ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 505
April 23, 2016
Huge coral reef discovered at Amazon river mouth
By John Vidal
A huge 3,600 sq mile (9,300 sq km) coral reef system has been found below the muddy waters off the mouth of the river Amazon, astonishing scientists, governments and oil companies who have started to explore on top of it.
The existence of the 600-mile long reef, which ranges from about 30-120m deep and stretches from French Guiana to Brazil’s Maranhão state, was not suspected because many of the world’s great rivers produce major gaps in reef systems where no corals grow.
In addition, there was little previous evidence because corals mostly thrive in clear, sunlit, salt water, and the equatorial waters near the mouth of the Amazon are some of the muddiest in the world, with vast quantities of sediment washed thousands of miles down the river and swept hundreds of miles out to sea.
But the reef appears to be thriving below the freshwater “plume”, or outflow, of the Amazon. Compared to many other reefs, the scientists say in a paper in Science Advances on Friday, it is is relatively “impoverished”. Nevertheless, they found over 60 species of sponges, 73 species of fish, spiny lobsters, stars and much other reef life.
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Dinosaurs in decline long before asteroid catastrophe, study reveals
By Nicola Davis
Dinosaurs were in decline long before the asteroid struck that spelt their doom, new research suggests.
Dinosaurs were on the up and up from the late Triassic about 220m years ago, with new species arising faster than others went extinct. But the study reveals their fortunes had begun to change long before the catastrophic six-mile-wide asteroid hit what is now the Gulf of Mexico, 66m years ago.
The research, the authors believe, could resolve a longstanding controversy among palaeontologists.
“One of the things that has been long debated about dinosaur evolution is whether they were reigning strong right up until the time of the meteorite impact, or whether there was a slow, gradual decrease in [the emergence of new species] or an increase in extinction before that time,” said Chris Venditti, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading and an author of the paper.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Bristol and the University of Reading describe how they carried out a new kind of statistical analysis based on large “family trees” of dinosaurs, allowing them to explore the rise and fall of species as time marched on. The study looked at the three major groups of dinosaur: the ornithischians (beaked herbivores such as Stegosaurus), theropods (flesh-eating beasts such as Tyrannosaurus rex) and sauropods (long-necked plant-eaters that included Diplodocus).
The results showed that while dinosaurs flourished from about 220m years ago, with species arising faster than they went extinct, about 140m years ago their success started to stall. Eventually, about 90m years ago, 24m years before the asteroid hit, the dinosaurs entered a long-term decline, with species going extinct faster than new ones emerged.
That, the authors reveal, could have left the dinosaurs more vulnerable to extinction when the six-mile-wide disaster struck. “Because diversity was lacking, because species were going extinct and not being replaced, it might have made them more susceptible,” said Venditti.
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Free Omid Kokabee, another Iranian prisoner of conscience
By Herbert L. Berk
As the Iran nuclear deal has marched forward from negotiations to agreement to implementation, a University of Texas graduate student in physics named Omid Kokabee has sat in Tehran’s Evin Prison, where he has languished for nearly five years for the crime of refusing to engage in scientific research that he deems harmful to humanity.
As an engineering physics student in Iran, Kokabee worked in the rapidly expanding field of laser technology. After obtaining his bachelor’s degree and several years of industrial laboratory experience, he was accepted into the physics graduate program at the University of Texas but was unable to attend due to visa issues. Instead, he enrolled in the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona, under the tutelage of Majid Ebrahim-Zadeh, an Iranian scientist working on laser development and the president of Radiantis, a company manufacturing state-of-the-art infrared lasers. One possible application of this technology is the enrichment of uranium to produce the high-grade fissile material necessary for nuclear reactors and weapons.
