More Bad Science Writing

It always amazes me how people with little or no experience doing science end up as science writers, and, worse, end up being taken seriously as science writers.

The latest example is Mary Roach, author of a book about space travel, Packing for Mars. She was interviewed on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" yesterday, and this hilarious exchange took place:

Interviewer Tony Cox: "Do you know whether or not a gun would even operate in zero gravity?"

Roach: "Oh! You know, ahh, that's something for the Mythbusters to play around with!"

(Now, there is actually a small scientific issue about whether a gun will fire in space, but it has nothing to do with "zero gravity". A gun's firing comes from a chemical reaction, and that chemical reaction needs oxygen. In an oxygen-free environment, if the gunpowder doesn't contain its own oxidizer, the gun wouldn't fire. But, as I understand it, most modern gun cartridges do contain their own oxidizers, so this would not be an issue.)

If you don't know that "zero gravity" isn't an issue for whether a gun could fire, then you have no business writing a book about space travel.

Elsewhere in the program, Steve from Florence, Kentucky said, "I understand that when people are actually put into a Faraday cage so there's no electromagnetic radiation that actually comes in contact with them, they kind of lose the ability to actually think. As I understand it, when humans go into space, this is a problem. How has NASA dealt with this?" And instead of laughing and explaining why this is nonsense, Roach goes off onto a tangent about "space stupids".

Shouldn't a good science education be a prerequisite for science writers?

David Warren is an Ignoramus

What happens when a newspaper hires an ignoramus as a columnist?

You get this kind of drivel, which has been deftly taken apart by media culpa.

David Warren seems to have attended the Denyse O'Leary school of ignorance.

My Annie Hall Moment

One of the best moments in Annie Hall occurs when Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) is standing in line at the theater with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), listening to a guy pontificate behind him. When the guy mentions Marshall McLuhan, Singer pulls out McLuhan from behind a poster, who then proceeds to say "You know nothing of my work!"

Singer then says, "Boy, if life were only like this!"

Well, perhaps what just happened to me is not up to that standard, but here goes anyway:

Over at Uncommon Descent, writer "DonaldM" uses the satiric experiment of physicist Alan Sokal to argue against "dogmatic Darwinism" and for "the sunshine of Truth".

I wrote to Alan Sokal and asked him what he thought of DonaldM's ramblings. Here are excerpts from his e-mail to me (ellipses, as usual, denote omissions):

Many thanks for drawing my attention to that strange blog item... I don't really understand the logic of how that ID guy is purporting to use me!

I mean, I looked at Paul Greenberg's article in the Jewish World Review that he cites http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/greenberg070610.php3?printer_friendly and it seems to be a straightforward piece supporting my contention that there is such a thing as objective reality (though he didn't get quite correct his purported quote from me). But then the ID guy seems to overlook the obvious irony in the paragraph from Greenberg that he quotes, and takes it literally -- or else he just drops the subject there, says that "All this reminds me" of something else that is vaguely related, and goes on with his own pet story.

Now, that story makes a valid point, namely that how one interprets evidence is affected (though not determined) by the preconceptions one comes with. But if we are having a contest about who is more open to having his or her preconceptions be refuted by inconvenient evidence, then I would have to say that -- though no one is perfect -- scientists win hands down over the devotees of sacred texts. (I know, I know, they will respond in a chorus: ID is not religion, and our support for ID does not arise from any religious commitment but simply from our dispassionate analysis of the scientific evidence. Yeah, right.)

...


Isn't it great that life is like this!

The Day My Father Got Arrested

Sixty-eight years ago today, my father was arrested in Philadelphia.

He didn't rob a bank or run over a priest. No, his only crime was to take a photograph of one of the US's most enduring symbols of freedom: the Liberty Bell.

Back in 1942, the country was at war. My father hadn't yet enlisted in the Army; he was still a reporter for the Philadelphia Record. He was living only three blocks away from the Liberty Bell, which at the time was in Independence Hall. (Now it's in its own special building across the street.) My father often met tourists who wanted to take a picture of the Liberty Bell, but were prevented from doing so by an arbitrary rule imposed by the Bureau of City Property. My father got indignant when he learned that commercial photographers were able to take pictures of the Liberty Bell, but not the average citizen. That's the way my father was -- he liked to stick up for the little guy.

So he took a photograph -- and promptly got arrested. Maybe it was partly a publicity stunt for the newspaper, but I think he was trying to make a serious point, too. Officials asked if he was a communist, and called him "vindictive". He spent the night in jail. But after the article he wrote about his experience appeared in the Record, he was acquitted of the charge of "breach of the peace" by Magistrate Nathan A. Belfel. Maybe that's because my father was clever enough to bring along some important people, like the president of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, to witness his arrest and speak on his behalf. Today, I'm happy to say, that old rule about the Liberty Bell is no longer in place.

But some things never change. We're at war again. And ordinary citizens are still being harassed for taking perfectly legal photographs of public buildings.

My father died in 1995. I like to think, however, that if he were still alive, he'd still be sticking up for the little guy -- and for the right to photograph without being arrested by overzealous officials.

The Worst Science Books

Over at Uncommon Descent, Denyse O'Leary, the world's worst journalist™, gives us a list of her favorite science books --- in her usual barely literate style. (Note to Denyse: the plural of "coo" is not "coo's".)

No surprise, three of them aren't written by scientists: Darwin on Trial, Signature in the Cell, and Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution. Of the other two, one was written by a very mediocre scientist who made basic mistakes in previous books, and the other by a man whose bogus claims were repudiated by his own department. In Denyse's topsy-turvy world, actual scientists can be dismissed as "mooches and tax burdens", or "British aristocrats".

The late Martin Gardner studied this kind of crankery and knew how to recognize it. A scientific crank, Gardner said, "has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories." It is not possible to reason with this kind of idiocy -- ridicule is the best response.

Actually, Denyse's list would be a good start on a list of the Worst Science Books. Do you have any more nominations? I'll start with Judith Hooper's Of Moths and Men, Arthur Koestler's The Case of the Midwife Toad, and anything by Jeremy Rifkin.

Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose

I recently read a fun little book, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose, by Lee Alan Dugatkin. It's the story of a little-known episode in American history -- how Jefferson tried to combat the bogus claims of French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, that North American biota was "degenerate" compared to European biota.

Jefferson was worried that if such claims became accepted knowledge, then the US's reputation would suffer. Who would want to conduct trade with "degenerate" humans, or buy "degenerate" agricultural products?

In part, Buffon's claims were responsible for Jefferson's magnum opus, Notes on the State of Virginia, the most important American book published before 1800. Writing Notes involved correspondence with luminaries such as James Madison. Dugatkin quotes from a 1786 letter from Madison to Jefferson, where they discuss the fine points of weasel biology, including measuring the "width of the ears horizontally" and the "distance between the anus and the vulva".

But Jefferson had other ideas for convincing Buffon. As the book's title suggests, Jefferson's most concerted effort in terms of hands-on evidence was to procure a very large, dead, stuffed American moose - antlers and all - to hand Buffon personally in Paris, in effect saying "see".

You can't help but love a book that has sentences like "The first pre-moose incident occurred just before Jefferson was to sail off to his ministerial post in France" and "The second pre-moose instance -- wherein Jefferson encountered in Buffon a man who seemed to refuse to budge, even in the face of physical evidence -- revolved around the "mammoth" discussed in Notes on the State of Virginia."

I recommend it to anyone interested in the crucial role of ungulates in American history.

More Lousy Reporting from Mirko Petricevic

Mirko Petricevic, the religion reporter for the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, is at it again.

I previously criticized his coverage of a local creationist group. I pointed out that Petricevic -- unlike a good reporter -- never asks any hard questions of believers. Instead, his "reporting" is mostly just taking dictation.

Now he's got an article about the local Christian Science church, and he's employing exactly the same modus operandi: local believers are allowed to prattle on, and not a single skeptical word in the entire article.

