ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 482

‘Liquid’ Cancer Test Offers Hope for Alternative to Painful Biopsies

By Andrew Pollack

A blood test to detect cancer mutations produced results that generally agree with those of an invasive tumor biopsy, researchers reported, heralding a time when diagnosing cancer and monitoring its progression may become less painful and risky.

The blood tests, known as liquid biopsies, represent one of the hottest trends in oncology. They take advantage of the fact that DNA fragments from tumors can be found in tiny amounts in the blood of patients with cancer.

Researchers hope that such tests can become alternatives to conventional tumor biopsies, in which a piece of the tumor is extracted by needle or by surgery — procedures that can have complications.

The results of the study, the largest to date of a liquid biopsy test, give some reassurance that this might be possible.

“I think this study really demonstrates the veracity of the liquid biopsy approach,” said Philip C. Mack, director of molecular pharmacology at the University of California Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, who is presenting the results here this weekend to the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

The liquid biopsies are not currently used to diagnose cancer but rather to monitor disease progression or to detect genetic mutations in the tumor that could suggest which drug should be used to treat the disease.

Just this week the Food and Drug Administration gave its first approval for such a test, one developed by Roche to detect mutations in a particular gene. Lung cancers with mutations in that gene are vulnerable to treatment with certain drugs, including Roche’s own Tarceva. Many liquid biopsy tests are being sold by other companies under rules that do not require F.D.A. approval.

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A New Origin Story for Dogs

By Ed Yong

Tens of thousands of years ago, before the internet, before the Industrial Revolution, before literature and mathematics, bronze and iron, before the advent of agriculture, early humans formed an unlikely partnership with another animal—the grey wolf. The fates of our two species became braided together. The wolves changed in body and temperament. Their skulls, teeth, and paws shrank. Their ears flopped. They gained a docile disposition, becoming both less frightening and less fearful. They learned to read the complex expressions that ripple across human faces. They turned into dogs.

Today, dogs are such familiar parts of our lives—our reputed best friends and subject of many a meme—that it’s easy to take them, and what they represent, for granted. Dogs were the first domesticated animals, and their barks heralded the Anthropocene. We raised puppies well before we raised kittens or chickens; before we herded cows, goats, pigs, and sheep; before we planted rice, wheat, barley, and corn; before we remade the world.

“Remove domestication from the human species, and there’s probably a couple of million of us on the planet, max,” says archaeologist and geneticist Greger Larson. “Instead, what do we have? Seven billion people, climate change, travel, innovation and everything. Domestication has influenced the entire earth. And dogs were the first.” For most of human history, “we’re not dissimilar to any other wild primate. We’re manipulating our environments, but not on a scale bigger than, say, a herd of African elephants. And then, we go into partnership with this group of wolves. They altered our relationship with the natural world.”

Larson wants to pin down their origins. He wants to know when, where, and how they were domesticated from wolves. But after decades of dogged effort, he and his fellow scientists are still arguing about the answers. They agree that all dogs, from low-slung corgis to towering mastiffs, are the tame descendants of wild ancestral wolves. But everything else is up for grabs.

Some say wolves were domesticated around 10,000 years ago, while others say 30,000. Some claim it happened in Europe, others in the Middle East, or East Asia. Some think early human hunter-gatherers actively tamed and bred wolves. Others say wolves domesticated themselves, by scavenging the carcasses left by human hunters, or loitering around campfires, growing tamer with each generation until they became permanent companions.

Dogs were domesticated so long ago, and have cross-bred so often with wolves and each other, that their genes are like “a completely homogenous bowl of soup,” Larson tells me, in his office at the University of Oxford. “Somebody goes: what ingredients were added, in what proportion and in what order, to make that soup?” He shrugs his shoulders. “The patterns we see could have been created by 17 different narrative scenarios, and we have no way of discriminating between them.”

The only way of doing so is to look into the past. Larson, who is fast-talking, eminently likable, and grounded in both archaeology and genetics, has been gathering fossils and collaborators in an attempt to yank the DNA out of as many dog and wolf fossils as he can. Those sequences will show exactly how the ancient canines relate to each other and to modern pooches. They’re the field’s best hope for getting firm answers to questions that have hounded them for decades.

And already, they have yielded a surprising discovery that could radically reframe the debate around dog domestication, so that the big question is no longer when it happened, or where, but how many times.

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Solving the Mystery of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

By Adrienne LaFrance

The Great Red Spot wasn’t always red.

Early observers said the oval swirl, Jupiter’s most puzzling and distinctive marking, was more of a salmon pink—or even pale violet—before darkening to a brick red in the early 1880s. After that, it seemed on the brink of vanishing for a time, before it swelled and again deepened in hue. Today it is again shrinking, and it’s turning orange.

