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Thread: Science News

  1. #271
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    World's Oceans Clogged by Millions of Tons of Plastic Trash
    The world's oceans are clogged with the equivalent of five grocery bags full of plastic trash on every 30 centimeters of every nation's coastline around the globe
    February 12, 2015 By Will Dunham



    WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Reuters) - The world's oceans are clogged with plastic debris, but how much of it finds its way into the seas annually? Enough to place the equivalent of five grocery bags full of plastic trash on every foot (30 cm) of every nation's coastline around the globe.

    That's according to scientists who released research on Thursday estimating that a staggering 8 million metric tones of plastic pollution enter the oceans each year from the world's 192 coastal countries based on 2010 data.

    Based on rising waste levels, they estimated that more than 9 million tons would end up in the oceans in 2015.

    Experts have sounded the alarm in recent years over how ...

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    Mutation Order in Tumor Genes Affects Cancer Outcome
    Findings could one day lead to more personalized treatment decisions
    February 11, 2015 |By Christine Gorman


    The experiment hinges on being able to look at single cells of a tumor.
    Credit: Vonschonertagen/Thinkstock


    For the first time, researchers have proved that the order in which cancer genes mutate affects the type of malignancy that results and its response to treatment. Although the findings are specific to a particular group of preleukemic disorders known as myeloproliferative neoplasms, they suggest that scientists studying other types of tumors should start taking into account the timing of the underlying genetic mutations as a potentially critical factor in establishing an accurate diagnosis as well as in making choices about treatment. The study, which was conducted by investigators in the U.K., Spain and Germany, was published in the February 11 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

    Myeloproliferative neoplasms are particularly compelling cancers to study, from a scientific point of view, for two reasons: as disorders of ...

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    With Liver Donors in Short Supply, Cell Transplants Offer New Options
    For many liver disease patients, implantation of a few new cells from a healthy organ may buy time or avoid a full transplant altogether
    February 17, 2015 |By Jessica Wapner


    A new approach may provide a stopgap or, in time, an entirely new alternative. Called hepatocyte transplantation, the technique replaces approximately 10 percent of the liver with healthy cells from a deceased donor.
    Credit: Nephron via Wikimedia Commons


    Every year more than 6,000 people with liver disease or facing liver failure receive whole-organ transplantations in the U.S. Although the procedure is relatively safe and effective, problems remain: Demand outpaces supply; whereas the current U.S. waiting list stands at more than 15,000 only about 6,000 donations are made yearly. The procedure can cost more than $300,000 and immunosuppressants, drugs that prevent the immune system from rejecting the new organ, can lead to dangerous infections and uncontrolled bleeding.

    A new approach may provide a stopgap or, in time, an entirely new alternative. Called hepatocyte transplantation, the technique replaces approximately 10 percent of the liver with healthy cells from a deceased donor. The patient’s organ is not removed, decreasing recovery time, complications and cost. With fewer than 150 U.S. recipients so far, the approach is in its early days.

    If certain hurdles—such as the limited supply of cells and ...

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    U.S. Droughts Will Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
    The Southwest and central Great Plains will dry out even more than previously thought
    February 12, 2015 |By Mark Fischetti


    The dryness of soil, basically measured as a balance between precipitation and evaporation, is predicted to drop steadily in the U.S. central Great Plains and Southwest, during the second half of this century.
    Credit: Unprecedented 21st Century Drought Risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains. Benjamin Cook et. al in Science Advances, Feb. 12, 2014.


    SAN FRANCISCO—Several independent studies in recent years have predicted that the American Southwest and central Great Plains will experience extensive droughts in the second half of this century, and that advancing climate change will exacerbate those droughts. But a new analysis released today says the drying will be even more extreme than previously predicted—the worst in nearly 1,000 years. Some time between 2050 and 2100, extended drought conditions in both regions will become more severe than the megadroughts of the 12th and 13th centuries. Tree rings and other evidence indicate that those medieval dry periods exceeded anything seen since, across the land we know today as the continental U.S.

