Interesting discussion at the Loom (via Panda's Thumb):
So here is a fascinating scenario to consider: a small-brained African hominid species expands out of Africa by 2 million years ago, bringing with it stone tools. It spreads thousands of miles across Asia, reaching Indonesia and then getting swept to Flores. It may not have undergone any significant dwarfing, since they were already small. This would change the way we think about all hominids. Being big-brained and big-bodied could no longer be considered essential requirements for spreading out of Africa. And one would have to wonder why early lineages of hominids became extinct in Africa when one branch managed to get to Flores.
I figure the most scientific explanation is that one day a wizard showed up at the door. The road goes ever on and all that.
I’d just about finished this lengthy post when I got the news that our readers and fellow bloggers are calling for lots of juicy attackblogging instead of dryasdust issues analysis. But it’s done now, so I’m going to post it anyway.
Matthew Yglesias had a well-argued piece a couple of days ago on Social Security and the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH), in which he quoted me on the (generally left-wing) implications of rejecting the EMH. This spurred me to start on a post (or maybe a series) on the EMH, the equity premium and the implications for Social Security reform. Most of what I have to say is consistent with what Matt and others have said previously, but perhaps there will be a bit of a new perspective.
I’m going to look at three plans1. First, the status quo, that is, a scheme where the Social Security fund is invested in government bonds and pays a defined benefit. Next, diversification, that is, investing the Social Security fund in a diversified portfolio of debt and equity, but still with a defined benefit structure. Third, privatisation private accounts personal accounts, that is, allowing individuals to make their own investments and reducing the defined benefit correspondingly.
The main reason the alternatives might yield substantial benefits is the equity, premium, that is, the fact that, on average, returns to equity have been much higher than returns to debt in the long run. So, it might appear that investing Social Security money in equity, either individually or through the Fund could yield better returns than the current policy of holding only government debt.
This post will be about the implications if the EMH is exactly, or approximately true.
The easy case is when the EMH is exactly correct. In this case, the equity premium is simply the market’s aggregate evaluation of the required premium for the additional risk involved in holding equity. The EMH requires that each individual hold their own optimal mix of risk and expected return at the prevailing market prices, and that they take full account of expected taxes, Social Security payments and so on.
Under the EMH, neither of the reforms will make a difference. If the Social Security fund shifts into equities, individuals will reduce their own holding of equity until the desired balance is restored. Moreover, individuals will be entirely indifferent about personal accounts. If forced to open them, they will, initially at least, invest entirely in bonds, so restoring their (by hypothesis, optimal) status quo ante.
One important point about the EMH that’s relevant at present is that the risk associated with the equity premium has to be real long run risk. If equity investors were guaranteed of coming out ahead over, say, 20 years, no significant premium could be sustained. So the US experience, where a 20 year holding period has almost always been enough must be somewhat atypical. Shiller makes the point that other countries have experienced longer periods of poor stock returns, while still exhibiting an equity premium.
A more interesting case is when the EMH nearly holds. Suppose that the market is efficient in most respects but that some people are credit-constrained or face high borrowing costs. As a result they can’t hold as much equity as they want, since they can’t borrow to get it. This gives a case for either of the proposed reforms, since directly or indirectly, this gives credit-constrained households exposure to equity.
Note however, that almost any violation of the EMH leads to interventionist policy conclusions unappealing to free-market types. For example, given credit constraints, it’s generally desirable to increase the consumption of the young, for example by subsidising post-secondary education. something that is commonly stigmatised as “middle-class welfare”. So, as Matt says, invoking EMH violations, implicitly or otherwise, is a very dangerous intellectual strategy for supporters of privatisation.
1 In each case, I’ll ignore the underfunding issue, the fact that Social Security taxes at current rates will eventually be insufficient to fully fund promised benefits, under current rules. Whichever scheme is adopted, some combination of lower benefits, higher Social Security taxes or general revenue support will be required.
Whenever anyone raises the possibility that resource shortages may have serious social consequences in public, they’re almost certain to run into flak from someone citing Julian Simon’s bet with Paul Ehrlich on metal prices. Thus, Jim Henley, in response to my previous post on Gregg Easterbrook and Jared Diamond says:
Right-leaning technophiles adopt this posture because, in our experience, scientific (or scientistic) pessimism has proven itself repeatedly, embarassingly wrong, from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich to the Club of Rome. We saw Julian Simon win the Great Dispute of the 1970s, and are inclined to think the Julian Simons of today and tomorrow will win their own disputes.
But what I suspect Jim doesn’t know (and what I didn’t know until I read it yesterday in Jared Diamond’s Collapse), is why Simon was quite so confident that metal shortages weren’t a problem. Over to Diamond:
There is an abundance of errors of the latter sort (anti-environmentalist predictions that have proved wrong): e.g. overly optimistic predictions that the Green Revolution would already have solved the world’s hunger problems; the prediction of the economist Julian Simon that we could feed the world’s population as it continues to grow for the next 7 billion years; and Simon’s prediction “Copper can be made from other elements” and thus there is no risk of a copper shortage.
Now Diamond himself exaggerates a little when he says one page later that copper cannot be made from other elements by definition, because it itself is an element. More precisely, we could make industrial quantities of copper from other elements if we had the power and the inclination to whizz around the universe creating supernovas. Quite why we would want to create more copper if we had these superpowers is a question that I’ll leave to our readers’ ingenuity and imagination.
Simon’s prediction is far and away the most impressive example that I’ve ever seen of lunatic technological optimism in support of a transparent political agenda. I don’t think that even the boyos over at Flack Central Station would have the chutzpah to make this claim; Easterbrook’s belief that we don’t have to worry about material shortages because we can spread across the galaxy is strictly minor league stuff in comparison. More seriously, Diamond makes a strong case that a qualified scientific pessimism (along with a qualified optimism about the ability of human beings to respond to environmental problems and resource limits) is the appropriate attitude to take. Otherwise, we face a very serious risk of environmental collapse - not the end of humanity, but some very serious problems all the same. Jim should read Diamond’s book (we live quite near each other; I’m happy to lend him my copy) - while I doubt that it would convert him, I do think that it would give him some serious food for thought.
This piece by Nicholas Kristof encapsulates everything I don’t like about ‘evolutionary psychology’, particularly in its pop mode. Kristof makes the argument that the success of the religious right is due to a predisposition to religious belief grounded in supposed evolutionary advantages, supposedly reflected in a particular gene, referred to by its putative discoverer as ‘The God Gene’. This is pretty much a standard example of EP in action. Take a local, but vigorously contested, social norm, invent a ‘just so’ story and assert that you have discovered a genetically determined universal. Kristof doesn’t quite get to the point of asserting that there exists a gene for voting Republican, but it follows logically from his argument (Dawkins defends the idea of a gene for tying shoelaces, for example).
Where to begin on the problems of all this?
The obvious one is that a large proportion of the US population, and a much larger proportion of the population in other developed countries, appears to lack the necessary gene. If you are going to explain this kind of thing properly in an EP context, you can’t, as Kristof does, assert that believing in God has evolutionary advantages - otherwise atheists would be extinct. You need a stable mixed-strategy equilibrium. I’m sure I could generate half a dozen untestable Pleistocene scenarios for such an equilibrium if I put my mind to it for an hour, but Kristof doesn’t even bother.
