Dave Friedman's Soul of Wit

Eureka, Or, How to Circumvent Calculus??

How the hell does the following make any kind of sense:

In mathematics, formulae form a crucial end result of many calculations. For example the problem of determining the volume of a sphere is one that requires a sigificant amount of integral calculus to solve.

Archimedes displaced water long before Newton and Liebniz invented calculus*.

*It should be noted that this blog post was written by someone who took precisely no math in college. And yet, your humble blogger seems more numerate than most?

My comment on Wikipedia's discussion page:

The reference to needing integral calculus to determine the volume of a sphere doesn't make sense, in light of Archimedes. While it makes sense to argue that integral calculus is needed to derive a formula with which to determine the volume of a sphere without dunking the sphere in water, one can nonetheless dunk a smaller sphere in water, measure the volume of water displaced, and proportionately calculate the volume of a larger sphere. So, calculus is not needed to determine the volume of any sphere. Its use is limited to creating a general formula with which to calculate a sphere's volume.

Yet more info: the density of the sphere in question doesn't matter, though density affects bouyancy. A sphere with a one-inch radius has the same volume, 4.1 cubic inches, whether it weighs one pound or one ton, though the one ton sphere is much more dense.

Communism In America, Or, You Should Be Reading the Economist

It's true. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, communism is running amok, ruining the insurance industry:

Robert Muir-Wood, head of research at Risk Management Solutions, a firm that creates catastrophe models for use in the insurance industry, says that “if you ask climatologists how much of the extra activity is the result of climate change, the range of opinion is between 10% and 60%.”

The insurance industry has a strong interest in these matters. In 2004 and 2005, the two most active hurricane years on record, weather-related losses amounted to $145 billion and $200 billion respectively. The big losses of the past two years have pushed reinsurance prices up. “When events occur, prices rise,” says Christian Mumenthaler, chief risk officer with Swiss Re. “Post-Katrina prices in this bit of the reinsurance business have doubled. Such events usually pay themselves back.”

If prices are rising, that should be a signal to people and businesses to avoid settling in risky areas. The economic centre of the hurricane business is Florida, which is both the most vulnerable part of America and the most valuable. In 2004 the total value of insured coastal property in Florida was $1.937 trillion, compared with $1.902 trillion in New York. Unfortunately, the signal is not getting through to homeowners in Florida, because the government is cushioning the blow. Insurance companies in America may not set their own prices. The rates they charge customers (and indeed the models on the basis of which they calculate their rates) are regulated by state governments. “Communism survives in three parts of the world,” says Mr Muir-Wood: “North Korea, Cuba and the American insurance market.”

Kill communism. Let nature destroy the Southeastern United States and induce people to move away from such areas. A dead Miami is a good Miami.

Darwin

Lest anyone still think that man is not descended from ape here is a video showing a monkey doing martial arts.

Idiots Concerned About Pluto's Status

The freakshows otherwise known as astrologers are concerned about Pluto's demotion:

"Scorpios can be extremely explosive, and very direct, and this could be the trigger that makes them explode," says Milton Black, an Australian astrologer who claims to have more than 580,000 clients. Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, take note. All three are Scorpios.

How a group of astronomers decided that diorama you built in grade school has one too many planets.

Yesterday's ruling in Prague brought good news to some. The astronomers indicated that several planet-like bodies -- including the asteroid Ceres and the newly discovered UB313, sometimes known as Xena -- will also be classified as dwarf planets. That has generated excitement among a small group of practitioners known as "minor-planet astrologers" who have long contended that outer-lying asteroids and ice balls exert a powerful tug on our psychological makeup. Some astrologers believe that officially introducing new dwarf planets to the charts might give astrologers additional information about people, by providing more planetary bodies and forces to study in the charts.

"This is a moment that I've been waiting for a long time," says Eric Francis, a minor-planet astrologer who edits the Web site Planetwaves.net. "People are finally talking about Charon." Charon is Pluto's largest moon, which astronomers briefly considered granting official planet status at the IAU meeting.

Mr. Francis and many other minor-planet enthusiasts are interested in raising awareness about Charon and the new dwarf planets, Ceres and UB313, in part because they consider them female planets that would symbolize a rush of new maternal energy into the cosmos.

"Most of our clients are women, and we need stories women can relate to," says Mr. Francis. (A planet's sex is determined largely by the name given to it by astronomers.)

Kill religion. Elevate man.

That this shit should appear on the front page of the Wall St. Journal beggars belief.

By the way, are women really as weak as "most of our client are women, and we need stories women cna relate to" implies? If so, they should no longer have the right to vote or to drive, or to do anything which qualifies them as "human" for those beasts for whom astrology is a reliable guide are not man at all but fool.

Explain the Religious Mindset to Me

Posner on stem cell research:

There are several economic points that spring to mind about the U.S. ban. The first is its futility, and this for two reasons. Since the researchers are not tied to any particular country, the maximum effect of the U.S. ban would simply be to shift all stem cell research to other countries; it would not stop the research and save the embryos. In addition, however, U.S. law does not ban stem cell research, but only the use of federal funds for that research. The main therapeutic applications of stem cell research lie too far in the future and are too uncertain to attract much private investment, given the high discount rates that most businesses use to evaluate projects. But there is plenty of state and especially private charitable spending on medical research, and so the ban on federal funding of this one area of medical research should merely cause a reallocation of research funds. More state and private money will go to stem cell research and more federal money to areas of research that will be receiving less state and private money because more of that money will be used for stem cell research.

