My name's Joe. I'm a chemical engineering graduate student and a skeptic. If I told you about chemical engineering you'd probably want to strangle yourself with your keyboard wire, so let's talk about skepticism!
Contact email: cheglabratjoe (at) gmail.com
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July 1, 2009
Entry 31: Research Should Validate Alternative Medicine
Let's start with the impetus for this entry. I give you the recent statement by Senator Tom Harkin, D-IA, in regards to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and its predecessor, the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM):
One of the purposes of this center [NCCAM] was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short. I think quite frankly that, in this center and in the office previously before it [OAM], most of its focus has been on disproving things rather than seeking out and approving.
That would have been this week's statement, but it would have made the title too long. Senator Harkin was instrumental in creating and shaping OAM/NCCAM, the branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that funds CAM research. The original stated purpose of this center was to rigorously and scientifically evaluate CAM modalities. This goal was, and may even remain, quite important. Some of these treatments were very popular yet very untested, so determining their safety and efficacy was an important public health matter.
But, Senator Harkin just admitted that NCCAM's charge wasn't actually to investigate alternative medicine. The goal of NCCAM was, apparently, to validate alternative medicine. This isn't merely a verbal flub, nor is it simply Harkin hoping that the hypothesis he bet his nickel on wins. Unless we pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, this is evidence of serious bias afoot at the NIH.
Investigate, Validate ... To-may-toe, To-mah-toe, Right?
NCCAM is charged with the scientific evaluation of alternative medicine. I'm not getting all civics-lesson on you here; this is the only way to actually determine whether or not any type of medical treatment works. While there are certainly pockets of mainstream medicine that aren't as science-based as they ought to be, medical treatments in general are investigated scientifically to determine their safety and efficacy. This is most readily apparent in drug trials: phase one looks for toxicity in healthy people, phase two tests the efficacy and safety in the target patient group, and phase three compares the treatment's efficacy to currently-available treatments.
Many alternative treatments have not been subjected to this rigorous evaluation, especially not prior to efforts like NCCAM. Alternative medicine was (and is) living off anecdotes and appeals to antiquity and popularity, the same sort of "evidence" that has kept the Four Humours in business for millennia (and counting). Rigorous scientific testing would determine once and for all whether or not these treatments worked.
But wait ... Senator Harkin isn't interested in whether or not these treatments work. He was looking for validation that alternative medicine does work. Thus, Senator Harkin already had his mind made up back when he started the OAM/NCCAM. He believed that alternative medicine worked; he just wanted science to give him an official-sounding rubberstamp to slap on it. Senator Harkin was convinced by the anecdotes and fallacies mentioned earlier, and his mind was and remains closed* to the possibility that CAM modalities might not work.
*Bear this in mind the next time some true believer calls you closed-minded: any true believer is far more closed-minded than a skeptic, since the true believer's mind is already made up and thus closed to the possibility that they are wrong. But, that's another story for another time.
Science doesn't work this way. While anecdotes are not worthless, they are only useful as generators of hypotheses. If tons of people are getting acupuncture and claiming that it somehow helped them, then it's worth investigating whether or not acupuncture has therapeutic value. The trick here is that these anecdotes don't themselves prove the efficacy of acupuncture, since they're completely uncontrolled and unverifiable. Any number of confounding factors could complicate the matter: maybe these people would've felt better regardless of what they did, maybe these people are misremembering, maybe these people just needed a little personal attention, maybe these people only claimed to feel better to placate the acupuncturist, etc, etc, etc.
A scientific study of a CAM modality would strive to reduce these variables to determine the actual efficacy of the treatment. The people participating in the study would be carefully and objectively monitored for unbiased data reporting. Half of the study participants would receive a placebo, so that the treatment outcomes could be compared to a control outcome. The testing would be double-blinded, so that neither the participants nor the therapists would know who received the placebo or the real deal. This entire process would be repeated at different institutions, so that subtler biases or even research misconduct could be circumvented. All these precautions would be necessary to eliminate the unconscious cognitive biases that creep into our everyday lives as humans. Only after these steps do we have a chance of knowing whether or not a treatment is effective.
If you'll allow me to be so bold (or italic), that last sentence bears repeating: Only after these steps do we have a chance of knowing whether or not a treatment is effective. What I've described is a scientific investigation of an alternative medicine treatment. Note the fundamental difference between this and a scientific validation of alternative medicine. Validation assumes that the treatment in question has already been proven effective. Validation is not something science does, except perhaps as training exercises. (Your chemistry labs during school could be considered validating already-proven knowledge.) Senator Harkin asked researchers to prove his beliefs correct, and then had the audacity to get annoyed at them when their data demonstrated that his beliefs are wrong. Senator, as the LOLcats would say: SCIENCE ... ur doin it rong!
Pseudoscience: The Only Bipartisan Thing in Washington
Senator Harkin communicated a variety of important points in his little spiel about alternative medicine. One aspect I haven't addressed is that he reminded us that woo is eminently bipartisan. Republicans certainly don't (and never did) have a monopoly on un-, anti-, and pseudoscientific positions. A lot of pro-science folks have been understandably pumped about the Obama administration after years of what some have gone so far as to call a Republican war on science. But, issues like alternative medicine make it abundantly clear that skepticism is necessary regardless of which political party is in power.
Complementary and alternative medicine needed to be investigated via science, not validated by it. Many skeptics feel that NCCAM was wrongheaded from the get-go, via the argument that research dollars ought to be allocated according to individual treatments' plausibility. While they have a point about prior plausibility, I disagree that NCCAM was unnecessary. I believe that public's fascination with CAM warranted some scientific scrutiny, at least to check the safety of these treatments. This is all academic, of course, since it's in the past. What matters is that NCCAM spent millions of dollars over eighteen years investigating alternative medicine, and has demonstrated the efficacy of precisely zero treatments*.
*Special aside time again! The bolding and underlining was not sufficient to highlight the starkness of that fact. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has yet to establish the effectiveness of a single alt-med modality. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Furthermore, no flavor of CAM has been determined ineffective. It seems that further research is always required.
The time for special NIH centers to study one Senator's sacred cow is over. If alternative medicine advocates want federal research dollars to study their favorite modality, they should have to write grants and compete with other treatments on a level playing field. If the treatment actually works, scientists are going to find it and doctors are going to incorporate it into regular old Medicine (M). M gets to cheat that way. As a quick example, everyone used to think that stomach ulcers were caused by too much acid in the stomach. A couple guys during the eighties did some novel but overlooked work suggesting that bacteria caused ulcers, and eventually the evidence was abundantly clear and M changed its ways. This story even has a Cinderella ending, since these guys won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005.
I assure you that the same could happen to a chiropractor or acupuncturist, but the onus is of course on them to prove their theories. Homeopaths should be even more excited by this story, since they'd also be shoo-ins for the physics and chemistry Nobels. Best of luck, fellas!
Posted at 9:38 pm by cheglabratjoe
June 18, 2009
Entry 30: Daniel Dennett and Memes
And, welcome back! If you missed last week’s entry, I went to a lecture by Daniel Dennett and really dug it. Last time, I covered the lecture in general and plowed through his early points. This time, I’m going to discuss memes and how he used them to wrap up his lecture. Without further ado, let’s get back to Professor Dennett.
My Introduction to Memes
I’m a meme skeptic. I’ve never read anything that directly contained arguments for or against memes, but I’ve seen/heard them come up occasionally during interviews and discussions. My quite-uninformed opinion was that they were just a misguided attempt to quantize the humanities that lacks any evidence whatsoever. Dennett didn’t sway me, but he at least prevented me from dismissing them out-of-hand in the future.
The easiest critique of memes is that there is no hard evidence for them. Dennett summarized this skepticism as show me a meme, and that’s glib but accurate. His simple response was that words are memes: they are a quantized unit of culture, they spread from person-to-person, they evolve, they experience natural selection, and they even go extinct. There is apparently a linguistic counter to this argument, as Dennett felt the need to warn against over-Chomsky-ing words and making them all about syntax; in particular, he mentioned labels and passwords as examples of words/memes that are 100% syntax-free. I have nothing to add about this, because I know jack-all about linguistics. (I find it interesting that Noam Chomsky, who is alive, will probably go down as one of the more important thinkers in history, yet I know literally nothing about his work.)
Another counter to my own show me a meme argument occurred to me after the presentation. (There’s a chance Dennett mentioned this and I just forgot about this; if so, my bad on the semi-plagiarism.) Genes have a clear physical analogy: stretches of DNA. Well, when Darwin first put out his ideas about evolution, there was no physical evidence for genes. Hell, we didn’t know about genes period. Mendel was working with his peas around the same time as Darwin, but his work wasn’t rediscovered for fifty years after the Origin’s publication. It was another fifty years until DNA was really sorted out. So, the theory of evolution did its thing for practically a century before absolute slam-dunk evidence for genes hit the stage.
I realize I haven’t rigorously defined what a meme is. It’s basically the cultural equivalent to a gene. Just as genes are little bits of hereditary information that evolution works via and upon, memes are little chunks of culture that can spread and mutate and be selected for or against. Wait … since when does culture evolve?
Mitochondria vs. Michelangelo
… which brings us to Dennett’s next big comparison. At some point in the extraordinarily distant past, an amazing thing happened. A single-celled life form joined forces with another distinct single cell. They didn’t merely become friends or form a symbiotic tag team; they literally fused into one discrete creature. This isn’t science fiction or a tentative hypothesis (a la the lightening-struck primordial soup starting life); this is the birth of eukaryotes. Every single cell in your body contains mitochondria, and every single mitochondrion has its own DNA sequence distinct from your regular cellular DNA. Your mitochondria ultimately descend from this engulfed critter.
Eukaryotes have gone berserk since this alliance, evolving extreme complexity and diversity. Everything from humans to palm trees to mushrooms is a eukaryote. Meanwhile, your mitochondria’s distant cousins that didn’t find a friend (or enemy, for that matter) to ally with are still largely relegated to being comparatively-simple prokaryotes (like bacteria). So, why did eukaryotes take over the world? What gave this conglomerate critter its edge?
The likely explanation is that evolution had a new vector to act upon. With two distinct genomes to pass on, evolution was granted that many more potential cranes to work with. Eukaryotes have an entirely distinct route of evolutionary action that prokaryotes simply lack. This gave eukaryotes the evolutionary prowess to dominate the planet.