Then there’s the problem that proportions of believers have changed radically in the space of a few generations. In the late 18th century, Dr Johnson plausibly asserted that there were not above a dozen outright atheists in the kingdom of England. Unless this tiny band of infidels was incredibly fecund, it’s hard to account for the millions who can be found there today. The contrast between the US and Europe today is even more striking, since the differences in living standards and lifestyles is small and the gene pools are fairly similar. Quite subtle differences in social conditions can generate huge differences in religious beliefs.
Third, there’s the definition of religion. Kristof makes much of Chinese drivers dangling pictures of Chairman Mao from their rear-view mirrors, but this is better described as superstition than religion. If he is saying that people haven’t evolved to be perfectly rational, and that superstition is one manifestation of this, then I won’t disagree, but I’ll bet my lucky T-shirt he wants to claim something stronger than this.
Coming back to the starting point, this kind of problem arises invariably with pop EP because it’s inherent in the applications. No doubt EP can be used, at least in principle, to explain genuine cultural universals (according to Pinker, ‘tickling’ is an example) but no one cares much about genuine cultural universals. If there were pro-tickling and anti-tickling factions, a great deal of effort would be expended on proving that tickling was natural, and a crucial part of training hunters to stay silent while tracking the great mammoth or whatever. Since, AFAIK, no-one much is against tickling, the issue doesn’t arise.
Ernst Mayr has died. The NYT has an obit describing him as a giant of the field, but also strongly hinting that he was a bit of a controversialist (I’m not a biologist, so I don’t feel competent to judge the truth or untruth of that assessment).
Carl Zimmer has a good discussion of the discovery that the embryonic stem-cell lines approved by the Bush administration appear to be contaminated with sugars from the substrate they were originally grown in. He has a nice angle on whether the Intelligent Design types who disagree with stem cell research will try to rely on the paper describing the discovery, which demonstrates the problem with the the cell lines by drawing on evidence about molecular evolution.
I’ve been reading Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World, which is one of the most profoundly annoying books that I’ve read in the last few years. There’s nothing more frustrating than to read a book by someone who shares several of your pet aversions (trickle down economics, Deepak Chopra, obscurantist literary theory), but who isn’t bright enough to say anything interesting or non-trivial about them. It’s a rambling, shallow book which aspires to, and occasionally even attains, the intellectual level of a middling Sunday-supplement broadside.
There’s one unintentionally hilarious bit, where Wheen vigorously excoriates literary theorists for having been taken in by the Sokal hoax and then goes on a few pages later to deliver an extended harrumph attacking Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. Wheen cites a passage where Feyerabend attacks the teaching of science in schools as a form of tyranny (in Wheen’s reading, Feyerabend is saying that we shouldn’t be teaching children that the earth moves around the sun; we should be teaching them that some people believe that the earth moves around the sun). What makes this delicious is that Wheen, like the literary theorists whom he’s been fulminating against a few pages previously, has been taken in by a provocation. If he’d bothered to read the preface of Against Method properly, he’d know that Feyerabend is deliberately and consciously putting forward as outrageous a set of examples as he can in support of a serious argument. The essay was originally planned as one half of a twofer, in which Imre Lakatos would try to top Feyerabend with an equally vigorous set of arguments on behalf of a somewhat more orthodox account of the sources of scientific progress. Sadly, Lakatos died before the project could be completed. Unlike the postmodernists (Irigaray, Kristeva) whom Wheen lumps him in with, Feyerabend was a trained scientist who knew what he was talking about, and was engaged in a very serious debate about the scientific method and its merits as a process of generating new discoveries. As an aside, Feyerabend also wrote one of the most entertaining autobiographies, Killing Time that I’ve ever read.
From the FT’s review of Len Fisher’s Weighing the Soul :
Weighing the Soul is a mine of delightful oddities, such as the origins of Galileo’s “scaling theory”, which is still used to estimate proportions when turning a model into an actual building. Early in his career Galileo was asked by the Pope to use his mathematical skills to work out the exact location and dimensions of Hell. His calculations showed it to be a cone-shaped structure with the point at the centre of the earth and the top a circle whose centre was below Jerusalem. The big structural problem was the unsupported roof, which spanned 5,000kms. Galileo claimed that the design used for the dome of the cathedral in Florence would do the job and was lavishly praised. In fact he rapidly realised that his calculations were wrong but kept it secret, only publishing the amended equations years later.
Congratulations really go to Tim Lambert, who has been playing a fine game of whack-a-mole with respect to Lancet study denialists. The state of the game, as far as I can see it is pretty much as we left it at the last CT summary; the Lancet editors mischaracterized the 100K excess deaths as civilian, but the study itself is sound science. The only methodological critique I regard as currently having any validity is that the clusters were selected based on 2003 census data without adjusting for population movements since the war; this could have resulted in an overestimate or an underestimate; what I’d call an “unknown bias in an unknown direction”. By Sod’s Law (a statistical regularity), this critique was made in the CT comments thread about five minutes before the post fell off the front page; I’d be very interested in continuing that discussion.
But anyway, another party not usually associated with the blogosphere has entered the fray; the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. And their critique is … to be honest, not very good. Detailed comments below the fold.
The majority of the FCO comments deal with legal and moral issues about who is responsible for what, rather than factual questions about whether more or fewer Iraqis are consuming oxygen as a result of the invasion we launched with the hope of helping them. I won’t comment on these points much here; in general, they appear to be a version of the argument most clearly put forward by Norman Geras: that the Ba’athists and Islamists were morally obliged to grant the coalition forces a cakewalk and that therefore Straw and his American counterparts were morally entitled to plan on the basis that there would be one. This seems wrong to me, but I suspect that the main reason is that I think about this sort of thing as an economist, and lots of intelligent and thoughtful people don’t believe that’s the right way to think about it. So no more on that score from me. Just the facts, ma’am.
And the facts as I see them are as follows (before launching into this hatchet job, I first want to give the FCO staff credit; they acknowledge that the study’s methodology is orthodox, they don’t cast aspersions on the peer review process and give the team credit for their diligence and courage. The tone of the memo is reasoned and thoughtful and it treats the study seriously and respectfully while disagreeing with it. The civil servant who drafted this was clearly a class act, albeit that I don’t really rate his or her statistics).
First, there is one serious mistake in the FCO critique, which I have informed them about and which they ought to correct. They say:
“The figures derived from the survey’s data on Fallujah would have resulted in an estimated 200,000 excess deaths within Fallujah alone over the past 18 months. This would amount to almost two-thirds of the total population of the town - which is just not credible.”
This is wrong and is based on a misreading of the Lancet article. The article actually says on page 5:
In our Falluja sample, we recorded 53 deaths when only 1·4 were expected under the national pre-war rate. This indicates a point estimate of about 200 000 excess deaths in the 3% of Iraq represented by this cluster.
