It had to be the Higgs boson, what else could I write about?
The recent discovery of persuasive evidence of the existence of this mysterious sub-atomic particle is one of the biggest discoveries in physics in recent decades. It really is a big one. Strangely it doesn’t actually introduce anything new to our knowledge of the universe but it does confirm our current understanding of how things work. For now.
This current understanding is usually called “The Standard Model”. This describes the different types of sub-atomic particles that comprise everything that we can see and sense. It describes particles such as electrons, the quarks that make up protons and neutrons, photons and a range of bizarre things that collectively comprise matter and it’s non-identical twin, anti-matter.
One mystery that the Standard Model couldn’t fully explain was mass, the amount of physical “stuff” that each particle comprised. Some had lots of it, some just a little, others none at all.
In 1964 Peter Higgs, a physicist at Edinburgh University, predicted the existence of an energy field throughout the universe that would explain why things had mass.
Higgs suggested that certain particles have mass only because they interact with this field, now called the Higgs Field, as they pass through it. The more particles interact with the field, the more they develop mass. Those that interact travel slowly as a result, those that don’t continue travelling at full speed, the speed of light. Photons, the particles that make up light, whizz around at blinding speeds, the particles that make up you and me lumber around like elephants in custard.
But all of this has been theoretical until recently. Two competing laboratories, Fermilab in the USA and CERN who host the Large Hadron Collider in Europe have been doing their best to discover evidence of Higgs’ prediction using a technique that doesn’t sound that advanced. Each has constructed massive particle accelerators that shoot atomic particles at each other at speeds very close to the speed of light and see what happens. You could argue it’s a bit like trying to work out how a cellphone works by repeatedly hitting it with a hammer but it is actually more thoughtful than that.
CERN, having a bigger and more powerful accelerator were the ones most likely to make any discovery and that’s what appears to have happened. Last week they announced that they had found convincing evidence amongst all those particles smashing around of something that really looked like a Higgs boson, one of the particles that makes up the Higgs field. Like all decent scientists they’re treading cautiously, they’re not actually saying they caught the real thing yet, they’re just saying that they saw something that was “consistent with” a Higgs boson. Like proper scientists they had done the maths properly. The chances of what they saw not being a genuine particle was at the “5-sigma” level of certainty, 5 standard deviations away from the mean, in other words there’s only a 1 in 3.5 million chance that this isn’t genuine. As the Director General of CERN said: "As a layman I would now say I think we have it."
There is one major misunderstanding that many people have experienced about the Higgs boson. For some unaccountable reason, much of the media decided to refer to it as the “God particle”, a reference to a popular science book published twenty years ago. The particle of course has nothing to do with God, religion or anything “spiritual”. Higgs himself has rejected the term, not because he is religious, in fact he’s an atheist, but because he doesn’t want his theory to offend people who have religious sensibilities.
So where do things stand, now that we’re confident the Higgs field exists?
The Standard Model is still with us, but there’s still a lot of things we don’t know. Perhaps the most mysterious is the existence of “dark matter”, the matter that our understanding of physics says is out there but we just can’t see. About 95% of the universe is invisible.
Unfortunately, covered up by the almost hysterical reaction to the Higgs’ discovery was another, much quieter science news story, one that’s perhaps just as important. A paper published in Nature announced the first observations of wispy filaments of dark matter between galaxies connecting the much larger clumps of dark matter whose enormous mass give the universe it’s gravitational structure. While the word “filament” might imply that these things are small and insignificant in fact they’re massive. The filament identified is estimated to be a billion trillion kilometers long and has a mass a hundred trillion times greater than our sun. So not exactly small.
The wonderful thing is that in the same week scientists have discovered something unimaginably small and something else unimaginably massive, both of which were predicted but not yet spotted. Both perfect examples of the scientific method. Create a theory that explains things, make predictions from it, identify how it can be tested and then sit back and wait.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Sunday, July 08, 2012
Weekend Post - Wishful thinking
You can’t make things happen just by wishing for them. No, you really can’t.
Despite what New Age mystical thinkers like the authors of The Secret will tell you, positive thinking is utterly useless. If you make the mistake of buying a copy of The Secret, you’ll learn that their nonsensical “Law of Attraction” suggests that positive thinking will magically lead to positive results. In the same way, thinking sad thoughts will lead to sad things happening, anger will beget anger and homicidal thoughts will transform you into a combi driver.
For a moment let’s ignore the fact that this is nonsense. Does this really mean that Jews got themselves Holocausted because they weren’t thinking positively enough? Did slaves get kidnapped and murdered because they weren’t looking on the bright side of life? Do murder victims deserve it? That’s what The Secret implies.
It IS nonsense of course, there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that wishful thinking works. In fact there’s evidence that it doesn’t. It’s not exactly the same thing, but there HAS actually been some experimentation into one form of magical thinking: prayer.
Does praying for sick people actually help them? Millions of people are told by their religious leaders every week to pray for the sick and unfortunate so it must work, mustn’t it?
No. It doesn’t. While there have been experiments showing some benefit, so far all of them have been discredited. One of them was even undertaken by a mixture of researchers who didn’t actually exist, others whose names had been hijacked and another who was a convicted criminal.
One of the very few properly controlled, truly scientific experiments was undertaken by a Harvard professor in 2006. A sample of 1,800 heart patients was divided into three groups. Group 1 were prayed for by unnamed strangers but didn’t know this was happening. Group 2 were not prayed for and also didn’t know this. The members of Group 3 were prayed for but they were told this was happening. The real test would be whether there was a difference in outcome between Groups 1 and 2. Did the prayers offer any benefit to people who didn’t know it was happening? The results (pdf file) were disappointing for the believers. Precisely no difference. The prayer had no observable effect on people who didn’t know they were the “recipients” of it.
However the really interesting thing though was what happened to the third group, the patients who knew strangers were praying for them. Members of this group had a noticeably greater level of complications. It seems that knowing that people are praying for them actually seems to have made them more unwell. Whoops.
The non-religious equivalent of prayer, often used in business, therapy and sports, is visualization. People are taught to picture mentally their success, their happiness and prosperity and are taught that this will help these things come true.
The science is simple. Visualization works but only if you do it the right way. Despite what the mystics will say, imagining success doesn’t work. What DOES work is imagining HOW you might succeed. Successful athletes don’t visualize winning the race, they visualize how they will win it. They picture leaving the starting line, how they accelerate, how they control their breathing, how they maintain their speed and how they cope with the pain. Students who visualize HOW they’ll study for that exam do better than the ones who just imagine getting an A grade.
I’m not really a big believer in self-help books but if you are interested in making changes to your life and you want to use techniques that actually work, go and buy a book called 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman. Wiseman is a psychologist who has done genuine research into the vast array of self-help myths and talks about the things that actually work and dismisses the pseudoscience that doesn’t. He discusses exactly how techniques like visualization can actually help but also covers how to do better in interviews, reduce stress and even how to do better on a first date and it’s all based on scientific research. And the reason the book is called 59 Seconds? It’s because every suggestion he gives can be understood in less than a minute.
Wiseman also recently wrote an article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper in which he discussed the fallacy of positive thinking. In particular he mentioned the studies showing that students who visualized success in their examinations actually ended up studying less and performing more poorly in the exams. Another study showed that graduates who fantasized about getting fantastic jobs actually received fewer job offers and got lower average salaries.
