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have you noticed how the capacity of the media to explain in lay terms such matters as quantum physics, or cosmology, is contracting faster than the universe is expanding? The more mind warping the discoveries the less opportunity there is to fit them into 30 seconds in a news cast, or 300 words in print.

There has been a long running conspiracy of convenience between science reporters and the science being reported to leave out inconvenient time and space consuming explanations, and go for the punch line that best suits the use of the media to lobby for more project funding.

Almost every space story I have written over 50 years has been about projects claiming to ‘discover the origins of the solar system/life on earth/life on Mars/discover the origins of the universe, or recover parts of things like comets because they are as old as the sun, except that we have discovered they aren’t ancient at all.’ None of them were ever designed to achieved those goals. They were brilliant projects, brilliantly misrepresented by the scientists and the reporters because an accurate story would have been incomprehensible to 99.9% of readers or viewers.

The commenter starts with some ad hominems, asserting that my post is biased and emotional. They provide no evidence or argument to support this assertion. And of course they don’t even attempt to counter any of the arguments I laid out. They then follow up with an argument from authority – he can link to a PhD creationist – so there.

The article that the commenter links to is by Henry M. Morris, founder for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) – a young-earth creationist organization. Morris was (he died in 2006 following a stroke) a PhD – in civil engineering. This point is irrelevant to his actual arguments. I bring it up only to put the commenter’s argument from authority into perspective. No disrespect to engineers – but they are not biologists. They have no expertise relevant to the question of evolution – no more than my MD. So let’s stick to the arguments themselves.

The article by Morris is an overview of so-called Creation Science, of which Morris was a major architect. The arguments he presents are all old creationist canards, long deconstructed by scientists. In fact I address many of them in my original refutation. Creationists generally are not very original – they recycle old arguments endlessly, regardless of how many times they have been destroyed.

A skeptic challenges a natural health product for the lack of an evidentiary base.  A proponent of that product responds that the skeptic has made a logical error – an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and in such a scenario it’s not unreasonable to rely on patient reporting and traditional uses as a guide. The skeptic chimes back with a dissertation on the limits of anecdotal evidence and arguments from antiquity — especially when the corresponding pharma products have a data trail supporting their safety and efficacy. The proponent responds that it’s unfair to hold natural health products to the same evidentiary standard, because only pharma has the money to fund proper research, and they only do so for products they can patent. You can’t patent nature, so no research into natural health products gets done.

look here, here, and here for recent examples

natural health industry isn’t rich enough to sustain proper research.  Is that true? Natural health, by the numbers On the surface, it certainly wouldn’t appear so. While the industry can be difficult to get a bead on – due both to differing definitions of what it includes (organic foods? natural toothpaste?), and the fact that many of the key players are private companies that don’t report revenues – by any measure it’s sizable. A survey by the University of Guelph  references KPMG estimates that the Natural Health Products sector in Canada grew from $1.24B in 2000 to $1.82B in 2006 – a growth rate that would bring the market to about $2.5B today.   Figures from the Nutrition Business Journal quoted in the same survey seem to agree, suggesting Canada is 3% of a global “supplements” (herbal, homeopathy, vitamins) market that was $68B globally in 2006 and growing at 5% a year – bringing it to perhaps $85B today. Figures from various sources quoted in a recent Health Canada report support these estimates.

climate (mis)communication. Two sessions explored a focal point of this blog, the interface of climate science and policy, and the roles of scientists and the media in fostering productive discourse. Both discussions homed in on an uncomfortable reality — the erosion of a longstanding presumption that scientific information, if communicated more effectively, will end up framing policy choices.

First I sat in on a symposium on the  future of climate communication in a world where traditional science journalism is a shrinking wedge of a growing pie of communication options. The discussion didn’t really provide many answers, but did reveal the persistent frustrations of some scientists with the way the media cover their field.

Sparks flew between Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist long focused on hurricanes and warming, and Seth Borenstein, who covers climate and other science for the Associated Press. Borenstein spoke highly of a Boston Globe dual profile of Emanuel and his colleague at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  Richard Lindzen. To Emanuel, the piece was a great example of what he described as “he said, he said” coverage of science. Borenstein replied that this particular piece was not centered on the science, but on the men — in the context of their relationship, research and worldviews. (It’s worth noting that Emanuel, whom I’ve been interviewing on hurricanes and climate since 1988, describes himself as  a conservative and, mainly, Republican voter.)

