ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 654

Mormon leader speaks out against Kim Davis, urges balance in religious freedom disputes

Image Credit: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer

By Michelle Boorstein

The Mormon Church has been among the most vocal in expressing worry that the expanded rights of LGBT people — among other liberalizing changes in the United States — are trumping those of religious Americans who may disagree with gay equality. On Tuesday, the church offered its first high-level comments on perhaps the most contentious case in that realm, saying through a top leader that Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis erred and that more balance, tolerance and civility are needed when it comes to protecting religious freedom.

Dallin Oaks, a member of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, laid out what should be seen as the church’s official view in a lecture Tuesday to the Sacramento Court-Clergy Conference, an event sponsored by Sacramento area judges and the Sacramento Superior Court. Oaks was a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, a prosecutor in Illinois and a Utah state Supreme Court justice.

Oaks’s talk, called “The Boundary Between Church and State,” echoes in its conciliatory tone other recent efforts by the Mormon Church on this topic, including a compromise the church and its allies worked out in Utah with gay rights advocates earlier this year.

The talk reflects the Mormon Church’s desire not to be associated with divisive culture wars, particularly after it became highly involved in fighting gay marriage in California in the late 2000s and took a serious public relations bruising for it, in part by Mormons who didn’t want to see their church so intertwined with politics.

It also shows the way the Davis’s case is bringing out the nuances among the religious liberty crowd. The movement, with religious conservatives as its most vocal proponents, can seem monolithic, but divisions over the Davis case revealed different views and strategies. Some prominent religious freedom advocates said Davis had gone too far in refusing not only to issue marriage licenses to gay couples but in barring her staff from doing so as well.

The Vatican took pains after Pope Francis met with Davis last month during his U.S. trip — a visit that triggered huge controversy — to clarify the meeting. It “should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,” the Vatican statement read.

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With G.M.O. Policies, Europe Turns Against Science

Image Credit: Pascal Pavani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By MARK LYNAS

CALL it the “Coalition of the Ignorant.” By the first week of October, 17 European countries — including Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland — had used new European Union rules to announce bans on the cultivation of genetically modified crops.

These prohibitions expose the worrying reality of how far Europe has gone in setting itself against modern science. True, the bans do not apply directly to scientific research, and a few countries — led by England — have declared themselves open to cultivation of genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.s. But the chilling effect on biotech science in Europe will be dramatic: Why would anyone spend years developing genetically modified crops in the knowledge that they will most likely be outlawed by government fiat?

In effect, the Continent is shutting up shop for an entire field of human scientific and technological endeavor. This is analogous to America’s declaring an automobile boycott in 1910, or Europe’s prohibiting the printing press in the 15th century.

Beginning with Scotland’s prohibition on domestic genetically modified crop cultivation on Aug. 9, Europe’s scientists and farmers watched with mounting dismay as other countries followed suit. Following the Scottish decision, signatories from numerous scientific organizations and academic institutions wrote to the Scottish government to express grave concern “about the potential negative effect on science in Scotland.”

The appeal went unheeded.

Without a trace of embarrassment, a spokeswoman for Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, admitted that the first minister’s science adviser had not been consulted because the decision “wasn’t based on scientific evidence.” Instead, the priority was to protect the “clean green image” of the country’s produce, according to the secretary for rural affairs, food and environment.

This decision of a majority of European countries to apparently ignore their own experts may undermine any claim to the moral high ground at the coming Paris talks on climate change. The worldwide scientific consensus on the safety of genetic engineering is as solid as that which underpins human-caused global warming. Yet this inconvenient truth on G.M.O.s — that they’re as safe as conventionally cultivated food — is ignored when ideological interests are threatened.

The scientific community is facing a new European reality. Last November, the European Commission’s president, Jean-Claude Juncker, chose not to reappoint Prof. Anne Glover as his science adviser after lobbying by Greenpeace and other environmental groups.

“We hope that you as the incoming Commission president will decide not to nominate a chief scientific adviser,” they wrote.

Never mind that Professor Glover’s advice on G.M.O. safety reflected the scientific consensus. Mr. Juncker, hoping to make his political life easier, complied with their demand. Europe now has no chief scientific adviser.

Facing this hostile climate, the crop biotech sector in Europe is dying. The plant science division of the agrochemical giant BASF closed its doors in Germany back in 2012, shifting some operations to the friendlier climes of the United States. In the public sector, the European Academies Science Advisory Council, the leading voice of science in Europe, lamented in 2013: “The E.U. is falling behind international competitors in agricultural innovation and this has implications for E.U. goals for science and innovation.”