In other words, the 200,000 excess deaths figure is the result of applying the Fallujah relative risk ratio to a population of about 739,000 individuals, not to the 300,000 inhabitants of Fallujah itself. The point estimate for the town of Fallujah under suitable assumptions would be more like 27% of the population; this still looks like an outlier, but it cannot be dismissed in the same hand-waving manner. In any case, the FCO have made a simple mistake here and should correct it. [numerical error in this paragraph now corrected - thanks, commenter “gkl”]
Second, the FCO critique is shot through with what I would call “Kaplan’s Fallacy”, the rhetorical device of equivocating from uncertainty about sampling error to specific conclusions about the direction of that sampling error. They come very close at one point to the howler that all points within a confidence interval are basically the same, but probably get themselves off the hook on this one with a caveat. I have developed a rule of thumb since the Lancet study was published; anyone who makes a big deal out of sampling imprecision without even mentioning the possibility of the study having underestimated the change in the death rate, does serious damage to their credibility in my eyes when they start talking about reasons for believing in an overestimate.
And finally, they engage in a form of critique that has had me tearing my hair out from day one of this whole debate. I’ve called it “clearly wrong”, I’ve described it as “beyond hackish” – I really don’t know how I can put this more strongly. I’ll try saying it in bold italics and all capital letters, with three exclamation marks at the end.
IT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE TO COMPARE A PASSIVELY REPORTED COUNT OF CRUDE CIVILIAN DEATHS BY VIOLENCE TO AN ACTIVELY RESEARCHED ESTIMATE OF TOTAL EXCESS DEATHS!!!
To recap; the Iraq Body Count number, and the Iraqi Ministry of Health number are:
1) Passive reporting systems; they rely on people reporting the events to them rather than going out and looking for them
2) Counts rather than estimates; they only publish the count from their own sample rather than attempting to scale it up or down to the whole population
3) Referring to straightforward body counts rather than excess death rates relative to a baseline
4) Restricted to deaths of a particular kind; deaths identified as having been caused by coalition violence, of individuals identified as being civilians.
Comparing the magnitudes of these numbers to the Lancet central 98,000 estimate is simply the wrong thing to do. I honestly don’t believe that this is difficult to understand, or that I am indulging in statistical elitism when I insist that if you take two numbers which count different things in different ways, you cannot judge one against the other. A subsidiary mistake, by the way, and one that also probably ought to be corrected, is that the FCO claims:
If the Lancet survey is accurate we could have expected Iraqi Ministry of Health figures, compiled by hospitals, to show many more times the number of people killed and wounded over that period than they in fact do. Hospitals in Iraq have no obvious reason to under-report the number of dead and injured. The Lancet article does not explain this discrepancy.
Actually, it does, on page 7. It doesn’t mention the Ministry of Health by name, but there is a discussion of the observed fact that, in other contexts, passive reporting systems materially undercount casualties of this kind. I would also note that the people who compile the Ministry of Health statistics have nothing like the confidence in the comprehensiveness of their own numbers that the FCO has on their behalf.
On the whole, I think this matters. The FCO is still refusing to “do body counts” – they believe that they have no legal obligation to do so as the Lancet claims, and they might be right. But one has to say that it would bloody useful if someone were to start doing body counts, for the Iraqis as well as for domestic commentators on the war. And I reiterate my conclusion from my last Lancet post; you can tell a lot about people’s character by the way in which they protect themselves against information they don’t like. Institutionally, the FCO is putting all of its trust in the Iraqi Ministry of Health number, which in the first place is almost bound to materially undercount what it intends to measure, and in the second place is not measuring anything like a wide enough range of deaths to get a real handle on how the invasion is going. This head-in-the-sand attitude is pretty worrying.
Via Butterflies & Wheels I came across the following ludicrous and offensive argument against gay marriage from Keith Burgess-Jackson, the self-styled AnalPhilosopher :
I have said in this blog many times that the very idea of homosexual marriage is incoherent, which is why I put the word “marriage” in quotation marks. I do the same for dog “voting.” If we took our dogs to the polls and got them to push levers with their paws, they would not be voting. They would be going through the motions of voting. It would be a charade. Voting is not made for dogs. They lack the capacity to participate in the institution. The same is true of homosexuals and marriage.
Richard Chappell at Philosophy etc says nearly all that needs to be said about Burgess-Jackson’s “argument”, so I wouldn’t even have bothered mentioning it if I hadn’t been in conversation on Tuesday with the LSE’s Christian List whose article “Democracy in Animal Groups: A Political Science Perspective” is forthcoming in Trends in Ecology and Evolution . List draws on Condorcet’s jury theorem (previously discussed on CT here ) to shed more light on research by Conradt and Roper in their paper Group decision-making in animals , from Nature 421 (155—8) in 2003. Conradt and Roper have this to say about animal voting:
Many authors have assumed despotism without testing, because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans. However, empirical examples of ‘voting’ behaviours include the use of specific body postures, ritualized movements, and specific vocalizations, whereas ‘counting of votes’ includes adding-up to a majority of cast votes, integration of voting signals until an intensity threshold is reached, and averaging over all votes. Thus, democracy may exist in a range of taxa and does not require advanced cognitive capacity.
[Tiresome, humourless and literal-minded quasi-Wittgensteinian comments, putting inverted commas around “voting” etc. are hereby pre-emptively banned from the comments thread.]
I can still recall my surprise when I happened upon a volume in a second-hand bookshop by Maurice Maeterlinck, author of Pelleas et Mellisande and one of history’s most famous Belgians, only to discover that it was all about the natural history of bees. If James Meek’s piece in the latest LRB is anything to go on, I’m in good company:
Not long after the First World War, the movie baron Samuel Goldwyn set up a stable of Eminent Authors in an attempt to give silent screenplays more literary weight. One of the recruits was the Nobel Prize-winning Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Initially, neither party seems to have been troubled that Maeterlinck spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des abeilles. When the script was translated Goldwyn read it with increasing consternation until he could no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The hero is a bee!’
Further on in Meek’s review of Bee Wilson’s The Hive [1] he claims that Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserts somewhere that nations which eat honey are natural democracies but those which use sugar as a sweetener are fit only for tyranny. I guess I can see what the argument might be — something about honey-gathering being a suitable activity for free citizens whereas sugar came from large plantations worked by slaves — but does JJR really say it anywhere?2
1 One of the names we canvassed for this blog before we launched was “The Grumbling Hive”, I’m glad I lost that argument.
2 Montesquieu makes explit the link between sugar and black slavery at Spirit of the Laws I.15.v.
The BBC is reporting that scientists have discovered evidence of a new human species that outlasted the Neanderthals:
Scientists have discovered a new and tiny species of human that lived in Indonesia at the same time our own ancestors were colonising the world. The new species - dubbed “the Hobbit” due to its small size - lived on Flores island until at least 12,000 years ago.
It turns out that Frank Wilczek, co-winner of the Nobel prize in physics, is the father of Amity Wilczek who is now back blogging at Nature is Profligate. Amity has also gotten married during her hiatus - it’s hard to know where the congratulations should begin.
Chris Brooke has an entertaining discussion of this year’s IgNobel prize for Medicine (“Effects of Country Music on Suicide”). A perusal of all the winners over the years reveals some really good stuff. It turns out that the 1999 prize for physics was shared between Len Fisher — a former student of mine — who calculated the optimal way to dunk a biscuit and Professor Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck of the University of East Anglia who worked out how to make a teapot spout that doesn’t drip. I know I’m risking the ire of at least two of my CT colleagues here, but I can’t help having the thought that Vanden-Broeck’s researches potentially represent a greater contribution to human happiness than those of the majority of winners of the real Nobel prize for economics.
