The Wondering Mind

This weekend, the NY Times Magazine had an interesting article on a rather interesting man.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really agree with what most of the article and Mr. Dyson had to say. But one particular point really caught my attention. And that was the point that if Mr. Dyson is wrong, any remedial action would be “too late”. It’s a point he never really addresses.

The point caught my attention because over 30 years ago while I was still in secondary school, one of my class projects was on the environment. (Since this is an issue which has only really gained prominence in the last decade or so, at least among the public, I am amazed, and rather pleased with myself, for being so prescient.)

Most of the class research argued that this was a desperately dire issue in need of action NOW! For my part, I was more cautious. Although I’ve always been interested in and cared about conservation issues, my research on the issue led me to believe that at the time there was insufficient evidence to warrant such alarmist notions. There was beginning to be gathered evidence supporting global warming, but it was sketchy at best, and certainly did not deserve the sort of drastic actions being advocated even back then, and which seem necessary now.

I made the sort of argument that Mr. Dyson is making, which is that the suspected (back then) causes of global warming, namely pollution, was the result of economic activity which did have concrete benefits, and it would be irresponsible to curtail those on the basis of flimsy (back then) evidence of environmental damage.

This brought howls of protest from my classmates who, rather than making reasoned arguments, basically insulted my supposed lack of intelligence. They, however, were ignoring one important point; my concluding point, which the teacher had to repeat (and shout to the class to be heard).

That was that almost all researchers were agreed that the reason the evidence for environmental damage was flimsy at the time was that the impact showed up as a slow-moving process. That is, the effects of pollution take years to show up to a measurably large degree. So it was feasible that we were causing damage, but we wouldn’t see for years if we were.

The flip-side of that observation was that if there was indeed man-made damage, it would take equally long, if not even longer, for the remedial effects of any action we took to counteract our past actions, if any means could be found to reverse the damage at all.

From that perspective, many scientists were agreed that we should at least try to curtail our level of pollution as a precaution since by the time concrete evidence of environmental damage was available, it would be “too late”. And that was my conclusion, which my teacher, if not my classmates, found to be a reasoned and reasonable conclusion.

This is the conundrum facing Freeman Dyson today, in reverse. There exists ample evidence that man is causing a change in the climate, and that this will have long-lasting, if not permanent, impact on our environment. Plenty of evidence exists to suggest that this will be bad for mankind.

Faced with this prospect and overwhelming consensus, it is silly for opponents of environmental action to argue we should blithely ignore the evidence and just carry on. They have to have some realistic contingency if they are wrong, but they don’t.

If the proponents of environmental control are wrong, we would have expended a lot of resources on something that was not necessary. But that activity will create some of the benefits which the critics argue we will fore go in “stalling” economic development. While it’s difficult to know if it will fully compensate, it is a certainty that it will compensate to some degree. So the worst case scenario if the environmentalists are wrong is not great, but not catastrophic.

But if the opponents are wrong, there is no “plan B” to counteract the potentially apocalyptic consequences. All Mr. Dyson has is a vague belief that man will somehow figure out a way to deal with it, because that what you have to call silly ideas about planting trillions of trees, or genetically modified trees.

Perhaps the difference is Mr. Dyson’s tendency to concentrate on only one problem at a time, rather than looking at the whole ecosystem, much the same way he compared himself to Feynman. But Mr. Dyson’s approach seems to be either thoughtless of the complexity of the whole problem, or blindly faithful of the notion that things will somehow work out OK for man.

That seems strange in a man so proud of being a heretic. More importantly, it is potentially disastrous for mankind if we blindly follow him.

Not having much success trying to discredit evolution, at least among respectable and intelligent people outside of the U.S., the crazy wing of what one can barely call “Christianity” are trying a different tack in having religion, or more accurately superstition, taught as science.

With continuing study of the human brain, some are trying to argue that science shows that there is, or must be, a “soul”, which science cannot explain or understand. Their arguments go something like this:

Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use “mindful attention” to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material.

This is actually generally accepted as bad neuroscience.

In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology – the material brain is changing the material brain.

The less than stellar standard of neuroscience demonstrated Schwartz is perhaps due in nor small part to the fact that the researcher is not a neuroscientist but a psychiatrist. He may be a clever fellow and a great psychiatrist, or not, I have no idea. But this does not qualify him to speak on neuroscience as an informed authority, no more than you would rely on him to send a man to the moon.

It is also quite ignorant and stupid. As one critic points out,

And for Patricia Churchland, a philosopher of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, “it is an argument from ignorance. The fact something isn’t currently explained doesn’t mean it will never be explained or that we need to completely change not only our neuroscience but our physics.”