What does this billion-year-old cellular biology have to do with memes? Well, Dennett posits that this is happening again literally as we speak thanks to the human brain. Just as those first eukaryotes had a second genome upon which evolution could act, humans now have a “memome” that is subject to evolutionary pressures. Those first eukaryotes passed a second set of DNA to their progeny, and humans now pass memes onto their children.
Ironically, Dennett has ceded one of the mind creationists’ points. He agrees with them that modern humanity cannot be explained merely by genes and old-school evolution. However, Dennett is most certainly not admitting that some sort of skyhook is necessary to explain humanity’s section of design space. On the contrary, he is arguing that we need to look for a new type of crane. Trying to sort out human evolution without memes would be like trying to explain lizards without accounting for mitochondria, according to Dennett. Memetics is a whole new avenue upon which random variation and natural selection can work their evolutionary wonders.
Memetics in the Origin?
No, but Dennett had one last comparison to hammer memes home before wrapping up his lecture. I’ve never read On the Origin of Species, so I’m going to have to relay Darwin’s big approach to natural selection third-hand. (I really should read it, and everyone reading this should, too. My understanding is that it’s extremely well-written and accessible, and is basically a fantastic book-long argument for evolution.) Darwin outlined three stages of selection within populations, the first two artificial and the third natural.
The first type of selection is intentional artificial selection. This is what farmers and dog breeders do. You look at a population, pick out which traits you want to select for, and have the individuals with those traits mate. The second type of selection is unintentional artificial selection. The most dangerous example of this is antibiotic-resistant bacteria; no one planned for MRSA to show up, but it sure did thanks to our willy-nilly antibiotic usage. The neatest example of this is probably the samurai crabs (heikigani) popularized by Carl Sagan in Cosmos; check out the Wikipedia page for the story. And, finally, Darwin marched onward to explain natural selection.
This was a great way to approach his argument, and I won’t dwell on it because it goes without saying that the Origin is good stuff. One thing I’ll add is that we now have a zeroth level of selection (with the above list being the first, second, and third): genetic engineering. Rather than wait around for random mutations to lead to desirable traits, we can directly insert genes that ought to provide traits we’re ultimately interested in. The power this offers us probably cannot be understated, but that’s another story for another time.
According to Dennett, memes are subjected to the same four types of selection. We intentionally teach our children math and art (type one), but we do so with an accent and thus, for no conscious reason, no one from Boston pronounces their r’s (type two). Conversely, sometimes an individual will have a crazy idea that will spread and mutate from person to person with no artificial selection involved (type three). Abduction stories are a good example of this: nowadays aliens beam you into space, before that it was fairies taking you to a magical world (see Entities by Joe Nickell), and before that it was demons possessing you (see Summis Desiderantes Affectibus Papal Bull*, Innocent VIII, 1484). Lastly, we have advertisers, our society’s memetic engineers (type zero). Just Do ItTM.
*Seriously, a papal bull about succubi and incubi and magic spells during the freaking Renaissance. But, hey, I probably shouldn’t cast stones … a former US President and Nobel laureate (Jimmy Carter) swears he saw a UFO. In fairness, and despite ufologists’ claims, he believes it was a top-secret military aircraft and not an alien craft. But still …
Though it probably doesn’t sound like it, I remain skeptical about memes. I’m definitely fascinated by the idea, but I’d like to look into the claims a bit more and check out some formal counterarguments. In the meantime, I think Dennett has made a compelling case for considering memetics as a hypothesis to explain the homo block of design space. If nothing else, memetics is a much more satisfying hypothesis than the mind creationists’ god-did-it skyhook.
I Even Like Latin, But Come On …
As you can probably tell from the hundreds upon hundreds of words and the rare double-entry, I really enjoyed Professor Dennett’s lecture. I’m still thinking about pretty regularly, and I’m admittedly enchanted by the idea of memes. Nevertheless, the skeptical activist in me is rather worried about his "tactics" (for lack of a better word), especially because he’s supposed to be the nice one of the big four New Atheists (the meanies being Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens).
I covered my concern over and reconciliation of his choice to not present hard evidence for evolution last time, so I won’t bring that up again. What I want to cover now during my conclusion is his conclusion. He ended with a little story of how someone once called him out on a Darwin fish pin he had on. This person claimed that the Jesus fish is the first known acronym, because, in ancient Greek, the first letters in the phrase "Jesus Christ God’s Son, Savior" spells the word for FISH. (I could verify that this is the likely origin of the symbol, but not that it’s the very first known acronym.) He then chided Dennett, because surely DARWIN wasn’t an acronym for anything.
Dennett thought for awhile, and came up with a phrase in Latin that he thought was appropriate. (Props go to my mad google skills and a dude who attended his lecture at another university and took copious notes.) Note that ancient Latin didn’t have a w, so he used two u’s:
Delere Auctorem Rerum Ut Universum Infinitum Noscas
Destroy the author of things in order to understand the infinite universe
This a nice point to end on, because it’s something of a microcosm of Dennett’s entire lecture. It is very clever, and people on his “side” will definitely enjoy it. But, it will probably alienate people on the other “side” and, more importantly, it might drive away people on the fence.
If I was commenting on someone else’s blog or posting in a forum, right about now someone would probably be calling me a concern troll. However, I think some concern is warranted in this instance. I grabbed the UW student newspapers the day after the lecture, hoping for some reflection and perhaps a fresh take on the lecture. I got neither. The articles hardly offered any insight on the lectures whatsoever, instead focusing on Dennett’s atheism and his “radical perspective” and quote-mining his statements about life being “meaningless” and “purposeless.” This certainly could be an instance of the journalists either drumming up unwarranted controversy or having the gist of their stories prepared before the event, but I doubt it. I suspect that those stories wouldn’t have been written so negatively if Dennett doesn’t end his lecture by suggesting we destroy peoples’ god.
Looking back, I feel even better about Dennett all but ignoring his opponents (as he implicitly did by not opening with the evidence for evolution or for creationism’s vapidity). In a lecture like this, ignoring them is, interestingly, both the worst insult he could have dealt out and a strategically shrewd move. Completely ignoring them would be insulting because he would basically be saying that they aren’t worth his time (which they aren’t). On the other hand, ignoring them is advantageous because he would be giving them precisely zero ammunition.
Unfortunately, rather than continue to give his cultural competitors the cold shoulder, Dennett decided to end with his little Latin line about destroying god. Don’t get me wrong; I liked that just as much as I liked the lecture as a whole. It was a great comeback to the smartass who called him on his pin, and it’s pretty damn clever in its own right. Hell, I might even try to remember it, in case I ever get called out for the Darwin fish on my car and backpack. Nevertheless, I don’t know that it was worth it. I can’t help but suspect that that one slide turned many attendees’ opinion on the lecture from “philosopher gives thoughtful insight on evolution” to “atheist wants to kill god.” It’s unfair and unfortunate, but that’s public perception for you.
Posted at 10:52 pm by cheglabratjoe
May 3, 2009
Entry 29: Daniel Dennett Lecture
I’m just going lecture-crazy, aren’t I? The Distinguished Lecture Series here at Wisconsin is pretty cool; they bring in big-name speakers a half-dozen times a year, and tickets are free for students. I just wish I had known about it earlier. In particular, I’m pretty frustrated that I missed Richard Dawkins a few years back. I’m definitely not going to make that kind of mistake again. Of course, I say that, but only a few months ago I missed Neil deGrasse Tyson because I was running late to the lecture from the gym. That’ll teach me to exercise … dammit, I’m still pissed about that. Let’s just move on.
It’s good that I started off this entry more bloggy and less structured than usual, because this isn’t going to be my typical lecture deconstruction. (That is, assuming something can be called ‘usual’ or ‘typical’ after two occurrences.) The main reason for this is simply because I don’t really disagree with Professor Dennett. This probably isn’t too surprising to you, since he’s one of those newfangled New Atheists everybody’s talking about. Beyond that, I made something of a conscious decision early in the lecture to not do my usual inquiry thing. Boy, how skeptical of me, right? Well, let me explain.
Wow … That Is, Well, Probably the Appropriate Approach
Professor Dennett did not start his lecture with the evidence for evolution. This bothered me. I wondered what any creationists in the audience would think. I figured people might just dismiss what he was saying because he “assumed” evolution was correct. I especially worried about on-the-fence folks jumping ship because of this. Regardless of these concerns, he hopped right into his talk without bothering to demonstrate the validity of evolution or the vapidity of its competitors. He certainly discussed nuts-and-bolts evolution as necessary throughout his talk, but left out this beginning section I’ve come to expect from lectures related to evolution (Entries 23 and 24).
At this point, a stark realization struck me: I shouldn’t expect this evidence out of him. Creationism and its spawn are not scientific critiques of evolution; they are cultural phenomena. As such, they don’t really have a place in an academic lecture. This might sound like a strange statement coming from a member of the skeptical community, but note that I’m not saying we should ignore creationism. On the contrary, I think it needs to be combated at every turn. However, Professor Dennett’s talk was not about creationism or the public understanding of evolution; it was a philosophy-based examination of evolution and its future. Creationism really didn’t have a place, and he was justified in not defending evolution.
As an analogy, let’s imagine that Stephen Hawking gives a lecture here next year. (This is apparently a possibility, and it would be awesome.) If he mentions general relativity early in the lecture, should I expect him to spend half an hour explaining the evidence for it? Should I expect significant time spent debunking Newtonism and geocentrism? Or, if he mentions quantum mechanics, should I be worried if he doesn’t devote two-thirds of his lecture to the consilience of evidence for it? What if there are Bohrists in attendance?
This is a better analogy than you might think. I’m guessing most people’s response to that analogy would be a chuckling oh, come on, now. After all, there are some pretty big holes at the edges of evolution; things like abiogenesis and consciousness have certainly not been figured out. Well, what do you think happens at the edges of physics? For example, black holes pretty much break both general relativity and quantum mechanics. One might be able to argue that evolution is stronger than either general relativity or quantum mechanics, actually.
Not Your Father’s Creationists
Speaking of people worried about the evolution of consciousness, Dennett mentioned early on some prominent scientists who feel that the human brain just cannot be explained by mere evolution. They’re fine with the molecules-to-monkeys part, but they just don’t like last bit about humans and consciousness. Dennett’s term for these people is mind creationists. As he hastily pointed out, these are not dumb people; Roger Penrose ranks among them, and I’m pretty sure he’s one of those guys who might just be the smartest person on the planet.
