It's been a few years since this blog has had a post, and for a couple of reasons. First, the concerns that have been expressed here about the behavior of the government have become so mainstream there's been less point in authoring posts on them here. Second, the investments that have occupied the author's interest haven't been publicly-traded assets but things like single-family homes and small retail centers, where generalized conversation isn't useful because it's not specific enough to be actionable and highly-specific conversation isn't useful because it involves assets that aren't available to parties other than those involved in the transactions.
But a neighbor of mine recently said she didn't understand why everyone should be so exercised about COVID-19 risk when H1N1 was worse. To get an idea what COVID-19 has done in this country since winter ended, one can look at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's page on the illness. As of this writing, the novel coronavirus has killed over 168,000 Americans. It's worth noting that it's currently August, and the flu season hasn't begun. By contrast, the CDC's page on the H1N1 pandemic presents full-year data from the H1N1 impact on the United States. From April of 2009 through April of 2010, the CDC's best estimate of deaths caused by the pandemic is 12,469 individuals. We're not yet one year in, and the death toll from COVID-19 is already over an order of magnitude worse than entire H1N1 pandemic.
Why's COVID-19 worse? First, it's more contagious. Contagiousness is often measured using the illness' spread in a population with no immunity, with R0 ("r-naught") representing the average number of infectees to whom one host will transmit the illness during its life cycle in the host. For H1N1, R0 is thought to lie in the range of 1.46 and 1.48. COVID-19's R0 is estimated to lie between 1.5 and 3.5. Two significant facts are worth keeping in mind. First, when R0 is less than one the infected population dwindles rather than grows: the illness dies out because infected carriers don't on average infect enough people to maintain a stable patient population. Second, R0 isn't a static figure: it can be manipulated with mitigation efforts. When Austria's government observed low spread rates in some Asian countries and mandated face masks, its infection rate dropped 90%. Apparently anyone can kill local spread by reducing the spread of airborne exhaled particles, which can be accomplished with face masks. Cheap.
The second factor differentiating the current coronavirus from the H1N1 "Swine Flu" pandemic of 2009 is severity. The published data on H1N1 are that the United States had 60.8 million cases of H1N1, 274,304 H1N1 hospitalizations, and 12,469 H1N1 fatalities. This means that an H1N1 case had a 0.45% chance of hospitalization and that 4.5% of those hospitalized died, with deaths amounting to 0.02% of total estimated cases. So far in the United States the CDC reports 5,340,232 total cases and 168,696 deaths, for a case fatality rate of 3.2%, which means a confirmed case of COVID-19 is more likely to kill a patient than a confirmed case of H1N1 was likely to put a patient in the hospital.
Naturally, these facts left me wondering what could possibly have left my neighbor thinking the current pandemic was a relative non-event, less disruptive on its own than an H1N1 season that closed no restaurants and halted no flights. The answer isn't hard to fathom: politics. Rather than base public health policy on data, quite a few elected officials have taken positions based on the positions of other politicians. Accordingly, some politicians have proclaimed that the current economic problems have been created by government restrictions rather than by the necessity of responding to an illness.
Sigh.
The article about Austria is dated in April, people. April. You can read, right? And now that you understand R0, you know how to stop the pandemic. You're better informed than officials who rushed to crowd people unmasked in bars, and can take action.
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Sunday, August 16, 2020
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Experimental Error Explains 2011 Miracle
Italians who last year announced they had demonstrated faster-than-light travel have admitted their observed effect disappeared when they tightened a cable between a GPS receiver and a timer. Correcting the cabling issue altered the measurable transit time by 60 nanoseconds, bringing the observed facts into consistency with well-tested theories about the relationship between time and space.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Global Warming?
We're suffering a heinous cold snap that has Houston raining ice chips instead of water, and has stranded travelers, closed airports, and delayed flights from cold-weather issues. Endangered manatees are suffering cold-weather injuries in Florida's waters. Naturally, it's a fine time for pundits to issue a seasonal zinger on climate change policy. I mean, you really think it's getting hotter?
With Japan having already announced the conclusion that manmade global warming is as scientific and as grounded a theory as ancient astology, one wonders where the political and ecological pendulum will swing. And whether they will swing in concert, or in diametric opposition.
In the meantime, the music is good and the lyrics fun.
With Japan having already announced the conclusion that manmade global warming is as scientific and as grounded a theory as ancient astology, one wonders where the political and ecological pendulum will swing. And whether they will swing in concert, or in diametric opposition.
In the meantime, the music is good and the lyrics fun.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Social Pain Processed Like Physical Pain
Taking two Tylenol turns teens' tortures tolerable? New research into the similarity of the processing of social injury and physical injury may explain why some victims of bullying and social isolation react (that is, overreact) with high-level violence. Do they feel they must act in self-defense in the same way as if in physical jeopardy?
Interesting stuff.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Lunacy and Lunar Missions: Lessons in the Shortcomings of Media Claims
Less than a century ago, the institution promising "all the news that's fit to print" offered a written excoriation of Professor Goddard and his dreams of reaching the moon, the cornerstone of which was "knowledge ladled out daily in high schools" about thermodynamics. The New York Times' author wrote that "[t]o claim that it would be [feasible to steer rockets in space] would be do deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that."
The 1920 editorial, not only made after the realization of the law of conservation but actually citing it as support, seemed both to require special certifications before one could observe phenomenon in nature, and to overlook that a craft expelling accelerated exhaust would necessarily realize a change in its vector, lest the departing and just-accelerated high-speed exhaust particles create a net change in momentum of the system that includes the craft and its fuel.
