ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 508
April 20, 2016
This “Living Rock” Appears To Be Filled With Blood When It’s Cut Open
Photo credit:
Wolfgang Raab/Youtube
This freakish sea creature might be able to fulfill the hype your pet rock could never live up to.
What The European Union Can Learn From CERN About International Co-Operation
Photo credit:
CERN, CC BY-SA
Can Europe work? This is the real question being asked of British people on June 23. Behind the details of subsidies, regulations and eurozones lies a more fundamental puzzle: can different nationalities retain their own identities and work together, without merging into some bland United States of Europe?
Study Confirms Wildlife Is Flourishing In The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
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Wolves were frequently seen in the camera traps, suggesting that the ecosystem is incredibly healthy. National Geographic/Jim Beasley/Sarah Webster
A camera trap survey of the forests and town surrounding the location of the Chernobyl power plant nuclear meltdown in 1986 has given a glimpse into the lives of the animals that have reclaimed the deserted landscape. But rather than suffering from the huge amounts of radiation and contaminants belched out by the disaster, researchers have found that the wildlife populations in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) are flourishing.
A Pseudo-Huxley Quotation, Part 2
Under the microscope today is the following passage, which is widely attributed in creationist circles to Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley: “It is clear that the doctrine of evolution is directly antagonistic to that of creation…Evolution, if consistently accepted, makes it impossible to believe the Bible.” In part 1, I identified the source of the first half of the passage: the article on evolution in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which contains the sentence “It is clear that the doctrine of evolution is directly antagonistic to that of creation.” The problem is that the encyclopedia’s article on evolution is divided into two parts, and while the first part, on “Evolution in Biology,” is signed with the initials THH, the second part, on “Evolution in Philosophy,” is the part that contains the sentence in question. And it is signed with the initials JS, which stand for James Sully (1842–1923), then (i.e., before 1878, when the article was first published) early in his career as philosopher and psychologist.
Reading the whole of Sully’s contribution, it is clear that it would be unfair to represent him as portraying evolutionary science as opposed to the Bible. He distinguishes evolution in general from “the modern doctrine of evolution in its narrow sense…[as] essentially a product of scientific research and speculation,” and says of the latter that “[t]he bearing of the doctrine of evolution on religious ideas is not so easy to define…the idea is by no means incompatible with the notice of an original Creator, though it serves undoubtedly to remove the action of such a being further from our ken.” With regard to the question of a future afterlife, he suggests that although evolution might seem to undermine it, “it may be found, after all, that it leaves the question very much where it was.” These are not the words of someone insisting that evolutionary science is definitively and unequivocally incompatible with Christianity. But even if they were, they still wouldn’t be the words of Thomas Henry Huxley!
What about the second half of the passage—“Evolution, if consistently accepted, makes it impossible to believe the Bible”? It isn’t in fact unrepresentative of Huxley’s thinking about the relationship between evolution and Biblical literalism. For example, in 1892, he was engaged in a dispute over Genesis and evolution in the letters column of the Times of London. Comparing “the natural sense of the text” of the first chapter of Genesis with the deliverances of natural science, he concluded, “Until it is shown that the first two propositions are not contained in the first chapter of Genesis, and that the second pair are not justified by the present condition of our knowledge, I must continue to maintain that natural science and the ‘Mosaic’ account of the origin of animals and plants are in irreconcilable antagonism.” (It is noteworthy, though, that Huxley wasn’t hostile to the Bible in general, recommending that it be taught in Britain’s public schools on its moral and literary merits.) But were those his exact words?
The earliest appearance of the “impossible to believe the Bible” sentence I have been able to find is in a 1905 book by Joseph Birkbeck Burroughs (1854–1921) entitled Titan, Son of Saturn: The Coming World Emperor. (I’ll just wait here in parentheses while you gasp in awe at the splendor of that title, okay?) The Left Behind of its time, Titan, Son of Saturn was a widely read novel—it reached its tenth edition in 1917—that sought to dramatize the Biblical prophecies of the End Times as Burroughs understood them. “[L]ater editions marshaled a series of commendations from prominent pastors whose names, by 1914, included that of the respected evangelical James M. Gray, an Episcopal clergyman who had become a leading figure in the Moody Bible Institute, a contributor to The Fundamentals[,] and editor of the Scofield Reference Bible,” notes Crawford Gribben in Writing the Rapture (2009). So the book was doubtless read by, or at least known to, the leaders of the antievolutionist campaigns in the 1920s.
