On Evolution and Chickens Movement Capabilities

Here is a cool video from YouTube that shows the ability that a chicken has to control their head's position relative to its body's movement. (thanks to Diana for the link)

Satel on Neuropseudoscience

Psychiatrist and author Sally Satel wrote a great item for the Feb. 2 issue of Forbest titled "Dopamine Made Me Do It", in which she criticizes the people she calls "neuropseudoscientists" -- the kind of people who misuse neuroscience and brain scans to try to explain a wide range of people's behavior.

The Hurdles to Kurzweil's AI Fantasies

In April Wired magazine had an article about Ray Kurzweil, AI/futurist/singulartarian, and his hopes for Artificial Intelligence to extend his life. Indeed, he takes a couple hundred pills a day in the hopes he will live long enough to see the day when computer technology will have advanced enough that his "personality" can be uploaded and hence, he claims, he'll achieve immortality.

While the main Wired article linked above was mildly interesting (i.e., as an update to what Kurzweil is doing these days), what I was really glad to see was the shorter sidebar: Never Mind the Singularity, Here's the Science. This was an excellent overview of five scientific hurdles that Kurzweil and others like him will need to solve -- and they won't be easy! I found the first four to be especially compelling. I highly recommend this sidebar to anyone interested in this topic.

NOTE: I have decided to remove the second paragraph of this posting, wherein I made some offhand remarks about my opinions on Strong AI vs. Searle's views on it (Chinese Room Argument and so on). This generated some interesting comments, but I just don't have time to get into a debate with anyone on this topic right now -- I'd need to do a lot of catching up from 15 years away from the subject to have an intelligent debate, and I just don't have the time/interest at present. So I've removed that part of this posting, and I've deleted the comments and my replies as well. (My apologies to those who spent time on composing those comments.)

On Complementary and Alternative Medicine

I want to thank R. Barker Bausell (professor of research methodology in the School of Nursing at the University of Maryland at Baltimore) for his excellent essay "Placebo Effect" in March 14 issue of The Chronicle Review. He makes several outstanding criticisms of so-called complementary and alternative medicine, and the call for more testing and studies. He argues instead that there should be less such testing and research, primarily because most such things haven't even passed the basic threshold to warrant rigorous testing by scientific methods. Read his essay for some clarity on an issue that we are often mentally clouded with vague and tricky claims.

Blue Eyes? Then apparently we are related!

USA Today had an interesting article recently (another copy of the article ran here). Research published in the journal Human Genetics found that every person with blue eyes descends from just one "founder", an ancestor whose genes mutated 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

I have blue eyes -- so if you do too, then we are apparently distant relatives.

On Theory and Law

Clive Thompson wrote an interesting column in the November issue of Wired, "A War of Words". He reports on the view of physicist Helen Quinn that scientists are too tentative when they discuss scientific knowledge, and that this problem allows creationists the opportunity to mockingly refer to evolution as "just a theory" (as opposed to fact).

They're an inherently cautious bunch, she points out. Even when they're 99 percent certain of a theory, they know there's always the chance that a new discovery could overturn or modify it.

So when scientists talk about well-established bodies of knowledge — particularly in areas like evolution or relativity — they hedge their bets. They say they "believe" something to be true, as in, "We believe that the Jurassic period was characterized by humid tropical weather."

This deliberately nuanced language gets horribly misunderstood and often twisted in public discourse. When the average person hears phrases like "scientists believe," they read it as, "Scientists can't really prove this stuff, but they take it on faith." ("That's just what you believe" is another nifty way to dismiss someone out of hand.)

Of course, antievolution crusaders have figured out that language is the ammunition of culture wars. That's why they use those stickers. They take the intellectual strengths of scientific language — its precision, its carefulness — and wield them as weapons against science itself.

The defense against this: a revamped scientific lexicon. If the antievolutionists insist on exploiting the public's misunderstanding of words like theory and believe, then we shouldn't fight it. "We need to be a bit less cautious in public when we're talking about scientific conclusions that are generally agreed upon," Quinn says.

What does she suggest? For truly solid-gold, well-established science, let's stop using the word theory entirely. Instead, let's revive much more venerable language and refer to such knowledge as "law." As with Newton's law of gravity, people intuitively understand that a law is a rule that holds true and must be obeyed. The word law conveys precisely the same sense of authority with the public as theory does with scientists, but without the linguistic baggage.

