Anyone who has paid attention knows that Denmark and Sweden are among the least religious nations in the world. Polls asking about belief in God, the importance of religion in people’s lives, belief in life after death or church attendance consistently bear this out.This is a very important issue. You should read the article by Peter Steinfels and the posting by Hemant Mehta. I often encounter otherwise intelligent people who try to tell me that religion is here to stay—it will never disappear. Those people really need to get out more. We already have societies today where religion, and belief in God, are minority views.
It is also well known that in various rankings of nations by life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness, Denmark and Sweden stand in the first tier.
Well documented though they may be, these two sets of facts run up against the assumption of many Americans that a society where religion is minimal would be, in Mr. Zuckerman’s words, “rampant with immorality, full of evil and teeming with depravity.”
Which is why he insists at some length that what he and his wife and children experienced was quite the opposite: “a society — a markedly irreligious society — that was, above all, moral, stable, humane and deeply good.”
The U.S. imports more oil from Canada than from any other nation, about 19 percent of its total foreign supply, and around half of that now comes from the oil sands. Anything that reduces our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, many Americans would say, is a good thing. But clawing and cooking a barrel of crude from the oil sands emits as much as three times more carbon dioxide than letting one gush from the ground in Saudi Arabia. The oil sands are still a tiny part of the world's carbon problem—they account for less than a tenth of one percent of global CO2 emissions—but to many environmentalists they are the thin end of the wedge, the first step along a path that could lead to other, even dirtier sources of oil: producing it from oil shale or coal. "Oil sands represent a decision point for North America and the world," says Simon Dyer of the Pembina Institute, a moderate and widely respected Canadian environmental group. "Are we going to get serious about alternative energy, or are we going to go down the unconventional-oil track? The fact that we're willing to move four tons of earth for a single barrel really shows that the world is running out of easy oil."Canadians know there's a problem but politicians are very reluctant to address it. Albertans have been very vocal in playing the victim card in Canadian politics. They have successfully convinced people that the province was hard done by in the past when the evil citizens of Ontario and Quebec tried to deprive them of their right to keep all the oil money for themselves, instead of sharing it with less fortunate Canadians.
[Photo Credit: Peter Essick, National Geographic]
From NatureNews: Brown pledges to protect science during downturn.British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he would not let science "become a victim of the recession" in a speech today at the University of Oxford.Meanwhile, Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party are cutting the budgets of the major granting agencies in Canada.
Speaking to an invited audience, Brown said he would defend investment in science by maintaining the ring fence around the science budget, so that it cannot be raided to prop up other areas competing for public funds such as the health service and industry.
He signalled his aim for Britain to move away from an economy "heavily centred" on financial services and towards one focused on science.
....
Responding to Brown's speech, Nick Dusic, director of the Campaign for Science & Engineering in the UK (CaSE), a London-based lobby group says, "The prime minister is absolutely right that now is the time to show the world the UK is the place to do science. Unfortunately he needed to go further today in his commitments because other countries are raising the bar by making science and engineering central to their economic recovery."
Dusic added that just maintaining current spending commitments will mean that Britain loses ground against countries, like the United States, that are giving science a huge boost within their stimulus packages.
The punitive response may play well to citizens who fear gun battles erupting on city streets. But that get-tough approach lards the Criminal Code with redundant laws that haven't worked in other countries, says criminologist Irvin Waller.The second article, Critics say more jail time won't help curb violence, goes into more detail about what the experts are saying.
"This is yet again a debate about penalties when it's very clear from looking south of the border that these penalties do not make a lot of difference to the number of people killed," he said.
"It's not a debate about what will actually stop them from happening."
Waller, a professor at the University of Ottawa, wrote the book Less Law, More Order to educate politicians on prevention and smart policing practices that have worked in other countries.
Criminologists predict tough sentences won't be effective in preventing gun and gang violenceI'm disappointed in all four political parties. Most of our MP's have IQ's above 100 and they know the rational response to gang violence. They know that this bill will be completely ineffective.