But if the federal ban is not affecting the amount of financial support for stem cell research, why are many of our researchers going abroad to conduct that research? Why do countries like the U.K. and Singapore think they can steal a march on us? The answer may be that the U.S. research community does not think that opposition to stem cell research will express itself only in a ban on federal support for such research. Although the Supreme Court has recognized a constitutional right to abortion, it is unlikely to recognize a constitutional right to conduct stem cell research, even if the objections to such research are the same as the objections to abortion. The fact that the objections are primarily a product of religious belief would not invalidate them, because banning stem cell research does not infringe anyone's free exercise of religion or constitute an establishment of religion. Many moral precepts embodied in laws that no one supposes unconstitutional are the product of sectarian beliefs that secular people (or indeed religious people belonging to sects that are less influential in this country) reject. However, most of the precepts themselves, such as the taboo against murder, are shared by people of different, and of no, religious faiths; you don't have to believe that Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai (you don't have to believe there was a Moses) to condemn murder. In contrast, opposition to abortion and stem cell research is not widely shared by people who do not belong to a particular subset of religious sects.

The loss of leading-edge biological researchers to other countries could be costly to the United States, especially if there are complementarities between stem cell research and other areas of biological and medical research. We may wake up some day to find that foreign institutions have obtained patent protection for highly lucrative medical therapies that our population will demand the government subsidize. I predict, however, that generous state and private funding of stem cell research will stem the reverse brain drain. (And if researchers are easily lured abroad, they are easily lured back.) Moreover, as therapeutic applications of stem cell research become more imminent, the pressure to relax the ban on federal funding is bound to give way.

Now, what's that mantra I keep hearing about?

Oh yes: The only thing I ask of the religious is that they consider the depths to which religious belief has sunk man.

What's that? There's another mantra? Why, you're right: Kill religion. Elevate man.

0!

Of all the things that are certain in life, among them being evolution and gravity, add mathematics.

Anything multiplied by zero equals 0.

Except.

0! = 1.

"The Darwinian theory is absolutely opposed to Christianity, and a public demonstration in its favor should not be permitted"

The New York Times has a fascinating article about a pygmy who was used by the Bronx Zoo in the early 1900s in an exhibit with an organutan. Some religious people, unconcerned with the implicit equivalence of man and beast, were more upset with the implicit support of Darwinian evolution that such an exhibit demonstrated.

It is good to know the religious of one hundred years ago, as today, have their priorities in order. Never mind the epistemological failings of religion; Man is being insulted by being compared to a mere ape!

One racist man nonetheless demonstrates a better sense of perspective on the matter than the clergy:

The New York Globe printed a letter from a reader that said: “I lived in the south several years, and consequently am not overfond of the negro, but believe him human. I think it a shame that the authorities of this great city should allow such a sight as that witnessed at the Bronx Park — a negro boy on exhibition in a monkey cage.”

It is one thing to dislike a man based on the color of his skin, and it is quite another to judge a man as not human based on the color of his skin.

Numbers

Nothing is as important as numeracy.

When I was in high school I had a chemistry teacher with an odd sense of humor, and on the final for the year he had as an extra credit question something like the following: "It was 300 degrees yesterday and I went for a swim. Explain how this is possible."

The answer of course--immediately obvious to the numerate among us--is that "300 degrees" doesn't tell us anything about the scale being used. 300 degrees Kelvin is about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, which, for May in Maine, was not unusual.

I'm reminded of this because Marginal Revolution quotes Richard Feynman on the size of 100 billion:

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

Science and Cash are My Religions

The New York Times has a long, and important, article about the differences between twenty-first century Man and nineteenth-century man. Among the most interesting differences: twenty-first century man is, on average, much taller, heavier, and longer-lived (healthy) than nineteenth-century man:

New research from around the world has begun to reveal a picture of humans today that is so different from what it was in the past that scientists say they are startled. Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.”

The difference does not involve changes in genes, as far as is known, but changes in the human form. It shows up in several ways, from those that are well known and almost taken for granted, like greater heights and longer lives, to ones that are emerging only from comparisons of health records.

The biggest surprise emerging from the new studies is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today, according to a federal study that directly measures it. And that is not just because medical treatments like cataract surgery keep people functioning. Human bodies are simply not breaking down the way they did before.

Even the human mind seems improved. The average I.Q. has been increasing for decades, and at least one study found that a person’s chances of having dementia in old age appeared to have fallen in recent years.

The proposed reasons are as unexpected as the changes themselves. Improved medical care is only part of the explanation; studies suggest that the effects seem to have been set in motion by events early in life, even in the womb, that show up in middle and old age.

One thing the article neglects to mention: this increase in man's well-being is directly attributable to science and capitalism. Over the past two hundred years, many advances in medical science, and trillions of dollars in wealth, have created a population of males that is both healthier and wealthier than any group in the entire history of man.

It should be noted that none of these advances can be ascribed to religion. Praying will not save man; advancing science and creating wealth will. Jonas Salk and Gordon Moore are far better men than any religious figure, for they have contributed to science and the creation of wealth, respectively*. The benefits of their work (and countless other men and women) redound to us daily.

*Some would argue that the very fact that I am blogging to the world about the deprivations that religion visits upon man would indicate that Moore, a co-founder of Intel, has brought much scientific knowledge to man, and that would be correct. But for all the benefits that microprocessor technology has brought to man, of at least equal importance, is the wealth that Moore and his colleagues have generated for thousands of Intel shareholders.

One of the more incomprehensible claims made in the article:

Craig and Sandy Keller had all the advantages of middle-class Americans of their age: childhood vaccines, plenty of food, antibiotics when they fell ill. Now, wanting to stay healthy, they walk in the evenings, try to eat well and rely on their strong faith, which, they say, makes a big difference to their health. And they enjoy life.

(Emphasis mine.)

The problem with this kind of argument is that, to the critical (non-religious) mind, it simply makes no sense: nineteenth-century man was no less religious than twenty-first century man, and yet, health problems felled nineteenth-century man decades before his twenty-first century counterpart.

No, the deprivations wrought by religious belief are incalculable; religiosity has nothing to do with one's propensity to enjoy retirement. Science and capitalism are the only things that can explain lengthening lives. (If capitalism were not a cause of long lives, then it should follow that the life expectancy of a Russian male would be equal to that of an America or Japanese male.)

Scientific Evangelism

If ever there were a paradox, it would be the notion of scientific evangelism, wherein an insular community of scientists reinforces each others' opinions, to the detriment of data and empirical fact.