While this sounds like a glib dismissal of these folks, all Dennett has done is recognize a pattern. From day one, creationists’ main tactic in fighting evolution has been to cite various things that seem too complicated to have arisen naturally via evolution. Look at creationism’s latest cheap tuxedos, Intelligent Design and Michael Behe’s Irreducible Complexity: some parts of biology are supposedly irreducibly complex, so they must have been intelligently designed. After a century and a half, biologists have addressed virtually all the creationists’ concerns. This is why the creationism movement must resort to playing linguistic games to retain their patina of science; there’s just no meat there.
Did you catch my weasel word? I said that scientists have addressed virtually all the creationists’ concerns. That is why intelligent, intellectually honest people can be mind creationists; human consciousness hasn’t been figured out yet. Did you catch the sneaky little word this time? Consciousness hasn’t been figure out … yet. At this point, I again expected piles of hard evidence from Dennett, and again I was left wanting. He didn’t spend an hour outlining the “materialist” explanation for consciousness, but I again realized that I shouldn’t have expected him to. That’s not what he does, and that’s not what he was lecturing about. He’s a philosopher, not a hard scientist, and he was giving a lecture on the philosophical considerations, not the hard evidence, for evolution. I have no doubt that he knows the evidence (and likely covers it in appropriate settings, such as his books), but it had no place in the lecture.
Cranes and Skyhooks
Dennett had a neat metaphor about evolution and creationism, and I wanted to relay it to you so that I can borrow the useful terminology. Imagine a design space, where complex things are “above” or “higher than” simple things. Humans and other eukaryotes would be like tall buildings in design space, while prokaryotes or viruses would be shorter structures. Evolution is a crane in design space; complexity is built up from simpler forms via natural means. Creationists of all stripes invoke a skyhook in design space; at some point, an outside force had to pull a structure up in complexity. Hardcore young-earth creationists would claim that you need the skyhook for every building, while mind creationists would only appeal to skyhooks to explain the human building (or perhaps the entire homo block).
Charles Darwin and … Alan Turing?
Dennett’s next point was to compare Darwin’s big idea to Alan Turing’s. This struck me as an odd comparison, and also a tactically poor one. Alan Turing is considered the father of computer science, and computers are definitely, well, intelligently designed. Moreover, I definitely didn’t see the connection whatsoever going into the discussion. But, Dennett pointed out that Darwin’s main observation was that he turned design on its head. He proposed that stupid processes could pump out smart-looking results. Random variation and natural selection certainly aren’t intelligent in any sense of the word, but they do a damn fine job of producing exquisitely complex designs.
I know virtually nothing about Turing, but Dennett explained his big idea as the realization that you don’t actually need to understand algebra or calculus to do algebra or calculus. He took a look at the “computers” of his day (mainly women trained in math), and recognized that the meat-and-potatoes of their job didn’t actually require comprehension of any mathematics. Thus, their jobs could be accomplished by stupid things (modern computers). As with evolution, we have something completely unintelligent simulating something very intelligent. The analogy can only be extended so far, but the concept of turning design and intelligence on their heads definitely resonates through both of these luminaries’ big ideas.
As a quick contrast along these lines, compare yourself to one of your cells. You are intelligent, conscious, alive, and a whole host of other smart qualities. However, you are made up of a bunch of dumb things: cells. Cells are not conscious or intelligent, and they’re not really alive. (If you think your cells are individually alive, you’re committing mass murder every time you scratch your arm, and the dusty corners of your bedroom are macabre mass graves.) Even if you want to quibble about cells’ smart-ness, the constituents of cells (proteins, RNA, and DNA) are certainly dumb since they’re individually nothing more than inert chemicals.
This comparison extends nicely to consciousness. Indeed, Turing’s lasting legacy (if any) in pop culture is the Turing Test. The test proceeds as follows: a person attempts to have a regular conversation with two other entities, one computer and one human. If the first person cannot distinguish between the other human and the computer, then the computer is said to have passed the Turing Test and perhaps ought to be considered intelligent and/or conscious. This would be something dumb churning out something so smart that it’s considered the single best evidence for the existence of a skyhook (the human intellect). While no computer has passed the Turing Test, there’s little reason to think that it won’t happen at some point in the near future.
Though critiques of the Turing Test as a valid criterion for consciousness abound, the analogy to biology cannot be ignored. If silicon can simulate consciousness and free will, why couldn’t carbon? Our brains need not necessarily “understand” consciousness to act in a manner that appears conscious. That is, our mind can appear non-physical and supernatural yet still be the product of mere cranes.
Until Next Time …
If it’s not obvious, Professor Dennett’s talk really got my brain juices flowing. This entry is already pretty hefty, and I haven’t even mentioned the word “meme” yet. So, I’m going to truncate it here and get into the second half of Professor Dennett’s talk next time. Have I already used the same skeptical time, same skeptical place bit? If not, forget that I qualified it. If so, hopefully you forgot about it, too.
Posted at 2:37 pm by cheglabratjoe
April 11, 2009
Entry 28: The Stanford Prison Experiment
The list of experiments well-known as the Such-And-Such Experiment is pretty short. Off the top of my head, I can think of the Michelson-Morley Experiment, the Miller-Urey Experiment, and Millikan’s Oil-Drop Experiment. A few others come to mind, but either don’t have an apt name or aren’t really experiments, per se: Eddington measuring the stars moving during an eclipse, Rutherford and his gold foil, Pavlov’s dogs, a number of things Galileo did, Mendel’s peas, and the Manhattan Project.
The Stanford Prison Experiment definitely qualifies. It is a famous experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971. It put twenty-four randomly-assigned college students in a simulated prison setting for two weeks. Zimbardo got the actual local police to “arrest” the students selected to be prisoners, and then had them turned over to the students selected to be guards in a fake prison constructed in the basement of the Stanford University Psychology building. Zimbardo played the prison superintendant, and one of his research assistants played the warden.
What Went Down
The guards were explicitly told that they could not hurt the prisoners. Despite this instruction, the situation quickly got out of hand. The prisoners rioted on the second day, due to terrible treatment from the guards. The guards voluntarily spent extra time in the prison to suppress the riots, attacking the prisoners with fire extinguishers without provocation from Zimbardo or his assistants. Sanitary conditions deteriorated, exacerbated by guards not letting prisoners go to the bathroom. Some guards punished prisoners by forcing them to walk around naked.
Rumors of a breakout led to the building of a second prison and an attempt to move the experiment to an actual prison, which the real police would not permit. By the sixth day, an outside observer finally questioned the morality of the situation (due to the filthy conditions) and the experiment was halted early. The researchers reported that one-third of the guards had behaved in a genuinely sadistic manner, and most were upset to see the experiment end early. Zimbardo himself cited his own absorption into his role as prison superintendant.
Many of the prisoners exhibited signs of emotional trauma. Some did leave the experiment early, but others who requested but were refused “parole” decided to stay rather than quit. Zimbardo cited this as internalization of their role as prisoner; if they wanted to leave (since they asked for parole), why would they not just quit the experiment (which would have gotten them out of there immediately)? Similarly, the guards were said to have internalized their roles, per their shocking behavior.
What Was Concluded
The participants (both guards and prisoners) in the Stanford Prison Experiment were the male applicants considered most stable and healthy by the researchers. As such, the stark and horrifying results are often cited as evidence that perfectly normal people will do awful things when put in an awful situation. It seems that the situation caused the participants’ behaviors, as opposed to the participants acting in accordance with their own predispositions.
These results have huge implications for how society punishes people for their actions during extreme situations. The most obvious example would be the holocaust: were the guards in the concentration camps just victims of circumstance? Would you or I do the same thing, if put in a similar situation? What about the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib? Professor Zimbardo himself famously testified on the behalf of the guards, citing the similarities between the experimental and real-world situations. Indeed, some of the similarities are rather striking; I will leave you to investigate the details of either on your own. Zimbardo dismissed the army’s blaming the scandal on “a few bad apples,” eventually penning the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil about Abu Ghraib and his experiment.
What Should Give Us Pause
If you’re surprised that something like the Stanford Prison Experiment was even permitted to occur at a university, you aren’t alone. The experiment was wildly unethical, even by the standards of the time. The experiment has never been and never will be repeated, for fairly obvious reasons. This is a problem for the experimental results, as they can never be replicated. We’re ultimately dealing with a single data point. But, what an amazing point it is!
Well, we need to dial back that amazement once again. The study has some serious scientific problems, as well. Most egregiously, Professor Zimbardo acted as the leader of the prison during the experiment. A scientist should strive for impartial observation as much as possible, so that the act of measurement does not impact the results. Zimbardo, by directly instructing the guards prior to and acting as their leader during the experiment, could hardly have influenced the results more.
This fact alone casts serious doubt upon the reliability of the results, but some digging makes it even worse. Zimbardo went out of his way to dehumanize the prisoners, and encouraged the guards to: scare the prisoners, make their lives feel arbitrary, eliminate all privacy, and emphasize that the guards control their entire life. On his website dedicated to the study, he cites historical examples where such things have occurred. This is a ludicrously circular approach. If you’re trying to prove that regular person A will do awful thing B in situation C, why would you explicitly encourage B in your simulation of C?
It gets worse. A variety of the experimental results were anecdotal and subjective. The selection of the “most normal” of the applicants to participate in the study was not well-described in the study, and so cannot be analyzed by other researchers. Even according to the subjective anecdotes, most of the guards did not participate in the awful treatment of the prisoners. Zimbardo made no effort to explain these guards’ behavior, rather focusing on the guards who were abusive. These and many other critiques were laid out by Erich Fromm, and his language is telling. Academics aren’t supposed to say “those guys are totally wrong and they’re probably effing idiots, to boot.” So, they say things like “there seems to be an unnecessary lack of precision when it should have been very easy” and “puzzling results” and “[that] is all the more regrettable” and “I doubt the experiment proved this thesis” and so on.