I’ve spent the past couple of days at the latest in a series of conferences under the name Priority in Practice , which Jo Wolff has organized at UCL. I don’t think I’d be diminishing the contribution of the other speakers by saying that Michael Marmot was the real star of the show. He’s well known for the idea that status inequality is directly implicated in health outcomes, a thesis that he promotes in his most recent book Status Syndrome and which first came to the fore with his Whitehall Study which showed that more highly promoted civil servants live longer even when we control for matters like lifestyle, smoking etc. Even when people have enough, materially speaking, their position in a status hierarchy still impacts upon their longevity. One interesting other finding that he revealed was that being in control at home (as opposed to at work) was massively important in affecting women’s longevity, but didn’t really impact upon men. There’s an excellent interview of Marmot by Harry Kreisler of Berkeley in which he outlines his central claims.
From Mike “M. John.” Harrison:
The difference between Berkeleyism and superstrings is that the latter will eventually test out or be chucked on the rubbish heap of ideas that looked good but weren’t good. The project of science differentiates itself from the projects of philosophy or religion, or even politics, precisely by the size of its rubbish heap.
Discuss.
It’s fifty years since the death of mathematician, code-breaker and computer pioneer Alan Turing. Turing committed suicide after being forced to take estrogen for a year to “cure” him of his homosexuality. I read Andrew Hodges’ excellent biography of Turing when I was in College. I remember Hodges noting that from about 1935 to his death he had a new and basically unprecedented idea about every five or six years. A remarkable character.
Last year, I fell off my bike, and had to have my arm in a sling for a couple of days. I don’t care, even a little bit, that Bush had a spill. It happens.
But if the White House is going to come out and blame the fall on “what the White House described as soil loosened by recent rainfall”… (Here’s the quote: “It’s been raining a lot. The topsoil was loose.”)
Well, I can check that. There hasn’t been any rain in Crawford all week. The last day with more than an inch of precipitation was May 1.
Again, not a big deal, but why would they say that? And do you share my suspicion that Caren Bohan, who wrote the Reuters report from Crawford, knows perfectly well that there wasn’t any rain?
UPDATE: Kos has a similar post, with a different data set but the same conclusion.
There’s a fascinating piece in the Economist about the 17-year cicadas that are about to emerge — in “a plague of biblical proportions” — all over the eastern United States, why they (and their 13-year cousins) have prime-numbered life-cycles, how parasites evolve strategies to match, and other cool stuff. Enjoy!
This is a more personal note although certainly related to topics discussed on CT and I’ll add some stats to give it some context. Congrats to my Mom for being elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences this week! The Academy has been around since 1825 and in all that time has had a total of eighteen women elected to its membership. The three women elected this week boosted the number up from fifteen. My Mom is only the second female chemist ever to become a member. The Academy altogether has no more than 200 members younger than 70 years old at any one time. (Members 70 or older do not count toward the 200 so there are just less than 300 current living members.)
Apparently the gender ratio is similarly abysmal in the science academies of other countries. Tabulations have shown that although in a few countries (e.g. Norway, Finland) the percentages are a bit higher around a whopping ten percent, among many other countries such as the UK, Germany, Israel, Denmark, France the figure is around four percent.1 The state of things is especially striking given that nowadays women often make up more than fifty percent of those getting college degrees (although that’s distributed quite unevenly across fields). Sure, it takes time for people to go through the ranks, but a significant number of women have been getting degrees in science for a while yet the pipeline narrows for women at every step of the way from college degrees to graduate degrees to post-docs to assistant professorships to full professorships to membership in science academies.. all the way to the Nobel Prize.
1 Joan Mason: “Not much room at the top for women”, Forum, Journal of the Association for Women in Science and Engineering, No.8, Autumn/Winter, 1999/2000, p.3.
PZ Myers has a delightful short story on what scientists do when presented with a ridiculous supernatural hypothesis that has testable empirical consequences.
As a philosopher I’d have been quite happy to dispatch that one from the armchair. That’s (part of) why they don’t teach my stuff in high-school science classes, and rightly so.
Via Tyler Cowen , a rather wonderful example of the absurdities of gung-ho evolutionary psychology. Edward H. Hagen, Paul J. Watson and J. Anderson Thomson Jr. propose that severe depression is adaptive - it serves a functional purpose. It compels others to help the victim and thus redounds to his or her long term advantage. In short, depression is “an unconsciously calculated gamble to gain greater long-term benefits.”
This is a near-perfect example of what might be dubbed (with no apologies whatsoever to Cosmides and Tooby) the Standard Evolutionary Psychology Model. First, take some human trait or behaviour. Bonus points if it’s something weird like slash fiction that’s likely to attract the interest of the Sunday supplement editors. Second, construct an ad hominid argument claiming that this trait or behaviour served some functional need for hunter-gatherers on the veldt. Third, use your findings to justify some right-wing shibboleth or another, showing that hunter-gatherer societies hardwire us for perfectly competitive markets or the like (in fairness, Hagen, Watson and Thomson jr. don’t do this). Fourth, write article. Repeat as often as necessary to get tenure and/or the attention of the popular press. Of course, at no stage of the process need you deign to provide convincing empirical evidence that might sully the clarity and vigour of your argument. It’s wretched stuff, that doesn’t do any favors to Darwinian theory. That our minds are undeniably the product of evolutionary forces doesn’t and shouldn’t provide a license for half-baked functionalist explanations of the psychology of everyday life.
Read Kip, at Long Story; Short Pier on what gay people, feminists and creationists don’t have in common.
Kieran suggests ” that people who subscribe to Intelligent Design theory need to have the perverse mechanics of childbirth explained to them.” Carl Zimmer goes one step further, and asks why the intelligent design crowd doesn’t embrace “one of the most successful, intricate examples of complexity in nature” - the cancer tumour.
Cancer cells grow at astonishing speeds, defying the many safeguards that are supposed to keep cells obedient to the needs of the body. And in order to grow so fast, they have to get lots of fuel, which they do by diverting blood vessels towards themselves and nurturing new vessels to sprout from old ones. They fight off a hostile immune system with all manner of camouflage and manipulation, and many cancer cells have strategies for fending off toxic chemotherapy drugs. When tumors get mature, they can send off colonizers to invade new tissues. These pioneers can release enzymes that dissolve collagen blocking their path; when they reach a new organ, they can secrete other proteins that let them anchor themselves to neighboring cells. While oncologists are a long way from fully understanding how cancer cells manage all this, it’s now clear that the answer can be found in their genes. Their genes differ from those of normal cells in many big and little ways, working together to produce a unique network of proteins exquisitely suited for the tumor’s success. All in all, it sounds like a splendid example of complexity produced by design. The chances that random natural processes could have altered all the genes required for a cell function as a cancer cell must be tiny—too tiny, some might argue, to be believed.
Interesting, but also a bit demoralizing, to see the bloggers of the Harvard Law Federalist Society on the side of Intelligent Design Theory. (See Cosma Shalizi and Brian Leiter for context.) Maybe it’s only a short hop from originalism about the Founding Fathers to creationism about God the Father. They’d probably describe themselves as being on the side of free speech and free thought rather than pseudo-science and sophistry, though their hysterical description of Leiter’s criticisms as “thuggish,” “vicious,” “naked threats” leads me to think that Harvard Law students are a lot more thin-skinned than they ought to be. My own view is that people who subscribe to Intelligent Design theory need to have the perverse mechanics of childbirth explained to them.
