ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 652
October 29, 2015
Video Shows An Orca Throwing A Seal 80 Feet Into The Air
Photo credit:
Roll.Focus. Productions/YouTube
Ah, the ocean – so peaceful, so majestic... sometimes. This amazing video shows an orca punting a harbor seal 20 meters (80 feet) into the air with its tail fin.
The incredible footage was shot by Mike Walker, the owner of Roll Focus Productions, just off the coast of Victoria, British Columbia. The killer whale in question is a 20-year-old male known as T69C.
Russia Announces Plans To Send Humans Back To The Moon
Photo credit:
Shown is a European concept for a lunar base. ESA/Foster + Partners.
Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, has announced that it wants to land humans on the Moon by 2029 – six decades since the first men walked on the lunar surface. It follows news earlier this month that both Russia and ESA want to eventually colonize the Moon, by creating a permanent lunar base there.
Why Do Light Touches Make You Itchy?
Photo credit:
Itching can be either mechanical or chemical. Voyagerix/Shutterstock
When an insect lands on your skin, it causes a tickling sensation that gives you a strong urge to itch. This is known as a mechanical itch, as opposed to the other type of itch experienced by animals that is induced by chemicals. But while the pathway that leads to chemical itches has been studied, the one controlling the mechanical itch is a little less understood. Now researchers have found that there are in fact two separate pathways that transmit itching: one for chemical stimuli and one for mechanical.
A Historic NASA Lunar Rover Was Sold For Scrap In Alabama
Photo credit:
An artist’s impression of an early Local Scientific Survey Module (LSSM) from 1967. NASA
A historic NASA Moon rover is most likely found in a museum or, at least, heroically stranded on the lunar surface. However, a peculiar twist of fate led to one of NASA’s Moon rovers being found in an Alabama scrap yard.
After making requests through the Freedom of Information Act, a reporter at Motherboard discovered that a NASA space rover was sold for scrap metal to a junkyard in Alabama last year.
New Fossil Suggests We Had A Gibbon-Like Early Ancestor
Photo credit:
Reconstruction of the skull and representation of Pliobates cataloniae. Marta Palmero/Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont
Humans and other great apes diverged from smaller, "lesser" apes like gibbons about 17 million years ago based on molecular data. It’s thought that our common ancestor was great ape-like, and that gibbons are a specialized, dwarfed lineage that evolved from big-bodied apes. However, a new fossil small-bodied ape discovered in Spain – and dating back just 11.6 million years – features characteristics of both groups. They named it Pliobates cataloniae.
NASA Reveals The Origin Of Lunar Amino Acids Collected In Apollo Missions
Photo credit:
Astronaut Alan L. Bean Samples The Ocean of Storms by NASA via Flickr. CC-BY 2.0
When the Apollo missions brought back lunar samples, scientists were surprised to find traces of organic matter in the form of amino acids. The origin of these molecules was shrouded in mystery, and no explanation had enough evidence to back it up. Over 40 years later, a team of NASA-funded scientists has identified that most of those amino acids were due to contamination from Earth.
October 28, 2015
Evolution for John Doe, Part 1
Photograph courtesy of Michael Barton’s The Dispersal of Darwin blog, https://thedispersalofdarwin.wordpres....
Over the Labor Day weekend, I was visiting a used bookstore in Jackson, California, which happened to be having a sale. The sale induced me to buy a copy of Henshaw Ward’s popular exposition of evolution Evolution for John Doe (1925). John Doe, of course, is a common placeholder name in legal documents in the United States: Ward might have aimed his book at Joe Bloggs or John Q. Public or Joe Sixpack. But who was Henshaw Ward? According to the brief obituary in The New York Times for October 9, 1935, Charles Henshaw Ward was born in Norfolk, Nebraska, in 1872. After attending Pomona College and Yale University, where he earned a master’s degree in 1899, Ward taught English in the Thacher School in Ojai, California, and then at the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, from 1903 to 1922. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley after leaving the Taft School, according to the obituary; it’s not clear to me in what capacity, although I found evidence that he was teaching a summer session class to English teachers in 1924. He died in 1935.
In keeping with his profession, Ward published a number of books on English composition and edited a 1916 edition of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and a 1919 edition of Edmund Burke’s speech on conciliation with America. In the 1920s, though, he also ventured into popular science, editing Exploring Nature (1923) and writing Evolution for John Doe (1925), later reissued under the less interesting title Evolution for Everybody (1925); Exploring the Universe (1927); and Charles Darwin: The Man and His Warfare (1927), later reissued under the less combative title Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution (1943). He also offered two pleas for critical thinking: Thobbing (1926) and Builders of Delusion (1931). The former’s unusual title comes from a verb that he coined specially: “If you dearly love a theory, you are thobbing. If you are curious about it, you are not thobbing...A man can believe in ghosts without thobbing, or he may be a mighty thobber when he despises some alleged evidence about ghosts. All depends on whether he lets himself wish that evidence would prove this or that.”
