Tag Archives: skepticism

BigBang, Environs

PhotoMash: Climate Skeptic and Climate Science

Aptly, today’s juxtaposition of stories comes from the Washington Post. One day into the COP21 UN climate change conference in Paris, France, US House of Representatives’ science committee chair Lamar Smith is still at it. He’s a leading climate change skeptic, an avid opponent of the NOAA (National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration) and self-styled overlord of the National Science Foundation (NSF). While Representative Smith seeks to politicize and skewer science, intimidate scientists and trample on funding for climate science research (and other types of basic science funding), our planet continues to warm.

Photomash-Climate-Skeptic-Climate-Facts

If you’re an open-minded scientist or just concerned about our planet this is not good.

So, it’s rather refreshing to see Representative Smith alongside a story showing that the month of December could be another temperature record breaker — the warmest on record for the northern tier of the continental US.

Images courtesy of the Washington Post, November 30, 2015.

BigBang

The Dangerous World of Pseudo-Academia

Pseudoscience can be fun — for comedic purposes only of course. But when it is taken seriously and dogmatically, as it often is by a significant number of people, it imperils rational dialogue and threatens real scientific and cultural progress. There is no end to the lengthy list of fake scientific claims and theories — some of our favorites include: the moon “landing” conspiracy, hollow Earth, Bermuda triangle, crop circles, psychic surgery, body earthing, room temperature fusion, perpetual and motion machines.

Fun aside, pseudoscience can also be harmful and dangerous particularly when those duped by the dubious practice are harmed physically, medically or financially. Which brings us to a recent, related development aimed at duping academics. Welcome to the world of pseudo-academia.

From the New York Times:

The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects.

But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by e-mail, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a résumé.

“I think we were duped,” one of the scientists wrote in an e-mail to the Entomological Society.

Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events.

Steven Goodman, a dean and professor of medicine at Stanford and the editor of the journal Clinical Trials, which has its own imitators, called this phenomenon “the dark side of open access,” the movement to make scholarly publications freely available.

The number of these journals and conferences has exploded in recent years as scientific publishing has shifted from a traditional business model for professional societies and organizations built almost entirely on subscription revenues to open access, which relies on authors or their backers to pay for the publication of papers online, where anyone can read them.

Open access got its start about a decade ago and quickly won widespread acclaim with the advent of well-regarded, peer-reviewed journals like those published by the Public Library of Science, known as PLoS. Such articles were listed in databases like PubMed, which is maintained by the National Library of Medicine, and selected for their quality.

But some researchers are now raising the alarm about what they see as the proliferation of online journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee. They warn that nonexperts doing online research will have trouble distinguishing credible research from junk. “Most people don’t know the journal universe,” Dr. Goodman said. “They will not know from a journal’s title if it is for real or not.”

Researchers also say that universities are facing new challenges in assessing the résumés of academics. Are the publications they list in highly competitive journals or ones masquerading as such? And some academics themselves say they have found it difficult to disentangle themselves from these journals once they mistakenly agree to serve on their editorial boards.

The phenomenon has caught the attention of Nature, one of the most competitive and well-regarded scientific journals. In a news report published recently, the journal noted “the rise of questionable operators” and explored whether it was better to blacklist them or to create a “white list” of those open-access journals that meet certain standards. Nature included a checklist on “how to perform due diligence before submitting to a journal or a publisher.”

Jeffrey Beall, a research librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, has developed his own blacklist of what he calls “predatory open-access journals.” There were 20 publishers on his list in 2010, and now there are more than 300. He estimates that there are as many as 4,000 predatory journals today, at least 25 percent of the total number of open-access journals.

“It’s almost like the word is out,” he said. “This is easy money, very little work, a low barrier start-up.”

Journals on what has become known as “Beall’s list” generally do not post the fees they charge on their Web sites and may not even inform authors of them until after an article is submitted. They barrage academics with e-mail invitations to submit articles and to be on editorial boards.

One publisher on Beall’s list, Avens Publishing Group, even sweetened the pot for those who agreed to be on the editorial board of The Journal of Clinical Trails & Patenting, offering 20 percent of its revenues to each editor.

One of the most prolific publishers on Beall’s list, Srinubabu Gedela, the director of the Omics Group, has about 250 journals and charges authors as much as $2,700 per paper. Dr. Gedela, who lists a Ph.D. from Andhra University in India, says on his Web site that he “learnt to devise wonders in biotechnology.”

