There is a middle-of-the-road report on the “new atheist”/”accommodationist” argument in The New Statesman, which, it seems to me, gives a pretty fair account of the dispute. Frankly, I am surprised that there has not been more objective media coverage of this very significant rift; if Lingua Franca magazine were still around, that would be an appropriate place for it, but where are other appropriate outlets, like the Chronicle of Higher Education?

Anyways, I didn’t speak with the New Statesman author, but it seems Barbara Forrest did:

Forrest argues that new atheists should respect the personal nature of faith, and nurture a sense of humility by recognising that scientific evidence does not rule out existence of the divine. They should accept that there is a wide range of views, she says, and stop insisting that everyone follow the “one true way” of atheism. Failing to do so only turns people off in droves.

Yet it seems unlikely that the new atheists have been this damaging. They have been an identifiable group and social force for five years only – starting with Harris’s The End of Faith in 2004, which was followed by Dawkins’s The God Delusion in 2006. More significantly, polls indicate that the proportion of the US public that subscribes to a creationist account of human origins has remained relatively constant for the past 25 years, hovering around 45 per cent. The previous era, which advocated greater respect for religion, does not seem to have won over hearts or minds. So who is to say that taking the opposite approach will drive anyone away?

I want to comment on this, because I think it contains some pretty big misconceptions about the nature of public opinion, and how we might detect changes therein.

We know there is a strong and unwavering subset of the public that embraces creationism, and that it is deeply entrenched, and has been for decades. That’s not in dispute. But there is a lot of questionable thinking about how the New Atheism, a very young movement, may or may not have affected this.

First, I don’t know to what extent that part of the population that embraces creationism views the New Atheism as something distinctly “different” from what came before. After all, creationists and the religious right were denouncing “secular humanists” long before the New Atheism came along. Creationist leaders are surely aware of the New Atheism, but for the creationist rank-and-file, who have long considered evolutionary science to be the equivalent an atheist plot (and have been told this repeatedly by said leaders), it is not clear to me that they will find any news here, much less change their views dramatically on that basis.

Therefore, even assuming that the New Atheists are having an impact somewhere, it is hardly obvious that the creationist ranks are the place where we would expect to detect it. For my part, I’m far more worried about alienation of the middle, and the thwarting of coalitions that might combat the creationists, as a result of the New Atheism.

Secondly, I find it highly dubious to judge past strategies to be a failure based on the lack of movement in the creationist polling numbers cited above.

In a longstanding culture war situation, like the one we have over the teaching of evolution, you often have to run to stand still. And in the “previous era,” at least one kind of undeniable stride was made that has nothing to do with polling numbers–namely, we won the court cases and got the legal precedents when it really counted. Moreover, in the courtroom, e.g., the Dover trial, “accommodationism” was the triumphant strategy.

These court victories don’t mean that the creationist numbers went down; they just mean the creationists didn’t get a stronger foothold in our schools–which itself was a pretty big achievement.

Throughout all of this, there has been a longstanding perception in much of America that science and religion are inimical to one another, and contradictory. This is a perception that the creationists have fanned for a long time (hence the “secular humanism” business), and that the New Atheists now also explicitly support. In a sense, it works to the advantage of both groups, at the expense to of the middle.

This “conflict narrative” or “conflict thesis” also happens to be a historically misinformed perspective, in my view, and one that is questionable on other fronts as well–but I think it is a dominant perception, and constantly reinforced by the mass media.

For those of us critical of the New Atheists, then, it is not because we think they have emerged and dramatically upset the culture war stalemate over the teaching of evolution in some way. Rather, it is because they are likely alienate the middle ground and aren’t a constructive response, in the present moment, to the need to defuse longstanding tensions over science and religion in America.

Employers in the U.K. have just learned that there’s a word for discrimination against a person based on their earth-conscious, tofu-eating ways: “greenism.” And firing someone for their environmental views is just as illegal as firing someone for their religious or philosophical beliefs, according to a court ruling.

