ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 564
February 10, 2016
Are Male And Female Brains Really Different?
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T. L. Furrer/shutterstock.com
Along with just about every other aspect of real or imagined differences between the sexes, the idea that your biological sex will determine the sex of your brain – and so your behaviour, aptitudes and personality – has a long and controversial history. The idea that a man’s brain is “male” and a woman’s brain “female” is rarely challenged.
Our Thirst For New Gadgets Has Created A Vast Empire Of Electronic Waste
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gopixa/Shutterstock
Technological improvements mean that the phones, tablets, computers and other electric devices we find so essential are cheaper and more powerful than ever. But this means we upgrade them sooner and they quickly become unwanted or obsolete, and are thrown away. The huge amounts of waste electrical and electronic equipment – WEEE, or e-waste – that results is quickly becoming a major worldwide environmental, economic and health problem.
Could Laser-Powered Superconductors Spark A Technological Revolution?
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Wikipedia
One of the most remarkable and unexpected discoveries of the 20th century is that some materials can become “superconductors“ when cooled down to very low temperatures. This means that they can conduct electricity with no resistance and are used in applications ranging from MRI scanners and particle accelerators to the "maglev trains” that move without touching the ground.
The Science Behind Making A Perfect Pancake
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Shutterstock
Everyone loves pancakes and wants to know the secret of cooking them. And that partly depends on whether you’re after the thin, crêpe-like European style or the thicker ones more popular in North America as each requires a different approach.
Why Are So Many Unnatural Deaths Not Investigated?
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Cause of death? www.shutterstock.com
The UK’s most prolific murderer, Harold Shipman, would have been 70 this year had he not killed himself 16 years ago in Wakefield Prison. He managed to kill at least 250 women without alerting suspicion. The whistle was blown by a relative of one of the victims. So why wasn’t the case picked up by a coroner and how many more unnatural deaths are officially missed?
What do coroners do?
China’s Wildlife In Safer Hands – Thanks To A New Generation Of Animal Scientists
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Cheer up, golden monkey. Zeng Wei Jun/Shutterstock
When you think of China, animal welfare probably isn’t the first phrase that springs to mind. In a country known for its fur farms, bile bears and live animal eating, you could be forgiven for assuming everyone is in on the act.
Tyndall Twice Twisted, Part 1
John Tyndall (right; 1820–1893), is, of course, the Anglo-Irish physicist remembered for demonstrating the greenhouse effect. But he was also a supporter of Darwin, and a member, along with his friend Thomas Henry Huxley, of the x Club, which promoted evolutionary ideas, opposed religious interference in science, and sought to increase the authority of science in society. (The other members were William Spottiswoode, George Busk, Edward Frankland, T. A. Hirst, John Lubbock, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and Herbert Spencer; all but Spencer were Fellows of the Royal Society, and four of them—Spottiswoode, Lubbock, Huxley, and Hooker—were pallbearers at Darwin’s funeral, as I observed: part 1, part 2.) So it isn’t particularly surprising to find that Tyndall, like Huxley, is occasionally misleadingly quoted by creationists.
Writing in Reports of the NCSE in 2010, Michael D. Barton traced a fine example. Seeing a report in The New York Times of a lecture in which it was claimed that Tyndall admitted that “evolution belongs to the twilight of conjecture,” Barton identified the original source: Tyndall’s 1878 essay “Virchow and Evolution,” in which he discussed a speech by the German physician and biologist Rudolf Virchow expressing opposition to evolution. There Tyndall mentioned a talk of his own in which he referred to “the theory of evolution applied to the primitive condition of matter as belonging to ‘the dim twilight of conjecture’” (emphasis added). Clearly he was not talking about biological evolution. But he was nevertheless subsequently misrepresented as having described evolution as conjectural, as Barton relates.
