Fact-Check: Bernie Sanders and Detroit

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton will face off in the Michigan primary on Tuesday, at a time when the state's major cities have seen better days. Flint faces a lead-tainted-water crisis, while Detroit is still reeling from its bankruptcy.

Sanders attacked Clinton on Twitter this week, connecting Clinton's support for free trade, specifically the North American Free Trade Agreement signed into law by her husband, to the kind of blight Detroit and other cities in the Upper Midwest are seeing.

But is it that simple? We decided to try and find out.

On Thursday, Sanders tweeted, "The people of Detroit know the real cost of Hillary Clinton's free trade policies," along with five photos of dilapidated buildings. Shortly after that initial tweet, he added: "43,000 Michiganders lost their jobs due to NAFTA. I opposed that bad deal, @HillaryClinton did not."

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The Big Question:

There's a lot going on here, so we're going to break this into two parts:

1. What does free trade (and especially NAFTA) have to do with the devastation Sanders' tweet depicted?

2. How big of a proponent of NAFTA was Hillary Clinton?

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The Short Answers:

1. Probably not much (though it did cost some people their jobs), and

2. She supported it, though she expressed reservations sometimes. (Either way, importantly, it was signed under her husband's administration.)

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The Long Answers:

Let's do this point by point:

1. What does free trade have to do with the devastation Sanders tweeted about?

Detroit's blight makes for striking photos, but its causes go well beyond trade policy.

"I'm pretty sure the buildings he posted were abandoned before 1993 [when NAFTA was signed]," said James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Policy Institute, a Michigan-based economic policy think tank that describes itself as "free market"-oriented.

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White flight: Clearly, Detroit had plenty of problems (and abandoned buildings) outside of trade agreements. And those problems started well before, for example NAFTA or the decision to normalize trade relations with China in 2000. In the 1950s and 1960s, and particularly after the 1967 race riots, Detroit was the poster child of "white flight," as hundreds of thousands of white Detroiters fled to the suburbs.

Since then, other factors have contributed to Detroit's decline:

Auto industry problems: Threatened by strikes, some factories started to leave the city — and no other industry could fill the gap left by those factories, as the New York Times reported in 2013. Foreign competition also contributed to the decline in employment, and many argue that automation also has hurt manufacturing.

Mismanagement: Many also point the finger at a series of Detroit's mayors for problems ranging from bad fiscal decisions to outright corruption.

All of this made for a vicious cycle. A diminished population left a weaker economy and also less government revenue, which meant fewer government services, which meant a lower quality of life, which helped send more people packing.

Even in the last few years, the population continued to plummet — the Census Bureau reported in 2011 that the Motor City's population fell by a stunning 25 percent between 2000 and 2010.

"That's really not going to be NAFTA," Hohman said. "That's basic corruption and mismanagement of the city government that has made it unable to provide the basic services."

Also, there's the question of what Sanders means by "Hillary Clinton's free trade policies." It's true that she voted for some trade pacts as a senator and that she once was an advocate for TPP (more on that later), but as for NAFTA, that was signed under her husband's administration. She did promote it at one point (more on that later, too), as Sanders says, but that in particular isn't her policy.

OK. So if free trade policies like NAFTA didn't drive Detroit's decline, that doesn't mean it didn't affect the city's (or the state of Michigan's) economy. Sanders' 43,000 figure comes from a 2011 report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning policy think tank that has produced several reports about the potential detrimental effects of trade pacts like NAFTA and TPP.

Specifically, that 43,000 number refers to the number of jobs "displaced due to trade deficits with Mexico" — and, in terms of percent change, EPI ranks Michigan as the hardest hit. Altogether, that report said the U.S. lost more than 680,000 jobs, as of 2010, to Mexico, thanks to NAFTA.

Meanwhile, the Clinton administration had argued that the pact would create hundreds of thousands of jobs. And that argument for NAFTA continues to this day. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce last year said that NAFTA "supports" millions of jobs. The idea is that opening up the U.S. to that many new markets (and new customers) sparks more economic activity.

So two different sides disagree on the direction of the employment effects of trade policy — but then, some economists believe that trade pacts simply don't bring about any major changes in the long run.