The fact that respected news organizations can be so utterly wrong on what seems a point of basic science, to the point of issuing a public recantation one generation later when the folly has become laughable, should be noted by those of us who rely on the authority of a speaker's credentials rather than on the authority of the evidence in deciding how public resources might best be spent. After all, The New York Times' recantation of its 1920 editorial contained only this explanation for its retraction:
So when media outlets confidently issue pronouncements on more complex interactions than those involved in space flight -- say, in the debate on man-made planet warming, an idea with great currency in Washington, D.C. but which has been dismissed in Tokyo as "ancient astrology" -- one does well to look at the evidence rather than the claims.
There could be another retraction coming in a generation or so.
The 1920 editorial, not only made after the realization of the law of conservation but actually citing it as support, seemed both to require special certifications before one could observe phenomenon in nature, and to overlook that a craft expelling accelerated exhaust would necessarily realize a change in its vector, lest the departing and just-accelerated high-speed exhaust particles create a net change in momentum of the system that includes the craft and its fuel.
The fact that respected news organizations can be so utterly wrong on what seems a point of basic science, to the point of issuing a public recantation one generation later when the folly has become laughable, should be noted by those of us who rely on the authority of a speaker's credentials rather than on the authority of the evidence in deciding how public resources might best be spent. After all, The New York Times' recantation of its 1920 editorial contained only this explanation for its retraction:
Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Issac Newton in the 17th Century and it is not definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.That a 1920 author purported to cite Einstein as an authority (whose speeches against space flight, if any, are unknown to me) is appalling enough without his ignoring or misunderstanding Newton to reach his erroneous conclusion.
So when media outlets confidently issue pronouncements on more complex interactions than those involved in space flight -- say, in the debate on man-made planet warming, an idea with great currency in Washington, D.C. but which has been dismissed in Tokyo as "ancient astrology" -- one does well to look at the evidence rather than the claims.
There could be another retraction coming in a generation or so.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
New Flu Spotlights Little-Known Evolutionary Trick
The new flu shows big evolutionary changes can occur virtually overnight.
The influenza virus recently in the news -- first known as a "swine flu" then rebadged as H1N1 2009 to better identify it with comparison H1N1 influenzas and to protect hog farmers and the hogs themselves from public backlash -- represents a change (i.e., a mutation) that is not the kind of point-mutation "accident" most commonly understood to create change in a genome over time. Known as "reassortment", the trick that combined genetic material from several different influenza strains -- strains with known origins in three different host species, namely human, swine, and avian -- enables a strain in one step to take on genetic material with a proven track record developed in an entirely different virus population. Instead of changing one base pair at a time -- which may allow slow drift of a genome, or may simply produce a dead-end that doesn't work -- this process enables huge genetic changes in a single generation.
These dramatic changes can mean improved avoidance of host population defenses built up against predecessor agents of infection. Reassortment has thus been identified as a factor in major epidemics -- that is, sudden population-level problems coping with the dominant virus strain, and the replacement of the dominant virus strain with a successor -- over the last century.
The existence of sudden mechanisms of significant genetic alteration offers some interesting food for thought as we consider periods of time in which our planet has experienced an apparently accelerated speciation. New species, perhaps more resistant to prevailing illnesses or more capable of competing for food, might displace existing species with relative speed. New pathogens might crush longstanding species' public-health-free populations, creating opportunities for creatures that could not compete until hardiness from new illnesses became a competitive advantage. Collapse of certain species might have ripple effects across an environment, creating new opportunities for naescent competitors.
Debates will doubtless continue over just how major population collapses occurred, or the reasoning behind major speciation events. It is certain that argument will continue over even the existence of speciation through the mechanism of evolution. (Interestingly, however, I have not yet heard any alternate theory to explain speciation. Presumably -- if non-evolutionary theory is to be accepted -- there is every so often another Creation, isolated so one or isolated parts of the globe, to produce whatever new species might emerge there. I haven't seen any particular evidence gathered for this kind of claim; much less, I haven't even heard the apparently-necessary claim.)
Reassortment, or other mechanisms such as transposons that enable single-step alterations much greater in scope than mere point mutations, and can even allow cross-species importation of survival-proven genetic material, absolutely torpedo the claim of Mr. Berlinski -- that the theory of evolution "requires for every significant morphological or physiological feature in a modern species ... a panoply of intermediate forms that explains how they arrived." Since massive single-generation genetic changes would not leave a "panoply of intermediate forms" there is no reason to expect such a "panoply of intermediate forms[.]" Such a presentation of "intermediate forms" would not explain how they arrived, they would only illustrate one possible effect of a series of related point mutations. When mutation mechanisms other than simple point mutations are considered, it's obvious that Mr. Berlinski's argument is bankrupt, and capable only of fooling those who have no idea what kinds of mechanisms might underlie mutation.
The important thing is that we continue to collect and evaluate evidence -- without which we have little hope of understanding the rules that govern the world around us. Why the rules are as they are is of course a matter of faith, and philosophy. However, I have grave doubts about any system of belief that requires people to turn a blind eye to the evidence available in the world about them. If humans live with some purpose, surely this purpose does not require each member of the species to shrink from having a close look at the world about. Particularly if from the earliest record we were called upon before all other tasks to give a name to all the species, then to cultivate the place where we were delivered to live, we should be making some non-trivial effort to understand what the species are so they can be named, and to learn what might be learned about the cultivation of the resources entrusted to us so that we may do a competent job of it.
Falling to bickering over why there are species seems backward when we have yet to understand fully how they are made and what the result has been -- both of which would presumably be a source of insight into that why question, evidencing its answer like little else.