In 2010, after completing his master’s degree in Barcelona, Kokabee sought to pursue his doctorate at the University of Texas, and this time he was able to enter the United States. During winter break in December 2010, he traveled to Iran to visit his ailing mother. While there, government scientists offered him a position working on security and military research, something Kokabee had repeatedly turned down before. He again refused. Then, while attempting to return to Texas in January 2011, he was detained by Iranian authorities, who offered him freedom from incarceration if he agreed to work for the government. Once again, he said no. Subsequently, Kokabee was convicted in the Islamic Revolutionary Court of collaborating with an enemy of Iran and sentenced to a 10-year prison term.
In a letter from prison, Kokabee said that if he had accepted the government position, he would forever be a hostage because of the military secrets he would acquire. This is a remarkable insight from an individual who at the time was not yet 30. “Is it a sin that I don’t want, under any circumstances, to get involved in security and military activities?” Kokabee asked.
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Free Speech and Islam — In Defense of Sam Harris
By Jeffrey Tayler
“It’s gross! It’s racist!” exclaimed Ben Affleck on Bill Maher’s Real Time in October 2014, interrupting the neuroscientist “New Atheist” Sam Harris. Harris had been carefully explaining the linguistic bait-and-switch inherent in the word “Islamophobia” as “intellectually ridiculous,” in that “every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry toward Muslims as people.” The result: progressives duped by the word shy away from criticizing the ideology of Islam, the tenets of which (including second-class status for women and intolerance toward sexual minorities) would, in any other context, surely elicit their condemnation.
Unwittingly, Affleck had confirmed Harris’ point, conflating religion with race. In doing so, the actor was espousing a position that can lead to a de facto racist conclusion. If you discount Islamic doctrine as the motivation for domestic violence and intolerance of sexual minorities in the Muslim world, you’re left with at least one implicitly bigoted assumption: the people of the region must then be congenitally inclined to behave as they do.
There was a disturbing irony in Affleck’s outburst. Few public intellectuals have done as thorough a job as Harris at pointing out the fallacies and dangers of the supernatural dogmas of religion, for which far too many are willing to kill and die these days. An avowed liberal (who plans to vote for Hillary) Harris is the author of, among many books, the groundbreaking The End of Faith. Yet Affleck seemed predisposed to regard him with hostility, possibly because Harris, at least for some on the Left, has acquired a toxic reputation — one stemming from what amounts to a campaign of defamation involving, by all appearances, a willful misrepresentation of his work, plus no small measure of slipshod “identity politics” thinking.
Harris has been lambasted as, among other things, a “genocidal fascist maniac” advocating “scientific racism,” militarism, and the murder of innocents for their beliefs, as well as racial profiling at airports, a nuclear first strike on the Middle East, plus, of course, Islamophobia and a failure to understand the faiths he argues against. (This is just a partial list.) The result? Harris has had to take measures to ensure his personal security, with negative ramifications in almost every area of his life. “I can say that much of what I do,” he told me in a recent email exchange, “both personally and professionally, is now done under a shadow of defamatory lies.”
The attacks against Harris have emanated predominantly from a prominent yet persistent handful of supposed progressives (and their peons), among whom are the religion scholar and media personality Reza Aslan, and the journalists from The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald (famed for transmitting Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations to the world) and Murtaza Hussain. Lately, with Harris’ publication of Islam and the Future of Tolerance, they have even taken aim at his coauthor and friend, the onetime Islamist turned reformer Maajid Nawaz.
Nonetheless, Harris’ own words, conveyed through his books, podcasts, blog posts, interviews, and Twitter feed, bely the attacks, which can be as mean-spirited as they are groundless and muddled. They have tainted the debates we need to conduct about Islam and terrorism in particular, but, more generally, the danger religious fundamentalism poses to our constitutionally secular republic and to the largely post-Christian countries of Western Europe now confronting huge inflows of Muslim migrants. The sum effect is to leave us all less well-off, less safe. And certainly more confused.