Update: For somewhat more in-depth and professional commentary on ID and evolution, check out the newly-formed Panda’s Thumb group blog.
People inclined to make sweeping judgments about the nature of the natural and social sciences based on a glancing acquaintance with the idea of falsification and a collection of popular books about quantum mechanics should read ‘Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass’. (Via Electrolite.)
While we're on the subject of anniversaries, I just got an invitation to a conference on the 300th anniversary of the death of John Locke (Southern Hemisphere readers can email j.jones@griffith.edu.au, there are also events at Yale and Oxford.
I was first introduced to Locke through his demolition of Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarchia in which the divine right of kings is derived from the supposed natural rights of fathers, beginning with Adam. Locke has great fun with this, pointing out that if Filmer is right, there is a single rightful monarch for the entire planet, namely the man most directly descended from Adam under the rules of primogeniture - by implication, all existing monarchs (except perhaps one) are usurpers who can justly be overthrown.
I was very disappointed then, to discover that Locke's own analysis of property rights was no better than Filmer's theory of divine right; in fact worse. Rights to property are supposed to be obtained by the first productive user and then passed on by inheritance and voluntary transfer. So, if we could locate the Garden of Eden, where Adam delved, his lineal descendent, if not king of the world, would be the rightful owner of Eden. To determine a rightful allocation of property, we would need to repeat the same exercise for every hectare on the planet. The Domesday Book wouldn't even get you started on this task.
That was thirty years ago or so, and science has advanced a lot since then, to the point where we can award victory to (a modified version of) Filmer. By careful analysis of DNA, we can now postulate a mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam from whom we are all descended (of course, there's no reason to suppose the two were contemporaneous). Suppose, following the practice of various hereditary monarchies, we identify the rightful heir of Y-chromosomal Adam as the man with the smallest number of accumulated mutations (defects from the point of view of a strongly hereditary principle). In principle, this man could be identified uniquely. In practice, I imagine it would be possible to identify the ethnic group to which this man belongs, probably somewhere in Africa, and crown some prominent member of that group. A feminist version, with descent on matriarchal lines, is equally reasonable and, on the current state of scientific knowledge, a litte more practical.
Of course, for those of us who don't buy patriarchal/matriarchal arguments in the first place, this isn't at all compelling. But I don't find Locke's theory of property any more compelling and, unlike Filmer, his theory is no closer to implementability than it was 300 years ago.
[Posted with ecto]
Has either Flack Central Station or Junkscience.com thought about commissioning a few articles from David Icke and friends? It sounds to me as though there might be a real meeting of minds (although they might have to get the Icke crowd to soft-pedal the shapeshifting reptilians from outer space angle).
Tim Lambert has a devastating critique of Steve Milloy, operator of the "junkscience.com" site attached to the Cato Institute, and model for many of the similar party-line science sites that have proliferated in the blogosphere. Most of these promote some combination of
As with John Lott and the American Enterprise Institute, the link between Cato and Milloy raises the question of how an institution that has some pretensions to respectability and employs some decent people can justify supporting such unethical and intellectually bankrupt charlatans.
An episode of Blackadder I just watched makes a point relevant to recent discussion on the plausibility of alternatives to the theory of evolution:
Blackadder [to Baldrick]: If I don’t come up with an idea soon, in the morning we’ll both go to meet our maker. In my case, God; in your case, God knows — but I doubt he’s won any design awards.
I just got the latest issue of Scientific American, and noted with interest the Table of Contents, in which the Skeptic column promised an evolutionary explanation of the mutiny on the Bounty. I vaguely expected the usual stuff about alpha and beta males or somesuch, but I found that the ev psych boffins have come up with a startling new discovery. Young men like having sex. At this point the mathematics and biochemistry get a bit complicated for me (oxytocin is in there somewhere), but apparently this has something to do with the survival of the species.
Even more startling, though, is the fact that
Although Bligh preceded Charles Darwin by nearly a century,he managed to anticipate this discovery. Who would have thought that a former governor of New South Wales (and not a successful one) would share with EO Wilson and Stephen Pinker the honour of founding evolutionary psychology? In Bligh's words
I can only conjecture that they have Idealy assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheitians than they could possibly have in England, which joined to some Female connections has most likely been the leading cause of the whole business.Delivery times are somewhat strange here in the Antipodes, and I thought perhaps I had an advance copy of the April edition, but the cover says February.
Via CNN.
The state’s school superintendent has proposed striking the word evolution from Georgia’s science curriculum and replacing it with the phrase “biological changes over time.”
From the details it looks like this is repeating the Kansan tragedy as farce, and since the proposal has bipartisan opposition this farce probably won’t go far. But don’t you just love a country where scientific theories that are accepted universally within the relevant scientific community are the subject of partisan disagreements? If this were happening in a tiny unimportant country it would be the stuff of late-night comedy. Instead, well it probably is a little tragic.
Michael Crichton has made millions by writing mass market thrillers that either regurgitate partially understood scientific factoids, or pander to the nasty little revenge fantasies of male white middle-managers. He’s not averse to spicing his novels up with a hefty pinch of racism (the ‘Fu Manchu’ in a three-piece suit Japan bashing in Rising Sun) or sexism (in the rather revolting Disclosure). All in all, it’s rather surprising that Caltech should have asked him to deliver a prestigious lecture. The content and tone of that lecture, however, aren’t surprising at all. The speech - which argues that global warming is pseudo-science - is as specious a bit of argumentation as I’ve seen in a while.
Crichton, through a rather extravagant series of logical contortions, argues that believing in global warming is equivalent to believing in extra-terrestrials. As best I can reconstruct his argument, it goes something like the following.
THEREFORE (cue applause, amazement, gasps of awe from the audience)
global warming is a pseudo-scientific religion
It’s hard to know where to start. Crichton makes a couple of reasonable (if hardly novel) points. He sees the Bjorn Lomborg affair as evidence that anyone who disagrees with the prevailing consensus is likely to be treated as a pariah (while notably failing to mention that Lomberg is convinced that global warming is real). He points to the desire of scientists for publicity and grants as a possible corrupting factor. Fair enough. But he then goes on to argue that science is inherently antithetical to consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.
Science is only science when it “has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.” The problem isn’t just that Crichton’s view of science is methodologically and epistemologically naive, and fails hopelessly to describe how science actually makes progress (for a corrective, read Imre Lakatos for starters). It’s that it’s naive in a politically loaded way. Which is another way of saying that it isn’t naive at all.
All of Crichton’s examples of pseudo-science are chosen so as to suggest that the problem with modern science is that it’s prone to lefty political prejudice. The implication is that global warming too is a fantasy, the product of more-or-less deliberately biased computer models. Crichton not only ignores the rather substantial cumulation of physical evidence that suggests that global warming is a real threat. He proposes a model of science under which most of the major theoretical advances of the last few centuries wouldn’t be counted as science. And he does so in pursuit of a dubious goal - to undermine a set of scientific results that he doesn’t like on policy grounds. More than anything else, his style of logic is reminiscent of the creationist quacks who set out to undermine evolution by arguing that it’s a ‘theory’ that hasn’t been ‘proved.’ Caltech can’t be held fully to blame for Crichton’s speech; universities rarely know in advance what their guest speakers are going to say. But it should be a lot more careful about whom it chooses to deliver major talks in the future.