The irony is that positive thinking and visualization are perhaps the worst things you can do to achieve success. Maybe instead you should try the scientific approach. Get off your backside and take some action instead of just fantasizing. The science will support you.
Despite what New Age mystical thinkers like the authors of The Secret will tell you, positive thinking is utterly useless. If you make the mistake of buying a copy of The Secret, you’ll learn that their nonsensical “Law of Attraction” suggests that positive thinking will magically lead to positive results. In the same way, thinking sad thoughts will lead to sad things happening, anger will beget anger and homicidal thoughts will transform you into a combi driver.
For a moment let’s ignore the fact that this is nonsense. Does this really mean that Jews got themselves Holocausted because they weren’t thinking positively enough? Did slaves get kidnapped and murdered because they weren’t looking on the bright side of life? Do murder victims deserve it? That’s what The Secret implies.
It IS nonsense of course, there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that wishful thinking works. In fact there’s evidence that it doesn’t. It’s not exactly the same thing, but there HAS actually been some experimentation into one form of magical thinking: prayer.
Does praying for sick people actually help them? Millions of people are told by their religious leaders every week to pray for the sick and unfortunate so it must work, mustn’t it?
No. It doesn’t. While there have been experiments showing some benefit, so far all of them have been discredited. One of them was even undertaken by a mixture of researchers who didn’t actually exist, others whose names had been hijacked and another who was a convicted criminal.
One of the very few properly controlled, truly scientific experiments was undertaken by a Harvard professor in 2006. A sample of 1,800 heart patients was divided into three groups. Group 1 were prayed for by unnamed strangers but didn’t know this was happening. Group 2 were not prayed for and also didn’t know this. The members of Group 3 were prayed for but they were told this was happening. The real test would be whether there was a difference in outcome between Groups 1 and 2. Did the prayers offer any benefit to people who didn’t know it was happening? The results (pdf file) were disappointing for the believers. Precisely no difference. The prayer had no observable effect on people who didn’t know they were the “recipients” of it.
However the really interesting thing though was what happened to the third group, the patients who knew strangers were praying for them. Members of this group had a noticeably greater level of complications. It seems that knowing that people are praying for them actually seems to have made them more unwell. Whoops.
The non-religious equivalent of prayer, often used in business, therapy and sports, is visualization. People are taught to picture mentally their success, their happiness and prosperity and are taught that this will help these things come true.
The science is simple. Visualization works but only if you do it the right way. Despite what the mystics will say, imagining success doesn’t work. What DOES work is imagining HOW you might succeed. Successful athletes don’t visualize winning the race, they visualize how they will win it. They picture leaving the starting line, how they accelerate, how they control their breathing, how they maintain their speed and how they cope with the pain. Students who visualize HOW they’ll study for that exam do better than the ones who just imagine getting an A grade.
I’m not really a big believer in self-help books but if you are interested in making changes to your life and you want to use techniques that actually work, go and buy a book called 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman. Wiseman is a psychologist who has done genuine research into the vast array of self-help myths and talks about the things that actually work and dismisses the pseudoscience that doesn’t. He discusses exactly how techniques like visualization can actually help but also covers how to do better in interviews, reduce stress and even how to do better on a first date and it’s all based on scientific research. And the reason the book is called 59 Seconds? It’s because every suggestion he gives can be understood in less than a minute.
Wiseman also recently wrote an article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper in which he discussed the fallacy of positive thinking. In particular he mentioned the studies showing that students who visualized success in their examinations actually ended up studying less and performing more poorly in the exams. Another study showed that graduates who fantasized about getting fantastic jobs actually received fewer job offers and got lower average salaries.
The irony is that positive thinking and visualization are perhaps the worst things you can do to achieve success. Maybe instead you should try the scientific approach. Get off your backside and take some action instead of just fantasizing. The science will support you.
Sunday, July 01, 2012
Weekend Post - Vaccinating against intelligence
Intelligence is dangerous. What’s more dangerous is skepticism. Worst of all is the combination of both.
It’s not that knowing more about the world and questioning received wisdom will directly threaten you but it they will both expose you to things that you might not want to experience. Things like uncertainty, doubt and the acceptance of ignorance. The nature of science, the primary tool used by skeptical, intelligent people to conquer ignorance, is that it’s incomplete. There are things we don’t know, at least not yet. One day we will. We’ll know whether dark matter and dark energy exist, we’ll know whether string theory does indeed reconcile relativity and quantum theory, we’ll even know why combi drivers drive the way they do. One day.
But some things we DO know. There are things we know for sure, about which there is absolutely no doubt. Gravity exists and we now have a very good theory that explains it. Evolution happened, is still happening and will continue to happen and we have theories that explain it very well. More practically we know for sure that vaccinations work, they protect us against dreaded diseases and they’ve extended our lifespans enormously. That’s why it’s horrible to hear of cases of resistance to vaccination. Earlier this month the Pakistani Express Tribune reported on objections to an anti-polio vaccination campaign in the Punjab region of Pakistan:
However it’s not just the ignorant that oppose vaccination.
In the UK in 1998 a doctor called Andrew Wakefield published a fraudulent study in The Lancet incorrectly suggesting that there was a link between the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. He even invented a fictitious medical condition that he called “autistic enterocolitis”.
This caused a major panic in the UK that spread worldwide. Unfortunately it took many years to fully expose Wakefield as a fraud. In 2004 the UK Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer revealed Wakefield’s fixing of experimental results, his improper and unethical treatment of children and his corrupt financial interests. Faced with this The Lancet fully retracted the article and the UK’s General Medical Council formally investigated Wakefield’s conduct. They were so horrified by his conduct that he was struck off the medical register in disgrace. There were even calls for him to be prosecuted.
But the damage was done. MMR vaccination rates dropped significantly. In the UK the vaccination rate dropped from 90% to 73%. In the USA more cases of measles occurred in 1998, following the reports, than had occurred in the decade beforehand. Obviously nobody can prove this beyond doubt but it’s likely that Wakefield’s activities killed children.
The fascinating but dreadful news is that despite Wakefield and his ideas being completely discredited, despite every single piece of evidence showing that childhood vaccination is a life-saver, vaccination levels in the developed world haven’t recovered. Worse still we can’t make the easy assumption that the parents of the non-vaccinated children are all stupid. In fact according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, unvaccinated children in the USA were more likely:
Many examples of progress are mixed. While nuclear power is the safest way to produce electricity we all find radiation scary. The internal combustion and jet engines have each made travel easier but they bring pollution. The internet can be wonderfully empowering but it’s full of garbage.
Vaccination is an exception. It’s saved and prolonged everyone’s life and there is virtually no downside to it. The terrible irony is that the greatest threat this remarkable bit of scientific progress faces is the very same intelligence that created it.
It’s not that knowing more about the world and questioning received wisdom will directly threaten you but it they will both expose you to things that you might not want to experience. Things like uncertainty, doubt and the acceptance of ignorance. The nature of science, the primary tool used by skeptical, intelligent people to conquer ignorance, is that it’s incomplete. There are things we don’t know, at least not yet. One day we will. We’ll know whether dark matter and dark energy exist, we’ll know whether string theory does indeed reconcile relativity and quantum theory, we’ll even know why combi drivers drive the way they do. One day.