The influenza virus recently in the news -- first known as a "swine flu" then rebadged as H1N1 2009 to better identify it with comparison H1N1 influenzas and to protect hog farmers and the hogs themselves from public backlash -- represents a change (i.e., a mutation) that is not the kind of point-mutation "accident" most commonly understood to create change in a genome over time. Known as "reassortment", the trick that combined genetic material from several different influenza strains -- strains with known origins in three different host species, namely human, swine, and avian -- enables a strain in one step to take on genetic material with a proven track record developed in an entirely different virus population. Instead of changing one base pair at a time -- which may allow slow drift of a genome, or may simply produce a dead-end that doesn't work -- this process enables huge genetic changes in a single generation.
These dramatic changes can mean improved avoidance of host population defenses built up against predecessor agents of infection. Reassortment has thus been identified as a factor in major epidemics -- that is, sudden population-level problems coping with the dominant virus strain, and the replacement of the dominant virus strain with a successor -- over the last century.
The existence of sudden mechanisms of significant genetic alteration offers some interesting food for thought as we consider periods of time in which our planet has experienced an apparently accelerated speciation. New species, perhaps more resistant to prevailing illnesses or more capable of competing for food, might displace existing species with relative speed. New pathogens might crush longstanding species' public-health-free populations, creating opportunities for creatures that could not compete until hardiness from new illnesses became a competitive advantage. Collapse of certain species might have ripple effects across an environment, creating new opportunities for naescent competitors.
Debates will doubtless continue over just how major population collapses occurred, or the reasoning behind major speciation events. It is certain that argument will continue over even the existence of speciation through the mechanism of evolution. (Interestingly, however, I have not yet heard any alternate theory to explain speciation. Presumably -- if non-evolutionary theory is to be accepted -- there is every so often another Creation, isolated so one or isolated parts of the globe, to produce whatever new species might emerge there. I haven't seen any particular evidence gathered for this kind of claim; much less, I haven't even heard the apparently-necessary claim.)
Reassortment, or other mechanisms such as transposons that enable single-step alterations much greater in scope than mere point mutations, and can even allow cross-species importation of survival-proven genetic material, absolutely torpedo the claim of Mr. Berlinski -- that the theory of evolution "requires for every significant morphological or physiological feature in a modern species ... a panoply of intermediate forms that explains how they arrived." Since massive single-generation genetic changes would not leave a "panoply of intermediate forms" there is no reason to expect such a "panoply of intermediate forms[.]" Such a presentation of "intermediate forms" would not explain how they arrived, they would only illustrate one possible effect of a series of related point mutations. When mutation mechanisms other than simple point mutations are considered, it's obvious that Mr. Berlinski's argument is bankrupt, and capable only of fooling those who have no idea what kinds of mechanisms might underlie mutation.
The important thing is that we continue to collect and evaluate evidence -- without which we have little hope of understanding the rules that govern the world around us. Why the rules are as they are is of course a matter of faith, and philosophy. However, I have grave doubts about any system of belief that requires people to turn a blind eye to the evidence available in the world about them. If humans live with some purpose, surely this purpose does not require each member of the species to shrink from having a close look at the world about. Particularly if from the earliest record we were called upon before all other tasks to give a name to all the species, then to cultivate the place where we were delivered to live, we should be making some non-trivial effort to understand what the species are so they can be named, and to learn what might be learned about the cultivation of the resources entrusted to us so that we may do a competent job of it.
Falling to bickering over why there are species seems backward when we have yet to understand fully how they are made and what the result has been -- both of which would presumably be a source of insight into that why question, evidencing its answer like little else.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Japan: Global Warming Theory 'Ancient Astrology'
A Japanese advisory board recently published that the manmade climate change theory currently backed by the United Nations' International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is just so much hogwash that "has been substituted for truth". Likening the theory to "ancient astrology", the Japanese panel by the vote of 3 of 5 declared the theory apparently bogus, and not subject to proof.
The Earth, which was once rather warmer than it is today, was noted by the Japanese panel not to have been continually increasing in temperature since the 1940s as predicted by the IPCC's hypothesis linking global climate change to human carbon emissions.
Between luddites fighting scientific inquiry and fakers consuming scientific funding while engaged in religious-political-lobbying endeavors (Michael Crichton has some good pieces on this sad topic, notably in a speech to the California Institute of Technology and in testimony before the United States Senate; an interview with Charlie Rose offers an overview for those who don't feel like reading), it's a miracle any science is done with public dollars at all.
Perhaps we should reconsider the terms on which we want government involved in serious policy research. Considering the track record of government in discovering facts in time to avert disasters, I'd say Congress is among the least qualified entities on the planet to allocate resources to such a purpose.
The Earth, which was once rather warmer than it is today, was noted by the Japanese panel not to have been continually increasing in temperature since the 1940s as predicted by the IPCC's hypothesis linking global climate change to human carbon emissions.
Between luddites fighting scientific inquiry and fakers consuming scientific funding while engaged in religious-political-lobbying endeavors (Michael Crichton has some good pieces on this sad topic, notably in a speech to the California Institute of Technology and in testimony before the United States Senate; an interview with Charlie Rose offers an overview for those who don't feel like reading), it's a miracle any science is done with public dollars at all.
Perhaps we should reconsider the terms on which we want government involved in serious policy research. Considering the track record of government in discovering facts in time to avert disasters, I'd say Congress is among the least qualified entities on the planet to allocate resources to such a purpose.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Golbal Cooling? Earth Apparently Once Rather Warmer
According to calculations made on the basis of an enormous monster snake fossil found near the equator in Columbia, the Earth where the fossil was found was once 10ºF warmer. All reptiles in the rain forest were apparently much larger than comparable current reptiles.