Anyhow, in Evolution for John Doe, Ward explains that for twenty years he sought a popular treatment on evolution to recommend to “young men [not as sexist as it seems: the Taft School wasn’t co-ed until 1971] who were curious to read about evolution,” but without success. “Apparently biologists know so much of the details that they can not [sic] write a brief account of the whole theory.” In the year before his book’s publication, “I grew so desperate as to read a number of the standard works of evolution,” and Evolution for John Doe represents his attempt to present a digest of them, “as if I were telling a friend about the knowledge that is so new and imperfect in my mind.” He was not alone in seeing the need for a popular treatment of evolution. As the historian Constance Areson Clark notes in her God—or Gorilla (2008), which takes its title from a creationist book of the era (see “The Real McCann”), “Books on evolution for a lay audience were so numerous that for several weeks during the summer of the Scopes trial, Brentano’s Bookstore in New York devoted an entire window display to them.”
I’ve read a lot of the Scopes-era popular books on evolution, although not systematically, and Evolution for John Doe strikes me as remarkable in part on account of its first chapter, “What John Doe Thinks about Evolution,” in which Ward lists what he takes to be common misconceptions about evolution:
John Doe thinks that evolution is “the doctrine that man is descended from monkeys” …
John Doe thinks that evolution explains the origin of life.
John Doe thinks that evolution has something to do with “progress”—that it announces some creed of an onward and upward movement toward perfection.
To the mind of John Doe, there is something mystical and awesome about “Evolution,” especially if it is printed with a large E.
John Doe guesses that evolution is true, but he rather wishes it were not.
John Doe suspects from head-lines in his newspaper that evolution is a debatable theory, that it is being overthrown every six months, and that it may be discarded before long.
To the common horse-sense of John Doe evolution appears probable. “But,” he says, “it is not to be seen at work here and now, and so it looks dubious to me.”
Mr. Doe supposes that evolution is extremely difficult, so that he has small chance of ever finding out about it.
(All these sentences appear verbatim in the book, but not in a bulleted list as above.) Ward not only lists these misconceptions, but also explains how Evolution for John Doe attempts to defuse them. I intend to work through Ward’s list, starting in part 2.
Subway Joins Other Fast-Food Giants to Cut Back on Antibiotics
Last week Subway, the world’s biggest fast food chain, became the latest in the industry to announce it was adopting a stronger antibiotic-free policy—serving chicken and turkey raised without medicines intended to fight bacterial infections starting next year. The announcement came shortly before a petition with hundreds of thousands of signatures was about to be delivered to Subway’s headquarters in Connecticut calling for an end to antibiotic use in the sandwich maker’s food supply chain. More and more restaurant chains and food production companies are taking action against antibiotic overuse, in large part due to public demand. Although the trend started with Chipotle and Panera Bread, fast-food giants such as McDonald’s and Chik-fil-A are also making the switch. As more large food chains commit to antibiotic-free policies, suppliers will be forced to adopt new practices or lose vital sales.
Overusing antibiotics can lead to bacteria that are resistant to treatment. Limiting antibiotic use to when it is strictly necessary—in humans as well as in animals—is vital in order to ensure their continued efficacy. That’s why advocacy groups, wielding massive petitions, had been calling for Subway to stop using meat from suppliers that raised their animals with routine antibiotics and rely instead on what they referred to as antibiotic-free livestock.
But the term antibiotic-free is a bit of a misnomer. According to Bill Wenzel, Antibiotics Program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, the PIRG is not calling for a total ban on antibiotics, which are at times necessary to treat sick animals. What the group seeks to eliminate is the routine overuse of antibiotics for growth promotion or wide-scale disease prevention. Routine use of antibiotics is mainly seen in large-scale farming operations, where animals are kept in close, confined areas that often become breeding grounds for transmitting illnesses. Addressing the routine use of antibiotics—mainly seen with cattle and pigs—thus requires a change in farming practices.
When it comes to taking action against antibiotic overuse, efforts in the marketplace have been much more effective than tackling the government. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has guidelines in place that seek to restrict the routine use of antibiotics. Adopting those guidelines is voluntary, however. “One of the things that was frustrating to us was that we couldn’t move the Congress or the president to substantial action to take care of the public health threat,” Wenzel says.