Well, it appears that a group of statisticians* have unearthed a claque of climatological evangelists; that is, a group of climatologists who claim, despite faulty statistical methodologies, that the evidence for global warming is abolsute:

Mr. Wegman brings to bear a technique called social-network analysis to examine the community of climate researchers. His conclusion is that the coterie of most frequently published climatologists is so insular and close-knit that no effective independent review of the work of Mr. Mann is likely. "As analyzed in our social network," Mr. Wegman writes, "there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis." He continues: "However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility."

In other words, climate research often more closely resembles a mutual-admiration society than a competitive and open-minded search for scientific knowledge. And Mr. Wegman's social-network graphs suggest that Mr. Mann himself -- and his hockey stick -- is at the center of that network.

Mr. Wegman's report was initially requested by the House Energy Committee because some lawmakers were concerned that major decisions about our economy could be made on the basis of the dubious research embodied in the hockey stick. Some of the more partisan scientists and journalists howled that this was an attempt at intimidation. But as Mr. Wegman's paper shows, Congress was right to worry; his conclusions make "consensus" look more like group-think. And the dismissive reaction of the climate-research establishment to the McIntyre-McKitrick critique of the hockey stick confirms that impression.

*I'm fully aware that, if it is possible for a group of climatologists to be insular, it is equally possible for a group of statisticians to be insular.

Calcium Gas

Who knew that one of the gases ejected by the sun was the gaseous form of the element which is the main ingredient of animals' bones?

I get light-headed when I read that the surface of the sun "is really a thousand times more vacuous than a candle-flame on Earth, and even the concentrated moiling gases hidden a thousand miles below it are a hundred times thinner than earthly air." Indeed, some stars, such as E Aurigae I – a star so huge that it could "contain most of our solar system, including the 5.5-billion-mile circumference of Saturn's orbit" – "are sometimes described as 'red-hot vacuums' because their material, though hot, averages thousands of times thinner than earthly air and is normally invisible, so that you might fly through them for days in your insulated space ship without even realizing you were inside a star." Meanwhile, in the sun's whirling interior, "the highly compressed gassy matter is ten times as dense as steel." Then, of course, there are "magnetic hurricanes thousands of miles in diameter" – which would be a lot more exciting if those magnetic hurricanes were not "commonly known on Earth as sunspots." As the sun unceasingly explodes in arching structures of storm and prominence, "glowing veils of gaseous calcium" escape. In others words, the same mineral responsible for animal bones bursts outward from the sun in astrophysical shells that "look like gnarled trees with blazing rain pouring downward from their branches in beautiful magnetic curves that have been clocked at speeds up to 400 miles a second."

From BLDGBLOG.

Science literacy test: do you understand all the science in this Wikipedia entry on the sun? I doubt most people do; it is written at a very introductory level, which level ought to be sufficient for a high school graduate. If you don't understand it do yourself a favor and get yourself an education.

Scalability

Wal-Mart's competitive advantage has been scale: it buys in such quantities from vendors that it can extract concessions from vendors that want to use it as a sales channel.

Any business that wants to grow big has to have a scalable product; Microsoft is an exercise in scalability as well.

So why aren't there more windmills generating power from the wind?

Scalability:

Today's largest horizontal-axis turbines produce around five megawatts, and are proving difficult to scale up. Each blade has to be more than 60 metres long, and the bigger the blade, the greater the stress it experiences as it turns: the blade's own weight compresses it at the top of the cycle and stretches it at the bottom. As a result, blades must be made and transported in one piece, which is expensive. Reinforcing the blade to enable it to withstand these forces further increases cost and reduces efficiency.

The blades of a [windmill that rotates about its vertical axis], in contrast, do not have to undergo this repeated stretching and compression. Nor does their cross-section vary from top to bottom, which makes them cheaper to manufacture than windmill blades, the shape of which must be painstakingly engineered. VAWT blades can also be made in pieces and joined together on site. So vertical-axis designs should enable wind turbines to be scaled up more easily, resulting in cheaper electricity, even for VAWT designs of similar efficiency to conventional turbines. “If we can build a ten megawatt turbine for only slightly more than other companies build five megawatt turbines, then the efficiency question goes out of the window,” says Steven Peace of Eurowind.

Creationists Are Stupid

Althouse notes that some idiot proponent of the creationist* idea--the idea that the Biblical account of Genesis is a literal one, and therefore, the universe is less than empirical observation says it is--has been eulogized thusly: "All of us in the modern creationism movement today would say we stand on his shoulders."

Althouse post here. Story from which that quote was taken here.

This prompted me to comment:

OK....so here's the irony. This dude invokes Newton's claim that "if I have achieved great things, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants"--those giants being scientists like Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo.

And here is this idiot--this creationist--co-opting the language of one of the progenitors of modern, empirical science, Newton, for praise of the work of a man whose mission in life seems to have been to repudiate all that empiricism and scientific observation can tell us about the world.

Not only are these creationists idiots, they are abjectly so.

*Creationism should properly be separated from a related idea, Intelligent Design, though both arise from the same set of ignorant, anti-science belief system that seems so popular among some religious groups today. Intelligent Design makes no claim about the age of the Earth or the Universe but rather claims that life is too complex to have arisen by anything other than an intelligent designer, whereas creationism claims that all the evidence necessary to determine the age of the Earth and hence the Universe can be found in Genesis. While both theories probably have overlapping adherents, they are nonetheless distinct phenomena of religious belief.

Euclid

How many people reading this blog know who Euclid is?

I would hope all; I suspect few.

Euclid, as rendered by Kansas farmers.

Google link here if you want to learn who Euclid was.

Watch Out For Burning Water

The next time you boil water for pasta, you better make sure that the pot doesn't boil over. Because water is combustible.

See, water contains oxygen, and oxygen is combustible, therefore water is combustible.