Proposals to slap first-degree murder charges and tougher sentences on gangsters and police assailants will have little practical effect on curbing gang crime and gun violence, criminologists and other critics say.
More front-line officers, more intrusive investigative police powers and more resources for crime prevention are needed, they say.
Ross Hastings, director of the Institute for the Prevention of Crime at the University of Ottawa, joins other criminologists in arguing there is no evidence tougher sentences deter criminals, but the "certainty of being caught" is more likely to do so.
Nonetheless, amid an alarming rise in Vancouver's gang violence, politicians of all stripes rushed yesterday to endorse federal proposals to label gang killings first-degree murder offences, and to stiffen jail terms for drive-by or reckless gang-motivated shootings and assaults on police.
All three federal opposition parties promised to fast-track the measures proposed by the Tories.
A few days ago I got a letter from the Royal Mail. It was a complete set of Darwin stamps issued by the Royal Mail in the UK to honour Charles Darwin. You can see some of them on the right. They are stunning. Thank-you Ms. Sandwalk for arranging to have them sent.1. Eat your heart out, Ken Miller (Only a Theory). :-)
Carl Zimmer has posted another article on the Geroge Will affair [Unchecked Ice: A Saga in Five Chapters]. Recall that George Will made a number of scientifically inaccurate comments in his Washington Post article last week. He defends himself in another column today.What has kept me hooked on this saga is not George Will’s errors. Errors are as common as grass. Some are made out of ignorance, some carefully constructed to give a misleading impression. What has kept me agog is the way the editors at the Washington Post have actually given their stamp of approval on Will’s columns, even claiming to have fact-checked them and seeing no need for a single correction.
Chris Mooney has also attacked the newspaper for it's lack of integrity [George Will Lies; His Editor Does Nothing].Many of the column's incorrect factual assertions were challenged, and as Will is revisiting the column due to the response it has garnered, it's inconceivable that he doesn't know that. For God's sake, Will claimed that "according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade." That's false. And Will doesn't even address the issue at all in his latest column.All of this is good. It is highly appropriate that science journalists reestablish their credibility by criticizing amateurs who don't know what they're talking about.
Meanwhile, the Post's editorial page editor Fred Hiatt has made himself look terrible over all this. He should have held Will to the truth and thereby upheld his paper's standards. Instead he tells CJR this:"It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject -- so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don't make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn't be allowed to make the contrary point. Debate him."
Where is Matt Nisbet in all of this? Here's what Nisbet says in In the Clamor Over George Will, Pundits Win But Public Loses.The same observation currently applies to the clamor over George Will's recent syndicated column on global warming. As I detail in a cover article at the March/April issue of the journal Environment, Will's column is part of a decade-old message playbook on climate change, effectively (and falsely) framing the problem in terms of lingering scientific uncertainty.Over the past two years, many of us have been pointing out the conflict between "framing" and scientific accuracy. Now Nisbet makes it perfectly clear. If you criticize the scientific accuracy of an article in the main stream media then you might be hurting the cause.
The irony of this latest netroots clamor is that dozens of bloggers are just feeding the George Will beast, sustaining and amplifying attention to his false claims about climate science while providing easy cues to the public that the issue can be readily interpreted through the lens of partisanship and ideology. (Sound familiar? As I wrote at Skeptical Inquirer, the same thing happened in the initial response to Ben Stein's anti-evolution doc Expelled.)
The conflict and heat generated not only focuses more attention on Will's preferred uncertainty interpretations, but it also distracts from the narratives and frames that are actually likely to build broad-based support for action. As I note in the Environment article, these frames include an emphasis on the moral and religious imperative to action along with a focus on the public health and energy innovation dimensions of climate change.