Evolution is supersolid. We even base the vaccine industry on it: When we troop into the doctor's office each winter to get a flu shot — an inoculation against the latest evolved strains of the disease — we're treating evolution as a law. So why not just say "the law of evolution"?

Best of all, it performs a neat bit of linguistic jujitsu. If someone says, "I don't believe in the theory of evolution," they may sound fairly reasonable. But if someone announces, "I don't believe in the law of evolution," they sound insane. It's tantamount to saying, "I don't believe in the law of gravity."

The Big Questions

Recently I've noticed some advertisements from the John Templeton Foundation in The Economist and The Chronicle for Higher Education. These ask a "big question", and then give snippets of responses from various academics or others. See their archive.

The one I've seen in ads lately is "Does the universe have a purpose?". The answers provided are of course varied, and are summed up as Yes, No, Unlikely, Perhaps, "I hope so", and so on. Read them all to get several perspectives.

Astrophysicists Neil deGrasse Tyson and Lawrence Krauss make some interesting points, but in the end are not confident enough (or don't understand proper epistemology well enough) to assert certainty.

The two that most align with my own views are from biochemist Christian de Duve and professor of chemistry Peter William Atkins. Mr de Duve is a little all over the place in his essay, but finally raises a core issue at the end:

It will be noted that there is no logical need for a creator in this view. By definition, a creator must himself be uncreated, unless he is part of an endless, Russian-doll succession of creators within creators. But then, why start the succession at all? Why not have the universe itself uncreated, an actual manifestation of Ultimate Reality, rather than the work of an uncreated creator? The question is worth asking.

Indeed it is! This is a basic question of metaphysics: does existence simply exist, or did someone or something create it? I would argue it doesn't even make sense to ask that question, and even if you do ask it, you immediately have an immediate regress. The only proper position is to simply start with the given: the world we perceive and live in, which includes both material objects and consciousness (lest you think I am crude materialist).

But I actually like Atkins' essay better. Here it is in full:

In the absence of evidence, the only reason to suppose that it does is sentimental wishful thinking and sentimental wishful thinking, which underlies all religion, is an unreliable tool for the discovery of truth of any kind.

The extension of analogies is another tool that accompanies wishful thinking in the toolboxes of the credulous. That an intricate mechanism, such as an engine or even a spoon, is commonly associated with a purpose cannot be taken to be evidence that the universe as a whole is associated with a purpose, any more than the existence of a cheetah implies that it has been designed with a purpose in mind. Cheetahs have evolved by the bloody, directionless, unguided processes of evolution: they have not been provided for the purpose of killing antelopes. Similarly, the universe has evolved over its 14 billion years of current existence by the directionless, unguided processes that are manifestations of the working out of physical laws: it has not been made for the purpose of providing platforms to enable cheetahs to stalk their prey or humans to generate great art or to entertain delusions. That we do not yet understand anything about the inception of the universe should not mean that we need to ascribe to its inception a supernatural cause, a creator, and therefore to associate with that creator's inscrutable mind a purpose, whether it be divine, malign, or even whimsically capricious.

Theologians typically focus on questions that they have invented for their own puzzlement. Some theologians are perplexed by the nature of life after death, a notion they have invented without a scrap of evidence.

Some are mystified by the existence of evil in a world created by an infinitely loving God, another notion that theologians have invented but which dissolves into nothing once it is realized that there is no God. The question of cosmic purpose is likewise an invented notion, wholly without evidential foundation, and equally dismissible as patently absurd. We should not regard as great the questions that have been invented solely for the sake of eliciting puzzlement.

I regard the existence of this extraordinary universe as having a wonderful, awesome grandeur. It hangs there in all its glory, wholly and completely useless. To project onto it our human-inspired notion of purpose would, to my mind, sully and diminish it.

I love the analogy with cheetahs here! And I very much like this point (italics mine above) about the very question itself being dismissable, as being a category mistake in essence.