"Most analysts would agree that, and we certainly agree that, jobs were lost. It's true that jobs are lost," said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow and trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

He added that the auto industry was one of the hardest hit by NAFTA, as some production was shifted to Mexico. However, Hufbauer contended the net number of jobs created by a trade agreement usually balances that out.

"Any trade agreement is basically a job churn agreement," he said. "Jobs are lost, and jobs are gained, and on balance it's about zero in terms of number of jobs." (Read more about this dynamic in a fact check on TPP job gains from the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler.)

As one 2004 Congressional Research Service study — itself a review of other studies — found, NAFTA had "little or no impact on aggregate employment" during its then-10-year existence.

Hufbauer added that he believes, on balance, that the gains from trade are positive, leading to lower prices on consumer goods and higher-wage jobs. Of course, if that's true, that still stings for the workers who loses her job at, say, a Michigan auto plant, if she isn't qualified for or can't reach the job that replaces hers.

And not everyone buys this idea. Robert Scott, who wrote the EPI report, argued that while the net-zero effect might be true in theory, it's not true in practice. He believes that, thanks to a number of factors including what economists call secular stagnation, the U.S. isn't producing those replacement jobs. And those jobs that NAFTA did create he believes tend to be lower-wage than the ones it sent elsewhere.

So NAFTA meant that some people lost their jobs as factories moved South of the border, while other jobs were created.

And it's true that employment has fallen in Michigan's manufacturing sector since the agreement was signed (though the major decline began years after NAFTA took effect).

But knowing exactly how many of those job losses (or gains in other sectors or other places) to attribute NAFTA is virtually impossible, as NPR's Don Gonyea put it in 2013, as the causes are complicated and interwoven.

Regardless of how trade affected the local economy, tying Detroit's problems to more open trade is far oversimplifying what's going on. "Detroit and Flint are suffering, largely from self-inflicted, in some cases state-inflicted, wounds," said Hohman.

2. Did Hillary Clinton support NAFTA?

Yes, though she often expressed reservations.

"I think NAFTA is proving its worth," she said in 1996.

And she told an audience at Davos in 1998, "I hope that American business voices will be heard" in promoting fast-track authority, a policy under which Congress can give trade pacts an up-or-down vote only.

However, she added that there needed to be "sensitivity to worker and environmental concerns."

In her book Living History, she characterized NAFTA as an "important administration goal" for her husband's presidency and praised the pact's potential to create jobs, despite the fact that it was "unpopular with labor unions." But over the years, she offered measured critiques. In 2000, she had called the agreement "flawed," and, in 2004, she said that while the agreement was "on balance" good for the U.S., it could have been negotiated better.

Later, when running for president, she was more explicitly critical of the agreement. "NAFTA was a mistake to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would," she said in a 2007 CNN presidential primary debate.

Clinton's record doesn't show her to be fully in favor of or opposed to all instances of trade liberalization. While she voted for several deals as a New York senator, she also voted against the 2005 Central American Free Trade Agreement.

"Some people are generally pro-trade or anti-trade. She's case-by-case on trade," as Gene Sperling, chairman of the National Economic Council under both Presidents Clinton and Obama, told the Washington Post in 2015.

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The Broader Context

This doesn't just matter because the Michigan primary is coming up. And it's not that Sanders is unnecessarily fixated on a 23-year-old trade deal. Rather, this is all part of a bigger fight over the Trans Pacific Partnership, the massive trade deal that the U.S. has been negotiating with Asia.

On TPP, President Obama has found himself in the unusual position of agreeing with many Republicans and the business community on TPP while alienating farther-left lawmakers, with Sanders among the most vocal critics of the deal.

As secretary of state, Clinton most famously supported the TPP when she, in 2012, told an audience that it "sets the gold standard" for trade agreements. (CNN later counted 45 instances in which she praised the deal.) And this has been one of the areas on which Sanders has been able to contrast himself most with Clinton — and therefore hit her hard. Many labor unions are strongly opposed to the trade deal as well, meaning hitting Clinton on TPP could threaten her support.

But on the campaign trail in 2015, she expressed doubts about the deal. And then in October, she made her position clear, telling PBS NewsHour's Judy Woodruff that the deal didn't meet the "high bar" she said she had set for it.

Not that Sanders is about to let this go. As Sanders Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver said on Thursday, "Election-year conversions won't bring back American jobs."

