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snousleThere is a scene in the film Never Cry Wolf that has stuck with me for a long time. (Fans will forgive me if my recollection is inaccurate.) A scientist, studying wolves in the Arctic, is attempting to explain to an Inuit fellow what it is he is doing. He lives in a shack filled with glass jars, and when he is asked what is in the jars, he replies "wolf scat". The Inuit guy goes "Hmmmm". It goes downhill from there, and the comic absurdity of his work is laid bare in having to actually explain it to someone.
I've always felt that way about science. There is a myth out there that science is, like mathematics, a discipline of pure reason. That one can take any theory and demonstrate its truthfulness in a way that is inevitable and inarguable. That you should be able to reconstruct all of science from nothing but direct, tangible evidence combined with flawless reasoning.
Not so. Scientific theories are dog turds in glass jars. They are complicated, difficult to justify, implausible, and messy. They require forms of thinking that are deeply unnatural and in constant conflict with everyday intuition. They involve subjective judgments that are often a subject of earnest, long-lasting debate. That is why I describe science as "epistemically ridiculous" - to have to defend a theory on purely philosophical grounds can get a bit embarrassing. Paul Feyrabend, a well known philosopher of science, calls them "fairy tales". He's not wrong. Aside from moments of great structural beauty, they have only one redeeming quality: they work.
Science does not run on just evidence and logic. It also runs on trust. Reasoning makes the bricks, but trust is the mortar that binds them into a larger structure. No single person can understand the whole of even one scientific discipline. Every scientist relies on a small amount of direct evidence, a small amount of their own reasoning, and an entire cathedral of established knowledge that is far too large to fully question or apprehend.
So where does this trust come from? What justifies it? Trust is distinct from faith for a particular reason: faith is given blindly, but trust is earned. Specifically, it is built up from a deep understanding of some other person's worldview, combined with large numbers of small, rewarding transactions that work out in accordance with that understanding. Trust is built on a history of reliability and an expectation of more to come. It is not itself 100% reliable. But the presence of trust in science enables a process that is good enough to sustain a self-correcting system of knowlege that converges, as best as we can determine, on something that really does look like "truth".
(Oooh, that's a strong word for a postmodernist! But in saying this, I recognize that truth is inseparable from power; theory is considered true because it gets things done. That it is sometimes surprisingly elegant and parsimonious in its own right is a fringe benefit. I suppose that is unsatisfactory for certain kinds of idealists, but it's good enough for me.)
Science is a fault-tolerant system that admits human error. By way of illustrating this, it is instructive to look at previous scientific controversies that have involved political elements. The Millikan oil drop experiment is especially interesting - a quote from Feynman on this subject is worth copying here:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
I was discussing this with John over dinner, and asked him if he thought that the last sentence was correct - that scientists knew better than to do this nowadays. His answer was immediate: "No". He pointed out how powerful Millikan was at the time, and how intimidating it would have been to contradict his result in print. Well, I asked, how far astray do you think this leads science in our age? "Not very".
I think that's about right - Feynman is a little too optimistic in pronouncing the disease of politics to be cured. But the interesting thing is that, in the long run, it didn't matter so much - the correct value for the charge of the electron was established regardless, and it didn't take very long to sort out.
(It was an especially interesting discussion because he's been through a very similar thing himself, concerning the timing of volcanic eruptions in antiquity. Volcanic ash layers are used to date archaeological artifacts and can be recognized in ice cores. John's contention is that ash layers attributed to particular eruptions could in fact have been due to several others occurring at about the same time. He published a letter to Nature that rankled quite a few noses and got a scathing review from some "establishment" researchers whose existing body of research was substantially threatened by this contrary perspective. But his results were accepted in time.)
So... back to climate change. As I was saying, the most critical part of the climate-change argument, the part that is not simple arithmetic, is establishing that a little more carbon dioxide changes IR absorption in the atmosphere enough to change the whole climate. If this is true, the discussion moves from whether there is a substantial effect to exactly what that effect would be. This latter question is interesting and important, but not so urgent as the former.
There is a convenient summary of the "Carbon Dioxide Problem" here which serves as a useful jumping-off point into the literature. Step 2 of the argument is the "hard part" that I want to focus on - the notion that "trace gases contribute to the natural greenhouse effect".