Read the entire article following the jump.

Image courtesy of University of Texas.

Idea Soup

Psst! AIDS Was Created by the U.S. Government

Some believe that AIDS was created by the U.S. Government or bestowed by a malevolent god. Some believe that Neil Armstrong never set foot on the moon, while others believe that Nazis first established a moon base in 1942. Some believe that recent tsunamis were caused by the U.S. military, and that said military is hiding evidence of alien visits in Area 51, Nevada. The latest of course is the great conspiracy of climate change, which apparently is created by socialists seeking to destroy the United States. This conspiratorial thinking makes for good reality-TV, and presents wonderful opportunities for psychological research. Why after all, in the face of seemingly insurmountable evidence, widespread common consensus and fundamental scientific reasoning, do such ideas, and their believers persist?

[div class=attrib]From Skeptical Science:[end-div]

There is growing evidence that conspiratorial thinking, also known as conspiracist ideation, is often involved in the rejection of scientific propositions. Conspiracist ideations tend to invoke alternative explanations for the nature or source of the scientific evidence. For example, among people who reject the link between HIV and AIDS, common ideations involve the beliefs that AIDS was created by the U.S. Government.

My colleagues and I published a paper recently that found evidence for the involvement of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of scientific propositions—from climate change to the link between tobacco and lung cancer, and between HIV and AIDS—among visitors to climate blogs. This was a fairly unsurprising result because it meshed well with previous research and the existing literature on the rejection of science. Indeed, it would have been far more surprising, from a scientific perspective, if the article had not found a link between conspiracist ideation and rejection of science.

Nonetheless, as some readers of this blog may remember, this article engendered considerable controversy.

The article also generated data.

Data, because for social scientists, public statements and publically-expressed ideas constitute data for further research. Cognitive scientists sometimes apply something called “narrative analysis” to understand how people, groups, or societies are organized and how they think.

In the case of the response to our earlier paper, we were struck by the way in which some of the accusations leveled against our paper were, well, somewhat conspiratorial in nature. We therefore decided to analyze the public response to our first paper with the hypothesis in mind that this response might also involve conspiracist ideation. We systematically collected utterances by bloggers and commenters, and we sought to classify them into various hypotheses leveled against our earlier paper. For each hypothesis, we then compared the public statements against a list of criteria for conspiracist ideation that was taken from the previous literature.

This follow-up paper was accepted a few days ago by Frontiers in Psychology, and a preliminary version of the paper is already available, for open access, here.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Area 51 – Warning sign near secret Area 51 base in Nevada. Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]

BigBang

Lead a Congressional Committee on Science: No Grasp of Science Required

[div class=attrib]From ars technica:[end-div]

The House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology hears testimony on climate change in March 2011.[/ars_img]If you had the chance to ask questions of one of the world’s leading climatologists, would you select a set of topics that would be at home in the heated discussions that take place in the Ars forums? If you watch the video below, you’d find that’s precisely what Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) chose to do when Penn State’s Richard Alley (a fellow Republican) was called before the House Science Committee, which has already had issues with its grasp of science. Rohrabacher took Alley on a tour of some of the least convincing arguments about climate change, all trying to convince him changes in the Sun were to blame for a changing climate. (Alley, for his part, noted that we have actually measured the Sun, and we’ve seen no such changes.)

Now, if he has his way, Rohrabacher will be chairing the committee once the next Congress is seated. Even if he doesn’t get the job, the alternatives aren’t much better.

There has been some good news for the Science Committee to come out of the last election. Representative Todd Akin (R-MO), whose lack of understanding of biology was made clear by his comments on “legitimate rape,” had to give up his seat to run for the Senate, a race he lost. Meanwhile, Paul Broun (R-GA), who said that evolution and cosmology are “lies straight from the pit of Hell,” won reelection, but he received a bit of a warning in the process: dead English naturalist Charles Darwin, who is ineligible to serve in Congress, managed to draw thousands of write-in votes. And, thanks to limits on chairmanships, Ralph Hall (R-TX), who accused climate scientists of being in it for the money (if so, they’re doing it wrong), will have to step down.