In addition, the council is worried that Europe’s G.M.O. phobia may slam the door on new technologies. For example, the gene-editing tool known as Crispr is on the brink of revolutionizing the field of genetics internationally.

The historical irony is that Europe once led in biotech: In 1983, Marc Van Montagu and Jeff Schell at the University of Ghent in Belgium introduced the world to modern plant genetic engineering. Today, however, no rational young scientist interested in molecular techniques of crop breeding would choose a base in Continental Europe.

Meanwhile, hypocrisy rules: Europe imports over 30 million tons per year of corn and soy-based animal feeds, the vast majority of which are genetically modified, for its livestock industry. Imports are preferred to European crops partly because biotech traits make them cheaper. Yet these same traits — such as herbicide tolerance and insect resistance — are now widely barred from domestic use.

In essence, Europe has chosen chemistry over biology: It will not be able to reduce fungicide applications by adopting genetically modified blight-resistant potatoes; nor can it cut down on insecticide sprays, since it won’t allow genetically modified insect-resistant crops to be grown. The data is clear: One study found that G.M.O. cultivation has led to a 40 percent reduction in insecticide spraying worldwide.

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What Makes the New Atheists So Charitable?

by Joey Savoie, Co-founder of Charity Science

Before getting to know your local atheist, it’s very much worth rehashing the ABCs of non-belief that run the risk of remaining little known, especially now that the skeptic community has become more interested and active in charitable causes. Public intellectuals frequenting bestseller lists on our behalf are swift to go on the offensive, but there’s something to be said for shoring up the defense as well. A real uneasiness toward atheists and their intentions seems to flow from a very common and endlessly parroted assumption–that without belief in god, anything would be allowed. Divine reprimand and reward are ultimately credited with keeping us on the straight and narrow, and often said to have provided the moral foundation for our society. A charitable movement populated with skeptics and atheists would seem counterintuitive or even completely bananas then, but nonetheless, a number of causes under the umbrella of Effective Altruism (EA) are blossoming. How do we account for this? Should we credit our learned behavior to a society built on these heavenly mandates, or is it something else?

Spoiler alert: the answer is something else.

Whether it comes from the prosaic lips of Ivan Fyodorovitch of The Brothers Karamazov, in the more contemporary form of Dinesh D’Souza, or confronted you recently one way or another, the common argument sees morality as having originated from the outside. Without a punishing set of external pressures imposed from up high, so it goes, mankind will naturally veer off into a wilderness of undesirable behavior. If we care to reexamine the ABCs of atheism, we could start with what Elizabeth Anderson aptly describes as the atheist commitment to “the expansion and growth of the human mind.” Of course, this might seem obnoxiously smug. Who would march against personal growth?

Nobody

What Anderson is getting at is less about condescending to theists and more about illustrating where morality originates for atheists. Jean-Paul Sartre pre-empted her decades before by contending that morality comes from within and grows outwardly. Without wading too far into the philosophical thicket, we’ll leave you with Sartre illustrating how even personal decisions can radiate outwards, “In fashioning myself I fashion man.” Within each of us, overlapping and intertwining motivations help us fashion ourselves and our morals, and much of the time we would like to see the rest of the world follow suit. Have we met nudists that only want for the whole of humanity to shed these rags we affix to ourselves on the regular? Absolutely. Transplant this model onto an aversion to human suffering and now we’re talking.

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How To Build A City Fit For 50℃ Heatwaves

Environment





Photo credit:

Steve Crisp / Reuters

The Persian Gulf is already one of the hottest parts of the world, but by the end of the century increasing heat combined with intense humidity will make the region too hot for habitation, according to research published in Nature Climate Change.

Road Runoff A No-No for Coho

Each fall, thousands of coho salmon flock to Northwest rivers to spawn. But many never get the chance, especially near big cities like Seattle. “And in some of these urban areas, up to 90 percent of the females were dying before they spawned, which is not a good thing for a population long term.” Julann Spromberg, a toxicologist affiliated with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center.