Some explanation is in order. Instapundit links to this article about China's plans for nuclear power plants, and the article contains the following explanation of why their design is safer than Chernobyl's:

What makes the pebblebed technology so important is its fail-safe design—it would not be possible for the reactor to melt down or explode like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. The uranium in each sphere can't get hot enough to melt the casing and escape. Also, the main coolant for the system is inert helium, not water, as is used in other types of reactors (water, of course, contains oxygen, which is combustible). As global warming and politics render the world's reliance on fossil fuels problematic, China may in a few short years hold the key to a renaissance in nuclear power.

(Emphasis mine.)

Never mind that the other component of water, hydrogen, is more combustible and dangerous than oxygen. If the assertion here--helium is safer because water is composed of a combustible element--were true, then it should also be true that boiling water poses a fire risk because an unwatched pot always boils over. Any two year old can tell you that what happens when water touches a sufficiently hot surface is that it turns into steam. Steam is dangerous in its own right, and it can be explosive, but fire does not result from water being in the presence of something very hot. If fire did result from water being near something hot, we would never boil water, let alone use it as coolant in nuclear towers or car radiators.

The prospect of China developing a nuclear power industry may be very real. But a huge dose of skepticism is in order, on the basis of this Newsweek article's singular failure to get its (basic) science right.

UPDATE: A reader comments that oxygen is not combustible, but rather fosters the combustion of other materials. The way I wrote the first sentence of the penultimate paragraph in the original blog post is a little confusing: I say hydrogren is "more combustible" than oxygen, when oxygen is not combustible at all. There probably is a more clear way of writing this; the point remains, however, that Newsweek's article is shot through with scientific error. It is not a reliable source from which to conlude anything about China's nuclear ambitions. I still don't understand why Instapundit would use the article as a reference piece, given its errors.

Richard Feynman

One of the great travesties of modernity is that in spite of our reliance on, and benefits accrued from, science, most people are woefully illiterate when it comes to science. This is not an argument along the lines of the intelligent design crowd versus the evolution crowd, though that debate certainly can be contextualized in terms of scientific illiteracy, as positing a divine perspective to scientific inquiry demonstrates an utter lack of what is meant by "science."

But there is an even more fundamental problem at play here, that is relevant even for those people who intuitively distrust the notion of intelligent design, and who do not want it to be part of science education: too few people genuinely have any understanding of science. Doctors routinely prescribe antibiotics to patients who have viral infections, despite the fact that viruses, consisting only of RNA, are markedly different than bacteria, for which antibiotics are useful. Bacteria, of course, contain DNA, much like our own, or our dog's or the chimpanzee in the zoo. Doctors prescribe antibiotics for viral infections either due to their own ignorance (highly unlikely) or simply to shut up ignorant patients.

In any event, Cathy Seuipp writes:

If you are new to [Richard] Feynman, I envy you the joy of first discovery. If you are not, perhaps you will agree with me that we need him now more than ever in these days that, unfortunately, seem to grow more scientifically illiterate with each passing hour. I happen to believe, for instance, in the general theological aspects of intelligent design — for many reasons, not the least of which is that the existence of people like Feynman in the world seems to suggest a witty and amazingly creative designer rather than random chance. This is a philosophical theory, however, perhaps a metaphysical one — but not by any stretch of the imagination scientific. It cannot be proved (or disproved) by empirical evidence, and it comes from my own subjective observations and ideas rather than hard facts.

None of the “debates” about evolution vs. intelligent design I’ve encountered seem to be aware that a theory by definition cannot be scientific if its proponents will only accept one conclusion or result. Naturally, any human being has hopes and preferences, which is why the double-blind test (in which experimenters as well as subjects don’t know whether they’re getting medicine or a placebo) is the gold standard in drug research, even though of course it’s not always practical.

But however much researchers might hope they’ve found, for instance, a new cure, they do not set out to prove that a specific one has to work because their religion requires them to have faith in it. Not if they expect to be taken seriously as scientists.

Unfortunately, despite the landmark Pennsylvania schools case last month, in which U.S. District Judge John E. Jones, a conservative Republican, memorably described the Dover, Penn.’s school board’s decision to teach I.D. as “breathtaking inanity,” the anti-science campaign is not dead. This week it migrated to rural central California, where a minister’s wife hopes to get away with teaching I.D. as science by throwing in the word “philosophy.”

It should be noted that anti-science rhetoric is not expressed only by religious conservatives: it is also remarkably popular among post-modern intellectuals, those strange people who posit that there is no such thing as objective reality. Implicit in this type of argumentation is that mathematical principles, far from being universally true, are, instead relative. Who are we to impose our "patriarchical hegemony" of number theory: two plus two should equal what one wants it to equal. It need not equal four because, well, not everyone needs a base-10 number system.

Of course, while it is true that there are uses for non-base-10 number systems, that is nonetheless irrelevant to the grander point: all manner of people are anti-science, despite science having given humanity far more benefits than any other human invention. Considering the degree to which our living standards have improved over the past one hundred years, as compared to the miserable state of life over the past ten thousand, it is quite clear that science has done for more good for humanity than has any other human endeavor, including religion and post-modern thought.

For a good introduction into the anti-science post-modern left, see Alan Sokal.

"Nay Say"

Burt Rutan's pronunication of NASA: "Nay say" which is rather apt.

More here.

Just as privately-funded education achieves things impossible to achieve in public education, so it follows that privately funded space technologies will usher in an era of widespread space travel impossible to achieve when space travel is the exclusive domain of government bureaucracies.

On Being Stupid

Pat Buchanan informing us about the logic of the Dover decision:

But if intelligent design is creationism or fundamentalism in drag, how does Judge Jones explain how that greatest of ancient thinkers, Aristotle, who died 300 years before Christ, concluded that the physical universe points directly to an unmoved First Mover?

Dispatches From The Culture Wars:

The mind boggles, doesn't it? This is like asking, "If intelligent design is creationism or fundamentalism in drag, how does Judge Jones explain the success of Garth Brooks' latest album?" The one simply has nothing to do with the other. And isn't it funny how ID advocates keep changing definitions, merrily bouncing back and forth between biology and cosmology? But this controversy is specifically about biology. It was in a 9th grade biology classroom that ID was asserted and ID is, first and foremost, a set of arguments about biological evolution. That has nothing to do with the existence of a "prime mover".

