ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 606
December 22, 2015
Can Chicken Soup Really Cure Body And Soul?
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Just like grandpa used to make. Soup by Shutterstock
Chicken noodle soup is regarded as a therapeutic dish in several cultures, including Jewish-American and Chinese communities where traditional medicine is practised.
Although researchers have not been able to determine the cause of the alleged positive effects of chicken soup, several studies have confirmed that it helps to unblock congested noses and throats.
5 physics experiments for the holidays!
These 5 holiday-themed physics experiments will keep you and your family busy with science during the winter holidays! All experiments involve materials found around the house. Parental supervision advised .
Flame Eraser – put out a candle by pouring CO2 over the flame! Easy-to-do experiment, and CO2 is made from household ingredients: Baking soda and vinegar. Materials: cups, baking soda, vinegar, candles, matches
Resonant Straws – discover the property of resonance in a straw by creating a home-made kazoo out of nothing but a straw! Materials: straws, scissors
O’ Tinsel Tree – play with static electricity using holiday balloons and tinsel. Materials: balloon, tinsel, confetti
12 Days of Tape – more fun with static electricity, this time using just tape. Sticking tape to various surfaces (including itself!) and then ripping it off results in some fun static electricity experiments. Materials: Tape!
Leidenfrost-y Effect – this simple experiment shows an unusual property of water when it is dropped on a very hot surface. This experiment should involve parent supervision. Materials: pan, stove, water
Host/writer/editor: Dianna Cowern
http://physicsgirl.org/
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Thanks to the Dawsons for letting me film in their home (during their ugly sweater party. I came dressed for the occasion.)
Music: APM
SpaceX Successfully Lands Reusable Rocket
After two previous failed attempts, SpaceX has finally managed to land one of its 15-storey tall Falcon 9 rocket boosters back on earth. Watch the video below of the launch and landing (and a bit of SpaceX staff cheering).
Tardigrades Turn To Glass When Dried Out
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Tardigrades are tiny creatures capable of surviving almost anything. Now we're learning how they combat one of their fiercest enemies - loss of water. Darron Birgenheier via Wikimedia Commons CC BY 2.0
Tardigrades, also known as water bears, are the ultimate survivors. They can handle everything from the vacuum of space to 600 times the normal atmospheric pressure. And new research is revealing how they manage one of their party tricks, turning to glass when there is not enough water to maintain normal life processes.
Scientists Discover “Intelligence” Genes That Code For Cognitive Ability
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A network of genes is shown to strongly influence neurological development. naddi/Shutterstock
Cognitive ability, such as decision-making skills, varies wildly from person to person, and although it is acknowledged that both genes and the environment play a role in this variation, linking specific genes to healthy cognitive abilities has proven incredibly difficult. However, a new study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience reveals that a genetic network within part of the brain may indeed be the genes researchers have been looking for.
Australian Government Gives Approval To Expand Coal Port Near The Great Barrier Reef
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The location of the mine and and what will become one of the world's largest coal ports at Abbot Point, Queensland. Tom Jefferson/Greenpeace
The Australian government has just given the approval for the expansion of a controversial port in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef. When built, it’s expected that up to 120 million tonnes (132 million tons) of coal a year will pass through the port, and through the world’s largest coral reef system.
Northern Spotted Owls Are Losing To Owl Invaders
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Northern spotted owl. Hollingsworth/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Despite extensive recovery efforts, northern spotted owls in the northwestern U.S. are declining. Fast. According to a new Condor study, their populations have dropped by as much as 77 percent in parts of their range in just the last few years. What’s surprising is their biggest threat: not climate change or habitat loss, but other owls.
“Not Proved and Not Provable”
I have just weighed my copy of William A. Williams’s The Evolution of Man Scientifically Disproved (1925) on the postal scale in the NCSE office, and it weighs 6.7 ounces. For such a slight volume, it is awfully ambitious. According to the title page, it is designed “(1) As an up-to-date text book, and a companion to all other text books on evolution; and (2) As an antidote to books in libraries teaching evolution, infidelity[,] and atheism; and (3) As an aid to all students, parents, teachers, ministers, lawyers, doctors, and all other lovers of the truth.” The book packs a lot of quotations and misquotations from various scientific authorities into chapter 28, “Scientists Condemn Evolution.” As it happens, I have already blogged here at the Science League of America about a number of them: Lionel S. Beale, Albert Fleischmann (misspelled “Fleishman” by Williams), St. George Mivart (misspelled “Mivert” by Williams), Ernst Haeckel, Nathaniel S. Shaler (although Williams didn’t misattribute his words to Darwin), and Oscar Fraas (misspelled “Traas” by Williams). And now it’s time for the quotation from, as the slipshod Williams might have called him, “Homas Tenry Tuxley” (above).