In chapter 3 of the novel, the young Homer McRain is riding with Dr. Southern Twofold (!) in his carriage, listening to him deliver a lengthy antievolutionary rant. (Burroughs was a doctor, so it’s especially tempting to regard Dr. Twofold as the author’s voice here.) Dr. Twofold eventually declaims:
There is offered to every young student a life of faith in God or a life of reasoning with the rationalists. It’s Genesis or evolution; Jesus or Darwin. You can not [sic] hold to both. The evidence is in not a few parsonages that Huxley was right when he said, “The doctrine of evolution is directly antagonistic to that of creation. Evolution, if consistently accepted, makes it impossible to believe in the Bible.” That this is true has been seen in many young men…
Since he was in his carriage, presumably without his library at hand, it’s hard to fault Dr. Twofold, and Burroughs himself may be granted the privilege of literary license. But if I’m right about the source of the sentence, those relying on Titan, Son of Saturn for their information about Huxley should have remembered that it was fiction.
Why grammaMistakes In A Short Email Could Make Some People Judge You
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Who is more sensitive to email errors? Robin Hutton, CC BY-NC-ND
I’m a cognitive psychologist who studies language comprehension. If I see an ad for a vacation rental that says “Your going to Hollywood!” it really bugs me. But my collaborator, Robin Queen, a sociolinguist, who studies how language use varies across social groups, is not annoyed by those errors at all.
We were curious: what makes our reactions so different?
Human Beings – And Our Offices – Are Crawling With Microbes
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from www.shutterstock.com
Humans are crawling with microorganisms – indeed, each of us has our own unique microbial ecosystem, otherwise known as a “microbiome”. Microorganisms are the smallest forms of life, and the human microbiome includes bacteria, viruses and fungi. There are more microbial cells on and in our bodies than the ten trillion human cells which make us what we are. This microbial life helps us to break down our food, provides vitamins we cannot produce and plays a big role in keeping us healthy.
April 19, 2016
Researchers Think They’ve Uncovered A Link Between The Deaths Of Three Different Presidents
Photo credit:
Alex Kuzoian/Business Insider
Something odd went on with three of the four United States presidents elected during the 1840s.
For The First Time, Scientists Restore Finger Movements In Paralyzed Man
Photo credit: Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center/Batelle
By Alexandra Ossola
Four years ago, now 24-year-old Ian Burkhart was in a diving accident that paralyzed him below the shoulder. Most of the 250,000 Americans with spinal cord injuries simply learn to go through life with limited mobility. But thanks to a team at Ohio State University, that wasn’t the case for Burkhart—an implant allowed his brain to send the proper signals to move his finger, hand, and wrist, bypassing the damaged nerve pathways. The technique, about which a study was published today in Nature, could someday help people around the planet regain movement in their limbs.
In order to regain movement in Burkhart’s right hand, the researchers implanted an array of electrodes in his left primary motor cortex, a region in the front of the brain that helps plan and direct movements. Then Burkhart spent three sessions per week during the next 15 months training his brain to use it. A machine learning algorithm learned to interpret which brain waves corresponded to the patient’s intended movements. When Burkhart’s brain would emit the proper signals, the implant would send those signals through wires to a flexible sleeve around his wrist lined with electrodes that would stimulate the muscles accordingly.
The researchers used different types of tests to see how well Burkhart could perform six different hand, wrist, and finger movements. An algorithm determined that Burkhart’s movements were about 90 percent accurate on average. After those repeated tasks improved his strength, Burkhart was able to pour water from a bottle into a jar, then stir it—an impressive feat for someone who wasn’t able to move his hand at all not long before. He was also able to swipe a credit card and even play the Guitar Hero video game.
