I read the other day that a recent Gallup poll found that about 83 percent of Americans felt interracial dating was OK, and I believe this was a new high-water mark for this view. There was a degree of understandable concern about the remaining 17 percent, but (some people said) it’s only been forty years since _Loving vs Virginia_. And, as it turns out, it could be worse. The idea that the Earth orbits the Sun has had rather longer to catch on, but my colleague Omar Lizardo over at OrgTheory brings us new data from this year’s General Social Survey on the popularity of _that_ idea. It turns out that almost three quarters of Americans now subscribe to the Galilean view. Click through to Omar’s post for data on the percentage of Heliocentric-Positive Americans who think the Earth takes a year to orbit the sun, as opposed to a day, a month, or some other time period.
From the category archives:
Science
Steven Pinker reviewing Natalie Angier’s _The Canon_:
bq. Though we live in an era of stunning scientific understanding, all too often the average educated person will have none of it. People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics.
C.P. Snow, 1959:
bq. A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?-not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
John Holbo’s naming of the two-step of terrific triviality reminded me that this manoeuvre is one of the basic steps in the nature-nurture dance. I looked at
Steven Pinker’s agile performance
a while back.
Anyway, this reminds me of a vaguely related point I’ve been meaning to make for a while. Debate over the relative influence of environment and heredity on intelligence has been going on for at least a century without much change or resolution, or any obvious reduction in the level of vitriol. The only significant new information in the last few decades has been the discovery that average IQ scores have risen substantially over time (the so-called Flynn effect). There has been vigorous debate over whether this effect is real or spurious.
On the other hand, no-one seems particularly exercised about the relative effects of nature and nurture on height, even though the observed patterns seem to be much the same: a fairly high correlation between parents and children, significant class effects, a correlation with wages and a surprisingly strong increasing trend over time.
And much the same things can be said about health, except that the parent-child correlation is specific to particular conditions.
Height, health status and measured intelligence are all positively correlated so it seems as if we should be looking for the same kind of explanation in all cases. This will be left as an exercise for readers (that is, I haven’t got around to working on it myself).
Update The comments do a good job of making my point. There’s plenty of vitriol on the subject of intelligence, but not much new. On the other hand, there’s some interesting, and reasonably civilised, discussion of genetic and environmental determinants of height.
UK viewers were treated the other night to a superficially impressive global-warming denialist documentary: “The Great Global Warming Swindle”:http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/G/great_global_warming_swindle/index.html . The programme was the work of “Martin Durkin”:http://tinyurl.com/38n6np who has previous form for dodgy science documentaries. “Medialens”:http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/0313pure_propaganda_the.php has a reasonably comprehensive account of the film’s reception and also gives an idea of the contents. See also “George Monbiot”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2032575,00.html in the Guardian and “Steve Connor”:http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2355956.ece in the Independent. Central to the film was the testimony of the MIT oceanographer Carl Wunsch. Wunsch’s own account of how his material was edited and presented so as to give a misleading account of his actual views is “here”:http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2359057.ece .
Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science has joined forces with Alan Sokal, scourge of leftwing relativism and pseudoscience, in an LA Times op-ed piece on the current state of the Science Wars.
As Mooney and Sokal note, the decline of antiscience views on the left
frees up defenders of science to combat the enemy on our other flank: an unholy (and uneasy) alliance of economically driven attacks on science (on issues such as global climate change, mercury pollution and what constitutes a good diet) and theologically impelled ones (in areas such as evolution, reproductive health and embryonic stem cell research).
I’ve just finished reading Philip Kitcher’s new book Living With Darwin
An important aspect of scientific research is that others should be able to reproduce the work. This is significant partly, because it serves as a check on the system, but also, because it allows others to build on previous achievements. Replication is not trivial to achieve, however, given that studies often rely on complex methodologies. There is rarely enough room in journal articles or books to devote sufficiently detailed descriptions of how data were collected and procedures administered. Moreover, even with adequate space for text, many actions are hard to explain without visuals.
This is where recently launched JoVE comes to the rescue. The Journal of Visual Experiments publishes short videos of procedures used in biology labs. Former Princeton graduate student Moshe Pritsker created the peer-reviewed online journal with Nikita Bernstein. The inspiration came back in his graduate school days when he had often been frustrated in the lab while trying to conduct experiments based on others’ descriptions of the necessary methods. The goal of the journal is to assist others with such tasks. The publication has an editorial board and submissions are reviewed before a decision is made about publication.
What a great use of the Web for dissemination of material that would otherwise be difficult to get to relevant parties.
[Thanks to Mark Brady for pointing me to the Nature article – that is now behind subscription wall – about JoVE. That piece served as the source for some of the above.]
Via “Jeremy Freese”:http://jeremyfreese.blogspot.com/2006/11/why-get-help-when-you-can-help-science.html, a poster for a Mass General Hospital study. As Jeremy says,
Do you have not one, but two separate problems that are associated with making bad decisions? If so, why don’t you choose to have a 50% chance of forgoing treatment for both for three months, in exchange for _$600_?… Don’t worry: you can rest assured you’ll be in the most capable, professional hands — just look at the quality of our graphic design! Yes, that’s a picture of a human brain we got off the web, with a martini glass superimposed on top of it. And, see, there’s a photo of an anguished woman, just below a photo of a cartoon man so excited he’s raising his arms with glee.
This reminds me of one of my favorite books, encountered during research for Last Best Gifts: Ed Brassard’s Body For Sale: An Inside Look At Medical Research, Drug Testing, And Organ Transplants And How You Can Profit From Them. This is a how-to guide for selling the renewable and non-renewable bits of yourself and also for getting accepted into paying clinical trials of all kinds.