But wait, there’s more. We now know that most of the abuse came from only one guard, dubbed “John Wayne” in a misplaced reference to the movie Cool Hand Luke (a Paul Newman film). Some claim that this person has since admitted that he was both actively mimicking the warden from Cool Hand Luke (“what we’ve got here is … failure to communicate”) and was responding to positive feedback from his play-acting superiors (Zimbardo and his research assistant). I wasn’t able to verify this online, but that’s not terribly surprising because I think the source is dated investigative journalism. I did find an interview with Zimbardo and John Wayne, during which Zimbardo asserted that the other guards were “just as bad” as John Wayne because they didn’t stop him from acting this way. Well, then! Whatever you say, Professor! I rest my case.
What to Make of the Stanford Prison Experiment
I’ve heard both skeptics and psychologists (my fiancé is a clinical psych grad student) dismiss the Stanford Prison Experiment out-of-hand. They most certainly have two extremely strong points: (a) it is completely irreproducible, and (b) Zimbardo brazenly impacted the outcome of the experiment. I personally don’t think it’s appropriate to stop there, simply because the results were so striking and remain so well-known. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not crediting the results with any scientific legitimacy. I just think that they deserve a deeper investigation (translation: a harder smack-down).
And, damn, does that inquiry find some dirt! This experiment really was a catastrophe. From conception through execution and onto analysis, Zimbardo did just about as poor a job as a scientist can do. Probably the most shocking thing about this entire situation is that his reputation doesn’t seem to have been sullied whatsoever. On the contrary, he’s apparently one of the most highly respected psychologists out there. He was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 2002, for crying out loud! Now, I don’t know anything about his other pursuits and accolades, but part of me wonders how this wasn’t career suicide for the guy. (I’ll be sure to give my fiancé and her friends crap for this … silly soft scientists.)
One last point that warrants mentioning is some speculation a few people have made about Zimbardo’s motives. I’ve heard both Barbara Oakley (during an interview on the Point of Inquiry podcast) and Brian Dunning (on his Skeptoid podcast) suggest that Zimbardo’s childhood in the ghettos of New York City convinced him that horrible situations make good people do bad things. This does makes sense: if all your childhood friends grew up to be awful people, it would be nice to think that the terrible situations they were in caused their downfall (as opposed to something inherently bad about them). While this is an intriguing explanation for why he conducted such a biased experiment, I hesitate to agree with them here because it seems like idle speculation on their part.
Most importantly, worrying about Zimbardo’s specific biases is unnecessary. The results fail on their own lack of merit. The Stanford Prison Experiment was simply junk science. It’s a damn shame that one of the few truly famous scientific experiments is such bad science.
Posted at 7:37 pm by cheglabratjoe
March 25, 2009
Entry 27: Why I’m Doing This, Part 2: To Highlight the Importance of Inquiry
Time for another Why I’m Doing This entry! Hopefully my entries demonstrate that there’s a lot going on behind the scenes of some very simple statements. A blithe assertion or association might easily require some serious investigation to sort out. I’ve actually lamented this point in a few entries, especially while discussing the Gish Gallop (Entry 15). That wasn’t prudent of me, for a variety of reasons. Feel free to rap me with a rolled-up newspaper and say “bad skeptic.”
In my defense, the necessity of inquiry can definitely be troublesome. If you’re debating with someone whose position is not bound by logic and reason and evidence, then you’re obviously at a huge disadvantage. They get to just make shit up willy-nilly and/or use shoddy (yet superficially compelling) lines of reasoning. You need a deep breadth of knowledge on the topic to ensure that you’ll catch them in any outright lies, and you need to be pretty versed in debate so that you won’t succumb to fallacious arguments. It’s a tall order.
Outside of public debates, such arguments become open to inquiry. You can sit down and dissect what is actually being said. Factual claims can be checked, and background information can be gathered. Positions can be clarified, and heat-of-the-moment emotion can (ideally) be put aside. The structure of the argument can be analyzed, and logical fallacies can be flagged.
This sort of inquiry is the bread and butter of skepticism. (One of the leading publications of the skeptical movement is even called the Skeptical Inquirer.) After all, it’s really the only way to get to the bottom of something. Just accepting everything that’s told to you without question is an absurd proposition, and nobody actually does that during their day-to-day life. Skeptics merely set their bars for buying arguments a bit higher than most people, and such standards often require some digging and thinking on their part.
This inquiry can also be viewed at the first step of the scientific method. In a way, it’s the background research you have to do before you make your hypothesis. In practice, most people often end up stopping there. This makes your inquiry essentially a reflection upon past hypotheses, which is certainly fine because science doesn’t mandate that we retest stuff every time someone brings them up. Researching past results is key to understanding the state of the field; you have to ensure that you aren’t beating a dead horse or proposing ridiculous ideas.
Some lucky skeptics get to continue on down the scientific method checklist; Joe Nickell springs immediately to mind. While some of us have to stop our inquiry at reading (due to, say, money and jobs), his job is to go out and actually investigate the paranormal. He’s written books on lake monsters, sideshow tricks, religious relics, alien abductions, haunted houses, psychics, and many other paranormal topics. He’s a treasure trove of skepticism, and a huge asset to the movement.
Joe seems like a great guy, but listening to his interviews can get frustrating because he often disparages the sort of inquiry I’m talking about as “armchair skepticism.” It’s a fair point as far as it goes, but I disagree with the premise that you always have to go out into the field and poke the pseudoscience to make sure it’s not real. Over-applying this idea ignores the progressive nature of science; we shouldn’t be expected to send field researchers to the garage workshop of some guy who advocates phlogiston theory. Moreover, I really just didn’t have the scratch to travel to the southern hemisphere for my entry about the direction that toilets flush (Entry 21). Sorry, Joe, but we all don’t get to be “real” skeptical investigators. 
This sort of inquiry isn’t just a tool for the skeptic. It’s a great way to learn about new and interesting things. Before you scoff and dismiss me as a nerd (assuming you haven’t yet), think about what you actually spend your time doing online. If you’ve managed to find your way to my blog, I’m going to assume that you spend quite a bit of time on the internet. The web surfing you do on a daily basis is essentially learning about things you like. Maybe you’re reading a news article and see something that strikes your fancy, so you highlight it and right-click to search Google for it. (Who’s the nerd now?) Most skeptics’ inquiry is very much targeted web surfing taken with a large grain of salt.
Lastly, skeptical inquiry is a good way to learn about logic and formal arguments. Philosophy and logic can be painfully dry, and the thought of sitting down and studying formal logic on the internet would probably drive anyone outside into the sunlight and fresh air. But, seeing woo-pushers raise the same poor arguments over and over again slowly but surely teaches you about logic. When I first was getting into skepticism, I remember being overwhelmed by other skeptics’ ability to effortlessly dissect crappy arguments and pinpoint logical fallacies. I even thought to myself: there’s no way I’m getting this without studying, and the hell I’m doing that! But, now it just comes naturally when I’m having a discussion with somebody. Calling out crummy logic has gradually become part of the way I argue, without any conscious effort on my part.
So, there you go: another reason I’m doing this blog is to emphasize the importance of inquiry. It’s something that you do countless times every day; every time you hear a new piece of information, you perform a little inquiry inside your head without even being cognizant of it. Pending your semiconscious examination, you accept or reject the tidbit of information. If you want to avoid accepting crummy ideas, you have to make this process a little less passive. You’ll have to check some facts, analyze some arguments, and avoid some cognitive biases. This is certainly not trivial or easy, but the alternative is believing in utter bullshit.
It’s all fun and games until you’re one of the people the headline People Increasingly Turning To Psychics For Financial Advice refers to. Think about it. [Gah! The damn psychics didn’t see the financial crisis coming, so how are they going to scrye you out of it! Are they serious?!] Okay, I’m going to stop thinking about it … feel free to continue on your own.
Posted at 1:06 am by cheglabratjoe
March 3, 2009
Entry 26: Truth vs. truth
Watch as I use my amazing psychic abilities to read your mind: oh no, a skeptical lesson on capitalization ... and he wonders why no one reads this thing! No worries, gentle reader; the capitalization is intentional but isn’t the main point of this week’s entry. I’m going to be discussing the loaded word “truth” and its relationship to science.
The germ of this entry comes from the Teaching Company series Science Wars by Professor Steven L. Goldman. Yes, I listen to academic lectures in my spare time. This is the single nerdiest thing about me, and that’s saying something considering the grad school and science blogging things. This “truth” issue didn’t really strike me after listening to the lectures; in fact, I found the series as a whole a bit dry and esoteric (it is philosophy, after all). But, “truth” has come up every time I’ve had a conversation with someone who could be even remotely described as dissenting from science. So, it’s turned out to be quite an important point, and I’d definitely give Science Wars another listen if I didn’t have a huge queue of other things I want to check out.
So, what do I mean by “truth,” and am I really going to keep putting it in quotes? The first question is really the crux of the matter, and, no, I’ll stop with the quotes. There are different types of truth, and different worldviews and philosophies provide different truths. Let’s go over the two main categories of truth.
Capital-T Truth
We’re quickly going to run into vocabulary limitations during this entry. What I mean by capital-T Truth is a deep, cosmic, ultimate, comprehensive understanding of absolutely everything. Words like omniscient and omnipresent come to mind. For you Douglas Adams fans, I’m talking about 42; for the uninitiated, 42 is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Many religious people would say that their god is this Truth, or perhaps that their religion comprises or gives insight into this Truth. I imagine that philosophers get high and discuss Truth into the wee hours of the morning. Capital-T Truth is *how* and *why* reality works, in every sense of those tiny words.
Little-t truth
Little-t truth, on the other hand, makes no pretension about being *the* explanation of everything. A little-t truth is just *an* explanation of how things work. Little-t truth need not be cosmic in scale or profound in depth, nor must it answer why-type questions.
As the structure of the last paragraph implies, there can be, and indeed are, many truths (as opposed to the solitary Truth). Little-t truths can come in all shapes and sizes, and they can be contradictory or complementary to one another. Indeed, any given person can subscribe to a variety of truths, even contradictory ones.
Is Science Truth?
As I insinuated, talking about Truth immediately indicates deep philosophical and/or religious notions. But, what about science? Does science give us Truth, or is the scientific worldview merely one truth among many? The answer to this question may surprise and trouble you. Indeed, it is the basis for a variety of serious attacks levied against science from various ontological adversaries. I have seen religious people, post-modernists, and objectivists all pounce on the scientific worldview due to the answer I’m about to give you.