Types of Spanish Accents - Joanna Rants

if physical ailments were treated like mental illness

© 2009-2015 Nathan Diebenow

toxoplasma gondii

Toxoplasma gondii, a parasitic protozoan, afflicts cats and other mammals. Acute toxoplasmosis produces flu-like symptoms and has been linked to behavioral changes in humans. npr

'Becoming Nicole' Recounts One Family's Acceptance Of Their Transgender Child

When Wayne and Kelly Maines adopted identical twin boys, Jonas and Wyatt, at birth in 1997, they were thrilled at the idea of having two sons. For a while, it was virtually impossible to tell the boys apart. But as they grew older, one child, Wyatt, started insisting that he was a girl.

"I [was] like, 'Hmm, I've got twins but one's not like the other. They're very different,' " Kelly Maines, the twins' mother, tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on: ... Is she gay? Is she transvestite? Is she transgender? I honestly had no experience in understanding what any of that meant."

Over the course of several years, Kelly and Wayne began to accept that one of the twins was transgender. They had Wyatt's name changed to Nicole and began buying her dolls and girls' clothes, which she had been asking for.

Wayne acknowledges that it wasn't always easy. He worried about what the neighbors would think, but those concerns faded when Nicole began being bullied and harassed. "When people start coming after your kid, you get your head right: 'This is my baby. Don't mess with my kids.' That's probably when I turned a corner," he says.

The Maines went on to file a discrimination lawsuit against Nicole's school district, which they won on appeal last year. This year, Nicole and her twin brother, Jonas, graduated from high school and Nicole had gender reassignment surgery.

Together with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Amy Ellis Nutt, Wayne and Kelly Maines tell their family's story in the new book, Becoming Nicole. Nutt joins Kelly and Wayne Maines in the studio to discuss the book and how biology affects gender identity.

On Wayne's initial reaction to Nicole insisting she wanted to be a girl
Wayne Maines: I tried to influence it in other ways, you know, you meet Nicole, even at that age, extremely strong personality. If I would say to her, 'You don't want to be a girl,' she'd say, 'Yes I do.' I'm a 40-year-old guy having this debate with this little kid and I'm losing, you know? It was hard. ... You have this vision of what you think the American dream is and your family, and it's not what it is. I've learned more from my two children and Kelly than I ever thought possible. I learned that everybody needs to be who they need to be, and I learned that people, little children, know who they are at that age.

On Kelly taking the lead on accepting Nicole
Kelly Maines: Back then ... the popular way of proceeding was gender neutral, try to keep her gender neutral. But Nicole did not like that at all. It took a while. I think it was about when she was 7 ... we had a birthday party for her and Jonas and we gave her all the boys toys ... and she was very unhappy and I looked at Wayne and I said, 'That's it. I'm not doing this anymore. It's not working. She's angry. She's doubting herself. This is not healthy. She has to have a safe place here.' So we took the toys back and we got her some mermaid things, and she was very, very happy with that and about then that's when I was like, 'This is crazy. I just gotta do what's gonna make this kid the best person she can be.' ...

I would be in those aisles in Target with girl's clothes like, "I wish I could get this for her, for Wyatt. I know Wyatt would love this. I can't. I can't." Or sometimes I would [buy the girl's clothes] and it would be like, "These are your home clothes. These are your school clothes." It just got so much better when we finally said, "Enough. You can like it or leave it: This kid is who they are."

For a parent, too, when you do finally make that turn, the biggest fears are she's gonna get hurt. Somebody's not gonna like it. And when we ended up having our problems the anger [of others toward Nicole] was the thing that was so shocking.

On the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders]changing gender identity disorder to gender identity dysphoria in 2013,and the significance of that change
Nutt: I think the most important thing is that it changes the view of gender identity, or of an anomalous gender identity, as being somehow abnormal. It's not a disorder. The problem for kids, for transgender people, isn't within, it's without. In other words, their trouble with their gender identity comes essentially because others view them one way when they view themselves another. Nicole, for instance, even as Wyatt, always described herself as a "boy-girl," or a "girl-boy." She was completely confident in who she was. She knew that she was a girl, but she also knew that people referred to her as a boy and that she had a boy anatomy. So this was a child who was never unsure of who she was, but she knew there was a problem with how other people and the rest of the world viewed her. And that's where the dysphoria comes in — when there's a mismatch between what we expect and what, perhaps, the sexual anatomy says, and what the brain is telling us.