In addition to Rohrabacher, the other Representatives that are vying to lead the Committee are Wisconsin’s James Sensenbrenner and Texas’ Lamar Smith. They all suggest that they will focus on topics like NASA’s budget and the Department of Energy’s plans for future energy tech. But all of them have been embroiled in the controversy over climate change in the past.

In an interview with Science Insider about his candidacy, Rohrabacher engaged in a bit of triumphalism and suggested that his beliefs were winning out. “There were a lot of scientists who were just going along with the flow on the idea that mankind was causing a change in the world’s climate,” he said. “I think that after 10 years of debate, we can show that there are hundreds if not thousands of scientists who have come over to being skeptics, and I don’t know anyone [who was a skeptic] who became a believer in global warming.”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

Environs

Pluralistic Ignorance

Why study the science of climate change when you can study the complexities of climate change deniers themselves? That was the question that led several groups of independent researchers to study why some groups of people cling to mistaken beliefs and hold inaccurate views of the public consensus.

[div class=attrib]From ars technica:[end-div]

By just about every measure, the vast majority of scientists in general—and climate scientists in particular—have been convinced by the evidence that human activities are altering the climate. However, in several countries, a significant portion of the public has concluded that this consensus doesn’t exist. That has prompted a variety of studies aimed at understanding the large disconnect between scientists and the public, with results pointing the finger at everything from the economy to the weather. Other studies have noted societal influences on acceptance, including ideology and cultural identity.

Those studies have generally focused on the US population, but the public acceptance of climate change is fairly similar in Australia. There, a new study has looked at how societal tendencies can play a role in maintaining mistaken beliefs. The authors of the study have found evidence that two well-known behaviors—the “false consensus” and “pluralistic ignorance”—are helping to shape public opinion in Australia.

False consensus is the tendency of people to think that everyone else shares their opinions. This can arise from the fact that we tend to socialize with people who share our opinions, but the authors note that the effect is even stronger “when we hold opinions or beliefs that are unpopular, unpalatable, or that we are uncertain about.” In other words, our social habits tend to reinforce the belief that we’re part of a majority, and we have a tendency to cling to the sense that we’re not alone in our beliefs.

Pluralistic ignorance is similar, but it’s not focused on our own beliefs. Instead, sometimes the majority of people come to believe that most people think a certain way, even though the majority opinion actually resides elsewhere.

As it turns out, the authors found evidence of both these effects. They performed two identical surveys of over 5,000 Australians, done a year apart; about 1,350 people took the survey both times, which let the researchers track how opinions evolve. Participants were asked to describe their own opinion on climate change, with categories including “don’t know,” “not happening,” “a natural occurrence,” and “human-induced.” After voicing their own opinion, people were asked to estimate what percentage of the population would fall into each of these categories.

In aggregate, over 90 percent of those surveyed accepted that climate change was occurring (a rate much higher than we see in the US), with just over half accepting that humans were driving the change. Only about five percent felt it wasn’t happening, and even fewer said they didn’t know. The numbers changed only slightly between the two polls.

The false consensus effect became obvious when the researchers looked at what these people thought that everyone else believed. Here, the false consensus effect was obvious: every single group believed that their opinion represented the plurality view of the population. This was most dramatic among those who don’t think that the climate is changing; even though they represent far less than 10 percent of the population, they believed that over 40 percent of Australians shared their views. Those who profess ignorance also believed they had lots of company, estimating that their view was shared by a quarter of the populace.

Among those who took the survey twice, the effect became even more pronounced. In the year between the surveys, they respondents went from estimating that 30 percent of the population agreed with them to thinking that 45 percent did. And, in general, this group was the least likely to change its opinion between the two surveys.

But there was also evidence of pluralistic ignorance. Every single group grossly overestimated the number of people who were unsure about climate change or convinced it wasn’t occurring. Even those who were convinced that humans were changing the climate put 20 percent of Australians into each of these two groups.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Flood victims. Courtesy of NRDC.[end-div]

Environs

A Climate Change Skeptic Recants

A climate change skeptic recants. Of course, disbelievers in human-influenced climate change will point to the fact that physicist Richard Muller used an op-ed in the New York Times as evidence of flagrant falsehood and unmitigated bias.

Several years ago Muller set up the Berkeley Earth project, to collect and analyze land-surface temperature records from sources independent of NASA and NOAA. Convinced, at the time, that climate change researchers had the numbers all wrong, Muller and team set out to find the proof.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural.

Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.

The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Niño and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the “flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant. What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.

Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes. This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we’ve learned from satellite measurements that solar activity changes the brightness of the sun very little.

How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does. Adding methane, a second greenhouse gas, to our analysis doesn’t change the results. Moreover, our analysis does not depend on large, complex global climate models, the huge computer programs that are notorious for their hidden assumptions and adjustable parameters. Our result is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.

It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Global land-surface temperature with a 10-year moving average. Courtesy of Berkeley Earth.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Beautiful Explanations

Each year for the past 15 years Edge has posed a weighty question to a group of scientists, researchers, philosophers, mathematicians and thinkers. For 2012, Edge asked the question, “What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, or Beautiful Explanation?”, to 192 of our best and brightest. Back came 192 different and no-less wonderful answers. We can post but a snippet here, so please visit the Edge, and then make a note to buy the book (it’s not available yet).

Read the entire article here.

The Mysterious Coherence Between Fundamental Physics and Mathematics
Peter Woit, Mathematical Physicist, Columbia University; Author, Not Even Wrong

Any first course in physics teaches students that the basic quantities one uses to describe a physical system include energy, momentum, angular momentum and charge. What isn’t explained in such a course is the deep, elegant and beautiful reason why these are important quantities to consider, and why they satisfy conservation laws. It turns out that there’s a general principle at work: for any symmetry of a physical system, you can define an associated observable quantity that comes with a conservation law:

1. The symmetry of time translation gives energy
2. The symmetries of spatial translation give momentum
3. Rotational symmetry gives angular momentum
4. Phase transformation symmetry gives charge

 

Einstein Explains Why Gravity Is Universal
Sean Carroll, Theoretical Physicist, Caltech; Author, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

The ancient Greeks believed that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. They had good reason to do so; a heavy stone falls quickly, while a light piece of paper flutters gently to the ground. But a thought experiment by Galileo pointed out a flaw. Imagine taking the piece of paper and tying it to the stone. Together, the new system is heavier than either of its components, and should fall faster. But in reality, the piece of paper slows down the descent of the stone.

Galileo argued that the rate at which objects fall would actually be a universal quantity, independent of their mass or their composition, if it weren’t for the interference of air resistance. Apollo 15 astronaut Dave Scott once illustrated this point by dropping a feather and a hammer while standing in vacuum on the surface of the Moon; as Galileo predicted, they fell at the same rate.

Subsequently, many scientists wondered why this should be the case. In contrast to gravity, particles in an electric field can respond very differently; positive charges are pushed one way, negative charges the other, and neutral particles not at all. But gravity is universal; everything responds to it in the same way.

Thinking about this problem led Albert Einstein to what he called “the happiest thought of my life.” Imagine an astronaut in a spaceship with no windows, and no other way to peer at the outside world. If the ship were far away from any stars or planets, everything inside would be in free fall, there would be no gravitational field to push them around. But put the ship in orbit around a massive object, where gravity is considerable. Everything inside will still be in free fall: because all objects are affected by gravity in the same way, no one object is pushed toward or away from any other one. Sticking just to what is observed inside the spaceship, there’s no way we could detect the existence of gravity.

 

True or False: Beauty Is Truth
Judith Rich Harris, Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption; No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” said John Keats. But what did he know? Keats was a poet, not a scientist.

In the world that scientists inhabit, truth is not always beautiful or elegant, though it may be deep. In fact, it’s my impression that the deeper an explanation goes, the less likely it is to be beautiful or elegant.

Some years ago, the psychologist B. F. Skinner proposed an elegant explanation of “the behavior of organisms,” based on the idea that rewarding a response—he called it reinforcement—increases the probability that the same response will occur again in the future. The theory failed, not because it was false (reinforcement generally does increase the probability of a response) but because it was too simple. It ignored innate components of behavior. It couldn’t even handle all learned behavior. Much behavior is acquired or shaped through experience, but not necessarily by means of reinforcement. Organisms learn different things in different ways.

 

The Power Of One, Two, Three
Charles Seife, Professor of Journalism, New York University; formerly journalist, Science Magazine; Author, Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

Sometimes even the simple act of counting can tell you something profound.