The Amazing Randi on YouTube

I was recently poking around YouTube and found the many great James Randi video clips where he debunks and shows to be frauds various supposed psychics and other mystics. Here are some worth seeing:

• James Randi exposes Uri Geller and Peter Popoff - I esp. love how Randi used radio equipment to expose the religious faith-healer Popoff as a fraud, and that Popoff then went into bankruptcy... alas, Popoff is back to his con-man ways, see below for the latest.
• James Randi exposes James Hydrick - this is classic... what a clown Hydrick looks like in his outfit, and then with his claims about why he can't perform during the test.
• James Randi explains Homeopathy - this stuff is such nonsense. So many believers in its effectiveness are so deluded. Placebo effect, anyone?
• James Randi on Astrology - short, but effective, refutation of astrology (as if it needs refuting, LOL)
• James Randi and a Medium - Randi manages to make some very important points in the Q&A in this one.
• Peter Popoff vs. James Randi 2007 - from Inside Edition. This covers his latest con, the Miracle Water nonsense. A great exposing of this criminal con-man! This one is the best of this group... if you just watch one of these, WATCH THIS ONE!

Flowcharts for Science and Faith

Here are two good flowcharts showing a methodological difference between science and faith. Classic. (Thanks to GeekPress for this.)

More on Elon Musk, and What is Wrong with NASA

Back in April I blogged a bit about Elon Musk, after learning a bit about this amazing entrepreneur in Wired magazine. So I was pleased to see the latest issue of Wired have a cover story titled Rocket Boom, which goes into more detail about Elon Musk's efforts to build privately-funded space rockets. It is a well-written piece, as it gives a glimpse of what his work is like in this field.

And another, shorter item in that issue is also worth reading: How NASA Screwed Up (And four ways to fix it). Author Gregg Easterbrook really makes clear the failings of NASA -- not just failed projects, but more importantly its misguided priorities for projects going forward. Consider the moon-base plan, being pushed by George Bush:

For a sense of how out of whack NASA priorities have become, briefly ponder that plan. Because the Apollo missions suggested there was little of pressing importance to be learned on the moon, NASA has not landed so much as one automated probe there in three decades. In fact, the rockets used by the Apollo program were retired 30 years ago; even space enthusiasts saw no point in returning to the lunar surface. But now, with the space station a punch line and the shuttles too old to operate much longer, NASA suddenly decides it needs to restore its moon-landing capability in order to build a "permanent" crewed base. The cost is likely to be substantial -- $6 billion is the annual budget of the space station, which is closer to Earth and quite spartan compared with what even a stripped-down moon facility would require. But set that aside: What will a moon base crew do? Monitor equipment -- a task that could easily be handled from an office building in Houston.

In 2004, former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, now an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin, calculated that NASA can place objects on the moon for $26,000 a pound. At that price, each bottle of water a crew member uncaps will cost the taxpayer $13,000. Even if the new moon rocket being designed by NASA cuts launch costs in half, as agency insiders hope, that's still $6,500 for one Aquafina (astronauts and moon base are extra). Prices like this quickly push the total construction bill for any serious facility into the hundreds of billions of dollars. A private company facing such numbers would conclude that a moon base is an absurd project -- at least until a fundamentally different way of reaching space is found -- and would put its capital into the development of new propulsion technologies. But NASA takes a cost-is-no-object approach that appeals only to those who personally benefit from the spending.

Although the article begins by laying out several projects that would be more rational for NASA to focus on than what it currently has as its priorities, I was glad to see the article end with the following emphasis on the need for a turn away from NASA and towards the private sector:

Given NASA's politicization, we should hope that the space industry evolves as aviation did — transitioning from ponderous government-run projects to mostly private-sector activities attuned to customer needs. That raises the question: Could entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos eventually put NASA out of business? Perhaps, but not for the next couple of decades — space has colossal economic barriers to entry. Given that NASA is sure to be around for a while, taxpayers should insist the space agency be recon figured to produce tangible benefits for all of us. With any luck, private space enterprise will eventually find success and begin to exert competitive market pressures on the government space program. NASA's success in putting men on the moon in the 1960s is one of history's enduring achievements. But it's the 21st century now — long past time for a new set of space priorities.

Alert: Don't Lick Your Lunchbox 600 Times a Day for 15 Days

I remember the good ol' cafeteria days I experienced at a public elementary school in a small town in Western, NY. Lunch ladies blowing a whistle when kids acted up, or worse, making us sit "boy/girl/boy/girl" because the boys (typically) would cause trouble if allowed to sit together. Of course, a few years later we gents would have been all to happy to be allowed to sit boy/girl/boy/girl, but in 2nd or even 5th grade, that was no fun at all.