On how gender anatomy, sexuality and identity are set prenatally
Nutt: In the first six weeks our gender anatomy, our sexual anatomy, is set. Essentially we all begin in life asexual and then certain genes and hormones kick in, and our sexual anatomy is determined to either have male genitalia and male reproductive organs, or female. However, scientists are learning that while that happens at six weeks, it's not until six months that the brain masculinizes or feminizes. That is, that the hormones in the brain determine is this the brain of a girl or is this the brain of a boy? Sexual orientation, they're also discovering, is a third process, but what they're really focusing on is trying to understand that they're not all congruent.

Normally, prenatally we develop along the same lines, that our sexual anatomy matches up with our gender identity, but what they've discovered is that there's a space in-between. There are weeks in-between in pre-natal development when many things can happen. We know that many things can influence the environment of the womb and the environment of the womb influences the level of hormones and the chemicals that go into the development of a fetus. And so there are many things that can happen between the time that a fetus' sexual identity is set and their gender identity is set.

On how gender identity is in the brain
Nutt: Identical twins obviously have the exact same DNA. What they don't have is the exact same epigenome, which means not all of the genetic switches are turned off and on in identical ways. ... The explanation for that, scientists give, is that in the womb identical twins have separate amniotic sac[s] and umbilical cord[s] and therefore they get various and different amounts of hormones and nourishment. And they've discovered that even your placement in the womb — where you are located in the womb — for identical twins can affect the ratio of hormones and nutrients that you get, and, therefore, it is a different environment. The environment affects who we are, our gender identity, and the environment of the womb, even the top of the womb, the lower part of the womb, can affect how the brain is set, even in identical twins.

On the fluidity of gender
Nutt: Gender isn't something that's necessarily fixed, that it's dynamic, that it's fluid. ... There are very few people that are 100 percent totally masculine or 100 percent totally feminine. We have traits of both, and so, ordinarily, it's something in between. I think, people are feeling more comfortable now saying, "Yeah, I've never felt 100 percent masculine, but I'm mostly masculine." And, I think, it has become a more comfortable society to say that in. But I think it's also because the science is now supporting that. npr

South African Cave Yields Strange Bones Of Early Human-Like Species

Scientists have discovered the fossilized remains of an unusual human-like creature that lived long ago. Exactly how long ago is still a mystery — and that's not the only mystery surrounding this newfound species.

The bones have a strange mix of primitive and modern features, and were found in an even stranger place — an almost inaccessible chamber deep inside a South African cave called Rising Star.

"It is perhaps one of the best known caves in all of South Africa," says Lee Berger, who studies human evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

In 2013, some local cavers found some fossils inside Rising Star cave. Berger had asked them to be on the lookout, so they brought him photos.

"And there I saw something I perhaps thought I'd never see in my life," recalls Berger. "That is, clearly primitive hominin remains lying on the floor of a cave."

A jaw and a skull were just sitting there in the dirt — usually such bones are encased in rock.

Berger was excited, but he knew he personally could never reach this fossil site. To get into the cave chamber, you have to climb a steep, jagged rockfall called Dragon's Back, then wiggle through a small opening that leads to a long, narrow crack.

The crack is only about 7 ½ inches wide, and goes down more than 30 feet. Squeezing through it is the only way to reach the chamber of bones at the bottom.

Since he couldn't go, Berger sent in his tall, skinny 16-year-old son. "When he came out after 45 minutes, he stuck his head out. And to tell you how bad I am, I didn't say: 'Are you OK?' I said: 'And?' And he says, 'Daddy, it's wonderful.' "

Berger got funding from the National Geographic Society to excavate the site. And he advertised for research assistants on Facebook — for skinny scientists who weren't claustrophobic. Six women took the job.

They worked in the chamber almost like spacewalkers, communicating with researchers outside, via cameras and about 2 miles of fiber optic cable. The team in the chamber used paintbrushes and toothpicks to gently unearth fossil bones — there were more than 1,550 of them, an incredible treasure trove. The researchers describe their find Thursday in a journal called eLife.

