ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 554

Human Children Capable Of Spontaneous Tool Development, Just Like Young Chimpanzees

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While chimps learn by themselves how to use tools, it was thought human children had to be taught. grass-lifeisgood/Shutterstock

Until chimpanzees were discovered to crack nuts, dip for termites, and use leaves as sponges, it was long thought that the use of tools was a defining human characteristic. We now know that to be wrong, but questions still remain as to how both humans and apes learn the capacity to use tools. It has generally been assumed that while basic tool use in human children has to be socially learned, young chimpanzees will spontaneously invent tool behavior themselves, rather than having to be first shown by an adult.

Are Teachers to Blame?

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By Melanie Fine

I’ll admit it. I’m first in line to fault teachers — English teachers all the more so — on poor grammar, written or verbal, poor spelling, and lack of depth in their subject areas and breadth across others. I guess I got a little of the “teachers are to blame” gene from my mom, who threw a massive fit when I told her, as I was finishing up my senior year at Cornell, that I wanted to take a year or so off from pursuing a medical degree to teach.

“We didn’t send you to Cornell so you could become a teacher!” she yelled over the phone, seeing her dreams for me crashing down all around her. But when I published my latest blog post on why students need to work hard to succeed in both comfortable and uncomfortable subject areas — namely math — I got a lot of teacher finger-pointing in response. “My teacher did me a disservice.” Teachers “ignored me.” My teachers “let me down.”

And I’ll also admit, I felt a little defensive. After all, I hear it every day from my own students. “You don’t teach us,” they mutter under their breath, or sometimes brazenly out loud. “No one gets this,” individual students remark beneficently on behalf of everyone. And so I struggle. Every day. Every class. Every interaction. To figure out how to make the complex subjects of chemistry and physics both understandable and engaging to each and every student.

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No, honey, you can’t be anything you want to be. And that’s okay.

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By Erica Reischer

When my son turned one, friends gifted him with an illustrated Snoopy the Dog book called “You Can Be Anything.” On page after page, this chirpy book shows Snoopy engaged in a variety of impressive professions: Sports Star, Surgeon, Flying Ace, and so on.

Dressed in the garb of his chosen occupation, Snoopy is pictured as a “world-famous lawyer,” a “world-famous literary ace,” and even a “world-famous grocery clerk.” Snoopy is superlative in everything he does.

The book was big and bright and colorful, and probably intended for an older child since the pages–instead of being thick and sturdy like board books–were made of regular paper.

When my son tried to turn these flimsy paper pages with his pudgy little hands, they inevitably ripped. Which delighted him, so he ripped them more. I let him. I even helped him sometimes.

You might think this permissiveness was due to a laid-back nature, or some lofty ideal of allowing my son’s curiosity (paper rips when I pull it!) to range free. You would be wrong.

The real reason I didn’t mind him ripping the pages of this book was because, as a psychologist and parent, I deeply object to its core message, which is succinctly stated on page one: “Just like Snoopy, what you can achieve is limited only by your imagination. You can be anything!”

This message—that our kids can do and achieve anything they put their minds to—can be deeply alluring to parents. What parent wouldn’t want to believe that their children’s achievement is limited only by imagination, and to encourage their kids to pursue ambitious goals, like becoming a surgeon or a tech company founder?

What could possibly be wrong with telling our kids they can be anything? Plenty.

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This Incredible ‘Boiling River’ Is A Scientific Enigma

Photo credit: Sofia Ruzo

By Chris D’Angelo

When geoscientist and National Geographic explorer Andrés Ruzo was growing up in Lima, Peru, his grandfather used to tell him wild stories of Spanish conquistadors, cities of gold, and an Amazonian river so hot it could boil men alive.

But it wasn’t until Ruzo was studying geothermal energy that he decided to look into this mythical boiling river — and, much to his surprise, actually found it. While boiling rivers do exist in the world, they are usually found close to active volcanos. This river is especially remarkable because it runs more than 400 miles from the nearest active volcano — the only non-volcanic river known to boil on Earth.

“At a time when everything seems mapped, measured and understood, this river challenges what we think we know,” Ruzo writes in his new book, The Boiling River: Adventure and Discovery in the Amazon. “It is a reminder that there are still great wonders to be discovered.”

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How Microbes Make Malnutrition Worse

Photo credit: Mike Hutchings/Reuters

By Ed Yong

Several years ago, a group of gut microbes went on a 14,000 kilometer-long trip. Having freshly emerged from an infant in southern Malawi, they were scooped up by eager scientists, frozen, stored in cold boxes, exchanged from one courier to another, flown across the Atlantic Ocean, driven to the Washington University in St. Louis, and finally transplanted into the bodies of germ-free mice that had been raised all their lives in a sterile bubble. Their epic voyage was part of a study by Jeffrey Gordon, showing how the microbes of our gut contribute to the problems of malnutrition—and how they might help to fix them.