No one is sure why, but we may soon find out. NASA’s Juno mission is currently on the way to Jupiter, where it will take an unprecedented close-up of the Great Red Spot.

“We’re going to skim within 3,100 miles of Jupiter’s cloud tops—in between the cloud tops and just inside the most intense portion of the radiation belt,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno’s project manager. “Nobody’s ever ventured there before. No spacecraft has ever operated this close to Jupiter.”

People have been captivated by the planet’s spot for centuries. Scientists today know that the Great Red Spot is an anti-cyclonic storm, a hurricane-like high pressure system that’s three times the size of Earth and has been raging for 400 years—maybe longer. (Its nickname seems to date back only to the 1870s, however.) The chaotic storm has churned for so long, astronomers surmise, because it has never made landfall—there is, after all, no land to fall upon.

The fact that the spot is actually a storm swirling in the Jovian atmosphere helps explain one of the characteristics that astronomers a century ago found most troubling. The Great Red Spot didn’t exactly stay put; it seemed detached from the planet’s surface. “No observer understands the cause of this huge rift,” The New York Times reported in 1880. “It may be an opening in the cloud-atmosphere disclosing the more solid matter beneath, and it may be something beyond human ken.”

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Scientists Stand Up To Congressional Attacks

By Phil Plait

To the surprise of no one, Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is continuing his unfounded attack on science, ratcheting it up even higher than before. This time, he’s trying to tie up the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The good news? They’re having none of it.

OK, let’s get you caught up first. Smith is the head of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and is also a 100 percent head-in-the-sand climate change denier, as well as a conspiracy theorist. A list of his nonsensical claims would take a long time to catalog, so here are just a couple: He thinks that scientists are manipulating data to make it look like the Earth is warming, and that the global warming pause is actually a thing, despite huge, overwhelming amounts of evidence that it isn’t.

Sadly, as head of the science committee he has the power to manifest his conspiracy ideations. He has used the threat of “Congressional oversight” to harass scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including subpoenaing its administrator, Kathryn Sullivan, a scientist and ex-NASA astronaut. The minority (Democratic) committee ranking member, Eddie Bernice Johnson, protested this move vocally. The NOAA refused Smith’s ridiculous request. Smith then slipped into some sort of alternate reality, demanding information from the NOAA because he thinks he has whistleblowers who claim NOAA scientists rushed a global warming paper into publication. Johnson wrote yet another letter to Smith protesting his actions. Smith responded by overreaching even more, broadening his McCarthy-esque fishing expedition against the NOAA.

And that brings us to now.

Smith’s been ramping up a new(ish) tactic, trying to flush out what he thinks is a cabal of scientists fighting the fossil fuel industry. On May 18, 2016, he sent a letter to the UCS, an obvious attempt to create a chilling effect on their work to help scientists maintain the freedom they need to do their research. Reading the letter, I don’t think George Orwell could have done any better. He’s claiming that the UCS is trying to “deprive companies, non profit organizations, and scientists of their First Amendment rights and ability to fund and conduct scientific research free from intimidation and threats of prosecution.”

That loud noise you may have just heard was my irony gland exploding.

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Tunisia Started the Arab Revolts, Now It’s Beat Back the Islamist Tide

By Maajid Nawaz

Something great is afoot in Tunisia. Having sparked the consecutive Arab uprisings that began over five years ago across the entire Middle East, the country is now proving itself a pioneer once again in the region.

Last weekend, Tunisia’s once-Islamist Ennahda party officially declared that it will separate its religious activities from its political ones. It now insists on the absolute political neutrality of mosques. In other words Ennahda, Tunisia’s version of the Muslim Brotherhood, just approved an internal reform that acknowledged the primacy of secular democracy over Islamist theocracy.

Amid all the dictatorships and destruction, the turmoil and turbulence, the extremism and extermination, finally some good news from the bitter politics of the Arab world. Such is the dearth of political progress from the wider Middle East today that only a fool would not seek to exploit the opportunity such an pronouncement presents.

Ahead of last weekend’s party congress that formalized this change, Ennahda’s founder and leader, Rached Ghannouchi, who once supported enforcing an interpretation of Islam as law, told the French daily Le Monde that “political Islam” no longer had a place in the Middle East.

“We want religious activity to be completely independent from political activity,” Ghannouchi said. “This is good for politicians because they would no longer be accused of manipulating religion for political means and good for religion because it would not be held hostage to politics… We are leaving political Islam and entering democratic Islam. We are Muslim democrats who are no longer claim to represent political Islam.”

