ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 693

Snakebite Anti-Venom Set To Run Out Next Year

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

The company that makes the anti-venom Fav-Afrique stopped producing it last year. Little Stocker/Shutterstock

If nothing is done, then by the middle of next year the world will run out of one of the safest and most effective treatments for snakebites. This could lead to tens of thousands of preventable deaths, warns the international medical organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which urges the global health community to take action in tackling one of the planet’s most neglected public health emergencies.

What Happens If You Add Propane To Cola?

Chemistry





Photo credit:

Screenshot from propane with cola video. Kreosan / YouTube

We've all seen Diet Coke and mentos, which classically ends in a Coca-Cola fountain. But what about Coke and propane gas?

Propane is otherwise known as the volatile component in gasoline. It is also classed as flammable. 

So what would happen if you pumped a bottle of Coke full of propane gas? Fortunately, Kreosan from YouTube was happy to relieve our curiosity and give it a go. 

 

This Is What Climate Change Deniers Sound Like To Normal People

Environment





Photo credit:

Melting earth. Bruce Rolff/Shutterstock.

Climate change is happening. The average surface temperature of the Earth has been steadily rising since 1880. There are heaps of evidence out there to support this claim; however, unfortunately with stronger evidence comes stronger voices from denialists.

Humans Predation Unsustainably Takes Healthy Adult Prey

Humanity has a long history of working together to hunt large prey. As evidence, see the extinction rates of large animals after people first arrive in a new locale.

Now scientists have a clearer view of our predatory role, across a number of terrestrial and marine ecosystems. And the picture is not a pretty one—we have some bad hunting habits.   

Researchers surveyed 2,125 species of predators on land and in the water. And they compared the behavior of non-human predators to humans in those ecosystems.

Perhaps not surprisingly, humans prey on important large carnivores at a dramatically higher rate than other predators do. The biggest difference, however, comes in which members of the population we cull.

Typical predators might kill the young or the infirm. Humans, both on land and particularly in the water, claim a disproportionate number of mature healthy adults of reproductive age.

This practice has dramatic consequences. Removing reproductive adults, especially for species that mature slowly, can do long-term damage to the entire population. The authors thus call humans “super-predators.” Their report is in the journal Science. [Chris T. Darimon et al, The unique ecology of human predators]

They write that options to encourage more sustainable exploitation could include reducing the take—but also mimicking other predators and leaving full-grown adults alone to continue repopulating their habitats.

—Cynthia Graber

(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)

Huxley’s Paley, Part 2

HistoryScience and religion

Thomas Henry Huxley’s admiration of William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) is relatively obscure, at least in comparison to that of Charles Darwin (who wrote to a friend just before the Origin was published, “I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s Natural Theology. I could almost formerly have said it by heart.—”). Yet Huxley’s admiration seems to have started earlier and continued later. In part 1, I quoted passages from Huxley (above) and his sometime student Henry Fairfield Osborn that together suggested that Huxley was a fan of Paley’s when he was a boy (regarding Natural Theology as a Sabbath treat) and when he was a middle-aged scientist at the height of his powers (keeping the book at his bedside). But Huxley invokes Paley for a specific purpose: to defuse the complaint that Darwin’s views “abolish Teleology.”

In “On the Reception of the ‘Origin of Species’” (published in volume 2 of The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin [1887]), as I mentioned in part 1, Huxley cites Paley as authority for the proposition “that the ‘production of things’ may be the result of trains of mechanical dispositions fixed beforehand by intelligent appointment and kept in action by a power at the centre.” A footnote attached to “centre” refers to the twenty-third chapter of Natural Theology, “Personality of the Deity,” where Paley argues that establishing the existence of design serves to establish that the designer is a person, a conscious agent with beliefs and desires, not a mere impersonal principle of nature, and indeed the section of the passage from “the result” to “the centre” is, though unenclosed by quotation marks, a verbatim quotation from Paley.

In the Rede lecture as reported by Nature, Huxley quoted exactly the passage from Paley that he deemed relevant. I’ll reproduce it here, adding the sentence before and the sentence after (in boldface) for the sake of context.

There may be many second causes, and many courses of second causes, one behind another, between what we observe of nature, and the Deity: but there must be intelligence somewhere; there must be more in nature than what we see; and, amongst the things unseen, there must be an intelligent, designing author. The philosopher beholds with astonishment the production of things around him. Unconscious particles of matter take their stations and severally range themselves in an order so as to become collectively plants or animals, i.e. organised bodies with parts bearing strict and evident relation to one another and to the utility of the whole; and it should seem that these particles could not move in any other way than they do, for they testify not the smallest sign of choice, or liberty, or discretion. There may be particular intelligent beings guiding their motions in each case, or they may be the results of trains of mechanical dispositions fixed beforehand by intelligence or appointment and kept in action by a power at the centre. But, in either case, there must be intelligence.

