Geoff Arnold

The lunatics are running the asylum....

From The Inquirer: US grants patent for anti-gravity device:

"ACCUSATIONS that the US Patent office is giving out dotty patents were given some credence this week after the magazine Nature discovered that the watchdog had just granted one to a bloke who claimed to have invented an anti-gravity machine.

Boris Volfson, of Huntington, is the proud holder of patent 6,960,975, which is for a space vehicle propelled by a superconducting shield that alters the curvature of space-time outside the craft in a way that counteracts gravity."

No word on whether it has to be constructed from transparent aluminum.

The United States of Mass Delusion

CBS News has published another survey on American attitudes towards evolution: "Most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution. Instead, 51 percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form, and another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the process."

Personally I'm going to ignore the second number, since "guided" is such a wishy-washy term (almost as ill-defined as "God"). But when over half the population is willing to deny that humans are connected with the rest of the animal world, things have come to a pretty pass. I'd love it if CBS would ask the following question: "The efficacy of many drugs is based on the theory that tests of these drugs on animals are reliable predictors of their effects on humans, because humans and animals share a well-understood biological and genetic relationship. Is it hypocritical for someone who does not believe in this relationship to use these drugs?"

(Via BoingBoing.)

UPDATE: I feel much better after reading The Abstract Factory on ID. Thanks, Susan!

Morally bankrupt, my good man?

Occasionally someone will post a comment on a blog entry that deserves a more prominent response than simply adding a further comment. A few hours ago, Alec commented on my criticism of Thomas Friedman:

"Morally bankrupt" - that's one of the phrases that even scientifically hip biology-teaching evangelical Christians use on me when I deny the existence of God and generally toast their tootsies with atheist rejection of their belief.

Does it actually mean anything to you, or have you too succumbed to subjective mudslinging as a means of argument, however odious the target, my good man?

The belief that morality is impossible without a belief in God, and that to be an atheist "shows a recklessness of moral character and utter want of moral sensibility" [1] is widespread; indeed it used to be the law of the land. One would expect those theists for whom the existence of [some kind of] God is an "objective fact" to argue from this that morality has an objective basis. What is curious is that some atheist philosophers have historically conceded the consequent of the argument, and have argued that, in the absence of a God, morality is necessarily "subjective" or "invented". (See, for instance, Mackie [2].)

Yet the notion that morality and ethics are God-given is hard to sustain these days. Indeed it is under attack from both science and theistic philosophy! For philosophers and theologians such as Swinburne, the notion of "goodness" must be independent of God, otherwise the assertion that "God is good" is simply a tautology. On the scientific front, we are developing better and better models of how creatures develop social behaviours, including cooperation and altruism: Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue [4] provides an excellent high-level account of this work, though geeks should also dive into Axelrod's fundamental work. [5] The key insight of researchers such as Kagen, Wilson, and Frank is that morality derives not from reason, but from instinct:

Wilson chides philosophers for not taking seriously the notion that morality resides in the senses as a purposive set of instincts. They mostly view morality as merely a set of utilitarian or arbitrary preferences and conventions laid upon people by society. Wilson argues that morality is no more a convention than other sentiments such as lust or greed. When a person is disgusted by injustice or cruelty he is drawing upon an instinct, not rationally considering the utility of the sentiment, let alone simply regurgitating a fashionable convention.
[4, p.143]

So to return to Alec's charge: when I refer to Thomas Friedman as being "morally bankrupt", I am inviting the reader to join me in an instinctually-based reaction, which derives from our shared heritage as social animals. These instincts are perfectly objective: the behaviours to which they give rise can, and have, been measured and modelled in a variety of ways. And the source of these instincts is, quite simply, our old friend natural selection. No theistic hypothesis is required.

[1] Odell v. Koppee, 5 Heisk. (Tenn) 91. Quoted in [3].
[2] John L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1979)
[3] Michael Martin, Atheism, Morality and Meaning (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002)
[4] Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (London: Penguin Books, 1997)
[5] Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984)

Geography lesson

A picture that needs no explanation (original at LSU):

(Via Boing-boing.)

