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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.

poised for fish

the reflection still

like nothing else

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!

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:

A few months ago I saw a claim that if theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking were in Britain with its socialized medicine he would have been dead by now. I blew it off as another stupid comment but apparently this comment has gotten repeated all over the web. The problem of course is the it is not true as Larry Krauss reminds us in this article in Scientific American:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=war-is-peace

So why do people repeat that sort of tripe?

Krauss asks

"What makes people so susceptible to nonsense in public discourse? Is it because we do such a miserable job in schools teaching what science is all about—that it is not a collection of facts or stories but a process for weeding out nonsense to get closer to the underlying beautiful reality of nature? Perhaps not."

My thought is that whether we are dealing with health care, global warming or various sorts of social issues, we get an emotional high from thinking we are going to win, pull the wool over our opponent's head. Or maybe repetition of simple nostrums and unexamined falsehoods provides us with a sense of security when dealing with the unknown. Maybe such behavior was at one point adaptive maintaining some sort of group cohesion.

Krauss phrases his arguments with examples from the right, but I don't think people of any ideology are immune to this. As I commented in a post to one of my readers it is if we are stuck in a strange attractor or the sort of cycling that a person's brain might get into when they are depressed and can't get out.

As Krauss so ably observes, quoting apparently from an earlier Krauss commentary:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

So take a look at the Krauss article and let me know what you think. Only be careful. Check your falsehoods at the door.

Today I stumbled upon what has to be the silliest article I have seen in a long time. The article in England's Daily Mail trumpets:

"Social networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users"

And the article quotes neuroscientist Susan Greenfield as being concerned that use of social networks, twitter, facebook and others are "infantilising" the brain, exposure to computers, video games "rewriting our children's brains.

The evidence cited? A teacher of 30 years told her that students are less able to understand others. Hmmm sounds to me like the old things were better when I was young line. Other evidence? Well Autistic people have difficulty communicating but are comfortable around computers, she claims. Then she raises the specter that the seeming increase in autism is due to computer usage, ignoring the overwhelming evidence that the increase is due in large part to better screening and changes is the diagnostic criteria for autism.

Oh and here is my favorite piece of evidence, namely that computer games trigger flight or fight responses rather than the reasoning centers of the brain. OK granted some games are of that type but there are all kinds of computer games including some that really do require lots of reasoning. This from an educational psychologist.

Now do we want people to learn to form real relationships? Sure. Are computers leading us to do things differently than we have done them before and maybe made people impatient with slower media? Sure. Are there risks and problems with social networks and computer gaming? Sure. But quite frankly, printed books led to major changes in the way we do things as well and some unintended consequences such as the reformation and stuff such as that.

Granted, people need to learn balance in using these new technologies but it just seems too easy to blame social networking systems and computer games for social ills rather than focusing on real causes for real problems.

Am I the only one skeptical of "chilling warnings" about social websites and computer games and their effects on kid's brains? Or maybe you agree with the article. If so, why?

...to see just how important we are in the over all scheme of things.

heic0406a.jpg

This is an older Hubble image but always worth revisiting. The official Hubble site says of this image:

" The HUDF field contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. In ground-based images, the patch of sky in which the galaxies reside (just one-tenth the diameter of the full Moon) is largely empty. Located in the constellation Fornax, the region is below the constellation Orion."

The LA times reports that the Chamber of Commerce has come up with a novel approach to stop proposed EPA regulation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant- hold a trial.

According to the article, Chamber officials are comparing the proposed trial to the "Scopes Trial" of evolution fame. That is unfortunate, because in the Scope's trial, the state won the technical point that Scopes was guilty of violating state law as it stood at the time, but no science was settled there.

Link to story http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-climate-trial25-2009aug25,0,901567.story

Actually the better trial comparison is with Phillip Johnson's book Darwin on Trial where Johnson attempts to poke holes in evolution using the sorts of rhetorical tricks and judicious evidence cherry picking lawyers use to cast "reasonable doubt" as to the guilt or innocence of a particular party. Of course the universe must not have been listening since evolution just keeps on happening and the intelligent Design movement he spawned has shown itself to be scientifically sterile.

So science really is not advanced by this sort of shenanigan, which after all is all about rhetoric rather than what ought to be our policy toward, say, carbon dioxide.

The whole thing is tied to another report I encountered this morning about another important issue, namely health care.

The article, Health Care Debate Based on Lack of Logic, discusses some of the issues that cloud our ability to think about complex policy issues.

What I found really interesting is the finding that often people who are less certain in their beliefs fail to look at opposing "perspectives". This sounds directly applicable to lots of other complex issues as well.