    The analysis “shows how exceptional future droughts will be,” says Benjamin Cook, a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and lead author of the study. The work was published ...

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    A Stormy Arctic Is the New Normal [Excerpt]
    The Arctic is changing fast
    February 13, 2015 |By Edward Struzik

    From Future Arctic: Field Notes from a World on the Edge, by Edward Struzik. Copyright © 2015, Island Press.


    Along the west coast of Hudson Bay, polar bears are producing fewer cubs and fewer are surviving beyond the first year of life.
    © Edward Struzik


    In the summer of 2000, Canadian national park warden Angus Simpson and his colleagues were camped along the north coast of the Yukon Territory near the Alaskan border, conducting a survey of archeological sites along the coast. The sea was dead calm at the time. But they could see in the inky blue sky over the Beaufort Seas the telltale signs of a storm advancing. An hour or so after they turned in that night, the first big gust of wind blew in, completely flattening their tent and forcing them to take refuge in the cubbyhole of their boat.

    It was just the beginning of a summer storm that some people in the western Arctic of Alaska, Yukon and Northwest Territories remember as the worst they had seen before the Great Cyclone of 2012 ripped through the region. At the height of this gale in 2000, dozens of Inuvialuit people camped on low-lying land along the Arctic coast had to be airlifted out by helicopter. The park wardens, exposed on the same ...

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    Sorry State: U.S.’s Nuclear Reactor Fleet Dwindles
    A falloff in construction of new nuclear power plants will make climate change requirements harder to meet
    Feb 17, 2015 |By David Biello


    PETER BAKER Getty Images

    The U.S.'s nuclear reactor fleet dipped below 100 for the first time in decades, when, at the tail end of 2014, Vermont Yankee shuttered its operations. The 604-megawatt power plant's termination did not come as a surprise: it had logged a slew of safety issues in recent years, including burst pipes, leaks and misplaced fuel rods. Nevertheless, it provided up to 4 percent of New England's power and one third of Vermont's. Its owner, Entergy, just did not have enough money to make the necessary upgrades, especially at a time of low electricity prices. The loss means more natural gas will be burned to meet New England's electricity needs, which undermines U.S. policy to move away from reliance on fossil fuels and control climate change.

    This year is expected to be a bad one for the nuclear energy industry in the U.S., with several reactors, including a handful in Illinois and New York, at risk of shutting down. Yet the dwindling number still produce roughly 70 percent of the electricity in the country that does not exacerbate global warming.

    The International Energy Agency's most recent blueprint for holding global warming to two degrees Celsius requires an expansion of nuclear power in every region of the world by 2040. Yet only 14 countries plan to build new reactors ...

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    The Universe's Oldest Stars Were Late Bloomers
    The Planck satellite reveals the universe's first stars formed more than a hundred million years later than previously believed
    February 17, 2015 |By Lee Billings


    The cosmic microwave background (CMB) as seen by the Planck Satellite across the entire sky. The color scale shows temperature differences in the CMB, while the texture maps the direction of polarized light. Some of Planck's CMB polarization measurements have yielded a new estimate for the formation of the universe's first stars.
    ESA and the Planck Collaboration


    If you could see the universe as it was about 13.8 billion years ago, it would look like a flame. Back then it was just a hot ionized fog—a plasma—still glowing from its birth in the big bang at the dawn of time. But when it was still in its infancy, a youthful 370,000 years old, everything changed. Slowly cooling as it expanded, the universe grew chilly enough for electrons in the plasma to combine with protons, forming hydrogen gas. When the opaque plasma transformed into see-through gas, the plasma's last, fiery light was suddenly freed to flash through a newly transparent universe.

    That ancient, relic light washes over us even now, diminished by the intervening eons to a faint all-sky microwave glow: the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This light gives cosmologists their earliest possible glimpse of the infant universe, providing crucial evidence for its origins, age and composition. But besides being the ultimate cosmic baby picture, the CMB also provides snapshots of the universe as it has grown up. Passing through billions of light-years of expanding space on its way to us, the CMB has been subtly altered by interactions with coalescing cosmic structures. It encodes the story of how a nearly featureless soup of matter and radiation came to be our orderly cosmos of galaxies, stars and planets.