Without bothering to calculate how far from the equator the find was at the time its occupant was alive, and what impact that might have on the global temperature differences (if Columbia was then further from the equator, the global temperature might have been even more different), it seems the Earth's typical temperature might have been significantly warmer. According to Jonathan Bloch, "[t]he result was, among other things, the largest snakes the world has ever seen...and hopefully ever will."
One question that comes to mind is whether the corals we currently have, which appear so sensitive to warming of their immediate environment, had not yet developed at the time the monster snake lived.
Interesting, no?
I wonder if the snakes picketed against global cooling ....
Without bothering to calculate how far from the equator the find was at the time its occupant was alive, and what impact that might have on the global temperature differences (if Columbia was then further from the equator, the global temperature might have been even more different), it seems the Earth's typical temperature might have been significantly warmer. According to Jonathan Bloch, "[t]he result was, among other things, the largest snakes the world has ever seen...and hopefully ever will."
One question that comes to mind is whether the corals we currently have, which appear so sensitive to warming of their immediate environment, had not yet developed at the time the monster snake lived.
Interesting, no?
I wonder if the snakes picketed against global cooling ....
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Thank God For Bad Rhetoric
I first encountered David Berlinski on Mr. Penick's blog Intelligent Design. In this YouTube video (given here under a different title with some editorialization), Berlinski begins arguing that evolution is criticized by different sorts of people (a join-the-bandwagon argument, humorously opposed by equally silly evidence collected by Project Steve) and then analogizes evolution of whales to the project of re-engineering an automobile into a submarine. Berlinski seems to invite evolution to be imagined as a process controlled by outside designers constrained to build new products out of existing products, a circumstance not in fact found either submarine design or in any articulation of scientifically-based evolutionary theory I have yet to encounter.
To truly appreciate the facetiousness of Berlinski's arguments, one does well to view him in the context of actual opposition -- in a debate on evolutionary theory and its proposed alternatives. Here, Berlinski offers fallacious argument in full view of cameras and onlookers and apparently gets away with it.
He does it beautifully.
This is, of course, why I think it's worth examining: his pitch is attractive to consumers of educational policy argument, and we should give the pitch a review, better to appreciate what it does and does not offer.
When evolutionary proponents held forth certain recorded fossil observations as strong evidence of descent with modification by virtue of their apparent completeness, David Berlinski argued they were insufficient in light of gaps elsewhere in observed fossil specimens:
Even assuming every fossil could or would be observed and recorded, why should anyone imagine phenotypic continuity in the fossil record? Lamarckian inheritance of acquired traits is not the theory under discussion. If one accepts that the mechanism by which ancestors pass traits to offspring is the transfer of genetic material, one would not expect continuity at all. One would expect discrete changes in phenotype to be acquired, associated with discrete changes in genetics. There are, after all, but four nucleic acids. Changes in a creature's inherited genetic structure must represent a discrete change, because the genetic mechanism affords only discrete changes and admits no half-measure: a point on a certain gene is either identical to that in its ancestor, or it is not. And there are only four molecules to fit in the spot in question.[1] Given a mutation, though, the story isn't yet told to mere observers of form: the genetic change may manifest in a phenotypic change, or it may not.
Just to clarify a bit: Brown-haired parents who produce blonde descendants do not do so only by making several successive generations of progeny with increasingly lighter hair. They either have brown-haired children, or they have children who inherit recessive light-hair-encoding genes from both parents -- in which case the offspring's hair will appear sharply discontinuous from that of immediate ancestors. No one is ever surprised that Berlinski's continuous parade of intermediate forms do not appear when unexpected-looking children are born, even if traits cause one to doubt the identity of a child's father (spotting the mother at the time of birth is ordinarily trivial). The same is true if one child is tall and the other short: some kids are just thought to take after one parent's parent, or the like. What of it? Is anyone really surprised all visible changes between do not occur in the context of a continuous progression?
Yet, David Berlinski urges his audience to accept as a test of whether genetic evolution could explain observed speciation whether observed morphological changes among observed fossils are marked by continuity. This is absurd. In light of the discrete nature of the inheritance mechanism, it is in fact contrary to expectation. One would not expect continuity. One would expect isolated points of data -- where specimens were preserved for observation -- and one would expect these isolated points to be different.
And the phenotypic change -- the visible manifestation, if any, of a genetic change -- cannot be continuous if its mechanism is necessarily discrete.
However, discontinuity isn't the only argument Berlinski makes; he tries to make a pitch for unlikeliness, but instead reveals himself not to understand the basic mechanism by which inherited traits are thought to be passed to descendants. Later in the same debate, Berlinski has this exchange:
What kind of test is that? He can keep saying he's unconvinced as long as doing so keeps him in speaking engagements.
And that's the beauty of his pitch. Calm and composed, Berlinski recites his demand for more evidence, only to shrug at whatever is produced. Faced with a fossil record documenting the transition from reptile ancestors to their mammal descendants -- so detailed the controversy is not whether it's the right lineage but where to decide observed fossils should start being labeled mammals -- he sidesteps by asking about the present state of knowledge of spiders' ancestors' fossils. Given an argument about genetics, he insists he never asked about genetics but is interested only in the evolution of phenotypic (he says "morphological") change. So long as he keeps his cool, his interrogators must perforce look like buffoons as they lose their composure in exasperation. Doesn't he know what he's talking about?
Well, apparently not -- but he'll look damned good while he does it. And he need neither propose a theory nor test one to do it.
