ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 571

In retrospect: The selfish gene

Photo credit: Terry Smith/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty

By Matt Ridley

Books about science tend to fall into two categories: those that explain it to lay people in the hope of cultivating a wide readership, and those that try to persuade fellow scientists to support a new theory, usually with equations. Books that achieve both — changing science and reaching the public — are rare. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was one. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is another. From the moment of its publication 40 years ago, it has been a sparkling best-seller and a scientific game-changer.

The gene-centred view of evolution that Dawkins championed and crystallized is now central both to evolutionary theorizing and to lay commentaries on natural history such as wildlife documentaries. A bird or a bee risks its life and health to bring its offspring into the world not to help itself, and certainly not to help its species — the prevailing, lazy thinking of the 1960s, even among luminaries of evolution such as Julian Huxley and Konrad Lorenz — but (unconsciously) so that its genes go on. Genes that cause birds and bees to breed survive at the expense of other genes. No other explanation makes sense, although some insist that there are other ways to tell the story (see K. Laland et al. Nature 514, 161–164; 2014).

What stood out was Dawkins’s radical insistence that the digital information in a gene is effectively immortal and must be the primary unit of selection. No other unit shows such persistence — not chromosomes, not individuals, not groups and not species. These are ephemeral vehicles for genes, just as rowing boats are vehicles for the talents of rowers (his analogy).

As an example of how the book changed science as well as explained it, a throwaway remark by Dawkins led to an entirely new theory in genomics. In the third chapter, he raised the then-new conundrum of excess DNA. It was dawning on molecular biologists that humans possessed 30–50 times more DNA than they needed for protein-coding genes; some species, such as lungfish, had even more. About the usefulness of this “apparently surplus DNA”, Dawkins wrote that “from the point of view of the selfish genes themselves there is no paradox. The true ‘purpose’ of DNA is to survive, no more and no less. The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Why Bernie Sanders doesn’t participate in organized religion

Photo credit: Mark Kauzlarich/Reuters

By Frances Stead Sellers and John Wagner

Growing up, Bernie Sanders followed the path of many young American Jews. He went to Hebrew school, was bar mitzvahed and traveled to Israel to work on a kibbutz.

But as an adult, Sanders drifted away from Jewish customs. And as his bid for the White House gains momentum, he has the chance to make history. Not just as the first Jewish president — but as one of the few modern presidents to present himself as not religious.

“I am not actively involved with organized religion,” Sanders said in a recent interview.

Sanders said he believes in God, though not necessarily in a traditional manner.

“I think everyone believes in God in their own ways,” he said. “To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Peter Boghossian accused of hate speech for correctly defining “faith”

Photo credit: Jerry Coyne/Oxford English Dictionary

By Jerry Coyne

I’m not quite sure who “James Bishop” is, as I hadn’t heard of him previously, but he writes at the website Historical Jesus Studies, and the header of his public Facebook page is strange. Has anyone else described their official position as “apologist”?

What brought Bishop to my attention was his bizarre article called “Answering Peter Boghosssian—atheist hate & the definition of faith.” And I want to say a few words about it because, although the piece is abysmally written, it appears to support a criticism leveled at many atheists, and at me in particular: namely, our conception of the nature of “faith” is completely off the rails. Moreover, Bishop goes farther, saying that those who use the classical conception of faith are promoting hate speech.

I’ve been told by some believers, especially after Faith versus Fact came out, that religious “faith” does not mean “belief in the absence of evidence”, or “pretending to believe something”, but is much more than that. What the “much more” constitutes is often unspecified, but Bishop appears to tout something called “evidence-based faith”. That apparently means “religious belief based on evidence”. In other words, it’s like science. In fact, Bishop argues that there’s no substantive difference between the nature of scientific “belief” (I don’t like to use that term for science) and religious belief.

The good thing about Bishop’s admission is that, since he claims there’s evidence supporting his Christianity, we can now engage him in a debate about the nature and strength of that evidence—in other words, a scientific debate. He also clarifies, as have some other Christians, that belief really is about evidence—that religion is more than just communality, fellowship, values, and morality, but, to be meaningful, must at bottom rest on verifiable epistemic claims.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

The black hole death problem

This episode is brought to you by Squarespace: ‪http://www.squarespace.com/physicsgirl

Black holes are not as black as we once thought. They are theorized to die a slow death by evaporation, emitting energy known as Hawking radiation. But the mechanism for evaporation is not well understood. Then again, no one has ever even directly detected a black hole.

‪http://physicsgirl.org/

‪http://twitter.com/thephysisgirl

‪http://facebook.com/thephysicsgirl

‪http://instagram.com/thephysicsgirl

Created by: Dianna Cowern

Animator: Kyle Norby

Researcher: Sophia Chen

Photos/Videos:

NASA

ESA (Cosmic Microwave Background)

clker.com (stock graphics)

Shutterstock.com (puddle)

Music:

APM –

“DNA Orbital Shift”

“The Bumbling Professor”

“Wellness and Science”

YouTube –

“On the Bach”

With Apple Sound effects

Her Father Shot Her in the Head, as an ‘Honor Killing’

Photo credit: HBO

By Nicholas Kristof

Whether it wins or not, the Oscar nominee with the greatest impact — saving lives of perhaps thousands of girls — may be one you’ve never heard of.

