iBiome

"Many of our cultural institutions cultivate a Philistine indifference to science"

Stephen Pinker writes about a matter close to my own heart - the apparent and growing distain for science as a way of understanding the world.

Moreover, science has contributed—directly and enormously—to the fulfillment of these values. If one were to list the proudest accomplishments of our species (setting aside the removal of obstacles we set in our own path, such as the abolition of slavery and the defeat of fascism), many would be gifts bestowed by science.

The most obvious is the exhilarating achievement of scientific knowledge itself. We can say much about the history of the universe, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our own mental life. Better still, this understanding consists not in a mere listing of facts, but in deep and elegant principles, like the insight that life depends on a molecule that carries information, directs metabolism, and replicates itself.

Science has also provided the world with images of sublime beauty: stroboscopically frozen motion, exotic organisms, distant galaxies and outer planets, fluorescing neural circuitry, and a luminous planet Earth rising above the moon’s horizon into the blackness of space. Like great works of art, these are not just pretty pictures but prods to contemplation, which deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and of our place in nature.

And contrary to the widespread canard that technology has created a dystopia of deprivation and violence, every global measure of human flourishing is on the rise. The numbers show that after millennia of near-universal poverty, a steadily growing proportion of humanity is surviving the first year of life, going to school, voting in democracies, living in peace, communicating on cell phones, enjoying small luxuries, and surviving to old age. The Green Revolution in agronomy alone saved a billion people from starvation. And if you want examples of true moral greatness, go to Wikipedia and look up the entries for “smallpox” and “rinderpest” (cattle plague). The definitions are in the past tense, indicating that human ingenuity has eradicated two of the cruelest causes of suffering in the history of our kind. 

via www.newrepublic.com

a christmas carol

Each Christmas I try to reread Dickens' A Christmas Carol, to let flow the spirit of the season. Harder and harder each year, as I get busier and busier. I really need a dollop of idleness to let joy sink in. Anyway, in my view Dickens is the greatest writer of the English speaking world, and I just finished one of his more powerful passages, from Stave Three (the Ghost of Christmas Present):

'Spirit,' said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, 'tell me if Tiny Tim will live.' 'I see a vacant seat,' replied the Ghost,' in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.' 'No, no,' said Scrooge. 'Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared.' 'If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race,' returned the Ghost, 'will find him here. What then. If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.' Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief. 'Man,' said the Ghost, 'if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.' Scrooge bent before the Ghost's rebuke, and trembling cast his eyes upon the ground.

"The Truth"

Link: The Science Creative Quarterly: THIS IS THE TRUTH.

1. Cigarettes are bad for you.
2. Men and Women are equal.
3. Global Warming is real, and (by the way) it’s all our fault.*
4. It’s not all relative.
5. Gin is better than Whiskey. Whiskey is better than Gin.
6. Intelligent Design is wrong.
7. Over consumption is a serious problem.
8. The Millennium Development Goals are worthy*.
9. Wilco is good, sometimes exceptional, but often inconsequential.
10. Shit happens (ditto for sex and death).
11. Creationism is silly. (also, see 6)
12. SUV’s are just stupid.
13. The truth is worth more than an iPod*.
14. On the whole, disorder increases.
15. Science, for better or for worse, is all around.

A Void

So, I'm wondering, if your surname is Void, how do you write a cheque?

Quote of the Day

'It is not humanity on my part. I am perfectly willing that other people should kill things for my comfort and advantage.  The mechanism of life is so wonderful that I shrink from stopping its action.  To tread on a black-beetle would be to me like crushing a watch of complex and exquisite workmanship.'
- W.S. Gilbert

The Pre-Natal Abyss

Nabakov, linked in  Andrew Sullivan.  I find the commonsense notion that what will happen to our consciousness when we die, will be pretty much like what was happening before we were conceived, to be at once compelling, comforting, and frightening:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged -- the same house, the same people -- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

What James Watson has Learned

Some insight from the discoverer of the double helix.  He's right, in my view, about the transformative effects of the falling costs of sequencing. "Esquire: What I've learned"

Never fight bigger boys or dogs.

The cost of DNA sequencing is going to change the world much faster than I would have thought. We can resequence someone now for $150,000. Can you reach the $1,000 genome? I'm skeptical of that. But just $15,000 would change the world. You'd do a thousand Greeks and a thousand Swedes and find out what's different about them. Anytime a child has problems at school or something where you worry something is wrong, you'll do a DNA diagnosis.