Reading it, you would never know that there is no good evidence that prayer works to heal people of diseases. Nor would you know that Christian Science practitioners have been implicated in dozens of cases of medical neglect, where simple and safe treatment could have saved lives.

This is not just shoddy journalism, it's morally culpable.

I'm Sorry to Have Missed This

Reader Paul C. A. points out that I was too late to attend the International Remote Viewing Association's 2010 conference. Too bad, I would have liked to see so many woomeisters in one room.

Just think, for only $436 I could have heard

* Robert Jahn, formerly of PEAR, a parapsychology lab associated with Princeton that embarrassed them for years until it was finally disbanded in 2006;

* Noreen Renier, a self-proclaimed psychic whose attempts at solving crimes have been extensively debunked;

* Alexis Champion, who advocates "psychic archaeology";

* Paul Smith, who taught dowsing to participants;

* Courtney Brown, a political scientist at Emory University who, according to Michael Shermer, is not allowed to mention his affiliation with Emory when discussing remote viewing. Did I mention that he was a "yogic flyer"?

Oh, the fun I could have had! For example, in the description of Jahn's talk, he says, "repeated applications proved to diminish the yield, suggesting that disproportionate focus on the analytical components of the perception, rather than on the phenomenal gestalt, can result in obscuring the essence of the phenomenon and that the subjective quality of these experiences is more effectively enhanced when their inherent uncertainties are both acknowledged and emphasized."

Translation: we can't figure out why our discovery of tiny psi effects disappear when we do more trials.

Yet Another Literary Quiz

What American polymath, professor, science and fiction writer lived in this house in Newton, Massachusetts from 1956 to 1970? Hint: he has an asteroid and a crater on Mars named after him.

Sorry about the photo quality - it was pouring at the time.

Literary Quiz

This house in New England was owned by one of America's most celebrated writers. One of his lesser-known achievements was a long attack on a home-grown American religion. This writer wrote most of his celebrated works in this house.

Who is it?

Fermat's Last Theorem Silliness

I am fascinated by cranks and crank mathematics, and there's a lot of them/it out there. Here's a new "proof" of Fermat's last theorem I was sent yesterday. There is only a small amount of entertainment value in this one, with phrases such as "only one of those cofactors is organically entered into the structure of the pair of conjugate variables". Much better is the book The Life-Romance of an Algebraist by George Winslow Pierce.

Some Unimpressive Numerology

The fine-structure constant α is a fundamental constant in physics, and is currently estimated to be approximately .0072973525376.

The physicist Arthur Eddington, who became rather eccentric and believed he could compute the number of protons in the universe accurately, thought it was equal to exactly 1/137, but our current estimate gives something closer to 1/137.03599967899.

The mathematician James Gilson seems to think that α is given by the rather complicated formula (29/π)*cos(π/137)*tan(π/(137*29)). But this is just numerology, and not even particularly impressive numerology. The trick is that tan(x) is very close to x when x is small, and cos(x) is very close to 1 when x is small. So Gilson's formula is just (29/π) times something that is very close to π/(137*29), with an additional fudge factor of something that's very close to 1 thrown in. There is no real surprise, then, that one can find small integers to make this close to α.

Heck, it's obvious that the real value of the fine structure constant is actually 250/34259. Or maybe (cos(2 π/57) - sin(4 π/47))/100? I can't decide which.

Great Moments in Reprint Requests

I just received the following letter:

Dear Professor Shallit,

I am a graduate student in XXX University majoring in YYY. I want to cite one of your papers that should be of great use to my current research. The title of the paper is "Randomized Algorithms in Number Theory", published on Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 39 (1986), S1.

Because our library does not have access to the article, it should be best that you send me a copy via email.

I really appreciate your worthless help!


Now that's the way to ask for a reprint!

John Alexander

My great-great-great-great-grandfather was John Alexander (1738-1799), a minister in the Church of England and a Loyalist during the Revolutionary War. (Although I'd have preferred a freethinker and a revolutionary, we don't get to choose our ancestors.) Here is a copy of his will, as reproduced in Volume 2, No. 4 (October 1901) of J. R. B. Hathaway's North Carolina Historical and Genealogical Register. The will is dated April 4 1795 and was probated in the August 1799 term of the court of Bertie County, North Carolina.


"Da Praecepta, Familiae, Tuae nam Tu Crive Morituruses."

"For as much as the last scene of life seems hastening on, and the curtain ready to fall," I think it prudent, before I make my final exit off the stage, whereon I have some time acted, to dispose of the few trifles fortune has bestowed me, in manner following to-wit:

Imprimis. I Give and bequeath to my two Daughters, Martha and Rachel, all and every part of my property whatever, to be equally divided between them, and to their lawful heirs forever. On the demise of either, before impowered to make a will, the surviving sister inherits the whole and should both decease, before the laws capacitate to will, then, my remaining property to be wholly converted to Educating the poor children within the counties of Hertford and Bertie; under such regulations as my Executors shall think fit. My body I bequeath to the earth, whence it originated, My Soul Immortal and unalloyed to dust, I commend to the Father of Mercies.

The manly, masculine Voice of Orthodoxy, is no longer heard in our land. Far, therefore, from my Grave be the senseless Rant of Whining Fanaticism; her hated and successful rival --- Cant and Grimace dishonour the dead, as well as Disgrace the living. Let the monitor within, who never Deceives, alone pronounce my Funeral Oration; while some Friendly hand Deposits my poor remains Close by the ashes of my beloved Daughter Elizabeth, with whom I trust to share a happy Eternity.

And of this my last Will and Testament, I constitute and appoint Capt'n George West, George Outlaw, Esq., and Mr. Edward Outlaw, my Executors, On whose Probity, Honor, and Disinterested Friendship, I entirely rely for the faithful Discharge of the trust I repose in them. Beseeching them, as they would approve themselves to him who is the Father of the Fatherless, to use all possible means of Inspiring my children with a love of Virtue and an abhorrence of Vice, Restraining them from all plans and persons Dangerous to their Virtue or Innocency --- Giving them an Education to their rank in life suitable and becoming. Let their books and their needles be their principal companions and Employ. I could wish the laws enable me to do more for my wretched and unfortunate slaves than that of recommending them to lenity and mild treatment.

Be to their faults a little blind;
Be to their virtues ever kind.

JOHN ALEXANDER.


The "manly, masculine Voice of Orthodoxy" is the Church of England; the "senseless Rant of Whining Fanaticism" is either the Episcopalian Church or the Baptist Church.

I don't know why, if he found his slaves "wretched and unfortunate", he didn't just free them. But perhaps it was just so far beyond the social norm that he didn't feel it possible to do so.

A Famous Wall

I would guess this is the most famous wall in professional sports. What do you think?

Great Moments in Lousy Writing

Harlan Coben is a pretty good mystery writer. I don't like his Myron Bolitar novels, but that's because I don't like the main character, a sports agent, at all. But some of his other books are top-notch: Tell No One, which was made into a movie by the French director Guillaume Canet (Ne le dis à personne) is excellent, as are many of his other stand-alone novels. Each stand-alone has a similar theme: something in the distant past of a character's life is eventually revealed, with strong repercussions in the present day, changing what many of the characters thought they knew.

His latest book, Caught, is about the disappearance of a high-school lacrosse player, and, while it starts slowly, you get the trademark Coben reversals in the last 50 pages. It's a good summer read.

However, there was one passage that stood out (p. 209):

Something was niggling at the back of Wendy's brain. It was there, just out of sight, but she couldn't quite get to it.

Is there anything more infuriating in mystery writing than this cliché? The reader learns that something is triggered at the back of the detective's mind, and it's like a great big sign reading, "IF YOU WANT TO FIGURE IT OUT, THIS IS AN IMPORTANT CLUE."

What are some other mystery novel clichés that turn you off?

No Ghost in the Machine

Back when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, I worked as a computer consultant for UC Berkeley's Computing Services department. One day a woman came in and wanted a tour of our APL graphics lab. So I showed her the machines we had, which included Tektronix 4013 and 4015 terminals, and one 4027, and drew a few things for her. But then the incomprehension set in:

"Who's doing the drawing on the screen?" she asked.