    Now, cosmologists using CMB maps from ...

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    Jupiter, as Aliens Might See It
    A view of the gas giant as if it were an exoplanet cross-checks methods for studying worlds outside our solar system
    February 17, 2015 |By Elizabeth Gibney and Nature magazine


    Comparing the spectrum of that light with what astronomers already know about the gas giant gives scientists a ‘Rosetta Stone’ for translating results about distant alien worlds.
    Credit: E. Karkoschka(Univ. of Arizona)/ESA/NASA


    Astronomers have observed Jupiter for centuries. But a study that looks at the gas giant as if it were an exoplanet could help to make more reliable interpretations of the atmospheres of bodies orbiting stars hundreds of light years away. The results largely confirm the conventional picture of Jupiter, but also reveal some surprises—including clouds of ice crystals previously unheard of on the planet.

    The hundreds of planets now known to orbit stars other than our own are almost never directly visible in telescopes. In a handful of cases, however, astronomers have been able to learn about their make-ups, by interpreting how starlight filters through their atmospheres as it skirts the planets while they cross between their parent stars and Earth.

    But low resolution and experimental noise mean that ...

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    NASA Probe Captures Images of Pluto and Its Moon Charon [Video]
    The New Horizons spacecraft is set to make the first flyby of Pluto this July
    February 13, 2015 |By Mike Wall and LiveScience

    A NASA spacecraft speeding toward an epic Pluto encounter this summer has captured a new movie of the dwarf planet and its largest moon, Charon.

    The new Pluto-Charon video was shot by NASA's New Horizons probe, which will make the first-ever flyby of Pluto on July 14. The time-lapse movie consists of a series of images taken by New Horizons' long-range camera from Jan. 25 to Jan. 31.

    That's just long enough to cover one day on these icy, distant worlds; Pluto and Charon both rotate once every 6.4 Earth days. The two objects also complete one orbit around their common center of mass, or barycenter, in the same amount of time. (Pluto and Charon are tidally locked to each other, with one body always showing the other the same face.) [Photos from NASA's New Horizons Pluto Probe]

    "These images allow the New Horizons navigators to ...

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    How Will the Fight over Public ISPs and Net Neutrality Play Out?
    The FCC will soon vote on the spread of high-speed municipal broadband services and ISPs’ rights to discriminate against certain Web traffic
    February 18, 2015 |By Larry Greenemeier


    END GAME: On February 26, the FCC will vote on the issues of publicly supported high-speed broadband networks and Net neutrality, after years of contentious debate.
    Courtesy of PhotoDisc/Getty Images.


    Several years of contentious debate over the Internet’s future come to a head next week. On February 26 the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will decide whether local communities can take a more active role in upgrading their access to high-speed broadband. During the same session, the regulatory agency will vote on the so-called “Net neutrality” issue that would ban paid prioritization of Internet traffic as well as the blocking and throttling of online content and services.

    The idea of local governments taking it upon themselves to improve community broadband speeds has caught on in recent years, particularly in towns and cities that host major universities craving greater network bandwidth. In 2011 a group of universities and their surrounding municipalities formed the University Community Next Generation Innovation Project, commonly referred to as Gig.U. The project’s goal has been to accelerate the deployment of next-generation networks in the U.S. by encouraging researchers—students and professors alike—to develop new applications and services that can make use of ultrafast data-transfer rates.

    Pres. Barack Obama has come down in favor of municipal broadband services as ...

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    Pros and Cons of 5 E-Mail Alternatives
    As messaging services eat into e-mail, what are we losing—and gaining?
    Feb 17, 2015 |By David Pogue


    Two key aspects of e-mail are changing: the store-and-forward routine (I send you a message, which waits until you come and get it) and the fact that these communications are typed.
    Credit: Thinkstock


    In my Scientific American column this month I noted that humanity's flood of e-mail seems to be subsiding. The quantity has dropped 10 percent in the last few years, and among young people it's dropped a staggering 60 percent.