I've given my DNA to two of these companies. I've told them they can publish everything except the structure of the gene that will tell me if I'm predisposed to Alzheimer's. I don't want to know.

New ideas require new facts.

You explain things by way of ideas. Why do we have a government that is run by rich trash? Because they've used their money to buy the presidency. Bush is a tool for the people who don't want an inheritance tax. And Frist isn't an innocent bystander, with his own family fortune--hundreds of millions. The piece of shit, I hate him.

For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change the world for the better.

I'm basically a libertarian. I don't want to restrict anyone from doing anything unless it's going to harm me. I don't want to pass a law stopping someone from smoking. It's just too dangerous. You lose the concept of a free society. Since we are genetically so diverse and our brains are so different, we're going to have different aspirations. The things that will satisfy me won't satisfy you. On the other hand, if global warming is in any way preventable and it's likely to come, not doing something would be irresponsible to the future of our society.

Quote of the Day

From the Atlantic, quoting from the Double Helix by James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA:

My interest in DNA had grown out of a desire, first picked up while a senior in college, to learn what the gene was. Later, in graduate school at Indiana University, it was my hope that the gene might be solved without my learning any chemistry. This wish partially arose from laziness since, as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I was principally interested in birds and managed to avoid taking any chemistry or physics courses which looked of even medium difficulty. Briefly, the Indiana biochemists encouraged me to learn organic chemistry, but after I used a Bunsen burner to warm up some benzene, I was relieved from further true chemistry. It was safer to turn out an uneducated Ph.D. than to risk another explosion …

He then went on to meet Francis Crick and the rest, as they say, is history.  Is laziness an engine of success?  Here's hoping.

Science vs. Scientism

There has been an excellent debate on Science & Intelligent design going on at a conservative web site, The Corner on National Review Online (scroll down a bit if you hit this link).  John Derbyshire, resident curmudgeon at NRO takes up the pro-science cudgel.  One example:

"To a great many people, Darwin is a bogey-man, a sort of anti-Christ figure.  I suspect that millions of American children are tucked up in bed at night with the warning that if they are not good, the Darwin monster will come and eat them up. To working scientists, this is nuts.  Darwin was a great observer of nature who established a neat theory that explains lots of stuff, and which, in 150 years of inquiry, no new observations--zero, zip, zilch, nada, none--have contradicted.   That's all.  Possibly some observation will be made tomorrow that contradicts it--an intact bird skeleton in precambrian rocks, for instance.  Then we'll need a revised theory, as we did in physics 100 years ago when Newtonism showed cracks.  The scientist who develops that revised theory will then be world-famous, and will enjoy wealth and prestige beyond the dreams of avarice.  He will not be burned at the stake by enraged Darwinians, any more than Einstein was by enraged Newtonians.  Lots of ambitious young biologists would l--o--v--e to be that guy.  None of them would describe himself as doing his daily research work 'in the name of Darwin.' But scientific thinking--dispassionate observation, measurement, experimentation, and hypothesis-forming--is deeply unnatural for human beings, and a great many people--most, I sometimes think--will just never get it, in fact will react violently against it, at any rate when it is applied to living creatures.  To most people, all abstract thought is really religion, or ought to be.  If it doesn't behave like religion, if a theory's proponents don't behave like evangelists and theologians, people get mad with them.  That is part of human nature, according to Paul Bloom, and I think he's right; but you can't build bridges or design drugs by thinking like that, and you can't enlarge your understanding of the natural world, either--no matter how many philosophers, theologians, novelists, and historians you hire."

The Upside of Crunchy

I have been speaking to several friends and colleagues lately about career choices, mine and theirs, weighing options and fretting about stability vs. risk, when and how to make a leap, and so on.  When considering a major decision, I often think back to this article by the late Nico Colchester that I first read in the Economist a few years ago.  "Comfortable sogginess" is something we all fall into from time to time, or all the time, but it risks regret over the life not lived.

Crunchiness brings wealth. Wealth leads to sogginess. Sogginess brings poverty. Poverty creates crunchiness. From this immutable cycle we know that to hang on to wealth, you must keep things crunchy.

Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. The going was crunchy for Captain Scott as he plodded southwards across the sastrugi. He was either on top of the snow-crust and smiling, or floundering thigh-deep. The farther south he marched the crunchier his predicament became.

Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty. The modern Scott is unsure how deeply he is in it. He can radio for an airlift, or drop in on an American early-warning station for a hot toddy. The richer a society becomes, the soggier its systems get. Light-switches no longer turn on or off: they dim.