Of two books on similar topics with similar publication dates, one is ranked #116 on Amazon (as of this writing, yesterday it was #350), the other is at #1,036,339 (as of this writing).* The former has an official publication date of October 17, 2006 (exactly a week ago) and has zero reviews on Amazon (as of this writing). The latter has an official publication date of July 27, 2006 and also has zero reviews on Amazon. Given zero reader reviews in both cases and the recent publication of the former manuscript, it would be hard to argue that it is its superior quality that has catapulted it to the top of Amazon’s popularity index. So what else differs?
Kati Marton’s book on The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World
Kati Marton is a journalist formerly married to the late ABC anchor Peter Jennings, currently married to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Her book has blurbs from the likes of Tom Brokaw and has gotten coverage on ABC’s Web site among many other venues. István Hargittai is a scientist in Budapest married to Magdolna Hargittai another scientist, both members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His book doesn’t have blurbs from the likes of Tom Brokaw (it only does from two scientists, true, both are Nobel laureates) and has not gotten coverage in any major outlets.
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration has blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the journal Nature reported Tuesday.
…The report drew a prompt response from Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg D-N.J., who charged that “the administration has effectively declared war on science and truth to advance its anti-environment agenda … the Bush administration continues to censor scientists who have documented the current impacts of global warming.”
via C&L
Hey, someone should write a book about this sort of thing. Maybe give away a companion to the book for good measure. (Admittedly, this report may be premature – the report about the report, that is. The actual Nature article title ends with a question mark, “Is the US hurricane report being quashed?”)
I didn’t mention this in my previous post: Mooney’s book
The war on science driven by a combination of Republican* ideology and corporate cash has been ably documented by Chris Mooney (see the Crooked Timber seminar here). Now, finally, science is striking back at one of the worst corporate enemies of science, ExxonMobil. As evidence of human-caused global warming has accumulated, leading energy companies like BP have seen the need to respond, with the result that industry groups like the Global Climate Coalition have broken down, leaving ExxonMobil to carry on a rearguard action through a network of shills and front groups. Now the company is finally being exposed by a major scientific organisation.
In an apparently unprecedented move, the British Royal Society has written to Exxon, stating that of the organization listed in Exxon’s 2005 WorldWide Giving Report for ‘public information and policy research‘, 39 feature
information on their websites that misrepresented the science on climate change, either by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change, or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge, or by conveying misleading impression of the potential impacts of climate change
(full copy of the letter here)
No time to comment at length, but I had to post about this since it is a big deal. It shouldn’t have been such a big deal, but it became one and so it’s worth a note: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has finally approved over-the-counter access to Plan B (“morning after pill”, emergency contraception) for women 18 and over. More here.
Planned Parenthood is quick to point out that it’s still a problem that those under 18 continue to require a prescription:
While we are glad to know the FDA finally ended its foot-dragging on this issue, Planned Parenthood is troubled by the scientifically baseless restriction imposed on teenagers. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the western world — anything that makes it harder for teenagers to avoid unintended pregnancy is bad medicine and bad public policy.
They’re right. But let’s take a moment to be excited about the progress that’s been made anyway. There are a lot of people who worked on this for years and to them a huge THANK YOU. Again, no time to comment at length, but I wanted to post a brief note to mark the occasion.
This post from the Freakonomics blog on why beautiful women sometimes marry unattractive men seems somewhat incomprehensible to me. Maybe you all can help:
…a new study by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, suggests it may be a simple supply-and-demand issue: there are more beautiful women in the world than there are handsome men.
Why? Kanazawa argues it’s because good-looking parents are 36% more likely to have a baby daughter as their first child than a baby son—which suggests, evolutionarily speaking, that beauty is a trait more valuable for women than for men. The study was conducted with data from 3,000 Americans, derived from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and was published in The Journal of Theoretical Biology.
According to this news article, “Selection pressure means when parents have traits they can pass on that are better for boys than for girls, they are more likely to have boys. Such traits include large size, strength and aggression, which might help a man compete for mates. On the other hand, parents with heritable traits that are more advantageous to girls are more likely to have daughters.”
A couple of “chancers”:http://www.steorn.net/en/downloads.aspx?p=6 in Dublin calling themselves “Steorn”:http://www.steorn.net/ claim to have developed “a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy” — in other words, they say they have a perpetual motion machine. As they “helpfully point out”:http://www.steorn.net/en/technology.aspx?p=5, this “appears to violate the ‘Principle of the Conservation of Energy’, considered by many to be the most fundamental principle in our current understanding of the universe.” On the other hand, Steorn’s actions thus far confirm some more sociological principles, including the first of the “seven warning signs of bogus science”:http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i21/21b02001.htm, viz, “The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.” Steorn have published a “challenge” in the Economist seeking a “jury of twelve qualified experimental physicists.”
All of this – and the media attention these guys are getting – makes me feel bad for some friends of mine at “Science Foundation Ireland”:http://www.sfi.ie/, who have worked very hard to build up Ireland’s scientific research infrastructure over the past few years. It also reminds me of a joke. Pádraig is walking along the beach when he finds a battered oil lamp. He rubs it an a genie appears, offering to grant him three wishes. “I’d like a bottle of Guinness that never runs out!” says Pat. The genie claps his hands and a bottle appears. Pat tips it upside-down and for a few minutes watches in delight as the stout pours endlessly from the bottle onto the beach. “That’s fantastic!” he says. “I’ll have two more of these, please.”
Sean Carroll has a “post”:http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/08/21/dark-matter-exists/ at _Cosmic Variance_ on some fascinating cosmological observations which seem (Sean’s take is obviously rather more authoritative than mine) to demonstrate the existence of dark matter as comprehensively as one could reasonably hope for.