ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 783
January 16, 2015
Atheist Experience #151
The Atheist Experience #151 for September 3, 2000, with Jeff Dee, Martin Wagner, and Rohan Wynar.
We welcome your comments on the open blog thread for this show.
► http://freethoughtblogs.com/axp/
YouTube comments are at present disabled in our channel, to the displeasure of some. However, each video has a prominent link to the associated open thread that appears on our blog. In the past we’ve tried opening up the channel to comments, but we found that a very high number of episodes wound up being flooded with a combination of spam, long winded apologists, and various obscene or misogynistic comments directed at various hosts by people with an axe to grind. This seems to be the nature of YouTube comment sections, in our experience.
We do moderate the blog, the same way that we moderate chat during the show, as well as comments on our Facebook group. For comment sections that are “officially” associated with our show (and, to a much lesser extent, channels that may give the unintended appearance of being official), we prefer not to play host to straight up ad hominem attacks and bigotry. As a general policy we do not block commenters simply on the basis of disagreement with our point of view. However, we do prefer discussion environments that don’t actively chase off more reasonable contributors.
——-
The most up to date Atheist Experience videos can be found by visiting http://atheist-experience.com/archive/
You can read more about this show on the Atheist Experience blog:
► http://freethoughtblogs.com/axp/
WHAT IS THE ATHEIST EXPERIENCE?
The Atheist Experience is a weekly cable access television show in Austin, Texas geared at a non-atheist audience. The Atheist Experience is produced by the Atheist Community of Austin.
The Atheist Community of Austin is organized as a nonprofit educational corporation to develop and support the atheist community, to provide opportunities for socializing and friendship, to promote secular viewpoints, to encourage positive atheist culture, to defend the first amendment principle of state-church separation, to oppose discrimination against atheists and to work with other organizations in pursuit of common goals.
We define atheism as the lack of belief in gods. This definition also encompasses what most people call agnosticism.
VISIT THE ACA’S OFFICIAL WEB SITES
► http://www.atheist-community.org (The Atheist Community of Austin)
► http://www.atheist-experience.com (The Atheist Experience TV Show)
More shows and video clips can be found in the archive:
► http://www.atheist-experience.com/archive
DVDs of the Atheist Experience can be purchased via:
► http://www.atheist-community.org/products
MUSIC CREDITS
Theme song: “Listen to Reason,” written and performed by Bryan Steeksma.
► http://www.youtube.com/bryansteeksma
► http://www.myspace.com/bryansteeksma
NOTES
TheAtheistExperience is the official channel of The Atheist Experience. “The Atheist Experience” is a trademark of the ACA.
Copyright © 2014 Atheist Community of Austin. All rights reserved.
Atheist Experience #128
The Atheist Experience #128 for March 26, 2000, with Martin Wagner and Vic Farrow.
We welcome your comments on the open blog thread for this show.
► http://freethoughtblogs.com/axp/
YouTube comments are at present disabled in our channel, to the displeasure of some. However, each video has a prominent link to the associated open thread that appears on our blog. In the past we’ve tried opening up the channel to comments, but we found that a very high number of episodes wound up being flooded with a combination of spam, long winded apologists, and various obscene or misogynistic comments directed at various hosts by people with an axe to grind. This seems to be the nature of YouTube comment sections, in our experience.
We do moderate the blog, the same way that we moderate chat during the show, as well as comments on our Facebook group. For comment sections that are “officially” associated with our show (and, to a much lesser extent, channels that may give the unintended appearance of being official), we prefer not to play host to straight up ad hominem attacks and bigotry. As a general policy we do not block commenters simply on the basis of disagreement with our point of view. However, we do prefer discussion environments that don’t actively chase off more reasonable contributors.
——-
The most up to date Atheist Experience videos can be found by visiting http://atheist-experience.com/archive/
You can read more about this show on the Atheist Experience blog:
► http://freethoughtblogs.com/axp/
WHAT IS THE ATHEIST EXPERIENCE?
The Atheist Experience is a weekly cable access television show in Austin, Texas geared at a non-atheist audience. The Atheist Experience is produced by the Atheist Community of Austin.
