gThe Secular Gazette h Supporting Science, Reason and the Separation of Church and State Issue #38 October 31, 2012 From the Editor Contents: Why evolution (and talking about it) is important Sam Harris Skeptics Corner Just last night at the Backyard Skeptics monthly meeting, a science teacher told a Science News story about how he was recently teaching a science class to home-schooled parents, most of which were creationists. He mentioned that these parents were Church & State not only teaching bad science (better to call it pseudo-science) but they were Politics teaching their children how to think. I feel sorry for the kids in these families and Religious Right there is nothing I can do except promote more debates among the creationist-lead Watch churches such as Calvary church, one of more predominant Biblical-literalists churches in my area. Although many evolutionary scholars have turned away Skeptoid.com from debating creationists because they feel it validates their claims of a 6000 Born Atheist year-old earth, I can do it quite freely as I am neither a professor nor educator of science. I debate others that are usually members of the church witch also have Evo Education no credentials in any science field. Since neither of us are professionals, we don’t God is add validity to the creationists viewpoint on a professional level because. I feel this Imaginary is one way to plant the seed of doubt in the minds of those creationists who are open to a sliver of critical thinking. Backyard Skeptics News The idea that anyone can use an unknown (God or any deity) to explain another and Meetings unknown (the claim that humans were ‘pooled’ into existence) has its own logical fallacies. But when parents, under the cloak of religion, hinder their children’s natural inquisitiveness, it harms all of us by essentially eliminating many young individuals many would have otherwise grown up to be scientists. I wonder if instead of answering the question “why is the sky blue daddy?” with “God did it” that the parent, even if they were creationists would rather answer “let’s explore that question through light scattering”. I wonder if the child would grow up to be the next Nobel Prize winner if he explored the natural world and discovered the majesty of nature’s complexity. Science (i.e., understanding the nature of reality of the universe) is majestic in the truest sense of the word. Bruce Gleason, editor 1 Our free on-demand lectures are starting to populate the playlist on our streaming server HERE. http://backyardskeptics.com/wordpress/new-streaming-video/ Our latest addition on our streaming server service was this month’s Backyard Skeptics meeting on October 24 with Brian Dunning about locally grown produce. Brian is the founder of the Skeptoid podcast of which an episode is included in every Secular Gazette. Visit his site at Skeptoid.com. Please contribute a minimum of $1 or more if you enjoy this or any lecture on our new streaming service. _________________________________________________________________________________________________ ___ All of the speakers from the last Orange County Freethought Conference are also on our new streaming server. We’re still trying to break-even at our conferences, so a $4 donation is requested for each lecture. Especially educational and entertaining is Michael Shermer’s lecture entitled “The Moral Arc of Science” . The lecture includes over 100 graphs about how the world is indeed getting better, from increased longevity and fewer wars, to better medicine and more democratic states. Also available are lectures from our other great secular speakers: Mr Deity, Rebecca Watson from Skepchick Brian Dunning from the Skeptoid Podcast , Eugenie Scott from NCSE, Sadie Crabtree from JREF, physicist Vic Stenger, writer Tim Callahan, science educator James Corbett, Sean Faircloth from Secular Coalition and Jim Underdown from Center for Inquiry . Feel free to let others know about the Secular Gazette. The only e- newsletter that promotes science, critical thinking, and the idea that a world of non-belief would be a better than one of superstitions. The download is free. 2 Sam Harris This Must Be Heaven Printed with permission Once upon a time, a neurosurgeon named Eben Alexander contracted a bad case of bacterial meningitis and fell into a coma. While immobile in his hospital bed, he experienced visions of such intense beauty that they changed everything—not just for him, but for all of us, and for science as a whole. According to Newsweek, Alexander’s experience proves that consciousness is independent of the brain, that death is an illusion, and that an eternity of perfect splendor awaits us beyond the grave— complete with the usual angels, clouds, and departed relatives, but also butterflies and beautiful girls in peasant dress. Our current understanding of the mind “now lies broken at our feet”—for, as the doctor writes, “What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.” Well, I intend to spend the rest of the morning sparing him the effort. Whether you read it online or hold the physical object in your hands, this issue of Newsweek is best viewed as an archaeological artifact that is certain to embarrass us in the eyes of future generations. Its existence surely says more about our time than the editors at the magazine meant to say—for the cover alone reveals the abasement and desperation of our journalism, the intellectual bankruptcy and resultant tenacity of faith-based religion, and our ubiquitous confusion about the nature of scientific authority. The article is the modern equivalent of a 14th-century woodcut depicting the work of alchemists, inquisitors, Crusaders, and fortune-tellers. I hope our descendants understand that at least some of us were blushing. As many of you know, I am interested in “spiritual” experiences of the sort Alexander reports. Unlike many atheists, I don’t doubt the subjective phenomena themselves—that is, I don’t believe that everyone who claims to have seen an angel, or left his body in a trance, or become one with the universe, is lying or mentally ill. Indeed, I have had similar experiences myself in meditation, in lucid dreams (even while meditating in a lucid dream), and through the use of various psychedelics (in times gone by). I know that astonishing changes in the contents of consciousness are possible and can be psychologically transformative. More: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/this-must-be-heaven 3 Science News Smoking laws limit heart attacks Perhaps living in a “nanny state” isn’t half bad. In a Minnesota county that banned smoking in public places in 2007, the heart attack rate dropped by one-third after the ban compared with the period just before the restrictions were phased in, researchers report in the Oct. 29 Archives of Internal Medicine. The study is the longest analysis to date to measure a smoking ordinance’s effect on community- wide heart health, says study coauthor Richard Hurt, an internist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “Our hope is that this will turn the page on this chapter, and whether secondhand smoke is associated with heart attacks,” Hurt says. “It is.” Olmsted County prohibited smoking in restaurants on January 1, 2002, and expanded the ban to all workplaces, including bars, on October 1, 2007. Cigarette smoke inhalation increases heart attack risk, so Hurt and his colleagues calculated the rate of heart attacks during the 18 months preceding the enactment of the first ordinance and the 18 months immediately after the full ban went into effect. More: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/346089/description/Smoking_laws_limit_heart_attacks Hunting dark matter with DNA RALEIGH, N.C. — Physicists racing to detect the mysterious substance known as dark matter are thinking outside the box by looking inside the cell. A new proposal for tracking dark matter particles relies on strands of DNA. All the ordinary stuff in the universe, from the atoms in people to the hot plasma in stars, makes up only about 5 percent of the universe’s mass and energy. About one-quarter of the universe’s composition is dark matter. (The rest is an even more puzzling entity known as dark energy.) Though several experiments claim to have detected dark matter, the results don’t agree and aren’t definitive. Katherine Freese, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, proposed October 28 at the New Horizons in Science meeting that a new kind of DNA-based detector could not only spot a leading candidate for dark matter, called WIMPs, but could also determine incoming particles’ direction of flight. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/346113/description/Hunting_dark_matter_with_DNA First all-carbon solar cell October 31, 2012 by Mark Shwartz "Carbon has the potential to deliver high performance at a low cost," said study senior author Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a working solar cell that has all of the components made of carbon. This study builds on previous work done in our lab." Unlike rigid silicon solar panels that adorn many rooftops, Stanford's thin film prototype is made of carbon materials that can be coated from solution. "Perhaps in the future we can look at alternative markets where flexible carbon solar cells are coated on the surface of buildings, on windows or on cars to generate electricity," Bao said.