Another academic gives a more elaborate example,

“At one time it looked like all physical causation was push/pull Newtonianism,” says Owen Flanagan, professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University, North Carolina. “Now we have a new understanding of physics. What counts as material has changed. Some respectable philosophers think that we might have to posit sentience as a fundamental force of nature or use quantum gravity to understand consciousness. These stretch beyond the bounds of what we today call ‘material’, and we haven’t discovered everything about nature yet. But what we do discover will be natural, not supernatural.”

Put more succinctly,

“Progress in science is slow on many fronts,” says John Searle, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley. “We don’t yet have a cure for cancer, but that doesn’t mean cancer has spiritual causes.”

Which brings us to the crux of why these “bible-bashers” (I think the term is most apt in this case) will never gain a reputable following in the scientific community, even among scientists of faith.

Science is the pursuit of understanding and explaining the natural world. If and when an explanation for a natural phenomenon is supernatural, all scientific inquiry must cease. For example, if Zeus is responsible for causing lightning, what would be the point of scientific inquiry? You could not observe natural phenomenon to explain and predict lightning. You would be better served by trying to divine Zeus’ moods to understand the phenomenon.

If you buy the argument these people are selling, you might also consider buying geese so that you can slaughter them and divine their entrails every morning, like the ancient Romans and Greeks did.

Those denying evolution seem to be the new “flat-earthers”. You get an eclectic mix of people who are too stupid to understand the material mingling with those who have stuffed their ears and are shouting “La, la, la, la” to drown out a truth they find too troubling to their existing beliefs. This story seems to be of someone from the former group than the latter.

Adnan Oktar is someone who first gained prominence by publishing a creationist book in Turkey, which was then sent to many leading biologists and others working in biological and related sciences. Let’s ignore the fact that this idiot clearly does not have the money to ever pay out on his offer. The real problem seems to be that Oktar does not understand the material and is too stupid to realise this.

Mr Dawkins had written of Mr Oktar’s book: “I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.”

Mr Oktar had responded: “We could have spoken on a more scientific basis if he had been able to produce an intermediate form fossil capable of confirming evolution in the face of all the hundreds of fossils in my book.”

Unfortunately, as this article in the NY Times makes clear, he doesn’t understand the science, so I’m not sure how anyone is supposed to speak to him “on a more scientific basis”. According to Kevin Padian, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley,

He said people who had received copies were “just astounded at its size and production values and equally astonished at what a load of crap it is.

“If he sees a picture of an old fossil crab or something, he says, ‘See, it looks just like a regular crab, there’s no evolution,’ ” Dr. Padian said. “Extinction does not seem to bother him. He does not really have any sense of what we know about how things change through time.”

As the New Scientist points out, any attempt to have a scientific discussion with Oktar would be useless.

So, will Oktar cough up? Unlikely. You might call the problem the Sorcerer’s Apprentice syndrome. Poor Mickey Mouse found out that every time he chopped up one of his magic brooms, the problem doubled as each half sprouted new legs and continued its duties.

Palaeontologists everywhere can sympathise with Mickey’s plight. When a seemingly large evolutionary gap is plugged with a remarkable new fossil, as happened just the other day with the discovery of a new primitive turtle from the Triassic, it just leaves two smaller gaps on either side. Now, instead of one gap in the fossil record there are two, and creationists argue that the fossil record is, paradoxically, even worse than it was before the new discovery.

What Oktar is demanding is for organisms to evolve right before his eyes. That is enough to tell you he just doesn’t understand the science. So good luck on anyone trying to get paid on this offer.

This post about a proposed fleet of ships traveling the world’s oceans trying to cool the globe has more than a hint of the sci-fi about it. So it immediately reminded me of one particular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

As I recall, the inhabitants of this particular planet used technology which caused terrible pollution, and set up devices which were designed to counteract their effects. It didn’t work out too well for those people either.

Not to appeal to the now hackneyed Occam’s razor, but is it just me, or is it crazy to spew out pollution and then create devices (which use energy and therefore also cause more pollution) to clear it up?

Apparently the French have found that Mac Pros emit benzene. What the article doesn’t mention is that benzene is not only poisonous, but is classified as a carcinogen.

You’d think Steve Jobs would get right on that…

We only ever seem to hear about science in the news when bad things happen, like the Challenger space shuttle blowing up. Or in negative controversy, like religious zealots wanting to teach children that God creating the universe in 6 days is science. You also hear about science being used in terrible policy decisions, such as greater surveillance of ordinary people.

So I wish mainstream media would make more a deal when there is good news, like this, or this. Both developments in water purification technology, if they can be developed to commercial levels, are , or should be, huge news. So many of the most serious and virulent diseases in poor nations, are related to lack clean drinking water. In addition to the direct cost of the illnesses caused, diseases often have a serious negative impact on the economic development of the affected countries.

When policy makers are seriously talking about possible future conflicts over access to water, these inventions may be some of the most important developments of today.