Williams writes, “Prof. Huxley, said that evolution is ‘not proved and not provable.’” While supplying a superfluous comma, he fails to supply a reference. Refreshingly, and uncharacteristically for a creationist author of his era, Williams acknowledges taking these “testimonies” from earlier books: namely, Luther Townsend’s Collapse of Evolution (1905), Alfred W. McCann’s God—Or Gorilla (1922), and Philip Mauro’s Evolution at the Bar (1922). But none of these contains the “not proved and not provable” passage. Williams may have found it in the writings of the self-educated geologist George McCready Price, although he doesn’t mention Price at all in his book. Price used the passage as early as 1906, in his Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory, where he quotes Huxley as saying, “In the present condition of our knowledge and of our methods (sic) one verdict—‘not proven and not provable’—must be recorded against all grand hypotheses of the paleontologist respecting the general succession of life on the globe” (the interpolation is Price’s). With regard to whether Huxley used “proven” or “proved,” Price is right and Williams is wrong.
But was Huxley, famously dubbed Darwin’s bulldog, really saying that evolution is “not proven and not provable”? Let’s take a look at the evidence. Williams and Price are quoting from Huxley’s “Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life” (1862), which was the annual address to the Geological Society. (The society’s president, Leonard Horner, was both abroad and infirm, so he asked Huxley to speak instead.) In it, Huxley proposed to inquire “into the nature and value of the present results of paleontological investigation,” a particularly important inquiry, he explained, in light of “the late multitudinous discussions in which palaeontology is implicated.” (Darwin is not mentioned in the address, but it’s hard to believe that Huxley didn’t have him in mind.) While acknowledging the value of the results of contemporary paleontology, Huxley expressed concern about two assumptions on which he thought that they depended, namely “that the commencement of the geological record is coeval with the commencement of life on the globe … [and] that geological contemporaneity is the same thing as chronological synchrony.”
The second of these assumptions is relevant to the passage quoted by Williams and Price. Huxley is worried that paleontologists are assuming that the Devonian fossils here are necessarily earlier than the Carboniferous fossils there and later than the Silurian fossils elsewhere. But, he says, “For anything that geology or paleontology are able to show to the contrary, a Devonian fauna and flora in the British Islands may have been contemporaneous with Silurian life in North America, and with a Carboniferous fauna and flora in Africa.” “It may be so; it may be otherwise,” Huxley adds. “In the present condition of our knowledge and of our methods, one verdict—‘not proven, and not proveable’—must be recorded against all the grand hypotheses of the palaeontologist respecting the general succession of life on the globe. The order and nature of terrestrial life, as a whole, are open questions. Geology at present provides us with most valuable topographical records, but she has not the means of working them into a universal history.” (Note that Huxley wrote “proveable,” with a surplus e; Price silently corrected him.)
You can see immediately, I trust, why Williams is wrong to describe Huxley as characterizing evolution as “not proved and not provable.” Assuming, arguendo, that Huxley is right in identifying a problem for paleontology here, it is a problem independent of evolution. Whether you suppose that all species—or “kinds,” if you want—of fauna and flora were separately created in a six-day period about six thousand years ago, or you suppose that they were separately created seriatim over billions of years, or you suppose that they descended with modification from a shared ancestry over billions of years, you are still faced with the problem that the geological evidence is incapable of revealing the actual chronological relationships among the fossils. All hypotheses about “the general succession of life” are not proven and not provable, so the geological evidence provides neither evidence for nor evidence against evolution or any supposed alternative to it. (Again, that’s assuming, arguendo, that Huxley is right about the problem.) Unlike Williams, Price recognizes that Huxley is not talking about evolution here, but he nevertheless errs in thinking that Huxley’s problem is a problem distinctive to evolution rather than paleontology.
Of course, that’s not the only problem with the creationist use of the passage from Huxley. There’s also anachronism. The statement of the problem is conspicuously conditioned on “the present condition of our knowledge and of our methods,” and Huxley proceeds to suggest that a universal history of life is not unattainable. The key is biology. He looks forward to the day “when the maze of the world’s past history, through which the pure geologist and the pure palaeontologist find no guidance, will be securely threaded by the clue furnished by the naturalist.” And the clue is “the law of evolution of organic forms.” (No wonder that Darwin was largely pleased with Huxley’s lecture.) Certainly evolutionary considerations proved to play a large role in reconstructing the history of life on the planet, although the absolute chronology provided by radiometric dating provides a definitive refutation of the supposed problem posed by Huxley in his 1862 address. (For a quick primer on geological dating, see Stephanie Keep’s series “How Old is That Fossil in the Window?” part 1, part 2, and part 3.) Alas, Huxley died in 1895, almost a decade before Ernest Rutherford attempted the first radiometric dating of a rock sample.
Tool-Using Parrots Use Pebbles to Grind Seashells
Greater vasa parrot. Credit: Frank Wouters
By Ed Yong
In the spring of 2013, Megan Lambert noticed the greater vasa parrots of Lincolnshire Wildlife Park doing something odd. They looked like they were licking the cockle shells that lined the floor of their outdoor enclosure. But when Lambert looked closer, she noticed that they were holding a pebble or date pit in their beaks, and rubbing these against the shells.
They were using tools.