    But that doesn't mean that written communications are dead—far from it. It means that we've found better, quicker, more targeted channels for sending messages, thanks to our trusty smartphones and tablets. With the rise of these new apps and channels, two key aspects of e-mail are changing: the store-and-forward routine (I send you a message, which waits until you come and get it) and the fact that these communications are typed.

    Here's a rundown of the messaging channels that ...

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    How to Get More Parents to Vaccinate Their Kids
    A look at the financial and behavioral nudges that can provide incentives for change
    February 19, 2015 |By Dina Fine Maron


    Credit: Thinkstock/Dmitry Naumov

    Four years ago schools and day cares in western Washington embarked on an experiment. Too many kids in the state were going without needed vaccines that protect them against measles, whooping cough and other preventable diseases. Part of the problem, public health officials believed, was that parents lacked accurate medical information and held misguided beliefs that the vaccines were not necessary.

    So they drafted some help—specifically, other parents who were trained by public health workers to answer common questions about vaccines’ risks and benefits. Armed with that knowledge and paid small stipends, these advocates went out to educate other parents. Many of the trained parents took to Facebook to spread the pro-vaccine word; others set up information booths at school and community events. “Over a period of three years we worked in a total of 21 sites including elementary schools, child care and preschools,” says Mackenzie Melton, immunization coordinator at WithinReach, a nonprofit that helped organize the program.

    In the U.S. it was one of the only recent efforts to audition new methods for getting more parents to ...

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    When High IQs Hang Out
    “Genius” societies offer a social network for the top tier of test takers
    Jan 1, 2015 |By Lena Groeger

    Kevin Langdon was writing several books and designing an inside-out clock. Karyn Huntting Peters was organizing a global problem-solving network. Alfred Simpson juggled multiple Web-programming projects in his free time. These three people might not have had much in common—except for their unusually high IQs.

    All three belong to exclusive high-IQ societies. Mensa International, whose members’ test scores must land above the 98th percentile (or one in 50), may be the most popular, but it is just one option for the discerning test taker. The Triple Nine Society demands an IQ in the 99.9th percentile, whereas the Mega Society cuts off at the 99.9999th percentile (one in one million). The memberless Grail Society claims to accept one in 100 billion people—no one has applied so far.

    Although members of IQ societies do not ...

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    Higgs Boson Could Explain Matter’s Dominance over Antimatter
    A new theory suggests the Higgs field varied in the early universe, offering matter a chance to split off from antimatter
    February 20, 2015 |By Clara Moskowitz


    Computer simulation of particle tracks from an LHC collision that produced a Higgs boson.
    CERN


    The stars, the planets and you and I could just as easily be made of antimatter as matter, but we are not. Something happened early in the universe’s history to give matter the upper hand, leaving a world of things built from atoms and little trace of the antimatter that was once as plentiful but is rare today. A new theory published February 11 in Physical Review Letters suggests the recently discovered Higgs boson particle may be responsible—more particularly, the Higgs field that is associated with the particle.

    The Higgs field is thought to pervade all of space and imbue particles that pass through it with mass, akin to the way liquid dye gives Easter eggs color when they are dunked in. If the Higgs field started off with a very high value in the early universe and decreased to its current lower value over time, it might have briefly differentiated the masses of particles from their antiparticles along the way—an anomaly, because antimatter today is characterized by having the same mass but opposite charge as its matter counterpart. This difference in mass, in turn, could have made matter particles more likely to form than antimatter in the cosmos’ early days, producing the excess of matter we see today. “It is a nice idea that ...

