LJWorld.com

A friend sent me a really interesting article that looks at how people sell junk science. The article focuses on Ray Kurzweil who has proposed an idea called the Singularity at which point he claims we will be able to move from human bodies to computers. Kurzweil sees this as the natural outcome of advances in "artificial intelligence", computer power and biology. The article draws parallels between Kurzweil and a 1930's huckster, John Brinkley who tried to sell the notion that he could treat impotence by implanting goat gonads into his victims (I mean patients).

The article gives an interesting checklist about how to sell junk science. One ought to be able to use to detect junk science:

1. Tie your product to the customer's fears
2. Tie your product to popular culture
3. Have multiple products to sell
4. Use social proof rather than scientific proof (aside maybe evidence would have been a better word choice)
5. Argue from authority rather than fact
6. Spread the BS as thickly as possible
7. Treat real science as junk science
8. When all else fails trot out your family
9. Use gullible reporters to get your message out. (Hmmmm how about in the LJWorld?)

Here is the checklist from the article:

The article is at: http://blogs.bnet.com/salesmachine/?p=10552&tag=col1;post-10552

For those interested in the controversies surrounding artificial intelligence the article has a reference to an article in Skeptic magazine about the difficulties involved in developing artificial intelligence and the different approaches to this problem.

What are some sorts of junk science do you see reflected in BNet's checklist?

Here's a partial list of mine:

Creationism and intelligent design Chiropractic (or at least some versions of it) Natural supplements and herbal medicines (not all but a large number of them) The autism/vaccine controversy Scientology Some non empirically based forms of psychology So called energy work Of course "traditional medicine" is not immune to the junk science syndrome Shampoos and skin care products (Think Botanicals-what the heck is that?)

What do you think of the checklist and my list of activities? What would you add to the list? Where am I wrong?

Am I just being a curmudgeon?

Yesterday one of my readers sent a link to a set of videos called Climate Crock of the Week by Peter Sinclair. These videos provide thoughtful analysis of what we know about climate change. You can find them here on You Tube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610

This video in particular gives a reasonable overview of the history of what we know about climate change:

Another reader sent a link to a report from the National Science Foundation about increased release of methane from the arctic shelf. Methane is of particular concern because it is a much more potent green house gas than carbon dioxide. According to the report, more methane currently is released from the shallow waters off of Siberia than from the rest of the ocean. Check the report out for yourself at:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116532&org=NSF&from=news

Remember that the arctic regions are warming faster than the rest of the world, so much methane locked in the permafrost will be released as the climate warms and since methane itself is such a potent greenhouse gas we could end up with much greater warming than we expect just focusing on carbon dioxide.

One more trend worth mentioning is that according to the New York Times anti-evolutionists at the Discovery Institute are making linkages with climate change skeptics. The idea is to push bills through state legislatures to promote critical analysis of controversial theories. Of course climate change and evolution are mentioned. By taking this tact, anti-evolutionists hope to get their ideas into the public school system under the guise of teaching critical thinking.

This article, Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/science/earth/04climate.html?em

This tactic though is not new. It is exactly the tactic taken by the creationists on the Board of Education in Kansas in their Science Standards rewrite of 1999. So the Times is, well behind the times on this one.

Being skeptical and critical is a good thing, but only if it is based on search for truth- not to maintain a cherished metaphysical or ideological position. Quite frankly, I see little of that sort of constructiveness in either global warming skeptics or anti-evolutionists. Lest you think I am being political here I have seen plenty of misplaced skepticism from the Left as well as the Right and it is reprehensible where ever it is found.

My son and I had the pleasure of seeing a large flock of snow geese at Baker Wetlands and got a small feel for what it must have been like when such flocks numbered in the millions. Click the image to see larger sizes on my photostream.