I’ve been meaning to blog this ever since I read about it a few days ago on Marginal Revolution; it’s one of the neatest ideas that I’ve seen in a while. Given endemic shortages in the availability of some vaccines (viz. flu shots this year), how should one allocate shots so as to prevent the spread of the disease in the general population? Tyler Cowen points to an article by Reuven Cohen, Shlomo Havlin, and Daniel ben-Avraham that suggests how best to do this. It’s fairly well established that some individuals are a lot more likely to spread viruses than others; these ‘super spreaders’ are exceptionally gregarious people, who have a wide and varied circle of friends with whom they share time, conversation, and unpleasant infections. This means that virus diffusion can be modelled nicely using scale free networks with power law distributions of linkages. Some individuals are much more ‘connected’ than others, and these highly connected individuals are much more likely to be the vectors of contagion. If you can vaccinate these individuals, who are the ‘hubs’ of the network, you can do an awful lot to limit the spread of the disease. The problem is that it’s often hard to figure out who the hubs are. Cohen, Havlin and ben-Avraham have figured out a very clever way of doing this. You randomly sample the population, and ask each person who you sample to nominate one of their acquaintances. You then vaccinate not the initial person who has been sampled, but instead their acquaintance. Because ‘super spreaders’ are likely to know far more people than the average member of the population, they will be heavily over-represented among the ‘acquaintances’ - and thus will be far more likely to be vaccinated. According to Cohen, Havlin and ben-Avraham’s model, you may be able completely to halt the spread of the disease by sampling some 20% of the population, and then vaccinating their acquaintances. This is very clever indeed - insights into the topology of social networks can be used to stop the spread of viruses. It goes to show that the study of power-law distributions may have more uses than securing your bragging rights in the blogosphere.
The Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation invites you to apply for their latest round of grants. Once you have satisfied the 27-point checklist for the application, you must send “one (1) original and ten copies (10) for review by Friday, January 30, 2004.” Do not keep calling to ask whether your application has been received.
I’m sorry. I’ll have to make a donation to them now or something.
Kevin Drum updates the score in the ongoing debate between Mann, Bradley and Hughes (climate scientists) and McIntyre and McKitrick (a couple of economists). The latter claim to have re-analyzed data from a famous paper of the former’s on global warming and found numerous errors that, when corrected, make the results go away. The climatologists have responded vigorously, saying that their critics have botched the job. Both sides are preparing further responses at the moment, so the issue is on hold.
That, however, hasn’t stopped Iain Murray from writing a quite inflammatory article in the NRO about all of this. The article tries to stamp the whole issue with his preferred spin:
The whole affair bears strong resemblance to the recent Bellesiles controversy. Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles won a Bancroft Prize for his argument that gun ownership in early America was not widespread. It took an amateur historian, Clayton Cramer, to point out that this claim could not be substantiated on the basis of actual gun-ownership records. Eventually, an Emory University investigation strongly criticized Bellesiles, and the Bancroft Prize was withdrawn.
Given what we know about the present case, this is an indefensible comparison.
The work of a number of researchers showed beyond reasonable doubt that Bellesiles had fabricated his data. Murray is saying the same thing is happening here, as hardy amateurs show the professional scientists up as frauds. But nothing of the sort is even on the cards. At the absolute worst, a dataset has been incorrectly analyzed and a finding will need to be withdrawn. (It’s too early to say whether that’s what’s going to happen: probably not, if you ask me, but you never know.) There’s no suggestion from the accusers that data have been fabricated or that other researchers have been deliberately misled. Mann et al made their data available to McIntyre and McKitrick for reanalysis in the first place! This makes the comparison to Bellesiles absurd, even defamatory. Murray almost explains why the comparison is obtuse himself, saying “So far, it looks like the errors in Mann’s data set were accidental,” though he can’t resist putting in that “So far.” You can see what he really wants to have happen.
Well, he should have kept it to himself until he was sure about it. Murray’s desire to see conventional wisdom about climate change proved wrong has led him to excitably jump to conclusions before. He may now be having reservations about knocking out his column so quickly, as he published it before Mann et al released a rebuttal of the charges, which contains a robust defence of their paper. A longer response is forthcoming from them. “The issue is getting very technical at present,” Murray now says, linking to a calmly-worded piece asking that people not “jump to any conclusions” before all the details from both sides are available. Sounds sensible to me. It’s why you shouldn’t be slinging around accusations of the most serious kind of academic fraud, I’d have thought.
On the one hand, Bruce Sterling waxes lyrical about the weirdness of dark matter in WIRED this month. On the other, Jacques Distler links to the rather more skeptical (and funnier) Dark Matter Flowchart. We blog; you decide.
Kevin Drum is keeping score in an argument about data on global warming. “M&M” (don’t ask me, I’m only reporting this) re-analyzed data for a famous graph and claimed to find serious errors. Now, Kevin says
Somebody — it’s not entirely clear who — exported the original raw data to Excel but somehow exported 159 columns of data into a 112-column spreadsheet. M&M failed to compare the spreadsheet to the original data and thus produced a “correction” that was riddled with errors.
Here’s something you can try at home: Walk up to a statistician, shake their hand and say “When I reanalyzed your data using Microsoft Excel, I found numerous errors.” Stand well back. Wait.
It’s all the worse, really, given that one of the best pieces of software for statistical computing is available for free. In fairness to these guys, though (and in response to a comment below from Kevin), I should say that data management is an often error-prone business that I’ve been bitten by myself. It’d be tough on them if an otherwise well-conducted reanalysis got tripped up because they used an incorrect version of the dataset.
Via the very interesting blog of Dr Anthony Cox , I see that Gerd Gigerenzer has a paper on risk in the British Medical Journal. Doctors, it seems, are alarmingly ignorant about statistics:
The science fiction writer H G Wells predicted that in modern technological societies statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write. How far have we got, a hundred or so years later? A glance at the literature shows a shocking lack of statistical understanding of the outcomes of modern technologies, from standard screening tests for HIV infection to DNA evidence. For instance, doctors with an average of 14 years of professional experience were asked to imagine using the Haemoccult test to screen for colorectal cancer. The prevalence of cancer was 0.3%, the sensitivity of the test was 50%, and the false positive rate was 3%. The doctors were asked: what is the probability that someone who tests positive actually has colorectal cancer? The correct answer is about 5%. However, the doctors’ answers ranged from 1% to 99%, with about half of them estimating the probability as 50% (the sensitivity) or 47% (sensitivity minus false positive rate). If patients knew about this degree of variability and statistical innumeracy they would be justly alarmed.
There’s been much blogospherical and press comment about the recent report that capuchin monkeys have a built-in sense of fairness. In case anyone missed the story here’s Adam Cohen’s summary in the New York Times :
Give a capuchin monkey a cucumber slice, and she will eagerly trade a small pebble for it. But when a second monkey, in an adjoining cage, receives a more-desirable grape for the same pebble, it changes everything. The first monkey will then reject her cucumber, and sometimes throw it out of the cage. Monkeys rarely refuse food, but in this case they appear to be pursuing an even higher value than eating: fairness.