But some things we DO know. There are things we know for sure, about which there is absolutely no doubt. Gravity exists and we now have a very good theory that explains it. Evolution happened, is still happening and will continue to happen and we have theories that explain it very well. More practically we know for sure that vaccinations work, they protect us against dreaded diseases and they’ve extended our lifespans enormously. That’s why it’s horrible to hear of cases of resistance to vaccination. Earlier this month the Pakistani Express Tribune reported on objections to an anti-polio vaccination campaign in the Punjab region of Pakistan:
“When the local cleric, Maulvi Ibrahim Chisti found out about the campaign, he immediately went to the biggest mosque in the area and declared that polio drops are ‘poison’ and against Islam. He added that if the polio team forced anybody to partake in the vaccination campaign, then Jihad was ‘the only option’.”Clearly this particular religious leader is an idiot. As a result of idiocy like this, the Indian Express reported that polio is back.
“Eight cases were detected in the Khyber tribal region. Polio cases have also been reported in areas like Rajanpur district of Punjab and Larkana district of Sindh that were free of the virus since 2004-05.”It’s not often that progress is actually overturned and the forces of idiocy drive us back into the Middle Ages. With a little luck the pragmatic Pakistani authorities will enforce some reason and rationality and Pakistani kids can live life with one fewer threat to their health.
However it’s not just the ignorant that oppose vaccination.
In the UK in 1998 a doctor called Andrew Wakefield published a fraudulent study in The Lancet incorrectly suggesting that there was a link between the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. He even invented a fictitious medical condition that he called “autistic enterocolitis”.
This caused a major panic in the UK that spread worldwide. Unfortunately it took many years to fully expose Wakefield as a fraud. In 2004 the UK Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer revealed Wakefield’s fixing of experimental results, his improper and unethical treatment of children and his corrupt financial interests. Faced with this The Lancet fully retracted the article and the UK’s General Medical Council formally investigated Wakefield’s conduct. They were so horrified by his conduct that he was struck off the medical register in disgrace. There were even calls for him to be prosecuted.
But the damage was done. MMR vaccination rates dropped significantly. In the UK the vaccination rate dropped from 90% to 73%. In the USA more cases of measles occurred in 1998, following the reports, than had occurred in the decade beforehand. Obviously nobody can prove this beyond doubt but it’s likely that Wakefield’s activities killed children.
The fascinating but dreadful news is that despite Wakefield and his ideas being completely discredited, despite every single piece of evidence showing that childhood vaccination is a life-saver, vaccination levels in the developed world haven’t recovered. Worse still we can’t make the easy assumption that the parents of the non-vaccinated children are all stupid. In fact according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, unvaccinated children in the USA were more likely:
“to belong to households with higher income, to have a married mother with a college education, and to live with four or more children”.The irony is that the more educated you are, the less likely you are to protect your children’s health. Part of this is undoubtedly the higher levels of curiosity that intelligent and educated parents are likely to express. In particular smart people (like readers of the Weekend Post!) are more likely to surf the web to research important decisions. The problem is that the Internet is filled to the brim with a mixture of lunacy, idiocy and lies. That’s if you can avoid the porn and celebrity gossip. The pseudoscience available on the Internet is dangerously prevalent.
Many examples of progress are mixed. While nuclear power is the safest way to produce electricity we all find radiation scary. The internal combustion and jet engines have each made travel easier but they bring pollution. The internet can be wonderfully empowering but it’s full of garbage.
Vaccination is an exception. It’s saved and prolonged everyone’s life and there is virtually no downside to it. The terrible irony is that the greatest threat this remarkable bit of scientific progress faces is the very same intelligence that created it.
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Weekend Post - the organic food deception
Why do people seem to think that things that are “natural” are somehow better than things seen as “unnatural”? Why is “organic” food so highly prized? Why do people object to “unnatural” additives in their foods, medicines and even their clothing?
Anyway, what does “natural” even mean?
Of course many natural products are perfectly wonderful. Oxygen is natural. Water is natural. Vitamin A, otherwise known as retinol, is natural. But all of these things, if taken to excess, will kill you. Arsenic, cyanides and many bacteria are all perfectly natural but they too will kill you stone dead. Lions and hippos are natural, as are mosquitos.
Unnatural products like anti-retroviral drugs, plastics and semiconductors have improved the quality of our lives almost immeasurably. Hospital operating theatres, telephone exchanges and refrigerators are all completely unnatural.
It’s not as simple as natural is good, unnatural is bad. That’s the “naturalistic fallacy”.
A very good example of the exaggeration of the benefits of so-called natural products is the organic food industry. Again we have to play with words a bit. All foods are organic, they’ve all come from some other form of life, whether animal or vegetable. Organic foods are no more “organic” than conventionally produced foods. So-called organic food is actually just conventional food that’s been grown, processed and delivered according to certain agreed standards. It’s similar to the production of Haalal meat. Fundamentally there’s no noticeable difference between an organic potato and a conventional one, just like there’s no observable difference between a Halaal chick burger and a conventional one. It’s just the production method that’s different.
Organic foods are produced largely without modern farming products like pesticides, veterinary products like antibiotics and modern fertilizers. That’s the main reason why organic foods are so expensive. In a store I visited recently they offered conventional spaghetti and organic spaghetti for exactly three times the price. Given that there’s no noticeable difference in taste, texture or quality I happily bought the cheaper version.
Perhaps the biggest argument for organic food, and the reason that many people are willing to spend three times as much for certain items is that they think it’s somehow healthier. The inconvenient truth for the followers of the organic movement is that there appears to be no evidence for this whatsoever. None.
In fact some of the fertilizers used in organic farming are really rather scary. Although the chemicals often used are “natural” that doesn’t mean they don’t cause cancer, Parkinson’s disease or food-poisoning. Unfortunately the organic food movement has resurrected an old farming practice that industry had begun to eradicate: spreading excrement over growing crops.
Here’s a simple science lesson. Excrement, faeces, poo, whatever you want to call it, is bad for you. Why do you think we spend so much time disposing of it hygienically? Why do you think we’ve evolved over millennia to find it revolting? It’s because given the slightest chance it will kill us, that’s why.
One of the tragedies in science is how little certain scientists are known. Most educated people can think of Einstein, Newton, Curie and Pasteur. Others can perhaps name Fleming, Lister and Watson and Crick. But how many know of true greats, absolute heroes like Norman Borlaug? As well as winning a huge variety of international awards, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his contributions to the world food supply. It’s impossible to prove but it’s been said that Borlaug and his work in agriculture saved perhaps a billion human lives by drastically increasing crop production.
Like many great breakthroughs Borlaug’s achievements sound very simple. He made maximum use of seasons, used multiple genetic lines of crops to provide disease resistance, planted stronger, dwarf strains of crops that were much sturdier and, just as importantly, made liberal use of inorganic fertilizers. He encountered enormous resistance from well-meaning but ignorant objectors to this approach and some of the most aggressive objections came from the so-called “environmental lobby”, probably the very same people who can afford to pay silly prices for organic foods. Borlaug’s reaction was damning:
Anyway, what does “natural” even mean?
