ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 568
February 5, 2016
Ravens might possess a Theory of Mind, say scientists
Photo credit: Jana Mueller
By Molly Jackson
From ancient Greek mythology to Native American folklore, ravens tend to have the same role: the clever tricksters you don’t want to cross. Corvus corax and its relatives were even spies for Apollo, which didn’t end well for his unfaithful lover Coronis, and served as the eyes and ears of Norse god Odin.
Ravens do spy on each other, it turns out, and they can infer when other birds are snooping on them. New findings, released Tuesday in a study in Nature Communications, highlight just how sophisticated – and human-like – ravens’ cognitive abilities are.
“What really is the feature that’s unique and special about human cognition?” asks co-author Cameron Buckner, a philosopher at the University of Houston.
Something helped propel us to learn language, built political institutions, develop arts and culture. Many biologists and philosophers think it’s our ability to see things through another person’s eyes, and to think about what they might be thinking, skills referred to as “Theory of Mind.”
But ravens do have basic Theory of Mind, the authors suggest, after cracking one of the biggest puzzles in animal cognition debates: without speech, how can we tell what a bird is thinking?
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UN calls on Ireland to recognise needs of non-Christian children in the education system
Photo credit: Philip Hollis
By National Secular Society
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has criticised Ireland in its periodic review, urging the country to protect the rights of non-religious and non-Christian children and families.
Strong criticism was made of the overwhelming religious control of Ireland’s schools, and the Committee said that Ireland must improve access to non-religious schools. 97% of Irish primary schools are denominational schools.
It said Ireland must “Expeditiously undertake concrete measures to significantly increase the availability of non-denominational or multidenominational schools and to amend the existing legislative framework to eliminate discrimination in school admissions, including the Equal Status Act”.
The report concluded that “Schools continuing to practise discriminatory admissions policies on the basis of the child’s religion” and the Committee said it remained “concerned at the very small number of non-denominational schools.”
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Sick and Tired of ‘God Bless America’
Photo credit: Credit Alec Soth/Magnum Photos
By Susan Jacoby
The population of nonreligious Americans — including atheists, agnostics and those who call themselves “nothing in particular” — stands at an all-time high this election year. Americans who say religion is not important in their lives and who do not belong to a religious group, according to the Pew Research Center, have risen in numbers from an estimated 21 million in 2008 to more than 36 million now.
Despite the extraordinary swiftness and magnitude of this shift, our political campaigns are still conducted as if all potential voters were among the faithful. The presumption is that candidates have everything to gain and nothing to lose by continuing their obsequious attitude toward orthodox religion and ignoring the growing population of those who make up a more secular America.
Ted Cruz won in Iowa by expanding Republican voter turnout among the evangelical base. Donald J. Trump placed second after promising “to protect Christians” from enemies foreign and domestic. The third-place finisher Marco Rubio’s line “I don’t think you can go to church too often” might well have been the campaign mantra. Mr. Rubio was first christened a Roman Catholic, baptized again at the age of 8 into the Mormon Church, and now attends a Southern Baptist megachurch with his wife on Saturdays and Catholic Mass on Sundays.
Democrats are only a trifle more secular in their appeals. Hillary Clinton repeatedly refers to her Methodist upbringing, and even Bernie Sanders — a cultural Jew not known to belong to a synagogue — squirms when asked whether he believes in God. When Jimmy Kimmel posed the question, Mr. Sanders replied in a fog of words at odds with his usual blunt style: “I am who I am. And what I believe in and what my spirituality is about, is that we’re all in this together.” He once referred to a “belief in God” that requires him to follow the Golden Rule — a quote his supporters seem to trot out whenever someone suggests he’s an atheist or agnostic.
The question is not why nonreligious Americans vote for these candidates — there is no one on the ballot who full-throatedly endorses nonreligious humanism — but why candidates themselves ignore the growing group of secular voters.
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Gallup: New Hampshire the least-religious state
Photo credit: AP Photo
By Nick Gass
New Hampshire is now the least-religious state in the country, according to Gallup’s 2015 state-by-state-analysis released Thursday, five days before voters in both parties make their pick in the presidential primary.
Based on the percentage of those describing themselves as very religious, 20 percent in New Hampshire said they were, slightly lower than the 22 percent who described themselves as such in Vermont, the home state of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders.
Both Sanders and Hillary Clinton addressed religion and faith during Wednesday night’s town hall event in Derry, New Hampshire.
Sanders, who is Jewish, called religion “a guiding principle” in his life, remarking that “everybody practices religion in a different way.”
“To me, I would not be here tonight, I would not be running for president of the United States if I did not have very strong religious and spiritual feelings,” he explained.
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What We’re Reading
Ce n’est pas un football
Just a few choice reads this weekend because I know you’ll all be busy watching the Super Bowl L festivities. Wait, you don’t know what that is? It’s a football game—football, it turns out, is quite popular in the U.S. This is the last football game of the year and it’s being played right here in San Francisco. Well, technically, about an hour away in Santa Clara, but don’t let the organizers know that, since they’ve taken over much of downtown San Francisco with a Super Bowl “City.” Anyhoo, once that’s out of the way, we can get back to watching the Warriors play the most beautiful basketball ever. Or reading about science. Your call.