And the food... ah, the food. Tater tots, fruit salad from a can, mexican pizzas (orange grease with some bread and other stuff holding it together), and of course small ice-cream dixie-cups for a quarter (if I remember correctly).

And then there were the lunchboxes. In the 1970s and early 1980s there were some very cool lunchboxes you could have: Star Wars and comic book superheroes for the guys, and other movie stars and things of interest for the girls (can you tell I didn't pay attention to "their" lunchboxes at that age?). Or, you could brown-bag it -- something we all did as we matured into middle- and high-school.

But what we didn't have were fancy, back-pack like vinyl lunch "boxes". I must have missed when those became popular, because I surely don't remember them from my days in school three decades ago. And perhaps that is just as well -- hot news in the newspaper and even on cable news today is that these things might have unsafe levels of lead in them, that could rub off and either get on children's skin or get into the food they are carrying inside. I hadn't heard this story before, but it no doubt made the news a while ago, as Wal-Mart pulled some brands and offered refunds for some customers (oh, that evil Wal-Mart!).

So the new news is that a report of 2005 testing by government scientists might have left out important information -- key data that meant the danger from lead in these lunchboxes was being wrongly dismissed. See this AP article from the Akron-Beacon Journal, nearly identical to the one which ran in my local paper. And if you want to learn more, you can read the release from the CEH (Center for Environmental Health) which is leading the charge against the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission), the government agency "charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks of serious injury or death from more than 15,000 types of consumer products."

If the CPSC committed scientific fraud in leaving out or distorting data, then that is one thing. Not being an expert, I can't really comment on the merits of the case being made by the CEH. Their press release includes various documents, but I'm not entirely convinced of what they are claiming against the CPSC.

And one reason I'm skeptical is that this story sound so very similar to the Alar scare (see Wikipedia entry) of the 1980s, in which the original tests that led to the scare actually meant that you'd have to drink far more apple juice every day than your stomach could even handle, and do so for many years, before Alar would be a risk as a carcinogen (or similarly eat so many apples that your insides would explode well before you were in danger of cancer from the Alar). The similarity arises here because of the following:

As a result of their tests, the CPSC issued a public statement last year reassuring consumers they had nothing to worry about: "Based on the extremely low levels of lead found in our tests, in most cases, children would have to rub their lunchbox and then lick their hands more than 600 times every day, for about 15-30 days, in order for the lunchbox to present a health hazard.''

Again, I'm not an expert here, but the similarity is striking.

Oh, and gotta love the knee-jerk over-reaction of some in Congress:

Said Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif.: 'I am concerned that the CPSC has failed to protect children from an unnecessary hazard they have known about for some time. We should protect our children by banning lead in all children's products.'

Ban all lead in all children's products? Really? Does the science really back that up? I highly doubt it. And I'm not even going to mention the philosophical question about the proper role of government, and whether it should be banning things like lead at all. Well, I guess I did just mention it... OK, so I won't say anything more about it... for now.

Mercury in Fish Another Overblown Issue

Today I read two somewhat contradictory stories in my local paper about mercury levels in fish, and to what extent this is a health hazard for us. The first (originally from Washington Post, but see it here) describes a recent report that suggests some areas are more susceptible to mercury pollution than others, describing these areas as mercury "hot spots". As a report about a report, it seemed like a fine article I suppose. But what it lacked was any mention of why we should care much about the issue. It just took it for granted that everyone knows that mercury-in-our-fish is a bad thing. And that is probably making a safe assumption on the part of readers, since we have been bombarded with stories of how dangerous mercury found in our fish diets can be for our health.

But the story gets very much complicated by the second, shorter article I read today. In the USA Weekend supplement to my local paper, the "Eat Smart" column by Jean Carper was titled "Phony Fish Scare?". Here it is in full:

Don't let a mercury scare keep you from eating fish, says William Lands, Ph.D., formerly with the National Institutes of Health and a leading expert on the benefits of fish oil. He says virtually all fish, even those high in mercury, are safe.

"Mercury is toxic in the absence of selenium," Lands says, "but fish is loaded with selenium that neutralizes the danger." A new University of North Dakota study shows that common fish, including grouper, swordfish, tuna and salmon, have much more selenium than mercury. Even albacore tuna (high on the government's hit list) has 15 times more selenium than mercury, making it perfectly safe, in Lands' view.