The charge of insufficient religious expertise is the least substantial, but nonetheless worth dispensing with, given that it could potentially be leveled at any nonbeliever disagreeing with faith’s precepts. In a 2007 debate, for instance, Reza Aslan accused Harris of having a “profoundly unsophisticated” view of religion, and of relying on Fox News as his “research tools” – an assertion that can be disproved by just opening The End of Faith, a meticulously compiled treatise with 237 pages of text (in the paperback edition) followed by sixty-one pages of footnotes and twenty-eight pages of bibliography listing some six hundred sources. In this opus, Harris walks us through the many follies of faith (mostly Christianity and Islam), but one key message transpires: belief guides behavior. A self-evident proposition no reasonable person would argue with.
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The World’s Newest Major Religion: No Religion
By Gabe Bullard
You don’t usually think of churches as going out of business, but it happens. In March, driven by parishioner deaths and lack of interest, the U.K. Mennonites held their last collective service.
It might seem easy to predict that plain-dressing Anabaptists—who follow a faith related to the Amish—would become irrelevant in the age of smartphones, but this is part of a larger trend. Around the world, when asked about their feelings on religion, more and more people are responding with a meh.
The religiously unaffiliated, called “nones,” are growing significantly. They’re the second largest religious group in North America and most of Europe. In the United States, nones make up almost a quarter of the population. In the past decade, U.S. nones have overtaken Catholics, mainline protestants, and all followers of non-Christian faiths.
A lack of religious affiliation has profound effects on how people think about death, how they teach their kids, and even how they vote. (Watch The Story of God With Morgan Freeman for more about how different religions understand God and creation.)
There have long been predictions that religion would fade from relevancy as the world modernizes, but all the recent surveys are finding that it’s happening startlingly fast. France will have a majority secular population soon. So will the Netherlands and New Zealand. The United Kingdom and Australia will soon lose Christian majorities. Religion is rapidly becoming less important than it’s ever been, even to people who live in countries where faith has affected everything from rulers to borders to architecture.
But nones aren’t inheriting the Earth just yet. In many parts of the world—sub-Saharan Africa in particular—religion is growing so fast that nones’ share of the global population will actually shrink in 25 years as the world turns into what one researcher has described as “the secularizing West and the rapidly growing rest.” (The other highly secular part of the world is China, where the Cultural Revolution tamped down religion for decades, while in some former Communist countries, religion is on the increase.)
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How To Count Past Infinity
Photo credit:
Tony Gao Photography/Flickr. (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Can you count beyond infinity? Or was Buzz Lightyear’s snappy quote nothing more than a catchphrase?
Well, that depends on the type of infinity – yes, more than one type exists. It’s a lot to get your brain around, but this video from Vsauce explains some of the intricacies of the concept, as well as a way that it’s technically possible to count past infinity.
Cretaceous Birds Survived Mass Extinction By Eating Seeds
Photo credit:
Reconstruction of a bird-like dinosaur hunting a lizard in the Hell Creek Formation at the end of the Cretaceous. Danielle Dufault
Many small, feathered dinosaurs called maniraptorans went extinct along with the likes of Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops at the end of the Cretaceous. But those who managed to survive became ancestors to all the birds we have today. Now, researchers studying thousands of fossilized teeth reveal that bird-like dinosaurs with beaks were able to survive by eating seeds. The toothy, carnivorous maniraptorans died out abruptly when their food sources declined.
What Do You See In This Image? Your Answer Could Help Crack Your “Brain Code”
Photo credit:
"Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire" by Salvador Dalí, 1940. Wikimedia Commons/Fair Use
The surrealist paintings of mustached maestro Salvador Dalí were all about playing with our minds. One of his most famous pieces, “Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire,” is now being used by researchers from Glasgow University to understand how our brains process visual information. The study is published in Scientific Reports.
April 22, 2016
What We’re Reading
Cute lemur videos, the next internet craze. You read it here first.
A philosophical question for you: Why do stories about dinosaur extinction bring out the punster in headline writers? In other news, we have a wealth of interesting stories for you this week plus a bonus adorable video. WAAAAY cuter than kittens.