Tim Nicholson, former head of sustainability at property firm Grainger Plc, claims he was laid off because of his views on climate change and the environment. A judge said Nicholson could take Grainger to the Employment Appeals Tribunal over the layoff, but Grainger challenged the ruling on the grounds that climate change is a scientific and not philosophical viewpoint. However, that challenge was overturned, according to the Telegraph:

In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that “a belief in man-made climate change … is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations.”

The ruling could open the door for employees to sue their companies for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.

Nicholson said during previous hearings that due to his strong convictions he refused to travel by air and renovated his house to be environmentally friendly. He also said Grainger’s chief executive, who allegedly once flew a staff member from Ireland to London to deliver a forgotten Blackberry, was hostile toward his beliefs. The company said it will now argue that there was no link between Nicholson’s views and his layoff.

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Image: flickr / hpeguk

Great white sharks, much like humans, tend to stick to familiar turf, according to new research. Also like a lot of people, they like to hang out along the coastal waters of California. Sharks tagged with acoustic devices often spent up to 107 days at four key sites along the central and northern California coast where seals and sea lions are abundant: Southeast Farallon Island, Tomales Point, Año Nuevo Island and Point Reyes [LiveScience]. A few of the fearsome predators were tracked as far inland as the Golden Gate Bridge, apparently in search of snacks, say the researchers. The study, the largest and most detailed study of North American great white sharks, provides evidence contrary to the popular notion of great white sharks swimming aimlessly in the ocean.

The sharks under study divided most of their time between three locations: Northern California, Hawaii, and an area that the researchers called the white shark café, a spot in the open ocean about halfway between the Baja Peninsula and the Hawaiian Islands. Exactly what goes on at the café is still unknown–although researchers suspect it may be a hot spot for mating. Lead researcher Salvador Jorgensen explains that male white sharks “converge in a very specific area of the cafe,” Jorgensen said, while female sharks move in and out of the area. “It adds a little more evidence to the argument that this could be an important reproductive area” [Washington Post].

The scientists tracked the snaggly toothed predators between 2000 and 2008 from the Bay Area to San Diego, Hawaii and back as the sharks followed a route that was carried out with surprising precision and under a strict time frame [San Francisco Chronicle]. These great whites have been isolated from other great white sharks near Australia and South Africa for so long that they are now genetically distinct. The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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Image: flickr / hermanusbackpackers

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

A) Yes.

B) No.

C) Cannot be determined.

This is from this month’s Scientific American — article unfortunately costs money. It’s about “dysrationalia,” which is what happens when people with nominally high IQ’s end up thinking irrationally. A phenomenon I’m sure we’ve all encountered, especially in certain corners of the blogosphere.

And the answer is the first option. But over 80 percent of people choose the third option. Here’s the solution: the puzzle doesn’t say whether Anne is married or not, but she either is or she isn’t. If Anne is married, she’s looking at George, so the answer is “yes”; if she’s unmarried, Jack is looking at her, so the answer is still “yes.” The underlying reason why smart people get the wrong answer is (according to the article) that they simply don’t take the time to go carefully through all of the possibilities, instead taking the easiest inference. The patience required to go through all the possibilities doesn’t correlate very well with intelligence.

Curvis Bickham spent eight months in prison for a triple-homicide because a police dog confused his scent with that of the killer. Now Bickham and others who spent months in jail after dogs linked their scents to evidence from crimes they did not commit are filing a lawsuit claiming Texas authorities falsely arrested and imprisoned them, their attorney said Tuesday [AP]. In a scent lineup, dogs sniff items found at a crime scene, and then sniff jars swabbed with the suspects’ scents and the scents of others not involved in the crime. When the dogs link crime scene and suspect, that evidence is often relied on heavily in court by the prosecution. Alaska, Florida, New York and Texas all use scent lineups to link suspects to crimes.

Dogs are used all the time to fight crime—from sniffing out bombs and drugs to locating dead bodies. However, scent lineups have critics barking. They say the lineups are poorly controlled, and argue that avoiding cross-contamination is basically impossible. The main target of the current lawsuit is Fort Bend County Deputy Keith Pikett—whose home-trained bloodhounds identified the suspects. A 2004 F.B.I. report warned that dog scent work “should not be used as primary evidence,” but only to corroborate other evidence. In several of the cases that were based on Deputy Pikett’s dogs, however, the scent lineups appear to have provided the primary evidence, even when contradictory evidence was readily available [The New York Times]. Deputy Pikett, by his own estimation, has conducted thousands of scent lineups.