The ten thousand dollar question: why should anyone believe that this is true?
[Twiddles thumbs, looks at watch, whistles idly...]
Why indeed. I began this investigation by searching Google with the phrase "carbon dioxide absorption spectrum". The very first article that pops up is a sophisticated-looking discussion from a guy named Gary Novak of why carbon dioxide could not possibly be a greenhouse gas. I thought, gosh, that's very interesting. I have to say, I was taken aback by this - until I realized the author is quite thoroughly insane. Aside from the CO2 issue, he is also asserting that there are fundamental and obvious contradictions in high school level physics that should be "considered proof in any rational mind" that the current definition of energy is incorrect.
Gosh, millions of people are taught this stuff, and there aren't enough rational minds out there to see this obvious problem? How curious. The conspiracy must be so much larger than I had expected. [snerk] I don't mean to dwell on this for too long - I mean, it's not nice to make fun of crazy people - but just how much time should someone spend on this sort of thing? Zero. While there might be brilliant lone-wolf scientists out there, if you don't participate in a system of trust, your work simply isn't trustworthy. It doesn't matter if you are right, because you have forsaken the only mechanism through which you can make your ideas useful to others. No, it's not "fair", merely practical.
If Novak had shown some restraint - reined back teh crazy just a little bit - and if the currently-accepted views were not embedded in a mostly-reliable system of knowledge, then it would not be possible to distinguish his conclusions from the currently accepted ones. Even his energy discussion, which I hope most readers will agree is pretty unlikely to be correct, shows great sophistication in befuddling the reader. I don't know if he is being deliberately deceitful or if he honestly believes this stuff. Either way, without the institutions of science, progress would grind to a halt because this sort of pathological anti-reason cannot be fought on purely logical grounds. There is not enough time for any single person to wade through it all.
[I will also point out that Google itself represents a kind of trust system, because it ranks articles by the number of incoming links. Novak has come out on top. Kind of disturbing, no? Here we are seeing a little corner of an alternative trust system established by radical skeptics. The reason we rely on the scientific establishment rather than this alternative system is not because science is essentially better, but because the skeptics have never produced anything of value. If the skeptics delivered computers and cars and GPS systems while the scientists sat around scratching their balls, I'd be following the skeptics.]
As it happens, before I concluded that Novak was nuts, I found a response to his first objection - that CO2 concentration doesn't matter because it's totally opaque to IR anyway - in an article from more than fifty years ago:
One further objection has been raised to the carbon dioxide theory: the atmosphere is completely opaque at the center of the carbon dioxide band and therefore there is no change in the absorption as the carbon dioxide amount varies. This is entirely true for a spectral interval about one micron wide on either side of the center of the carbon dioxide band. However, the argument neglects the hundreds of spectral lines from carbon dioxide that are outside this interval of complete absorption. The change in absorption for a given variation in carbon dioxide amount is greatest for a spectral interval that is only partially opaque; the temperature variation at the surface of the Earth is determined by the change in absorption of such intervals.
Note the difference here: the Plass article addresses Novak's objection, but Novak's article does not address Plass' answer to the objection, even though the Plass article came long before. The re-raising of old questions as if they were entirely new ones is a standard technique of denialists in all fields. In fact, almost all the questions they raise take this form - you almost never see an original question. One might speculate that the strategy being employed here is to troll the literature for old questions while ignoring any of the old responses to those questions.
In the meanwhile, from the summary page above, we find two lines of evidence that suggest that CO2 concentrations are relevant to IR emissions - more-recent calculations using "line by line" calculations of radiation flux through the atmosphere, and space-based measurements that assess the IR absorption more directly.
How far down the road do we need to go here in order to believe that these results are, if not perfectly correct, at least good-faith efforts that don't suffer from a fundamental error? Well, if you assume that everyone around you is lying to save their careers, there is no end to the questions you could raise. You could spend the rest of your life challenging the validity of every single data point in every single calculation.