Of course many natural products are perfectly wonderful. Oxygen is natural. Water is natural. Vitamin A, otherwise known as retinol, is natural. But all of these things, if taken to excess, will kill you. Arsenic, cyanides and many bacteria are all perfectly natural but they too will kill you stone dead. Lions and hippos are natural, as are mosquitos.
Unnatural products like anti-retroviral drugs, plastics and semiconductors have improved the quality of our lives almost immeasurably. Hospital operating theatres, telephone exchanges and refrigerators are all completely unnatural.
It’s not as simple as natural is good, unnatural is bad. That’s the “naturalistic fallacy”.
A very good example of the exaggeration of the benefits of so-called natural products is the organic food industry. Again we have to play with words a bit. All foods are organic, they’ve all come from some other form of life, whether animal or vegetable. Organic foods are no more “organic” than conventionally produced foods. So-called organic food is actually just conventional food that’s been grown, processed and delivered according to certain agreed standards. It’s similar to the production of Haalal meat. Fundamentally there’s no noticeable difference between an organic potato and a conventional one, just like there’s no observable difference between a Halaal chick burger and a conventional one. It’s just the production method that’s different.
Organic foods are produced largely without modern farming products like pesticides, veterinary products like antibiotics and modern fertilizers. That’s the main reason why organic foods are so expensive. In a store I visited recently they offered conventional spaghetti and organic spaghetti for exactly three times the price. Given that there’s no noticeable difference in taste, texture or quality I happily bought the cheaper version.
Perhaps the biggest argument for organic food, and the reason that many people are willing to spend three times as much for certain items is that they think it’s somehow healthier. The inconvenient truth for the followers of the organic movement is that there appears to be no evidence for this whatsoever. None.
In fact some of the fertilizers used in organic farming are really rather scary. Although the chemicals often used are “natural” that doesn’t mean they don’t cause cancer, Parkinson’s disease or food-poisoning. Unfortunately the organic food movement has resurrected an old farming practice that industry had begun to eradicate: spreading excrement over growing crops.
Here’s a simple science lesson. Excrement, faeces, poo, whatever you want to call it, is bad for you. Why do you think we spend so much time disposing of it hygienically? Why do you think we’ve evolved over millennia to find it revolting? It’s because given the slightest chance it will kill us, that’s why.
One of the tragedies in science is how little certain scientists are known. Most educated people can think of Einstein, Newton, Curie and Pasteur. Others can perhaps name Fleming, Lister and Watson and Crick. But how many know of true greats, absolute heroes like Norman Borlaug? As well as winning a huge variety of international awards, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his contributions to the world food supply. It’s impossible to prove but it’s been said that Borlaug and his work in agriculture saved perhaps a billion human lives by drastically increasing crop production.
Like many great breakthroughs Borlaug’s achievements sound very simple. He made maximum use of seasons, used multiple genetic lines of crops to provide disease resistance, planted stronger, dwarf strains of crops that were much sturdier and, just as importantly, made liberal use of inorganic fertilizers. He encountered enormous resistance from well-meaning but ignorant objectors to this approach and some of the most aggressive objections came from the so-called “environmental lobby”, probably the very same people who can afford to pay silly prices for organic foods. Borlaug’s reaction was damning:
"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."Organic food advocates should think hard about this. If they want to spend three times as much on food that’s absolutely identical to normal food, offers no real health benefits and doesn’t help the environment even a tiny bit then they’re welcome to. Just leave the rest of us out of it please?
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Weekend Post - the problem with chiropractic
Most so-called “alternative” health treatments are fundamentally harmless. Reflexologists, acupuncturists and the purveyors of nonsense like Reiki, energy medicine and QXCI are highly unlikely to harm you, let alone kill you. That’s because none of these “therapies” actually DO anything. Of course there IS the risk that someone will use these fake treatments instead of real medicine and suffer as a result. A friend of mine is a doctor who I once saw deeply upset because a patient who’s life he had improved dramatically, whose life he’d probably saved, ended up dead because he’d dabbled with nonsensical “traditional” medicine.
There are, however, alternatives that CAN do harm, that CAN hurt you. Chiropractic is a good example of this.
Chiropractic is, like most “alternative” therapies, based on a ridiculously simplistic view of the human body. Energy medicine practitioners will tell you that it’s all about balancing energies, reflexologists invent pathways between the soles of your feet and the rest of your body and the QXCI “therapists” don’t have any idea what they’re doing. Chiropractors will tell you that many disorders are due to “misalignments” in your spine that are somehow interfering with nerve signals from your brain. They claim that manipulating the spine can free these nerve signals and improve the victim’s health.
Let’s start with the facts. This is all utter nonsense. Even chiropractors admit this. The UK General Chiropractic Council admits on its web site that the basic idea behind their profession:
Admittedly, a number of chiropractors have moved away from these ridiculous claims and now include more mainstream ideas in their thinking and treatments. However there is little evidence that anything the more modern ones do has any genuine effect either. The overwhelming body of evidence suggests that spinal manipulation for back and neck pain offers no greater benefits than massage or taking some painkillers.
Then there are the dangers. People have died as a result of chiropractic treatment. Just last week the BBC reported on a warning published in the British Medical Journal about the low-level risk posed by spinal manipulation. Describing the procedure as “unnecessary and inadvisable” they highlighted the risk of damage to the arteries in the neck that might result in a stroke. This risk isn’t just theoretical. There are many documented cases of people being permanently disabled and even being killed by their chiropractic treatment, by the chiropractors themselves.
Of course alternative therapists will say that this happens in conventional medicine as well and they have a point. People do sometimes suffer side effects of modern medicine but its very rarely the treatment itself that directly harms them. Having a chiropractor, who would be forced to admit that his therapy was not based on any science, fool around with your spinal cord is asking for trouble.
Some years ago the chiropractic industry in the UK suffered an enormous setback when the British Chiropractic Association tried to sue the science writer Simon Singh for defamation. He had criticized chiropractors’ claims that they could successfully treat children with asthma, ear infections, colic and sleeping problems. He said that the BCA “happily promotes bogus treatments” and they sued him.
The good news is after a lengthy court battle the BCA was forced to drop their case against him because they realized they were going to lose. What he’d said was true. Unfortunately, unlike here in Botswana, the British legal system has no “public interest defense” to allegations of defamation.
One effect of this case was a massive increase in the number of complaints against chiropractors for false advertising. One report suggested that 25% of all practitioners in the UK were under investigation for making false claims. The “profession” remains in crisis to this day, having brought public attention to itself by trying to bully a science writer for telling the truth about their treatments.
The irony is that it took a court case, not scientific evidence, to force chiropractors to face up to the truth about their bogus, pseudoscientific claims. Hopefully science can prevail in future without the support of the courts?
There are, however, alternatives that CAN do harm, that CAN hurt you. Chiropractic is a good example of this.
Chiropractic is, like most “alternative” therapies, based on a ridiculously simplistic view of the human body. Energy medicine practitioners will tell you that it’s all about balancing energies, reflexologists invent pathways between the soles of your feet and the rest of your body and the QXCI “therapists” don’t have any idea what they’re doing. Chiropractors will tell you that many disorders are due to “misalignments” in your spine that are somehow interfering with nerve signals from your brain. They claim that manipulating the spine can free these nerve signals and improve the victim’s health.
