Science

Wired Magazine has a fascinating story about buprenorphine, a heroin detox drug that offers significant promise for recovering addicts. Unlike methadone, buprenorphine (or “bupe”) doesn’t produce a high or low, and it’s almost impossible to abuse it. As a result, it can be dispersed in large quantities. (Methadone clinics generally only deliver one dose per day, which must be consumed on the spot.) Recovering addicts using bupe don’t have to deal with the sedative quality of methadone, and don’t have to schedule a visit to a clinic every day. Unlike methadone, it doesn’t show up on a urine drug test. All of these factors should significantly ease the reintegration of ex-addicts into the work world.

Despite the improved technology, bupe hasn’t been much of a success. Regulation has been bungled, and the relevant parties simply don’t have the incentives to promote a new, improved treatment. Methadone clinics are afraid that they’d lose money if methadone users got on bupe. GPs are afraid of bringing a new population of ex-addicts into their offices. A set of idiotic regulations prevents clinics from dispersing more than a pill a day, and bans even giant health care providers from taking more than 30 cases. The patent holder isn’t a pharma company, and doesn’t have the interest or expertise to promote the new drug. In fact, the protagonists of the article are a pair of treatment specialists who are promoting the drug freelance.

Well worth reading.

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.

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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:

bq. 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:

bq. 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?

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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 :

bq. 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.

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Via Butterflies & Wheels I came across the following ludicrous and offensive argument against gay marriage from Keith Burgess-Jackson, the self-styled AnalPhilosopher :

bq. 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:

bq. 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:

bq. 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]

fn1. One of the names we canvassed for this blog before we launched was “The Grumbling Hive”, I’m glad I lost that argument.

fn2. 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:

bq. 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.