The evidence at the trial showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the modern ID movement, and its first textbook Of Pandas and People, were functionally and definitionally identical to the "creation science" ideas that were ruled out of public school science classrooms in 1987.

Suffice it to say Buchnanan is an idiot.

On Empiricism and Ontology

One of the fundamental critiques against religious faith is that it is cannot be tested empirically. Therefore, empiricists (such as myself) argue that religion is an epistemological fraud: it provides no coherent structure with which to understand the corporeal world in which we find ourselves. Empiricists will argue that a person who has visions is likely seeing things due to malnutrition, not because he is infected with some ethereal spirit. (As I recall, Aldous Huxley, in his book The Doors of Perception*, contemplates this very scenario: medieval accounts of people seeing strange visions were probably a function of medieval people's woefully inadequate diets, not religious epiphany.)

In any event, James Q. Wilson, writing in the Wall St. Journal elucidates this distinction far more eloquently than I ever could:

People use "theory" when they mean a guess, a faith or an idea. A theory in this sense does not state a testable relationship between two or more things. It is a belief that may be true, but its truth cannot be tested by scientific inquiry. One such theory is that God exists and intervenes in human life in ways that affect the outcome of human life. God may well exist, and He may well help people overcome problems or even (if we believe certain athletes) determine the outcome of a game. But that theory cannot be tested. There is no way anyone has found that we can prove empirically that God exists or that His action has affected some human life. If such a test could be found, the scientist who executed it would overnight become a hero.

Evolution is a theory in the scientific sense. It has been tested repeatedly by examining the remains of now-extinct creatures to see how one species has emerged to replace another. Even today we can see some kinds of evolution at work, as when scholars watch how birds on the Galapagos Islands adapt their beak size from generation to generation to the food supplies they encounter.

The theory of evolution has not been proved as fully as the theory of gravity. There are many gaps in what we know about prehistoric creatures. But all that we have learned is consistent with the view that the creatures we encounter today had ancestors from which they evolved. This view, which is literally the only scientific defensible theory of the origin of species, does not by any means rule out the idea that God exists.

*Fun fact: Jim Morrison's band The Doors took its name from Huxley's book. Huxley, in turn, got the name of his book from some of William Blake's poetry and art. Blake, of course, was a deeply religious man. Ironic, isn't it, that this deeply religious man's poetry served as the inspiration for a book discussed in a blog post about the limitations of religious faith? Another fun fact: The Door's song "Mr. Mojo Rising" is an anagram of Jim Morrison.

On Physics

Trucks carry more kinetic energy than do cars. Thus they require longer periods of time to come to a complete stop.

Repeat after me: cutting trucks off on the highway with the expectation that they can stop like cars is foolish and ignorant.

Via Stuart Buck.

Science Says Homosexuality is Natural...

...so will the Vatican's recent announcement that its adherents take seriously sicence force their hand on the issue of homosexuality and sin?

The Associated Press reports on the Vatican and science:

A Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into "fundamentalism" if it ignores scientific reason.

Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture, made the comments at a news conference on a Vatican project to help end the "mutual prejudice" between religion and science that has long bedeviled the Roman Catholic Church and is part of the evolution debate in the United States.

One cannot expect logical consistency when discussing religion, so, no, a change in views on homosexuality is not likely.

Logic and Statistics Trump Emotion and Morality Every Time

One reason that science, and its mathematical offshoots, such as statistical analysis, are so good at what they do is that they are amoral; morality or its absence properly do not fit into scientific considerations. At least, this is the ideal. Science, as we have seen with the evolution wars and post-modern attacks on scientific methodology has been under attack as of late.

In any event, the Wall St. Journal's Carl Bialik writes a popular online column in which he tries to use statistical analysis to debunk many of the "statistics" that are bandied about among journalists, bloggers and other uncritical people. His last column cast doubt on a study , which claimed that there is a link between kids not using drugs and kids having dinner with their family.

Some moron wrote to Bialik with this emotional, and irrelevant, appeal to moral sensibilities:

I find it interesting that you challenge statistics that encourage positive family activity. Having raised a family, I expected my children to sit at the dinner table each night without even thinking about its potential effect on fighting drug use. I also expected my children to attend church services weekly, act respectfully to older people, limit their outside activity during school and simply respect us as parents. We were not perfect, but my children are both responsible, successful citizens and never took drugs or ended up in jail. Basically, the attendance at dinner must include much more than just attendance at dinner. That is a no-brainer. Still, the encouragement to attend dinner is a start and may challenge parents to analyze their family life activity. It all fits if people sit down and think about it. So I am puzzled why you picked this subject to perform your analysis. Of all the surveys you could have investigated, you selected one that works for the betterment of society, yet are trying to find flaws.

Talk about not understanding the subject. The point here is not whether family time and family values is a moral absolute, or a moral good, but rather whether a correlative link between spending time with one's family and not using drugs is a valid link from which to conclude that spending time with one's family inculcates in one a tendency not to use drugs. That is an amoral question, and its answer has nothing to do with the moral question of whether spending time with one's family is a good thing to do in the first place. Conflating the two issues only allows one to draw irrelevant conclusions about the relationship between correlation and causation.

In any event, Bialik responds, accurately:

I appreciate your comments. I don't select topics based on their moral attributes, but their numerical merits and their value in illustrating statistical and mathematical ideas. A recurring theme of the column is that faulty numbers advocating a noncontroversial position -- like encouraging family dinners or decrying child pornography -- tend to be the ones that go unchallenged. Furthermore, I have no bone to pick with family dinners, per se, having enjoyed them on most nights in my own childhood. Families should decide whether to dine together for their own reasons. And efforts to prevent drug abuse by children should be guided by better research.

Are Conservatives Anti-Science?

Cathy Young on the anti-science attitude of some conservatives:

I do think that in recent years the increasing indentification of conservative Republicans with the anti-Darwinist backlash has made political conservatism less attractive to the scientifically literate.