"Often I was wondering, 'How on Earth are we going to get that fossil out?' because the density of bones in that chamber was so great, it was like a puzzle to get each fossil out," says Becca Peixotto, one of the scientist-cavers and a doctoral student in anthropology at American University.

The bones come from at least 15 individuals, says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was on the team that studied the bones.

"We have every age group represented" among the fossils, he says. "We have newborns; we have children of almost every age; we have adults and old adults."

He says these creatures were short — less than 5 feet tall — and thin. They have a particular combination of features that has never been seen before. "It's a new species to science," says Hawks. Researchers have named it Homo naledi, because "naledi" means "star" in a local South African language.

"They have a very small brain. They are not human-like at all in their brain," Hawks says. "It's around a third the size of a human brain today."

But the creatures had feet like us, and walked in a very human-like way. Their hands were also like ours, but their fingers were more curved.

The researchers also tackled this question: How did these human-like creatures get into such a crazy spot? It looks as though the cave chamber has always been hard to reach.

There are no animal bones there, except for a handful of bits from birds and mice. There's no evidence that a carnivore dragged the human-like creatures in, or that they somehow got washed in. And there's no evidence of a mass death, such as a cave accident.
Berger believes someone had to have put the bodies there.

"Homo naledi was deliberately disposing of its dead in a repeated, ritualized fashion in this deep underground chamber," he says.

That's quite a claim — that kind of ritual has been thought to be unique to modern humans or our very close relatives.

And really, the whole discovery — from the bones to their bizarre location — has perplexed experts on human evolution.

"To be honest, I would really distrust anyone who thinks they understand what the significance of these finds is," says Bernard Wood, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University.

Usually scientists can tell how old fossilized bones are, but in this case the geology of the cave gives no clues. The bones could be less than 100,000 years old or several million years old.

"These folks do not have an age, yet they have some remarkable fossils, and the context of them is also remarkable," says Wood. "It's not only remarkable, it's also rather weird. But nonetheless, the fossils are important. So the community is, I think, struggling to work out what it all means."

He notes that only a small section of the cave chamber has been excavated, and it looks like many more bones are down there.

"There is the potential for thousands of specimens in that cave," says Wood. "Intellectually, it's a real puzzle. And I think it's going to take scientists quite a time to get their heads around what the real significance of these discoveries is." npr

Nature May Have A Profound Effect On Our Religiosity

In U.S. counties with warm winters, temperate summers and beautiful natural resources — like beaches, lakes, hills or mountains — people's rates of affiliation with religious organizations are lower than in other places, according to a new study.

The study's authors, Todd W. Ferguson and Jeffrey A. Tamburello of Baylor University, write in the journal Sociology of Religion: "Natural amenities can be considered as a resource for spirituality that has the power to satisfy some people's need for inspiration, awe and divine connection ... When a person hikes in a forest to connect with the sacred, she or he may not feel the need to affiliate with a religious organization because her or his spiritual demands are met."

I first read about this study in a USA Today article headlined "God competes against Mother Nature on Sundays" and wondered right off about definitions. Worshipping God, affiliating with a religious organization and experiencing a sense of spirituality may all overlap — but certainly they're not the same. How do the Baylor researchers distinguish these dimensions, and how did they measure an area's natural resources?

Ferguson and Tamburello make use of a very cool USDA map that plots the results of the Natural Amenities Scale, which measures natural amenities in each of 3,107 U.S. counties (essentially all counties in the lower 48 states). Those amenities are assessed by six qualities people prefer, according to previous research: warm winter, winter sun, temperate summer, low summer humidity, topographical variation and water area, each precisely defined.

As the Washington Post reports, Ventura County, Calif., took the nation's top spot based on this ranking system; in fact, every one of the top ten counties is in California.

Measuring religiosity was trickier. In their paper, Ferguson and Tamburello use the term "religious adherence." Earlier this week, I asked Ferguson by email to clarify for me what precisely this means, and he replied in this way:

"A religious adherent is an individual who is connected (member, attender, etc.) to a religious organization, like a mosque, temple, synagogue or church. However, our study's level of analysis is at the county level and the data we use measure religious adherence, which is the number of people within each county who are connected to a religious congregation. Thus, when we write of adherence, we are using the collective, aggregate definition.

To help control for a county's population, we then made an adherence rate, where we took a county's level of adherence and divided it by 1,000 to get a rate that stands for how many adherents are there out of 1,000 people."

