ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 486

3rd Starmus Festival June 27th-July 2nd

The Royal Astronomical Society on Tenerife will host the Starmus Festival for the third time. Due to take place on the island from June 27th – 2nd July 2016, the event will bring together the world’s leading space travellers, stargazers and astrophysicists for an interactive extravaganza, inviting the general public to discover the wonders of the Cosmos through science, art and music.

Under the theme ‘Beyond the Horizon – Tribute to Stephen Hawking’ the 2016 event will take inspiration from the legendary man himself and the notion that nothing is impossible. A comprehensive programme of events will include lectures from key note speakers, round table discussions, exclusive music performances, creative arts exhibitions and visits to local observatories. Richard will be in attendance!

Click here for more information.

This Week in Science (May 15 – 22)

You want to have a reference point of where to find the best recent scientific and technological breakthroughs? Here they are, in the weekly science compilations. Share them with friends and family, online or in real life. Enjoy!

Check out this week’s edition: http://wke.lt/w/s/MYak5

Powered by

Powered by

Why Islamists Are Sex Obsessed

By Maajid Nawaz

Imagine making a televised court appearance broadcast to the whole nation to make a humbling, humiliating apology for … showing your hair. Last Sunday, the Iranian regime carried out just such a “public shaming” of some of the country’s most famous models. 

With a black scarf and black gloves replacing the happy wedding outfits and brightly dyed blond hair to which her Instagram followers had become accustomed, 26-year-old Elham Arab confirmed to two prosecutors that modeling had brought her nothing but “bitter experiences.” She went on to warn aspiring young models that they “can be certain that no man would want to marry a model whose fame has come by losing her honor.” 

Welcome to Operation Spider 2. Yes, Iran’s War Against Hair even has a code name. In a sting led by no less significant a unit than Iran’s cybercrimes division, eight other models were arrested and charged with “promoting western promiscuity.” State prosecutor for cybercrimes Javad Babaei confirmed that his unit was focused on Instagram and is concerned with “sterilizing popular cyberspaces.” Many of the country’s leading models have reportedly suffered this clampdown. They are accused of promoting “immoral and un-Islamic culture and promiscuity.” Another state prosecutor warned the nation’s women, “If you take part in vulgar sessions, we will publicly announce your names.”

Such is the Iranian theocracy’s fascination with female hair, that even elected officials have not been spared by the morality police. Moderate female politician Minoo Khaleghi was barred by the hard-line all-male Guardian Council from taking her seat in parliament, after images of her emerged on social media purportedly showing her without a head scarf. Prosecutor Jafar-Dolatabadi ordered Ms. Khaleghi to explain to judicial officials why the “offending” images of her existed. For her part, Khaleghi had no choice but to prop up the absurd notion that there’s something wrong with showing one’s hair by arguing that the images are “malicious fakes” and proclaiming, “I am a Muslim woman, adhering to the principles of Islam.” 

As moderate political forces continue to gain ground in Iran’s educated city centers, establishment clampdowns against “Western promiscuity” are becoming more visible, and more desperate.

Last year, hardliners warned Iranian women that they would have their cars impounded if they were caught driving without a hijab, or headcovering. And every time a woman has tried to run for president, she has always been turned down by the country’s powerful Guardian Council, which vets all candidates for public office.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Tunisian Islamists Ennahda move to separate politics, religion

By Tarek Amara

Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennahda will separate its political and religious work, its chief said on Friday, moving away from its tradition of political Islam.

Ennahda was the first Islamist party to come to power in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions and it took part in the first government coalition after the overthrow of Tunisia’s autocratic leader Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali.

It won the first post-uprising election by appealing to many Tunisians who saw its Islamist identity as an antidote to the years of corruption and repression under the Ben Ali government in one of the region’s most secular nations.

Free elections, a new constitution and a compromise politics between secular and Islamist parties have helped Tunisia avoid the turmoil seen in several other Arab nations.

“Ennahda has changed from an ideological movement engaged in the struggle for identity, to a protest movement against the authoritarian regime, and now to a national democratic party,” Ghannouchi told supporters at a rally. “We must keep religion far from political struggles.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

‘Is Bangladesh turning fundamentalist?’ – and other questions I no longer wish to answer

By Tahmima Anam

I am a novelist. I look around at the world and I make up stories about people, families, lovers and friends. More often than not, the stories take place in Bangladesh, where I was born. When I close my eyes and think of home, it’s the peaty smell of the monsoon, the harsh light of the equatorial sun, the clashing sounds of the capital city, Dhaka, that come to mind.