The capuchin monkey study, published last week in Nature, has generated a lot of interest for a scant three-page report buried in the journal’s letters section. There is, certainly, a risk of reading too much into the feeding habits of 10 research monkeys. But in a week when fairness was so evidently on the ropes — from the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancún, which poor nations walked out of in frustration, to the latest issue of Forbes, reporting that the richest 400 Americans are worth $955 billion — the capuchin monkeys offered a glimmer of hope from the primate gene pool.
Interesting, suggesting at least that monkeys on the receiving end of unfairness will would prefer to have nothing than be part of an unjust arrangement. It is a result that is consonant with lots of behavioural experiments involving humans, who will often walk away from a deal rather than maximizing their return. (See lots of places, but Skyrms’s Evolution of the Social Contract has some discussion.) But as Radley Balko points out , we’re a bit short of a true commitment to fairness here. If the monkeys were really into fairness, wouldn’t the one offered the grape spurn it rather than be party to such inequity?
Which brings me in touch with some of Henry’s Hobbesian speculations below, or at least to the subject of weapons. The poor monkey at the sharp end of unfairness in the wild is probably too weak to do much about it except feel grouchy and depressed. Not so, the human hunter gatherer, who, if he (and I’m afraid it is just he at this stage) feels aggrieved, can use language to form coalitions and spears to get his own back. Which provides a pretty good incentive to those with meat or other resources to share (or else). At least that’s the speculation contained in Christopher Boehm’s marvellous Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, which I’ve blogged about before. Principles of justice emerge as the weak use their language skills and weapons to conspire against the strong - a very Nietzschean thought.
It is an odd business, though, how so many people look to primates and hunter gatherers for a vindication of morality: that NYT piece even had the headline “What the Monkeys Can Teach Humans About Making America Fairer.” (Ernest Gellner has a funny, though otherwise misguided chapter lampooning such justificatory attempts in his Plough, Sword, and Book, entitled “Which way will the Stone Age vote swing?”) For whatever our ancestors or evolutionary relatives did or do, their behaviour can’t provide any kind of justification for principles. Still, I suppose there’s comfort to be had in the thought that we might be hard-wired to react against injustice. That fact — if it is a fact — may not justify principles of justice but it does give those of us who believe in them a tiny grain of confidence in the unjust getting their comeuppance … eventually.
The Age is running a story today headed Asteroid Heads for Earth. Which sounds fairly scary I guess. The article then says that the best estimate is that it has a 1 in 909,000 chance of hitting the earth. I guess Asteroid might be heading for earth, like you might win the lottery this week was too long to fit above the story.
A trawl around the blogosphere finds Lance Knobel in agreement with a piece by Will Hutton in the Observer on the MMR vaccine and media reporting of science. Hutton’s main point is that although most (British) doctors believe the vaccine is safe and that there is no link to autism, the media report the debate to give a completely different impression.
The dissident, so-called whistleblower, however dodgy the research on which his or her ‘evidence’ is based, is afforded massive attention; it is taken as axiomatic that the mainstream, evidence-based government-endorsed view will be self-serving and wrong. More than half of us believe the medical profession is divided over the health risks of MMR; in fact, it is more or less united that there is no risk.
As Hutton remarks, the rate of vaccination for measles in the UK is now so low in some areas that the risks of an epidemic are real. Those parents who listened to the alarmists and end up with a dead or permanently brain damaged child as a result of scaremongering will have cause both to regret their actions and to resent those who represented fringe dissidence as on a par with mainstream opinion.
Hutton continues:
The Royal Society has become increasingly concerned; the scientific community feels beleaguered. It proposes a register of journalists known to treat scientific research fairly, along with ready access to media advice. Scientists have come to dread rather than celebrate interest from the media because they know the mission is to sensationalise or, in some way, draw blood and so score a wider political point. The media respond that the Royal Society wants censorship; to write sympathetically about its concerns is to court being dubbed an establishment lackey.
There’s certainly no danger of such “censorship” in the sister paper of Hutton’s Observer, the Guardian, which today publishes an attack on the Royal Society by one Andy Rowell (provenance unknown), with the subtitle “The Royal Society must not be allowed to stifle the GM debate”. Among the real gems of Rowell’s piece is the following thought: “The scientific establishment’s obsession with the ‘peer review’ means important science that raises risks of GM technology is side-lined.” The rest of the article consists of dubious and unsupported claims that critics of GM have been harrassed and persecuted, including the hapless Arpad Pusztai, who has been thoroughly discredited.
Perhaps Hutton should have a word with his colleagues.
Glenn Reynolds outs himself as a Transhumanist - why am I not surprised?
Would I like to be smarter? Yes, and I’d be willing to do it via a chip in my brain, or a direct computer interface. (Actually, that’s already prefigured a bit in ordinary life, too, as things like Google and wi-fi give us access to a degree of knowledge that would have seemed almost spooky not long ago, but that everyone takes for granted now). And I’d certainly like to be immune to cancer, or AIDS, or aging.
Fair enough if that’s what turns him on. What’s a little less impressive is his dismissal of skeptics as cheerleaders for AIDS, irritable bowel movement, and everyday stupidity. Contra Reynolds, there are serious, principled reasons why you might want to disagree with transhumanism. And this argument has been going on for a long, long time.
As usual, Max Weber has interesting things to say on the subject. Which is why I propose to treat you to a big, quasi-digestible chunk of Science as a Vocation.
Now, this process of disenchantment, which has continued to exist in Occidental culture for millennia, and, in general, this ‘progress,’ to which science belongs as a link and motive force, do they have any meanings that go beyond the purely practical and technical? You will find this question raised in the most principled form in the works of Leo Tolstoi. He came to raise the question in a peculiar way. All his broodings increasingly revolved around the problem of whether or not death is a meaningful phenomenon. And his answer was: for civilized man death has no meaning. It has none because the individual life of civilized man, placed into an infinite ‘progress,’ according to its own imminent meaning should never come to an end; for there is always a further step ahead of one who stands in the march of progress. And no man who comes to die stands upon the peak which lies in infinity. Abraham, or some peasant of the past, died ‘old and satiated with life’ because he stood in the organic cycle of life; because his life, in terms of its meaning and on the eve of his days, had given to him what life had to offer; because for him there remained no puzzles he might wish to solve; and therefore he could have had ‘enough’ of life. Whereas civilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become ‘tired of life’ but not ‘satiated with life.’ He catches only the most minute part of what the life of the spirit brings forth ever anew, and what he seizes is always something provisional and not definitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence. And because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless; by its very ‘progressiveness’ it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness. Throughout his late novels one meets with this thought as the keynote of the Tolstoyan art.
Now this is very ponderous and Germanic, but I think that Weber is onto something. What he’s saying, I think, is that Tolstoy, and people like him, ask some interesting and important questions, which ‘progress’-obsessed types don’t. They may not have the right answers to those questions, but that’s beside the point. They’re interested in whether life is meaningful, not whether it can be infinitely extended. And meaning, for Tolstoy, requires some reference point other than the internal desires of the individual.