I explained that the program was doing the drawing.

"No, I mean what person is doing the drawing that we see?" she clarified.

I explained that the program was written by me and other people.

"No, I don't mean the program. I mean, who is doing the actual drawing, right now?

I explained that an electron gun inside the machine activated a zinc sulfide phosphor, and that it was directed by the program. I then showed her what a program looked like.

All to no avail. She could not comprehend that all this was taking place with no direct human control. Of course, humans wrote the program and built the machines, but that didn't console her. She was simply unable to wrap her mind around the fact that a machine could draw pictures. For her, pictures were the province of humans, and it was impossible that this province could ever be invaded by machines. I soon realized that nothing I could say could rescue this poor woman from the prison of her preconceptions. Finally, after suggesting some books about computers and science she should read, I told her I could not devote any more time to our discussion, and I sadly went back to my office. It was one of the first experiences I ever had of being unable to explain something so simple to someone.

That's the same kind of feeling I have when I read something like this post over at Telic Thoughts. Bradford, one of the more dense commentators there, quotes a famous passage of Leibniz

Suppose that there be a machine, the structure of which produces thinking, feeling, and perceiving; imagine this machine enlarged but preserving the same proportions, so that you could enter it as if it were a mill. This being supposed you might visit its inside; but what would you observe there? Nothing but parts which push and move each other, and never anything which could explain perception.

But Leibniz's argument is not much of an argument. He seems to take it for granted that understanding how the parts of a machine work can't give us understanding of how the machine functions as a whole. Even in Leibniz's day this must have seemed silly.

Bradford follows it up with the following from someone named RLC:

The machine, of course, is analogous to the brain. If we were able to walk into the brain as if it were a factory, what would we find there other than electrochemical reactions taking place along the neurons? How do these chemical and electrical phenomena map, or translate, to sensations like red or sweet? Where, exactly, are these sensations? How do chemical reactions generate things like beliefs, doubts, regrets, certainty, or purposes? How do they create understanding of a problem or appreciation of something like beauty? How does a flow of ions or the coupling of molecules impose a meaning on a page of text? How can a chemical process or an electrical potential have content or be about something?

Like my acquaintance in the graphics lab 30 years ago, poor RLC is trapped by his/her own preconceptions, I don't know what to say. How can anyone, writing a post on a blog which is entirely mediated by things like electrons in wires or magnetic disk storage, nevertheless ask "How can a chemical process or an electrical potential have content or be about something?" The irony is really mind-boggling. Does RLC ever use a phone or watch TV? For that matter, if he/she has trouble with the idea of "electrical potential" being "about something", how come he/she has no trouble with the idea of carbon atoms on a page being "about something"?

We are already beginning to understand how the brain works. We know, for example, how the eye focuses light on the retina, how the retina contains photoreceptors, how these photoreceptors react to different wavelengths of light, and how signals are sent through the optic nerve to the brain. We know that red light is handled differently from green light because different opsins absorb different wavelengths. And the more we understand, the more the brain looks like Leibniz's analogy. There is no ghost in the machine, there are simply systems relying on chemistry and physics. That's it.

To be confused like RLC means that one has to believe that all the chemical and physical apparatus of the brain, which is clearly collects data from the outside world and processes it, is just a coincidence. Sure, the apparatus is there, but somehow it's not really necessary, because there is some "mind" or "spirit" not ultimately reducible to the apparatus.

Here's an analogy. Suppose someone gives us a sophisticated robot that can navigate terrain, avoid obstacles, and report information about what it has seen. We can then take this robot apart, piece by piece. We see and study the CCD camera, the chips that process the information, and the LCD screens. Eventually we have a complete picture of how the robot works. What did we fail to understand by our reductionism?

Our understanding of how the brain works, when it is completed, will come from a complete picture of how all its systems function and interact. There's no magic to it - our sensations, feelings, understanding, appreciation of beauty - they are all outcomes of these systems. And there will still be people like RLC who will sit there, uncomprehending, and complain that we haven't explained anything, saying,

"But how can chemistry and physics be about something?"

Casey Luskin: Information Theory Expert

Well, it looks like the Discovery Institute was so unnerved by my pointing out the misunderstandings and misrepresentations in Stephen Meyer's book, Signature in the Cell, that they devoted two whole chapters to attacking me in their new book. The always-repulsive David Klinghoffer called me a "pygmy" and made fun of the name of my university (page 6). Paul Nelson called my critique a "fluffy confection" and alleged I was guilty of "sophistry". Casey Luskin said I indulged in "gratuitous invective".

The DI's responses to my arguments about Signature are about at the level of what you'd expect from them. I already replied to Paul Nelson months ago here, but of course they didn't see fit to reference that.

In their new book, they trot out lawyer Casey Luskin as their new expert on information theory. Luskin's main points are

(1) Shannon and Kolmogorov complexity are not "useful metrics of functional biological information" and
(2) eminent scientists have adopted Dembski and Meyer's notion of "functional information".

Here's my response:

(1) No measure of information is perfect. Both Shannon and Kolmogorov have proved useful in biological contexts; to claim, as Luskin does that they are "outmoded tools" is ridiculous. An exercise for Luskin, or anyone else: do a search of the scientific literature for "Shannon information" in biology, and count how many hits you get. Now do the same thing for "functional information". See the difference?

Indeed, it is the apparent incompressibility of the genome that suggests, through Kolmogorov complexity, that random mutations played a very significant role in its creation.

(2) Luskin cites a 1973 book by Orgel, where Orgel used the term "specified complexity", as evidence that creationist information is used by real scientists. However, Orgel did not give a rigorous definition of the term, and no one has since then. The term was only used in a popular book, and Orgel never published a definition in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Dembski later claimed that Orgel's term was the same as his, and Luskin now repeats this falsehood. A lie can travel around the world, while the truth is just lacing up its sneakers.

Luskin points out that very recently, Szostak has introduced a notion of "functional information". However, Szostak's "functional information" is not a general-purpose measure of information. It certainly does not obey the axioms of information as studied by information theorists, and it does not obey Dembski's "law of conservation of information". Furthermore, it is only defined relative to a set of functions that one specifies. Change the functions, and you might get a completely different measure. So it is clear that Szostak's measure is not the same as Dembski's.

Might Szostak's idea prove useful one day? Perhaps, although the jury is still out. It has yet to receive many citations in the scientific literature; one of the papers cited by Luskin is by creationist Kirk Durston. The last time I looked, Durston's paper had essentially no impact at all, to judge by citation counts.

In any event, my claim was "Information scientists do not speak about ‘specified information’ or ‘functional information.’” Luskin offers Szostak as a counterexample. But Szostak is not an information scientist; he's a biologist. No discussion of "functional information" has yet appeared in the peer-reviewed information theory literature, which was my point. Luskin's trotting out of Szostak's paper does not refute that.

A Much-Too-Credulous Review of Signature in the Cell

John Walker is a pretty bright guy who's done some interesting work, but in this review of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell, he demonstrates insufficient skepticism about Meyer's claims.

He asks, where did the information to specify the first replicator come from?, and then follows with this non-sequitur: The simplest known free living organism (although you may quibble about this, given that it's a parasite) has a genome of 582,970 base pairs, or about one megabit (assuming two bits of information for each nucleotide, of which there are four possibilities).

Of course, this is silly. Nobody thinks the first replicator was anywhere near this complicated, or even that it necessarily had a "genome" based on DNA. Even the genetic code itself may have evolved. Hypotheses like the RNA World suggest that the first replicator might have consisted of only a few hundred base-pairs.

Oddly enough for someone who has worked in artificial life, Walker shows no sign of having read Koza's 1994 paper, which shows how self-replicators can emerge spontaneously and with high probability in computer simulations.

He then goes on to claim you find that in the finite time our universe has existed, you could have produced about 500 bits of structured, functional information by random search. The only problem? The term "structured, functional information" has no definition in the scientific literature - it's just babble invented by creationists like Dembski and Meyer. There's no sign that Walker has read any of the criticism of Dembski's work.