This technique is invasive, the researchers note, which means that it might not be suitable for patients who are already in poor health or have compromised immune systems that make them more prone to infection. And typically implanted “neural bypass” devices like these allow for less range of movement than the one used in this study. It’s also important to note that the implant doesn’t restore a patient’s ability to feel, though other researchers are working on that problem, mostly with prosthetics. Maybe someday the two technologies could merge to give patients both the ability to move and to feel.
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When Doctors Refuse to Treat LGBT Patients
Photo credit: Andrey Popov/Shutterstock/Paul Spella/The Atlantic
By Emma Green
Being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender is not a disease. It took a long time, but nearly all medical organizations now agree that queerness is not a “sociopathic personality disturbance,” as the American Psychiatric Association once maintained.
“Nearly all” is an important caveat, though. There are still a few organizations—which most doctors and scholars would likely consider part of the fringes of medicine—that challenge this view. Some are dissenting offshoots of mainstream associations. Others are the de-fanged descendants of ex-gay-therapy groups. They’re often accused of outright bigotry, but these doctors tend to frame their dissent differently, placing an emphasis on “choice.” Patients have a right to choose a therapist who will help them with unwanted same-sex attractions or feelings of gender dysphoria, they say. And physicians and therapists have a right to choose not to provide treatments that conflict with their religious beliefs. These treatments might include sex-change operations, hormone-replacement therapy for transgender people, fertility treatments to same-sex couples, or counseling for patients who are in non-heterosexual relationships.
Some legislators agree. In the first week of April, Mississippi passed a new law making it expressly legal for doctors, psychologists, and counselors to opt out of any procedure or choose not to take on any patient if doing so would compromise their conscience. The law is specifically designed to protect medical professionals who object to gay marriage and non-marital sex. Tennessee’s general assembly just passed a similar law, which would only apply to counselors, and a now-dead Florida bill would have protected religious health-care organizations from having to “administer, recommend, or deliver a medical treatment or procedure that would be contrary to the religious or moral convictions or policies of the facility.”
This legislation is part of a wave of religious-freedom bills that have been introduced and passed in the past year or so, almost all inspired by objections to homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Some of these measures are just for show—pastors could never be legally compelled to perform a gay-marriage ceremony in the way some bills have suggested, for example. But some represent a relatively novel approach to religious-freedom legislation: They offer legal cover to people of faith who don’t want to provide certain goods or services to LGBT people, especially when doing so might seem like a tacit endorsement of their relationships and sex lives.
Medical exemptions, though, deserve to be considered in a category of their own. Doctors and therapists interact with people at their most vulnerable, and their training and expertise gives them incredible power over patients. The advice they provide—or refuse to provide—to an LGBT patient could influence the treatment that person seeks. It could make that person less likely to seek primary care or identify themselves as LGBT to other doctors, which can lead to the “failure to screen, diagnose, or treat important medical problems,” according to the American Medical Association. The medical community has a problem: What should hospitals, private practices, and medical associations do about doctors and therapists who say it’s against their beliefs to provide care to LGBT patients?
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Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea
Photo credit: Tomasz Wojtasik
By James Gorman
Bees find nectar and tell their hive-mates; flies evade the swatter; and cockroaches seem to do whatever they like wherever they like. But who would believe that insects are conscious, that they are aware of what’s going on, not just little biobots?
Neuroscientists and philosophers apparently. As scientists lean increasingly toward recognizing that nonhuman animals are conscious in one way or another, the question becomes: Where does consciousness end?
Andrew B. Barron, a cognitive scientist, and Colin Klein, a philosopher, at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, propose in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that insects have the capacity for consciousness.
This does not mean that a honeybee thinks, “Why am I not the queen?” or even, “Oh, I like that nectar.” But, Dr. Barron and Dr. Klein wrote in a scientific essay, the honeybee has the capacity to feel something.
Their claim stops short of some others. Christof Koch, the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, and Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin, have proposed that consciousness is nearly ubiquitous in different degrees, and can be present even in nonliving arrangements of matter, to varying degrees.
They say that rather than wonder how consciousness arises, one should look at where we know it exists and go from there to where else it might exist.
They conclude that it is an inherent property of physical systems in which information moves around in a certain way — and that could include some kinds of artificial intelligence and even naturally occurring nonliving matter.
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