'You haven't explained everything yet' is not a competing hypothesis

Nice op-ed piece on ID in the NYT by Dan Dennett entitled Show Me the Science. Key paragraph:

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, 'You haven't explained everything yet,' is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.

The wackos are crawling out of the woodwork

In the spirit of equal opportunity, the Huffington Post is providing a platform for that Sensitive New-age Guy Deepak Chopra*. For an M.D. (lapsed?) he seems remarkably ignorant when it comes to science. For example, one of his "leading principles" is "Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe." Paging Steve Weinberg....

UPDATE: Michael Shermer deals with Deepak in a kinder, gentler, and more comprehensive manner.

--
* Last heard of on a Buddha Bar Volume II track called "Desire (The Lover's Passion)/Do You Love Me/Come to Me/Desire", vocals by Demi Moore.

In defense of uncommon sense

A couple of days ago I read an op-ed piece in the New York Times by John Horgan, entitled In Defense of Common Sense. Horgan is (in)famous for his announcement of "The End of Science"; now he rails against the fact that modern science is counterintuitive and violates common-sense.

"Scientists' contempt for common sense has two unfortunate implications. One is that preposterousness, far from being a problem for a theory, is a measure of its profundity..." [Can Horgan really cite an example of this? I've never seen one outside the field of semiotics, which isn't a science.] "The other, even more insidious implication is that only scientists are really qualified to judge the work of other scientists. Needless to say, I reject that position, and not only because I'm a science journalist (who majored in English). I have also found common sense — ordinary, nonspecialized knowledge and judgment — to be indispensable for judging scientists' pronouncements, even, or especially, in the most esoteric fields."

I found this kind of stuff offensive on several grounds. From an evolutionary standpoint, it's nonsense - why should the set of cognitive skills that evolved in support of a hunter-gatherer existence be well adapted to the study of subatomic particles, DNA, or pulsars? From a sociological (and ultimately political) perspective, it suggests that scientific rigor and willingness to follow where the data leads should be trumped by a populist appeal to lay opinion; Lysenkoism and Kansas School Boards lie in that direction. Note his use of the word "contempt": he clearly wants to suggest that scientists feel contempt for those who live by common-sense, i.e. non-scientists. That's the kind of thing I'd expect from, say, Pat Buchanan.

In the latest issue of The Edge, Leonard Susskind from Stanford effectively exposes the flaws in Horgan's piece. However rather than quoting from Susskind's elegant essay, let me cite the whole of Daniel Gilbert's blunt refutation:

"Horgan's Op-Ed piece is such a silly trifle that it doesn't dignify serious response. The beauty of science is that it allows us to transcend our intuitions about the world, and it provides us with methods by which we can determine which of our intuitions are right and which are not. Common sense tells us that the earth is flat, that the sun moves around it, and that the people who know the least often speak the loudest. Horgan's essay demonstrates that at least one of our common sense notions is true."

That's wonderful. The second sentence ought to be printed on the front page of every science textbook.

Science and varieties of theism

My contribution to the Priests in Lab Coats debate going on at Salon.com:

Science, including evolution, says nothing about theism in general. Given the wide variety of gods that people have believed in, this should not be surprising - it's not clear that ANYTHING speaks to theism in general.

However it is true that science - evolution, of course, but also geology, physics, and biology - is incompatible with certain religious viewpoints, particularly those that hold inerrantist positions concerning various ancient texts. Science explores regular relationships between phenomena - gravitational (stuff falls), chemical, kinetic, and so forth. If such relationships are merely the whimsy of a capricious deity - if water can be conjured into existence to create a flood and then made to vanish - then such regularities are impossible. Evidence becomes meaningless: we may as well believe in solipsism or Last-Thursdayism (the reductio ad absurdum that the universe was created last Thursday, complete with people with memories of a longer existence).

Scientists MUST disbelieve in a world that is phenomenally capricious. If a theist believes in such a world, they cannot accept science. There is no coherent worldview that is consistent with both. But this is not an argument about theism, merely about a particular fundamentalist worldview.

Cardinal Schönborn channeling ID

Over at Body and Soul there's an interesting piece about the background to Cardinal Schönborn's recent op-ed in the NYT "clarifying" the Roman Catholic position on evolution. Not only does it seem that the red-hatted one was working from an outline prepared by the creationist Discovery Institute, but: "The cardinal's essay was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the Discovery Institute."