Ravens Know When They’re Being Watched, Washington Post, February 3, 2016 — New research demonstrates that ravens may possess a theory of mind—a finding that chips away at popular notions of human uniqueness, and contributes to our evolutionary and behavioral picture of what constitutes sentience.
Mystery Meat: Was it Really Woolly Mammoth on the Menu? ABC News, February 3, 2016 — Of interest to NCSE readers, new genetic analysis suggests that no one actually ate any giant ground sloths at the famed 1951 Explorer’s Club dinner, nor did they have mammoth. The sad truth of the matter: nobody ate any prehistoric animals at all, only poor sea turtles.
DNA Study of First Ancient African Genome Flawed, Researchers Report, The New York Times, February 4, 2016 — Carl Zimmer reports on a mistake in the first reconstruction of an ancient human from Africa, leading to a partial retraction. Is "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact" the great tragedy of science, as Huxley said? Or is it the great triumph of science that it can be self-correcting?
A New Paper Showing the Usefulness of the Kin-Selection Model, Why Evolution Is True, February 4, 2016 — In a guest post at Jerry Coyne's blog, Phil Ward of the University of California, Davis, describes and explains the significance of a new paper in PNAS arguing (in Ward's words) that "intragenomic conflict in honey bees indeed reveals itself in a way predicted by kin selection theory."
Butterflies Forty Million Years Before Butterflies, Phenomena: Not Exactly Rocket Science, February 4, 2016 — Ed Yong writes about fossil lacewings with wings uncannily similar to butterfly wings, complete with eyespots, and similar strawlike mouthparts. They just lived 40 million years before the first butterflies, and long before the first flowers.
Young Stars Grow Via Violent Interactions With Protoplanetary Disks
Photo credit:
This infrared image 950 light-years away has an unusual variable object that has the typical signature of a protostar. NASA/ESA/J. Muzerolle/E. Furlan/K. Flaherty/Z. Balog/R. Gutermuth
Stars are born in chaotic collapsing clouds, and astronomers have now found evidence that the tumultuous times don’t stop at birth, but continue throughout their infancy.
A new study indicates that young stars may undergo an intense and messy growth process, during which they steal mass from the surrounding protoplanetary disk. The research, published in Science Advances, suggests that the growth process is not steady but intermittent, with powerful and quick mass accretion events.
Defunding Planned Parenthood Led To A Huge Increase In Medicare Births In Texas
Photo credit:
Texas excluded all Planned Parenthood clinics from its Women's Health Program in January 2013. Ken Wolter/Shutterstock
State legislation excluding Planned Parenthood-affiliated clinics from access to Medicaid funding in Texas has resulted in a decrease in the level of birth control care received by low-income women attending these centers. This, in turn, has caused an increase in the number of babies born to poorer women who had sought these services.
Primary Mirror Of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Finally Completed
Photo credit:
A robotic arm was used to install each of the 18 segments. NASA/Chris Gunn
It is several years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, but there is finally light at the end of the tunnel for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The primary mirror of the giant space telescope is now complete – a significant step towards launching in 2018.
Children’s Books To Be Served Up With McDonald’s Happy Meals Instead Of Toys
Photo credit:
Stéfan/Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0
One of the joys of childhood was receiving a novelty-themed “Made in China” bit of plastic via a McDonald’s drive-through window. But in a bid to degrease their image, McDonalds branches in the United States are planning to give away books instead of toys.
Americans are ten times more likely to die from firearms than citizens of other developed countries
Gun deaths are a serious public health issue in the United States and the scope of the problem is often difficult to illustrate. A new study published in The American Journal of Medicine lays out the risk in concrete terms. When compared to 22 other high-income nations, Americans are ten times more likely to be killed by a gun than their counterparts in the developed world. Specifically, gun homicide rates are 25 times higher in the U.S. and, while the overall suicide rate is on par with other high-income nations, the U.S. gun suicide rate is eight times higher.
In order to help put America’s relationship with guns into perspective, researchers from the University of Nevada-Reno and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health analyzed mortality data gathered by the World Health Organization in 2010. Investigators found that despite having similar rates of nonlethal crimes as other high-income countries, the U.S. has much higher rates of lethal violence, mostly driven by extremely higher rates of gun-related homicides.
The study reveals some stark truths about living and dying in the United States. When compared to other high-income nations, as an American you are:
• Seven times more likely to be violently killed
• Twenty-five times more likely to be violently killed with a gun
• Six times more likely to be accidentally killed with a gun
• Eight times more likely to commit suicide using a gun
• Ten times more likely to die from a firearm death overall
Homicide is the second leading cause of death for Americans 15 to 24 years of age, and the third leading cause of death among those 25 to 34 years of age.
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