Walker goes on to give a definition of "structured, functional information" as "information which has a meaning expressed in a separate domain than its raw components". But then there are lots of examples of such information occurring in nature, such as varves. Varves are layers of sediment which encode yearly information about the environment in which they formed. Another example is Arctic ice cores, which encode essential information about climate that is being mined by climatologists today.

Finally, the notion of "meaning" is incoherent. Disagree? Then tell me which of the following strings have "meaning" and which do not:

#1:
001001001100011011111010010111010010111000100000100000100111

#2:
010100111011001100001111101011100101110011110110010000001101

#3:
101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010

#4:
101111101111101110101110111110101111101110101110101110101001

If that's too easy for you, let's try another. List all the binary strings of length 10 that have "meaning", and explain, for each one, what the meaning is.

Bottom line: insufficient skepticism leads to credulous acceptance of bad ideas.

Stephen Meyer - More Honesty Problems?

At Christianity Today, Stephen Meyer repeats the falsehood that "We know that information—whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal—always comes from an intelligent source." It's simply not so - for example, in the Kolmogorov theory, any random source produces information. Even in Meyer's own idiosyncratic definition of information, natural systems produce information - such as when you stick your head out the window to see if it will rain that day. Where did you get that information? Not from any intelligent source.

And he adds some new falsehoods: "My recent book on the subject received enthusiastic endorsements from many scientists not previously known as advocates of ID, such as chemist Philip Skell, a National Academy of Sciences member..."

As is well-known to anyone who follows the creation-evolution debate, Philip Skell is a longtime evolution opponent. His anti-evolution activity dates from at least 2000, and he has been quite active since then.

Meyer also claims, "those who reject ID within the scientific community do so not because they have a better explanation of the relevant evidence, but because they affirm a definition of science that requires them to reject explanations involving intelligence—whatever the evidence shows". Scientists don't reject explanations involving "intelligence"; they simply don't find "intelligence" alone to be a useful explanation for most phenomena. No archaeologist finds a potsherd and exclaims, "Intelligence must have been involved in the creation of this pot!" To do so would be regarded as moronic. Rather, archaeologists spend their time figuring out who made an artifact, what they used it for, and how it fits into a larger understanding of the human culture it was a part of. Contrary to Meyer's bogus claim, fields like archaeology have no problem incorporating human agency into their studies. But no scientific field incorporates agency without some evidence of the agent actually existing - something Meyer has yet to provide.

If ID wants to be taken seriously, ID advocates have to distance themselves from spokesmen who are more interested in public relations than scientific truth.

How to Test for Syphilis

Yesterday on NPR's "All Things Considered" I heard this segment about "sparsity", which tried to link several different issues about data compression in one story. I don't think it was very successful, and the chosen term "sparsity" wasn't really representative of the content.

Nevertheless, the piece opened up with an interesting puzzle. The Army wants to do comprehensive blood tests for syphilis, a relatively rare disease, but each individual test is expensive. How can they test everyone more cheaply?

The idea is simple: mix the blood of g individuals together, and test that. A positive outcome indicates that at least one person in the group has syphilis, and a negative outcome indicates that no person in the group has it. In the event of a positive outcome, test all the members of the group.

Now let p be the probability that a randomly-chosen person has syphilis, and let N be the population size. What is the optimal size for the group? Choose g too small, and you end up doing lots of tests, because N/g (the number of groups) is large. Choose g too large, and it becomes very likely that testing the group will be positive, so you end up doing lots of tests again. Somewhere in between is the optimal choice of g.

How do we find it? There are N/g groups, and we have to test each of them. A randomly-chosen person fails to have syphilis with probability 1-p, so the probability that everyone in the group fails to have it is (1-p)^g. Hence the probability that a group tests positive is 1-(1-p)^g, and the expected number of positive-testing groups is (N/g)(1-(1-p)^g). We have to test each person in a positive group, so this means g(N/g)(1-(1-p)^g) = N(1-(1-p)^g) additional tests. If the cost of a test is C, then the total cost is CN/g (the cost to test each group), plus CN(1-(1-p)^g) (the cost to test everyone in the positive-testing groups). Factoring out CN, we need to minimize

1/g + 1 - (1-p)^g.       (1)

Notice that this expression only depends on p, the probability.

We can, in fact, find a closed form for this minimum (or at least Maple can), but it is somewhat complicated, and depends on the little-known Lambert W-function. It's easier to compute the minimum through bisection or some other method for any particular p. A recent estimate is that syphilis occurs in about 15.4 per 100,000 people, which corresponds to p = .000154. For this value of p, the optimal g is g = 81, which gives (1) the value of .0247. Thus, for this p, we are able to test everyone by combining tests -- for less than 3% of the cost of testing everyone individually.

By the way, a simple heuristic argument suggests that the g that minimizes (1) will be about p^-½: to minimize (1), choose g so that the two terms in the sum (1), 1/g and 1-(1-p)^g, are equal. Set g = p^-½; then 1/g = p^½. On the other hand, 1-(1-p)^g = 1 - (1-g^-2)^g. But (1-1/g)^g is about 1/e for large g, so using the Taylor series for exp(x), we see that 1 - (1-g^-2)^g is about 1/g, too. So this choice of g will be very close to the one minimizing (1), and the value of (1) is therefore about 2/g = 2 p^½.

Added: with more complicated tests (see the comments), one can do even better. But some of the proposed methods are so complicated that it seems to me the possibility of human error in carrying them out would rule them out.

Charlie Went Through the Dryer

Son #2 put his Charlie Card (the electronic card that lets you ride on Boston public transit) through the dryer.

Twice.

Believe it or not, it still works.

Turing vs. the Creationists

Today we bring you your daily dose of breathtaking inanity from the creationist blog Uncommon Descent. A poster named "niwrad" (that's "Darwin" spelled backwards - the creationists are oh-so-clever) finds yet another reason to reject Darwinism.

"niwrad" draws an analogy with computer programming, and then "explain[s] as clearly as possible exactly what a program is". He goes on to say, "In order to process information – i.e. create software – it is necessary to create data and programs. Data is passive information: it cannot change or decide anything by itself" while "a program, in its simplest concept, is a blueprint specifying the reiteration of basic decision structures, about what to do and when to do it."

He/she then goes to say, "The argument which I am putting forward here cuts through these definitional controversies, because from my informatics-based perspective there are really only two possibilities, which can be summarized as follows: either (a) genes are data (which corresponds to the above old definition of a gene); or (b) genes are functions (which corresponds to the new definition)", gives incoherent reasons for rejecting both views, and concludes, "To sum up: Darwinism, from an informatics point of view, has absolutely zero credibility."

Poor "niwrad". He/she/it never learned much computer science, because we have known at least since 1936 that the artificial distinction between "program" and "data" is illusory. The existence of a universal machine shows that we can treat programs and data in the same fashion. That, indeed, was one of the fundamental insights of Alan Turing in his famous paper, "On computable numbers...". As Kleinberg and Papadimitriou remark, "Indeed, our style of writing programs and then executing them is so ingrained in our view of computation that it takes a moment to appreciate the consequences that flow from a universal machine. It means that programs and data are really the same thing: a program is just a sequence of symbols that looks like any other piece of input; but when fed to a universal machine, this input wakes up and begins to compute. Think of mobile code, java applets, e-mail viruses: your computer downloads them as data, and then runs them as programs."

Furthermore, we know from the field of DNA computing that very simple abstract operations, corresponding to the physics and chemistry of DNA, can simulate universal computation.

If creationists want to avoid being defeated by the ghost of Alan Turing, they need to spend more time reading about what is known in computer science and biology, and less time proclaiming (as "niwrad" did) that "God, also in this case, expects far less from us than what He Himself did and does".

Atheism - The Energy-Efficient Worldview

Spotted on a bus in Boston yesterday:



I guess that makes atheism the energy-efficient worldview. Go green!