One day, back in the late 1990s, when I was a correspondent for New Scientist magazine, I got an e-mail from a flack waxing rhapsodic about an extraordinary piece of software. It was a revolutionary data-compression program so efficient that it would squash every digital file by 95% or more without losing a single bit of data. Wouldn’t my magazine jump at the chance to tell the world about the computer program that will make their hard drives hold 20 times more information than every before.

No, my magazine wouldn’t.

No such compression algorithm could possibly exist; it was the algorithmic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. The software was a fraud.

The reason: the pigeonhole principle.

 

Watson and Crick Explain How DNA Carries Genetic Information
Gary Klein, Cognitive Psychologist; Author, Sources of Power; Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for Keys to Adaptive Decision Making

In 1953, when James Watson pushed around some two-dimensional cut-outs and was startled to find that an adenine-thymine pair had an isomorphic shape to the guanine-cytosine pair, he solved eight mysteries simultaneously. In that instant he knew the structure of DNA: a helix. He knew how many strands: two. It was a double helix. He knew what carried the information: the nucleic acids in the gene, not the protein. He knew what maintained the attraction: hydrogen bonds. He knew the arrangement: The sugar-phosphate backbone was on the outside and the nucleic acids were in the inside. He knew how the strands match: through the base pairs. He knew the arrangement: the two identical chains ran in opposite directions. And he knew how genes replicated: through a zipper-like process.

The discovery that Watson and Crick made is truly impressive, but I am also interested in what we can learn from the process by which they arrived at their discovery. On the surface, the Watson-Crick story fits in with five popular claims about innovation, as presented below. However, the actual story of their collaboration is more nuanced than these popular claims suggest.

It is important to have clear research goals. Watson and Crick had a clear goal, to describe the structure of DNA, and they succeeded.

But only the first two of their eight discoveries had to do with this goal. The others, arguably the most significant, were unexpected byproducts.

BigBang

The Debunking Handbook

A valuable resource if you ever find yourself having to counter and debunk a myth and misinformation. It applies equally regardless of the type of myth in debate: Santa, creationism, UFOs, political discourse, climate science denial, science denial in general. You can find the download here.

[div class=attrib]From Skeptical Science:[end-div]

The Debunking Handbook, a guide to debunking misinformation, is now freely available to download. Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, there’s no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths. The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators in all areas (not just climate) who encounter misinformation.

The Handbook explores the surprising fact that debunking myths can sometimes reinforce the myth in peoples’ minds. Communicators need to be aware of the various backfire effects and how to avoid them, such as:

  • The Familiarity Backfire Effect
  • The Overkill Backfire Effect
  • The Worldview Backfire Effect

It also looks at a key element to successful debunking: providing an alternative explanation. The Handbook is designed to be useful to all communicators who have to deal with misinformation (eg – not just climate myths).

[div class=attrib]Read more here.[end-div]

Idea Soup

How the World May End: Science Versus Brimstone

Every couple of years a (hell)fire and brimstone preacher floats into the national consciousness and makes the headlines with certain predictions from the book regarding imminent destruction of our species and home. Most recently Harold Camping, the radio evangelist, predicted the apocalypse would begin on Saturday, May 21, 2011. His subsequent revision placed the “correct date” at October 21, 2011. Well, we’re still here, so the next apocalyptic date to prepare for, according to watchers of all things Mayan, is December 21, 2012.

So not to be outdone by prophesy from one particular religion or another, science has come out swinging with its own list of potential apocalyptic end-of-days. No surprise, many scenarios may well be at our own hands.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

Stories of brimstone, fire and gods make good tales and do a decent job of stirring up the requisite fear and jeopardy. But made-up doomsday tales pale into nothing, creatively speaking, when contrasted with what is actually possible. Look through the lens of science and “the end” becomes much more interesting.

Since the beginning of life on Earth, around 3.5 billion years ago, the fragile existence has lived in the shadow of annihilation. On this planet, extinction is the norm – of the 4 billion species ever thought to have evolved, 99% have become extinct. In particular, five times in this past 500 million years the steady background rate of extinction has shot up for a period of time. Something – no one knows for sure what – turned the Earth into exactly the wrong planet for life at these points and during each mass extinction, more than 75% of the existing species died off in a period of time that was, geologically speaking, a blink of the eye.