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    Star Buzzed Our Solar System during Human Prehistory
    A faint star with an even fainter companion came close enough some 70,000 years ago to perturb distant comets in our solar system
    February 21, 2015 |By Ron Cowen and Nature magazine


    The discovery is surprising because stars are expected to come close to the outer Solar System only about once every 9 million years, yet this encounter occurred recently.
    Credit: NASA


    A recently discovered stellar neighbour of the Sun penetrated the extreme fringes of the Solar System—the closest encounter ever documented—at around the time that modern humans began spreading from Africa into Eurasia.

    During occasional flare-ups that may have lasted minutes to hours, the dim interloper might even have been bright enough for our ancestors to see.

    The red dwarf star, which has a mass about 8% that of the Sun and is orbited by a 'brown dwarf' companion—a body with too little heft to sustain the thermonuclear reactions that enable stars to shine—was discovered in 2013 in images recorded by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. It is relatively nearby, at about 6 parsecs (19.6 light years) away.

    Astronomer Eric Mamajek at the University of Rochester in New York became intrigued by it when he learned that ...

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    Net Neutrality Prevails in Contentious FCC Vote
    Broadband Internet access will be reclassified as a telecom service under a modified set of rules. Court battles and more Congressional hearings to follow
    February 26, 2015 |By Larry Greenemeier


    THE AYES HAVE IT: The FCC has voted to regulate the Internet as a utility, despite much opposition. This is hardly the end of the Net neutrality story, so stay tuned.
    Courtesy of Camilo Sanchez, via Wikimedia Commons.


    The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved its Net neutrality policy by a vote of three to two on Thursday. This unsurprising outcome follows years of contentious debate over the best way to ensure that Internet service providers (ISPs) treat all online data and services equally, without favoring one type of content over another.

    Rhetoric on both sides had been remarkably similar in recent months as the vote approached but was punctuated by mutual mistrust. By the end of Thursday’s debate—which is by no means the end of the matter—the parties agreed on the Net neutrality approach, although through different means. Expect the FCC’s decision to regulate the Internet as a utility to be challenged in the courts, through additional Congressional hearings and, ultimately, through legislation that would mitigate the agency’s authority to regulate broadband providers.

    The route to Net neutrality involves a governmental reclassification of Internet access under Title II of the Communications Act. Those in support claim to be promoting “innovation” and “openness” online by preventing ...

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    Tar Sands Pipeline Vetoed, Climate Threat Marches On
    By David Biello | February 25, 2015 | Comments15
    The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.


    A map of Canada's network of pipelines to transport liquids, included diluted bitumen from Alberta's tar sands. The dotted blue line cutting diagonally down from Alberta to Oklahoma is the Keystone XL pipeline while the dotted blue line headed east is the leading alternative, known as Energy East. Courtesy of Canadian Energy Pipeline Association

    Pres. Barack Obama vetoed a bill to approve construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline on February 24—not because of climate change, not because of low oil prices and not because of the risks from leaking diluted bitumen from the tar sands. Obama vetoed the pipeline bill “because this act of Congress conflicts with established executive branch procedures.” In other words Obama used the third veto of his presidency to preserve the prerogatives of his office, in this case evaluating cross-border pipelines and the ever-vague “national interest.”

    Veto aside, the Obama administration still might find Keystone XL is in the national interest, once the Department of State completes its six-years-and-counting review. Approval appears to hinge on whether the pipeline is judged to “significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution,” as the president put it in a speech in 2013. State has said no it won’t in the past, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, among others, say yes it will.

    There is little doubt that oil made from the bitumen stuck to sand buried beneath Alberta is among the dirtiest kinds of oil found on the planet. Interestingly, about the only worse type of petroleum is the heavy crude from Venezuela that refineries on ...

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    Why Julianne Moore and Taylor Swift See That Dress Differently
    By Stephen L. Macknik | February 27, 2015 | Comments31


    http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science...s-color-dress/

    As a visual neuroscientist I think a lot about how we see the world around us. And so I’ve found the scientific and celebrity controversy around #thedress to be especially fun and exciting. Most of the scientific pundits have concluded that the dress is black-and-blue, and they have offered up an illusions-in-the-brain explanation of why some people see the dress instead as white-and-gold. Yet after thinking thoroughly about this photo, looking at it on a number of different screens, and speaking with some of my lab partners, I’d like to offer my point of view. Yes, there is an illusion at play here that affects our brains, but no, it is not that illusion that causes it to look differently to different people: that difference is caused by a mundane photographic effect.