Or, you can suppose that the result is actually incorrect, and ask: how likely it is that an error of this type could be sustained? Between the flux models and the satellite measurements, there are a LOT of people with much more intimate contact with the data than I have. Similarly, I see in the scientific community strong incentives to find errors in that data. Every scientist I know stays up late at night running endless "reality checks" against what more sensible people would simply take for granted, because the consequences of publishing something that is later invalidated are rather uncomfortable. How would you like to have been the first scientist to "confirm" Millikan's value for the charge of the electron? I blush just thinking about it.
The biggest error of science skeptics is to misunderstand the incentive structure under which researchers operate. Yes, there are incentives to conform to established theory - but there are also incentives to question it. The interaction is complicated and not nearly as tidy as I would personally like. Is it possible that after fifty years of hammering on the IR flux question, involving large numbers of independent approaches, the fundamental conclusion is incorrect? Yes, it is possible. But if there is an error here, it is not going to be an obvious one, and it is not even remotely plausible that such an error could have been discovered and systematically repressed for half a century.
So, in summary, the reasons I believe this are:
1) I can see that it's an old question which has been worked on for a long time, from multiple perspectives, spanning several generations of researchers.
2) The literature shows that the conclusion has been honestly challenged, and those challenges have not been ignored.
3) A large number of people have understood and thought about it before me.
4) I know from personal experience that published conclusions of this type are generally reliable.
5) I know something about how the calculations are performed, and do not see anything that is inconsistent with this understanding.
And there, I stop, because I have many other things to worry about, and the probability of having reached an incorrect conclusion - in my judgment - is not high enough to merit spending more time on it. Are these criteria that would satisfy a skeptic? No. Should a skeptic believe the claim that CO2 affects IR emissions on this basis? No.
NO??? What, wasn't the whole point of this exercise to beat down the skeptics? No, it was not - it's an explanation of why I believe it. Skeptics should not be so accepting. This conclusion might surprise you, but it is a rational one. Skeptics have not participated in the long stream of satisfactory transactions that have led me to personally trust the scientific establishment, despite its many flaws. If you have no experience with a supposedly "authoritative" source of knowledge, and that source is asking you to trust them on a matter of great importance, you'd be pretty stupid to go along with what they say. There is simply no substitute for the trust-building mechanisms I have enjoyed myself. I cannot transfer to a skeptic the history of my own interaction with science, so I cannot transfer the trust in science that is necessary to adequately resolve questions of this nature.
The skeptic is on his own - unless, by chance, his trust in my judgment is adequate to let him transitively trust the literature in the way I do. And that would be very flattering, but I don't see it as something I can take for granted.
So the problem here - which I see as blocking any hope of taking actions to reduce the risk of climate change - is that the network of trust that constitutes science is too insular. Too many people are outside of it, alienated by it, or even harmed by it. Arguably, it is a "marketing" problem. If the contributions of science were more consistently recognized as such, the situation might be very different. But science is not a corporation, or a brand, so it's hard to imagine how that could happen.
There is no amount of argumentation that is going to overcome this problem - each tour through the web of theory is just another opportunity to raise allegations of conspiracy and fraud. It is a tragedy, because climate change is not the only challenge our civilization faces, and it's not going to be the last time science will be rejected as untrustworthy.
I started out, years ago, being angry that denialists would reject science, and have ended by recognizing that science has actually earned more trust than one could reasonably expect from the public. The glass is already half-full. The way forward is not debate, but engagement.
I've always felt that way about science. There is a myth out there that science is, like mathematics, a discipline of pure reason. That one can take any theory and demonstrate its truthfulness in a way that is inevitable and inarguable. That you should be able to reconstruct all of science from nothing but direct, tangible evidence combined with flawless reasoning.
Not so. Scientific theories are dog turds in glass jars. They are complicated, difficult to justify, implausible, and messy. They require forms of thinking that are deeply unnatural and in constant conflict with everyday intuition. They involve subjective judgments that are often a subject of earnest, long-lasting debate. That is why I describe science as "epistemically ridiculous" - to have to defend a theory on purely philosophical grounds can get a bit embarrassing. Paul Feyrabend, a well known philosopher of science, calls them "fairy tales". He's not wrong. Aside from moments of great structural beauty, they have only one redeeming quality: they work.