Testing theories is, in fact, the real way to falsify (and thus correctly reject) them. To be sure, one might test theories in many ways; we are creative creatures and some interesting discoveries have been made using experiments composed of little more than logic. However, the applause-o-meter isn't the kind of test likely to produce consistent results of the sort on which one would want to base public policy. Trying to embarrass, confuse, exasperate, or misrepresent the views of opponents may be a good way to achieve notoriety and get appearance requests on entertainment programs, but it's not worthy of the name science.
If it weren't so easy to spot David Berlinski's rhetorical flaws, just imagine what his argument might support. So, thank God for bad rhetoric. It's a fantastic tip-off to the sort of reasoning that should be immediately discarded in the search for genuine data on which to base one's conclusions.
The most interesting thing about the debate over evolution is the fact that both sides accuse the other of politicizing the debate, and using power rather than evidence to "win" through policy implementation. The primacy of political power over actual data-supported research results isn't confined to evolution, either. We see this also in ecological policy, energy policy, health policy, liability policy -- the problems facing the quest to get good policy (in education, public health, trade, you name it) are beset by folks who care more about being thought right than actually making sure they're right -- people who care more about getting their intended result than getting the right result.
I strongly believe that a lively debate over scientific matters improves the likelihood that bad ideas will be weeded out before they become established as the basis for policies that will only consume resources without useful or intended results. Unfortunately, the sort of public spectacle Berlinski encourages with arguments about people's credentials, about the number of adherents to their point of view, about the number of papers that contain or don't contain the word "evolution" -- these are pure entertainment. They are vacuous of the reasoning one needed to inquire into the evidence about any theory about the world one might hope to test.
This is a serious problem, unfortunately. These entertainment-oriented "rhetorical" tools (argument ad hominem, appeal to authority, etc.) abound in political debates. Debates about scientific matters impacting public policy -- regarding the environment, public health, liability issues -- impact so many aspects of our lives that we should not stand still for analytical incompetence as the matters are deliberated (and supposedly reasoned). The result is that we -- consumers of policy produced by legislatures, employers, benefit plans, and judicial systems -- suffer from policy developed without the benefit of rational consideration.
Despite my strong conviction that ID offers no helpful thesis (if you teach kids "it's magic" it offers them no tool for understanding how to work with the forces -- still operating and yet remaining subject to discovery -- that operate upon and govern the world, and offers no opportunity to improve understanding and interaction with the world -- which in my view one of the fundamental reasons to acquire education), I would rather see legitimate efforts to hone good theories about speciation than merely see destruction by political force of folks whose principal crime is a crackpot theory. We have, on this planet, come to respect some crackpot theories over time (Galileo's theory of the orbit of the Earth about the Sun; Newton's theory that all matter tends to continue in motion until acted upon -- an idea that flew in the face of millennia of observation that things tend to come to a halt when no longer pushed; atomic theory; germ theory; the theory of sterile surgical technique; the dietary theory of the origin of pellagra; it's endless, isn't it?) and it's hard to know from the great sea of crackpot theories which ones will turn out to be supported by evidence once observer can be troubled to collect it. The ecological debate is like this much more than the ID debate, of course, as the ID debate plainly offers a naked theological proposition not subject to test, but my point is that we have to think about the standards by which we will regard theories (regardless of origin) when designing policy potentially impacted by the theories. At present we have in my view a simple political fight, and may be tolerable in the case in which the prevailing theory happens by blind chance to be more correct than its critics, but it's a poor model for consistently developing good policy, and worthless for developing ideal policy.
The most interesting thing about the debate over evolution is the fact that both sides accuse the other of politicizing the debate, and using power rather than evidence to "win" through policy implementation. The primacy of political power over actual data-supported research results isn't confined to evolution, either. In ecological policy, energy policy, health policy, liability policy -- the quest to get good policy (in education, public health, trade, liability, you name it) is beset by folks who care more about being thought right than they do about any activity designed to increase the chance of actually being right -- that is, people who care more about getting their intended result than getting the best available result.
What we need, perhaps, is to develop a general rule for deciding when a theory has sufficient evidence to support expending public resources on it. Any takers for this project?
[1] It's also possible, due to molecular folding issues, that single changes might alter molecular structure in such a way as to prohibit affected sections from being accessed by the molecular mechanisms that enable the creation of proteins that have significant impact in a developing organism. Assuming the mutation isn't fatal, code thus obsoleted might have a substantial and discontinuous impact on the phenotype of those expressing the traits involved. Obsoleted code might thereafter be subject to change or elimination in future generations without much observable impact -- except, of course, that the eliminated code might change macromolecular shapes by folding or other mechanisms in such a way as to alter the likelihood of other segments of the DNA will participate in the kinds of chemical interactions that lead to protein manufacture.
Thus, the right point change might create a folding issue that would have an enormous impact on the genetic material likely to be active in a developing organism. The expected result might be a big change, though it's highly likely such a change would be fatal if it resulted in phenotypic expression. If not, however, the possibility exists that the resultant change would be significant.
[2] In point of fact, since it's possible to have more than one point mutation in a gene, and that particular genes might be subject to repeated mutation over millions of years, I would tend to disagree with Miller that 100,000 is necessarily too high a number of mutations given his assumptions about the number of genes in the creatures at issue.
To truly appreciate the facetiousness of Berlinski's arguments, one does well to view him in the context of actual opposition -- in a debate on evolutionary theory and its proposed alternatives. Here, Berlinski offers fallacious argument in full view of cameras and onlookers and apparently gets away with it.
He does it beautifully.