One or more of these mass extinctions occurred because of what we could call the big, Hollywood-style, potential doomsday scenarios. If a big enough asteroid hit the Earth, for example, the impact would cause huge earthquakes and tsunamis that could cross the globe. There would be enough dust thrown into the air to block out the sun for several years. As a result, the world’s food resources would be destroyed, leading to famine. It has happened before: the dinosaurs (along with more than half the other species on Earth) were wiped out 65 million years ago by a 10km-wide asteroid that smashed into the area around Mexico.

…

Other natural disasters include sudden changes in climate or immense volcanic eruptions. All of these could cause global catastrophes that would wipe out large portions of the planet’s life, but, given we have survived for several hundreds of thousands of years while at risk of these, it is unlikely that a natural disaster such as that will cause catastrophe in the next few centuries.

In addition, cosmic threats to our existence have always been with us, even thought it has taken us some time to notice: the collision of our galaxy, the Milky Way, with our nearest neighbour, Andromeda, for example, or the arrival of a black hole. Common to all of these threats is that there is very little we can do about them even when we know the danger exists, except trying to work out how to survive the aftermath.

But in reality, the most serious risks for humans might come from our own activities. Our species has the unique ability in the history of life on Earth to be the first capable of remaking our world. But we can also destroy it.

…

All too real are the human-caused threats born of climate change, excess pollution, depletion of natural resources and the madness of nuclear weapons. We tinker with our genes and atoms at our own peril. Nanotechnology, synthetic biology and genetic modification offer much potential in giving us better food to eat, safer drugs and a cleaner world, but they could also go wrong if misapplied or if we charge on without due care.

…

Some strange ways to go and their corresponding danger signs listed below:

DEATH BY EUPHORIA

Many of us use drugs such as caffeine or nicotine every day. Our increased understanding of physiology brings new drugs that can lift mood, improve alertness or keep you awake for days. How long before we use so many drugs we are no longer in control? Perhaps the end of society will not come with a bang, but fade away in a haze.

Danger sign: Drugs would get too cheap to meter, but you might be too doped up to notice.

VACUUM DECAY

If the Earth exists in a region of space known as a false vacuum, it could collapse into a lower-energy state at any point. This collapse would grow at the speed of light and our atoms would not hold together in the ensuing wave of intense energy – everything would be torn apart.

Danger sign: There would be no signs. It could happen half way through this…

STRANGELETS

Quantum mechanics contains lots of frightening possibilities. Among them is a particle called a strangelet that can transform any other particle into a copy of itself. In just a few hours, a small chunk of these could turn a planet into a featureless mass of strangelets. Everything that planet was would be no more.

Danger sign: Everything around you starts cooking, releasing heat.

END OF TIME

What if time itself somehow came to a finish because of the laws of physics? In 2007, Spanish scientists proposed an alternative explanation for the mysterious dark energy that accounts for 75% of the mass of the universe and acts as a sort of anti-gravity, pushing galaxies apart. They proposed that the effects we observe are due to time slowing down as it leaked away from our universe.

Danger sign: It could be happening right now. We would never know.

MEGA TSUNAMI

Geologists worry that a future volcanic eruption at La Palma in the Canary Islands might dislodge a chunk of rock twice the volume of the Isle of Man into the Atlantic Ocean, triggering waves a kilometre high that would move at the speed of a jumbo jet with catastrophic effects for the shores of the US, Europe, South America and Africa.

Danger sign: Half the world’s major cities are under water. All at once.

GEOMAGNETIC REVERSAL

The Earth’s magnetic field provides a shield against harmful radiation from our sun that could rip through DNA and overload the world’s electrical systems. Every so often, Earth’s north and south poles switch positions and, during the transition, the magnetic field will weaken or disappear for many years. The last known transition happened almost 780,000 years ago and it is likely to happen again.

Danger sign: Electronics stop working.

GAMMA RAYS FROM SPACE

When a supermassive star is in its dying moments, it shoots out two beams of high-energy gamma rays into space. If these were to hit Earth, the immense energy would tear apart the atmosphere’s air molecules and disintegrate the protective ozone layer.

Danger sign: The sky turns brown and all life on the surface slowly dies.

RUNAWAY BLACK HOLE

Black holes are the most powerful gravitational objects in the universe, capable of tearing Earth into its constituent atoms. Even within a billion miles, a black hole could knock Earth out of the solar system, leaving our planet wandering through deep space without a source of energy.