The Atheist Community of Austin is organized as a nonprofit educational corporation to develop and support the atheist community, to provide opportunities for socializing and friendship, to promote secular viewpoints, to encourage positive atheist culture, to defend the first amendment principle of state-church separation, to oppose discrimination against atheists and to work with other organizations in pursuit of common goals.
We define atheism as the lack of belief in gods. This definition also encompasses what most people call agnosticism.
VISIT THE ACA’S OFFICIAL WEB SITES
► http://www.atheist-community.org (The Atheist Community of Austin)
► http://www.atheist-experience.com (The Atheist Experience TV Show)
More shows and video clips can be found in the archive:
► http://www.atheist-experience.com/archive
DVDs of the Atheist Experience can be purchased via:
► http://www.atheist-community.org/products
MUSIC CREDITS
Theme song: “Listen to Reason,” written and performed by Bryan Steeksma.
► http://www.youtube.com/bryansteeksma
► http://www.myspace.com/bryansteeksma
NOTES
TheAtheistExperience is the official channel of The Atheist Experience. “The Atheist Experience” is a trademark of the ACA.
Copyright © 2014 Atheist Community of Austin. All rights reserved.
January 13, 2015
How Stupid Not to Have Thought of That! Part 1
“How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” was Thomas Henry Huxley’s reflection on reading Darwin’s Origin of Species. What might elicit such a reaction from a contemporary biologist? Today the question is answered by Rudolf Raff, Distinguished Professor and James H. Rudy Professor of Biology at Indiana University. His latest book is a memoir, Once We All Had Gills: Growing Up Evolutionist in an Evolving World.
When he heard of Darwin’s concept of natural selection, his friend the biologist Thomas Huxley famously remarked “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” I’m sure on occasion that others have had the same thought. My own sense of that feeling arises from realizing that when I began thinking and writing about the science that we now call evo-devo, I failed to realize how misleading the dominant concept of gene regulatory evolution of the 1970s was.
Insects, earthworms, jellies, sea stars, and kittens are all manifestly dissimilar to each other in body form. They are all animals, but so unlike each other in anatomy that they are placed in distinct phyla within the animal kingdom, as are the members of an additional thirty other animal phyla. The most prominent evolutionary biologist of the 1970s, Ernst Mayr, held that it would be futile to suppose that genetic homologies should extend across such widely different body plans. Thus the genes that regulated embryonic development in each animal species, like the body plans themselves, would not be shared across the animal phyla.
The exciting discovery that developmental regulation had a genetic basis that was linked to evolution was made in 1963 by geneticist Ed Lewis. He studied the family of genes (now known as Hox genes) that regulated segmental development in the fruit fly Drosophila. Lewis suggested that these genes very likely arose by duplication during fly evolution. However, these genes were observed to be linked in a gene cluster known only from flies, which suggested that they were unique to fly development. In addition, at that time a distinction was being realized by molecular biologists between structural genes that encoded plain workaday proteins such as globins and the more exciting regulatory genes that governed development and other processes. The best data of the day suggested that those regulatory genes evolved very rapidly.
At the time, we readily accepted the notion that regulatory genes were not shared across phyla, yet we all also knew and accepted Darwin’s second major hypothesis set forth in the Origin of Species. That is the concept that all organisms stem from a common ancestry deep in the past, and that all life is related. This realization came from the pattern of shared similarities seen among groups of organisms so universally portrayed in the phylogenetic trees that festoon textbooks and museums all around us. Thus, all mammals share a common ancestry, and deeper, all vertebrates do likewise, and still deeper yet, all animal phyla share a common ancestor. That means that all those different phyla have a common ancestry and therefore, so do their genes. If that’s so, it means that all those regulatory genes do too. Thus we seem to have suffered from an enormous evolutionary cognitive dissonance that somehow was apparently invisible to us. It was all in plain view. We never saw it.
The shattering of the cognitive dissonance about regulatory genes ultimately came from brilliant experimental data produced from several labs in the 1980s that showed that those fly Hox genes were present all across the animal kingdom. In fact, those genes did similar things in regulation of embryonic development across most phyla. Hox genes were not alone. Other studies of genes across phyla were made possible by techniques for cloning genes and determining their DNA sequences. These showed that regulatory genes of many kinds were widely shared all around the phyla, sometimes regulating similar developmental steps as in other phyla, sometimes quite distinct ones.