Agreed. Not for nothing did Marx refer to religion as an opiate that seduces man and dulls his critical thinking faculties.

Young also notes that Antonin Scalia in a 1987 dissent "recognized a scientific basis for creationism," in the case Edwards v. Aguillard. Having not read either the decision or Scalia's dissent from it, I can't reliably conclude anything from such a dissent; however, it would not surprise me that a man as foolishly religious as he would also be so foolish as to claim a scientific basis for creationism. Religion has repeatedly shown itself to be the enemy of critical inquiry.

UPDATE:

The Wall St. Journal publishes an interesting column today by its science correspondent, Sharon Begley, in which she discusses the phenomenon of apparently reasonable people earnestly believing that they have been abducted by aliens. The psychological explanation for these peoples' foibles gets to the heart of my antipathy toward blind religious faith:

The principle of parsimony that underpins all of science -- the simplest explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be right -- is, well, alien to abductees. So is the notion that "it feels right" doesn't make it so, and that exceptions to rules are, indeed, exceptions.

What an inability to think scientifically does not explain, however, is why many people believe this one weird thing, not weird things in general. In other words, why ET?

"Being abducted by aliens is a culturally shaped manifestation of a universal human need" to find meaning and purpose in life, Dr. Clancy writes. That need is stronger and more basic than any attachment to empiricism, logic or objective reality.

Most important, perhaps, is that alien abduction feels, to abductees, like the best explanation for their feelings and memories. It is transformative, giving their life meaning, reassuring them of their own significance. Will, the twins' dad, is happy he was "chosen," saying the abduction showed him there is "something out there much bigger, more important than we are." Through his twins, he can "have a part in it."

Dr. Clancy, raised as a Catholic, is aware of the human needs that religion fills -- and how belief in alien abduction fills them, too. "People get from their abduction beliefs the same things that millions of people the world over derive from their religions," she writes: "meaning, reassurance, mystical revelation, spirituality, transformation."

It's important to remember that religion can provide a lot of good to people--it can function as a spiritual salve to reassure a person and give him hope. But it is also important to remember that when our epistemological framework of the world is constrained by ontological fealty, we deny ourselves a full understanding of the corporeal world. Abduction becomes a real possibility, as does wanton slaughter of those who profess a creed different from our own.

Religion is a powerful cultural force, and, as with any cultural phenomenon it can be used for good or abject evil. It is the tendency toward evil to which some religious practioners descend that forces me to look critically at religion and its adherents.

Ashkenazi Jews and Eugenics

Are Ashkenazi Jews smarter than everyone else?

There has been some controversy surrounding this question, and, in a bit of demographic exploitation, New York magazine has tackled it, in a surprisingly interesting article, in this week's issue. The following is interesting, if only because it reflects my experience, having grown up in an intellectual, Jewish family:

Growing up, most children in Jewish households are at least vaguely aware of their intellectual aristocracy—who do you think was counting all those Nobel Prize winners? The Swedes?—and if it’s not the intellectuals they’re aware of, it’s the high-achieving Jews, the ones who killed on Dick Cavett, played lead guitar, helmed the Starship Enterprise. (The one season I attended Sunday school, one of my first assignments was to find the name of a Jewish celebrity; when I returned the following week with the name of Beverly Sills, rather than Gene Simmons, my teacher didn’t find it the least bit strange.) All minorities have their private halls of fame, of course, but it was a Jew, Adam Sandler, who took this obsessive curatorial tendency and set it to music. “David Lee Roth lights the menorah / So do James Caan, Kirk Douglas, and the late Dinah Shore-ah . . . ”

It’s staggering what an emphasis on scholarship, both secular and religious, combined with a history of relentless displacement will do. One could argue it’s a near-certain recipe for achievement. Just last month, Sherwin Nuland, author of How We Die, wrote a meticulous, almost pointillist essay for The New Republic explaining why Jewish doctors have been held in high esteem for centuries. (The title of the article: “My Son, the Doctor.”) He notes that physical healing has always been privileged by Jewish scripture, and therefore became the province of learned rabbis, the apotheosis of whom was Maimonides. If the Jews were expelled from a particular country, as they so often were, they could take their profession with them—medicine was divinely portable.

My parents have six degrees between the two of them--each with a bachelors, and two graduate degrees. They used to compete to see who could finish the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in the shortest amount of time.

Now, this anecdote, of course proves nothing other than human interest. And, obviously there are many smart people who are not Jewish. And, finally, the question of whether Jews are inherently smarter than non-Jews brings up troubling questions about eugenics and Jews' tragic experience with that intellectually fashionable strain of thought.

Finally, a note on this post's categorization: some denigrate the question of whether Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than other people as not being science. I am not expert enough in the epistemological/taxonomical questions of what constitutes "science" to determine whether this post is inaccurately categorized; if you are of the opinion that such a question should not be considered in science, then I would suggest you have an interesting blog post of your own to write.

On Money

Proving that money salves nothing more than the pain of the biological clock, New York Magazine reports that women with money to burn can now freeze their eggs.

On Ignorance

Dispatches From the Culture Wars has an as-always excellent discussion of "intelligent design" apologists. In discussing disingenuous arguments put forth by Congress' unrepentant creationism advocate, Senator Santorum, Dispatches notes:

The Washington Post has a pretty good article on ID this morning, one that will no doubt bring howls of outrage from the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division (aka their blog). A couple interesting bits from it:

Some evolution opponents are trying to use Bush's No Child Left Behind law, saying it creates an opening for states to set new teaching standards. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a Christian who draws on Discovery Institute material, drafted language accompanying the law that said students should be exposed to "the full range of scientific views that exist."

"Anyone who expresses anything other than the dominant worldview is shunned and booted from the academy," Santorum said in an interview. "My reading of the science is there's a legitimate debate. My feeling is let the debate be had."