An Academic Challenge

Today I saw the following poster at MIT:



This is the brainchild of the folks at phdchallenge.org. They want someone to get the phrase "I smoke crack rocks" into a scientific paper before December 1 of this year.

But someone at the challenge must have been smoking something, because in the FAQ, they say, "If your potential contest entry contains at least 90% of the words from challenge phrase, you may still submit it. For example, for the 2010 PhD Challenge, submissions containing the phrases I SMOKE CRACK and SMOKE CRACK ROCKS are valid and would be considered in the final judging." They seem to think that 75% is greater than or equal to 90%.

A Question for Christians

Here's a question for Christians - I'm genuinely interested in hearing your thoughts and I won't take issue with what you say.

Read this short blog post by Christian philosopher Doug Groothuis:

The more we submit to the higher, the more control we have over ourselves, and the more we find our place with that which is equal to us and and with that which is lower. Otherwise, we botch the hierarchy and bring (even more) chaos into this wounded world.

What do you make of it? Do you find it deep, or shallow? Insightful or fatuous? Meaningful or meaningless?

I'll give you my opinion in the comments, eventually, so as not to poison the well too much.

Do Asthmatics Really Sneeze at Plastic Flowers?

Do asthmatics really sneeze at plastic flowers, presuming them to be real?

So a variety of papers, books, and websites -- many of them arguing that the mind is "immaterial" -- would have you believe. Just to list a few:

James Le Fanu, in his 2009 book Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, writes (p. 219): "it is well recognised, for example, that asthmatics sneeze in the presence of plastic flowers, presuming them to be real", but he gives no citation.

Kenneth R. Pelletier, in a chapter "Between mind and body: stress, emotions and health" in a 1993 Consumer Reports book edited by D. Goleman and J. Gurin entitled Mind Body Medicine: How to Use Your Mind for Better Health, claims in the very first line of his article that "Asthmatics sneeze at plastic flowers" (p. 19). He gives no citation, but repeats this claim in his 1995 book Sound Mind, Sound Body: A New Model for Lifelong Health, writing (p. 79): "Control is the vital link between mind and body. It is the pivotal point between psychological attitudes and our physical responses. Asthmatics sneeze at plastic flowers."

Anees A. Sheikh, in his 2002 book Healing images: the role of imagination in health quotes Pelletier, as does Max Velmans, in a paper entitled How could conscious experiences affect brains? that appeared in the Journal of Consciousness Studies 9 (11) (2002), 3-29.

Arthur V. N. Brooks, in a paper presented at the Philosophical Club of Cleveland in 1993, asks "Why do asthmatics sneeze at plastic flowers?" No citation is given.

Christopher Gilbert, a physician currently at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco, writes in a 1998 article in the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies that "Asthma attacks, for example, can be set off by plastic flowers if the individual has had asthma responses to flowers in the past, and believes the flowers are real."

Naomi Judd, in her 1994 autobiography Love Can Build a Bridge, writes (p. 449) that "The mind is the deepest influence on the body. Asthmatics have been known to sneeze at plastic flowers." She seems to be citing Pelletier (1993).

A 1923 address by W. Langdon Brown that appeared in Proc. Roy. Soc. Med. 16 (1923), 1-16. He says, "That asthma often occurs in neuropathic families, and that asthmatics are unduly suggestible, are well-known facts. The paroxysm excited by an artificial flower figures in every text-book."

And what appears to be the original citation is an 1886 paper entitled "The production of the so-called "rose cold" by means of an artificial rose", by John Noland Mackenzie, in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences.

With all these citations, it would certainly seem to be a fact, right?

Not so fast.

First, single anecdotal examples (like that given in the 1886 paper) are not very convincing. There are lots of reasons other than psychological ones why someone allergic to flowers might sneeze in the presence of a plastic flower - such as, for example, having an allergy to plastic or residues of chemicals used to make plastic. That's why a controlled study would be needed to be truly convincing.

Second, Neville J. King, in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine 3 (2) (1980), 169-189, wrote, "The classical conditioning of human asthma attacks also has yet to be reliably demonstrated. Despite the many anecdotal cases of human asthma attacks elicited by the sight of dust and artificial flowers (Dunbar, 1954; McGovern and Knight, 1967) which are consistent with a classical conditioning model of asthma, attempts at the classical conditioning of human asthma in the laboratory have not been successful. Of approximately 100 asthmatic patients, Dekker et al. (1957) could succeed in classically conditioning asthma attacks to apparatus used in allergy investigations in only 2 of these patients. Also, Knapp (1963) reported negative findings after a careful and elaborate series of experiments on conditioned asthma in human beings. As Purcell and Weiss (1970) concluded in their review, "it appears accurate to state that, with either animals or human beings, the successful conditioning of asthma remains to be demonstrated, even in the opinion of those investigations whose original positive reports on conditioning are cited frequently" (p. 607).

Asthma is a common disease with a strong genetic component. If you have two asthmatic parents, your chances of developing asthma are about 1 in 2. Asthmatics react to various allergens and to infections of the upper respiratory system. In the 1930's, under the influence of Freud's batty ideas, many people claimed asthma was due to "separation anxiety", a claim that has since been discredited. Later, it has been claimed by some doctors that asthma was just a conditioned response, but as we have seen, this has not been demonstrated rigorously.

All in all, I am skeptical of the claim that asthmatics sneeze at plastic flowers. Even if it were true, I don't see how it supports the claim that the mind is "immaterial". I know very little about neuroscience, but it doesn't seem that farfetched to me that an neural network could, after repeated stimulation, associate some autonomic response such as sneezing, with some visual stimulation. No supernatural explanation seems to be required.

Our House on TV

The CTV show Dan for Mayor is filmed in Kitchener, Ontario, where I normally live. (This year I'm on sabbatical at MIT.)

I don't find the show particularly funny, but I have a soft spot for it, because last fall they filmed on our street. In Season 1, Episode 2, you can see the interior of our house. If you're in Canada, you can watch it on the CTV web site, but elsewhere you can buy it from the Itunes store or brave Megavideo. Our house appears about the 9 minute mark. Here's a screenshot:



Oddly enough, where we're temporarily living, in Newton, MA, another TV show was filmed just around the corner: a pilot for a CBS show called "Quinn-tuplets".

Oh, yeah, I forgot to say - that's Carl Zehr, mayor of Kitchener, in the pic above. Too bad we weren't there.

Muddled Thinking about Free Will

Over at his blog, in support of the existence of "free will", David Heddle says (in a comment):

If free will is an illusion, then deterrents are an illusion. How can a deterrent make me choose not to commit a crime, unless I have the facility of choice?

I think this is more muddled thinking about free will. I still don't know what free will is supposed to mean, exactly, and I don't think anyone else does, either.

But, ignoring this, let's address Heddle's claim. Could deterrents work on humans if they have no free will? I think the answer is clearly, yes. Let's pretend that humans are soulless computational machines, shaped by evolution, who act based on a very very very complicated algorithm that takes sensory impressions as inputs and produces actions as outputs. Let's say that this algorithm tends, generally speaking, to try to ensure survival and pleasure and reproduction of the individual. Now the human machine suddenly sees resources, for the taking, that belong to another. The human machine does a cost-benefit analysis to "decide" whether to take the resources or not. In the absence of a known deterrent, such as a dangerous dog or future incarceration, the human machine may decide to take the resource. In the presence of a deterrent, the human machine may make another decision.

How does this involve "free will"? You can call this decision-making "free will" if you like. But then a thermostat has free will, too.

It's not at all surprising to anyone who thinks about computation for a living that a complicated algorithm can result in different behavior based on different inputs. The mystery to me is why Heddle thinks this says anything about free will.

Beg the Question

Here's a great post about the phrase "beg the question", it history, and what to do about its misuse.

Authoritarian High School Superintendent of the Month

This month's Authoritarianism Award goes to Ricky Clapton, superintendent of the Copiah County schools in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. Mr. Clapton erased a student from her class yearbook. And what was her offense? Did she murder someone, or cheat on her final exams? No. She wore a tuxedo instead of a dress.