Ghannouchi’s reforms were overwhelmingly adopted by a jubilant conference that saw over 13,000 party activists packing a stadium. An overspill of 2,000 more waited in anticipation outside. Non-religious songs filled the conference hall, young girls without headscarves were given the stage, and Ghannouchi’s secular political rival Nidaa Tunis leader President Beji Caid Essebsi—yes, the man who ousted Ennahda in the last election—was the guest of honor for the evening.

Surprisingly, the party remained highly unified despite the unprecedented reforms: 80.8 percent of delegates voted in favor of separating the political from social work, and 87.7 percent voted in favor of Ghannouchi’s new intellectual vision for the party. Ghannouchi himself easily regained his presidency with a whopping 75 percent of the delegates’ votes.

None of the above should imply that Tunisia’s journey towards secularism will be without its challenges. Many Tunisians— and others who follow events in the region—will remain wary of a resurgent Ennahda. They may believe this to be nothing but a ruse in order to gain power in local elections next year, ahead of the 2019 general election.

But between the Egypt that didn’t even try, and the Turkey that tried and failed, there are reasons peculiar to Tunisia that may just allow this brave experiment to succeed.

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10 facts about atheists

By Michael Lipka

Estimating the number of atheists in the U.S. is complicated. Some adults who describe themselves as atheists also say they believe in God or a universal spirit. At the same time, some people who identify with a religion (e.g., say they are Protestant, Catholic or Jewish) also say they do not believe in God.

But one thing is for sure: Along with the rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans (many of whom believe in God), there has been a corresponding increase in the number of atheists. As nonbelievers and others gather in Washington, D.C., for the “Reason Rally,” here are key facts about atheists and their beliefs:

1) The share of Americans who identify as atheists has roughly doubled in the past several years. Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study found that 3.1% of American adults say they are atheists when asked about their religious identity, up from 1.6% in a similarly large survey in 2007. An additional 4.0% of Americans call themselves agnostics, up from 2.4% in 2007.

2) Atheists, in general, are more likely to be male and younger than the overall population; 68% are men, and the median age of atheist adults in the U.S. is 34 (compared with 46 for all U.S. adults). Atheists also are more likely to be white (78% are Caucasian vs. 66% for the general public) and highly educated: About four-in-ten atheists (43%) have a college degree, compared with 27% of the general public.

3) Self-identified atheists tend to be aligned with the Democratic Party and with political liberalism. About two-thirds of atheists (69%) identify as Democrats (or lean in that direction), and a majority (56%) call themselves political liberals (compared with just one-in-ten who say they are conservatives). Atheists overwhelmingly favor same-sex marriage (92%) and legal abortion (87%). In addition, three-quarters (74%) say that government aid to the poor does more good than harm.

4) Although the literal definition of “atheist” is “a person who believes that God does not exist,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, 8% of those who call themselves atheists also say they believe in God or a universal spirit. Indeed, 2% say they are “absolutely certain” about the existence of God or a universal spirit. Alternatively, there are many people who fit the dictionary definition of “atheist” but do not call themselves atheists. About three times as many Americans say they do not believe in God or a universal spirit (9%) as say they are atheists (3%).

5) Unsurprisingly, more than nine-in-ten self-identified atheists say religion is not too or not at all important in their lives, and nearly all (97%) say they seldom or never pray. At the same time, many do not see a contradiction between atheism and pondering their place in the world. Three-in-ten (31%) say they feel a deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being at least weekly. A similar share (35%) often thinks about the meaning and purpose of life. And roughly half of all atheists (54%) frequently feel a deep sense of wonder about the universe, up from 37% in 2007. In fact, atheists are more likely than U.S. Christians to say they often feel a sense of wonder about the universe (54% vs. 45%).

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Boy Scouts, Unitarians, and Atheists

By Herb Silverman

I was pleased when I heard last year that the President of the Boy Scouts of America, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, called for an end to the ban on gay leaders. But my brief satisfaction turned to disappointment when I learned his reason: Otherwise courts might force the BSA to radically modify its positions. Gates also wanted the BSA to give church sponsors of scout troops the option to reject gay leaders.

Gates further said he worried that a court order might overturn the BSA policy of banning atheist scouts and troop leaders. He wanted the BSA to maintain its right to promote religious bigotry, while he was willing to, sort of, give in on the anti-gay policy.

The change happened just as Gates proposed. Atheists and agnostics still need not apply. Gates cited membership decline as another reason to change the policy regarding gay boys and adults. Perhaps he did not realize that religiously unaffiliated young people are rapidly increasing across all demographic lines—another reason to welcome atheists and agnostics.