Several birds can use tools. Woodpecker finches prise grubs from wood with twigs, New Caledonian crows do the same, Egyptian vultures drop rocks onto eggs to crack them open, and rooks can raise the water level of a pitcher by dropping stones into it, Aesop-style. But among the 300 species of parrot, tool use is relatively rare. Black palm cockatoos use rocks to drum on tree trunks, while hyacinth macaws use sticks to prise open nuts. The kea, a delightfully mischievous New Zealand parrot, can use and make tools in the lab, but no one knows if they do so naturally.
Thanks to Lambert’s observations, the greater vasa parrot joins this exclusive club. Native to Madagascar, the greater vasa is a bit of a goth parrot, eschewing the vibrant hues of its relatives in favour of black and dark grey plumage. They’re sociable and inquisitive, and will often explore and manipulate objects in captivity; while watching them, Lambert saw one thread a twig through the open links of a chain. That seemed like play. By contrast, the thing with the seashells was probably more purposeful.
Seashells are made of calcium carbonate, and birds need calcium to build the shells of their eggs. Lambert thinks that the vasas were using the pebbles and pits to grind down the cockles and liberate the calcium within them. Other egg-laying animals, including sandwich terns and gopher tortoises, have been seen eating seashells, presumably for the same reason. But the vasas are the only ones known to process the shells. “That’s particularly interesting because humans are the only other animals known to use tools for grinding,” says Lambert.
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Erdogan’s Assault on Education: The Closure of Secular Schools
Photo Credit: MURAD SEZER / REUTERS
By Xanthe Ackerman and Ekin Calisar
In Turkey, where there has been a rise in Islamic religiosity, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, founder of the pro-Islamist Development and Justice Party (AKP), is converting some public schools into seminaries called imam–hatips (or traditional training schools for Sunni Muslim clergy) in an effort to raise a generation of “religious youth.”
Students who perform poorly on entrance exams for secondary school are shunted into imam–hatips where they study the Koran for up to 13 hours a week and take courses on the life of the Prophet Muhammad and Arabic. Erdogan has boasted that during his tenure as president, enrollment in these schools soared from 63,000 to over one million. The number of imam–hatips increased by 73 percent between 2010 and 2014 and 13 percent of Turkish students now study at such schools.
Outraged, dozens of Turkish parents in Istanbul created an advocacy group called Hands Off My School to fight against Erdogan’s education policy. In June of 2014, when the government tried to convert the local middle school to an imam–hatip, the group circulated a petition that quickly collected 13,000 signatures from other parents. A young lawyer from the neighborhood, Yasemin Zeytinoglu, even filed an emergency suspension with the Istanbul Administrative Court to halt the conversion.
Government officials eventually dropped the order to convert the school, giving the parents a short-lived victory. But the school stopped taking new students and after the current classes graduate, it will reopen as an extracurricular center. Left with no choice but to enroll their children in a different middle school, some parents told us that they felt the government was punishing them for protesting.
In September, at the start of the 2014 school year, the members of Hands Off learned that 40,000 children were registered at imam–hatips without parental permission, including the grandson of Turkey’s Chief Rabbi, Ishak Haleva. Hands Off, along with the tens of thousands of people from the secular teachers’ union and from religious minority groups, rallied forcefully in response. During one nationwide demonstration in February, the government responded by locking students inside their schools and calling the police to fire water cannons on protestors.
In Gongoren, a working class borough of Istanbul where three middle schools were recently converted to imam–hatips, 50 men and women met over the summer with Zeytinoglu. She told her audience, “The decision to change the school wasn’t legal. You were never asked if you wanted it to change.” Zeytinoglu has five cases in front of the court now, each for a different school. She argued that in Gongoren, officials did not adequately consult parents and gave no notice before converting the school. Further, there was insufficient demand for religious education in the neighborhood given that it already had seven other imam–hatips.
One parent, Gulay Kacar, a stout woman who wore a paisley headscarf, has a son in the fifth grade at Mehmet Akif Middle School, now an imam–hatip. To avoid religious education, which she said will deprive her son of science classes, she will have to send him to a school in another neighborhood where, “there is so much violence, people are stabbing each other.” She told the parents, “They put pressure on us. They force our kids to have the education that they want.”
Kacar, along with Nurcan Aybalik, whose child was also a student at the now-converted school, set up a signature drive in the Kale Outlet Mall in the city center. Shortly after, five clean-shaven youths approached them and swore at the two women, telling them that they had loosened their headscarves and had made prostitutes of themselves by questioning Islam. “Islam is coming and we will make you observe our laws,” they said, according to both Kacar and Aybalik.
Extremist views are on the rise in Turkey. Twenty percent of Turks support responding to an insult against Islam with violence, up almost 8 percent from last year, according to the Turkish polling firm Metropoll. A Pew Research Center poll released last month reported that eight percent of Turkish people have a favorable opinion of ISIS and 19 percent are “undecided.”
“Because of the mindset of religious education, we are being polarized,” said Aybalik. Erdogan and the AKP have fought hard to hold onto their tenuous majority in parliament, and religious values are a cornerstone of their message to their Sunni Muslim base. Meanwhile, political opponents warn that religious educational policies will polarize the citizenry. Minority groups, especially Alevi–Muslims, who follow a blend of Shia and syncretic beliefs and make up as much as 25 percent of the Turkish population, are increasingly alienated.
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