Let’s start with the facts. This is all utter nonsense. Even chiropractors admit this. The UK General Chiropractic Council admits on its web site that the basic idea behind their profession:
“is not supported by any clinical research evidence that would allow claims to be made that it is the cause of disease or health concerns”If even the governing bodies admit that it’s nonsense, why do individual chiropractors think we should trust them?
Admittedly, a number of chiropractors have moved away from these ridiculous claims and now include more mainstream ideas in their thinking and treatments. However there is little evidence that anything the more modern ones do has any genuine effect either. The overwhelming body of evidence suggests that spinal manipulation for back and neck pain offers no greater benefits than massage or taking some painkillers.
Then there are the dangers. People have died as a result of chiropractic treatment. Just last week the BBC reported on a warning published in the British Medical Journal about the low-level risk posed by spinal manipulation. Describing the procedure as “unnecessary and inadvisable” they highlighted the risk of damage to the arteries in the neck that might result in a stroke. This risk isn’t just theoretical. There are many documented cases of people being permanently disabled and even being killed by their chiropractic treatment, by the chiropractors themselves.
Of course alternative therapists will say that this happens in conventional medicine as well and they have a point. People do sometimes suffer side effects of modern medicine but its very rarely the treatment itself that directly harms them. Having a chiropractor, who would be forced to admit that his therapy was not based on any science, fool around with your spinal cord is asking for trouble.
Some years ago the chiropractic industry in the UK suffered an enormous setback when the British Chiropractic Association tried to sue the science writer Simon Singh for defamation. He had criticized chiropractors’ claims that they could successfully treat children with asthma, ear infections, colic and sleeping problems. He said that the BCA “happily promotes bogus treatments” and they sued him.
The good news is after a lengthy court battle the BCA was forced to drop their case against him because they realized they were going to lose. What he’d said was true. Unfortunately, unlike here in Botswana, the British legal system has no “public interest defense” to allegations of defamation.
One effect of this case was a massive increase in the number of complaints against chiropractors for false advertising. One report suggested that 25% of all practitioners in the UK were under investigation for making false claims. The “profession” remains in crisis to this day, having brought public attention to itself by trying to bully a science writer for telling the truth about their treatments.
The irony is that it took a court case, not scientific evidence, to force chiropractors to face up to the truth about their bogus, pseudoscientific claims. Hopefully science can prevail in future without the support of the courts?
Saturday, June 02, 2012
Weekend Post - Stemming stem cell research?
One of the most controversial areas of scientific research in modern times is stem cell therapy. Actually, it’s only controversial because certain religiously motivated groups have decided it should be controversial, regardless of the scientific truth. In fact there’s no controversy at all if you look at the facts.
Some background would be useful. Everyone reading this was originally formed from a single human cell, an egg from your mother. Once fertilized by your father’s sperm that single cell divided into two, then four, eight and so on until your body consisted of tens of trillions of cells. Here’s the clever bit. That single original cell gave rise to an enormous range of different, specialized cells. Your body contains around 200 different types of cells that are each devoted to specific purposes. Some transmit messages in your brain, others help your heart pump blood, others exist in your liver solely to “detox” your system, others receive light in your eye. The variation is amazing but they all came from that single generic cell. They all “stem” from that single cell.
These stem cells have that amazing capability: to become other types of cells. Like that first cell from your mother that created you, they have the capacity to produce the specialist cells needed in specialized organs. One of the biggest hopes in modern medicine is to find a way of introducing stem cells into damaged or diseased tissue to grow new tissue to replace the damaged bits.
This would be revolutionary and might offer us an enormously powerful technique to help cure a range of conditions.
The controversy came from one of the original sources of stem cells for research: human embryos, either from aborted embryos or from spare embryos created during fertility treatments. I can understand how people would find this instinctivel a little distasteful but these embryos weren’t in any real sense human. They had developed no further than the blastocyst stage when the embryos consists of no more than about 100 cells. In real terms they were no more “human” than the fleshy inside bit of your tooth.
However, whether rightly or wrongly, there was considerable resistance to using embryonic stem cells in research. Former President George W Bush even banned their use in any federally funded research programs.
The good news is that it looks like we can avoid the need for embryonic stem cells entirely. Stem cells can be harvested instead from adults, avoiding any of the emotional complications arising from embryo use. In fact we’ve been using adult stem cells to treat disease for years, it was just never called that. Bone marrow transplants, most commonly used to treat leukemia, actually use the stems cells found in adult bone marrow.
Bizarrely one of the richest sources of adult stem cells is the dental pulp tissue found inside adult teeth. These stem cells could, in principle, be used to grow new heart and nerve tissue, muscle and bone. The potential is extraordinary.
It’s early days but there’s great reason to be optimistic. A recent study published in The Lancet used stem cells taken from the heart tissue of heart attack victims. The scientists cultured stem cells from this tissue and re-implanted them into the damaged heart. Four months after the procedure, those participants who had received the stem cells had a significant improvement in heart function compared to a group who had not been given stem cells. The improvement wasn’t complete, their hearts were still damaged, but every little improvement helps tremendously in heart attack patients and it shows the potential for the procedure.
A similar study in Israel, which involved introducing stem cells into the hearts of rats, confirmed that the stem cells were busy bonding with existing heart tissue. The lead researcher, Lior Gepstein from Rambam Medical Center commented to the BBC that “we have shown that it's possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young - the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when just born."
The potential for stem cell therapies is enormous, so long as ignorance isn’t allowed to get in the way.
Some background would be useful. Everyone reading this was originally formed from a single human cell, an egg from your mother. Once fertilized by your father’s sperm that single cell divided into two, then four, eight and so on until your body consisted of tens of trillions of cells. Here’s the clever bit. That single original cell gave rise to an enormous range of different, specialized cells. Your body contains around 200 different types of cells that are each devoted to specific purposes. Some transmit messages in your brain, others help your heart pump blood, others exist in your liver solely to “detox” your system, others receive light in your eye. The variation is amazing but they all came from that single generic cell. They all “stem” from that single cell.
These stem cells have that amazing capability: to become other types of cells. Like that first cell from your mother that created you, they have the capacity to produce the specialist cells needed in specialized organs. One of the biggest hopes in modern medicine is to find a way of introducing stem cells into damaged or diseased tissue to grow new tissue to replace the damaged bits.
This would be revolutionary and might offer us an enormously powerful technique to help cure a range of conditions.
The controversy came from one of the original sources of stem cells for research: human embryos, either from aborted embryos or from spare embryos created during fertility treatments. I can understand how people would find this instinctivel a little distasteful but these embryos weren’t in any real sense human. They had developed no further than the blastocyst stage when the embryos consists of no more than about 100 cells. In real terms they were no more “human” than the fleshy inside bit of your tooth.
However, whether rightly or wrongly, there was considerable resistance to using embryonic stem cells in research. Former President George W Bush even banned their use in any federally funded research programs.
The good news is that it looks like we can avoid the need for embryonic stem cells entirely. Stem cells can be harvested instead from adults, avoiding any of the emotional complications arising from embryo use. In fact we’ve been using adult stem cells to treat disease for years, it was just never called that. Bone marrow transplants, most commonly used to treat leukemia, actually use the stems cells found in adult bone marrow.
Bizarrely one of the richest sources of adult stem cells is the dental pulp tissue found inside adult teeth. These stem cells could, in principle, be used to grow new heart and nerve tissue, muscle and bone. The potential is extraordinary.