Researchers suspected these deaths were partly a matter of bad timing. The fish often reach streams during the first showers of the rainy season, which flush chemicals from roads and parking lots into the water. Now, Spromberg and her colleagues have produced the first direct evidence that this runoff kills coho salmon. Their study is in the Journal of Applied Ecology. [Julann A. Spromberg et al, Coho salmon spawner mortality in western US urban watersheds: bioinfiltration prevents lethal storm water impacts]

The researchers found that fish exposed to storm water from Seattle-area highways quickly grew sick and died. Surprisingly, though, the salmon did not seem to mind taking a dip in a cocktail of common road pollutants, including hydrocarbons and metals. That detail suggests the killer ingredient in runoff may be a different kind of chemical or a lethal combination of several compounds.

“There’s a whole lot of stuff in here that we haven’t been able to measure or don’t have the capabilities of measuring at this point.”

However, Spromberg says there’s a way to help the fish even before scientists hunt down the culprit. Her team also found that filtering runoff through just a few feet of soil made storm water safe for salmon. Cities can implement this simple form of clean water technology by building more systems, including roadside rain gardens, to collect runoff from paved areas and pass it through soil before it enters urban waterways. Literally a quick and dirty solution.

—Julia Rosen

(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)

Let’s all take a deep breath about pandemics

The Zombie Apocalypse...again?

Pandemics make for great drama. No TV or movie season is complete without at least one viral apocalypse—preferably involving zombies—sweeping the globe. But pandemics aren’t just science fiction. They have happened—and perhaps will happen again. (For more, see "Breakthrough: Fighting Pandemics" November 1 at 9 p.m. (ET) on the National Geographic Channel.)

So, quick quiz: what’s the best way to motivate people to plan for the next pandemic?

Be honest about the real risks, explain how these risks can be managed, demonstrate what is already being done and how successful it has been, and ask the public to support the necessary investment to maintain and extend that effort.
Whip the public into a frenzy with scientifically implausible doomsday scenarios and imply that nothing is being done to prevent them.

I guess you know where I’m going to come down on this.

1918 influenza ward, Fort Funston, Kansas

I take pandemics seriously; I spent nearly a decade studying the influenza virus that caused the granddaddy of all pandemics in 1918 and 1919. Estimates put the death toll between 20 and 50 million. The only other true pandemic—an outbreak of infectious disease that spreads rapidly across multiple continents or around the world—of the last century is still with us: HIV/AIDS has killed 39 million people since 1981, and nearly 37 million are living with the virus now, with just over one million people still dying every year.

There have been other serious outbreaks of infectious disease: terrible as it was, the 2014 Ebola outbreak was confined to West Africa and contained in a matter of months. It killed fewer than 10,000 people. SARS spread around the world but was rapidly contained, infecting fewer than 10,000 people and killing fewer than 1,000. Other emerging diseases—West Nile Virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), avian influenza—have not spread in humans widely or rapidly enough to rise to the level of pandemics.

[image error]Live market in China

But is the risk of pandemics growing? Many aspects of the modern world raise concern. We know that live animal markets, increased reliance on “bush meat” for food, and the massive displacement that climate change will cause, will all provide opportunities for infectious organisms to move into new territories, and “jump” species boundaries. And of course air travel makes it possible for infectious diseases that once had to sustain outbreaks for weeks to make it from continent to continent can now do so in hours.

On the other hand, advances in medicine, diagnostics, surveillance and communications put us in an ever stronger position to detect, contain, and treat emerging infectious diseases. In 1918, some 90% of deaths were caused by bacterial infections of lungs weakened by the virus. These deaths would now be preventable by antibiotics. (Nota bene, stopping the misuse of antibiotics and developing new ones needs to be right up there with pandemic prevention on the public health “to do” list.) It took 14 long years from the emergence of HIV/AIDS in 1982 to the development of the combination retroviral therapy that turned an invariably fatal disease into a chronic one. By contrast, SARS was first detected in November 2002, the coronavirus responsible was identified in March of 2003 and fully sequenced by April. The outbreak was contained by July.

So the legitimate concerns are balanced by some considerable assets. And besides, let’s not forget that viruses are not lurking behind every bush, just chomping at the bit to get into humans and wreak havoc around the world. As I wrote in two recent posts ("Viruses Are Not Omnipotent", Parts I and II), viruses don’t jump between species willy-nilly. Viruses and hosts have evolved together for billions of years with the result that humans, along with every other cell-based life form, have elaborate and sophisticated immune systems to fend off viruses. Even though viruses tend to have high mutation rates (that’s one of their evolutionarily-determined adaptations), it is not trivial to accumulate the multiple mutations that are usually necessary to thrive in a new host.