No, science does not provide Truth.
An example would be illustrative. Consider the “scientific consensus” on how the solar system works. First, the sun was pulled around the earth in a chariot by a sun god; we eventually lost the deity, but kept the geocentrism for some time. Copernicus and Galileo argued for a heliocentric solar system with circular orbits, and Kepler utilized Brahe’s meticulous data to demonstrate that the orbits are actually elliptical. Newton explained where these ellipses come from via the force of gravity, elegantly unifying the waltz of the heavens with the crude motion of boulders down terrestrial hills. And finally, thanks to Einstein, we now understand that the planets are merely traversing a straight line through spacetime curved by our massive sun.
Clearly, the scientific worldview has changed drastically over the past twenty-five centuries. And, hell, no one expects that science’s stance on the solar system is done changing! General relativity is fundamentally incompatible with Einstein’s other brainchild, quantum mechanics. Some physicists expect to discover virtual gravitons that pull the earth towards the sun, while others anticipate that the jiggles of the membranes predicted by string theory will eventually explain all cosmology. Many candidly admit that they just don’t know what the future holds.
In light of all this, science simply cannot be Truth. Each of these ideas about the solar system comprises a truth. Throughout this millennia-long (and counting) scientific progression of truths, the Truth about the solar system has not changed. We’re not in The Secret; Apollo didn’t stop dragging the sun around when Rome fell, nor did space and time merge into spacetime when Einstein had a brilliant flash of insight at the patent office. Our conceptions (our truths) have changed, but what the solar system is “really up to” (the Truth) has neither changed nor been discovered.
Uh-Oh …
This is bad, right? If science isn’t giving us Truth, then what the hell good is it? All these guys attacking science must be on to something; the bad guys in the Science Wars are winning, or might even have already won! The religious people are correct that science cannot provide Truth but they can. The post-modernists are correct that science is just one truth among many. The objectivists are correct that science has foolishly forsaken Truth in lieu of mere truth.
Despite my dramatic buildup, there’s actually no problem here whatsoever. This point (and indeed the entirety of the Science Wars) is much ado about nothing. Though science does not provide Truth, it is a system for determining the very best truths. Thus, the scientific consensus in a given domain is objectively the best truth we have. The scientific worldview adopts the best explanations for the best available data, and readily changes itself upon the discovery of new phenomena or the substantiation of superior theories.
“Woah woah woah,” cries the religious person, “my god provides Truth! Weren’t you listening?!”
Claiming that your personal truth is a Truth does not make it so. Each of the countless world religions maintains that it has the Truth, while every other worldview has it at least slightly wrong. None of them has evidence to support this assertion, or even definitive evidence that such a Truth exists in a meaningful way.* Take a precursory glance at Catholicism: the details of Christ’s divinity was more-or-less voted on over the years, and the church explicitly decided to accept evolution over creationism at some point in the recent past. We can argue about what Truth precisely is, but it certainly is not democratic or fluid.
*Per an epic hundred-facebook-comment and two-hours-in-person long discussion with a few of my friends, I think I now would agree with them that Truth does exist. The details will require a separate entry to cover; suffice to say here that I nevertheless don’t think their god is Truth. I’m probably ticking off the lion’s share of my current readers (translation: these two guys) by relegating our discussion to a footnote for now, but it really just doesn’t fit in this entry.
“Woah woah woah,” cries the post-modernist, “who are you to proclaim science the best truth? You’re just a prejudiced westerner who arrogantly thinks his pet truth is the best!”
Science is the best truth because it is self-correcting and ever-improving. When new or improved data is collected, we can test all our new and old hypotheses against this data. Going back to my cosmology example, you can easily demonstrate that general relativity is superior to gravity, which is superior to Copernican circles, which is superior to geocentrism.** If some group of indigenous people on an island thinks that it is turtles all the way down, we can test that truth and demonstrate its inferiority to science’s truth. No racism necessary.
**This point also might be relevant if a religious person claims that you need to have the Truth handy (which, of course, they think they do) to compare to candidate truths.
“Woah woah woah,” cries the objectivist, “we do Real Science, and it can provide Truth!”
My terminology might be on shaky ground here. I’m not terribly familiar with Ayn Rand’s work, especially the science-critiquing aspect of it. Apparently, there is a faction of her objectivist movement that really despises modern physics. To paraphrase e-reams of websites and documents someone sent to me recently, it seems that they feel science has abandoned logic and reason. For instance, they claim that wave-particle duality violates the law of non-contradiction; that is, it’s obvious that A cannot also be not-A, but that’s exactly the sort of thing quantum mechanics says.
I throw the word pseudoscience around willy-nilly, so I like to emphasize when I cover something that is literally pseudo-science. This form of objectivism is precisely fake science. Their Truth claim is no more scientific or logical or reasonable than any religion’s Truth claim. Wave-particle duality is an exhaustively experimentally established phenomenon. Thus, if your premise leads to the conclusion that wave-particle duality is impossible, you have nothing but a false premise. Theirs is simply a religious belief dressed in science’s clothing.
Truthiness, Or Would It Be truthiness
I could continue, but we’re getting pretty long and, more importantly, I’m hemorrhaging potential entry topics. (The three statements in quotes and italics above would each be plenty for an entry; my spider sense tells me that the first might cause entry-length comments if my buddies stop by and weigh in on the matter.) I definitely wanted to cover the fronts of the Science Wars, though.
To (over)extend the war analogy, the conventional fighting seems to be over but the guerrilla tactics have just begun. Science won the early battles: overt creationism isn’t in the classroom or laboratory, post-modernists are largely relegated to the fringes of the humanities, and Ayn Rand’s only recent claim to fame is a disparaging shout-out on the back of Jon Stewart’s satirical textbook. But, the fighting continues, from local school boards to college faculty meetings to internet message boards.
Science doesn’t provide the sort of capital-T Truth allegedly provided by many religions and philosophies. And that’s okay! The scientific worldview is a compilation of the very best little-t truths that we’ve come up with to explain the world around us. Though that isn’t Truth, it is the best we’ve got. Plenty of people profess to have the Truth, but I would go ahead and be skeptical of that assertion if I were you.
Posted at 10:01 pm by cheglabratjoe
February 21, 2009
Entry 25: Science Says Bees Cannot Fly, But They Do Anyways
This week’s statement is surprisingly complicated, because it comprises a variety of misconceptions in less than ten words. I was planning on covering the much more straightforward statement Science Cannot Explain How Bees Fly, but, after some quick googling, I found that the titular statement is actually a much more common take on the subject. Indeed, this is the way Mike Huckabee phrased it, comparing his tireless campaigning despite meager polling results to the naïve bee defying those pesky scientific facts. Huckabee eventually succumbed to those polls, but the noble bee flies on.
The way I see it, this statement raises three questions for the skeptic to address. Does science not understand bee flight? If not, do scientists declare bee flight to be impossible? And lastly, does not being aware of a law of nature let you defy it? In a word raised to the third power, No^3.
Pffft, Yeah, Maybe If Bees Could Fly ...
The precise origin of the notion that bees cannot fly is apparently lost in the sands of pseudoscientific time (pseudotime?). If an explanation is provided, it seems to be something like the following: an airplane the size of a bee could not fly at the speeds that bees buzz around. This seems pretty reasonable to me. I’m no aerospace engineer, but I can’t imagine the slow speed of a bumblebee generating enough fixed-wing lift to keep our imagined bee-plane aloft. Of course, bees flap their wings, so we shouldn’t expect an airplane to be an apt analogy.
Now, you didn’t think a good piece of false folk wisdom would die that easily, did you? Of course not, so all sorts of problems with bee flight have been concocted to keep this notion alive. Sure bees might flap their wings and solve the above problem, but they don’t have a rudder so they’d spin out of control! Sure bees flap their wings, but there’s no way they can flap them fast enough to fly! Sure the lame argument above could be used to “explain” that helicopters can’t fly, but helicopter blades are curvy and bees’ wings are flat!
Coincidentally, some of the points those fabricated problems stumbled upon are actually relevant. For instance, bees’ wings do indeed flap about ten times faster than their nerve impulses fire; the trick is that their muscles are vibrating rather than truly flapping, per se. In addition, the bee rotates its wings drastically during each flap, cutting through the previous stroke’s wake and creating some serious vortices (eddies). Via this rapid flapping and fancy wing rotation, bees are able to generate all the lift they need to happily buzz around.
Bee flight is definitely complex; heck, scientists at Caltech are building robotic model bees and publishing papers about the details of insect flight to this very day. But, no sober scientist worth his salt should have ever looked at an airplane and said “if this was as small as a bee it wouldn’t fly ... oh my god, we don’t know how bees fly!” Some websites speculate that this all might have started out as an inside joke gone awry, or perhaps some overzealous biologists getting excited that they stumped a hard scientist this one time. Regardless, we know how bees fly.
But, Even If We Didn’t Know How Bees Fly ...
Onto the second pseudoscientific angle of this week’s statement: that scientists would ever declare bee flight impossible. This flows out of the statement above pretty well, but when you take a step back it’s a pretty ridiculous suggestion. We have overwhelming evidence that bees can fly. There are over twenty thousand species of bee living on every continent except Antarctica. According to Wikipedia, every single habitat containing insect-pollinated plants has bees, and every single species of bee can fly.
Thus, a scientist should never claim that bee flight is impossible. Experimental observation is half the story in science, and declaring bee flight impossible would be in direct conflict with tons of available data. Anyone imagining that science would say such a thing is really missing the point of science. Let’s pretend for a moment that we have no idea whatsoever how bees manage to fly. It’s a total mystery, and scientists everywhere are completely befuddled by the bee flight problem. The appropriate scientific statement to make would be that “we don’t understand how bees fly.” Note the recognition that bees do fly, as this is what observation tells us. It would never be deemed impossible, since we see it happening every day.
Wouldn’t you know it; this is precisely the route pseudo-science takes when it encounters something it cannot explain. Take my favorite pseudoscientists, creationists. They cannot explain the existence of so-called transitional species, so they deny their existence outright. They declare transitional forms impossible, since their “theory”* cannot account for them. Thus, a fossil between snakes and other reptiles isn’t a transitional form to a creationist; it’s a snake with legs or a reptile with a snake-like body. Actual scientists don’t get to pull stunts like this.