Danger sign: Increased asteroid activity; the seasons get really extreme.

INVASIVE SPECIES

Invasive species are plants, animals or microbes that turn up in an ecosystem that has no protection against them. The invader’s population surges and the ecosystem quickly destabilises towards collapse. Invasive species are already an expensive global problem: they disrupt local ecosystems, transfer viruses, poison soils and damage agriculture.

Danger sign: Your local species disappear.

TRANSHUMANISM

What if biological and technological enhancements took humans to a level where they radically surpassed anything we know today? “Posthumans” might consist of artificial intelligences based on the thoughts and memories of ancient humans, who uploaded themselves into a computer and exist only as digital information on superfast computer networks. Their physical bodies might be gone but they could access and store endless information and share their thoughts and feelings immediately and unambiguously with other digital humans.

Danger sign: You are outcompeted, mentally and physically, by a cyborg.

[div class=attrib]Read more of this article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]End is Nigh Sign. Courtesy of frontporchrepublic.com.[end-div]

BigBang, tD

The Battle of Evidence and Science versus Belief and Magic

An insightful article over at the Smithsonian ponders the national (U.S.) decline in the trust of science. Regardless of the topic in question — climate change, health supplements, vaccinations, air pollution, “fracking”, evolution — and regardless of the specific position on a particular topic, scientific evidence continues to be questioned, ignored, revised, and politicized. And perhaps it is in this last issue, that of politics, that we may see a possible cause for a growing national pandemic of denialism. The increasingly fractured, fractious and rancorous nature of the U.S. political system threatens to undermine all debate and true skepticism, whether based on personal opinion or scientific fact.

[div class=attrib]From the Smithsonian:[end-div]

A group of scientists and statisticians led by the University of California at Berkeley set out recently to conduct an independent assessment of climate data and determine once and for all whether the planet has warmed in the last century and by how much. The study was designed to address concerns brought up by prominent climate change skeptics, and it was funded by several groups known for climate skepticism. Last week, the group released its conclusions: Average land temperatures have risen by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 20th century. The result matched the previous research.

The skeptics were not happy and immediately claimed that the study was flawed.

Also in the news last week were the results of yet another study that found no link between cell phones and brain cancer. Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Denmark looked at data from 350,000 cell phone users over an 18-year period and found they were no more likely to develop brain cancer than people who didn’t use the technology.

But those results still haven’t killed the calls for more monitoring of any potential link.

Study after study finds no link between autism and vaccines (and plenty of reason to worry about non-vaccinated children dying from preventable diseases such as measles). But a quarter of parents in a poll released last year said that they believed that “some vaccines cause autism in healthy children” and 11.5 percent had refused at least one vaccination for their child.

Polls say that Americans trust scientists more than, say, politicians, but that trust is on the decline. If we’re losing faith in science, we’ve gone down the wrong path. Science is no more than a process (as recent contributors to our “Why I Like Science” series have noted), and skepticism can be a good thing. But for many people that skepticism has grown to the point that they can no longer accept good evidence when they get it, with the result that “we’re now in an epidemic of fear like one I’ve never seen and hope never to see again,” says Michael Specter, author of Denialism, in his TEDTalk below.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you think I’m not talking about you. But here’s a quick question: Do you take vitamins? There’s a growing body of evidence that vitamins and dietary supplements are no more than a placebo at best and, in some cases, can actually increase the risk of disease or death. For example, a study earlier this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that consumption of supplements, such as iron and copper, was associated with an increased risk of death among older women. In a related commentary, several doctors note that the concept of dietary supplementation has shifted from preventing deficiency (there’s a good deal of evidence for harm if you’re low in, say, folic acid) to one of trying to promote wellness and prevent disease, and many studies are showing that more supplements do not equal better health.

But I bet you’ll still take your pills tomorrow morning. Just in case.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

Book Reviews

Book Review: The Believing Brain. Michael Shermer

Skeptic in-chief, Michael Shermer has an important and fascinating new book. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths – describes how our beliefs arise from patterns and that these beliefs come first, and explanations for those beliefs comes second.

Shermer reviews 30 years of leading research in cognitive science, neurobiology, evolutionary psychology and anthropology and numerous real-world examples to show how the belief mechanism works. This holds for our beliefs in all manner of important spheres: religion, politics, economics, superstition and the supernatural.