But, more often than not, people do not ask me about the peaty smell of the monsoon. The questions are about other things, the bigger things, such as religion, politics, the unaccounted bodies of the dead, the history that makes the present. I do not resent these questions – I understand why people ask them; after all, the headlines tell a particular story, and sometimes, we look for an interlocutor – someone to bridge the gap between here and there.

But I would like to declare a moratorium on such topics, and in preparation, I have listed here all the questions I no longer wish to answer about Bangladesh. Not because they are uninteresting to me, but because I am making space for all the other questions, the questions about falling in love, about the taste of water in the air, about the blue-black feathers and crimson eyes of the koel bird. Next time, ask me about those.

Here are the top questions I no longer want to answer about Bangladesh:

Is Bangladesh turning fundamentalist?

When I was a child growing up outside Bangladesh (my father was a UN diplomat, so we moved every few years), I would always dread the question: “Where are you from?” because as soon as I replied, a doleful, sorry expression would come over whoever I was talking to.

“Are there a lot of floods?” people would ask. Children, rather more blunt, would say: “Is everyone poor?” In graduate school, after I attended a guest lecture by a famous feminist, I was invited to have lunch with the lecturer, a woman I had long admired, and whose books I had devoured as a teenager. When I told her I was from Bangladesh, she said, “Good for you!”, as if I had crawled out of the gutter just moments before our meeting.

But I am nostalgic for those responses now. Today, when the name of my country comes up, people don’t immediately think of poverty – they think of fundamentalism, and the innocent victims of hate crimes. I can’t blame them: in the last three years, targeted, ideologically driven killings have occurred on a terrifyingly regular basis. It began with the murder of atheist bloggers in 2013, and has now spread to include foreign nationals, publishers, a university professor whose only crime was that he loved music, and, last month, the LGBT activists Xulhaz Mannan and Tonoy Majumder. The government’s response has been shameful, a combination of denial, victim-blaming and a complete lack of commitment to catching the killers. A man has just been arrested for Mannan’s death, and we are hoping this signals a change of attitude on the part of the authorities.

I can answer this question in two ways. Yes, there are murderers in Bangladesh who produce hitlists of the progressive, secular, music-loving professors and activists and journalists in the country. One by one, they are picking them off. International terror organisations such as Islamic State and al-Qaida have taken responsibility for these crimes, although the government insists they have been carried out by vengeful members of the opposition.

But I can also point to the strong tradition of diversity and inclusion in Bangladesh. I can describe last month’s celebration of Pohela Boishakh, Bengali new year, which was carried out with great fanfare and not a religious symbol in sight. I can continue to insist that the majority of Bangladeshis have no desire to murder bloggers or university professors or LGBT activists, as if that point needed to be made. I can insist that the story of Bangladesh is not the story of a secular country that has turned to radicalism: it is the story of a country that has, against all odds, survived, even flourished. Where there used to be famine, there is now a rice crop that manages to feed 180 million people. Where once there were devastating statistics on everything from education to public health, there is economic growth, and NGOs such as Grameen Bank and Brac, whose programmes on health, non-formal primary education and microcredit have been replicated all over the world.

There is no denying it: the murderous fringe groups exist. The apathetic government also exists. The secular tradition, which reveres the poet Rabindranath Tagore and has people painting murals on the pavement and celebrating the diversity of our culture in poetry and song, also exists. But it is impossible to write about religion, impossible to openly discuss a wide range of issues – not just because social media makes our opinions visible to a wide audience, but because there is a lack of moral outrage against these crimes, a tacit, understated belief that somehow, somewhere, the atheist blogger and the gay man and the music-loving professor deserved it. And that is the scariest thing of all.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

University of Miami Establishes Chair for Study of Atheism

By Laurie Goodstein

With an increasing number of Americans leaving religion behind, the University of Miami has received a donation in late April from a wealthy atheist to endow what it says is the nation’s first academic chair “for the study of atheism, humanism and secular ethics.”

The chair has been established after years of discussion with a $2.2 million donation from Louis J. Appignani, a retired businessman and former president and chairman of the modeling school Barbizon International, who has given grants to many humanist and secular causes — though this is his largest so far. The university, which has not yet publicly announced the new chair, will appoint a committee of faculty members to conduct a search for a scholar to fill the position.

“I’m trying to eliminate discrimination against atheists,” said Mr. Appignani, who is 83 and lives in Florida. “So this is a step in that direction, to make atheism legitimate.”