Researchers Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin report their conclusions in a new book, The Longevity Project. "Everybody has the ideas — don't stress, don't worry, don't work so hard, retire and go play golf," says Friedman, a psychology professor at University of California-Riverside. "We did not find these patterns to exist in people who thrived."

At the core of their 20 years of research is a study started by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921. Terman died in 1956, but other researchers carried on the study. One participant was biologist Ancel Keys, whose life-long work helped popularize the Mediterranean diet. He died in 2004 at age 100. He enjoyed gardening as an activity much of his life.

if your activities rise or stay high in middle age, you definitely stay healthier and live longer," says Martin, a research psychologist at University of California-Riverside.

Statistics that are quoted, by themselves, may be quite meaningless, unless they are on a comparative basis. To illustrate this, if we want to say that Group A (poorer kids) is not significantly worse off than Group B (richer kids), then it may be pointless to just cite the statistics for Group A, without Group B’s.

“How children from the bottom one-third by socio-economic background fare: One in two scores in the top two-thirds at PSLE” “One in six scores in the top one-third at PSLE” What we need to know for comparative purposes, is the percentage of richer kids who scores in the top two-thirds too.

“… one in five scores in the top 30% at O and A levels… One in five goes to university and polys” What’s the data for richer kids? Since the proportion of the entire population going to university and polys has increased substantially, this clearly shows that poorer kids are worse off!

I’m a John Ioannidis convert, and I accept that there is a lot of medical literature that is erroneous. (Just search for Dr. Ioannidis’ last name on this blog, and you’ll find copious posts praising him and discussing his work.) In fact, as I’ve pointed out, most medical researchers instinctively know that most new scientific findings will not hold up to scrutiny, which is why we rarely accept the results of a single study, except in unusual circumstances, as being enough to change practice. I also have pointed out many times that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Replication is key to verification of scientific findings, and more often than not provocative scientific findings are not replicated. Does that mean they shouldn’t be published?

As for pseudoscience, I’m half tempted to agree with Dr. Spector, but just not in the way he thinks. Unfortunately, over the last 20 years or so, there has been an increasing amount of pseudoscience in the medical literature in the form of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) studies of highly improbable remedies or even virtually impossible ones (i.e., homeopathy). However, that does not appear to be what Dr. Spector is talking about, which is why I looked up his references. The second reference is to an SI article from 2009 entitled Science and Pseudoscience in Adult Nutrition Research and Practice. There, and only there, did I find out just what it is that Dr. Spector apparently means by “pseudoscience”: By pseudoscience, I mean the use of inappropriate methods that frequently yield wrong or misleading answers for the type of question asked. In nutrition research, such methods also often misuse statistical evaluations.

Dr. Spector doesn’t really know the difference between inadequately rigorous science and pseudoscience! Now, don’t get me wrong. I know that it’s not always easy to distinguish science from pseudoscience, especially at the fringes, but in general bad science has to go a lot further than Dr. Spector thinks to merit the the term “pseudoscience.” It is clear (to me, at least) from his articles that Dr. Spector throws around the term “pseudoscience” around rather more loosely than he should, using it as a pejorative for any clinical science less rigorous than a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial that meets FDA standards for approval of a drug (his pharma background coming to the fore, no doubt). Pseudoscience, Dr. Spector. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Indeed, I almost get the impression from his articles that Dr. Spector views any study that doesn’t reach FDA-level standards for drug approval to be pseudoscience.

“Under no circumstances are you to go to those lectures. Do you hear me?” Kuhn, the head of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Princeton where I was a graduate student, had issued an ultimatum. It concerned the philosopher Saul Kripke’s lectures — later to be called “Naming and Necessity” — which he had originally given at Princeton in 1970 and planned to give again in the Fall, 1972.

Whiggishness — in history of science, the tendency to evaluate and interpret past scientific theories not on their own terms, but in the context of current knowledge. The term comes from Herbert Butterfield’s “The Whig Interpretation of History,” written when Butterfield, a future Regius professor of history at Cambridge, was only 31 years old. Butterfield had complained about Whiggishness, describing it as “…the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present” – the tendency to see all history as progressive, and in an extreme form, as an inexorable march to greater liberty and enlightenment. [3] For Butterfield, on the other hand, “…real historical understanding” can be achieved only by “attempting to see life with the eyes of another century than our own.” [4][5].