Shermer proposes that our brains are “belief engines” that “look for and find patterns” quite naturally, and it is only following this that our brains assign these patterns with meaning. It is these meaningful patterns that form what Shermer terms “belief-dependent reality.” Additionally, our brains tend to gravitate towards information that further reinforces our beliefs, and ignore data that contradicts these beliefs. This becomes a self-reinforcing loop where beliefs drive explanation seeking behaviors to confirm those beliefs which are further reinforced, and drive further confirmation seeking behavior.

In fact, the human brain is so adept at looking for patterns it “sees” them in places where none exist. Shermer calls this “illusory correlation”. Birds do it, rats to it; humans are masters at it. B.F. Skinner’s groundbreaking experiments on partial reinforcement in animals shows this “patternicity” exquisitely. As Shermer describes:

Skinner discovered that if he randomly delivered the food reinforcement, whatever the pigeon happened to be doing jiust before the delivery of the food would be repeated the next time, such as spinning around once to the left before pecking at the key. This is pigeon patternicity or the learning of a superstition.

. . . If you doubt its potency as a force in  human behavior, just visit a Las Vegas casino and observe people playing the slots with their varied attempts to find a pattern between (A) pulling the slot machine handle and (B) the payoff.

This goes a long way to describing all manner of superstitious behaviors in humans. But Shermer doesn’t stop there. He also describes how and why we look for patterns in the behaviors of others and assign meaning to these as well. Shermer call this “agenticity”. This is “the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention and agency”. As he goes on to describe:

… we often impart the patterns we find with agency and intention, and believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down, instead of bottom-up causal laws and randomness that makes up much of our world. Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspiracists, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Combined with our propensity to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise, patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Backed with the results of numerous cross-disciplinary scientific studies, Shermer’s arguments are thoroughly engrossing and objectively difficult to refute. This is by far Shermer’s best book to date.

(By the way, in the interest of full disclosure this book thoroughly validated the reviewer’s own beliefs.)

Idea Soup

Test-tube truths

[div class=attrib]From Eurozine:[end-div]

In his new book, American atheist Sam Harris argues that science can replace theology as the ultimate moral authority. Kenan Malik is sceptical of any such yearning for moral certainty, be it scientific or divine.

“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Dostoevsky never actually wrote that line, though so often is it attributed to him that he may as well have. It has become the almost reflexive response of believers when faced with an argument for a godless world. Without religious faith, runs the argument, we cannot anchor our moral truths or truly know right from wrong. Without belief in God we will be lost in a miasma of moral nihilism. In recent years, the riposte of many to this challenge has been to argue that moral codes are not revealed by God but instantiated in nature, and in particular in the brain. Ethics is not a theological matter but a scientific one. Science is not simply a means of making sense of facts about the world, but also about values, because values are in essence facts in another form.

Few people have expressed this argument more forcefully than the neuroscientist Sam Harris. Over the past few years, through books such as The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris has gained a considerable reputation as a no-holds-barred critic of religion, in particular of Islam, and as an acerbic champion of science. In his new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, he sets out to demolish the traditional philosophical distinction between is and ought, between the way the world is and the way that it should be, a distinction we most associate with David Hume.

What Hume failed to understand, Harris argues, is that science can bridge the gap between ought and is, by turning moral claims into empirical facts. Values, he argues, are facts about the “states of the world” and “states of the human brain”. We need to think of morality, therefore, as “an undeveloped branch of science”: “Questions about values are really questions about the wellbeing of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood: regarding positive and negative social emotions, the effects of specific laws on human relationships, the neurophysiology of happiness and suffering, etc.” Science, and neuroscience in particular, does not simply explain why we might respond in particular ways to equality or to torture but also whether equality is a good, and torture morally acceptable. Where there are disagreements over moral questions, Harris believes, science will decide which view is right “because the discrepant answers people give to them translate into differences in our brains, in the brains of others and in the world at large.”

Harris is nothing if not self-confident. There is a voluminous philosophical literature that stretches back almost to the origins of the discipline on the relationship between facts and values. Harris chooses to ignore most of it. He does not wish to engage “more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy”, he explains in a footnote, because he did not develop his arguments “by reading the work of moral philosophers” and because he is “convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics’, ‘deontology’, ‘noncognitivism’, ‘antirealism’, ’emotivism’, etc directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.”

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]