Gordon is a leader in the study of the human microbiome—the trillions of microbes that share our bodies and influence our health. A few years ago, his team showed that malnourished children grow up with different gut microbiomes. These communities change during early life. Waves of species replace each other in predictable steps, much like new landscapes get colonized by lichens, then shrubs, then trees. Normally, it takes three years for the communities to reach an adult state. But this pattern of succession slows and stagnates in malnourished children, leaving them with a microbiological age that lags behind their biological one.

This hidden immaturity matters because our microbes help us to harvest energy from our diet. If they’re not doing that effectively, their hosts might suffer, especially when their diet offers very little energy to begin with. “Most people think about development from the perspective of our human cells and organs, but there’s another facet to it–our gut microbiota, an organ composed of microbes,” says Gordon. “It gives us a more transcendent view of human developmental biology.”

Now, following similar work in Bangladesh, Gordon’s graduate student Laura Blanton studied the changing microbiomes of 60 healthy Malawian infants, and devised an algorithm that calculated their microbiological age based on the species in their guts. She then applied the algorithm to another group of 259 babies, and found that their microbiological age scores at 12 months predicted how much weight they had put on by 18 months. That’s a sign that the microbes are influencing the babies’ growth, rather than merely reacting to them.

The team found another such sign by transplanting stool samples from Malawian infants into sterile baby mice. Even though all the rodents ate the same food, those that received microbes from an underweight infant put on less weight and developed weaker bones than those which received a healthy baby’s microbiome.

So, if certain gut microbes can stymie a baby’s growth, perhaps others can speed things up? To find out, Blanton simply implanted mice with microbes from either a healthy infant or an underweight one, and housed them together in the same cages. Mice willingly eat each other’s poop, and so regularly bombard their own microbiomes with those of cage-mates. And in these “Battles of the Microbiomes”, the healthy communities came out on top, invading and displacing the immature ones.

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Chinese Wind Turbine Maker Is Now World’s Largest

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By Daniel Cusick

General Electric Co. has ceded its position as the world’s No. 1 wind turbine manufacturer to a Chinese competitor, according to 2015 market data compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology Co. Ltd. received orders for 7.8 gigawatts of new wind turbines in 2015, exceeding GE, which dropped to No. 3 globally with 5.9 GW of new commissioned capacity, according to BNEF. Vestas Wind Systems A/S of Denmark attracted 7.3 GW of new orders in 2015, solidifying its No. 2 ranking in the global supply chain.

While Goldwind maintains a North American headquarters in Chicago and has provided turbines to several U.S. wind farms, BNEF said that almost all of the company’s recent growth was in the Chinese market, where wind power developers are riding an unprecedented boom. About 29 GW of new capacity came online in China last year alone (ClimateWire, Feb. 2).

David Halligan, CEO of Goldwind Americas, said Goldwind is pleased to be at the forefront of a global wind market that “is growing at an exponential rate.”

“While Goldwind’s anchor is in China, our global aspirations remain strong and we are continuously looking for opportunities across many different geographies,” he said in email.

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The Psychology of the Breathtakingly Stupid Mistake

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By David Z. Hambrick

We all make stupid mistakes from time to time. History is replete with examples. Legend has it that the Trojans accepted the Greek’s “gift” of a huge wooden horse, which turned out to be hollow and filled with a crack team of Greek commandos. The Tower of Pisa started to lean even before construction was finished—and is not even the world’s farthest leaning tower. NASA taped over the original recordings of the moon landing, and operatives for Richard Nixon’s re-election committee were caught breaking into a Watergate office, setting in motion the greatest political scandal in U.S. history. More recently, the French government spent $15 billion on a fleet of new trains, only to discover that they were too wide for some 1,300 station platforms.

We readily recognize these incidents as stupid mistakes—epic blunders. On a more mundane level, we invest in get-rich-quick schemes, drive too fast, and make posts on social media that we later regret. But what, exactly, drives our perception of these actions as stupid mistakes, as opposed to bad luck? Their seeming mindlessness? The severity of the consequences? The responsibility of the people involved? Science can help us answer these questions.

In a study just published in the journal Intelligence, using search terms such as “stupid thing to do”, Balazs Aczel and his colleagues compiled a collection of stories describing stupid mistakes from sources such as The Huffington Post and TMZ. One story described a thief who broke into a house and stole a TV and later returned for the remote; another described burglars who intended to steal cell phones but instead stole GPS tracking devices that were turned on and gave police their exact location. The researchers then had a sample of university students rate each story on the responsibility of the people involved, the influence of the situation, the seriousness of the consequences, and other factors.

Analyses of the subjects’ ratings revealed three varieties of stupid mistakes. The first is when a person’s confidence outstrips their skill, as when a Pittsburgh man robbed two banks in broad daylight without wearing a disguise, believing that lemon juice he had rubbed on his face would make him invisible to security cameras. Or, in what is widely regarded as one of the top mascot failures in history, when Wild Wing of the Anaheim Ducks caught himself on fire attempting to leap over a burning wall (cheerleaders pulled him from the flames and he returned to action later in the game, unhurt). “This story of Duck a l’Orange County is no canard. A duck could get fired for this, or at least demoted to the Rotisserie League,” the New York Times reported.