On May 26, Gates ended his BSA term and was replaced by AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, who has not said if he will propose any policy changes.

Not all churches had supported BSA policies. The national Unitarian Universalist Association took a principled stand and disaffiliated from the BSA in 1998 because of its discrimination against gays and atheists. Unfortunately, the UUA recently decided to affiliate again because the BSA ended its ban on gay leaders, even though it continues to ban atheists. This decision is particularly perplexing because the tolerant Unitarian Church counts many atheists and agnostics among its members throughout the country.

My wife and I are atheists and token members of our local Unitarian Church in Charleston, South Carolina. We have long supported and appreciated this church because of its commitment to social justice in our conservative community, and its welcoming inclusion of atheists and humanists. When we learned the dismaying news that the national UUA has re-affiliated with the Boy Scouts, we told our local minister that we wouldn’t be making our annual financial contribution while the situation continues. We don’t blame our local church, but we hope that its minister will vocally support the many atheists and humanists in his congregation and oppose the UUA decision.

Probably the group most upset with the UUA/BSA affiliation is the nontheistic UU Humanists, which is also a member of the Secular Coalition for America. I’m on the board of directors of the American Humanist Association, which held its annual conference in Chicago from May 26-29. The UU Humanists attending the conference arranged for a Sunday breakfast and lively discussion there with UUA President Peter Morales and some AHA members. I admire Rev. Morales for agreeing to talk with a group he knew would disagree strongly with the recent Boy Scouts decision.

Morales told participants that the UUA cherishes and respects the humanists, agnostics, and atheists among its members, and that he feels the best way to change BSA policy is from the inside rather than from the outside.

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Question of the Week- 6/1/2016

Whether you’ll be at the Reason Rally in person, or keeping up online, what speaker or event at the Rally are you most excited about, and why?

Our favorite answer (non repeat winners only) receives a copy of “A Brief Candle in the Dark” by Richard Dawkins!

And please don’t forget to send in your submissions for Question of the Week! You can suggest a question by emailing us at QotW@richarddawkins.net. Please remember this is for “Question of the Week” only, and all other comments should go to their respective threads under the Question of the Week itself. Thank you!

Pakistani media mocks clerics who say men can ‘lightly beat’ wives

By Agence France-Presse

Pakistani media and activists poured scorn Friday on a suggestion from an Islamic religious body that men should be allowed to “lightly beat” their wives, made in their draft of a women’s protection bill.

The Council of Islamic Ideology released a draft of the bill on Thursday, their response to progressive legislation giving women greater rights and protection in the province of Punjab.

Local media quoted the draft as saying: “A husband should be allowed to lightly beat his wife if she defies his commands and refuses to dress up as per his desires; turns down demand of intercourse without any religious excuse or does not take bath after intercourse or menstrual periods.”

The proposal was met with a wave of mockery in the media and online Friday.

The country’s biggest and most influential newspaper, the English-language daily Dawn, published a satirical article with a list of things people could beat other than their wives — including eggs, the bottom of ketchup bottles, and the Michael Jackson hit Beat It.

The article was a rare example of the media mocking those claiming to speak in the name of religion in conservative Muslim Pakistan.

The draft was also slammed by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which condemned its recommendations as “ridiculous” and called for the council of “zealots” to be disbanded.

“It is difficult to comprehend why anyone in his right mind would think that any further encouragement or justification is needed to invite violence upon women in Pakistan,” the HRCP stated.

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Ray Comfort’s Plan to Evangelize to Atheists at the Reason Rally Has Been Thwarted

By Hemant Mehta

I know all of you were very excited to see Ray Comfort at the upcoming Reason Rally. He announced last month that he would be training hundreds of Christians to preach at (and hopefully convert) atheists, adding that he would give away 5,000 copies of his new book and $25,000 worth of Subway gift cards.

Sad news: It won’t be happening anymore. At least not with the 1,000+ Christians who had already registered for the event.

“To the D.C. police,” Comfort reported, “that constituted a protest and therefore we needed a permit to gather. We would have to stay at the other end of the National Mall, and they said that if we persisted to approach atheists to speak with them we would be arrested.”

The best-selling author then decided to cancel the outreach event, though they would still be filming at the Washington Monument. He added, “Our crew is only 17 people, so we don’t need a permit if we go there as individuals. The Reason Rally is free and open to the public, so if any other groups of individuals show up on their own initiative they won’t need a permit either or be arrested if they approach atheists.”

The idea here is that atheists have the space reserved. So if Christians want to oppose the event as an organized group, the police can require them to follow certain rules.

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