The movie Avatar must really be a great movie because it has struck so many nerves on the left and the right. My favorite (and I use that word advisedly) take is from the loony right by Phil Kline Kansas's former attorney general. I am not going to dissect his whole scree which you can read on his blog:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2415427/posts?page=64

Kline predictably thinks Avatar is pro-environmental propaganda (he may be correct by the way), for he writes:

"The natives are one with their native planet, including their mother-god Eywa. Eywa is the planet, and the natives reach oneness by entwining fibers from their bodies with the fibers of the planet. This representative sexual union allows them to hear their departed ancestors and gain rhythm with the planet — a séance orgy so to speak. All life on the planet is one, with one spirit and one energy."

Notice how nicely he works in the evil SEX into his rhetoric.

Later on we get the evil bugaboo of evolution:

"Such a prayer represents atheistic Hollywood's dilemma. The only way to reconcile a godless Darwinistic worldview with a deeply spiritual American culture is to convert environmentalism into religion. For what greater purpose for man than to save mother earth, or Pandora? And thus, our purpose in a purposeless world."

And he says that that culture of the Pandorans is Pantheistic. Well that is true I suppose but if Kline would take off his blinders a bit he would see that it is really a practical pantheism. After all, on Pandora evolution (sorry Phil that is the way the world works) has led to a system where the Pandorans can little plug into each other and indeed that is necessary for their survival. So it's not some really some sort of mystical new age Pantheism, but quite practical.

Now we don't have the same explicit connections to our environment that the Pandorans have but we are interconnected much more and need the rest of the biosphere a lot more than Kline seems to care about. At simplest level we are not even a single organism but a community of roughly 100 trillion human cells and 10 times that many bacterial cells that are symbiotic with us. And I don't think that includes the mitochondria which were believed derived from free living bacteria. And examples of how we are interconnected can be multiplied repeatedly at other levels of biological organization.

So Kline and company may scream but maybe we need a good dose of practical pantheism.

It's good to start 2010 on a hopeful note, in this case new clues about the origin of the infectious cancer threatening the Tasmanian Devil.

In addition to the LJW article, readers might want to check out this article in the NYTimes Science section.

The research study's abstract is at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/327/5961/84/

The Science site also has a pod cast with the research study's lead author: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;327/5961/84/DC2

The authors of the report in science suggest that the infectious cancer originated once in a mutated Schwann cell in a devil about 20 years ago. Schwann cells wrap around the axons of many nerve cells and speed up the transmission of nerve signals. The hope is that knowing the origin of the cancer will help in the development of a vaccine to protect the remaining Devils, assuming we can figure out why the devil's immune system doesn't reject the foreign tumor cells.

One thing that strikes me about people's ability to understand science is that people do not have a good grasp of the span of geological time. A good example is in Lee Gerhard's recent opinion piece in the Journal World, http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2009/dec....

Dr. Gehard makes he following claims:

"Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history. "

"Temperature change correlation with carbon dioxide levels is not statistically significant. "

Well the first claim is certainly is true, if you for instance inspect this interesting graph:

Geocarb_III-Mine-03.jpg

http://sbvor.blogspot.com/2009/10/climate-change-science-overview.html

But notice the time scale is in millions of years. Indeed if you enlarge the chart and look at the lower right corner where we get to recent history, carbon dioxide levels appear to be higher than at any time in the past 20 million years.

Let's look more closely at recent geological history using ice core data:

icecoredata.jpg

http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/climatechange/figure_1.jpg/image_view

Notice a couple of things. First of all current carbon dioxide concentrations appear way out of line from historical norms over the last 400,000 years. This is relevant because we are subjecting the biosphere to a rapid increase in carbon dioxide not in the evolutionary experience of modern organisms.

Let's turn to Dr. Gehard's second claim of no statistically significant correlation between temperature change and carbon dioxide. This has been examined for the ice core data and the correlation between temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration turns out to be highly significant. Roughly 89% of the variance in temperature is related to variance in carbon dioxide concentration.

See http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6846/full/412523a0.html

Of course correlation does not mean causality as the tobacco companies were once found of reminding us, but this tight relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide is quite striking and needs explaining even if, as could be the case, there is some other factor triggering the initial temperature rise. Perhaps Dr. Gehard means something else by the interesting phrase "temperature change" and perhaps he could explain it here and provide references to this. But from my end his essay merely illustrates how much can be unconsciously obscured by examining a time frame that is not relevant to the problem at hand!

