ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 621
December 5, 2015
Spectacular New Pluto Images Show Closest-Ever View Of The Dwarf Planet
Photo credit:
New Horizons/NASA
On Friday, NASA released the first in a series of Pluto close-ups. These breathtaking views could be the best we ever see. The images were taken 15 minutes after closest approach from an altitude of 17,000 kilometers (10,000 miles) above the surface. The high-resolution photos feature details as small as half a city block.
Six Things Americans Should Know About Mass Shootings
Photo credit:
Police secure the area near a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, December 2 2015. Mario Anzuoni/REUTERS
America has experienced yet another mass shooting.
As a criminologist, I have reviewed recent research in hopes of debunking some of the common misconceptions I hear creeping into discussions that spring up whenever a mass shooting occurs.
#1: More Guns Don’t Make You Safer
A study I conducted on mass shootings indicated that this phenomenon is not limited to the United States.
Forget About Designer Babies – Gene Editing Won’t Work On Complex Traits Like Intelligence
Photo credit:
Image of babies via www.shutterstock.com.
This week, scientists gathered in Washington, DC for the International Summit on Human Gene Editing to discuss a technology called CRISPR-CAS9, which can insert, remove and change the DNA of basically any organism.
Total Recall Sounds Great, But Some Things Should Be Forgotten
Photo credit:
External enhancements of memory may soon go high-tech. *Nom & Malc, CC BY-NC-ND
Imagine never again forgetting where you parked your car, or that last item you had on your grocery list, or why you walked into this room anyway. If you trust media stories about research currently under way at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to build an implantable device to restore memory, you might not have to worry about these memory lapses in the future.
Can Solar Geoengineering Be Part Of Responsible Climate Policy?
Photo credit:
Volcanoes produce large amounts of a gas that interacts with air to produce sulfate aerosols, which act as tiny mirrors in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight – and heat. NASA
There are a number of ideas for how people might intentionally alter the planet’s climate system – an approach called geoengineering. One of the most frequently discussed ideas is solar geoengineering, blocking some of sun’s energy by, for example, injecting tiny particles called sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere. But solar geoengineeering remains a controversial method of addressing climate change.
And while much has been written about its potential benefits and its potential drawbacks, relatively little work has been done systematically evaluating those costs and benefits.
The Latest Bad News On Carbon Capture From Coal Power Plants: Higher Costs
Photo credit:
Renewable sources of energy are already more cost-competitive than coal-fired power plants with carbon capture. rpeschetz/flickr, CC BY
Coal powered much of the industrial revolution and continues to fuel economic growth in developing nations, including China and India.
The dark side of coal, however, is that it generates large quantities of the heat-trapping greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide (CO2), that lead to climate change. This CO2 pollution is in addition to other emissions from coal burning that lead to thousands of premature deaths per day around the world.
What Clues Does Your Dog’s Spit Hold For Human Mental Health?
Photo credit:
There goes some precious DNA…. Graeme Bird, CC BY-NC-ND
Dogs were the first animals people domesticated, long before the earliest human civilizations appeared. Today, tens of thousands of years later, dogs have an unusually close relationship with us. They share our homes and steal our hearts – and have even evolved to love us back. Sadly, they also suffer from many of the same difficult-to-treat psychiatric and neurological diseases we do.
December 4, 2015
What We’re Reading
Welcome back! I hope you had a wonderful holiday, and put into practice Josh Rosenau’s helpful advice if there was a monster at your Thanksgiving table. We’ve got a nice collection of articles for you this week, from tardigrades to koalas, and from Iraq to Miami to the halls of Congress. Enjoy!
The Young Iraqis Promoting Evolutionary Theory and Rational Thought to Save Iraq, Niqash, January 10, 2015 (but still timely) — Young Iraqis are working to save their country by, among other things, translating books about evolution and other sciences into Arabic. (Thanks to Salman Hameed for the link.)
The Koala in the Coal Mine, TakePart, November 30, 2015 — Koalas are outstandingly cute, but they're also outstandingly at risk from climate change, Todd Woody explains. (What about the drop bear, though?)
The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood, by David Montgomery, BioLogos, December 1, 2015 — Mark Harris of the University of Edinburgh contributes a thoughtful (if tardy) review of Montgomery’s book. It is interesting to compare his reaction to NCSE’s Steven Newton’s take (PDF) in RNCSE in 2013. A sample (PDF) from the book is available on NCSE’s website.
The Genome of the Tardigrade Hypsibius dujardini, bioRxiv preprint, December 1, 2015 — Contrary to a recent study (discussed in Tardigrades, World’s Toughest Animals, Borrowed a Sixth of Their DNA from Microbes), Georgios Koutsovoulos and his colleagues report that they “do not find support for massive horizontal gene transfer” in tardigrades. “The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
Steven Vogel, Biologist Who Studied How Things Move, Dies at 75, The New York Times, December 4, 2015 — Sad news of the death of a professor at Duke University who was the founder of comparative biomechanics, the author of Cat’s Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People, and Steve #63 of NCSE’s Project Steve.
Water as a Climate-Change Gut Punch in a City Defined by an Ocean, The New York Times, December 4, 2015 — An artist brings sea level rise and climate change to Miami in a troubling, but gorgeous, performance art piece.