Now why would the former Count Christoph Maria Michael Hugo Damian Peter Adalbert von Schönborn require the services of a PR firm in Virginia?

(Via Suburban Guerilla.)

UPDATE: It turns out that Creative Response Concepts has an interesting notorious history. They became (in)famous as the PR firm responsible for packaging the Swift Boat Veterans' libel The principals include Greg Mueller and Mike Russell, formerly communications directors for Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson respectively. They've been caught out trying to feed stories into the blogosphere as part of their PR work on behalf of various right-wing groups, to the extent that they actually had to (vaguely) apologize for it.

Evolving evolution

In discussing Pigliucci's review of Jablonka and Lamb's controversial book Evolution in Four Dimensions, Jason Rosenhouse (a.k.a. Evolutionblog) makes a key point that it's easy to overlook:

...the problem facing evolutionary biologists is never 'How could bit of anatomy X possibly have evolved naturally?' Rather, the question is 'Of the many possible mechanisms by which this system might have evolved, which is the correct one?' It seems that scientists are constantly discovering new mechanisms for explaining evolution....

Of course, any talk of fiddling with the neo-Darwinian synthesis tends to make the hearts of creationists go pitter pat. They know that any suggestion that the nineteen fifties version of evolution may have been incomplete can be spun into a statement that evolution is dying. They will conveniently ignore the fact that the discoveries that are persuading scientists of the incompleteness of the original synthesis are all in the direction of making evolutionary change easier, not harder, to explain.

[Emphasis added.]

Cute tricks with fMRI

From today's Guardian: Scientists learn the taste of words: "Now you know why those restaurant menus wax lyrical about that succulent salmon on a bed of piquant herbs. The words themselves enhance the flavour. Oxford scientists today confirm what every sommelier has always known instinctively: that labels can trick the brain into a different kind of perception."

(fMRI = "functional magnetic resonance imaging". Check out the gallery. No, this particular image doesn't have anything to do with today's Guardian story, but it's too cool to pass up....)

Table-top fusion? Hmmmm

Shades of Pons-Fleischmann, 1989, perhaps? Or possibly not...? Newsday is reporting UCLA Researchers Produce Nuclear Fusion: "In the latest attempt to create nuclear fusion under laboratory conditions, scientists reported they achieved it in a tabletop experiment that uses a strong electric field generated by a small crystal."

Coincidentally, last night I was finishing up the wonderful new book A Different Universe by Robert Lauglin. His comments on the cold fusion scandal:

The cold fusion example is dear to my heart because I was in an office with a nuclear expert when a journalist phoned him and asked him for comments on the [Pons-Fleischmann] paper. It was probably the closest I have ever come to dying of a heart attack, for we were both suffocating with laughter reading the pages, each funnier than the last, as they slowly crept out of the FAX machine.... [Their] claim made no sense at all quantum-mechanically. The energy scales of ordinary chemistry are not right for catalyzing nuclear reactions. But it turned out that enough people did not believe in quantum mechanics, were willing to distort its complexities to their own ends, or simply viewed its practitioners as con artists that the voices of reason went unheard.... [This led to work that] wound up squandering between $50 million and $100 million of taxpayer money.

In the present case the claims are more modest, but a healthy skepticism is definitely warranted.

PZ Myers on Intelligent Design

The biologist PZ Myers (who blogs as Pharyngula) has a beautifully written op-ed piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. After contrasting how real science is done, compared with the unproductive sniping of "the hodge-podge of lawyers, philosophers, theologians, rhetoricians, and rare scientists willing to abandon scientific principles found in the ID movement", and giving a quick tour of the state of evolutionary biology today, he concludes:

"ID is a sterile philosophy whose proponents spend their time lobbying school boards, producing nothing new, and with no promise of new ideas for the future. Asking our schools to teach ID is like suggesting that they offer instruction in buggy whip manufacture - it's a futile exercise that is going to leave the students unprepared for both college and the real world. As a university instructor, I want my incoming students to be well versed in the fundamentals of biology, which includes evolution but not the empty pseudoscience of ID, so that we can move quickly to the real excitement of modern biology...which is almost entirely informed by the concepts of evolution."

