ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 538
March 15, 2016
Backpack-Wearing Pigeons Are Being Used To Monitor Pollution In London
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These backpacks contain all the scientific necessaries. Pigeon Air Patrol/Plume Labs via Twitter
Air pollution’s a killer: In China alone, 1.6 million people a year die from this increasingly problematic phenomenon.
The U.K. Wants To Reduce Carbon Emissions To Zero By 2050
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The government does not have a very good track record when it comes to fighting climate change. 1000 Words/Shutterstock
The U.K. government is to take steps to tighten the country’s climate legislation, and to enshrine into law the long-term commitment to cut carbon emissions to zero by 2050. This goes beyond the already legally binding Climate Change Act, which is meant to see the U.K. reduce emissions by 80 percent over the same period, and instead pushes for full acceptance of the commitments made in Paris last year of zero emissions.
Ice Shelf Bigger Than Manhattan Could Be About To Break From Antarctica
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Nansen Ice Shelf and the crack, taken by Landsat 8 on December 16, 2015. USGS
Antarctic scientists have documented ice shelves disintegrating from the southern continent at an unprecedented rate, thanks in no part to the pace of man-made climate change.
Refugees Are Three Times More Likely To Develop Schizophrenia
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Thousands of refugees could be at risk of developing non-affective psychosis. thomas koch/Shutterstock
As Europe’s borders continue to bulge under the weight of displaced refugees desperately seeking a passage to safer ground, a new study has revealed that the psychological trauma suffered by many of those affected by the crisis could persist long after their journey ends. Examining schizophrenia rates in Sweden, researchers found that refugees granted asylum in the Scandinavian country were 3.6 times more likely to develop the condition than the Swedish-born population.
Asian Bats Seem To Be Resistant To Deadly Fungus
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U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
White-nose syndrome is a fungal disease that infects bats, and since its first detection in North America in 2006, it has devastated bat populations across most of the continent. But Asian bats – which have coexisted with the fungus for a long time – seem to be resistant to the disease, according to a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The findings suggest that resistance might evolve over time.
“Fairy Circles” Found In Australia
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A lone "fairy circle" in the Namibian desert. Tilo G/Shutterstock.
The “fairy circles” of the Namibian desert have confused onlookers and sparked myths for centuries. These crisply shaped circles of bare dust in arid grassland have been explained away through tales of underground dragons, the footsteps of Gods, aliens and, of course, fairies. But the two scientific explanations – termites and insect life or water competition – have long divided scientists.
March 14, 2016
Stepford students’ new target: other Stepford students
Photo credit: The Spectator
By Mick Hume
In 1793, on the eve of the Terror in France, the royalist journalist Mallet du Pan coined the adage ‘The Revolution devours its children.’ Today, on the left, history is repeating itself as farce. In universities, childish pseudo-revolutionaries are devouring their elders and self-styled radical betters.
Last week, student activists at Columbia University in New York mounted a concerted campaign against that notorious neo-fascist puppet Pinocchio. A big blow-up Pinocchio doll had starred in a display by Students Supporting Israel, staged as a counter demo to a fun-sounding campus festival called ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’.
Presumably his role was to suggest that the pro-Palestinian students were telling porkies and their noses should grow. After these opponents protested, the university authorities removed Pinocchio — purely, of course, as a ‘safety’ measure, the new all-purpose excuse for political censorship.
But why pick on Pinocchio? Because, the anti-Israeli lobby insisted, the inflatable constituted ‘an explicitly and overtly anti-Semitic image’. A group of Jewish American students was censored because they were accused of, er, anti-Semitism.
Barely a week goes by without similar student-eat-student lunacy. Campuses are becoming ‘intersectional’ war zones, where identity zealots compete to see who can appear the most offended and victimised and so silence the rest.
In British universities, a rising ride of intolerance sweeps away anything that might make students feel uncomfortable. A leading anti-fascist campaigner has been ‘no-platformed’ by the NUS black students’ group, who branded him ‘Islamophobic’. The NUS lesbian, gay, bi- and transsexual officer refused to share a platform with Peter Tatchell, doyen of LGBT lobbyists, because he had opposed bans on Terfs (‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists’). After standing up for free speech, it seems, the likes of Tatchell must be denied the right to speak on -campus.
Over a year ago, Brendan O’Neill introduced Spectator readers to this new breed of super-squeamish, censorious student. The Stepford students, as Brendan called them, might ‘look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform.’