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President Barack Obama On How To Win The Future

Photo credit: F. Scott Schafer

By Cliff Ransom

Along with running the free world, President Barack Obama has spent the past seven years guiding U.S. science and technology policy. The initiatives and goals he puts in place—in clean energy, space, medicine, education, nanotechnology, and more—help direct research, which in turn directs the future. With one year left in the Oval Office, the president talks about what he’s achieved, what’s left to do (a lot), and why being a nerd is one of the best ways to serve your country.

Popular Science: You have been a very pro-science president. Why do you see science and technology as being so important?

Barack Obama: Science and technology helped make America the greatest country on Earth. Whether it’s setting foot on the moon, developing a vaccine for polio, inventing the Internet, or building the world’s strongest military, we’ve relied on innovative scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians to help us tackle the toughest challenges of our time.

In my first inaugural address, I promised that my administration would restore science to its rightful place, and that’s exactly what we’ve done. We’ve expanded clean-energy research; we’ve launched major initiatives in advanced manufacturing, biomedicine, and strategic computing; we’ve increased preparedness and resilience against climate change; and we’re training STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] teachers so every child grows up with the skills they need to compete in the 21st century. Being pro-science is the only way we make sure that America continues to lead the world. Our policies reflect that.

PS: Among your White House initiatives, you’ve focused heavily on improving STEM education in America. What’s your proudest achievement on that front?

BO: There’s a lot to be proud of. We now graduate 25,000 more engineers per year from our colleges and universities than we did when I took office. We’re more than halfway toward our goal of preparing 100,000 new math and science teachers by 2021. We’ve secured more than $1 billion of private investment for improving STEM education, and commitments from college and university leadership to help underrepresented students earn STEM degrees. There’s also something that’s harder to measure, but every bit as important: all the young people, including minorities and young women, who are more excited than ever about pursuing their passions for STEM.

One of the new traditions I’ve started as president is the White House Science Fair. We ought to celebrate science fair winners at least as much as Super Bowl winners. And when young people are excited about science, technology, engineering, and math, that’s not just good for them. That’s good for America. We want the next game-changing industry or life-saving breakthrough to happen right here in the United States.

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We Need to Educate the Public about Dirty Bombs

Photo credit: historicair/Wikimedia Commons

By David Ropeik

Terrorism works not as much by causing death as by causing fear. Bombings and shootings kill a few, or a few dozen or few hundred or even a few thousand, but frighten millions. The unpredictable random attacks in public places leave us all feeling vulnerable, afraid, just what terrorists hope to achieve. So wouldn’t you assume that among all the things that governments are doing to reduce the danger from terrorist attacks, that a big part of that effort would be to try and minimize the fear these attacks cause? You’d think so, but with one of the most fear-inducing weapon terrorists might use, you’d be wrong.

The weapon is a dirty bomb, a conventional explosive mixed with radioactive material that would be dispersed across a community (it’s technically known as a radiological dispersal device). In the aftermath of the Paris attacks last November Belgian authorities discovered evidence that the terrorists involved in the Paris attacks were surveilling a high-level Belgian nuclear official who had access to radioactive material—not the kind that could be used to build a nuclear weapon, but perfect for a dirty bomb. And Reuters reported that radioactive material was stolen in Iraq last November from an oilfield company that was using the material to test the integrity of oil pipelines. No one knows who took it, or where it is.

The prospect of such a bomb seems terrifying, but anyone who knows the basic science of radiation biology knows that it wouldn’t cause much health damage, because the dose of radioactivity to which most people might be exposed would be very low. And experts know, based on the 65 year Life Span Study of the survivors of atomic bomb explosions in Japan, that even at extraordinarily high doses, ionizing radiation only raises lifetime cancer mortality rates a little bit—just two thirds of one percent for survivors who were within three kilometers of ground zero. And despite popular belief, it causes no genetic damage that is passed on to future generations. At the low doses most people might get from a dirty bomb, the health risk is infinitesimal. Not zero, but tiny.

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Parenting Without God pg 90

“Go to every PTA meeting you can. Be a voice and run for PTA and the school board if you can. Meet with your children’s teachers to find out what is being taught in their classes. Sadly, we may have to supplement at home. I think this is one reason why I am hearing more and more secular parents opting to home school rather than send their kids to public or private schools. Education has gotten so bad, you can no longer trust that a school will give your child a proper education.

I am personally against homeschooling. I think it lacks the social necessity of school, and as smart as we parents think we are, many of us do lack the formal education to teach all subjects. I may be able to handle history and science, but I certainly don’t want my own child learning math from me. I think the solution is to help everyone. Homeschooling may seem right for your child, but it leaves thousands behind in need of help. The last thing we should be doing is giving up on the system. We should be fixing it.”

–Dan Arel, Parenting Without God pg 90

Discuss!