(Via Evolutionblog.)

The joy of minerals

This morning I took the T to Harvard Square¹ to meet Kate and Tom for lunch, after which we headed over to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Our immediate objective was the exhibit "Origins: Life's First 3 Billion Years", which is closing soon. (Good exhibit, a bit smaller than I expected, but worthwhile.) However it was my first visit to the museum, so we explored. The famous glass flowers were breath-taking; it was interesting that I found the extraordinary accuracy of tangled roots, stalks and leaves more impressive than petals and stamens. The dinosaur fossils were fun, as always, and the ornithological section was remarkably comprehensive.

But the exhibition that stole my heart was in the Mineralogical and Geological collection. I took quite a few pictures: here are some thumbnails:

¹ A very dangerous place: I discovered the philosophy books section of the Harvard Coop, which cost me over a hundred dollars. More on that anon.

Getting a sense of perspective

In his weekly opinion piece for the BBC, the British political commentator (and ex-Labour MP) Brian Walden wrote: "Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, wrote something recently that chilled me to the bone. Sir Martin is the winner of the Michael Faraday Prize awarded annually by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. In my case he did almost too good a job. He pointed out that though the idea of evolution is well-known, the vast potential for further evolution isn't yet part of our common culture. He then gave an example. He said: 'It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; it will be entities as different from us as we are from bacteria.'"

Now, why should this chill someone to the bone? After all, we've known for about a century that humans have only been around for a tiny fraction of the lifetime of this planet, let alone the universe. Furthermore the extrapolation of this pattern to the future is not scientifically hard. There's no reason to believe that evolution stopped once homo sapiens arrived on the scene.

But then Walden brings in religion. "A growing number of people believe that we need a fresh dialogue between science and religion. I mean religion in its widest sense - a belief in the value of human life. [Don't use those code-words, Brian.] Apparently the direction of scientific progress means that we have to make moral judgements about what's permissible and what isn't. We need a moral consensus. Most emphatically, I don't mean that we need to create a sort of blancmange morality that wobbles about, containing a bit of God, a bit of physics, a dash of Catholicism plus a smattering of Buddhism and a few sprigs of well-meaning atheism. That kind of ethical coalition wouldn't survive, and we need something that will. What we all need is to acknowledge our interdependency."

I'm all for a robust debate about ethics, for creating a coalition that will survive. But I'm not sure that religion as we presently understand it is capable of adapting to this role. We've just gone through a series of religious holidays in which everybody - bloggers, magazine editors, broadcasters, politicians - seem fixated on a handful of people, events, places, and ideas from a brief period of time, roughly 2500 to 1500 years ago. It's going to be hard to open your mind to the future if you insist that some historical events are uniquely privileged. Forget about six billion years: a hundred thousand years from now, nobody will remember, or care about, any of those ideas.

If Walden wants to talk about "religion in its widest sense", I suspect most of his opposition will come from those who espouse religion in the narrowest and most retrograde sense. Perhaps we need a new label. Humanism? In the meantime, he might want to contemplate the role that religion's historically narrow perspective may have played in creating an intellectual climate in which cosmology "chills him to the bone."

Thought for the day: "When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions: that is the heart of science." - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Dissonance

There's science: a method of learning about the physical universe by applying the principles of the scientific method, which includes making empirical observations, proposing hypotheses to explain those observations, and testing those hypotheses in valid and reliable ways; also refers to the organized body of knowledge that results from scientific study.

And then there's Kansas, as reported in the Guardian today: But the largest applause of the evening was reserved for a silver-haired gentleman in a navy blue blazer. "I have a question: if man comes from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? Why do you waste time teaching something in science class that is not scientific?" he thundered.

(Woodrow Wilson had it right, a mere 83 years ago: "...of course, like every other man of intelligence and education, I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should still be raised.)

Must-see 3D iMax: Aliens of the Deep

Over at Boing-Boing, Xeni Jardin is waxing lyrical about James Cameron's 3D iMax film: Aliens of the Deep. Quote: "I still can't get one of these deep, deep, deep-sea creatures out of my head -- shown here. Looked like a giant diaphanous curtain of glass, rippling through the water. Amazing. And amazing because it is real, and alive, and not a product of CGI." I can't wait to see it, even if I will have to wear dorky cardboard 3D glasses.