Since Brendan’s piece came out, things have got worse. Some Cambridge undergraduates set up a website ironically called the Stepford Student, intending to show that they didn’t fit the stereotype. Before too long they surrendered and closed it down — because of protests from real Stepford students outraged by tongue-in-cheek articles such as ‘Am I only a feminist to get laid?’ which showed a ‘flippant and harmful attitude towards feminism’. Feminism is never a laughing matter and flippancy equals heresy.
The ‘Rhodes must fall’ campaign, demanding the removal of the Victorian imperialist’s statue from an Oxford college because it made students feel ‘unsafe’, has been reportedly superseded by a move to bring down a statue of Queen Victoria at Royal Holloway, in London, because she was ‘implicitly involved in colonial exploits’. The reports were later denied – but it was widely reported in the press because it was so believable. It fits a relentlessly depressing trend.
Separation of Church and Candidate?
Photo credit: MARK KAUZLARICH / Reuters
By Herb Silverman
Recently I wrote about presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s comment that “all the answers are in the Bible” and his remarks to an atheist that our rights could only come from a creator. A number of readers agreed that Rubio’s view made no sense, but they also mentioned that religious views of other candidates are just as bad, or worse. I agree. Rubio has never claimed that God told him to run for president. That alone distinguishes him from current candidates Ted Cruz and John Kasich, and dropout candidates Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Scott Walker.
Of those who dropped out, despite God’s support, Ben Carson remains the most active politically. He is the new national chairman of My Faith Votes, an organization that wants Christians to decide who will be the next president and all national and local leaders.
So who was the last non-Christian president? William Howard Taft (1909-1913). Taft was a Unitarian. Earlier presidential icons Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln had no religious affiliation. None believed in the Trinity, and Christians accused all three of being atheists.
Well, what about this year’s remaining presidential candidates?
The Sexual Misery of the Arab World
Photo credit: Eiko Ojala
By Kamel Daoud
After Tahrir came Cologne. After the square came sex. The Arab revolutions of 2011 aroused enthusiasm at first, but passions have since waned. Those movements have come to look imperfect, even ugly: For one thing, they have failed to touch ideas, culture, religion or social norms, especially the norms relating to sex. Revolution doesn’t mean modernity.
The attacks on Western women by Arab migrants in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve evoked the harassment of women in Tahrir Square itself during the heady days of the Egyptian revolution. The reminder has led people in the West to realize that one of the great miseries plaguing much of the so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, is its sick relationship with women. In some places, women are veiled, stoned and killed; at a minimum, they are blamed for sowing disorder in the ideal society. In response, some European countries have taken to producing guides of good conduct to refugees and migrants.
Sex is a complex taboo, arising, in places like Algeria, Tunisia, Syria or Yemen, out of the ambient conservatism’s patriarchal culture, the Islamists’ new, rigorist codes and the discreet puritanism of the region’s various socialisms. That makes a good combination for obstructing desire or guilt-tripping and marginalizing those who feel any. And it’s a far cry from the delicious licentiousness of the writings of the Muslim golden age, like Sheikh Nafzawi’s “The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight,” which tackled eroticism and the Kama Sutra without any hang-ups.
Today sex is a great paradox in many countries of the Arab world: One acts as though it doesn’t exist, and yet it determines everything that’s unspoken. Denied, it weighs on the mind by its very concealment. Although women are veiled, they are at the center of our connections, exchanges and concerns.
Women are a recurrent theme in daily discourse, because the stakes they personify — for manliness, honor, family values — are great. In some countries, they are allowed access to the public sphere only if they renounce their bodies: To let them go uncovered would be to uncover the desire that the Islamist, the conservative and the idle youth feel and want to deny. Women are seen as a source of destabilization — short skirts trigger earthquakes, some say — and are respected only when defined by a property relationship, as the wife of X or the daughter of Y.
Bonobos May Have “Emotional Bias”
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Bonobos are described as "soft and friendly," while humans and chimps are more aggressive. GUDKOV ANDREY/Shutterstock
Though research has indicated that the ability to empathize and experience emotions may not be uniquely human, many questions still remain over the extent to which different species are able to "have feelings" or sympathize with others. But according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bonobos are capable of recognizing and reacting to pictures of an emotional nature, revealing fascinating insights into their cognitive abilities as well as their social character.
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