ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 746
June 3, 2015
Lack of Food Competition May Explain the Diversity of African Savanna Herbivores
Photo credit:
Andrzej Kubik / shutterstock.com
Zebras, impalas, elephants, and a handful of other large African herbivores have surprisingly different diets, according to a new analysis of plant DNA in animal dung. With each species enjoying their own favorite plants, the reduced competition over time may explain how so many wondrous species have managed to coexist. The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, suggest that diverse vegetation may be key in maintaining the continent’s rich variety of animals.
Single Therapy Session Cures 73% Of Insomniacs
Photo credit:
Marcos Mesa Sam Wordley/ Shutterstock
Anyone who has suffered insomnia will know just how soul-destroying it is. No matter how many herbal teas you slurp, pages you read, sheep you count or rainforest recordings you listen to, your brain simply just does not want to switch off. Given the importance of sleep to your health, knocking the problem on its head in its early stages is crucial to decrease the risk of the situation worsening into the development of chronic insomnia. And scientists may have just found a remarkably effective way to do that.
NASA Flying Saucer Test Launch Delayed
Photo credit:
NASA flying saucer test flight preparations. NASA
NASA's flying saucer test flight, which was scheduled for June 2, has been delayed due to turbulent ocean conditions. If the waves are too high then it will become difficult for the recovery team to retrieve the craft and its data safely. Other conditions have to be perfect too: the launch team is eager to avoid high winds and stormy weather.
Why the Supreme Court’s Upcoming Obamacare Ruling Matters
In the five years since the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) became law it has survived some 60 recall attempts by the House of Representatives and one major U.S. Supreme Court challenge. Most of the House votes were little more than opportunities to burnish GOP credentials but the latest legal challenge could be a game-changer for the 2010 law designed to help millions of uninsured Americans get health insurance and lower health care costs.
At issue is something seemingly insignificant: tax subsidies. Virginia limo driver David King and three other Virginia residents filed a lawsuit that challenges the federal government’s approach to tax subsidies created under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The government, officially represented by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell in the court case’s name, maintains that the law allows for individuals who purchase health insurance through any health insurance marketplace created by the law—regardless of whether Washington or a state runs it—to be eligible for tax subsidies to pay for that insurance. (The marketplaces are health insurance price comparison Web sites that consumers can use to find the best plan for themselves—somewhat like the Expedia travel site but for insurance.) But the challengers argue the 2010 law only permits individuals from states that have their own state-run health exchanges—rather than the majority of states, which rely on federal exchanges—to apply for those subsidies. And so, for the second time in three years, the Supreme Court is effectively considering how the law helps to cover the insurance needs of millions of Americans with modest incomes. The nine Supreme Court justices are expected to release their decision in the case later this month.
What’s at stake
Under Obamacare, millions of Americans with modest means have been able to obtain health insurance with the assistance of tax subsidies that help blunt its cost. Those subsidies have helped both sicker and healthier people to buy insurance, which helps keep costs for consumers low because not everyone in the insurance pool racks up high bills. Without the subsidies it is likely that only the sickest low-income individuals would continue to buy insurance. Such a shift would raise health care premiums because healthier persons would no longer be helping to offset the costs of sicker ones.
As a result, the subsidies have become the Achilles’ heel of the ACA. Only 16 states and the District of Columbia have set up their own health marketplaces (or marketplaces partially supported by the federal government); the remaining 34 states rely on the federal exchange to provide that service instead. Now the King v. Burwell Supreme Court case will decide whether people who purchase health insurance via the federal exchanges are still eligible for the subsidies.
How could a scuffle over subsidies be a significant blow to the health care law? If the court rules against the federal government, then individuals in those 34 states relying on federal exchanges will still need to adhere to the law’s individual mandate, which stipulates that Americans must buy health insurance or face a penalty fine. But they will no longer qualify for federal tax subsidies that would help make the insurance more affordable. Instead, they will have to pay more of that insurance cost out-of-pocket. If they cannot pay, then they will be fined for not buying health insurance. And because they will be uninsured they will also have to pay higher fees at the doctor’s office or hospital when they seek care, unraveling the ACA’s provisions to minimize health care costs.
Under Obamacare, subsidies may be offered to people earning between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty line who are shopping for health insurance in “marketplaces by the state,” according to the law’s language. Those four words are at the center of the case, because if “state” is tightly defined as one of the 50 states (as the plaintiffs argue), then states using the federal exchange would not be eligible to utilize the subsidies. If “state” is interpreted more broadly—as the federal state, for example—then states on the federal exchanges would be eligible for the subsidies.
What happens if the Supreme Court rules against the administration?