Kuhn had attacked my Whiggish use of the term “displacement current.” [6] I had failed, in his view, to put myself in the mindset of Maxwell’s first attempts at creating a theory of electricity and magnetism. I felt that Kuhn had misinterpreted my paper, and that he — not me — had provided a Whiggish interpretation of Maxwell. I said, “You refuse to look through my telescope.” And he said, “It’s not a telescope, Errol. It’s a kaleidoscope.” (In this respect, he was probably right.) [7].

perhaps the reason stem cells managed to lodge themselves so deep in the public psyche was not just because of their awesome scientific potential, or their ability to turn into the treatments of the future.

For years, stem cells dominated all other science stories in newspaper headlines because they framed an ethical conundrum – to get to the most versatile stem cells meant destroying human embryos.

Research on stem cells became a political football, leading to delays in funding for scientists, particularly in the US. Not that the work itself was straightforward – the process of extracting stem cells from embryos is difficult and there is a very limited supply of material. Inevitable disappointment followed the years of headlines – where were the promised treatments? Was it all over-hyped?

LAST week Michele Bachmann, a Republican representative from Minnesota, introduced a bill to roll back efficiency standards for light bulbs, which include a phasing out of incandescent bulbs in favor of more energy-efficient bulbs. The “government has no business telling an individual what kind of light bulb to buy,” she declared.

But this opposition ignores another, more important bit of American history: the critical role that government-mandated standards have played in scientific and industrial innovation.

inventions alone weren’t enough to guarantee progress. Indeed, at the time the lack of standards for everything from weights and measures to electricity — even the gallon, for example, had eight definitions — threatened to overwhelm industry and consumers with a confusing array of incompatible choices.

Recently I re-read Richard Taylor’s An Introduction to Virtue Ethics, a classic published by Prometheus

Taylor compares virtue ethics to the other two major approaches to moral philosophy: utilitarianism (a la John Stuart Mill) and deontology (a la Immanuel Kant). Utilitarianism, of course, is roughly the idea that ethics has to do with maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain; deontology is the idea that reason can tell us what we ought to do from first principles, as in Kant’s categorical imperative (e.g., something is right if you can agree that it could be elevated to a universally acceptable maxim).

Taylor argues that utilitarianism and deontology — despite being wildly different in a variety of respects — share one common feature: both philosophies assume that there is such a thing as moral right and wrong, and a duty to do right and avoid wrong. But, he says, on the face of it this is nonsensical. Duty isn’t something one can have in the abstract, duty is toward a law or a lawgiver, which begs the question of what could arguably provide us with a universal moral law, or who the lawgiver could possibly be.

Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.

Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of - such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it, or the size of research contracts - are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a particular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference." I believe it is important to examine this method, its use and history and rationale, and to see whether other groups and individuals might learn to adopt it profitably in their own scientific and intellectual work. In its separate elements, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: Devising alternative hypotheses; Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly is possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain, and so on.

On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps 1 and 2 require intellectual inventions, which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism; and the question of how to generate such inventions is one which has been extensively discussed elsewhere (2, 3). What the formal schema reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork, without dawdling or getting tied up in irrelevancies.

"Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour," Liu told the Guardian. "There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn't see any of the money. The computers were never turned off."

"If I couldn't complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things," he said.

"gold farming", the practice of building up credits and online value through the monotonous repetition of basic tasks in online games such as World of Warcraft. The trade in virtual assets is very real, and outside the control of the games' makers. Millions of gamers around the world are prepared to pay real money for such online credits, which they can use to progress in the online games.The trading of virtual currencies in multiplayer games has become so rampant in China that it is increasingly difficult to regulate. In April, the Sichuan provincial government in central China launched a court case against a gamer who stole credits online worth about 3000rmb.

Corballis reckons instead that the thought processes that made language possible were non-linguistic, but had recursive properties to which language adapted: "Where Chomsky views thought through the lens of language, I prefer to view language though the lens of thought." From this, says Corballis, follows a better understanding of how humans actually think - and a very different perspective on language and its evolution.

So how did recursion help ancient humans pull themselves up by their cognitive bootstraps? It allowed us to engage in mental time travel, says Corballis, the recursive operation whereby we recall past episodes into present consciousness and imagine future ones, and sometimes even insert fictions into reality.

theory of mind is uniquely highly developed in humans: I may know not only what you are thinking, says Corballis, but also that you know what I am thinking. Most - but not all - language depends on this capability.