*God, how it pains me to honor their blather with that term. Is there a good word for pseudo-theory? You know, besides bullshit, of course.
Can Ignorance Be That Blissful?
Part three of the titular statement manages to be even worse than the first two. You can’t fault someone for not knowing the scientific explanation for bee flight, and accusing scientists of denying evidence to fit their theories is pretty bad but not too hard to imagine someone doing. But, this last part is a doozy.
Let’s continue our make-believe game from above: pretend scientists cannot explain bee flight. So, in this hypothetical situation, how can bees fly? The appropriate response is a simple I dunno. However, the answer you’re getting from someone making this week’s statement is because they don’t know the laws of physics. Thus, the person is claiming that not knowing the rules by which the universe behaves allows you to break those rules.
Think about that for a minute. This person is saying that bees are flying via the power of their own ignorance. According to this statement, if some paragon bee looked around and figured out some basic physics principles, it would drop out of the sky like a stone. This is quite literally magical thinking. Amnesiacs should be able to fly out of their hospital room windows or walk through walls, at least until they figure out that they shouldn’t be able to.
Such a sentiment belies something profound about the person holding it, assuming they actually mean it and aren’t just blithely reciting the titular statement after reading it somewhere. I wouldn’t even call it pseudoscientific; magical really is the best word for it. If you think an animal can defy gravity because it doesn’t know about gravity, then you believe in magic.
This slice of the titular statement also has some anti-scientific connotation. It implies that science ruins all the fun, so to speak. If we weren’t such inherently good scientists and we stayed ignorant of physics like those lesser beasts, we could probably fly just like they do. Damn you and your rules, science!
I hate to wax psychologic about the imaginary person I’m envisioning making this week’s statement, but I think this sentiment is telling. It’s as if the person is lamenting the woo-of-the-gaps forced upon them by science. Back in the good old days, astrology and sacrifices to minor gods worked great. Then science came along with its white lab coats and beakers and procedures, and spoiled everything for everyone!
Science Is the Bee’s Knees!
As I mentioned early on, we had an action-packed nine words this week. Indeed, I managed to spin a 1400+ word yarn out of it; that’s a 150-fold return on word investment. I’ve been meaning to do an entry about the importance of this kind of inquiry in skepticism, and next time would definitely be prudent. Of course, it also would’ve been a good idea to write about the tryptophan in turkey making you sleepy around Thanksgiving, as opposed to merely thinking about what a good idea that would be. Ah well.
Back to bee flight, the titular statement is about as wrong as you can get. Science does have a handle on bee flight, scientists would never declare bee flight impossible per the obvious evidence for it, and unawareness of physics does not let you defy gravity. The first part is probably an honest mistake or oversight, the middle part is a pretty serious misunderstanding or misrepresentation of science, and the end forces you to question just how reality-based the person’s worldview is(n’t). As it turns out, ignorance can’t be used to generate power. If only it could …
Posted at 5:15 pm by cheglabratjoe
February 11, 2009
Entry 24: T.O. Shanavas Lecture: Creation and/or Evolution, An Islamic Perspective
Perhaps the last entry wasn’t so different after all! A few days after attending the Francisco Ayala lecture, I attended another lecture concerning the intersection of science and religion. This second lecture was by T.O. Shanavas, a Muslim medical doctor who, like Professor Ayala, sees no conflict between evolution and his religion. Unlike Professor Ayala, though, I disagreed with Dr. Shanavas’ position pretty much from the get-go.
Dr. Shanavas spent the early part of his talk going over how obvious evolution is, as he put it, even to a medical doctor. He covered all the vestigial parts of the human body, from the tailbone through the appendix and up to that little spot in the corner of your eye (which I’d never heard about before). He didn’t spend 90% of his talk on the matter like Professor Ayala did, but he made it clear that he wholeheartedly accepts evolution. All well and good, but I had an ominous feeling that the other shoe was getting ready to drop. Maybe I’m psychic, because I didn’t have to wait long.
I didn’t write down Dr. Shanavas’ exact words, but I did record the gist of his next point. Here it is: “since evolution is true, it must be in the Qur’an.” If any statement I’ve covered thus far in my blog warrants Wolfgang Pauli’s famous epithet not even wrong, I’m sorry to say that it would probably be this one. We’ll get into why I’m sorry to say this at the end of this entry, but for now let’s go over the big problem with this opening statement.
Harpies Are Clearly a Transitional Form
Dr. Shanavas did not give a second thought to his bold assertion in italics above, and began outlining parts of the Qur’an that demonstrate evolution. Full disclosure: I know virtually nothing about the Qur’an, or even really Islam in general. I know that much of the scripture coincides pretty well with Judaism and Christianity, hence the whole Abrahamic religions term, but really not a whole lot else. So, I was pretty interested to see what verses (are they called verses?) he was going to pull out to exhibit pre-Darwinian evolutionary thinking. I was, to say the very least, quite disappointed.
The passages Dr. Shanavas cited simply did not demonstrate evolutionary thinking. Period. Most of the verses he selected were spectacularly vague, and some went so far as to outwardly assert creationism. Dr. Shanavas only arrived at evolution from these statements via remarkable extrapolation and byzantine reasoning. If you feel that I’m being way too hard on the guy, let me give you his most egregious example.
The Qur’an states that god fashioned man out of clay, and then breathed life into him. (It sounded more-or-less like the Book of Genesis, from what I remember.) Pretty cut-and-dry creationism, right? Not for the good doctor. According to Dr. Shanavas, this is just like how scientists think life began on earth. You see, scientists have shown that DNA won’t just spontaneously polymerize in water, but the surface of some types of clay can act as catalyst for this process. Thus, the Qur’an predicts modern evolutionary theory.
That’s the caliber of evidence we’re dealing with here. An explicitly creationist passage of the Qur’an sounds a little bit like a highly tentative and contentious hypothesis about abiogenesis that occurred four billion years ago. While the other “examples” of evolution in the Qur’an weren’t as bad as this clay business, none of them clearly or unambiguously indicated evolutionary ideas.
It was very clear to me that Dr. Shavanas just dug through the Qur’an looking for passages that he could twist around to make them sound like they’re related to the modern theory of evolution. This isn’t just cherry-picking and post-hoc reasoning,* it is preposterous cherry-picking and post-hoc reasoning.
*I’m using the phrase post-hoc reasoning as a substitute for continually saying that he assumed evolution was true and then dug through a book to find evolutiony-sounding stuff. I don’t think I’m correct in using the term post-hoc (“after the event”) to describe this, but I don’t know any other phrase to use describe this succinctly. It’s kind of like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, where you shoot wildly at a barn and then paint bulls-eyes around the bullet-holes. In a way, Dr. Shavanas just went through the Qur’an and painted modern biology around certain passages.
I called Dr. Shavanas out on this during the Q&A segment. I told him that it sounded to me like he started with his conclusion: that evolution could be found in the Qur’an. I repeated his made-from-clay to clay-catalyzing-DNA leap, and said that if you’re going to accept that sort of link you could find anything in anything. With that lax of criteria, I’m sure that a diligent ufologist could find evidence of alien visitation in the Qur’an, or conversely I’m sure that a classicist could find evolution in the Iliad or Odyssey. (I doubt I was that elaborate out loud, but I was at least thinking all this.) In response, he obfuscated for thirty seconds or so, at one point lowering his voice and mumbling a bit. He eventually admitted my point, reiterating that he was just trying to find evolution in the Qur’an because he believes that both must be true. Just as with Professor Ayala, we have in Dr. Shavanas a religious man striving to reconcile his science with beliefs he did not arrive at scientifically. I can’t say I was surprised to learn that. I guess that makes me a gotcha journalist ... you betcha.
Those Amazing Islamic Scholars!
The most interesting part of Dr. Shavanas’ lecture came after his highly biased reinterpretation of Qur’anic creationism. He argued that Islamic scholars had described evolution centuries before Darwin, providing and interpreting quotations from famed Muslim thinkers from the Islamic Golden Age. I found this section of the talk interesting because many people feel that Islam does indeed have a great history of scientific inquiry, in stark contrast to the current situation in many Islamic theocracies. My understanding is that they certainly have a point; we’ve all heard about Islamic scholars inventing algebra and Arabic numerals, and my limited knowledge is that these claims are more-or-less true.
None of the examples of pre-Darwin evolutionary thinking Dr. Shavanas provided compared to the clay issue discussed above, but neither were any of the examples worth writing down and recounting here. He once again clearly had just mined huge bodies of text for passages that sounded compatible with evolution. However, this exercise was much more compelling than his Qur’an-mining for one simple reason: an Islamic scholar may well have had some evolution-type ideas during the Middle Ages. The Islamic world was indeed pro-science during its Golden Age, acting both as a repository for Ancient Greek knowledge and as a proficient originator of new science and technology. It would be spectacular and unexpected if an Islamic scholar truly did have some ideas about natural selection or common descent centuries before Darwin, but it’s not inconceivable.
All that having been said, I don’t think Dr. Shavanas actually has any convincing evidence that an Islamic scholar beat Darwin to the theory of evolution. He’s especially off base in his accusation that Darwin almost certainly knew about these purportedly proto-evolutionist Islamic scholars before publishing the Origin. (He’s venturing dangerously close to proposing a conspiracy theory with that little tidbit.) I’d hesitate to call him a historical revisionist, because that’s a pretty ugly word in my book due to its association with holocaust deniers, those lowest of the low pseudoscientists. I think he’s approaching, if not already among, the folks who try and promote the ancient knowledge and technology of their favorite non-European ethnic group. I see the appeal and the optimistic reasons for adopting such a stance, but, hey, pseudoscience is pseudoscience.
I Keep Feeling Like a Jerk ... Maybe It’s Me?
Even before the situation I’m about to describe, I felt a little bad about disliking Dr. Shavanas’ talk. Just as with Professor Ayala, I take no joy from denigrating someone that’s striving to mediate the conflict between science and religion. Compared to your average fundamentalist’s position on evolution or science in general, Professor Ayala’s and even Dr. Shavanas’ position on the matter is clearly superior in every regard I can think of. They both fully accept the reality of science (particularly evolution), which is more than can be said for an alarming percentage of people.