The Domesticated Human, Sapiens, April 5, 2016 — For World Wildlife Day, anthropologist Caitlin Schrein (the delightful @paleophile on Twitter) ponders this question: Are humans still “wild”? If not…why? You’ll be surprised at how many of our most human traits are not unique to us.
Reduced Flight-to-Light Behaviour of Moth Populations Exposed to Long-term Urban Light Pollution, Biology Letters, April 12, 2016 — Researchers in Switzerland and France found that urban populations of the small ermine moth are less attracted to light than rural populations. These difference appeared even when the moths were raised from eggs, indicating that the difference is genetic. The differences are likely driven by increased predation on moths at urban lights, a case study in natural selection with eerie echoes of Kettlewell’s iconic research on peppered moths darkening as a result of industrial soot.
The Quest for Historical Accuracy: Ronald Numbers Replies to William VanDoodewaard, BioLogos, April 15, 2016 — The historian Ronald L. Numbers convincingly replies to a critic who contended that his scholarship “not only overemphasized the decline of scriptural geology in the second half of the nineteenth century but exaggerated the importance of the Seventh-day Adventist flood geologist George McCready Price in bringing about its revival.”
The Long Decline of the Dinosaurs, The Atlantic, April 18, 2016 — The always excellent Ed Yong discusses the long decline—or as the URL suggests, the long diminuendo—of the dinosaurs, which a new study confirms were already in trouble before the K-T extinction event.
Are Humans Definitely Smarter Than Apes?, Slate, April 18, 2016 — “The evolutionary tree is rather shaped like a giant bush, with branches in many different directions, allowing sophisticated tool use in crows, highly coordinated cooperation in orcas, and inferential reasoning in apes,” writes Frans de Waal, in this excerpt from his new book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
Opponents of Kansas Schools’ Science Standards Lose Legal Battle, Topeka Capital-Journal, April 19, 2016 — Opponents of Kansas’ new science standards have lost their legal battle. The group had argued that the science standards were anti-religious and violated their religious rights. The judges in the case found that the plaintiffs did not have legal standing and further noted that the science standards “simply establish performance expectations for what students should know and be able to do at each K-12 grade level.” They further noted, “The Standards do not condemn any or all religions and do not target religious believers for disfavored treatment.”
Video: Three Baby Red-Ruffed Lemurs Are Now Frolicking At The National Zoo, DCist, April 20, 2016 — Guys. Baby lemurs. Video of baby lemurs. No, really. Just click.
Vitellogenin and Common Ancestry, BioLogos, February 1–-April 21, 2016 — In a five-part series, Dennis Venema explains why the remains of vitellogenin gene sequences in the genomes of placental mammals are good evidence for their descent from egg-laying ancestors—and comprehensively debunks creationist claims to the contrary.
And the Beak Shall Inherit the Earth: Why Did Birds Live When Dinosaurs Died? The Globe and Mail, April 21, 2016 — From alert reader Steve Bowden, a story about research with a hypothesis about why some birds may have survived the event that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, including an interesting story about how the idea for the research was generated. Another link about the same story from the BBC: Why Did Birds Live While Dinosaurs Died?: It’s a Seedy Story, Researchers Say.
A Candid Mother-Daughter Talk on Parenting in the Age of Climate Change, Huffington Post, April 22, 2016 — A mother/daughter conversation about the issues and ethics of bringing children into a future challenged by climate change.
Photo credit: By Arjan Haverkamp
Here’s Why Freddie Mercury’s Voice Was So Awesome, According To Science
Photo credit:
Killer Queen. Paul Natkin/Gettyimages
Why do so many people go ga ga when listening to Freddie Mercury sing? What is it about his serenading that’s so utterly seductive to the ear? Wanting to know if there’s some science behind the remarkable tones of the legendary chanteur, or if it’s just a kind of magic, a team of researchers decided to pick apart his unique vocalizations.
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