    First, the illusory explanation (it’s black-and-blue but only appears white-and-gold) arises from what we scientists call “color constancy.” It’s the process by which we can recognize the same object under different light sources. My favorite example of this effect is from Dale Purves’s lab, and is shown in the image of the Rubik’s Cube. You see the brown central chip on the top and the orange central chip on the front-face? In fact they are identical in color and only ...

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    Alien Life Prefers Circles
    Solar systems with many planets are more likely to feature the circular orbits that could foster intelligent life
    Feb 17, 2015 |By Ken Croswell


    Credit: SKY2014/Thinkstock

    If intelligent life is out there, it probably resides in a solar system with many planets. The more planets a star has, a recent study found, the more circular the orbits tend to be. Because planets on circular orbits do not move toward or away from their star, their climates may be stable enough to foster advanced life.

    Our own solar system fits that pattern. The sun has eight or nine planets (depending on how you count), and most of them have fairly circular paths. Earth's orbit, for example, has an eccentricity of just 1.7 percent. (Eccentricity ranges from 0 percent for a perfect circle to nearly 100 percent for extreme ellipses.) Mercury and Pluto pursue oval-shaped orbits, with eccentricities of 21 and 25 percent, respectively, but even Pluto—whose planetary status is controversial—seems tame when compared with many of the planets orbiting other stars, where eccentricities can exceed 60, 70, even 80 percent.

    As far as we know, such wild worlds exist only in solar systems with one or two planets, say astronomers Mary Anne Limbach and Edwin L. Turner of Princeton University, who conducted the study. In contrast, solar systems with ...

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    Why People "Fly from Facts"
    Research shows the appeal of untestable beliefs, and how it leads to a polarized society
    March 3, 2015 |By Troy Campbell and Justin Friesen


    The truth can be uncomfortable
    Credit: Jo Naylor via flickr


    “There was a scientific study that showed vaccines cause autism.”

    “Actually, the researcher in that study lost his medical license, and overwhelming research since then has shown no link between vaccines and autism.”

    “Well, regardless, it’s still my personal right as a parent to make decisions for my child.”

    Does that exchange sound familiar: a debate that starts with testable factual statements, but then, when the truth becomes inconvenient, the person takes a flight from facts.

    As public debate rages about issues like immunization, Obamacare, and same-sex marriage, many people try to use science to bolster their arguments. And since it’s becoming easier to test and establish facts—whether in physics, psychology, or policy—many have wondered why bias and polarization have not been defeated. When people are confronted with facts, such as the well-established safety of immunization, why do these facts seem to have so little effect?

    Our new research, recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, examined a slippery way by which people get ...

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    Complex Societies Evolved without Belief in All-Powerful Deity
    The emergence of politically sophisticated societies may be assisted by faith in supernatural spirits but does not require "big god" religion
    March 6, 2015 |By Philip Ball and Nature magazine


    Joseph Watts, a specialist in cultural evolution at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, wanted evidence to examine the idea that "big Gods" drive and sustain the evolution of big societies.
    Credit: Arian Zwegers/Flickr


    All human societies have been shaped by religion, leading psychologists to wonder how it arose, and whether particular forms of belief have affected other aspects of evolved social structure. According to one recent view, for example, belief in a "big God"—an all-powerful, punitive deity who sits in moral judgement on our actions—has been instrumental in bringing about social and political complexity in human cultures.

    But a new analysis of religious systems in Austronesia—the network of small and island states stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island—challenges that theory. In these states, a more general belief in supernatural punishment did tend to precede political complexity, the research finds, but belief in supreme deities emerged after complex cultures have already formed.

    Joseph Watts, a specialist in cultural evolution at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who worked on the study, wanted evidence to ...

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