I recently encountered two similar misleading quotations of Tyndall, involving “Virchow and Evolution,” at about the same time. The first is from J. W. Porter’s Evolution—A Menace (1922). As I related in “Martin’s Mysterious Myrmidons,” Porter (1863–1937) was a Baptist minister in Lexington, Kentucky, who was at the forefront of a campaign to ban the teaching of evolution in the Bluegrass State in the early 1920s. In a sermon, he declared, “Darwinism would be run out of Kentucky if it took every cent the Baptist people of the Commonwealth had to do it.” Porter’s campaign was responsible for the first legislative attempt to ban the teaching of evolution: Kentucky’s House Bill 191, introduced in 1922. The bill was defeated—by a single vote. Observing the furor from the University of Kentucky was a young college student named John T. Scopes.
Anyhow, in chapter 3, “Evolution Falsely Explains Origin of Life,” of Evolution—A Menace, there appears a long paragraph teeming with various quotations from scientists about the origin of life. Among them is the following, attributed to “Prof. Tyndall”:
Again, Science has no explanation of the origin of life. The living organism instead of being the product of physical forces, controls these forces for its higher forms, functions and purposes. I share with Virchow’s opinion that the theory of evolution, in its complete form, involves the assumption that at some period or other in the earth’s history, there occurred what would now be called spontaneous generation; but I agree with him that the proofs of it are wanting. I also hold with Virchow that the failures have been so lamentable that the doctrine is utterly discredited.
From “I share” onward, the words are, more or less, from Tyndall’s essay. There are minor if sloppy differences, and a sentence quoted from Virchow that appeared between the sentences is missing without any indication, but otherwise it’s a faithful rendition.
The first two sentences, however, are not from Tyndall at all. With the exception of the word “Again,” they are from James Dwight Dana’s Manual of Geology (fourth edition, 1895: the sentences in question seem not to appear in the previous editions), in a chapter on “Archaean Time.” There’s no shame in quoting Dana, to be sure: he was a major figure in American science. It’s a little ironic, though, since Dana, originally unsympathetic to evolution, started to shift his view: in the second edition of the Manual (1875) he concedes that it is “most likely to be sustained by further research” that “[t]he evolution of the system of life went forward through the derivation of species from species, according to natural methods not yet clearly understood, and with few occasions for supernatural intervention.” But the misattribution is egregious.
As far as I can tell, the chimeric passage that combines Dana and Tyndall began with Porter. And it may have ended with him as well: with the exception of a few appearances of the passage in the Bible Champion—in which, as William J. Morison explains in his article on the magazine in The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America (1999), “Antievolutionism in particular became a constant theme … throughout the 1920s”—I don’t see any further instances of it in the literature. The Dana quotation appears (in, e.g., Philip Mauro’s Evolution at the Bar [1922]); the Tyndall quotation appears (in, e.g., Luther Tracy Townsend’s Collapse of Evolution [1905], which was constantly plundered for such gems); but rarely were they merged. Thank heaven for small mercies! In part 2, I turn to the second misleading quotation from Tyndall.
NASA’s Proposed 2017 Budget Would Cut Funding For Europa Mission
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Scientists think Europa has a vast ocean of water below its surface. NASA
The first stage in deciding NASA’s budget for 2017 has just been completed: the President’s Budget Request. Although important, the budget will be chopped and changed over the coming months before it is finalized, but it does at least give an indication of what the White House wants NASA to be doing.
Lasers Can Stimulate The Natural Healing Of Deeper Skin Wounds
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The new biodegradable waveguide allows lasers to get deeper into the wound. St. Andrews University/Nature Communications
Healing wounds with stitches and staples could be a thing of the past, thanks to this latest advance in laser technology.
Taking LSD May Help Shed Light On Early Stages Of Psychosis
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A new study suggests that the acute effects of LSD may resemble early psychosis, although it's longer-term effects can be therapeutic. Zerbor/Shutterstock
Ever since Albert Hoffman famously stumbled upon the hallucinogenic properties of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1943, scientists have debated whether the drug’s psychoactive effects are harmful or therapeutic. According to a new paper in the journal Psychological Medicine, the substance does indeed have the potential to generate long-term mental improvements, although its immediate acute effects may mirror certain aspects of psychosis.
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