It’s early days but there’s great reason to be optimistic. A recent study published in The Lancet used stem cells taken from the heart tissue of heart attack victims. The scientists cultured stem cells from this tissue and re-implanted them into the damaged heart. Four months after the procedure, those participants who had received the stem cells had a significant improvement in heart function compared to a group who had not been given stem cells. The improvement wasn’t complete, their hearts were still damaged, but every little improvement helps tremendously in heart attack patients and it shows the potential for the procedure.
A similar study in Israel, which involved introducing stem cells into the hearts of rats, confirmed that the stem cells were busy bonding with existing heart tissue. The lead researcher, Lior Gepstein from Rambam Medical Center commented to the BBC that “we have shown that it's possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young - the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when just born."
The potential for stem cell therapies is enormous, so long as ignorance isn’t allowed to get in the way.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Weekend Post - Are you in control?
Here’s a test for you. With the index finger of the hand you write with, touch either your left ear or your right ear. It’s entirely up to you to decide which ear to touch.
Done that?
How did you decide which ear to touch? Did you think about it logically? Did you give it a lot of thought or just choose the nearest one?
The question is really about free will. Did you actually have a choice at all or was it predestined that you would choose that ear?
Theologians, philosophers and everyday people have wondered about this issue for centuries. Do we actually have control over our actions or is everything predestined? Can I really decide what I’m going to do or is it all written down somewhere? Frankly I’m not terribly interested in the metaphysical side of things. I want to know, and I think this matters a whole lot more than a bunch of mystical ponderings, what does the evidence say?
Luckily we have now have the technology to investigate the brain. We can measure activity in the brain with some accuracy, we can estimate fairly well when things happen. That’s proved to be fantastically useful to anyone studying the brain and it’s functions.
In the 1980s a neuropsychologist called Benjamin Libet and his team in California did an experiment that had disturbing results. They looked at the time it took for their subjects to take a decision to flex a muscle and then for the muscle to flex. In fact there were three separate events that they measured. Firstly the conscious decision itself, then the activity in the brain that sent the signals to the muscle and finally the muscle flexing. Mind, brain then muscle. That’s surely how it works? A conscious decision leads to brain activity and then the muscular action happens. It can’t be much simpler than that, can it?
Actually it IS more complicated than that and even a bit disturbing. It turns out that the conscious decision occurred, on average, about 200 milliseconds before the muscle flexed. So far so good. The surprising thing is that the brain activity that sent the signal to the muscle started even earlier, on average 500 milliseconds before the muscle flexed. Let me make that perfectly clear. The brain began preparing the signal to the muscle BEFORE the subject had consciously decided to do anything. The correct sequence appeared to be brain, mind and then muscle. Free will would seem to be an illusion if Libet’s findings are correct.
Libet’s work has been heavily criticized but mainly because of it’s implications, not the science. The experiment has been repeated and adjusted to explore the effect more closely and although the findings have been modified slightly, the essence remains the same. The brain is busy BEFORE the mind does anything.
So what role does the mind have in this situation? One role it might play is simply as a mechanism for giving us a “sense” of control, of what philosophers called “agency”, the sense that we exercise some control over ourselves. Another intriguing idea is that although “free will” might be an illusion, we still might have what researchers have jokingly called “free won’t”, a final veto on the actions we take. The role of the mind might be just to stop things happening rather than causing them to. So, male readers, this research does NOT give you that great excuse, “I’m sorry dear, I couldn’t help myself, it was an irresistible urge”.
However, even that idea is under attack. Other experiments have suggested that free will truly is no more than an illusion, an experience created by our brains to give us that sense of agency that we like, that allows us to explain our behavior to ourselves.
Those of a religious persuasion, and even those who are not, find this disturbing. People will say that this means we have no conscience, no sense of morality or ethics, no knowledge of right and wrong. That’s just rubbish, this is NOT what this research suggests. Nobody has suggested that we don’t learn things, that we don’t instinctively have a sense of right and wrong and that our parents and society can’t give us morality.
Of course that all happens. It’s just that the evidence suggests that we don’t consciously think about these things when we make specific decisions. But they’re still there, influencing our decisions, our personalities and our lives. There is no contradiction between having no free will and being a decent, caring person who makes the right decisions, who recognizes morality and who lives a decent life.
In fact I’d go one stage further. I think this places an emphasis on us, as individuals, to think more about right and wrong, to care even more about the morality we teach our children and how we live our lives. It’s just that we can now do this based on real knowledge, science and evidence, not superstition.
Done that?
How did you decide which ear to touch? Did you think about it logically? Did you give it a lot of thought or just choose the nearest one?
The question is really about free will. Did you actually have a choice at all or was it predestined that you would choose that ear?
Theologians, philosophers and everyday people have wondered about this issue for centuries. Do we actually have control over our actions or is everything predestined? Can I really decide what I’m going to do or is it all written down somewhere? Frankly I’m not terribly interested in the metaphysical side of things. I want to know, and I think this matters a whole lot more than a bunch of mystical ponderings, what does the evidence say?
Luckily we have now have the technology to investigate the brain. We can measure activity in the brain with some accuracy, we can estimate fairly well when things happen. That’s proved to be fantastically useful to anyone studying the brain and it’s functions.
In the 1980s a neuropsychologist called Benjamin Libet and his team in California did an experiment that had disturbing results. They looked at the time it took for their subjects to take a decision to flex a muscle and then for the muscle to flex. In fact there were three separate events that they measured. Firstly the conscious decision itself, then the activity in the brain that sent the signals to the muscle and finally the muscle flexing. Mind, brain then muscle. That’s surely how it works? A conscious decision leads to brain activity and then the muscular action happens. It can’t be much simpler than that, can it?
Actually it IS more complicated than that and even a bit disturbing. It turns out that the conscious decision occurred, on average, about 200 milliseconds before the muscle flexed. So far so good. The surprising thing is that the brain activity that sent the signal to the muscle started even earlier, on average 500 milliseconds before the muscle flexed. Let me make that perfectly clear. The brain began preparing the signal to the muscle BEFORE the subject had consciously decided to do anything. The correct sequence appeared to be brain, mind and then muscle. Free will would seem to be an illusion if Libet’s findings are correct.
Libet’s work has been heavily criticized but mainly because of it’s implications, not the science. The experiment has been repeated and adjusted to explore the effect more closely and although the findings have been modified slightly, the essence remains the same. The brain is busy BEFORE the mind does anything.
So what role does the mind have in this situation? One role it might play is simply as a mechanism for giving us a “sense” of control, of what philosophers called “agency”, the sense that we exercise some control over ourselves. Another intriguing idea is that although “free will” might be an illusion, we still might have what researchers have jokingly called “free won’t”, a final veto on the actions we take. The role of the mind might be just to stop things happening rather than causing them to. So, male readers, this research does NOT give you that great excuse, “I’m sorry dear, I couldn’t help myself, it was an irresistible urge”.
However, even that idea is under attack. Other experiments have suggested that free will truly is no more than an illusion, an experience created by our brains to give us that sense of agency that we like, that allows us to explain our behavior to ourselves.