Chief of House Science Panel Picks Battle Over Climate Paper, The New York Times, December 4, 2015 — The Gray Lady is now covering Rep. Lamar Smith’s (R–Texas) efforts to force scientists and government officials to turn over emails relating to a peer-reviewed paper published in Science. The paper definitively refutes climate change-deniers’ favorite (and already discredited) claim that global warming has been on “pause” for 17 years. Read my posts about Smith’s campaign here and the scientific community’s reaction here.
Tracking Dr. Traas, Part 1
Reminded, in a recent discussion with Jason Rosenhouse, of William A. Williams’s The Evolution of Man Scientifically Disproved (1925), a Scopes-era effort in using pseudomathematics to debunk evolution, I was skimming the book again. Chapter 28 is entitled “Scientists Condemn Evolution,” and it consists, predictably, of the usual assemblage of quotations and misquotations from various scientific authorities. 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, and Nathaniel S. Shaler (although at least his words aren’t misattributed to Darwin here). Of the remainder, most were familiar to me: Rudolf Virchow, William Dawson, James Orr, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Charles Bell (writing in 1833!). 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 who was Dr. Traas? Williams writes, “Dr. Traas, a famous palaeontologist, concludes: ‘The idea that mankind is descended from any simian species whatever, is certainly the most foolish ever put forth by a man writing on the history of man.’” (He then snarkily asks, “Does this apply to H. G. Wells?” The novelist’s The Outline of History was published in book form in 1920; unsurprisingly for a student of Thomas Henry Huxley, Wells devoted the first fifty pages or so to sketching the history of life.) Evidently so famous as not to require the use of a first name, Dr. Traas is not mentioned in Townsend, McCann, or Mauro’s books. He is mentioned, as “Dr. Traas,” in T. T. Martin’s Hell and the High Schools (1923), where “simian” is capitalized and the sentence is followed by, “It should be handed down to posterity as a new edition of the Memorial on Human Follies. No proof of this baroque theory can be given from discovered fossils” (emphasis in the original). But that isn’t of any help in identifying the famous paleontologist. And I wasn’t able to find Dr. Traas in the standard works of reference, such as the Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography (2008), or by trying a variety of clever on-line searches.
In the end, it was Theodore Graebner who showed the way. As I mentioned in “The Two Theodores,” Graebner (1876–1950) was a Lutheran theologian who spent the bulk of his career at the Lutheran Synod of Missouri’s Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. In his Evolution: An Investigation and a Criticism (1921)—which, as Ronald Numbers comments in The Creationists (1992), Graebner “erroneously regarded as ‘the first scientific work printed in America against the evolution theory’”—I found that Graebner quotes the three-sentence passage as quoted by Martin (with a few variations: Graebner inserts “(ape)” after “Simian,” refers to the “Memorial of” rather than the “Memorial on Human Follies,” and doesn’t emphasize the third sentence)—but attributes it to “Prof. Fraas, who devoted his long life to the study of fossil animals.” That’s Fraas with an F, not Traas with a T. Also importantly, Graebner indicates the provenance of the quote: from a book of essays by “[t]he Russo-French physiologist, M. Elie DeCyon, for many years professor in the Faculty of Sciences and in the Academie Medico-chirurgicale at the University of Petrograd.”
Elie de Cyon (1843–1912)—born Ilya Fadeyevich Tsion, also known as Elias von Cyon—indeed published such a book of essays: Dieu et Science (1910), translated into German as Gott und Wissenschaft (1912) but never, it seems, into English. Am I unduly cynical to suspect that none of the Scopes-era creationists examined the book? The earliest description of it in English that I could find was in the Literary Digest for September 9, 1911, in “The Religious World” section under the heading, “From Darwin Back to Faith” (above). There the three-sentence passage, attributed to Fraas, is provided as it appears in Martin’s book except the third sentence is not emphasized. By the time that the Bible Champion took notice, in its September/October issue of 1917, the same passage appears, attributed to Traas; it precedes, and is not connected with, a discussion of de Cyon’s views on evolution. The author of the Bible Champion’s article, entitled “Scientific Opinion Opposed to Evolution,” is none other than Luther Townsend, on whose authority it seems likely that Williams, Martin, and William Bell Riley (in Inspiration or Evolution [1926]) relied for “Traas.” In part 2, then, the task is to find, not Fraas, but Traas.
Spacetime is not pixelated – Holometer rules out first theory of space-time correlations
Our common sense and the laws of physics assume that space and time are continuous. The Holometer, an experiment based at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, challenges this assumption.
We know that energy on the atomic level, for instance, is not continuous and comes in small, indivisible amounts. The Holometer was built to test if space and time behave the same way.
In a new result 1 Search for space-time correlations from the Planck scale with the Fermilab Holometer released this week after a year of data-taking, the Holometer collaboration has announced that it has ruled out one theory of a pixelated universe to a high level of statistical significance.
If space and time were not continuous, everything would be pixelated, like a digital image.
When you zoom in far enough, you see that a digital image is not smooth, but made up of individual pixels. An image can only store as much data as the number of pixels allows. If the universe were similarly segmented, then there would be a limit to the amount of information space-time could contain.
The main theory the Holometer was built to test was posited by Craig Hogan, a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Chicago and the head of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics. The Holometer did not detect the amount of correlated holographic noise—quantum jitter—that this particular model of space-time predicts.
But as Hogan emphasizes, it’s just one theory, and with the Holometer, this team of scientists has proven that space-time can be probed at an unprecedented level.
To continue reading the entire article, click the name of the source below.
ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog
- ريتشارد دوكنز's profile
- 106 followers