It stars not Leonardo DiCaprio but a real-life 19-year-old Pakistani woman named Saba Qaiser. Her odyssey began when she fell in love against her family’s wishes and ran off to marry her boyfriend. Hours after the marriage, her father and uncle sweet-talked her into their car and took her to a spot along a riverbank to murder her for her defiance — an “honor killing.”

First they beat Saba, then her uncle held her as her own father pointed a pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. Blood spewed, Saba collapsed and her father and uncle packed her body into a large sack and threw it into the river to sink. They then drove away, thinking they had restored the family’s good name.

Incredibly, Saba was unconscious but alive. She had jerked her head as the gun went off, and the bullet tore through the left side of her face but didn’t kill her. The river water revived her, and she clawed her way out of the sack and crawled onto land. She staggered toward a gasoline station, and someone called for help.

About every 90 minutes, an honor killing unfolds somewhere in the world, usually in a Muslim country. Pakistan alone has more than 1,000 a year, and the killers often go unpunished.

Watching the documentary about Saba, “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness,” I kept thinking that just as in the 19th century the central moral challenge for the world was slavery, and in the 20th century it was totalitarianism, in this century the foremost moral issue is the abuse and oppression that is the lot of so many women and girls around the world.

I don’t know whether “A Girl in the River” will win an Oscar in its category, short subject documentary, but it is already making a difference. Citing the film, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan has promised to change the country’s laws so as to crack down on honor killings.

Saba’s story underscores how the existing law lets people literally get away with murder when honor is the excuse. After doctors saved Saba’s life — as police officers guarded the door so her father didn’t return to finish the job — she was determined to prosecute her father and uncle.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

The G.O.P.’s Holy War

Photo credit: Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images

By Frank Bruni

IN the final, furious days of campaigning here, it was sometimes hard to tell whether this state’s Republicans were poised to vote for a president or a preacher, a commander or a crusader.

The references to religion were expansive. The talk of it was excessive. A few candidates didn’t just profess the supposed purity of their own faith. They questioned rivals’ piety, with Ted Cruz inevitably leading the way.

A rally of his devolved into an inquisition of Donald Trump. Speakers mocked Trump’s occasional claims of devout Christianity. Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, pointedly recalled Trump’s admission last summer that he never really does penance.

Cruz, in contrast, “probably gets up every morning and asks God for forgiveness at least a couple of times, even before breakfast,” Perry told the audience.

The evangelist or the apostate: That’s how the choice was framed. And it underscored the extent to which the Iowa caucuses have turned into an unsettling holy war.

Religion routinely plays a prominent part in political campaigns, especially on the Republican side, and always has an outsize role in Iowa, where evangelical Christians make up an especially large fraction of the Republican electorate.

But there was a particular edge to the discussion this time around. It reflected Trump’s surprising strength among evangelicals and his adversaries’ obvious befuddlement and consternation about that.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

First Case of U.S. Transmission in Ongoing Zika Outbreak Announced in Texas

Although more than 40 cases of Zika virus have been carried to the U.S. by unwitting travelers, today officials in Dallas County, Texas, announced the country’s first case of local transmission in the ongoing outbreak.

The patient acquired the virus through sexual transmission, the Dallas County Health and Human Services department said after receiving confirmation of the infection from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The newly infected individual had sex with a person who had acquired Zika virus while traveling outside of the U.S., it said.

Prior to this incident there had been one other documented case of apparent transmission of the mosquito-borne Zika virus via sexual contact in 2008 from Colorado State University biologist Brian Foy to his wife. Foy, who specializes in insect-borne diseases, contracted the virus in rural Senegal and a few days after he became ill his wife (who did not go on the trip) also became symptomatic with the disease.

Public health officials are advising individuals infected with Zika virus to use protection such as condoms to block potential disease transmission. The virus is believed to clear from the blood in about a week but there is no available data about how long it would take for it to clear from sexual fluids. “Men who are diagnosed can now be followed over time to answer this question,” says Scott Weaver, an expert on mosquito-borne viral diseases at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, via e-mail.

Although the mosquitoes that are biologically capable of transmitting Zika virus are present in Texas there are currently no reports of the virus being transmitted by the mosquitoes in Dallas County or anywhere else in the U.S.

Shark Caught On Camera Devouring Fellow Shark

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Guardian Wires/YouTube

Word of advice: Be careful who you’re roommates with. It can be a shark-eats-shark world out there, a saying that proved painfully true for an unfortunate 5-year-old male shark who was eaten by his 8-year-old female tankmate last week.

Why It’s Wrong To Compare Zika To Ebola

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

Illustration of the zika virus. Zika by Shutterstock

A committee of the World Health Organisation has declared the Zika virus a global public health emergency. This designation gives the WHO and member states the ability to recommend limits on travel to prevent the potential spread of disease and to call for emergency measures and resources to combat an outbreak.

British Pilot Shot By Elephant Poachers In Tanzania

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Roger Gower was killed as he tracked poachers in Tanzania. Tropic Air Kenya

The war against wildlife crime has taken another victim. While tracking elephant poachers from a helicopter over a game reserve in Tanzania, British pilot Roger Gower was shot by the criminals. He managed to fly the helicopter down into a tree, allowing his colleague and friend to jump out, before crashing the vehicle into the ground and succumbing to his injuries. Gower had been flying anti-poaching operations over the Maswa Game Reserve for the Friedkin Conservation Fund.