Those of a religious persuasion, and even those who are not, find this disturbing. People will say that this means we have no conscience, no sense of morality or ethics, no knowledge of right and wrong. That’s just rubbish, this is NOT what this research suggests. Nobody has suggested that we don’t learn things, that we don’t instinctively have a sense of right and wrong and that our parents and society can’t give us morality.
Of course that all happens. It’s just that the evidence suggests that we don’t consciously think about these things when we make specific decisions. But they’re still there, influencing our decisions, our personalities and our lives. There is no contradiction between having no free will and being a decent, caring person who makes the right decisions, who recognizes morality and who lives a decent life.
In fact I’d go one stage further. I think this places an emphasis on us, as individuals, to think more about right and wrong, to care even more about the morality we teach our children and how we live our lives. It’s just that we can now do this based on real knowledge, science and evidence, not superstition.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Weekend Post - Bad ideas stick around. Like astrology.
I find it amazing how certain ideas stick around, way beyond the end of their natural lifetimes. There are still people who believe in witches, evil spirits and mysterious forces controlling our destiny. There are still people who believe, fundamentally, in fairy tales. However, perhaps the longest running nonsensical and straightforwardly WRONG belief is in astrology.
Astrology is based on the belief that the planets have some sort of effect upon our daily lives. It suggests that the date and time of your birth and the position of the planets at that moment have an everlasting influence on your life and the events it includes.
Most astrologers also suggest that we can all be grouped according to the month of our birth into so-called star signs. These signs are named after a range of astronomical constellations like Cancer, Libra, Taurus and Sagittarius. Apparently people in each of these groups share similar personal characteristics and, if you believe the astrological predictions published in newspapers over the world, identical life experiences each week.
Where to begin on this one?
To begin with let's think carefully about each of the issues. Firstly that the planets have a direct influence on our lives. How do they do this? The only force we know of that might do this is gravity. Gravity can act at a huge distance, it holds the planets in orbit around the sun and the sun in it's place in the galaxy. There’s no point in going into the physics of this other than to point out that there’s a greater gravitational attraction between you and your husband or wife than you have with Jupiter. The moon has a much greater gravitational influence on our planet than all the planets combined so why do astrologers ignore it's influence?
So, given that the gravitational effect of the planets on us is insignificant isn't it also stretching our credibility a bit too far to believe that the effect they have on us is at the moment of our birth and not at any time later? Oh and why don’t astrologers consider the moment we were conceived rather than the moment of our birth? Surely that would be more logical? However logic is not something that astrologers seem to rate very highly.
So perhaps there is some other force that has this effect. Some force that we don't know about yet? If astrology is actually a good predictor of life's events maybe that would be good enough proof? If astrologers could show us that their predictions were accurate that would be a good thing wouldn't it?
Unfortunately it's simply not the case. Every truly scientific analysis of astrological predictions has shown that astrological predictions are nonsense. They predict nothing. If they did why didn't astrologers tell us about 9-11, the banking crisis or who was going to win Big Brother? And why aren’t they all multi-millionaires having predicted lottery results?
Experiments that looked at couples who got married and analysed their star signs showed that there was absolutely no relationship between the so called compatibility of their signs and whether their marriages lasted or not. The same thing happened when researchers examined people in various professions and found that their astrological signs were in no way related to their professional success.
However my favourite experiment has been undertaken several times, notably by the French researcher and astrologer Michel Gauquelin. He gave a large group of people a horoscope and asked them to rate how accurately it described their personality. Ninety-four percent of the people said it accurately described them. The bad news though is that they had all been given the very same horoscope, that of Marcel Petiot, one of France’s most vicious psychopathic serial killers.
This is an example of the so-called "Forer effect", the tendency people have to consider general statements about them as correct, particularly when they're flattering. It's our nature to believe this sort of garbage when we hear it. But that doesn't mean we have to give in to idiotic temptation.
So why do so many people read their horoscopes and feel that they actually mean something? Why do they genuinely seem to believe they predict what will happen and give guidance on what they should do?
I think it's quite simple. We all want certainty. We want to be able to understand our lives and astrologers give us this. They give us simple, amazingly broad generalisations that can apply to pretty much anyone. A horoscope in a newspaper here recently stated that any Capricorn should"
People believe astrology because they seek simple explanations for a complex life. Fortunately life is much more complex and interesting than this and astrology is utter nonsense.
 |
| Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology |
Most astrologers also suggest that we can all be grouped according to the month of our birth into so-called star signs. These signs are named after a range of astronomical constellations like Cancer, Libra, Taurus and Sagittarius. Apparently people in each of these groups share similar personal characteristics and, if you believe the astrological predictions published in newspapers over the world, identical life experiences each week.
Where to begin on this one?
To begin with let's think carefully about each of the issues. Firstly that the planets have a direct influence on our lives. How do they do this? The only force we know of that might do this is gravity. Gravity can act at a huge distance, it holds the planets in orbit around the sun and the sun in it's place in the galaxy. There’s no point in going into the physics of this other than to point out that there’s a greater gravitational attraction between you and your husband or wife than you have with Jupiter. The moon has a much greater gravitational influence on our planet than all the planets combined so why do astrologers ignore it's influence?
So, given that the gravitational effect of the planets on us is insignificant isn't it also stretching our credibility a bit too far to believe that the effect they have on us is at the moment of our birth and not at any time later? Oh and why don’t astrologers consider the moment we were conceived rather than the moment of our birth? Surely that would be more logical? However logic is not something that astrologers seem to rate very highly.
So perhaps there is some other force that has this effect. Some force that we don't know about yet? If astrology is actually a good predictor of life's events maybe that would be good enough proof? If astrologers could show us that their predictions were accurate that would be a good thing wouldn't it?
Unfortunately it's simply not the case. Every truly scientific analysis of astrological predictions has shown that astrological predictions are nonsense. They predict nothing. If they did why didn't astrologers tell us about 9-11, the banking crisis or who was going to win Big Brother? And why aren’t they all multi-millionaires having predicted lottery results?
Experiments that looked at couples who got married and analysed their star signs showed that there was absolutely no relationship between the so called compatibility of their signs and whether their marriages lasted or not. The same thing happened when researchers examined people in various professions and found that their astrological signs were in no way related to their professional success.
However my favourite experiment has been undertaken several times, notably by the French researcher and astrologer Michel Gauquelin. He gave a large group of people a horoscope and asked them to rate how accurately it described their personality. Ninety-four percent of the people said it accurately described them. The bad news though is that they had all been given the very same horoscope, that of Marcel Petiot, one of France’s most vicious psychopathic serial killers.
This is an example of the so-called "Forer effect", the tendency people have to consider general statements about them as correct, particularly when they're flattering. It's our nature to believe this sort of garbage when we hear it. But that doesn't mean we have to give in to idiotic temptation.
So why do so many people read their horoscopes and feel that they actually mean something? Why do they genuinely seem to believe they predict what will happen and give guidance on what they should do?
I think it's quite simple. We all want certainty. We want to be able to understand our lives and astrologers give us this. They give us simple, amazingly broad generalisations that can apply to pretty much anyone. A horoscope in a newspaper here recently stated that any Capricorn should"
"Use your time as productively as possible. Individual achievements are possible within a working team structure. A game of one-upmanship might ultimately benefit everyone."What utter rubbish. What on earth does this mean? What sort of a prediction is that? Notice how deliberately vague that all is? Couldn't it apply to anyone at any time?