Is there any fish Lands would avoid because of high mercury? No, except maybe the pilot whale, not seen in U.S. markets.

So that was eye-opening for me. Selenium, which is common in fish, counter-acts the dangers from mercury.

So I did a little looking around the web, and I found several interesting things. The first was this article, which has an interesting excerpt including a graph showing the relative levels of mercury and selenium in various types of fish, and also in pilot whale -- the mammal mention by Lands above. Very interestingly, there are far greater levels of selenium than mercury in all the fish species shown: sole, flounder, salmon, tuna, pollock, halibut, cod, snapper, grouper, and swordfish. But in the case of pilot whale, the relative amount of selenium is much lower than in all the types of fish listed.

The info in the article was taken from materials at mercuryfacts.com, which seems to be the same site as fishscam.com. This site has lots of interesting materials, including critical comments about prominent scientists and environmentalists who are promoting fear of mercury in fish. As just one item on their site, see "The Flip Side of Mercury". One also discovers that much of the health concern over mercury in fish comes from a study that involved... guess what... pilot whale. See also the Mercury Myths page, which details problems with the following common claims:

• The amount of mercury in our environment (and in the fish we eat) is dangerously increasing.
• Mercury in fish presents a serious health risk to Americans.
• The health risk from mercury outweighs the health benefits of eating fish.
• You can get mercury poisoning from the amount of fish you might consume in a given week or month.
• Every year in the United States, 630,000 children are born with mercury levels in their blood that put them "at risk" for neurological disorders later in life.
• Eight percent of American women of childbearing age have unsafe levels of mercury in their blood.

Apparently there is good reason to doubt each of these claims.

Pinker on Reason and Faith

Steven Pinker's "Less Faith, More Reason" piece was a treasure-trove of important points and distinctions (thanks to Stephen Hicks for the link). While he says there is much to praise in Harvard's Report of the Committee on General Education, he has a few criticisms. His first concern is with how the "Science and Technology" requirement is described. I liked this passage in particular:

The report introduces scientific knowledge as follows: “Science and technology directly affect our students in many ways, both positive and negative: they have led to life-saving medicines, the internet, more efficient energy storage, and digital entertainment; they also have shepherded nuclear weapons, biological warfare agents, electronic eavesdropping, and damage to the environment.”

Well, yes, and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced both museums and gas chambers, that opera has both uplifted audiences and inspired the Nazis, and so on. It makes it sound as if the choice between science and technology on the one hand, and superstition and ignorance on the other, is a moral toss-up! Of course students should know about both the bad and good effects of technology. But this hardly seems like the best way for a great university to justify the teaching of science.

Then he also rightly objects to the requirement called "Reason and Faith". Here is his excellent list of concerns on that one:

First, the word “faith” in this and many other contexts, is a euphemism for “religion.” An egregious example is the current administration’s “faith-based initiatives,” so-named because it is more palatable than “religion-based initiatives.” A university should not try to hide what it is studying in warm-and-fuzzy code words.

Second, the juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith” and “reason” are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these. Imagine if we had a requirement for “Astronomy and Astrology” or “Psychology and Parapsychology.” It may be true that more people are knowledgeable about astrology than about astronomy, and it may be true that astrology deserves study as a significant historical and sociological phenomenon. But it would be a terrible mistake to juxtapose it with astronomy, if only for the false appearance of symmetry.

Third, if this is meant to educate students about the role of religion in history and current affairs, why isn’t it just a part of the “U.S. and the World” requirement? Religion is an important force, to be sure, but so are nationalism, ethnicity, socialism, markets, nepotism, class, and globalization. Why single religion out among all the major forces in history?

There is also considerable disagreement over whether religion really is the driving force behind the conflicts that are commonly attributed to it. Many people in Ireland insist that the Ulster conflict is about British rule versus Irish unification, not about Protestantism versus Catholicism. And among the Islam-aligned forces with which our country is currently entangled, Saddam Hussein’s Baathism is more secular and nationalist than it is religious. Whether or not religion is a major force is a question best left to our colleagues in history, government, and area studies, in the context of the broadest possible study of world affairs. This empirical issue should not be prejudged in the categories of a general education requirement.