The three men who filed the lawsuit against Deputy Pickett were all eventually set free after contradictory evidence proved their innocence. The Innocence Project of Texas, a legal defense organization … released a report last month that excoriated dog scent lineups as a “junk science injustice” [The New York Times]. Dog scent lineups bring to mind another high profile forensic science debate in Texas that many believe led to the execution of an innocent man. Now that the science behind dog scent lineups is coming under the same scrutiny, one can’t help but wonder if scent lineups might have led to a similar outcome.

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DISCOVER: Reasonable Doubt examines the fallibility of DNA evidence

Image: flickr / contadini

The quest to find a second Earth–a potentially habitable planet that’s about the size of our home, but that lies in a distant solar system–has hit a snag. The Kepler space telescope was expected to be well on its way to detecting Earth-sized exoplanets by now, but an electronic glitch is slowing it down. The delays are caused by noisy amplifiers in the telescope’s electronics. The team is racing to fix the issue by changing the way data from the telescope is processed, but the delay could mean that ground-based observers now have the upper hand in the race to be the first to spot an Earth twin [Nature News].

Kepler, which was launched in March, uses the transit method to detect exoplanets; it’s watching a patch of 100,000 stars in hopes of detecting the brief dimming of a star’s light, which indicates that a planet has passed in front of the star. Kepler focuses light onto 42 light-detecting chips, called CCDs, each of which monitors stars in a different part of the telescope’s field of view. Each CCD is split into two for the purposes of sending data back to Earth, for a total of 84 data channels. Three of these channels are plagued by electronic noise that makes stars in their field of view appear to flicker – “like it’s changing its brightness at a rapid rate”, says Kepler chief scientist William Borucki [New Scientist]. That’s awkward, since the artificial flickers could obscure the real dimming that occurs during a planet’s transit.

The astronomers reportedly detected the problem during testing before Kepler’s launch, but they judged it riskier to dismantle the satellite at the last minute than to correct the glitch after launch. The noise affects only a small portion of the data, Borucki says, but the team has to fix the software — it would be “too cumbersome” to remove the bad data manually — so that it accounts for the noise automatically. He says that the fix should be in place by 2011 [Nature News].

Still, researchers say that the problem isn’t likely to delay the announcement of an Earth-like planet. For an exoplanet to be habitable to life as we know it, the planet would have to orbit its star at a distance that would keep it at a reasonable temperature and allow for liquid water. An Earth-like planet around a sun-like star would have an orbit roughly similar to Earth’s, and would take about a year to complete one circuit around its star. Astronomers feel the need to record three transits to confirm a planet’s existence–and in three years time, the noise-canceling software should be available. The delays would only affect habitable planets around smaller, cooler stars. The habitable zone for these stars is closer in, where planets could complete the necessary three orbits in about one Earth year. Without the glitch, this kind of planet could in principle be confirmed in 2010 [New Scientist].

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DISCOVER: The Inspiring Boom in “Super-Earths”

Image: Kepler / Ames Research Center

The folks behind the best-selling book, “What’s Your Poo Telling You?” aren’t satisfied with being mere bathroom reading material. So they’ve dropped a new iPhone app, the Poo Log, which allows you to time, log, and graph your BMs—and learn about your gastrointestinal health while doing so.

Via The Presurfer:

The ‘Poo Log’ is a digital timer and journal for recording and studying the wondrous uniqueness of each bowel movement. With a clever mix of bathroom humor and legitimate medical information, the ‘Poo Log’ allows the user to track his/her digestive workings and graph their ‘poo’ – all with one hand.

According to the app’s developers, AvatarLabs Inc, the tracker features medically accurate info that is suitable for all ages, and of course helpful tips such as, “Light a match. Now.”

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Image: AvatarLabs Inc

In 2005, the earth cracked open in Ethiopia. Two volcanic eruptions shook the desert, and a 35-mile-long rift opened in the land, measuring 20 feet wide in some places. Now a new study adds weight to the argument that the opening of this crack marks the first step in the formation of a new sea that may eventually separate East Africa from the rest of the continent. Says lead researcher Atalay Ayele: “The ocean’s formation is happening slowly, likely to take a few million years. It will stretch from the Afar depression (straddling Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti) down to Mozambique” [ABC News].