Another interesting point the article makes is that the sort of town hall format that politicians love, tends to harden people's positions rather than enabling some sort of consensus. Now granted, I think we people and organizations should, air their concerns about public issues, but are Town Hall meetings and show trials the way to do it?

The evidence suggests no, and I believe the Chamber ought to carefully rethink how it presents business's quite legitimate concerns with the proposed EPA regulations of carbon dioxide emissions. If the Chamber isn't careful, it might just end up with credibility on par with tobacco industry with respect to the health risks of smoking.

Multi's comments about dangerous toys brings back memories:

I remember my chemistry set very fondly and I would spend hours making dangerous stuff...my favorite was making chlorine. Such a pretty yellow/green color.

This whole discussion reminds me of Terry Pratchett's book "Hogfather" . Death is playing the Hogfather and giving gifts to all the kids. Death is reprimanded for giving a real sword to a child and Death's response is something like: "It's educational".

Ah, in fact thanks to the wonders of the internet here is exact quote:

"The mother took a deep breath.

"You can't give her that!" she screamed. "It's not safe!"

IT'S A SWORD, said the Hogfather, IT'S NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE.

"She's a child!" shouted Crumley.

IT'S EDUCATIONAL.

"What if she cuts herself?"

THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON."

Seriously, we could also by real pyrex glass ware and replacement chemicals for our home labs in the "dime" store which was Newberry's in my home town. The upshot is that I developed a good sense of measurement and the importance of following laboratory directions- and safety-yes I had a pair of goggles as a kid-well before I got to college.

Now if you are going to give your kids Death's version of dangerous toys, you as a parent have to take responsibility here. Some of my friends had BB guns and couldn't content themselves with hitting tin cans. I remember finding a freshly shot gold finch and watching it die in my hands. Might have been educational for me in terms of developing a sense of empathy but based on what I remember about the shooter...certainly not for him. It was just another bird.

Charles Krauthammer's article on Obama and science raises some very interesting issues some of which I agree with and others I don't.

First of all having watched Obama's science policy development, I don't think the President is acquiescing to the mystique of science. What I see is an attempt to bend over, perhaps too far, to distinguish himself from President Bush on science policy.

Science really is not divorced from ethics and Krauthammer rightly seems to be on the side of Hume's guillotine which says what is is not what ought to be.

The problem with Bush's science policies was that he ignored and in some cases attempted to suppress scientific discourse be it related to climate change or population control. I would like to think that Obama would avoid such extremes but I am, I hope, realistic here.

After all, history teaches us that suppression of scientific thought knows no ideological boundaries. From the right we get attempts to suppress the proper teaching of evolution in the schools based on misguided theology. From the left we got suppression of genetics, first in the Soviet Union because genetics conflicted with their notion of the perfectability of Man.

More recently from the left we had the whole sordid sociobiolgy debacle where proponents of the notion that social behaviors are evolutionary adaptations were pummeled, sometimes physically by their opponents mainly on the left.

There is an interesting article by Steven Wiley in this week's The Scientist which bears on science policy. Dr. Wiley notes that most controversies in science revolve around interpretation of data.

He observes:

"Scientific disputes seem inevitable in any career, but mine gave me a keen appreciation of the need for caution in accepting simple interpretations of the behavior of complex systems. In science, we do not gather facts. We make observations. Our interpretation of observations is only as good as our assumptions and conceptual frameworks. "

And I think this has lots of relevance to controversies in the popular mind about scientific issues be it global warming or stem cell research. After all the non scientific public not only rarely has an understanding of the nature of science but is filtering scientific data second hand through other and non scientific sets of assumptions.

This is not to belittle those assumptions. We all have them and they are bound up with how we make ethical decisions.

Ultimately scientific controversies get ironed out empirically. As Steven's notes further:

"Scientists don't generally care about who is right or who is wrong in a dispute. They want a conclusion that can help predict their own experimental outcomes. Science is built brick by brick from ideas and concepts that can lead to the next successful series of experiments and concepts. If an idea doesn't support the next brick, it is discarded. It's natural selection in science. "

Sometimes this is a long tortuous and imperfect process, one that maybe uncomfortable at times. Krauthammer seems to recognize this when he quotes from Dr. Thompson that if stem cell research doesn't make you uncomfortable then you haven't thought enough about it.

But there is a flip side to this: namely just because a scientific finding or conclusion makes you uncomfortable that is no reason to deny what the evidence appears to be saying. This sort of denial has been a repeated failure of both the left and the right in dealing with science.

I would like to think Obama's reluctance to get into the the ethical debate about embryonic stem cell research is not intellectual laziness, but rather an attempt to isolate scientific inquiry from the political arena.

We shall see.