When asked about it, Mr. Clapton retreated behind legalese, saying "We have had our legal counsel research the validity of the position of the School District on this matter.. We are informed by counsel that this exact issue has been litigated in federal court. The decisions of the federal courts completely support the policy of the district in this regard. It is the desire of the Copiah County School District to inform, first, the patrons of the district, and second, all other interested parties, that its position is not arbitrary, capricious or unlawful, but is based upon sound educational policy and legal precedent."

Horseshit.

Congratulations, Mr. Clapton. Your award is well-deserved.

LaTeX Search Tool

Well, this doesn't do exactly what I'd want - but latexsearch is at least a start to making mathematical equations searchable.

Boston Marathon!

The Boston Marathon went by on Commonwealth Avenue, just a few blocks away from where I'm living in Newton. We watched at about mile 20 of the course, at the start of the infamous Newton hills, the most famous of which is called "Heartbreak Hill".

Here are a few pictures:



Above: Teyba Erkesso, the top woman finisher, from Ethiopia, all alone with a very substantial lead near mile 20. She would fade and still win, but only by a few seconds.



Above: Robert Cheruiyot (#6) and Deriba Merga (#1) duelling near mile 20. Cheruiyot would win in 2:05:52, a minute and a half ahead of his nearest competitor.



Wheelchair marathoners near mile 20: In the front, from left to right: Kota Hokinoue of Japan (finished 3rd); Soejima Masazumi of Japan (finished 4th); Ernst van Dyk of South Africa (the winner). In the back: Roger Puigbo of Spain (finished 5th) and Kriga Schabort of the USA (finished 2nd).

Biblical Mathematics

For a good laugh, look at this website, which claims to find the values of the mathematical constants π = 3.14159... and e = 2.71828 ... hidden in the bible.

Needless to say, such numerology is not considered very highly by most mathematicians. It depends too much on the choice of passage, and the method of calculation. In this page, the author decides that the proper measure is the number of letters times the product of the letters divided by the number of words times the product of the words, but on what basis? And even then, he must remove powers of 10 to get his desired result, and cheat in other ways, such as considering a comma as a letter for one calculation, but not another.

Sad to say, this kind of foolishness is the one area where devout Jews and Muslims find agreement. Numerology has wide currency among many Jewish people, where it is called gematria, and among Muslims such as Louis Farrakhan, who says things like, "What is so deep about this number 19? Why are we standing on the Capitol steps today? That number 19 -- when you have a nine you have a womb that is pregnant. And when you have a one standing by the nine, it means that there's something secret that has to be unfolded."

Jesus Off Limits for Criticism

Here's a laughable press release from a Christian group that claims "Blasphemy does not qualify as free speech".

They're wrong. It does.

They go on to claim, "Gallaudet University has no right to harm and slander the spotless reputation of the God-Man with blasphemy".

They're wrong. It does.

Look for more and more demands from fundamentalist believers of all religions that criticism of their beliefs be outlawed.

Ignoramus of the Month: Denyse O'Leary

Not all intelligent design advocates are dishonest. Some of them are merely ignorant, abysmally ignorant, pig-stupefyingly-ignorant of the theory they criticize.

Example: here is Canadian "journalist" Denyse O'Leary describing her understanding of evolution:

So the claim is, "changed shape, changed size, changed metabolism and changed food source. How much more MACRO do you expect an organism to evolve?"

Hmmmm. Kittens do this all the time.

Change size? You bet. Goes from a couple of ounces to five lbs in half a year.

Confusing development of an individual with evolution in a population? That's a misconception about evolution that is usually ironed out in high school. Looks like Denyse was absent that day. I'd blame Pokemon, but I think Denyse is far too ancient for that.

Denyse O'Leary: our ignoramus of the month.


Update: O'Leary's posting was apparently too stupid even for her. It now seems to have disappeared from her website.

Further update: it's now back here.

My Sabbatical Project

Now that the contract has finally been signed, I can reveal my sabbatical project:



Oxford University Press will be publishing my latest book, An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers and Zombies. This is a revised edition of the classic text of Hardy and Wright, modified to include new results in algebraic number theory and zombiosis. I am particularly proud of the new chapter that discusses Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem, which has a short section mentioning how Wiles was able to defend himself from a zombified Ken Ribet using the Tate module and a meat cleaver.

This is just one of a series of new editions of classic mathematical books that have been updated for the 21st century. I am really looking forward to the updated version of Constance's Reid's book, entitled David Hilbert: Vampire Slayer.

(Hat tip: A. L. and A. S. for the graphic.)

Alan Cobham

Alan Belmont Cobham (b. November 4 1927, San Francisco) is a mathematician and theoretical computer scientist. He was an undergraduate at Oberlin College and the University of Chicago, and later went on to do graduate work at both Berkeley and MIT, although he never got a Ph. D. He worked at IBM Yorktown Heights, and for a while was chair of the computer science department at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He still lives in Middletown. I recently had a chance to talk briefly with Alan Cobham at his home, and took the picture above.

He is known for several achievements. He was one of the first people to bring attention to the complexity class P, in a paper entitled "The intrinsic computational difficulty of functions", where he proposed studying the functions computable in polynomial time.

In 1969, he wrote the first of two papers on what are now called "automatic sequences" (he called them "uniform tag sequences"). An automatic sequence (a_n) is one in which the nth term can be calculated by expressing n in some base k, feeding it into a deterministic finite automaton, and then looking at the state reached at the end. An output function converts the state name into (a_n). In this paper Cobham proved a subtle and beautiful result: if a sequence is generated by two automata that accept inputs expressed in multiplicatively independent bases, then it is ultimately periodic. There is still no really simple proof of this result.

In 1972, he wrote a very influential paper entitled "Uniform tag sequences", where the theory of automatic sequences was developed in great detail. This paper has led to hundreds of others exploring the theory of automatic sequences and generalizing them.

I Won't Be Going to This Cafe

Two women sharing a kiss got told off by the owner of the 1842 Cafe in Waterloo, Ontario. Well, I guess I won't be buying anything from that place when I return to KW from my sabbatical.

Protons, Proteins - What's the Difference?

NPR's science reporter Nell Greenfieldboyce just now (2 PM EST, March 30) referred to the Large Hadron Collider sending "beams of proteins whizzing around a 17-mile circular tunnel, then smash[ing] them together at high speed, creating a shower of debris". I sure hope that was just a slip of the tongue. Any science journalist who doesn't know immediately what the difference between a proton and protein is, and why the LHC would be smashing the former and not the latter, doesn't deserve a job.

Economist is the New Messiah, Cult Says

Here's a funny article about Raj Patel, an economist who appeared on the Colbert Report and is now being proclaimed as the new Messiah by a religious cult.

I thought the Brits knew that Eric Clapton is god?

Freedom of Expression: Canada vs. Texas

The president of Tarleton College in Texas has a stronger commitment to free speech than the vice-president of the University of Ottawa.

This is one of the worst things about living in Canada.

Mathematical Genealogy

The Mathematics Genealogy Project records Ph. D. mathematicians and their thesis supervisors. Recently they've relaxed the "thesis supervisor" to include advisors of various sorts, which allows them to extend their records back to the Middle Ages.

Of course, I couldn't resist looking at my own record. (It's incomplete; they don't list 2 of my Ph. D. students.) Some of my supervisory ancestors include:

Saunders MacLane - 3
Hermann Weyl - 4
David Hilbert - 5
Felix Klein, Georg Frobenius, Lindemann - 6
Kummer, Weierstrass - 7
Jacobi, Dirichlet - 8
Fourier - 9
Gauss, Lagrange, Laplace - 10
Euler - 11
Leibniz - 14
Huygens - 15
Mersenne - 17
Copernicus - 23

Here the numbers indicate the number of links it takes to get to that person. Assuming that each student has shaken the hand of their supervisor, I find it neat to think that only 23 handshakes separate me from Copernicus. Of course, I'm not very special in this regard, as lots and lots of mathematicians have illustrious forbears. The database, for example, currently lists 53,775 descendants for Copernicus, or about 38% of all the people listed.