Darwin’s vision of a common ancestry of all animal phyla meant that the evolutionary relationships of animals consisted of a bush of ancestors and descendants. The phylogenetic trees of these evolving lineages were based on comparative anatomy and the fossil record. Now the phylogenetic tree was confirmed by a source of data that was completely unknown during his time. Common descent left its mark not only in anatomy, but in the genes inherited by an organism. Common descent of genes did not involve only structural genes, but also the genes that play roles in the generation of body form and behavior through the embryological development of organisms.
This tale of regulatory genes shows something about how science generates hypotheses, sometimes quite incorrect ones, which eventually meet the shock of novel discoveries. When that happens, our new hypotheses have to take new data into account, and research begins to focus on new ideas. However, it leaves unanswered for me why I couldn’t recognize the dissonance. I was in good company, but still: “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”
How Stupid Not to Have Thought of That!
In his essay on “On the Reception of the ‘Origin of Species,’” which was published in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887), Thomas Henry Huxley famously commented on how he himself received it: “My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the ‘Origin,’ was, ‘How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!’”
Just for the fun of it, we asked a handful of contemporary biologists if they had any Huxley moments of their own to relate: ideas they wish they had had or discoveries they wish they had made. (They didn’t have to accuse themselves of stupidity!) Over the course of the month their answers will appear here.
Part 1: Rudolf Raff
Answering 16 of the Worst #JeSuisCharlie #CharlieHebdo Memes
Six Steps to Women’s Heart Health
Fewer Americans have been dying from heart disease in recent decades. But the rate among women from 35 to 44 has not dropped. There’s no secret sauce for good health, of course, but now researchers have identified six commonsense lifestyle choices that they believe could slash heart attacks within this female age group.
They base their conclusions on the analysis of medical records of nearly 70,000 mostly Caucasian female nurses tracked for two decades. They were all in a large, long-term epidemiological effort called the Nurses Health Study II. The findings are in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. [Andrea K. Chomistek et al, Healthy Lifestyle in the Primordial Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease Among Young Women]
The six anti-heart attack behaviors are: not smoking; exercising for at least 2.5 hours each week: watching TV for fewer than 7 hours a week; consuming a diet rich in veggies, legumes and whole grains but low in red meat, refined grains and sugar; consuming no more than one alcoholic drink daily; and having a Body Mass Index in the normal range.
The data showed that non-smoking women who exercised regularly and maintained a healthful diet lowered their heart disease risk by 92 percent compared with women who did not have those habits. They also had a 66 percent lower risk for heart disease factors such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol or type 2 diabetes. Take those numbers to heart.
—Dina Fine Maron
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast]
January 11, 2015
Armoured Review – Left Behind (Part 1)
Nicolas Cage phones it in for one of the worst films of 2014.
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Many People Use Drugs – But Here’s Why Most Don’t Become Addicts
Photo credit:
Some people are more vulnerable. Chicago Public Media, CC BY-NC
Drug use is common, drug addiction is rare. About one adult in three will use an illegal drug in their lifetime and just under 3m people will do so this year in England and Wales alone. Most will suffer no long-term harm.
Explainer: Why Reusable Rockets Are So Hard To Make
Photo credit:
But giving it a go… EPA
SpaceX is attempting a huge feat in spacecraft engineering. It is seeking to land the first stage of its Falcon 9-R rocket on a floating platform at sea. Normally this would end up at the bottom of the ocean. If successful, SpaceX will shake the rocket launch market, by shaving millions of dollars off launch costs.
New class of antibiotics discovered – and why there may be more to come
Photo credit:
Food for drug-resistant bacteria. AthanArk, CC BY-NC-ND
The rise of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics is a growing worry and threatens to put healthcare back to the early 20th century. Such resistance to drugs was inevitable, because bacteria evolve and learn to defend themselves. But we are worried now because new classes of antibiotics aren’t being found.
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