(The quotation is accurate, except for minor details of punctuation, which I’m not bothering to correct here, since I don’t know what edition of Natural Theology Huxley was reading: there have been a lot.)

Paley is not conceding anything here that was not conceded earlier in Natural Theology. In the second chapter, continuing his discussion of the famous example of a watch found on a heath, he supposes that it is discovered that the watch is capable of reproducing itself. The lucky finder of the watch would, Paley says, acknowledge that a parent watch was “in some sense” the maker of the child watch, yet in no sense would it be “the author of its contrivance, the cause of the relation of its parts to their use” in the same way that a carpenter is responsible for the functional organization of a chair (or, of course, a watchmaker is responsible for the functional organization of a watch). The novelty in the twenty-third chapter is the generalization of the point: the fact of design, for Paley, isn’t committed to any particular account of how the design is effected.

That’s the crucial principle, as far as Huxley is concerned: if the fact of design isn’t committed to any particular account of how the design is effected, as in effect recommended by what he calls “the wider teleology,” then it presents no obstacle to the acceptance of evolution. (Significantly, though, Huxley never seems to comment on the antecedent issue of whether it is possible, as Paley alleges, to detect design in the natural world. The fact that he refers to the explananda in such vague terms—“the phenomena of the universe”; “things”—suggests to me that he was unimpressed.) In part 3, I want to say a word about the importance of Huxley’s attributing the principle to Paley (of all people) before I turn, at last, to the question of whether Paley, as Huxley claims, “proleptically [i.e., in advance] accepted the modern doctrine of Evolution.”

Scientists Plan On Resurrecting A 30,000-Year-Old Giant Virus

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

Electron microscopy image of the Pithovirus discovered in the same 30,000-year-old sample of the newly described Milliovirus. Julia Bartoli & Chantal Abergel, IGS, CNRS/AMU

Discovered frozen in the permafrost of Siberia, scientists will attempt to reanimate a long extinct 30,000-year-old “giant” virus. Found buried 30 meters (100 feet) deep in the frozen soil, this could be the second time that the team of researchers will reawaken a prehistoric virus.

DEAR FAT PEOPLE (part 3/3)

Parody and response to Nicole Arbour talking about fat people. Dear Fat People: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXFgNhyP4-A

This is the 3rd video because social experiments and because maps.

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Thanks for watching this parody/reaction to Nicole Arbour fat shaming. “Dear Fat People” was offensive, no arguing that. Saying it shouldn’t be offensive doesn’t somehow turn shaming into comedy. Really? You needed to make a “point” by saying fat people smell like sausages and that crisco comes out of their pores? Very effective, Nicole. I’m so impressed. Dear Fat People, briliant.

Boeing Unveils “Starliner” That Will Take Astronauts To Space

Space





Photo credit:

Coming soon to an orbit near you. NASA/Boeing.

NASA is adamant we are about to enter an era of commercial space travel akin to the dawn of private air travel a century ago. It was no doubt with glee, then, that Boeing unveiled the infrastructure that will support its newly-named manned spacecraft: the CST-100 Starliner.

The Liberty Counsel has released about the most dishonest press release ever.

I’m not surprised, by my cynicism has reached previously unthinkable heights – not because the Liberty Counsel will lie, that’s a given, but that anybody could believe such obvious lies.  Anyway, the Liberty Counsel’s new fund-raising vehicle press release is precisely what you’d expect:

Today, Judge Bunning issued an order to release Kim Davis from custody.

Judge Bunning issued an order this afternoon ordering that Kim Davis be released from the custody of the U.S. Marshals. She has been held at the Carter County Detention Center since last Thursday where she had been sentenced to jail for exercising her sincerely-held religious beliefs.

Non-Believers Participating In Religious Rituals: A Question of Inclusiveness, Respect for Boundaries, and Consciences

After deconverting during my senior year at a conservative evangelical college, I enrolled the next year as a first year philosophy graduate student at a Catholic university. I took university housing and so was assigned my roommates through the graduate school. They were both Catholics. Mike was a medieval studies graduate student and Matthew was a philosophy graduate student focusing on [Read More...]