My wife's tree might even be more prestigious. She's got Newton at level 14, and Galileo at 17.

Everything in its Proper Place

Tony McManus sent along this picture from the Chapters bookstore in Waterloo, Ontario, showing that at least some bookstores recognize a charade when they see one.

Take That, Bob Dylan!

I had a nice time with Celtic guitar superstar Tony McManus last night. Tony revealed that two of his pieces will be in the new Neil Jordan film, Ondine.

He also told the following story: a guitarist he knew recently died and was buried in a Jewish cemetery in Newton. His epitaph reads, "Times were sometimes tough, but at least I never made a Christmas album."

Boehner's Ridiculous Rhetoric

I have mixed feelings about the healthcare bill, but Boehner's hyperbolic rhetoric on the House floor last night was simply ridiculous:

"Today we stand here amidst the wreckage of what was once the respect and honor that this House was held in by our fellow citizens."

And just when was the House viewed with "respect" and "honor"? Was it when Joe Wilson yelled "you lie!" during Obama's speech? Or, for a bipartisan example, was it when disgraced federal judge Alcee Hastings was elected to that august body?

"We have failed to reflect the will of our constituents."

Duh - there's a reason why we elect our representatives instead of deciding everything by referendum. It's so that our representatives can do what they think is right, not what will appeal to the emotions of the moment. Besides, polls show wide support for the main provisions, even if people think they oppose the bill as a whole.

"They’re disgusted, because they see one political party closing out the other from what should be a national solution."

Actually, the bill had over 200 Republican amendments. It's not the Democrats' fault if the Republicans are bent on opposition and obstruction at all costs.

"Around this chamber, looking upon us are the lawgivers – from Moses to Gaius, to Blackstone, to Thomas Jefferson.

By our action today, we disgrace their values.

We break the ties of history."


Providing healthcare to more people disgraces the values of Moses? Who knew?

"It is not too late to begin to restore the bonds of trust with our Nation and return comity to this institution."

Yeah, and it's not too late for Republicans - like Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) - to stop yelling "baby killer" at Stupak.

When to Doubt the Science Bashers

Former DI flack Jay Richards has a piece over at the American Enterprise's "journal", giving 12 reasons why you should stick your fingers in your ears and say "Na, na, I can't hear you!" when there is strong scientific consensus. So, in the spirit of that piece, let me offer a few reasons why you should doubt the doubters:

1. When the deniers have little or no scientific training. Richards has "a B.A. with majors in Political Science and Religion, an M.Div. (Master of Divinity) and a Th.M. (Master of Theology), and a Ph.D. (with honors) in philosophy and theology from Princeton Theological Seminary."

2. When the deniers worked for groups, such as the Discovery Institute, who have a history of prevaricating, dissembling, and just flat out lying.

3. When the deniers publish their supposedly scientific books with publishers devoted to far-right political screeds.

4. When the deniers have held appointments at so-called universities that advertise "biblically centered education" and offer courses in scientific apologetics designed to "demonstrate the harmony between science and a biblical worldview".

5. When the deniers claim that the very existence of a scientific consensus is a reason to doubt the consensus.

6. When the deniers are well-funded by groups that stand to lose a lot of money when action is finally taken.

7. When the deniers post their claims on web pages that don't allow comments.

8. And finally, when the evidence is strongly against the deniers.

Turkey!

This is the turkey I met walking down the street today - here in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Any resemblance to a Discovery Institute fellow is purely coincidental.

The 2010 Bernoulli Trials

Here's a copy of the 2010 Bernoulli trials, a contest held annually at the University of Waterloo and open to all undergraduates. The students were given 13 statements and had to decide the truth or falsity of each one. Two incorrect answers and you're out. (For some previous years, see here.)

I like many of these questions, and a couple of them made me think for a while. How many can you do? Go ahead and post solutions in the comments, if you feel like it.

Loftus vs. Wood: An Atheist-Theist Debate

Here's a link to a debate entitled "Does God Exist?", featuring David Wood (theist) versus John Loftus (atheist).

I wasn't impressed at all with Wood's argument, which went roughly as follows:

1. He claimed that "Atheists have held that the Universe is eternal ... Much to the horror of atheists, research in the 20th century showed that the Universe is expanding, and we can therefore trace its development back to a beginning."

I think this misrepresents the case. Some physicists supported a steady-state universe (and some few still do), and some opposed it. But I see no evidence that atheists came down overwhelmingly on one side or the other. And I see no evidence today that atheists regard the Big Bang theory with "horror". Why should we? The Big Bang doesn't imply a magical creator.

2. He claimed that "Either the Universe began to exist as the result of some cause, or the Universe sprang into existence uncaused. The second alternative is obviously absurd - out of nothing, nothing comes."

Not much of an argument. First, we see apparently uncaused events all the time in radioactive decay. When a particular Americium atom decays in your smoke detector, what causes that one to decay rather than some other one? Nothing that we know. Second, even in a vacuum, virtual particles come into existence all the time and are measurable. So appealing to naive folk wisdom like "out of nothing, nothing comes" when modern physics contradicts this --- it's not intellectually honest.

3. He gave an argument about fine tuning. "These numbers [constants of physics] could have had a wide range of values, and yet the values they actually have fall into the extremely narrow range that makes biological life possible."

How does Wood know that the constants of physics "could have had a wide range of values"? Answer: he doesn't - it's just an assertion. Maybe because of something about physics we don't know, only a narrow range of constants is possible.

How does Wood know that tweaking the constants would usually result in an unlivable universe? Answer: he doesn't. Vic Stenger has modeled universes where the constants can change, and found that a relatively wide range of constants still allowed interesting physics.

How does Wood know that tweaking the constants couldn't result in some other completely different form of life? Answer: he doesn't.

4. He argued that the complexity of biology implies a Designer: "Where did Earth's diverse biological complexity come from? The most obvious explanation is design."

Yes, that may have been true before 1859, back in the day when our ideas about biology were so primitive that many physicians rejected the germ theory of disease. But a lot has happened since then, much of it due to another D-word: Darwin. We now have a strongly-supported theory that can account for biological complexity -- the theory of evolution -- so to pretend that we must stick with the "obvious explanation" 150 years later is dishonest.

5. He claimed that consciousness requires a "soul". "I can have a thought about a grilled cheese sandwich - I can't have a pattern of molecules about a grilled cheese sandwich".

Why not? I see no logical or physical problem in maintaining that I can have a thought about a grilled cheese sandwich and that this thought ultimately reduces to matter and energy in my brain. Much of Wood's argument seemed like this: pure assertion.

"If a scientist examines my brain he might learn all kind of things about my brain that I don't know, but he'll never learn more about my mind than I know."

Why not? What logical or scientific principle would prevent us, for example, from being able to access the subconscious through a physical examination of the brain, resulting in knowledge of (say) a repressed memory that you don't "know" consciously?

6. "We know scientifically that the mind can function even when the brain stops working. There are numerous cases in medical journals of people who are clinically dead, showing no brain activity at all, being brought back to life and reporting that they had conscious experiences while they were dead."

Near-death experiences typically occur during medical crises, when (for example) the brain might be starved of oxygen. If we don't consider the testimony of drunk people reliable, why should we consider the testimony of oxygen-starved brains as reliable? Claims about near-death experiences have been exaggerated and research has been plagued by poor experiment design; see the chapter by Hövelmann in the Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology.

7. Naturalism must be able to account for the coherence of human reason: "According to John, our ability to reason is the product of natural selection acting on random mutation ... Does this give us any basis for trusting our reasoning ability when it comes to questions of theology or philosophy or science?"