Fourth, if the requirement is supposed to be about the clash in the history of ideas between religion and reason in Western thought, here again it seems far too arbitrary and specific a choice for a general education requirement. Why not rationalism and empiricism, or idealism and materialism, or the subjective and the objective?

Finally, if the requirement is meant to be the union of all or any of these (some students concentrate on Islamic jihad, others on the Reformation, still others on the argument from design or the ontological argument for God’s existence, still others on biblical history), it just doesn’t hang together as a coherent requirement.

Again, we have to keep in mind that the requirement will attract attention from far and wide, and for a long time. For us to magnify the significance of religion as a topic equivalent in scope to all of science, all of culture, or all of world history and current affairs, is to give it far too much prominence. It is an American anachronism, I think, in an era in which the rest of the West is moving beyond it.

Bill Nye on Astrology

Bill Nye ("The Science Guy") makes an interesting point about Astrology in this video available at YouTube. Although I haven't corroborated this with other sources, it seems the Earth has wobbled a bit since the original astrological assignments were made, thereby making them no longer accurate. Reminded me of a few weeks ago of the many jokes made at astrologers' expense when Pluto was de-throned as a full planet in our solar system: won't that mess up some astrology stuff that involves the planets? I'm not sure, as I don't know much about astrology (since I don't believe in completely arbitary things like that)... but that predicament gave me a good chuckle. [Hat tip to Stephen Hicks for the link.]

Becker and Posner on Women in Science and Engineering

Judge Richard Posner has commented and critiqued the recent 'NAS' study titled "Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering". Then Nobel-prize winning economist Gary Becker adds his further comments on it. Some very good questions and concerns raised here.

Solid Red Oxygen

Solid Red Oxygen: those three words don't seem to fit together, do they? There seems to be a category mistake here. But no! See this article from Nature that reports that scientists have reported the crystal structure of a a form of solid oxygen that is dark red in color and that is formed under immense pressure. (Thanks to Paul at GeekPress for the link.)

Global Warming is quite busy

Here is a very interesting list of links to things that "Global Warming" has been said to be the cause of. Now, one would expect a massive global change of any kind to effect a lot of things, like if a massive asteroid hits the earth, or if the sun changed in some dramatic way. But I don't intuitively put the increase in CO2 levels from human activity to be on that obvious of a level, so the length of this list of claimed effects of "Global Warming" seems a bit hard to believe to me.

This was my first experience with the site Numbers Watch. Although its site design looks like something from 1996 or so, it is updated regularly and seems to have some good resources included. The other "list" like the one mentioned above is a list of things that have been argued to give you cancer. But there is much content at this site besides these two lists, and I plan to look it over more in the future.

Questions raised on NSF Coral Reef Report

Patrick J. Michaels of Cato has raised some interesting questions in Okay Coral regarding a recent NSF study about the connection between increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the acidity of the oceans and the effect of this on coral reefs. I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, so I'd be interested in hearing any responses to the questions he raises, if any are forthcoming from NSF or elsewhere... so if readers know of any, please let me know.

Collections of Cells and Federal Funds

I read two brief items today about President Bush's veto of legislation on federal funding of stem cell research. Both were pretty good pieces, but neither quite lays out my complete view on the matter.

Michael Tanner's article Does the Senate Vote on Stem Cell Research Matter? focuses attention on the fact that stem cell research is not actually illegal, and is actually moving ahead in the private sector without federal funding. He gives good examples of such projects that are going on now, and so argues that the veto doesn't matter. Worse, he notes, this bill and the veto are politicizing science:

"Stem-cell researchers have become just one more special interest at the federal trough. And, as such, the coming debate is a perfect example of how science becomes politicized when government money is involved.

Instead of a serious scientific debate about the merits and drawbacks of a promising new therapy, one side will treat us to extravagant claims from celebrity spokespeople implying that miracle cures for everything from spinal injuries to Alzheimer's disease are just around the corner. The other side will downplay studies that show promise from embryonic stem-cell research, while overselling results from adult stem cells. In reality, most scientists believe that embryonic stem cells may eventually help people with Parkinson's disease, muscular dystrophy and spinal injuries, among other conditions. But widespread application of this research is years, likely decades, away."

And he is correct as far as that goes.