This is a major part of the ID strategy and it's a bit of bait and switch. Having failed to convince the scientific community of the validity of ID, and most importantly having refused to do any of the difficult and time-consuming theoretical and expiremental work necessary to establish that validity, they instead want to portray scientists as dogmatic inquisitioners throwing them out of the temple for heresy. But the fact is that scientists at this point don't take ID seriously because there isn't anything to it - no general ID theory, no testable hypotheses and hence no actual research performed that could confirm or disconfirm the idea, no novel predictions or even positive statements about how ID might be tested and confirmed. It is greeted with the same sort of shrug with which one would greet the notion that gravity isn't the real explanation for planetary orbits, but rather is the result of the willful actions of an unnamed, undefined supernatural designer. The difference, of course, is that biological ID is very well funded and pushed by a very sophisticated public relations effort.

Global Warming

The righty blogs will be all over this story. The Wall St. Journal publishes a long article in tomorrow's newspaper discussing global warming. "According to a semi-retired minerals consultant" global warming is not happening and has not been caused by industrialization. "After spending two years and about $5,000 of his own money trying to double-check the influential graphic [of a hockey stick, representing the increase in global temperatures], Stephen McIntyre says he has found significant oversights and errors."

Intelligent Discussion on Intelligent Design

Mark Steckbeck at the Liberal Order has an excellent discussion about intelligent design and its (lack of a) place in science curricula:

Evolution is a scientific theory. It is scientific in that a hypothesis is made that is testable. Legitimate scientists pursue a research program that attempts to falsify the hypothesis that humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years from animals. In other words, the job of a scientist is to try to disprove the theory of evolution.

To many on the religious right evolution is simply a means of promoting a secular doctrine while ignoring their religious-based counter argument. But their religious beliefs don't belong in the science curriculum: religion is not science. Creationism and/or it's sister, Intelligent Design, are not in any way science--they are faiths. Certainly there is an attempt to "prove" that the world was created by some deity at some specific point in time, but such arguments are philosophical and not scientific. Nobody who promotes creationism or ID is actively pursuing to falsify their beliefs.

Should they be taught as part of a philosophy or religious or history or literature curriculum in government schools? I guess that depends on how the First Amendment is interpreted. (See below.) Right now it can't, which I believe is unfortunate. As long as it is taught as an academic pursuit and not an indoctrination program, then there is much to learn about religious beliefs, history, literature, etc. But as long as our academic institutions continue to devolve into ideological battlefields, neither side can be trusted to present the material in an unbiased manner as a means of teaching students how to think rather than instilling in them what to believe.

UPDATE:

A reader objects to Steckbeck's argument:

When a scientist questions evolution, as in the case you cited last week of the museum curator and editor, careers are ruined. That kind of orthodoxy is not just the antithesis of the quote above it is frighteningly rigid, whether it's from religious or antireligious folks. Like the man said, "...as long as our academic institutions continue to devolve into ideological battlefields, neither side can be trusted to present the material in an unbiased manner as a means of teaching students how to think rather than instilling in them what to believe.

My response to the reader follows:

I think Steckbeck's point is this: science operates on the assumption that hypotheses should be scrutinized with the intent of disproving them. If they cannot be disproven, then they should be correct.

So, if I have a hypothesis that water is constituted of hydrogen and oxygen, I should, in order to prove that hypothesis correct, try to prove it incorrect. In other words, if I can't prove that water is made of anything but hydrogen and oxygen, then I will have proven my hypothesis correct. If you apply that kind of thinking to evolution, we would say that scientists should try to prove the theory of evolution incorrect; if they are unable to do so, then by implication the theory of evolution is correct.

Advocates of intelligent design would counter with an argument like this: "You say that in order to prove evolution correct, you have to disprove all alternative hypotheses. Well, creationism is an alternative theory, and, per the Bible is verifiable. Therefore, evolution is a false doctrine promulgated by secular humanists. It should be rejected."

But the problem with this line of thinking, and this is the key to Steckbeck's argument, is that such is not science; it is dogma or philosophy. The scientific method--disproving hypotheses, or proving them by being unable to disprove them--is the scientific method and should be applied to science. Dogmatic discussions about whether what the Bible says is true or not should be confined to their appropriate forum--i.e., a religion or philosophy or history class.

Aurora Borealis

I came across this cool photoblog. Check out this picture of the aurora borealis (aka Northern Lights).

I've always liked photography but never did it particularly well.

Intelligent Design

Apologists for intelligent design are quick to jump on any positive mention of their pet theory that appears in mainstream media. The Wall St. Journal's OpinionJournal.com site published this piece on January 28th which discussed the inclusion of a paper somewhat friendly to the intelligent design theory in a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal:

The question of whether Intelligent Design (ID) may be presented to public-school students alongside neo-Darwinian evolution has roiled parents and teachers in various communities lately. Whether ID may be presented to adult scientific professionals is another question altogether but also controversial. It is now roiling the government-supported Smithsonian Institution, where one scientist has had his career all but ruined over it.

The scientist is Richard Sternberg, a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The holder of two Ph.D.s in biology, Mr. Sternberg was until recently the managing editor of a nominally independent journal published at the museum, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, where he exercised final editorial authority. The August issue included typical articles on taxonomical topics--e.g., on a new species of hermit crab. It also included an atypical article, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories." Here was trouble.

Note that nothing in the essay addresses the validity of the intelligent design theory; it only addresses so-called anti-religious sentiment at the Smithsonian. The essay concludes:

Intelligent Design, in any event, is hardly a made-to-order prop for any particular religion. When the British atheist philosopher Antony Flew made news this winter by declaring that he had become a deist--a believer in an unbiblical "god of the philosophers" who takes no notice of our lives--he pointed to the plausibility of ID theory.

Darwinism, by contrast, is an essential ingredient in secularism, that aggressive, quasi-religious faith without a deity. The Sternberg case seems, in many ways, an instance of one religion persecuting a rival, demanding loyalty from anyone who enters one of its churches--like the National Museum of Natural History.