Science does not run on just evidence and logic. It also runs on trust. Reasoning makes the bricks, but trust is the mortar that binds them into a larger structure. No single person can understand the whole of even one scientific discipline. Every scientist relies on a small amount of direct evidence, a small amount of their own reasoning, and an entire cathedral of established knowledge that is far too large to fully question or apprehend.
So where does this trust come from? What justifies it? Trust is distinct from faith for a particular reason: faith is given blindly, but trust is earned. Specifically, it is built up from a deep understanding of some other person's worldview, combined with large numbers of small, rewarding transactions that work out in accordance with that understanding. Trust is built on a history of reliability and an expectation of more to come. It is not itself 100% reliable. But the presence of trust in science enables a process that is good enough to sustain a self-correcting system of knowlege that converges, as best as we can determine, on something that really does look like "truth".
(Oooh, that's a strong word for a postmodernist! But in saying this, I recognize that truth is inseparable from power; theory is considered true because it gets things done. That it is sometimes surprisingly elegant and parsimonious in its own right is a fringe benefit. I suppose that is unsatisfactory for certain kinds of idealists, but it's good enough for me.)
Science is a fault-tolerant system that admits human error. By way of illustrating this, it is instructive to look at previous scientific controversies that have involved political elements. The Millikan oil drop experiment is especially interesting - a quote from Feynman on this subject is worth copying here:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
I was discussing this with John over dinner, and asked him if he thought that the last sentence was correct - that scientists knew better than to do this nowadays. His answer was immediate: "No". He pointed out how powerful Millikan was at the time, and how intimidating it would have been to contradict his result in print. Well, I asked, how far astray do you think this leads science in our age? "Not very".
I think that's about right - Feynman is a little too optimistic in pronouncing the disease of politics to be cured. But the interesting thing is that, in the long run, it didn't matter so much - the correct value for the charge of the electron was established regardless, and it didn't take very long to sort out.
(It was an especially interesting discussion because he's been through a very similar thing himself, concerning the timing of volcanic eruptions in antiquity. Volcanic ash layers are used to date archaeological artifacts and can be recognized in ice cores. John's contention is that ash layers attributed to particular eruptions could in fact have been due to several others occurring at about the same time. He published a letter to Nature that rankled quite a few noses and got a scathing review from some "establishment" researchers whose existing body of research was substantially threatened by this contrary perspective. But his results were accepted in time.)
So... back to climate change. As I was saying, the most critical part of the climate-change argument, the part that is not simple arithmetic, is establishing that a little more carbon dioxide changes IR absorption in the atmosphere enough to change the whole climate. If this is true, the discussion moves from whether there is a substantial effect to exactly what that effect would be. This latter question is interesting and important, but not so urgent as the former.
There is a convenient summary of the "Carbon Dioxide Problem" here which serves as a useful jumping-off point into the literature. Step 2 of the argument is the "hard part" that I want to focus on - the notion that "trace gases contribute to the natural greenhouse effect".
The ten thousand dollar question: why should anyone believe that this is true?
[Twiddles thumbs, looks at watch, whistles idly...]
Why indeed. I began this investigation by searching Google with the phrase "carbon dioxide absorption spectrum". The very first article that pops up is a sophisticated-looking discussion from a guy named Gary Novak of why carbon dioxide could not possibly be a greenhouse gas. I thought, gosh, that's very interesting. I have to say, I was taken aback by this - until I realized the author is quite thoroughly insane. Aside from the CO2 issue, he is also asserting that there are fundamental and obvious contradictions in high school level physics that should be "considered proof in any rational mind" that the current definition of energy is incorrect.
Gosh, millions of people are taught this stuff, and there aren't enough rational minds out there to see this obvious problem? How curious. The conspiracy must be so much larger than I had expected. [snerk] I don't mean to dwell on this for too long - I mean, it's not nice to make fun of crazy people - but just how much time should someone spend on this sort of thing? Zero. While there might be brilliant lone-wolf scientists out there, if you don't participate in a system of trust, your work simply isn't trustworthy. It doesn't matter if you are right, because you have forsaken the only mechanism through which you can make your ideas useful to others. No, it's not "fair", merely practical.