Religion departments and professors of religious studies are a standard feature at most colleges and universities, many originally founded by ministers and churches. The study of atheism and secularism is only now starting to emerge as an accepted academic field, scholars say, with its own journal, conferences, course offerings and, now, an endowed chair.

“I think it’s a very bold step of the University of Miami, and I hope there will be others,” said Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and atheist luminary who is the author of “The God Delusion.”

“It’s enormously important to shake off the shackles of religion from the study of morality,” Mr. Dawkins said in a telephone interview from his home in Britain.

The percentage of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has risen rapidly in a short time, to 23 percent of the population in 2014, up from 16 percent in 2007, according to a report by the Pew Research Center. Younger people are even less religious, with 35 percent of millennials saying they identify as atheist, agnostic or with no religion in particular.

Secular Americans are beginning to organize themselves politically. Next month, nonbelievers are headed to Washington to lobby Congress and hold a “Reason Rally” at the Lincoln Memorial to showcase their numbers and promote the separation of church and state.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Evolution and religion: New insight into instructor attitudes in Arizona

By Phys.org

Evolution can be an emotionally charged topic in education, given a wide range of perspectives on it. Two researchers from Arizona State University are taking an in-depth look at how college professors handle it.

In a first-of-its kind study, scientists from ASU School of Life Sciences have found that a majority of professors teaching biology in Arizona universities do not believe that helping students accept the theory of evolution is an instructional goal. In fact, a majority of study participants say their only goal is to help students understand evolution.

According to the study’s authors, this finding was surprising. The exploratory research, published in the scientific journal CBE—Life Sciences Education, looked at how instructors perceived their role in helping students accept evolution. It also looked at the extent to which professors address the perceived conflict students may have between religion and evolution.

“Evolution is one of the key concepts in understanding biology,” said Sara Brownell, senior author of the study and assistant professor with the school. “My own view is, ‘Why would we want to teach evolution, if we don’t want our students to accept it? We teach them that cells have membranes and we expect them to accept that. Why should evolution be any different?’ Yet instructors in our study don’t see it that way. For most of them, evolution is separated—first, in understanding and second, in accepting the concept.” Brownell studies biology education, in particular how undergraduate biology students learn and how instructors can develop more effective ways to teach.

In biology education, evolution and religious beliefs are often “hot-button” topics that play out publicly in the media as an “either—or” scenario, in which one side wins and the other loses. This, according to the ASU researchers, may negatively affect students who have religious beliefs. Previous outside studies show that more than 50 percent of undergraduate biology students identify themselves as religious.

Yet, this study shows most instructors in Arizona neither acknowledge their students’ religious beliefs, nor discuss that there are a variety of beliefs about science. And, the study shows a majority of instructors are hesitant to discuss the topic in class.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

A New Documentary Will Investigate the Social Stigma and Civil Rights Aspects of Atheism

By Hemant Mehta

Filmmaker Micael Langer is working on a documentary exploring how tough it is to be an atheist in this world. That means looking at the stigma against us, as well as how atheists are responding to it all.

His film is called Godless and you’ll want to watch this trailer straight through. Regular readers of this site will recognize a lot of the interviewees (not to mention a lot of the disturbing clips):

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Welcome to the age of Trump

By Jonathan Freedland

It was the night the American media were too demure to call Pussygate. At the time, Donald Trump had won nothing. Twenty-four hours later, he would be celebrating his first victory in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, setting him on the path to face Hillary Clinton in November. But on this frigid Monday night in February, while a blizzard whipped outside, Trump stood before a packed Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester, New Hampshire and prepared to unleash his tongue.

After a rambling monologue that moved from his TV career to the happy, sunny world that would follow his elevation to the White House, Trump came to another of his pet themes: the inadequacies of his rivals. He was attacking the Texas senator Ted Cruz for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the torture technique of waterboarding when a woman in the standing area directly in front of the stage, a kind of Trumpian moshpit, called out, “He’s a pussy!” Trump pretended to look appalled, even walking away from the lectern in faux disgust, before finally, as if under pressure, repeating the insult for the benefit of the cameras that might not have caught it. “She said, ‘He’s a pussy.’ That’s terrible … Ma’am, you’re reprimanded,” he told the heckler, in the manner of a lax teacher going through the disciplinary motions.

And thus Trump secured his dominance over yet another news cycle – as the talkshows, cable TV and his fellow candidates all debated his lapse into vulgarity. As he has been throughout this campaign, starting in July of last year, Trump was the star of the show.