There are three broad camps in contemporary debates over bioethics. In the name of human rights and human dignity, “bio-conservatives” tend to support restricting, regulating and stigmatizing the technologies that allow us to create, manipulate and destroy embryonic life. In the name of scientific progress and human freedom, “bio-libertarians” tend to oppose any restrictions on what individuals, doctors and researchers are allowed to do. Then somewhere in between are the anguished liberals, who are uncomfortable with what they see as the absolutism of both sides, and who tend to argue that society needs to decide where to draw its bioethical lines not based on some general ideal (like “life” or “choice”), but rather case by case by case — accepting this kind of abortion but not that kind; this use of embryos but not that use; existing developments in genetic engineering but not, perhaps, the developments that await us in the future.

at least in the United States, the liberal effort to (as the Goodman of 1980 put it) “monitor” and “debate” and “control” the development of reproductive technologies has been extraordinarily ineffectual. From embryo experimentation to selective reduction to the eugenic uses of abortion, liberals always promise to draw lines and then never actually manage to draw them. Like Dr. Evans, they find reasons to embrace each new technological leap while promising to resist the next one — and then time passes, science marches on, and they find reasons why the next moral compromise, too, must be accepted for the greater good, or at least tolerated in the name of privacy and choice. You can always count on them to worry, often perceptively, about hypothetical evils, potential slips down the bioethical slope. But they’re either ineffectual or accommodating once an evil actually arrives. Tomorrow, they always say — tomorrow, we’ll draw the line. But tomorrow never comes.

The most disturbing example of this response came from the head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, who said, “I don't think we should be blaming any Afghan. We should be blaming the person who produced the news — the one who burned the Koran. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of offending culture, religion, traditions.” I was not going to comment on this monumentally inane line of thought, especially since Susan Jacoby, Michael Tomasky, and Mike Labossiere have already done such a marvelous job of it. But then I discovered, to my shock, that several of my liberal, progressive American friends actually agreed that Jones has some sort of legal and moral responsibility for what happened in Afghanistan

I believe he has neither. Here is why. Unlike many countries in the Middle East and Europe that punish blasphemy by fine, jail or death, the U.S., via the First Amendment and a history of court decisions, strongly protects freedom of speech and expression as basic and fundamental human rights. These include critiquing and offending other citizens’ culture, religion, and traditions. Such rights are not supposed to be swayed by peoples' subjective feelings, which form an incoherent and arbitrary basis for lawmaking. In a free society, if and when a person is offended by an argument or act, he or she has every right to argue and act back. If a person commits murder, the answer is not to limit the right; the answer is to condemn and punish the murderer for overreacting.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Governments have an interest in condemning certain speech that provokes immediate hatred of or violence against people. The canonical example is yelling “fire!” in a packed room when there in fact is no fire, since this creates a clear and imminent danger for those inside the room. But Jones did not create such an environment, nor did he intend to. Jones (more precisely, Wayne Sapp) merely burned a book in a private ceremony in protest of its contents. Indeed, the connection between Jones and the murders requires many links in-between. The mob didn’t kill those accountable, or even Americans.

The two largest studies of Alzheimer’s disease have led to the discovery of no fewer than five genes that provide intriguing new clues to why the disease strikes and how it progresses.

For years, there have been unproven but persistent hints that cholesterol and inflammation are part of the disease process. People with high cholesterol are more likely to get the disease. Strokes and head injuries, which make Alzheimer’s more likely, also cause brain inflammation. Now, some of the newly discovered genes appear to bolster this line of thought, because some are involved with cholesterol and others are linked to inflammation or the transport of molecules inside cells.

By themselves, the genes are not nearly as important a factor as APOE, a gene discovered in 1995 that greatly increases risk for the disease: by 400 percent if a person inherits a copy from one parent, by 1,000 percent if from both parents.

Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a "culture war of fact." In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

Kahan's work at Yale. In one study, he and his colleagues packaged the basic science of climate change into fake newspaper articles bearing two very different headlines—"Scientific Panel Recommends Anti-Pollution Solution to Global Warming" and "Scientific Panel Recommends Nuclear Solution to Global Warming"—and then tested how citizens with different values responded. Sure enough, the latter framing made hierarchical individualists much more open to accepting the fact that humans are causing global warming. Kahan infers that the effect occurred because the science had been written into an alternative narrative that appealed to their pro-industry worldview.

If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.