If Novak had shown some restraint - reined back teh crazy just a little bit - and if the currently-accepted views were not embedded in a mostly-reliable system of knowledge, then it would not be possible to distinguish his conclusions from the currently accepted ones. Even his energy discussion, which I hope most readers will agree is pretty unlikely to be correct, shows great sophistication in befuddling the reader. I don't know if he is being deliberately deceitful or if he honestly believes this stuff. Either way, without the institutions of science, progress would grind to a halt because this sort of pathological anti-reason cannot be fought on purely logical grounds. There is not enough time for any single person to wade through it all.
[I will also point out that Google itself represents a kind of trust system, because it ranks articles by the number of incoming links. Novak has come out on top. Kind of disturbing, no? Here we are seeing a little corner of an alternative trust system established by radical skeptics. The reason we rely on the scientific establishment rather than this alternative system is not because science is essentially better, but because the skeptics have never produced anything of value. If the skeptics delivered computers and cars and GPS systems while the scientists sat around scratching their balls, I'd be following the skeptics.]
As it happens, before I concluded that Novak was nuts, I found a response to his first objection - that CO2 concentration doesn't matter because it's totally opaque to IR anyway - in an article from more than fifty years ago:
One further objection has been raised to the carbon dioxide theory: the atmosphere is completely opaque at the center of the carbon dioxide band and therefore there is no change in the absorption as the carbon dioxide amount varies. This is entirely true for a spectral interval about one micron wide on either side of the center of the carbon dioxide band. However, the argument neglects the hundreds of spectral lines from carbon dioxide that are outside this interval of complete absorption. The change in absorption for a given variation in carbon dioxide amount is greatest for a spectral interval that is only partially opaque; the temperature variation at the surface of the Earth is determined by the change in absorption of such intervals.
Note the difference here: the Plass article addresses Novak's objection, but Novak's article does not address Plass' answer to the objection, even though the Plass article came long before. The re-raising of old questions as if they were entirely new ones is a standard technique of denialists in all fields. In fact, almost all the questions they raise take this form - you almost never see an original question. One might speculate that the strategy being employed here is to troll the literature for old questions while ignoring any of the old responses to those questions.
In the meanwhile, from the summary page above, we find two lines of evidence that suggest that CO2 concentrations are relevant to IR emissions - more-recent calculations using "line by line" calculations of radiation flux through the atmosphere, and space-based measurements that assess the IR absorption more directly.
How far down the road do we need to go here in order to believe that these results are, if not perfectly correct, at least good-faith efforts that don't suffer from a fundamental error? Well, if you assume that everyone around you is lying to save their careers, there is no end to the questions you could raise. You could spend the rest of your life challenging the validity of every single data point in every single calculation.
Or, you can suppose that the result is actually incorrect, and ask: how likely it is that an error of this type could be sustained? Between the flux models and the satellite measurements, there are a LOT of people with much more intimate contact with the data than I have. Similarly, I see in the scientific community strong incentives to find errors in that data. Every scientist I know stays up late at night running endless "reality checks" against what more sensible people would simply take for granted, because the consequences of publishing something that is later invalidated are rather uncomfortable. How would you like to have been the first scientist to "confirm" Millikan's value for the charge of the electron? I blush just thinking about it.
The biggest error of science skeptics is to misunderstand the incentive structure under which researchers operate. Yes, there are incentives to conform to established theory - but there are also incentives to question it. The interaction is complicated and not nearly as tidy as I would personally like. Is it possible that after fifty years of hammering on the IR flux question, involving large numbers of independent approaches, the fundamental conclusion is incorrect? Yes, it is possible. But if there is an error here, it is not going to be an obvious one, and it is not even remotely plausible that such an error could have been discovered and systematically repressed for half a century.
So, in summary, the reasons I believe this are:
1) I can see that it's an old question which has been worked on for a long time, from multiple perspectives, spanning several generations of researchers.
2) The literature shows that the conclusion has been honestly challenged, and those challenges have not been ignored.
3) A large number of people have understood and thought about it before me.
4) I know from personal experience that published conclusions of this type are generally reliable.
5) I know something about how the calculations are performed, and do not see anything that is inconsistent with this understanding.
And there, I stop, because I have many other things to worry about, and the probability of having reached an incorrect conclusion - in my judgment - is not high enough to merit spending more time on it. Are these criteria that would satisfy a skeptic? No. Should a skeptic believe the claim that CO2 affects IR emissions on this basis? No.