Okay, so where does spirituality fit in? In their article, Ferguson and Tamburello say that religion is "institutional, mediated and communal" whereas spirituality "points to the personal, subjective, non-institutionalized and unmediated experience with the sacred." In these terms, it's a spiritual experience to encounter the sacred in nature.

Ferguson told me that, as he sees it, the study "contributes one piece of the puzzle as to why regions in American differ in religiosity."

"It doesn't explain everything, but it does offer another mechanism for regional variation. For instance, the West Coast has lower rates of religious adherence, not because the population is in any way less religious/spiritual. It's that there is an additional supplier of spirituality (nature) and so they are less likely get their spiritual needs met from traditional religious congregations."

Ferguson and Tamburello believe they aren't just capturing a "time competition effect" in which, because people don't have time to do everything, religious affiliation drops out in areas where natural amenities are high. Instead, because they carry out statistical manipulations to remove the effect of confounding variables on the data — for example, they control for the number of civic organizations and recreation establishments in a region — they capture, they say, a competition for connections to the sacred.

I'd like to add that not everyone who is outdoors soaking up nature is communing with the sacred. I'm just back from a quick getaway to the mountains and forests of Shenandoah National Park. As I walked wooded trails and drove past breathtaking overlooks in order to observe wildlife, I felt filled with a deep pleasure.

For me, that wonderful feeling emerged from a strong sense of connection with other animals, even with the ancient geology of the region — not from an experience of the numinous.

Of course, as Ferguson highlighted for me, this study doesn't aim to explainindividual behavior but, instead, county-wide patterns. That's its strength.

By the way, it's pure fun to point your cursor over the map to find where you live — and figure out if it's time to move to California. npr

we don't need God to be good

In a 1958 poll of Americans, only 18 percent of respondents said they would vote for a generally well-qualified presidential candidate nominated by their political party if that person happened to be an atheist. In 2015, that number has jumped to 58 percent.

Yet, even today, 40 percent of respondents say they would not vote for an atheist.

As I wrote in a 2012 post, this seems to boil down to distrust. And that distrust stems from an assumption about the relationship between morality and religious belief. If immoral behavior is only averted by religious belief — the thought goes — then for atheists, anything is permitted.

Many have pointed out that this assumption is deeply problematic. For instance, in a nice article at The New York Times' philosophical forum, The Stone, philosopher Louise Antony writes:

"Think now about our personal relations — how we love our parents, our children, our life partners, our friends. To say that the moral worth of these individuals depends on the existence of God is to say that these people are, in themselves, worth nothing — that the concern we feel for their well being has no more ethical significance than the concern some people feel for their boats or their cars. It is to say that the historical connections we value, the traits of character and personality that we love — all count for nothing in themselves. Other people warrant our concern only because they are valued by someone else — in this case, God. (Imagine telling a child: "You are not inherently lovable. I love you only because I love your father, and it is my duty to love anything he loves.")"

After quite a bit more argument and exposition, she concludes: "The capacity to be moved by the moral dimension of things has nothing to do with one's theological beliefs."

Philosophical arguments aside, one might wonder about the everyday reality. Are atheists any less trustworthy than believers? Could it even be the reverse — that atheists tend to engage in more ethical behavior than believers? These are, by and large, empirical questions, and they're questions that some scientists have been rigorously tackling.

For the latest from the scientific front lines, I recommend the two videos below, recorded at a conference earlier this year and just made available to the public.

In the first video, psychologist Azim Shariff, a professor at the University of Oregon at Eugene, takes up the question of whether belief in God makes you good. The answer is more nuanced than you might expect, with evidence that religious people are more prosocial in their behavior than atheists, but only in religious contexts or when their religious identity is otherwise made salient. Importantly, though, God isn't the only way to be good: Secular institutions can play a similar role, with a variety of non-religious contexts and markers of identity expected to have the same effects.

In the second video, psychologist Will Gervais, a professor at the University of Kentucky, presents research on popular perceptions of atheists and offers compelling (and occasionally shocking) data on the perceived link between atheism and immoral behavior. His research suggests a close connection between atheism and distrust, precisely because people assume we need God to be good.