Which maybe allows me to articulate a little better what I find creepy about transhumanism than I could last week. It isn’t the prospect of brain-machine interfaces, Singularities, telomere hacks and the like, few of which are likely to be with us anytime soon, if at all. It’s the underlying philosophy behind this geek aesthetic - the idea of the self as a sort of infinitely extensible meccano-set, where you can plug in new bits and pieces all the time, just because it’s cool. And, in the best of all possible worlds, keep on doing this forever. Myself, I’d rather be dead.
Chris writes a couple of days ago about his sense of discomfort at
an attitude that sees the non-human world as merely an instrument for or an obstacle to the realization of human designs and intentions.
I’ve been interested for a while in a small group of people who take that attitude one step further. “Transhumanists” and “extropians” are extreme techno-libertarians who argue that human nature is an obstacle to the realization of human designs and intentions.
In their own words
Transhumanism is an extension of humanism, the philosophy of emphasizing human ability and intelligence as the main shaper of our personal reality and the realities of others. Transhumanism, like humanism, rejects superstition and religion in favor of empiricism and reason. However, transhumanism goes one step further than humanism and argues that to obtain true freedom, human beings deserve the opportunity to become more than human through the use of science and technology, in order to improve our mental, emotional, and physical capacities.
Transhumanists would like to escape human beings’ ‘natural’ limitations through various technological tricks: cryonic preservation, genetic engineering for immortality, human-machine interfaces, personality re-engineering, the uploading of personalities to computers. They’re fascinated with Vernor Vinge’s idea of the Singularity - a posited event in the near future in which humans either invent or become super-intelligences, and all the rules change (Charlie Stross accurately describes this as “the Rapture for nerds”). In short, they want to escape the human condition for something else.
All of these ideas makes for some good science fiction, but the aspirations behind them make my skin creep; they bring out the conservative in me. There’s something deeply unpleasant - and scary - about the assumption that human nature is an engineering problem. Not only does it hark back to some of the nastier elements of 1930’s socialist theory, as Chris has already pointed out (although those guys preferred eugenics), but it seems fundamentally ungrounded in any sense of what human beings are, and what that says about what they should be. And I don’t think that you need to make strong claims about natural law, or an Aristotelian telos for human beings to be concerned.
This said, these are real questions, even if the big predictions of Singularities and the like turn out to be utterly bogus. We already face some of them today. For example, drugs like Prozac allow a sort of primitive psychoengineering. I’m only vaguely familiar with bioethics, but this seems to me to be a rather tricky set of questions. How do we decide which ‘enhancements’ to human capacities are praiseworthy, and which beyond the pale? I’ve no idea: over to you.
I posted a pointed to to a moderately pro-GM report the other day. But in the comments section I got pretty revolted by the suggestion that one day we might synthesize all our food. As I said there, I want my potatoes from the earth and my apples from a tree. I don’t think there’s anything especially “green” about feeling this and I’m somewhat embarassed, as someone who is supposed to live by good arguments, by how hard I find it to get beyond the raw data of feeling, intuition and emotion when I try to think about what is of value.
The best I can do, is, I think to notice how much of that is of value in human life has to do with an engagement with the natural world and a recognition of the uniqueness and (sorry about this word) the ‘otherness’ of the world beyond the human. I’m not just thinking about raw untamed nature here (Lear on the heath) but also about the way in which an artist has to work with the natural properties of pigments, a gardener has to work with plants and their distinctive characteristics, and a cook has to work with ingredients. Architects too have to work with materials, with stone, wood and so on.
Contrast this with an attitude that sees the non-human world as merely an instrument for or an obstacle to the realization of human designs and intentions. On this view what is out there has no intrinsic value that we ought to respond to and respect. (And perhaps when we think that it does, we are just engaged in a projection of our concerns onto the world.)
As I’ve suggested, I’m not really sure how to think in this area (is this ethics, aesthetics or what?). And I’m alive to the danger that I’m running together a whole range of different issues that ought, properly, to be distinguished from one another. While worrying about all this, Orwell came into my head. I’m thinking partly of the Orwell of The Road to Wigan Pier who is revolted at technology-freak socialists of his day and who observes that the tendency of of modern development is to turn us all into brains on the end of wires. But a famous passage from Coming Up for Air also came to mind: the one where Bowling bites into a sausage:
The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly—pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was FISH! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.Outside the newsboy shoved the Standard into my face and yelled, ‘Legs! ‘Orrible revelations! All the winners! Legs! Legs!’ I was still rolling the stuff round my tongue, wondering where I could spit it out. I remembered a bit I’d read in the paper somewhere about these food-factories in Germany where everything’s made out of something else. Ersatz, they call it. I remembered reading that THEY were making sausages out of fish, and fish, no doubt, out of something different. It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of. That’s the way we’re going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruit-trees. But when you come down to brass tacks and get your teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that’s what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth.
The attitudes Orwell’s character is repelled by are now found less on the left and more in parts of the right (especially the libertarian right). TechCentralStation is a good place to observe them. But this clearly isn’t a left-right thing. Nor is it straightforwardly a matter of modernism versus anti-modernism. I also want to be alive to and to respond to the excitement and fluidity of the modern world - driven, in parts by markets and technological developement. Nevertheless, Orwell (together here with Rousseau, and Wordsworth, and …) is onto something important, I just wish I could better articulate exactly what it is.
Today’s Guardian has a profile of biologist David Sloan Wilson, whose book Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (with philosopher Elliott Sober) defended group selection against Dawkins’s “selfish gene” model. His latest book, Darwin’s Cathedral, is about religion. Functional explanations of the religion do not have a history of success (c.f. E. Durkheim), but Unto Others was impressive enough for this one to be worth a look.
One of the nicer things about trying to keep up a list of blogging academics, is that I’ve come across a whole bunch of blogging scientists. I’m a science junky, and love to read practitioners talk about how it’s done. Perhaps this is just discipline envy - we “political scientists” are often rather touchy about whether we’re actually scientists or not - but it probably has a lot more to do with my having read way too much science fiction over the last twenty years. Whatever. Anyway, to point you to a few particularly good science posts that I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks.
Chad Orzel, here and here on the discovery of a new type of subatomic particle. While you’re at it, check out his index of physics posts.
Amity Wilczek on how dung beetles navigate. This is a great blog on all manner of strange behavior in the animal kingdom.
Cosma Shalizi on dumb research on mating behavior.
John G. Cramer who has an incredible list of essays on cosmology, the physics of warpdrives &c &c (OK: he’s not a blogger, but his daughter is).
And (not a scientist, but debunking bad science nonetheless), Belle Waring on ad hominid arguments.
The UK’s GM Science Review Panel has published its first report. Like many people, I’ve found it difficult to make my mind up on this issue in the face of conflicting reports, biased commentary, lobbying by vested interests and so on. There’s good reason to believe that this panel has done (and is doing) a good job. They’ve rejected most of the crazier scare stories about GM technology and food, but they’ve identified one real area of worry: the effect on wildlife diversity of extensive use of herbicide tolerant GM crops. If all the weeds are gone, the animals which depend on them for food will have a hard time. Generally, this is a biotech-friendly report, but one which is sufficiently sceptical and critical to displease the real pro-GM enthusiasts. (For full disclosure, I should say that one of the panel members is known to me, and that fact has enhanced my confidence in the process.)
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