Americans, evolution, religion, and post-modernism

During the recent US election campaign, the issue of American's attitudes towards evolution popped up again. It's usually presented as "X million Americans don't believe in evolution...", with the corollary at election time "...and they all vote Republican". As I was dozing on the flight from Boston to Seattle on Friday, I found myself musing about this "fact" in various ways.

• Do non-evolutionists get flu shots? After all, they don't believe in the science that underlies the development of flu vaccines, and some of them (in Kansas) clearly don't want their children growing up with the kind of education that would equip them to work on new vaccines.
• How do Biblical inerrantists pick and choose those bits of the Bible they'll use and those bits they'll ignore? There are so many bits of blatantly allegorical and magical thinking, not to mention contradictions galore. Does consistency actually matter? If not, why not? Etcetera.
• Why should I worry about all of this? Things like belief in quaint creation myths, or circumcision, or not eating meat on Fridays, are all just tribal membership memes, ways of identifying that you are a member of a group in a way that is relatively resistant to mixing or diaspora. True... but it becomes important when people seek to impose it on others, whether it be banning the teaching of evolution in Kansas or orthodox Jews stoning tour buses in Jerusalem on Shabbat.

After all this fact-free speculation, it was nice to be proved wrong... or at least to get a chance to appreciate the true complexity of the situation. Over at People for the American Way there's a fascinating report on Evolution and Creationism in Public Education [PDF format]. It's based on a 1999 survey of 1,500 people. Among the more intriguing findings is the fact that for many people the inclusion of creationism in schools is based not on their religious beliefs, but on what the report calls a "Post Modernist" perspective.

A second important contextual point is what we term the “post-modernist” influence. For about a third of Americans, their fundamentalist religious beliefs drive their support for including Creationism in the public school curriculum. However, for most Americans who would like to see some mention of God or a Divine role in the development of humans, along with the teaching of Evolution, it is not primarily religion behind their opinions. It is much more of what can be called a Post Modernist perspective (a “Hey, you never know” mentality). This perspective is characterized by a wide tolerance for many different beliefs, since no single belief is seen as the final and complete answer to any issue. Also, many parents want their children to be exposed to a wide range of views. Their reasoning is, “our kids should be given enough information so, when they grow up, they can make up their own minds.”

Of course this meant that the vast majority of people were opposed to the Kansas evolution decision because it reduced the "wide range of views" that kids would be exposed to. And as one would expect, support for creationism and opposition to evolution were generally linked with poor education and based on ignorance of the ideas involved. Ironically, people were far more confident in the "proven" status of the Theory of Relativity than of Evolution. The basis for such a belief seems hard to understand....

Building sci-fi?

When I first started reading science fiction back in the early 1960s, it seemed that all future cities were either shattered dystopias or cool, automated Jetsons-like worlds. This account seems typical: "Just swipe a prepaid card through a stanchion in front of an empty waiting vehicle, punch in the destination number, take a seat in the vehicle and our computer control system will sweep you non-stop to your destination."

(Via Salon.)

John Maynard Smith interview

All of this stuff about Robert Wright and Daniel Dennett led me to meaningoflife.tv, a collection of interviews by Robert Wright with scientists, historians, philosophers and others. Wright doesn't pretend to be a professional interviewer, but that doesn't matter very much. I just watched the complete interview with the late John Maynard Smith (pictured here), probably the greatest evolutionary biologist of the 20th century. The interview runs just under an hour, and ranges from the application of game theory to evolution, to Marxism, to computers and consciousness, and death. Highly recommended. I hope the rest are as good.

Wonderful web site on evolution

A casual question from a colleague about spam prompted me to search the web for a quotation from Richard Dawkins on co-evolutionary "arms races". What I found was this wonderful site associated with Mark Ridley's magnum opus Evolution. The site includes a video gallery with clips featuring Dawkins, Dennett, Maynard Smith, and others. Highly recommended.

And yes, the "arms race" quote (and QuickTime video clip) is here.