Kary B. Mullis (1944 - ) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the polymerase chain reaction technique. This technique is used to amplify a given stretch of DNA by repeatedly copying it several dozen times. The technique has been honed and modified and it's now a standard tool in every biochemistry and molecular biology laboratory.The "Polymerase Chain Reaction" (PCR)
The PCR technique was first presented as recently as 1985 but is nevertheless already one of the most widespread methods of analysing DNA. With PCR it is possible to replicate several million times, in a test tube, an individual DNA segment of a complicated genetic material. Mullis has described how he got the idea for the PCR during a night drive in the Californian mountains. Two short oligonucleotides are synthesized so that they are bound correctly to opposite strands of the DNA segment it is wished to replicate. At the points of contact an added enzyme (DNA polymerase) can start to read off the genetic code and link code words through which two new double strands of DNA are formed. The sample is then heated, which makes the strands separate so that they can be read off again. The procedure is then repeated time after time, doubling at each step the number of copies of the desired DNA segment. Through such repetitive cycles it is possible to obtain millions of copies of the desired DNA segment within a few hours. The procedure is very simple, requiring in theory only a test tube and some heat sources, even though there are now commercial PCR apparatuses that manage the whole procedure automatically and with great precision.
The PCR method can be used for reduplicating a segment of a DNA molecule, e.g. from a blood sample. The procedure is repeated 20-60 times, which can give millions of DNA copies in a few hours.
As has site-directed mutagenesis, the PCR method has decisively improved the outlook for basic research. The sequencing and cloning of genes has been appreciably simplified. PCR has also made Smith's method of site-directed mutagenesis more efficient. Since it is possible with PCR to perform analyses on extremely small amounts of material, it is easy to determine genetic and evolutionary connections between different species. It is very probable that PCR combined with DNA sequencing is going to represent a revolutionary new instrument for studies of the systematics of plant and animal species.
The biomedical applications of the PCR method are already legion. Now that it is possible to discover very small amounts of foreign DNA in an organism, viral and bacterial infections can be diagnosed without the time-consuming culture of microorganisms from patient samples. PCR is now being used, for example, to discover HIV infections. The method can also be exploited to localise the genetic alterations underlying hereditary diseases. Thus PCR, like site-directed mutagenesis, has a great potential within gene therapy. Without the PCR method, the HUGO project, with its objective of determining every single DNA code in, among other things, the human genetic material, would hardly be realistic. In police investigations PCR can give decisive information since it is now possible to analyse the DNA in a single drop of blood or in a hair found at the scene of a crime.
Another fantastic application is that it is possible to mass-produce DNA from fossil remains. Researchers have, for example, succeeded in producing genetic material from insects that have been extinct for more than 20 million years by using the PCR method on DNA extracted from amber. This possibility has already inspired authors of science fiction. The very popular film "Jurassic Park" is about the fear that arises when researchers using PCR recreate extinct giant reptiles.
The images of the Nobel Prize medals are registered trademarks of the Nobel Foundation (© The Nobel Foundation). They are used here, with permission, for educational purposes only.
[Photo Credit: Geschichte der PCR]
1. They could also think about the kind of God who would do this.
[Hat Tip: Friendly Atheist: The Quick Astrology Test]
Indeed, researchers would do well to blog more than they do. The experience of journals such as Cell and PLoS ONE, which allow people to comment on papers online, suggests that researchers are very reluctant to engage in such forums. But the blogosphere tends to be less inhibited, and technical discussions there seem likely to increase.
Moreover, there are societal debates that have much to gain from the uncensored voices of researchers. A good blogging website consumes much of the spare time of the one or several fully committed scientists that write and moderate it. But it can make a difference to the quality and integrity of public discussion.
[Hat Tip: Chance and Necessity]
I'm told that buses with the atheist ads are on the streets of Toronto, although I haven't seen one yet. If you spot one, you are asked to take a photo and post it on the official website of the Canadian Atheist Bus Campaign [Photos of the Atheist Bus ads in Toronto].