The study, to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, explains that the seismic movements observed in Ethiopia are very similar to the changes wrought by faults and fissures on the seafloor, where the processes that move tectonic plates usually begin.

Seismic data from 2005 shows that the rift opened in a matter of days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began “unzipping” the rift in both directions, the researchers explained in a statement today. “We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this” [LiveScience], says study coauthor Cindy Ebinger.

The active volcanic region in Ethiopia’s Afar desert sits at the boundary of the African and Arabian tectonic plates, which have been gradually spreading apart for millions years; the new study shows that large-scale seismic events can speed up that process. The gradual separation has already formed the 186-mile Afar depression and the Red Sea. The thinking is that the Red Sea will eventually pour into the new sea in a million years or so [LiveScience].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Meet the New Continent: East Africa
DISCOVER: The Thrill-Seeker’s Travel Guide points tourists towards the Afar desert
80beats: Tremors Point to a Stressed-Out Stretch of the San Andreas Fault
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80beats: Ancient Continental Collisions May Have Provided Air to Breathe

Image: University of Rochester

The faces of addiction come in every color and gender. The disease creeps into the lives of those from a wide spectrum of socio-economic levels, backgrounds, and experiences. It crosses continents, latitudes, and longitudes. That’s the thing about addiction–it doesn’t discriminate. Neither should politicians. Particularly when it comes to funding the research to help those who need treatment most.

Jessica’s got a thoughtful post up over at Bioephemera on double standards, politics, and drug treatment research. Having spent two years as a AAAS fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, she understands the gravity of the issue. Jess writes:

..research to help smokers quit is generally portrayed as necessary and important, [while] increasingly, I’m seeing politicians complain that research to help other drug addicts quit is a waste of money.

Maybe it’s because these other addicts are meth addicts, or potheads, or heroin addicts – probably not people you relate to or approve of. That makes it pretty easy for the media to take cheap shots at crack, etc. addicts, and question whether we should waste money trying to help them. But we should get angry about these cheap shots…Tobacco is still a significant public health problem, and I want to do all we can to help smokers (like my mom) quit, but crack, meth, etc. utterly destroys families and communities. We should be leveraging scientific research every way we can to help these people – not throwing them away or taking shots at them because they’re “bad,” or because we can’t relate to them. They’re real people. They have families.

Nevertheless, people routinely and cynically use drug treatment research as a political football.

Of course it’s not news that politicians bash science research to score points with the voting public: Sarah Palin notoriously mocked fruit fly studies along the campaign trail while John McCain took issue with grizzly bear research and the Adler Planetarium. And the truth is that this tactic probably continues to win votes since science remains such a partisan issue. But when it comes to people–and finding the means to treat those most in need–a political agenda is unquestionably not acceptable.

Lots of us like to imagine there are justifiable reasons we’re the most deserving of the best care when sick. The truth is that better treatment and attention should not come as a result of wealth, location, or the social acceptability of a disease. Like Jess, I agree we must let doctors and scientists continue to study drug abuse and test treatments in the real world. That’s the way research progresses and results are achieved.

I’ll leave you with this illuminating video Jess posted that demonstrates the problem:

Update:  SOLVED!!

How about a riddle for your Saturday?  I’ll give you some clues, and then post the answer in the comment section tomorrow morning (or sooner, if someone guesses the correct answer).  To be fair to everybody, the answer will be something well known that you will have been familiar with since your childhood.  Ready?

Although composed of several bodies, this is referred to as one object.

It is visible to the naked eye; in fact, it is an ancient eye test, and can still be used to measure “perfect” (20/20) vision.

This object is often used as a guidepost.

It is mentioned in Homer’s Iliad.

It is visible in the northern skies (north of latitude 25 degrees south) all year.

In about 50,000 years, it will be gone.

Do you know to what I am referring?  The first person to guess correctly can choose the subject of my next post (must be about astronomy;  must be researchable).

Good luck!