At the same time, he sent a powerful signal. It’s the same one he transmits every time he denounces “political correctness” or violates one of its supposed strictures: mocking the disabled, judging women by their looks, bragging about his fortune, insisting that, when he is in charge, shop workers will go back to saying “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays”. The message every time is the same. It says: I’m outside the system. I don’t obey its rules. I’m different.

Why is this so effective? How have these outbursts – which were at first assumed to be terminal to his candidacy – instead garnered him endless media attention and, more important, millions of votes?

Part of it is sheer showbiz. Ever since he got himself a daily place in the New York tabloids in the 1980s, Trump has known that outrage sells. Long before Australian political consultant Lynton Crosby advised his clients to change the subject by throwing a dead cat on the table, Trump understood that people will always tune in to watch a taboo being broken.

An underestimated part of the formula is humour. Trump is funny. His speech pattern is funny, his use of the word “so” is funny – “It’s gonna be so great” – his flamboyant self-love is funny, his mocking of his enemies is funny.

But most powerful is the thrill Trump generates in the room, and in the audience watching on TV, when he dares reject the rules of the game. For those voters who feel the game is rigged – who feel that the game has turned them into perennial losers – the sight of someone prepared to defy its conventions is exhilarating. It signals the arrival of an outsider, a maverick unbound to the old order and ready to destroy it in favour of something entirely new.

For his followers, Trump’s willingness to trample on the pieties of civic discourse is a sign of his bona fides, even a statement of intent. If he’s prepared to say that about Carly Fiorina’s face, maybe he’ll be prepared to come down hard on an American company about to relocate a manufacturing plant from the US to Mexico. After all, he’s clearly not fettered by the restraints that hold back the rest of those politicians.

On this logic, Trump is the fearless truth-teller. Which may seem an odd accolade to give a man who has been caught out as a serial liar and perhaps the most provenly dishonest candidate to seek, let alone win, the nomination of a major US party. But that is to forget that Trump’s core supporters believe it is the establishment – the media and political elites – that have lied to them for at least two decades. So when those same elites brand Trump a liar, his supporters either don’t believe it, or else they don’t care.

For the next five months, Trump will face off against Hillary Clinton – the ultimate embodiment of the US political elite – in what looks fated to be the ugliest campaign in living memory. But even if he loses, he’s proved that he has deep appeal to a section of the US electorate that has come to regard him as their champion.

Their anger, which Trump has so deftly tapped, goes beyond this or that party, or even the current economic situation. He is channeling a rage at the state of America’s political system. And this fury is not confined to the US. There are versions of it surging across the world, hot with wrath at the status quo. In almost every case, those voicing it claim to be speaking for the people and for true democracy. But in their most extreme forms they threaten to shade into something darker: a revolt against the norms, the agreed boundaries, that make democracy possible.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Eliminate the TB Scourge

By Uvistra Naidoo

It’s 1 a.m. A young mother approaches me during my hospital shift. She asks if her 2-year-old son will survive the night. He has been given a diagnosis of severe tuberculous meningitis, months after her husband was found to have drug-resistant TB. We suspect the child acquired the infection from his father.

The mother was tormented by guilt and worried about her child’s future. The disease usually affects the lungs, but it can also strike the brain, kidneys and other parts of the body. How do I tell the mother that the fluid in her baby’s brain is terribly elevated and we need to drill holes into his skull to release the pressure? How do I tell her that, if he survives, he will probably have some brain damage and that the prospects that he’ll be able to lead an independent life are questionable?

For me, these moments are both a harsh reality and all too personal.

On Feb. 22, 2011, I was declared cured of a severe form of drug-resistant TB, which I contracted during my medical internship. It took three years, one week and one day for me to be released from the shackles of 23 tablets a day with additional intravenous medications.

I saw the fearful looks in my family’s eyes, wondering if I would make it through many a night. The fear was indistinguishable from what I see in the families of TB patients I treat today. Doctors and nurses resuscitated my ailing body, afflicted by almost every side effect known from the toxic drugs used to combat TB: Diffusely bleeding skin lesions. Liver inflammation. Severe limb pain and near immobility. Hearing loss. Depression and thoughts of suicide.

Since being cured, I have been forever changed. Odd as it may sound, I refer to TB as my greatest mentor in my work as a clinician and researcher against this scourge. But as I don my stethoscope each day, I also worry that this disease, caused by bacteria that can be spread through the air, will revisit my body.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.