NO??? What, wasn't the whole point of this exercise to beat down the skeptics? No, it was not - it's an explanation of why I believe it. Skeptics should not be so accepting. This conclusion might surprise you, but it is a rational one. Skeptics have not participated in the long stream of satisfactory transactions that have led me to personally trust the scientific establishment, despite its many flaws. If you have no experience with a supposedly "authoritative" source of knowledge, and that source is asking you to trust them on a matter of great importance, you'd be pretty stupid to go along with what they say. There is simply no substitute for the trust-building mechanisms I have enjoyed myself. I cannot transfer to a skeptic the history of my own interaction with science, so I cannot transfer the trust in science that is necessary to adequately resolve questions of this nature.
The skeptic is on his own - unless, by chance, his trust in my judgment is adequate to let him transitively trust the literature in the way I do. And that would be very flattering, but I don't see it as something I can take for granted.
So the problem here - which I see as blocking any hope of taking actions to reduce the risk of climate change - is that the network of trust that constitutes science is too insular. Too many people are outside of it, alienated by it, or even harmed by it. Arguably, it is a "marketing" problem. If the contributions of science were more consistently recognized as such, the situation might be very different. But science is not a corporation, or a brand, so it's hard to imagine how that could happen.
There is no amount of argumentation that is going to overcome this problem - each tour through the web of theory is just another opportunity to raise allegations of conspiracy and fraud. It is a tragedy, because climate change is not the only challenge our civilization faces, and it's not going to be the last time science will be rejected as untrustworthy.
I started out, years ago, being angry that denialists would reject science, and have ended by recognizing that science has actually earned more trust than one could reasonably expect from the public. The glass is already half-full. The way forward is not debate, but engagement.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 12:59 am (UTC)I like your phrasing about how trust is a large part of science. I hadn't really thought of it that way before.
What I find disturbing about the denialists ... I assume that they had the same high school science that I did .... so why do they not have the same trust in science that I do?
Granted I have had college science courses for my degree, but that didn't form my trust isn science, only increased it.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 01:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 02:10 am (UTC)A test I propose
Ecology of science
Bounded. You Trust me.
Unlike AIDS-virus denialists (as best I know their "issues", that is), climatic denialists seem to fall into a category in which physical science is at odds with their "values", the crux of their cognitive strain, perhaps. One can possibly grok that for 'creationism', but climate science? Really?
It's as though the politics for one issue has created a willing vortex for topic-du-jour.
Science as heresy reminds me of the Distant Origin Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Origin), in which it is demanded that the scientist admit that he could be mistaken, not that he is wrong - a fine point, but it makes this production a more subtle treatment of 'how it is done'.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 03:11 am (UTC)"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."
(Bertrand Russell, 1872 - 1970)
no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 03:14 am (UTC)I do think there are a whole lot of gadflies and media whores who casually tie everything into climate change because it's trendy. They may even dominate the public face of climate research. But that's not quite the same as scientists faking their results.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 05:37 am (UTC)People as intelligent as C. Paglia have gone on record as "suspicious" of the "agenda" of climate scientists.
The basis for such beliefs could be that (hippy?) 'save the earth' was around, as a philosophy, long before climate change became a ... field of study, a reality, an imperative - whichever, take your pick.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 05:39 pm (UTC)It seems impossible to demonstrate the idea of *abnormal* climate change in 160 characters or less. Current and historic pictures of Mt Fuji are facsinating, but are they enough to spur action? Not really.
Indignation
Date: 2010-01-17 02:21 pm (UTC)Indignation is both a healthy and an unhealthy tool for such matters. It allows the defending viewpoint to say "I stand on the backs of giants. Why should *I* believe *you*?" It gives people a reason to avoid wasting time on something that may simply be insane.
But it also prevents people from spending the time to see an otherwise well reasoned argument and concluding that the other person is also right.
In the end, it comes down to a rationing of your time to rebut what you have concluded to be correct. Except in cases of fundamental science, "close enough" is often "good enough".