Finally, lots of people are paying attention to the risk of a pandemic. Around the world, thousands of virologists, ecologists, epidemiologists, public health, aid, and disaster relief workers are collaborating to assess risk and plan for the worst. We know what we need to do: invest in basic virology and epidemiology research, build up health care capacity around the world, establish and maintain a comprehensive surveillance, diagnostics, and detection system, and make sure that public health authorities and emergency relief agencies around the world communicate with and trust each other, so that they’re ready to share information and coordinate their activities quickly and effectively. Not very sexy, perhaps, but certainly more effective than hysteria.

So let’s all take a deep breath and put the risk of a devastating pandemic in perspective. Panic may grab people’s attention for a little while, but it’s not a sustainable basis of support for sensible policy. Hysteria leads to poor policy. Hysteria leads to uninfected health care workers being placed under house arrest. Hysteria leads to holding on runways airplanes that have been nowhere near the outbreak area to check on passengers with fevers. Hysteria leads to closing schools in Ohio and Texas for no good reason. Portraying the natural world as a seething hotbed of viruses poised to invade humanity, and implying that we are helpless in their path, is not just plain wrong--it’s dangerously wrong.

Zombie photo credit: By Bob Jagendorf via Wikimedia Commons

Live animal market photo credit: "Chicken market in Xining, Qinghai province, China" by M M (Padmanaba01) via Commons

Answer Monday

Returning to our specimen from last week, this time from a different perspective:

 

 

Frankly, it still has a somewhat vertebra-like appearance, doesn’t it? Here’s a closer look at the polished surface, to help remove doubt.

 

 

As you are all probably aware by now, this is not an animal specimen at all, but a plant. Although it is a plant with a rather animal-like name: Archaeopteris. You can see that the wood was visually quite similar to that of modern trees, but this is an organism with a twist. Up until the 1960s, this specimen would have been identified as a fossil conifer named Callixylon that was often found near ferns of the genus Archaeopteris. Then the paleontologist Charles B. Beck found sufficient evidence to demonstrate that they were one and the same plant: a plant with unique characteristics linking spore-bearing ferns and seed-bearing gymnosperms.

We sometimes hear critics of evolutionary theory decry the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, but we have a nice one right here. Archaeopteris was until just recently considered the earliest known tree, and combines the characteristics of woody trees and ferns. If you were to travel back in time 350 million years to see one, you’d think it looked a lot more like a modern tree than many of the other large plants of the period. These tree plants were big, growing up to ten meters in height, with some regularly measuring more than 1.5 meters in diameter. They branched like modern trees (many large tree-ferns of the period did not) and their foliage would not have looked particularly strange to us, kind of like a top-heavy Christmas tree. They were the first plants to produce a wide-spread root system, which had a big impact on the soil chemistry of the period. There’s even some evidence these plants shed their leaves seasonally. Yet, unlike modern trees, Archaeopteris did not bear seeds. Some of its fertile branches would bear spore capsules instead of leaves.

Not only are we looking at a transitional form in plant evolution, but a distant ancestor to the extant gymnosperms. As usual, plants are a great source of evidence for evolutionary theory.

The winner this week: Thomas Temme! Congratulations, and thanks for playing! If you have a fossil you want to share, send your pictures to me at schoerning at ncse.com

Scientists Reveal How Gold Hitches A Ride Up To The Earth’s Crust

Chemistry





Photo credit:

optimarc/Shutterstock

Gold is one of the most important metals to humanity, primarily for the economic value we place on it: Unlike most metals, which are used for a variety of purposes, most gold is used for jewelry. Although we know that this rare ore was likely formed in massive stellar blasts, scientists weren’t sure why there was far more gold in the Earth’s crust than scientific models suggest.

Gene Therapy Treats Dogs With Muscle Disease, Paving Way For Human Trials

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock

Perhaps understandably, you might think of viruses as nasty, disease-causing microbes that we want out of the body. But they’re not all bad, and some have their uses, as evidenced by this extremely encouraging new study which enlisted them to help treat dogs with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Now that this novel treatment, a type of gene therapy, has proven to be safe and effective in animals, human trials could be on the horizon. 

Vibrating Magnets Help Male Bees Attract Females From Different Subspecies

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Red mason bees mating. Taina Conrad

Female red mason bees, Osmia bicornis, from the U.K. don’t usually mate with males of the same species from Germany. It’s in the way he vibrates. Males living in different regions vibrate their thorax differently. But with the help of magnets, German males can mimic the moves of their British counterparts and successfully copulate with British females.