My doubts about the value in criticizing someone like Dr. Shavanas were crystallized by a question asked by an audience member soon after my question. If my question was confrontational, then this person’s tirade was an out-and-out assault on Dr. Shavanas’ reconciliatory position. He opened by attacking evolution itself, referencing a book I now know to be the infamous Atlas of Creation by Harun Yahya (a.k.a. Adnan Oktar). Dr. Shavanas interrupted the questioner and laughingly dismissed the book as creationist propaganda, and rightfully so; Richard Dawkins famously found a fishing lure, complete with metal fishhook, presented as species of insect in this catastrophe of a ‘biology textbook.’
The questioner did not see the humor in this, and was visibly angered by Dr. Shavanas’ glib dismissal of his ‘evidence’ for creationism. He abandoned his brief evidence-based line of attack, and righteously began arguing religiously. Calling his diatribe scary would be too dramatic, but it was definitely unsettling. He told Dr. Shavanas in no uncertain terms that the Qur’an ought to be read literally, reciting a number of relevant passages from memory. When done ranting, the man received something of an ovation from the crowd, with a few older gentlemen even standing to applaud him. A number of the younger people in the crowd didn’t go so far as to applaud the questioner, but they did tentatively nod in agreement. It was a fine microcosm of the phenomenon of religious moderates enabling fundamentalists; many of these people wouldn’t say or do what this more radical person did, but they did tacitly approve of his actions.
I don’t recall Dr. Shavanas’ response to this outburst, probably because I was too lost in my own thoughts. (I imagine he just reemphasized the reality of evolution, and probably talked up what he viewed as the pro-science parts of the Qur’an.) I was busy questioning the utility in arguing with someone like Dr. Shavanas. While we disagree rather seriously, we’re worlds closer than I am to a religious literalist like the angry questioner. Should I stifle my criticism of pro-science moderates like Dr. Shavanas, and help them fight against our common opponents? Should I especially cool it with the likes of Professor Ayala, since their position is completely devoid of blatant pseudoscience?
Moderate Treatment of Moderates?
It’s a real dilemma. I’ve heard Richard Dawkins, currently the go-to New Atheist, speak about this issue during interviews a number of times. His general response to this critique is that he’s fighting the bigger fight: the fight against religion. In general, he doesn’t seem to agree with the tactic of promoting the liberalization of religion because he would rather see the abolition of religion. I’m sure he would agree that a liberal religious person who doesn’t have a problem with evolution is objectively better than a young earth creationist, but I suspect he would just disagree with both of them. I can see both sides of this argument.
Sam Harris, another prominent New Atheist, often raises the enabling problem I mentioned above. I witnessed this myself while researching Entry 09 and it disturbed the hell out of me. I’d read a news article about poor Kara dying in misery, and the comments section below the article would be full of people promoting the parents’ religious freedom. Two people watched their child die an agonizing death due to their demonstrably ridiculous religious beliefs, and people who would never dream of committing such a monstrous atrocity defended their right to do so. When you lie down with moderates, you might wake up with fundamentalists.
I don’t think there’s a single answer to this question, and I think we need a variety of people choosing and running with a variety of answers. It’s obvious that Professor Ayala and Dr. Shavanas have views that are much more pro-science than many religious people out there. On the other hand, I also have problems with many of their views. Some of Dr. Shavanas’ views are especially troubling, since he’s treating ancient texts as scientific documents and approaching bona fide pseudo-history.
I think that we ultimately need all the help that we can get while promoting the scientific outlook. As such, I think that we ought to reach out to people such as Professor Ayala and Dr. Shavanas when we’re trying to fight the anti-creationism fight. However, I think that it would be prudent not to completely stifle one’s worldview to cater to moderate religionists. The moment a moderate religionist defends fundamentalists’ right to commit barbaric acts like honor killings or child abuse, I think you have to throw the kiss-and-make-up routine out the window. I think we need (and want) moderate religionists, but we can’t sacrifice our own positions and wind up fully assimilated into their bloc.
Well, we’re onto page five in Word, which has been my stopping-point thus far. It’s not surprising that this topic took me to the limit, both because Dr. Shanavas’ talk was lousy with entry-able claims* and because these “tactical” considerations are a contentious and unresolved issues in the X** Movement.
*I didn’t even bother mentioning many of his gems, which included: the assertion that evolution is a progression towards perfection, that a medieval scholar’s passage about sperm becoming men is related to evolution, that giant monsters in the Qur’an might be Neanderthals, and that many of the supposedly proto-Darwinian ideas he championed sounded like Lamarckian evolution at best.
**Where X is atheism and/or skepticism and/or humanism and/or pro-science and/or ...
So, no conclusion this time. I wasn’t kidding about this issue being unresolved and contentious … I’ve seen profanity-laced tirades about how Richard Dawkins is so rude that he’s hurting science (hmmm), I’ve seen grown men with MD’s and PhD’s and Professorships throw e-hissyfits on their blogs about someone “siding” with creationists (stay classy, Doctors), and I’ve seen people use the phrase fundamentalist atheist without a hint of sarcasm (um). Truly, some srs bsns on teh interwebz. I love minor internet memes, by the way. You should be glad that I don’t know how to imbed pictures on this blog, or it would be chock full of LOLcats. I love those things; it’s inexplicable and not a little embarrassing. Let’s move on.
Random anecdotes from my time in the science blogosphere, followed by even more random references to internet phenomena? Yeah, that’s about where I want to end this entry. See you next time!
Posted at 12:11 am by cheglabratjoe
January 26, 2009
Entry 23: Francisco Ayala Lecture: Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion
This entry is going to be a little different. I recently attended a lecture by Francisco Ayala, a professor at UC-Irvine. That four word descriptor really does the man no justice, because he's quite literally a modern-day Renaissance man. He holds professorships in no less than four departments (Biological Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy, Logic and Philosophy of Science), a feat that would be impressive at a school one-tenth as reputable as UC-Irvine. He has received the National Medal of Science, he is a member of the National Academy of Science, and he was President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). According to Wikipedia, he's been published on the order of one thousand times; for comparison, I just finished fighting to get my second time wrapped up. He is truly one of the more remarkable scientists out there, to say the very least.
One interesting biographical fact I have yet to mention is that Professor Ayala was a Dominican priest before launching his amazing academic career. This is very interesting, because it puts him squarely at the sometimes-contentious intersection of science and religion. However, Professor Ayala sees no conflict between science and religion. He disagrees wholeheartedly with both creationism and intelligent design, and spent much of his lecture outlining the strengths of evolution and chiding creationists for the myriad problems with their position. I also gathered that he sees no need to "compartmentalize" his religion and his science, as religious scientists are often accused of doing by the Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett) types. On the contrary, per the title of his lecture and accompanying book, he feels that evolution is not only a great boon to science but also a great gift to religion.
Enough Stalling, What Did I Think?
Professor Ayala's pedigree for a lecture like this probably can't be topped. The man is a priest turned world-class scientist, with a knack for philosophy to boot. He's given talks the world over, at a fifty lecture per year pace. For crying out loud, he even grows his own wine grapes; there's nothing like an alcohol comment or two to warm up a Wisconsin crowd, especially on a cold night.
Amazing lecture, right? Wrong.
I feel like a jerk saying so, but really Professor Ayala's talk just wasn't that good. I wanted to like it, both because he's an amazing individual and because the topic is extremely interesting and important to me. Furthermore, the last thing I want to do is disparage a public intellectual, especially in light of the rampant anti-intellectualism during the buildup and aftermath of the Presidential election. (My usual response to someone making a nerd-based dig is to rhetorically ask: come on, what are we, in middle school? Yes, Virginia, most of the country is still emotionally in middle school.) But, like our first President probably didn't say, I cannot tell a lie.
A big part of the problem was that the majority of the talk wasn't about how Darwin proposing evolution was a gift to both science and religion. The first 80-85 minutes of Professor Ayala's 90-minute lecture was about evolution itself, and then he quickly tacked on a quick bit about religion before he wrapped up the talk and took some questions. The evolution part started off well, because he framed evolution in a neat way that I'd never heard before. He said that Darwin completed the Copernican Revolution. Copernicus (and Galileo) removed the earth from the center of the universe, then Newton unified the physical laws of the earth and the heavens, and finally Darwin removed the preternatural specialness we humans had ascribed to ourselves. Before the Revolution, we were Images of GOD living at the Center of CREATION in a world where GOD controlled everything. After Darwin completed the Revolution, we were, to borrow the words of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, a lucky species of ape living on an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy.
Beyond that neat framing of evolution, the first part of Professor Ayala's talk just wasn't that great. He certainly didn't do anything wrong, because he spent most of his time going over the evidence for evolution and pointing out where and how various creationists go wrong. He even spent a few slides detailing why intelligent design isn't science and why Michael Behe's irreducible complexity is hooey, topics near and dear to my heart (as evidenced by Entry 04 and Old Post C). That having been said, his treatment of the subject just wasn't that appealing or interesting. Part of the problem might have been that I've heard a lot of the layperson-caliber evolution evidence before, and in addition I'm pretty versed in many of the low-hanging creationist canards. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the problem was on Professor Ayala's end. Again, I feel like an ass saying so, but I really just don't think he gave that great of a presentation.
Those Pesky Last Few Minutes
After convincing us that evolution is the bee's knees, Professor Ayala wrapped up his lecture by getting to the key part of his title. How could anyone think that Darwin did religion a favor? After all, his insight effectively reduced man from an image of the omnipotent Creator to a fortunate primate; Freud called this one of the great affronts to man's ego, or something like that. Evolution was received as a huge threat to religion, and most of the planet still feels that way a whopping 150 years later.
In a sentence (and, as I've mentioned, it didn't get much more coverage than that during the lecture), Professor Ayala thinks that evolution explains away the stickiest theological problems with a loving god. For instance, someone might ask why a loving god lets innocent children die of cancer. Well, in light of evolution, we know cancer is a genetic disorder that occasionally comes about via evolutionarily necessary random mutations. Or, someone might ask why evil people exist if there's a loving god. Again, in light of evolution, we know that there will be a wide spectrum of people, and the evil ones won't necessarily be weeded out due to a lack of selective pressure against them.
Basically, Professor Ayala feels that evolution allows theologians to sidestep the thorny "problems" of evil and pain. He feels that, without evolution, there is no good answer questions such as why would a loving god give us an appendix that can only hurt us or why would a loving god let a psychopath kill an innocent person? He feels that the reality of evolution permits the existence of a loving god in spite of the regular and continuing occurrence of these seemingly horrible atrocities.