Octopuses have a reputation as being very smart invertebrates. But check out this coconut collecting octopus reported in Scientific American.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/video.cfm?id=57388094001

The original article's abstract is at http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2809%2901914-9

What makes this interesting is not just the use of the coconut shells as shelter-hermit crabs do something like that with shells-but that the octopus stores them for future use. Also this particular octopus also can walk on two hind legs which leads me to wonder if we are seeing an organism that could replace us assuming we don't muck things up so badly that the only life left consists of the sorts of hardy single celled organisms that existed around 3.5 billion years ago.

We are just beginning to understand the cognitive abilities of these critters. For a good discussion of octopus mental abilities see http://www.thecephalopodpage.org/behavior.php

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oct...

I hate year end reviews, which will probably be doubled in number this year since people have this idea that years that end in nine or zero are somehow important. For those that LIKE year end reviews the NY Times has done all the work for you with the 9th Annual Year in Ideas. This review includes semi serious stuff such as the epidemiology of zombies, and the latest in high fashion "Stiletto Claws", to sobering ideas such as the notion that evolutionary innovations in the biosphere have led to mass extinctions "Life's Greatest Hits" to "Lithium in the Water Supply".

Check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/projects/magazine/ideas/2009/

They did miss a few such as iPhones as musical instruments but nobody's perfect.

This is as close to a year end review you will get from me. I promise.

There was an interesting exchange this morning on National Public radio between Steve Levitt of SuperFreakonomics fame and Peter Frumhoff from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Levitt has proposed geo-engineering solutions as a stop gap measure to deal with global warming. The geo-engineering solution they discussed was pumping sulfur dioxide in to the stratosphere. The idea is to increase the amount of sunlight reflected away from the atmosphere. That this could work is well known, since violent volcanic eruptions inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and the atmosphre does indeed cool.

Levitt argues that this geoengineering approach will be cheaper and quicker than spending roughly 2% of GDP to reduce carbon dioxide output. Frumhoff argues that geo-engineering approaches carry significant risks and that we are simply substituting one global experiment with another. Also Frumhoff argues that many geo-engineering approaches don't address the other affects of increasing carbon dioxide concentration such as making the oceans more acid.

Listen to the discussion for yourself at the link below:

The climate noosphere is in an uproar about a bunch of e-mails there were hacked from a global climate site. The e-mails are allegedly from prominent climate scientists and date from the late 1990's. According to this article in the NY Times at least some of the e-mails don't show climate scientists in a very favorable light. For instance one e-mail talks about using a statistical trick, another e-mail calls global warming skeptics "idiots".

Of course skeptics are chortling over what they see as proof that global warming is a hoax and that climate scientists are trying to hide stuff, while the climate scientists involved in the e-mail exchanges seem to view the exchanges as normal give and take between scientists.

I have actually looked at some of the e-mails and quite frankly a lot of it really does look like the kind of give and take that people taking a particular position might have. Somehow I doubt that a similar hack of climate skeptic e-mails would be any different.

It is clear that the scientists involved are aware of the skeptics and how skeptics might react if certain data sets are not properly explained:

"Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith in the paleoestimates. I don't think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I'd hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!"

Well at any rate, I think this is typical scientific e-mail give and take in a highly politicized arena (been there myself) and I don't think that global warming skeptics should make too much of this stuff. Besides if they are crying foul because some one who disagrees with them in a private e-mail refers to them as idiots then maybe they ought to get thicker skins.

Don't take my word for it. You too can sleuth evil climate scientists e-mail by going to the following site and enter your favorite search term!

http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/index.php

Of course I would love to have an equivalent set of e-mails between global warming skeptics - maybe working for a large oil company or perhaps a certain large business group that will go unnamed -and I just bet a little judicious browsing would yield lots of choice quotes. But of course hacking e-mails is wrong, a minor point seems to have been lost in this whole tea pot tempest.

For full disclosure, I have used the word idiot at least 27 times in my e-mail career, all of them of course quite justified.