This is, of course, why I think it's worth examining: his pitch is attractive to consumers of educational policy argument, and we should give the pitch a review, better to appreciate what it does and does not offer.
When evolutionary proponents held forth certain recorded fossil observations as strong evidence of descent with modification by virtue of their apparent completeness, David Berlinski argued they were insufficient in light of gaps elsewhere in observed fossil specimens:
Barry Lynn: Mr. Berlinski, you're never going to be satisfied.This thesis regarding what one should expect evolution to predict in the fossil record underpins Berlinski's argument against evolution as an acceptable explanation for the observable evidence of speciation. When given an opportunity to interrogate opponents in a live debate, he offered this question as an intended show-stopper:
David Berlinski: You're right.
Lynn: Every time we find 16 new things, new fossils, to fill in the so-called fossil record that was missing, you just say, "Find 16 more."
Berlinski: I'll tell you exactly. Here is what Darwinian theory requires: for every significant morphological or physiological feature in a modern species we should have a panoply of intermediate forms that explains how they arrived. We don't have them for some good reasons, but we have nothing like an explanation ...
Berlinski: Would you agree, as almost everyone else affirms, that the overwhelming pattern of the fossil record is sharply discontinuous?While invoking the authority of the crowd he postulates agrees with him, he asks whether phenotypes observed among surviving fossils show the continuity he urges is required to support the theory he doubts. Why, however, should be urge phenotypic continuity as a necessary result of evolution?
Even assuming every fossil could or would be observed and recorded, why should anyone imagine phenotypic continuity in the fossil record? Lamarckian inheritance of acquired traits is not the theory under discussion. If one accepts that the mechanism by which ancestors pass traits to offspring is the transfer of genetic material, one would not expect continuity at all. One would expect discrete changes in phenotype to be acquired, associated with discrete changes in genetics. There are, after all, but four nucleic acids. Changes in a creature's inherited genetic structure must represent a discrete change, because the genetic mechanism affords only discrete changes and admits no half-measure: a point on a certain gene is either identical to that in its ancestor, or it is not. And there are only four molecules to fit in the spot in question.[1] Given a mutation, though, the story isn't yet told to mere observers of form: the genetic change may manifest in a phenotypic change, or it may not.
Just to clarify a bit: Brown-haired parents who produce blonde descendants do not do so only by making several successive generations of progeny with increasingly lighter hair. They either have brown-haired children, or they have children who inherit recessive light-hair-encoding genes from both parents -- in which case the offspring's hair will appear sharply discontinuous from that of immediate ancestors. No one is ever surprised that Berlinski's continuous parade of intermediate forms do not appear when unexpected-looking children are born, even if traits cause one to doubt the identity of a child's father (spotting the mother at the time of birth is ordinarily trivial). The same is true if one child is tall and the other short: some kids are just thought to take after one parent's parent, or the like. What of it? Is anyone really surprised all visible changes between do not occur in the context of a continuous progression?
Yet, David Berlinski urges his audience to accept as a test of whether genetic evolution could explain observed speciation whether observed morphological changes among observed fossils are marked by continuity. This is absurd. In light of the discrete nature of the inheritance mechanism, it is in fact contrary to expectation. One would not expect continuity. One would expect isolated points of data -- where specimens were preserved for observation -- and one would expect these isolated points to be different.
And the phenotypic change -- the visible manifestation, if any, of a genetic change -- cannot be continuous if its mechanism is necessarily discrete.
However, discontinuity isn't the only argument Berlinski makes; he tries to make a pitch for unlikeliness, but instead reveals himself not to understand the basic mechanism by which inherited traits are thought to be passed to descendants. Later in the same debate, Berlinski has this exchange:
Berlinski: Let's turn to the question I so vainly tried to pump an answer from Dr. Scott ... How many morphological changes do think are required to effect the transition those charts of yours [depicting a series of fossils described as ancestors of modern whales] were said to document?Berlinski's idea that one should ask questions about morphological changes rather than genetic changes is also silly, unless he seeks to propose a different mechanism than genetics to explain the transmission of traits from ancestors to descendants. This, of course, hits on the fundamental weakness of David Berlinski's argument: he proposes nothing. He merely shrugs at whatever evidence is offered, and says "yes, but I'm not convinced."
Miller: I will give you a straight answer. And the straight answer is that when you look at two species that are separated by five million years --
Berlinski: Okay.
Miller: -- of geological time the number of changes must be very, very large. However --
Berlinski: Give us a number.
Miller: -- However, recent studies of speciation -- and I'm sorry to pick this specific species, but it's relevant to your question -- in sunflowers have shown conclusively that a new species can be established in terms of a speciation-like isolation mechanism, with as few as ten genetic changes. That's your answer.
Berlinski: I've read the same Science papers you have but those are very close; a dog-like mammal and a whale are very far!
Miller: That's right! And the other end of the room is very far away, and it should not surprise you that I get there with one step at a time, and that's what we're talking.
Berlinski: No matter the number I give you, you will neither assent nor disagree with the number? If I say there are 100,00 morphological changes required to take a dog-like mammal living on the land to a whale --
Miller: Oh, sorry, yes, I will answer that. That's way too high .... The good genetic evidence is that there are about 100,000 genes in a human being. I would best guess there's somewhat fewer in whales. What you're telling me is that to change from one similar organism, an organism that looks more like a whale than any terrestrial animal that has ever lived, to a whale that looks more like a terrestrial animal than any whale has ever lived, would require every gene to change, and sir I --
Berlinski: No! I never talked about genes!