Uhhh ... I Don't Get It
If that explanation sounds extremely lame to you, you're not alone. I don't see how evolution does anything for these theological quandaries. Evolution certainly does explain why cancer and a host of other disorders happen. Random mutations are the driving force for evolution; you need a diverse genetic population over which natural selection can occur. Just as those mutations sometimes confer benefits, sometimes they cause really bad things to happen to a given organism. But, frankly, I don't see how on earth that relates to a loving deity.
I really just don't understand the angle Professor Ayala is espousing here. A child dies of cancer, and their parents ask how a loving god could let their innocent child die a painful, prolonged death. The appropriate response is that this loving god certainly exists, but chose to create life via evolution and things such as this innocent child's death are the consequence of said evolutionary processes? What a limp-wristed, outrageous argument that is!
Professor Ayala has clearly started with his conclusion: that a loving god exists. He then uses evolution to rationalize away the problems of evil and pain. It doesn't seem correct that a loving god would let evil or pain hurt the living creatures He loves, but such things would definitely occur in a biology controlled by evolution. Thus, both evolution and the loving god exist, but the loving god doesn't interfere with the evolutionary nature, red in tooth and claw. How Professor Ayala's god can sit idly by as such horrors occur and still be considered good and loving was not delved into.
The Q&A was nothing special. I'd love to elaborate the story and say that the end of Professor Ayala's lecture left me speechless, but really I just couldn't come up with any question to ask. I certainly felt underwhelmed by his explanation of how Darwin helped theologians and religion in general, as my last few paragraphs hopefully made clear. One questioner did raise my general point: the person said that evolution doesn't make the case for a loving god at all, and in fact the harsh reality of evolution actively hurts the case for a deity that loves us. Professor Ayala quite literally ducked the question, again saying that the reality of evolution provides answers for the theological problems of evil and pain. He did not address the possibility that the ruthless realities of evolution might preclude the existence of a loving god, and he quite clearly doesn't feel the need to. As I mentioned earlier, he had his conclusion about this matter from the get-go.
Bickering With My Enemies' Enemies
As luck would have it, I heard about and attended another lecture on the intersection of science and religion just a few days after Professor Ayala's lecture. The elephant in the room alluded to in this section's title was palpable at that lecture, and as such I'll save my discussion of it for next time. I'll give it a quick three sentences now (premise, question, answer), just to whet your appetite for Entry 24.
Francisco Ayala is a great advocate of science, and moreover actively seeks to reconcile the worst conflicts between science and religion in a positive manner. In light of all that good stuff about him, is it correct/appropriate/useful/tactful/tactical/advantageous/etc to criticize him over what amounts to that last little bit of traditional religion in his arguments? Briefly, I just don't know.
I'll spell it out one last time, I didn't like Professor Ayala's lecture but I feel lousy for thinking and saying so. He's an illustrious and interesting figure, but his talk honestly didn't come close to deserving either of those adjectives or any of their synonyms. I appreciate that he opposes fundamentalism and scriptural literalism and other religion-based anti- and pseudo-science, but I struggle to concede his final point because his argument for it is frankly vacuous.
Am I hurting my cause saying these things? Am I being a curmudgeonly debunker, or a grumpy atheist? Should I make friends with the enemy of my enemies and hop into bed with Professor Ayala and other pro-science, open-minded, liberal religionists? (Figuratively, of course.) Tune back next week for part two; same skeptical time, same skeptical place!
Posted at 11:47 pm by cheglabratjoe
January 14, 2009
Entry 22: The Large Hadron Collider Will Destroy the World When It Gets Turned On! I Mean, When It First Collides Particles! I Mean ...
The brouhaha surrounding the start of the LHC was both pleasantly surprising and surprisingly disappointing. It was certainly refreshing to see basic science in the news for a change. News coverage is especially important and appropriate for big science projects like the LHC, due to the huge investment of public funds such projects require. (Note that by big science I mean large-scale science projects, not the fictitious conspiracy against Intelligent Design alluded to in Ben Stein’s epic fail Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.) As for my disappointment, I am of course referring to the un- and anti-scientific first sentence of this week’s titular statement.
The venerable and reputable news sources generally did a good job dealing with the pseudoscience surrounding the LHC startup, merely mentioning unspecified people’s concerns and usually citing reasons why they were unfounded. Less reputable news sources, especially online news sites and blogs, often credulously took the pseudoscientific bait hook, line, and sinker. If they didn’t totally chug the doomsday kool-aid and “report” that we’re all gonna die!!1!, they at least called for the LHC startup plans to be hold on hold and everything re-examined.
That’s Fraunken-shteen; Or, Fighting the Mad Scientist Stereotype
Please note that I said re-examined in that last sentence. Scientists check for these sorts of things. The proposed LHC experiments were simulated long ago in a worse-case-scenario manner, precisely to ensure that the machine wouldn’t destroy the world. As a historical example, the Manhattan Project scientists were worried that the Trinity test in New Mexico might ignite the atmosphere in a runaway nuclear chain reaction. As such, the scientists did extensive calculations before the test to make sure that this wouldn’t happen. I’ve even heard admittedly-dubious stories that the top brass at Los Alamos didn’t tell their number-crunchers what they were working on, so that the results wouldn’t be biased.
Allow me one more quick aside for another example of scientists/engineers and their predilection for worst-case-scenario planning. I recently went to a presentation on the future of nuclear power, and the speaker went over how new nuclear power plants will be designed to withstand a direct hit from a fully-fueled passenger jet without releasing even a gram of radioactive material into the environment. Tell that to the next misguided environmentalist that tells you nuclear power plants are dangerous. Or, if you happen to be one of those misguided environmentalists, read that sentence aloud to yourself a few times. Am I saying scientists’ contingency plans are perfect, or are perfectly implemented? Of course not. But, give them some credit!
Back to the topic at hand, the LHC was built specifically to test theoretical predictions. Scientists didn’t just get together and decide “let’s build the biggest atom-smasher we can to see what we can blow up!” The sole purpose of this machine is to test a vast body of mathematical physics predictions in the real world. Theoretical physicists have been pushing our current models of the universe beyond experimental testability for decades. The LHC will tell us which of those predictions got it right, and which ones will become historical footnotes.
Most importantly, even if you don’t trust those scientists’ and their calculations and theories, collisions similar to those that will occur in the LHC happen regularly in the universe, often in the upper atmosphere of our own planet. Moreover, those collisions are completely uncontrolled and rain particles down all over us, all the time. Since gaping black holes of death aren’t regularly descending upon us and killing everything on the planet, it’s pretty safe to assume that the LHC won’t do that either.
Get Out Your Shovels, We’ve Got a Goalpost to Move
Enough about the media and environmentalists and physicists, what about the people making this week’s claim? Maybe these self-proclaimed eschatologists were just a little off in their apocalyptic predictions. Indeed, looking back, it seems silly to have thought that simply sending a beam around the LHC (what turning it on entailed) would destroy the world. But, when they collide something … hoo boy! That’s when the s--t’s gonna hit the fan! We’re all doomed to spaghettification in a black hole those reckless scientists are sure to create!
What’s going on here is a beautiful example of the moving goalposts logical fallacy. The anti-scientific people who oppose the LHC claimed that the world would end when the machine got turned on. Theories and explanations abound, but my two favorites were that (a) black holes would be created and would consume the entire world or that (b) strangelets would pop out and convert the entire planet into quarks. Regardless of what these people were specifically predicting, nothing catastrophic occurred. So, did these people admit that they were wrong and get on with their lives?
Of course they didn’t. They just moved the goalposts. Since turning on the LHC didn’t kill us all, they’re now predicting that the first collision experiment will be what destroys the world. See what happened there? My anti-scientific label for these folks wasn’t just name-calling after all. Rather than observing evidence and changing their hypotheses based on said evidence, they just desperately clung to their conclusions and arbitrarily pushed back their criterion for correctness. And, when the first LHC experiment destroys only particles and not the entire planet, they’ll move the goalposts again. Let’s diagram this out:
Claim: Turning on the LHC will destroy the earth!
Evidence: Turning on the LHC did not destroy the earth.
Rationale: Er, of course merely turning it on was safe.
Claim: Colliding particles in the LHC will destroy the earth!
Evidence: Colliding particles in the LHC will not destroy the earth.
Rationale: Er, they were just replicating old results.
Claim: Colliding particles at uniquely high energies will destroy the earth!
Evidence: Colliding particles at higher energies will not destroy the earth.
Rationale: Er, we got lucky this time.
Claim: Turning on [the next big accelerator] will destroy the earth!
Evidence: Turning on [the next big accelerator] will not destroy the earth ...
Don’t think I’m trying to predict the future or anything; all this has happened before. The same guys who are at the forefront of the anti-LHC movement also attempted to stop the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Lab in the late 90s. These guys filed frivolous lawsuits, wrote letters, worried about black holes, worried about strangelets ... hey, it’s déjà vu all over again! The only thing that’s changed between the RHIC and the LHC is Web 2.0 letting everyone and their mother go online and freak out about those damn scientists killing us all.
Emulate Al Bundy: Don’t Let Them Move That Goalpost!
A better blogger than I would’ve had this article out in time for the launch of the LHC, but, hey, you get what you pay for. It would have been really great to put this out there before they turned on the LHC, really put my nickel down against the pseudoscientists. But, alas, it didn’t happen. (Unfortunately for me, I’ve got more scruples than your average psychic, so I won’t be editing the posting date to make it look like I divined the safety of the planet ahead of time.)
Besides, the LHC story wound up being a bit of a letdown anyways. The world didn’t end, of course, but there was a malfunction that led to a major temperature rise in the beam and the subsequent damaging of a bunch of superconducting magnets. Between the necessary winter shutdown (I guess they need the energy to heat Zurich … pffft) and the repairs needed to fix this damage, they won’t be back on schedule until the summer of 2009.
Luckily for us, the pseudoscience the LHC’s launch engendered is still ripe for criticism, so we can learn about the moving goalpost fallacy and how it often indicates that people are starting with their conclusions. Good, clean, wholesome skeptical fun for the whole family!
Posted at 1:02 am by cheglabratjoe
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