On theories: What Darwin Got Wrong
Date: 2010-02-28 01:00 pm (UTC)"The main thing Darwin had in mind with natural selection was to come up with a theory that answers the question, "Why are certain traits there?" Why do people have hair on their heads? Why do both eyes have the same color? Why does dark hair go with dark eyes? You can make up a story that explains why it was good to have those properties in the original environment of selection. Do we have any reason to think that story is true? No."
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/02/22/what_darwin_got_wrong_jerry_fodor/index.html
Re: On theories: What Darwin Got Wrong
Date: 2010-03-02 09:20 pm (UTC)Critiquing Darwin as a proxy for evolution is a ruse - I mean, come on, the Origin of Species was published 150 years ago. It's like criticizing modern planetary science by attacking Copernicus.
The book is a non-critique because it takes a whole bunch of statements that no biologist would disagree with, and turns them around into a critique of very early and incomplete ideas of evolution, as if those early ideas were representative of modern thinking on the subject. From the perspective of anyone who knows anything about evolution, it's dishonest and kind of bizarre.
Re: On theories: What Darwin Got Wrong
Date: 2010-03-02 09:24 pm (UTC)Seriously. There is no such thing as Darwinism in the real world, any more than there is Newtonism or Keplerism.
Re: On theories: What Darwin Got Wrong
Date: 2010-03-02 11:36 pm (UTC)Is there a "weak form" evolutionary biology, that merely posits that we are products of a variety of forces that influence the gene pool, without specifying which traits or which forces? Does that meet minimum standards we'd set for "explanatory"?
What is it that allows one to move from a credible theory of change to "knowledge", on this topic?
Has anyone ever actually (physically) observed in real-time an "evolutionary step", unequivocally called (i.e. not simply genetic mutation), for any species? If not, does this theory have a different standard as "knowledge" than other physical theories that are falsifiable by experimentation?
Re: On theories: What Darwin Got Wrong
Date: 2010-03-02 11:59 pm (UTC)Darwin knew traits were heritable but didn't know how - he made a great leap of faith in guessing that characteristics were acquired through mutation.
Mendel figured out there must be two alleles influencing each characteristic. Later, these two alleles were identified with chromosomes, but the nature of chromosomes was a mystery.
Watson + Crick were involved in proving that the main mechanism of inheritance was the DNA code, which is but one constituent of the chromosome.
Later scientists found the specific molecular mechanisms by which mutations take place, mechanisms which are still being discovered. These mutations are certainly observed in the laboratory.
And today, now that we are sequencing the complete genomes of many species and are able to compare them in detail, we can see in exquisite and abundant detail the history of those mutations through time. In particular, we see that contemporary genomes were clearly formed through a sequence of mutations of already-known types, with any two (eukaryotic) species you might name showing evidence of common ancestry - this is now plain as day. So evolution isn't just a vague theory about an obscure process lost in time, it is literally an open book.
So these metaphysical arguments are way in the past. Now that we have the tools, evolution is a simple fact that reveals itself through bioinformatics analysis.
The talk.origins archive has a nice overview of evidence for speciation.
As I suspected, inferences, again
Date: 2010-03-03 01:33 am (UTC)"The literature has many more examples where a speciation event has been inferred from evidence than it has examples where the event is seen."
At a minimum, I'm glad to see my own impressions comfirmed.
I'm not unaware of the general precepts of the science: there are two "fundamental" "evolutionary" forces, environmental and genetic, both with various kinds. We can make convincing cases to varying degrees for each of those forces, in each kind, _in various instances_.
Still, to go beyond those various instances, we have to postulate (based on a half dozen cases of plant polyploidyzation?) that you and me and the millions of species now in distinct and exclusive breeding groups are the result of the process.
Dawkins' appeal on that topic is almost a faith appeal, namely that we can't comprehend how that could be because it is the result of billions of years of daily, hourly, running the evolutionary experiment. (At least that's how/when he introduces the concept of time-infathomable, paradoxically to make a case for near-certainty, based on a snippet of a talk of his that I heard).
If you had to pick a few things that the theory doesn't explain well, what would they be? Why doesn't evolution trend toward a handful of species, rather than a multitude?