If the Supreme Court rules against the administration, then the subsidies in those 34 states could be eliminated within weeks of the decision. Such a move would have ripple effects for health care costs because the low-income people most likely to continue buying insurance (and shouldering that cost out-of-pocket) would be the sickest individuals. Consequently, insurance premiums would then probably jump in the coming years for other people shopping on the exchanges—including those whose insurance was never subsidized. A study conducted by the RAND Corp., a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group, found that if the Supreme Court rules against the federal government (eliminating the subsidies), then insurance enrollment in affected states could drop by some 70 percent, leaving more than nine million people uninsured. Moreover, premium costs for an unsubsidized individual in those states would rise 47 percent, according to their analysis.
Making matters worse, many of the states that rely on the federal exchanges are also the same ones that did not expand Medicaid to cover more low-income people (as the ACA would have allowed). That means that more low-income people were buying policies in the insurance marketplaces than they might have otherwise.
Who will fix the problem?
If the subsidies are eliminated, Congress will need to take legislative action to help uninsured Americans still obtain insurance. Because Republicans control both the House and the Senate they will need to take the lead in passing legislation to mitigate the fallout of the Court’s decision. One option would be to simply pass a legislative fix that would expand the 2010 Affordable Care Act to allow “state” to refer to the federal exchanges as well—allowing individuals in all states to be eligible for the subsidies. Then everything could proceed as before. Alternatively, in the House plans have been proposed that would replace subsidies with tax credits to help people in affected states purchase insurance. Other options would phase out the subsidies over time. One offering from Sen. Ron Johnson (R–Wis.) and 29 co-sponsors would keep the subsidies in place until August 2017 while dropping the ACA mandates that require individuals and employers to buy insurance in the first place—centerpieces of the act. But without mandates for everyone to buy health insurance, prices for it would be expected to jump because healthier people may not choose to buy insurance.
What if the administration wins?
If the Supreme Court rules for the administration—keeping the subsidies in place for states getting services via federal exchanges—then everything will stay as is.
If they lose, do affected states have contingency plans?
Health officials in the 34 affected states must brace themselves for whatever decision comes down from the Court. Yet by the end of June, many states’ legislative sessions will have adjourned so special sessions would most likely have to be convened to address the fallout of losing the subsidies. Ahead of the Court’s decision some states preemptively introduced new bills this year that would either prohibit the establishment of a state-based exchange (like the Arkansas law enacted this year) or create one if the Court rules against the federal government (for example, the Florida bill that died in committee in May 2015). As the National Academy for State Health Policy suggests, “With only four months between the decision and the next open enrollment period for exchange health insurance coverage on November 1, 2015, states seeking to offer new coverage options will need to act quickly to provide options for the 2016 plan year.”
Which way is the Court likely to lean?
It is hard to predict how the Court will rule. Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are expected to back the federal government subsidies. Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are likely to oppose them. But Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy are wild cards. Kennedy seemed to offer a glimmer of support for the federal government when he said to the challengers’ lawyer during oral arguments in March that “there’s a serious constitutional problem if we adopt your argument.” Still, the justice also dismissed some arguments put forward by the federal government, too. For his part, Roberts said almost nothing during arguments, leaving his views basically unknown. In the end, either Kennedy or Roberts need to vote in favor of the federal government in order to uphold the subsidies.
Why wasn’t the 2012 Supreme Court decision on ACA the final word on the law?
Both the 2012 and 2015 cases hinge on how to pay for the ACA. A major legal question in the 2012 case centered on whether it was legal to require everyone to buy insurance—the individual mandate question. This 2015 case is instead considering the legality of subsidies used to pay for insurance. The same lawyer, Michael Carvin, who represented the plaintiffs in the 2012 case is representing the plaintiffs in the 2015 challenge to the health care law.
Why I’m Sailing To The Arctic In Search Of Missing Mercury
Photo credit:
Methylmercury in the fur sounds nasty – but this bear isn’t too bothered. HimmelrichPR, CC BY-SA
If you’ve ever eaten fish from the sea, especially an older or larger fish, you’ve probably been exposed to the pollutant mercury. It’s invisible, odourless, and dangerous. When ingested by humans, mercury is a neurotoxin, attacking the brain and nervous system, and the development of babies and infants can be particularly hampered.
Our Predictions Of Solar Storms Have Not Been Very Accurate Until Now – Here’s Why
Photo credit:
Ain’t half hot: but where’s it heading? Naeblys
When a space hurricane was unleashed from the sun on January 7 2014, space-weather centres around the world sent out warnings. The hurricane was heading directly for Earth and was predicted to produce a strong geomagnetic storm. But then an unexpected thing happened: the storm bypassed Earth and headed for Mars instead. It confirmed that our techniques for predicting such events are not as accurate as we would like.