Three states attempted to pass bills that would enact state-level policies. In Oregon and Maryland neither bill was voted into law. California is the one notable exception. Earlier this month the state signed into law legislation banning the use of antibiotics not prescribed by a veterinarian, including routine antibiotics for disease prevention. “Our hope is that now that California has proven that it can be done, other states will take up the charge as well,” says Lena Brook, a food policy advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The NRDC, along with PIRG, were two of the advocacy groups who planned to deliver the petition with nearly 300,000 signatures to Subway.
Consumers have already demonstrated the ability to change company policy. “Collectively, the companies are ahead of where the federal government is on this issue,” Brook says. “The marketplace is leading the charge.”
Chipotle in 2001 and Panera Bread in 2004 became the first restaurant chains to commit to sourcing some of their meat from antibiotic-free livestock. Other major chains, however, including McDonalds and Chick-fil-A, are beginning to take action as well, particularly in regards to sourcing poultry. This is partly because three major poultry producers—Tyson Foods, Purdue Farms and Pilgrim’s Pride—have all taken measures to reduce the amount of medically unnecessary antibiotics used. “Chicken is the low-hanging fruit in this scenario,” Brook says. For restaurants, making the switch to antibiotic-free beef and pork is where the real difficulty lies, because there’s so much less available.
Subway plans to switch to antibiotic-free beef and pork by 2025. Its biggest challenge will be securing a steady supplier that can meet both its standards and its demand for meat.
Restaurant chains taking such actions cause an industry-wide domino effect due to their power in the marketplace. “Larger restaurant chains deal with so much volume that having them put strict requirements in place affects change,” Wenzel says. Those requirements put financial pressure on farmers and food producers, unlike the voluntary guidelines set by the FDA. In order to continue doing business with major buyers, meat suppliers will have to follow requirements regarding antibiotics—although they have a few years to implement those changes.
Is It a Fake? DNA Testing Deepens Mystery of Shroud of Turin
by Tia Ghose
Is it a medieval fake or a relic of Jesus Christ? A new analysis of DNA from the Shroud of Turin reveals that people from all over the world have touched the venerated garment.
“Individuals from different ethnic groups and geographical locations came into contact with the Shroud [of Turin] either in Europe (France and Turin) or directly in their own lands of origin (Europe, northeast Africa, Caucasus, Anatolia, Middle East and India),” study lead author Gianni Barcaccia, a geneticist at the University of Padua in Italy and lead author of the new study describing the DNA analysis, said in an email. “We cannot say anything more on its origin.”
The new findings don’t rule out either the notion that the long strip of linen is a medieval forgery or that it’s the true burial shroud of Jesus Christ, the researchers said.
Long-standing debate
On its face, the Shroud of Turin is an unassuming piece of twill cloth that bears traces of blood and a darkened imprint of a man’s body. Though the Catholic Church has never taken an official stance on the object’s authenticity, tens of thousands flock to Turin, Italy, every year to get a glimpse of the object, believing that it wrapped the bruised and bleeding body of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. [Religious Mysteries: 8 Alleged Relics of Jesus]
According to legend, the shroud was secretly carried from Judea in A.D. 30 or 33, and was housed in Edessa, Turkey, and Constantinople (the name for Istanbul before the Ottomans took over) for centuries. After crusaders sacked Constantinople in A.D. 1204, the cloth was smuggled to safety in Athens, Greece, where it stayed until A.D. 1225.
However, the Catholic Church only officially recorded its existence in A.D. 1353, when it showed up in a tiny church in Lirey, France. Centuries later, in the 1980s, radiocarbon dating, which measures the rate at which different isotopes of the carbon atoms decay, suggested the shroud was made between A.D. 1260 and A.D. 1390, lending credence to the notion that it was an elaborate fake created in the Middle Ages. (Isotopes are forms of an element with a different number of neutrons.)
But critics argued that the researchers used patched-up portions of the cloth to date the samples, which could have been much younger than the rest of the garment.
What’s more, the Gospel of Matthew notes that “the earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open” after Jesus was crucified. So geologists have argued that an earthquake at Jesus’ death could have released a burst of neutrons. The neutron burst not only would have thrown off the radiocarbon dating but also would have led to the darkened imprint on the shroud.
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Cod Stocks Off Canada’s Eastern Coast Making A Comeback
Photo credit:
The cod was nearly fished to extinction in the early 1990s. *saipal/Flickr CC BY 2.0
The northern Atlantic cod fisheries off the Canadian coast are famed for being one of the most disastrous examples of overfishing and mismanagement. The stocks once supported several million tonnes of fish, and shaped the lives of those living on Canada’s eastern coast for half a millennia. But after heavy unsustainable fishing in the 60s and then again in the 80s, the stock eventually collapsed to 1% of its previous level and in 1992 fishing for cod was banned.
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