But he is very wrong to contend that the veto doesn't matter. And this is where the second item I read today comes into play. David Holcberg and Alex Epstein wrote a very short item in the form of a Letter to the Editor, which over at Principles in Practice goes by the title Bush's Opposition to Embryonic Stem Cell Research Is Anti-Life. They note:

"Contrary to the claims of Bush and others who oppose embryonic stem cell research, embryos destroyed in the process of extracting stem cells are not human beings. These embryos are smaller than a grain of sand, and consist of, at most, a few hundred undifferentiated cells. They have no body or body parts. They do not see, hear, feel, or think. While these early embryos have the potential to become human beings—they are not actual human beings.

To restrict the freedom of scientists to use clusters of cells to do such research on the basis of religious dogma is to violate their rights—as well as the rights of all who would contribute to, invest in, or benefit from this research."

I wouldn't say that scientists who don't receive federal funding are having their rights violated (though this issue is muddied by the long history of government funding of science, which violates all our rights as taxpayers since it is outside the proper scope of government action).

But I think their basic point is a critical one: collections of cells aren't people, they don't have the moral status granted by personhood, and so don't have a right to life (moral or legal). I argue that personhood and rights is based on our rational faculty. But even if you argue for personhood and rights based on something broader (the ability to feel pain, etc.), minute collections of cells still wouldn't qualify. They only qualify via either an arbitrary intrinsicist view of personhood as conveyed by "being human" (having the human DNA), or by the view from religion that personhood status is conferred at conception because that is when a soul (or something) enters the one or very few cells that then exist. Bush's view, from what I understand, is the latter view -- and so, as Holcberg and Epstein write, this "shows once again his commitment to impose his religious agenda on all Americans."

So while I quibble over whether scientists rights are being violated as a result of this veto, I would agree with them that this veto definitely does "matter" (contra Tanner's implication). Religious views (faith-based, mystical, supernatural, etc.) should not be involved in setting public policy or law.

However, Holcberg and Epstein don't go on to say or even imply anything about federal funding of science as such. Knowing a bit about their philosophical positions, I assume they are against it, but you couldn't tell that from their brief editorial -- in fact, one would conclude the opposite. (To be fair, they likely don't discuss this because of space limitations, given the format of their letter.)

So here is my view: given that this legislation was not actually authorizing new funding for scientific research, but (as I understand it) was merely lifting the ban on allocating federal (taxpayer) funds already budgeted for scientific research towards stem cell research... the legislation was a good thing, and the veto was wrong. I would be against, however, federal funding of scientific research in general (as I'm pretty sure Holcberg and Epstein are as well). So any bill that was introducing new funds for scientific research -- whether for stem cell research or any other kind of research -- would get a thumbs down from me. And this is because such research is simply outside the scope of legitimate government action -- because it has nothing to do with the protection of individual rights. It should be left to the private sector, where based on Tanner's examples, it seems it is proceeding anyway.

String Theory - Not Even Wrong!

Thanks to Paul Hsieh for blogging about articles on Peter Woit's book that challenge's String Theory. (Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics). Sounds like a very interesting book.

From the Times Online article (see also here), after giving some background on string theory, there is this nice paragraph explaining the book title:

But is string theory true? Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia University, has challenged the entire string-theory discipline by proclaiming that its topic is not a genuine theory at all and that many of its exponents do not understand the complex mathematics it employs. String theory, he avers, has become a form of science fiction. Hence his book’s title, Not Even Wrong: an epithet created by Wolfgang Pauli, an irascible early 20th-century German physicist. Pauli had three escalating levels of insult for colleagues he deemed to be talking nonsense: “Wrong!”, “Completely wrong!” and finally “Not even wrong!”. By which he meant that a proposal was so completely outside the scientific ballpark as not to merit the least consideration.

That is superb. I think I had heard of Pauli's tri-partite distinction before, but I am pleased at this reminder, and especially to hear of Not Even Wrong being applied to string theory. I also liked seeing the reference to Horgan's 1995 book The End of Science, and the analogy to deconstructionism in literary criticism.

I've added this book to my mammoth reading list.

Scientists Respond to Gore

See this enlightening article "Scientists Respond to Gore's Warnings of Climate Catastrophe".

In that article you can learn a bit about the "vast majority of scientists" that Al Gore refers to (are they relevant experts, that is climate change experts, or just scientists in various fields?), and more importantly, learn of numerous counterpoints to the claims Gore makes in his film.