June 2, 2015
The Flexibility of Racial Bias
The city of Baltimore was rocked by protests and riots over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American man who died in police custody. Tragically, Gray’s death was only one of a recent in a series of racially-charged, often violent, incidents. On April 4th, Walter Scott was fatally shot by a police officer after fleeing from a routine traffic stop. On March 8th, Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members were caught on camera gleefully chanting, “There Will Never Be A N***** In SAE.” On March 1st, a homeless Black man was shot in broad daylight by a Los Angeles police officer. And these are not isolated incidents, of course. Institutional and systemic racism reinforce discrimination in countless situations, including hiring, sentencing, housing, and even mortgage lending.
It would be easy to see in all this powerful evidence that racism is a permanent fixture in America’s social fabric and even, perhaps, an inevitable aspect of human nature. Indeed, the mere act of labeling others according to their age, gender, or race is a reflexive habit of the human mind. Social categories, like race, impact our thinking quickly, often outside of our awareness. Extensive research has found that these implicit racial biases—negative thoughts and feelings about people from other races—are automatic, pervasive, and difficult to suppress. Neuroscientists have also explored racial prejudice by exposing people to images of faces while scanning their brains in fMRI machines. Early studies found that when people viewed faces of another race, the amount of activity in the amygdala—a small brain structure associated with experiencing emotions, including fear—was associated with individual differences on implicit measures of racial bias. This work has led many to conclude that racial biases might be part of a primitive—and possibly hard-wired—neural fear response to racial out-groups.
There is little question that categories such as race, gender, and age play a major role in shaping the biases and stereotypes that people bring to bear in their judgments of others. However, research has shown that how people categorize themselves may be just as fundamental to understanding prejudice as how they categorize others. When people categorize themselves as part of a group, their self-concept shifts from the individual (“I”) to the collective level (“us”). People form groups rapidly and favor members of their own group even when groups are formed on arbitrary grounds, such as the simple flip of a coin. These findings highlight the remarkable ease with which humans form coalitions.
Recent research confirms that coalition-based preferences trump race-based preferences. For example, both Democrats and Republicans favor the resumes of those affiliated with their political party much more than they favor those who share their race. These coalition-based preferences remain powerful even in the absence of the animosity present in electoral politics. Our research has shown that the simple act of placing people on a mixed-race team can diminish their automatic racial bias. In a series of experiments, White participants who were randomly placed on a mixed-race team—the Tigers or Lions—showed little evidence of implicit racial bias. Merely belonging to a mixed-race team trigged positive automatic associations with all of the members of their own group, irrespective of race. Being a part of one of these seemingly trivial mixed-race groups produced similar effects on brain activity—the amygdala responded to team membership rather than race. Taken together, these studies indicate that momentary changes in group membership can override the influence of race on the way we see, think about, and feel toward people who are different from ourselves.
Although these coalition-based distinctions might be the most basic building block of bias, they say little about the other factors that cause group conflict. Why do some groups get ignored while others get attacked? Whenever we encounter a new person or group we are motivated to answer two questions as quickly as possible: “is this person a friend or foe?” and “are they capable of enacting their intentions toward me?” In other words, once we have determined that someone is a member of an out-group, we need to determine what kind? The nature of the relations between groups—are we cooperative, competitive, or neither?—and their relative status—do you have access to resources?—largely determine the course of intergroup interactions.
Groups that are seen as competitive with one’s interests, and capable of enacting their nasty intentions, are much more likely to be targets of hostility than more benevolent (e.g., elderly) or powerless (e.g., homeless) groups. This is one reason why sports rivalries have such psychological potency. For instance, fans of the Boston Red Sox are more likely to feel pleasure, and exhibit reward-related neural responses, at the misfortunes of the archrival New York Yankees than other baseball teams (and vice versa)—especially in the midst of a tight playoff race. (How much fans take pleasure in the misfortunes of their rivals is also linked to how likely they would be to harm fans from the other team.)
Just as a particular person’s group membership can be flexible, so too are the relations between groups. Groups that have previously had cordial relations may become rivals (and vice versa). Indeed, psychological and biological responses to out-group members can change, depending on whether or not that out-group is perceived as threatening. For example, people exhibit greater pleasure—they smile—in response to the misfortunes of stereotypically competitive groups (e.g., investment bankers); however, this malicious pleasure is reduced when you provide participants with counter-stereotypic information (e.g., “investment bankers are working with small companies to help them weather the economic downturn). Competition between “us” and “them” can even distort our judgments of distance, making threatening out-groups seem much closer than they really are. These distorted perceptions can serve to amplify intergroup discrimination: the more different and distant “they” are, the easier it is to disrespect and harm them.