There's a world of difference between deism--the idea that God created the universe and then let events unfold, as it were, without anymore involvement from him--and the arguments put forth by traditional advocates for Intelligent Design, which argues that God had a principal role in the design and creation of life here on Earth. For all we know, the deists are right, as there is no contradiction between the deistic view of our origins and our scientific knowledge of the origins of the universe. It would be overreaching at this point to argue that science has proved the deists wrong or right; we simply don't know enough.

In consideration of this, it's interesting that various sites sympathetic to intelligent design have seized upon this essay as evidence of (1) scientists' refusal to engage with those who believe in intelligent design, and (2) mainstream media's sympathy for such people and ideas. Point number one is valid--few scientists are willing to engage with intelligent design theorists because intelligent design rests on a set of assumptions contrary to the scientific method, and point number two is irrelevant, at least in this instance, because the essay did not address the validity of intelligent design, but rather (1) the ramifications for having published an article deemed controversial by the scientific community and (2) that some deists see a logic in the concept of intelligent design. None of this amounts to either support for intelligent design, or a mainstreaming thereof.

Religious people, especially those whose beliefs are at odds with science, are sure to impute onto this episode evidence of widespread anti-religious sentiment among scientists and government-run institutions. At least one blog points out that, at least in this instance, anti-religious sentiment is irrelevant to the issue:

But Sternberg’s personal idiosyncrasies, even if they be reason to suspect his academic judgment in the context of evolutionary biology, are really not at stake in this case. The publication of Meyer’s article raised controversy partly because of its defense of ID, but mainly because the defense was intellectually shoddy (which, as ID opponents love to point out, was only to be expected). Caught in the controversy, the Biological Society of Washington issued a statement on 7 September 2004 disclaiming as much responsibility as it could, given that the offending article had appeared in its own journal.

Biology as Software

It's often been said that those who revolutionize a particular field are those who look at the field from a fresh perspective. I thought about when reading this article in the Economist, which discusses Bill Gates' charitable efforts to rid the world of infectious diseases:

But there may be more to it than that. One of the most intriguing facts about the foundation is that its founder is himself a scientist—or rather, and rather better, an engineer—and that as a result, he is intellectually engaged in much of the medical research he has set in motion. Mr Gates's speciality is software. Creating and selling it made him rich. Not surprisingly, he thinks he is rather good at it. And he seems to have realised what biologists themselves are only starting to come to grips with—that biology is basically a software problem in which biochemical pathways stand in for computer algorithms. From this perspective, disease is the result of software failure or inappropriate data input—a fact that is very evident when listening to a conversation between Mr Gates and his scientists about the weak points of, say, the malaria parasite. (emphasis mine)

The Logical Conclusion of Intelligent Design

Instapundit on the logical conclusion of intelligent design apologists.

School Choice and Creationism

A Constrained Vision posts an interesting discussion about school choice and creationism. She notes that Andrew Coulson has made the point that no one is happy with the current system in which advocates of evolution and their antagonists litigate ad infinitum in the courts:

[Andrew Coulson] points out that no one--not creationists, not evolutionists, not supporters of intelligent design--is satisfied with the current system:

[H]onestly, is anyone happy with the way schools currently handle this issue?

Adherents of intelligent design presumably aren’t. They must fight to have their views heard in the public schools, and when they succeed, they immediately face legal challenges. Even if ID prevails in court (as biblical creationism did not), will science teachers present it in a way that will satisfy its advocates?

Adherents of evolution have nothing to cheer about, either. Virtually all biologists see evolution as the fundamental structuring principle of their entire discipline. By contrast, schools often teach it as a brief, isolated unit to avoid controversy. Tellingly, after generations of public school instruction in the theory of evolution, a recent Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Americans believe humanity is the comparatively recent product of divine creation, while only one-third believe that evolution is a theory well-supported by scientific evidence.

These results must dismay most scientists, and they should cause intelligent design advocates to question the wisdom of entrusting their own views to the public schools.

This prompted me to comment:

School choice is a good concept; providing an avenue through which children are fed misinformation about the origins of life is not.

Creationism is a body of theory developed by religious people unhappy with the intellectual underpinning of evolution, which is, mainly, that the bible's story of biological origins is not only incorrect, but laughably so. Creationism is a direct and fundamental repudiation of established science masquerading as religious belief. As such it is, according to conservatives, attacked only by anti-religious zealots, and, therefore, anyone who opposes its being taught in any school must be hostile to religion.

This is of course an out and out lie; hostility to creationism and hostility to religion are not necessarily mutually inclusive qualities. Many religious people are hostile to creationism for the precise reason that it reflects a radical form of biblical literalism that tries to contravene facts about which there is abundant empirical evidence.

Surely we can find better reasons to support school choice than because it is an opportunity for children to learn creationism.

Incidentally, Andrew Coulson notes that students are not taught much about evolution, in order, as he relates it, to avoid controversy. For what it's worth, my personal recollection is that when we discussed the origin of life in my various schools, the topic was always dealt with substantively (that is, as substantively as school-age children can comprehend evolution) and I graduated high school with a pretty firm grasp of modern evolutionary theory.

A reasonable critique of my argument is: If ignorant parents want to pass on to their children ignorant ideas about the origins of life, so what? How is society harmed by the foolishness of parents? Parents should be allowed to act on whatever foolish belief they have, so long as they do no physical harm to their children.

Perhaps. But a response to that counterargument is: don't we want to inculcate in our society an appreciation for scientific literacy? Don't we want a population that can speak with authority about scientific matters? Further, should government or society really be in the position of arguing that the veracity of what parents teach their children, or what their schools teach their children, be unchecked?

Consider the logical consequences of a laissez-faire approach which argues that parents should be able to teach their children creationism or evolution as is their wont: What's then to stop a parent from teaching a new kind of mathematics that the parent doesn't think "opressive"? Or, what's to stop the parent from teaching his child that blacks are genetically inferior to whites?

Just because we should have school choice does not mean we should also allow parents to teach their children whatever their political predilections dictate; school functions in society as an efficient tool by which to disseminate, as best possible, the sum of human knowledge. That goal is hardly served by allowing parents to teach their children lies that have no basis in empirical evidence.