Re: On theories: What Darwin Got Wrong
Date: 2010-03-03 01:42 am (UTC)People are still dragging out Keynes as a whipping boy. His key insights remain, but most modern macro economists are beyond Keynes.
Re: As I suspected, inferences, again
Date: 2010-03-03 02:02 am (UTC)I'm not sure what you mean "a few things that the theory does not explain well". You presumably mean things that one would expect it to explain, but does not? There are millions of particular observations in biology which we would not have predicted from evolution, the thing I don't get is, why would one expect otherwise? So I don't know how to address that question.
Re: As I suspected, inferences, again
Date: 2010-03-03 04:14 am (UTC)On the other hand, the sudden appearance of a parrot in the fossil record or otherwise - there doesn't seem to be anything to suggest why environmental forces would "create" a parrot or how genetic processes would either. It just doesn't seem intuitive.
Of course, it could seem intuitive, if one asks, "Well, what other forces could there be?" But, that's not typically the way one proves a theory, right?
At some level, we have to judge the strength of all theories, because flat earth is not as good a theory as roundish earth. Is that why there is controversy, is that what these question do? Where is the dividing line between saying, "We honestly don't know" and saying "This is our best conjecture"?
Re: As I suspected, inferences, again
Date: 2010-03-03 05:51 am (UTC)I don't think people outside biology quite grok how comprehensively and completely obvious the fact of evolution is at every level of analysis. It's sort of like calling the existence of the Empire State Building a "theory". At some point the discussion becomes exasperating to those who have seen and touched it themselves.
knowing what we don't know
Date: 2010-03-03 07:11 am (UTC)http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
I don't know how researchers use sequenced DNA to infer "relatedness". This seems to be limited to cross-sectional analysis, so that "relatedness" wouldn't imply "ancestry". Again, one could infer an ancestry, but we're back to inferring again.
For whatever unkown reason that we need sleep, I'm going to bow to evolutionary imperative, willingly, and get some.
Re: knowing what we don't know
Date: 2010-03-03 03:19 pm (UTC)For example, if humans and flounders shared several genes that were almost exactly the same, but were dissimilar in other fishes or other primates, then the idea of common ancestry would be overturned instantly. From another perspective, phylogenies created for many species from from one gene, and then seperately for another gene, result in the same tree - if the resulting trees were different, then we would know common descent could not be supported. So when it comes to genomics, common descent is not just falsifiable, but offers tens of thousands of opportunities to be falsified. This does not ever happen, except in special cases where we know why, such as endogenous retroviruses.
So yes, the particular forms of relatedness we see do indeed point to common ancestry, with great specificity. Anything other than common ancestry (or a very contrived effort to create animals with the appearance of common ancestry) would stick out like a sore thumb.
Re: knowing what we don't know
Date: 2010-03-03 07:41 pm (UTC)For instance, the author writes (in regard to specificity, unless I read it wrong):
"A phylogeny is a best approximation of the correct, historical tree using a given phylogenetic method. Some phylogenetic analyses are strongly supported by the data, some are weakly supported, and different parts of a tree may have more support than others. When comparing two independently determined phylogenies, one must take into account the statistical support assigned to each branch of the phylogenies."
At the same time, in regard to certainty (?), "a sore thumb" is not quite analogous, if one looks at mathematical comparisons to randomness, which would suggest "sticks out like a totem that reaches to the moon":
"The stunning degree of match between even the most incongruent phylogenetic trees found in the biological literature is widely unappreciated, mainly because most people (including many biologists) are unaware of the mathematics involved"
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/incongruent.html
Given that they are using branching Markov processes, according to the author, one wonders why they haven't tested "speciation events" against a purely mathematical model (unless someone has), even given the prescence of compounding factors (lateral gene transfer; varying rates of mutation along the genome, if I understood that point correctly; etc.).
Given that the stuff on phlylogeny (cladistic analysis) came out of work in the field of taxonomy and theorizing how to group things, perhaps I understand my own historical ennui with the topic.
I'm just not the kind of person who could ever have made exhaustive catalogs of things and wondered about the best way to arrange them in order to test theories about their relatedness (i.e. "origins"). My siblings are the ones interested in such things - I recall my brother learning endless classifications of fungi, for instance, at one time and being tested on something about fingernails. zzzzzzzzz