Thus, not all out-groups are treated the same: some elicit indifference whereas others become targets of antipathy. Stereotypically threatening groups are especially likely to be targeted with violence, but those stereotypes can be tempered with other information. If perceptions of intergroup relations can be changed, individuals may overcome hostility toward perceived foes and become more responsive to one another’s grievances.
The flexible nature of both group membership and intergroup relations offers reason to be cautiously optimistic about the potential for greater cooperation among groups in conflict (be they black versus white or citizens versus police). One strategy is to bring multiple groups together around a common goal. For example, during the fiercely contested 2008 Democratic presidential primary process, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters gave more money to strangers who supported the same primary candidate (compared to the rival candidate). Two months later, after the Democratic National Convention, the supporters of both candidates coalesced around the party nominee—Barack Obama—and this bias disappeared. In fact, merely creating a sense of cohesion between two competitive groups can increase empathy for the suffering of our rivals. These sorts of strategies can help reduce aggression toward hostile out-groups, which is critical for creating more opportunities for constructive dialogue addressing greater social injustices.
Of course, instilling a sense of common identity and cooperation is extremely difficult in entrenched intergroup conflicts, but when it happens, the benefits are obvious. Consider how the community leaders in New York City and Ferguson responded differently to protests against police brutality—in NYC political leaders expressed grief and concern over police brutality and moved quickly to make policy changes in policing, whereas the leaders and police in Ferguson responded with high-tech military vehicles and riot gear. In the first case, multiple groups came together with a common goal—to increase the safety of everyone in the community; in the latter case, the actions of the police likely reinforced the “us” and “them” distinctions.
Tragically, these types of conflicts continue to roil the country. Understanding the psychology and neuroscience of social identity and intergroup relations cannot undo the effects of systemic racism and discriminatory practices; however, it can offer insights into the psychological processes responsible for escalating the tension between, for example, civilians and police officers.
Even in cases where it isn’t possible to create a common identity among groups in conflict, it may be possible to blur the boundaries between groups. In one recent experiment, we sorted participants into groups—red versus blue team—competing for a cash prize. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to see a picture of a segregated social network of all the players, in which red dots clustered together, blue dots clustered together, and the two clusters were separated by white space. The other half of the participants saw an integrated social network in which the red and blue dots were mixed together in one large cluster. Participants who thought the two teams were interconnected with one another reported greater empathy for the out-group players compared to those who had seen the segregated network. Thus, reminding people that individuals could be connected to one another despite being from different groups may be another way to build trust and understanding among them.
A mere month before Freddie Gray died in police custody, President Obama addressed the nation on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma: “We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America. To deny…progress – our progress – would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America better."
The president was saying that we, as a society, have a responsibility to reduce prejudice and discrimination. These recent findings from psychology and neuroscience indicate that we, as individuals, possess this capacity. Of course this capacity is not sufficient to usher in racial equality or peace. Even when the level of prejudice against particular out-groups decreases, it does not imply that the level of institutional discrimination against these or other groups will necessarily improve. Ultimately, only collective action and institutional evolution can address systemic racism. The science is clear on one thing, though: individual bias and discrimination are changeable. Race-based prejudice and discrimination, in particular, are created and reinforced by many social factors, but they are not inevitable consequences of our biology. Perhaps understanding how coalitional thinking impacts intergroup relations will make it easier for us to affect real social change going forward.
June 1, 2015
Experiment Provides Further Evidence That Reality Doesn’t Exist Until We Measure It
Photo credit:
Pieter Kuiper via Wikimedia Commons. A comparison of double slit interference patterns with different widths. Similar patterns produced by atoms have confirmed the dominant model of quantum mechanics
Physicists have succeeded in confirming one of the theoretical aspects of quantum physics: Subatomic objects switch between particle and wave states when observed, while remaining in a dual state beforehand.
Tiny Parasite Infects Growing Honeybees, Not Just Adults
Photo credit:
Kletr/shutterstock.com
Across the planet, honeybee health has been declining, and mysteriously so. But now, researchers studying a global, tiny, single-celled parasite have discovered that, contrary to conclusions drawn from previous studies, honeybee larvae are being infected. When they mature into honeybee adults, they end up living shorter lives. The findings, published in PLoS ONE this week, could help us to better understand the sad decline of this important pollinator.
Obama Set To Create A ‘Butterfly Corridor’ Between Mexico And Minnestota
Photo credit:
Leena Robinson via Shutterstock
Fear not, monarch butterflies: Obama is flying in to the rescue. The White House has just unveiled its new national strategy to increase the monarch butterfly population through the creation of a “butterfly corridor” along Interstate highway 35 between Mexico and Minnesota.
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