Miller: -- Sir, you asked me for a number and I said, on that basis, a hundred thousand is too high. [2]
What kind of test is that? He can keep saying he's unconvinced as long as doing so keeps him in speaking engagements.
And that's the beauty of his pitch. Calm and composed, Berlinski recites his demand for more evidence, only to shrug at whatever is produced. Faced with a fossil record documenting the transition from reptile ancestors to their mammal descendants -- so detailed the controversy is not whether it's the right lineage but where to decide observed fossils should start being labeled mammals -- he sidesteps by asking about the present state of knowledge of spiders' ancestors' fossils. Given an argument about genetics, he insists he never asked about genetics but is interested only in the evolution of phenotypic (he says "morphological") change. So long as he keeps his cool, his interrogators must perforce look like buffoons as they lose their composure in exasperation. Doesn't he know what he's talking about?
Well, apparently not -- but he'll look damned good while he does it. And he need neither propose a theory nor test one to do it.
Testing theories is, in fact, the real way to falsify (and thus correctly reject) them. To be sure, one might test theories in many ways; we are creative creatures and some interesting discoveries have been made using experiments composed of little more than logic. However, the applause-o-meter isn't the kind of test likely to produce consistent results of the sort on which one would want to base public policy. Trying to embarrass, confuse, exasperate, or misrepresent the views of opponents may be a good way to achieve notoriety and get appearance requests on entertainment programs, but it's not worthy of the name science.
If it weren't so easy to spot David Berlinski's rhetorical flaws, just imagine what his argument might support. So, thank God for bad rhetoric. It's a fantastic tip-off to the sort of reasoning that should be immediately discarded in the search for genuine data on which to base one's conclusions.
The most interesting thing about the debate over evolution is the fact that both sides accuse the other of politicizing the debate, and using power rather than evidence to "win" through policy implementation. The primacy of political power over actual data-supported research results isn't confined to evolution, either. We see this also in ecological policy, energy policy, health policy, liability policy -- the problems facing the quest to get good policy (in education, public health, trade, you name it) are beset by folks who care more about being thought right than actually making sure they're right -- people who care more about getting their intended result than getting the right result.
I strongly believe that a lively debate over scientific matters improves the likelihood that bad ideas will be weeded out before they become established as the basis for policies that will only consume resources without useful or intended results. Unfortunately, the sort of public spectacle Berlinski encourages with arguments about people's credentials, about the number of adherents to their point of view, about the number of papers that contain or don't contain the word "evolution" -- these are pure entertainment. They are vacuous of the reasoning one needed to inquire into the evidence about any theory about the world one might hope to test.
This is a serious problem, unfortunately. These entertainment-oriented "rhetorical" tools (argument ad hominem, appeal to authority, etc.) abound in political debates. Debates about scientific matters impacting public policy -- regarding the environment, public health, liability issues -- impact so many aspects of our lives that we should not stand still for analytical incompetence as the matters are deliberated (and supposedly reasoned). The result is that we -- consumers of policy produced by legislatures, employers, benefit plans, and judicial systems -- suffer from policy developed without the benefit of rational consideration.
Despite my strong conviction that ID offers no helpful thesis (if you teach kids "it's magic" it offers them no tool for understanding how to work with the forces -- still operating and yet remaining subject to discovery -- that operate upon and govern the world, and offers no opportunity to improve understanding and interaction with the world -- which in my view one of the fundamental reasons to acquire education), I would rather see legitimate efforts to hone good theories about speciation than merely see destruction by political force of folks whose principal crime is a crackpot theory. We have, on this planet, come to respect some crackpot theories over time (Galileo's theory of the orbit of the Earth about the Sun; Newton's theory that all matter tends to continue in motion until acted upon -- an idea that flew in the face of millennia of observation that things tend to come to a halt when no longer pushed; atomic theory; germ theory; the theory of sterile surgical technique; the dietary theory of the origin of pellagra; it's endless, isn't it?) and it's hard to know from the great sea of crackpot theories which ones will turn out to be supported by evidence once observer can be troubled to collect it. The ecological debate is like this much more than the ID debate, of course, as the ID debate plainly offers a naked theological proposition not subject to test, but my point is that we have to think about the standards by which we will regard theories (regardless of origin) when designing policy potentially impacted by the theories. At present we have in my view a simple political fight, and may be tolerable in the case in which the prevailing theory happens by blind chance to be more correct than its critics, but it's a poor model for consistently developing good policy, and worthless for developing ideal policy.
The most interesting thing about the debate over evolution is the fact that both sides accuse the other of politicizing the debate, and using power rather than evidence to "win" through policy implementation. The primacy of political power over actual data-supported research results isn't confined to evolution, either. In ecological policy, energy policy, health policy, liability policy -- the quest to get good policy (in education, public health, trade, liability, you name it) is beset by folks who care more about being thought right than they do about any activity designed to increase the chance of actually being right -- that is, people who care more about getting their intended result than getting the best available result.
What we need, perhaps, is to develop a general rule for deciding when a theory has sufficient evidence to support expending public resources on it. Any takers for this project?
[1] It's also possible, due to molecular folding issues, that single changes might alter molecular structure in such a way as to prohibit affected sections from being accessed by the molecular mechanisms that enable the creation of proteins that have significant impact in a developing organism. Assuming the mutation isn't fatal, code thus obsoleted might have a substantial and discontinuous impact on the phenotype of those expressing the traits involved. Obsoleted code might thereafter be subject to change or elimination in future generations without much observable impact -- except, of course, that the eliminated code might change macromolecular shapes by folding or other mechanisms in such a way as to alter the likelihood of other segments of the DNA will participate in the kinds of chemical interactions that lead to protein manufacture.