Putting these pieces together, the story is this: On the one hand, we don't need God to be good — either as a matter of philosophical foundations, or as a matter of human psychology; on the other hand, many people believe that we do.

The result is distrust of atheists. And unless people correct their assumptions about the relationship between ethical behavior and religious belief, we're not likely to see an openly atheist presidential candidate make it to the White House anytime soon.

Evolution isn't controversial for scientific reasons, but it is controversial, in part, for psychological reasons

The theory of evolution by natural selection is among the best established in science, yet also among the most controversial for subsets of the American public.

For decades we've known that beliefs about evolution are well-predicted by demographic factors, such as religious upbringing and political affiliation. There's also enormous variation in the acceptance of evolution across different countries, all of which suggests an important role for cultural input in driving beliefs about evolution. A child raised by Buddhists in California is much more likely to accept evolution than one raised by evangelical protestants in Kansas.

But in the last 20 years or so, research in psychology and the cognitive science of religion has increasingly focused on another factor that contributes to evolutionary disbelief: the very cognitive mechanisms underlying human cognition.

Researchers have argued that a variety of basic human tendencies conspire to make natural selection especially aversive and difficult to understand, and to make creationism a compelling alternative. For instance, people tend to prefer explanations that offer certainty and a sense of purpose when it comes to their lives and the design of the natural world and they have an easier time wrapping their heads around theories that involve biological categories with clear boundaries — all of which are challenged by natural selection.

These factors are typically taken to hold for all humans, not only those who reject evolution. But this naturally raises a question about what differentiates those individuals who do accept evolution from those who do not. In other words, if the California Buddhist and the Kansas protestant share the same cognitive mechanisms, what accounts for their differing views on evolution?

In fact, there's evidence that individuals vary in the extent to which they favor purpose and exhibit other relevant cognitive tendencies, and that this variation is related to religious belief — itself a strong predictor of evolutionary belief. But there's a lot we don't know about how differences between individuals drive different beliefs about evolution, and about how these individual differences interact with cultural input.

A new paper by psychologist Will Gervais, just published in the journalCognition, sheds new light on these questions. In two surveys conducted with hundreds of undergraduates attending a large university in Kentucky, Gervais found an association between cognitive style and beliefs about evolution. Gervais used a common task to measure the extent to which people engage in a more intuitive cognitive style, which involves going with immediate, intuitive judgments, versus a more analytic cognitive style, which involves more explicit deliberation, and which can often override an intuitive response. npr

science puns

Lethal Interpersonal Violence in the Middle Pleistocene

Evidence of interpersonal violence has been documented previously in Pleistocene members of the genus Homo, but only very rarely has this been posited as the possible manner of death. Here we report the earliest evidence of lethal interpersonal violence in the hominin fossil record. Cranium 17 recovered from the Sima de los Huesos Middle Pleistocene site shows two clear perimortem depression fractures on the frontal bone, interpreted as being produced by two episodes of localized blunt force trauma. The type of injuries, their location, the strong similarity of the fractures in shape and size, and the different orientations and implied trajectories of the two fractures suggest they were produced with the same object in face-to-face interpersonal conflict. Given that either of the two traumatic events was likely lethal, the presence of multiple blows implies an intention to kill. This finding shows that the lethal interpersonal violence is an ancient human behavior and has important implications for the accumulation of bodies at the site, supporting an anthropic origin. PLOS

Fig 1. Stratigraphy of the Sima de los Huesos site (modified from Arsuaga et al. [21]).

The hominin bones were recovered in Lithostratigraphic Unit 6 (LU-6) dated to c. 430ka [21]. This unit is composed of pure red clays, filtering into the conduit system from overlying soils with little or no lateral transport, and very low velocity of sedimentation (decantation by dripping water) [23]. The figure also shows a detailed image of Cr-17 during its excavation at the site. Note the pure red clay that covers the cranial bones (partially cleaned in situ to enhance visualization) and the typical in situ postmortem (fossil diagenetic) fractures of the cranial vault. Photo credit: Javier Trueba (Madrid Scientific Films).

The skull in question was found at a site in Spain called Sima de los Huesos, or the Pit of the Bones, and it contained remains of 28 individuals. Quam said their presence there was intentional. "The only explanation that we have that can not be rejected is the idea that the human bodies arrived at this place by other humans," Quam told NPR. npr