Here he's stealing - without attribution - C. S. Lewis's argument against naturalism, which has also been argued by Plantinga and others. I find this argument one of the dumbest around. Study after study shows that humans are not always good reasoners: we routinely mishandle basic probability, we make snap judgments based on appearances, and we have unconscious biases. But there's also good empirical evidence (like the existence of spaceships and toasters) that we somehow manage to muddle along and figure things out much of the time. We're simply stuck with the reasoning ability we have, and the heuristics -- known as science -- we've deduced over thousands of years to make sure that our conclusions are correct. It's not like religion comes up with conclusions that we can have confidence in. Which would give you more confidence in a plane never flown in the air before: calculations and simulations by trained engineers, or the blessing of a priest?

8. "Our reasoning is governed by certain logical truths ... we are presupposing that there are logical absolutes - rules of reasoning that cannot be violated... A statement cannot be both true and false at the same time. But what are logical laws? They are not material objects. We don't learn about them through the senses... Logical laws don't depend on human minds. The law of non-contradiction was true before there were any human beings, and if all human beings died tomorrow they would still be true. In fact, the laws of logic would be true in any universe, not just ours. So the laws of logic transcend time, space, matter, and all human minds - they're invariant, unchanging, and eternal."

Spoken by someone who has clearly never heard of multi-valued logic. And is the axiom of choice true or false? When Wood says "the laws of logic would be true in any universe, not just ours", how does he know this? Does he have intimate knowledge of other universes?

In the clever words of philosopher Tim Kenyon, there aren't laws of thought. It's more like "municipal by-laws" of thought.

I might add that Wood gave us no reason to believe that there aren't multiple gods, or even infinitely many.

Unfortunately, Loftus' performance was not very impressive either. Although he made a lot of good points, he read his opening presentation from notes, mumbled too much, stumbled over pronunciations (like "plate tectonics"), made too many joking asides that weren't funny and chuckled at them, sounded a bit patronizing, didn't really connect with the audience, and didn't consistently offer strong rebuttals to Wood's points.

Don't Cite Works You Haven't Read

It's something you teach your graduate students: Don't cite works you haven't read.

It's a rule with good reasons behind it. First, it's a bad idea to rely on someone else's summary of another work. Maybe they summarized it incorrectly, or maybe there is more there you need to consider. Second, as a scholar, it's your obligation not to spread misinformation. Maybe the page numbers or the volume are given incorrectly.

Like all rules, there are occasional exceptions. Maybe it's a really old and obscure work that you've tried to get a copy of, but failed. In that case, you can cite the work but mention that you haven't actually been able to find a copy. (I've done this.) That way, at the least the reader will be warned that you're relying on someone else's citation.

And now, from Paris, comes a spectacular case of why citing works you haven't read is a bad idea. The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévi has been caught citing and praising, in his new book De la guerre en philosophie, the work of the philosopher "Jean-Baptiste Botul". Only problem? Botul doesn't actually exist. He is the creation of journalist Frédéric Pagès.

Now, maybe Lévy did actually read Botul's book La vie sexuelle d'Emmanuel Kant. But if so, despite the big warning signs (Botul's school is called "Botulism") he failed to recognize it as a big joke, which raises even more questions about his perspicacity.

Maybe I need to tell my graduate students another rule: Don't cite works that you suspect may be a hoax.

Oh, and for the record? I haven't read Lévi's new book, nor Pagès's satire.

Reply to Paul Nelson

Glenn Branch has kindly pointed out that Paul Nelson thinks that my counterexample to the claims in Meyer's Signature in the Cell is a "fluffy confection" and "sophistry".

Recall that Meyer claimed that only minds can create information. I gave a simple counterexample: weather prediction. Meteorologists gather the information needed to make their predictions from the natural world - things like wind speed, wind direction, temperature, and so forth - and then use this information to make their predictions. Nelson is unconvinced. But his reply is unconvincing.

Nelson starts by claiming that you can't determine quantities like barometric pressure and temperature without looking at a measuring instrument. This is both (a) false and (b) not relevant. Nelson must spend all his time indoors, because I can (and do all the time) estimate the temperature quite accurately (typically within 2-3 degrees C) just by sticking my head out the door.

Next, Nelson claims that you can't predict the weather accurately without a complex analytical model. Again, this is both (a) false and (b) not relevant. Even the boy scout manual gives some basic techniques that can be understood by teenagers.

Nelson also fails to recognize that answering a simple question like "Is it warm enough to go around without a coat?" gives you information about the weather. If the answer is yes, you can be pretty damn sure that it is not going to snow in the next hour. That's not a lot of information, perhaps, but it certainly constitutes information.

Third, Nelson claims that "there is complexity aplenty in the data, but, as SITC explains, that complexity is unspecified". This is the standard creationist ploy: admit that weather observations constitute "information", but just claim it is not the right kind of information. Never mind that this "right kind of information" is not recognized by anybody who actually studies information theory for a living - we should listen to Nelson because of his great credentials in mathematics.

However, weather observations do constitute information according to Meyer's own definition in Signature in the Cell, because these data are images of the underlying physical systems that cause the weather.

Finally, Nelson claims that the raw data (which he claims is not "specified information") suddenly becomes "specified" after it passes through an algorithm that does weather prediction. Nelson scores it in his own goal, because according to Dembski, computer algorithms cannot produce specified complexity. Even if Nelson is going to claim that the "specification" is contained in the algorithm, that doesn't explain how weather prediction algorithms can go on, day after day, producing weather forecast after weather forecast, each forecast with its own new amount of "specified information", from only the input data and a finite program.

Nelson's response is completely without merit. Look for more similar creationist attacks in the future, because this simple example of weather prediction is so devastating to their bogus claims.

When Faith Healing Kills

Via Hemant Mehta (the Friendly Atheist), here is the sad story of Neal Beagley, a 16-year-old killed by his parents' failure to seek adequate medical care, and their choice to rely on prayer instead.

Their son died, and the Beagleys have been sentenced to 16 months in jail. Yup, nothing fails like prayer.

I have a slightly different take on the case than Hemant does. I don't see any reason to doubt that the parents were sincere in their beliefs that they were doing what was best for their kid. And we don't always criminalize actions (or failure to act) that result in death: look at all the people that die during surgery - or perhaps, in a better parallel, look at all the people that died in the early history of medicine from the mistaken belief that being "bled" would help cure them. I don't see any "mens rea" in the Beagley case. Stupidity isn't a crime, and the parents have already paid a heavy emotional and genetic penalty for their stupidity.

The real criminals in this case are not the Beagleys, who were just doing what they had been told by authority figures would work. The real criminals are the religious leaders who make the bogus claim that "prayer heals", despite the fact that there is no good evidence that this is the case. Reportedly their church, the Followers of Christ, has a long history of letting children die by treating them with prayer instead of modern medicine.

I'll concede that we need laws against what the Beagleys did -- but purely for their deterrent, and not their punitive value. If people who rely on prayer alone to cure serious illnesses in children know that their failure may result in prison time, maybe they'll be less likely to rely on prayer alone. I'd definitely like to see a repeal of all religiously-based exemptions of child abuse charges for faith-healing deaths.

But more importantly, I'd like to see a law that makes it a crime for someone who is not a medical professional to counsel someone to withhold medical care for seriously ill children where there is a well-established and safe remedy known for the condition. Such a law could be very narrowly written and still have a beneficial effect.

Looking for an Honest Creationist

There's a new blog, Diogenes' Lamp, that takes on creationism, intelligent design, and similar foolishness. Worth a look - but, like Diogenes, if he's looking for an honest creationist, he's going to have a long wait.

Justice Isn't Blind

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University has been hosting a really interesting series of talks. Video is available on the internet, too.

Here's one: Leslie Zebrowitz, a professor at Brandeis, has been doing research on how people's appearance governs how they are treated in court. The results are a little scary: if you have a "baby face", you are more likely to win your case in Small Claims Court when you are denying intentional wrongdoing. If the defendant is "maturefaced", and the plaintiff is "babyfaced", the plaintiff is more likely to get larger monetary damages.

This is just one in a series of results showing that people's unconscious biases strongly color their decision-making.