Thus, the right point change might create a folding issue that would have an enormous impact on the genetic material likely to be active in a developing organism. The expected result might be a big change, though it's highly likely such a change would be fatal if it resulted in phenotypic expression. If not, however, the possibility exists that the resultant change would be significant.
[2] In point of fact, since it's possible to have more than one point mutation in a gene, and that particular genes might be subject to repeated mutation over millions of years, I would tend to disagree with Miller that 100,000 is necessarily too high a number of mutations given his assumptions about the number of genes in the creatures at issue.
Modeling the number of mutations one would expect to be associated with a large speciation project spanning millions of years probably requires more considerable analysis than is plausible off the cuff during a live debate. Whether the number is enormous or not enormous doesn't really address the question of the possibility of descent with modification, it merely invites questions about the likelihood of a particular occurrence and the mechanisms by which different sorts of mutations might be possible.
There are some non-point-mutation sources of genetic alteration, like the so-called "jumping genes", that might be interesting to understand more about before trying to calculate the probability of speciation by descent with modification, or trying to use descent with modification to predict likely future fossil discovery patterns. For an entertaining (and scary) evening, read Doglas Preston's and Lincoln Child's purely-fictional horror-thriller Relic, the bogeyman of which originates with such a modification. While the monster is fictional, the discovery of "jumping genes" is not. A mechanism like the jumping gene might enable in one event to impart the accumulated effect of a whole geological age of mutation through the transposition, intact, of a proven gene from a different species with an evolutionary history as long as a gene's new host. Once isolated from its source species, the new gene would of course be subject to divergent evolution through the (slower and less radical) mechanism of random mutation.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Luddites: CERN Will Destroy Earth!
From the apparent safety of their underground bunker within filing distance from the United States District Court for Hawaii, critics of an experimental particle accelerator in -- wait for it -- Switzerland alleged the likelihood that the tool's scheduled activation in August would "ultimately result in the destruction of our planet." Operated by CERN, the collaborative physics research center where the world's first web server was programmed and operated after its Tim Berners-Lee published a proposal outlining the workings of hypertext, the supercollider known as the "Large Hadron Collider" would allow experiments on subatomic particles traveling virtually the speed of light. (If you need eight significant digits to tell the difference, you are close enough I will not argue with you.)
The quick version of what supercolliders do is to focus enormous energy on tiny subjects to create circumstances so unstable and short-lived and tiny that one determines what happened, very often, by looking at what happened after and working backward to what must have occurred to yield the things that lasted long enough to be seen. Anything requiring the use of a supercollider to create seems hardly a viable candidate for an immortal world-killing cataclysm. The best we can hope for, basically, is some good film to argue about afterward. Actually keeping some kind of miniscule superparticle or black hole is an idea Crichton might have trouble selling.
The position of the critics seems to be "some knowledge was not meant for Man!" To which I respond that with 6.6% of CERN staff being female, we can just have most of the folks there blink for a minute when the data is printed.
But I joke.
The idea that humans are not fit to know the rules of the game into which they've been born is just silly. The universe appears to conduct itself according to a number of general rules, and where the rules are unclear it's entirely reasonable to conduct experiments to understand what's really happening. The ability to travel hundreds of miles per hour, send email almost as fast as thought (well, sometimes that's not such an asset, is it?), and to produce enough food to sustain the world's billions wasn't a recent gift. Success like this took years of work, each generation building atop the discoveries of predecessors.
To abandon the search into the unknown as hopeless would be such a terrible insult to the memory of those whose dedication and care have brought us so far. While it's not obvious what will be learned through fundamental research, the likelihood that we'll learn nothing of value seems so slight in view of our history that I'm inclined to dismiss it.
It looks like the government's position on this is the same.
We have enough trouble getting well-designed scientific inquiry funded without this lunacy. Maybe later I'll give myself license to vent my spleen on politically-timely issues and how really poor research gets funding while the good work sits around waiting for a sponsor.
The quick version of what supercolliders do is to focus enormous energy on tiny subjects to create circumstances so unstable and short-lived and tiny that one determines what happened, very often, by looking at what happened after and working backward to what must have occurred to yield the things that lasted long enough to be seen. Anything requiring the use of a supercollider to create seems hardly a viable candidate for an immortal world-killing cataclysm. The best we can hope for, basically, is some good film to argue about afterward. Actually keeping some kind of miniscule superparticle or black hole is an idea Crichton might have trouble selling.
The position of the critics seems to be "some knowledge was not meant for Man!" To which I respond that with 6.6% of CERN staff being female, we can just have most of the folks there blink for a minute when the data is printed.
But I joke.
The idea that humans are not fit to know the rules of the game into which they've been born is just silly. The universe appears to conduct itself according to a number of general rules, and where the rules are unclear it's entirely reasonable to conduct experiments to understand what's really happening. The ability to travel hundreds of miles per hour, send email almost as fast as thought (well, sometimes that's not such an asset, is it?), and to produce enough food to sustain the world's billions wasn't a recent gift. Success like this took years of work, each generation building atop the discoveries of predecessors.
To abandon the search into the unknown as hopeless would be such a terrible insult to the memory of those whose dedication and care have brought us so far. While it's not obvious what will be learned through fundamental research, the likelihood that we'll learn nothing of value seems so slight in view of our history that I'm inclined to dismiss it.
It looks like the government's position on this is the same.
We have enough trouble getting well-designed scientific inquiry funded without this lunacy. Maybe later I'll give myself license to vent my spleen on politically-timely issues and how really poor research gets funding while the good work sits around waiting for a sponsor.
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