that dwarf humans roamed the island – hunting pygmy elephants and fending off komodo dragons – for more than half a million years.

The first bones belonging to the miniature humans were dug from the floor of the Liang Bua cave on Flores in 2004. The 50,000-year-old fossils pointed to a now-extinct group of humans that stood only a metre tall. Named Homo floresiensis, but swiftly nicknamed the “hobbits”, they made simple stone tools and had desperately small brains, one third the size of ours.

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Dancing the Tree of Life

Dancing the Tree of Life A contemporary dance interpretation of the genetic ancestry we share with all life on earth

Join evolutionary biologist Yan Wong, choreographer Joelle Pappas, and dancers to see how evolution works as they dance you through the tree of life. Made possible through funding from RDFRS.

This project is loosely based on Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong’s 2016 book “The Ancestor’s Tale (2nd edn), published by Weidenfeld &

Nicholson, a comprehensive journey through the evolutionof all life on earth

Cheltennam Literary Festival 11 June 3:30 – 4:15 pm

http://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/li...

Oxford University Museum of Natural History 2 July 4pm

http://eventful.com/oxford_nj/events/...

http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/visiting/what...

Richard Dawkins: Ignoramuses should have no say on our EU membership—and that includes me

by Richard Dawkins

“Are you an Inny or an Outy? A Keeper or a Brexiteer?”

“Well, at first I wanted to leave, to punish David Cameron. But then Boris came out as a leaver and I can’t stand his hair so I’ll be voting to stay in Europe.”

That is approximately the level of discourse which will momentously decide Britain’s future.

My own answer to the question is, “How should I know? I don’t have a degree in economics. Or history. How dare you entrust such an important decision to ignoramuses like me?”

I, and most other people, don’t have the time or the experience to do our due diligence on the highly complex economic and social issues facing our country in, or out of, Europe. That’s why we vote for our Member of Parliament, who is paid a good salary to debate such matters on our behalf, and vote on them. The European Union referendum, like the one on Scottish independence, should never have been called.

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No Escape From Black Holes? Stephen Hawking Points to a Possible Exit

By Dennis Overbye

“A black hole has no hair.”

That mysterious, koan-like statement by the theorist and legendary phrasemaker John Archibald Wheeler of Princeton has stood for half a century as one of the brute pillars of modern physics.

It describes the ability of nature, according to classical gravitational equations, to obliterate most of the attributes and properties of anything that falls into a black hole, playing havoc with science’s ability to predict the future and tearing at our understanding of how the universe works.

Now it seems that statement might be wrong.

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Elite’s AI Created Super Weapons and Started Hunting Players. Skynet is Here

By Julian Benson

A bug in Elite Dangerous caused the game’s AI to create super weapons and start to hunt down the game’s players. Developer Frontier has had to strip out the feature at the heart of the problem, engineers’ weaponry, until the issue is fixed.

It all started after Frontier released the 2.1 Engineers update. The release improved the game’s AI, making the higher ranked NPCs that would fly around Elite’s galaxy more formidable foes. As well as improving their competence in dog fights, the update allowed the AI to use interdiction hardware to pull players travelling at jump speed into normal space. The AI also had access to one of 2.1’s big features: crafting.

These three things combined made the AI a significant threat to players. They were better in fights, could pull unwary jump travellers into a brawl, and they could attack them with upgraded weapons.

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Bangladesh Says It Now Knows Who’s Killing the Bloggers

By Geeta Anand and Julfikar Ali Manik

The young man, inching past a crowded checkpoint near a truck stand in Bangladesh’s capital, caught the attention of an alert police officer.

His backpack, together with his appearance, from the unshaven beard to the long Punjabi tunic over baggy pants, set off the suspicion that he was an Islamist militant. The man was arrested after he was found to be carrying a machete, an unregistered pistol and six bullets.

The discovery of the weapons raised alarms. For the last three years, atheist writers, freethinkers, foreigners, religious minorities, gay rights activists and others have been terrorized and killed in Bangladesh by shadowy figures who have struck with machetes and sped off on motorbikes.

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Secularist Activists Are Being Murdered in Bangladesh: An Ongoing Crisis Causes Many to Flee

By Michael De Dora

If you’ve seen any news headline on Bangladesh in Western media over the past 15 months, odds are strong the headline included the phrase “hacked to death”: Writer hacked to death outside a book fair. Blogger hacked to death on his way to work. LGBT activists hacked to death in their apartment.

These reports illustrate a deep human rights crisis in Bangladesh. Since 2013, violent extremists linked to militant Islamist groups have attacked or killed more than one dozen writers, publishers, and activists. The attacks intensified starting in February 2015, when Avijit Roy, author and founder of Bengali freethought website Mukto-Mona, was murdered as he was leaving a book fair in Dhaka. His wife, author Bonya Ahmed, was severely injured in the attack. Within six months, three more secularist bloggers would be murdered.

In 2016, these attacks have continued and widened in scope. Recent attacks have claimed religious minorities—including Christians, Hindus, Sufis, and Shias—professors, students, LGBT activists, and even the wife of a police investigator.

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The Craziest Demands of College Kids in 2016

By Robby Soave

“We have spoken. We are speaking. Pay attention.”

So said Yale University students to the faculty of the English department, perfectly encapsulating the attitude of the college activist in 2016. Students at campuses across the country are demanding—not asking, but demanding—fundamental changes to their education.

Sometimes, change is good, and these kids deserve to be heard. But the demands of student activists have increasingly taken an Orwellian bent—and, if met, would eviscerate the free speech rights of faculty members, campus visitors, and even other students.

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Want to Be Good at Philosophy? Study Maths and Science

By Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay

If you want to be a good philosopher, don’t rely on intuition or comfort. Study maths and science. They’ll allow you access the best methods we have for knowing the world while teaching you to think clearly and analytically. Mathematics is the philosophical language nature prefers, and science is the only truly effective means we have for connecting our philosophy to reality. Thus maths and science are crucial for good philosophy – for getting things right.

Truth is not always intuitive or comfortable. As a quirk of our base-ten number system, for example, the number 0.999…, the one that is an infinite concatenation of nines, happens to equal 1. That is, 0.999… is 1, and the two expressions, 0.999… and 1, are simply two ways to express the same thing. The proofs of this fact are numerous, easy, and accessible to people without a background in mathematics (the easiest being to add one third, 0.333…, to two thirds, 0.666…, and see what you get). This result isn’t intuitive, and – as anyone who has taught it can attest – not everyone is comfortable with it at first blush.

The sciences, which were largely born out of philosophy, are also replete with nonintuitive, and even uncomfortable truths. The most extreme examples of this are found in quantum mechanics, with interpretations of double slit experiments, quantum entanglement, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle confounding essentially everyone. But even sciences investigating scales more familiar to us, like biological evolution, are nonintuitive and uncomfortable to the point of being rejected by surprising numbers of people despite overwhelming scientific consensus spanning nearly a century and a half.

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