People believe astrology because they seek simple explanations for a complex life. Fortunately life is much more complex and interesting than this and astrology is utter nonsense.
Saturday, May 05, 2012
Weekend Post - Two types of thinking?
It’s been said that there are two types of people: those that divide humanity into two types and those that don’t.
Crudely dividing humanity into “types” is always a very dangerous pastime. Despite what some will say you can’t divide humanity into black and white, straight or gay or even male or female. In all cases there are people in between. One of the most ridiculous books in recent years was entitled “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” by “Dr” John Gray. To my shame I have a copy of this fatuous book beside me as I write this. No, I didn’t pay for it. Nor did I steal it.
I put the “Dr” in quotes for the simple reason that he doesn’t have a real doctorate. His obtained his PhD from Colombia Pacific University, a now closed diploma mill. I know I risk being accused of an “ad hominem” attack but can you trust the work of a person who buys a fake degree and who got his first two degrees from that fabulous old fraud, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi?
Whether you can or not you can certainly reject his ridiculously simplistic, crude and wholly unscientific idea that men are basically cavemen and women are conversationalists and that the way they communicate is radically different. Some may argue that I’m also being simplistic but too bad. Simplistic ideas can only be described simplistically.
Of course I’m not going to deny that there are differences between women and men, between girls and boys, of course there are. No matter how strong our liberal convictions may be, anyone who’s had kids knows that at least part of the nature of girls and boys is biological. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give them all equal opportunities and expose them to the same experiences and influences, but it genuinely helps to understand the differences that affect them.
I suggest that instead of reading fake, pseudoscientific claptrap like Gray’s book you read instead a book by Steven Pinker called The Blank Slate (available in all good book shops or online). My favourite quote from the book (also beside me as I write and this one I DID pay for) discusses the differences between men and woman and goes like this:
A recent study, published in Science, and conducted by the University of British Columbia in Canada looked at the two types of thinking that humans demonstrate. The first is intuitive, the other analytical. The intuitive process makes snap judgments based on “mental shortcuts”, the analytical process is the one that takes longer to consider things in a more “reasoned” manner. The Los Angeles Times gave one of the questions the study had used as an example. See how you answer it.
We all have both of these thought processes and each of them has their role to play. When our distant ancestors were in the bush and they heard a rustling sound from behind the grass they had to act intuitively. They didn’t have the time to think analytically, it could be a lion, they had to act intuitively. Analytical thinking in those circumstances only benefits the hungry lion. Analytical thinking is good when you have the time to indulge in it.
The focus of this study was controversial to some. It looked at religious belief and found that people who think more analytically were less likely to be religious. Religious belief was much more often found in people who thought more intuitively.
What this means for religious belief I’ll leave up to you. It doesn’t mean religion is right or wrong, it just helps us to understand where beliefs based on faith come from. It’s clear that they certainly don’t come from reason.
Crudely dividing humanity into “types” is always a very dangerous pastime. Despite what some will say you can’t divide humanity into black and white, straight or gay or even male or female. In all cases there are people in between. One of the most ridiculous books in recent years was entitled “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” by “Dr” John Gray. To my shame I have a copy of this fatuous book beside me as I write this. No, I didn’t pay for it. Nor did I steal it.
I put the “Dr” in quotes for the simple reason that he doesn’t have a real doctorate. His obtained his PhD from Colombia Pacific University, a now closed diploma mill. I know I risk being accused of an “ad hominem” attack but can you trust the work of a person who buys a fake degree and who got his first two degrees from that fabulous old fraud, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi?
Whether you can or not you can certainly reject his ridiculously simplistic, crude and wholly unscientific idea that men are basically cavemen and women are conversationalists and that the way they communicate is radically different. Some may argue that I’m also being simplistic but too bad. Simplistic ideas can only be described simplistically.
Of course I’m not going to deny that there are differences between women and men, between girls and boys, of course there are. No matter how strong our liberal convictions may be, anyone who’s had kids knows that at least part of the nature of girls and boys is biological. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give them all equal opportunities and expose them to the same experiences and influences, but it genuinely helps to understand the differences that affect them.
“So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species.”The evidence is that the differences between the minds of men and women are trivial at most and are only based on averages. Although men tend to be slightly better at three-dimensional reasoning than women this is only on average. There are plenty of women who can easily reverse a car, just slightly more men. There are plenty of men who demonstrate empathy, just more empathetic women. The most interesting difference is that on many measures men are more varied than women and are more often found at the extremes. Male mathematical geniuses outnumber their female counterparts but there are also many more men and boys with autism than girls.
A recent study, published in Science, and conducted by the University of British Columbia in Canada looked at the two types of thinking that humans demonstrate. The first is intuitive, the other analytical. The intuitive process makes snap judgments based on “mental shortcuts”, the analytical process is the one that takes longer to consider things in a more “reasoned” manner. The Los Angeles Times gave one of the questions the study had used as an example. See how you answer it.
“A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”Most people intuitively respond by saying the ball costs 10 cents but it’s only when they think analytically that they realize their mistake. The answer is 5 cents. Go back and think about it again if you doubt this.
We all have both of these thought processes and each of them has their role to play. When our distant ancestors were in the bush and they heard a rustling sound from behind the grass they had to act intuitively. They didn’t have the time to think analytically, it could be a lion, they had to act intuitively. Analytical thinking in those circumstances only benefits the hungry lion. Analytical thinking is good when you have the time to indulge in it.
The focus of this study was controversial to some. It looked at religious belief and found that people who think more analytically were less likely to be religious. Religious belief was much more often found in people who thought more intuitively.
What this means for religious belief I’ll leave up to you. It doesn’t mean religion is right or wrong, it just helps us to understand where beliefs based on faith come from. It’s clear that they certainly don’t come from reason.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Things we don't understand. Yet.
One of the most powerful words in the scientific vocabulary is “yet”. As in “We don’t know the answer to that question. Yet.”
It’s one of the biggest challenges that the opponents of science face, trying to understand how scientists and the followers of the scientific approach can cope with not knowing things. It’s particularly hard for those followers of belief systems who offer fake certainty, all-encompassing but wrong explanations for life’s challenges and a bogus absence of doubt.
In fact science actually welcomes doubt and uncertainty. After all if the scientific method provided all the answers it would simply stop. There’d be nothing left to do, no more findings to find, no more fun to have.
The greatest of all the uncertainties we face at the moment is also the simplest to understand. Where the hell is everything?
Our current understanding of the universe suggests that most of the matter out there in the universe is missing. The way the galaxies are moving in relation to each other suggests that there should be a lot more “stuff” out there than we can see. Only a huge amount of missing matter could explain why the galaxies are gravitationally attracted to each other as strongly as they are. We’re pretty sure it’s out there somewhere but we just can’t see it. That’s why it’s called “dark”.
And it IS a big chunk. The mathematics suggests that something over 80% of all the matter that exists is this invisible, dark matter.
This is the biggest puzzle in physics at the moment and astronomers and theoretical physicists all over the world are doing their best to come up with a suggestion about what this stuff might be. The current consensus is that it’s not matter that’s simply hiding, it must be something entirely new, something that we simply don’t know how to detect. Yet.
For scientists this is as good as it gets. The uncertainty, this gap in humanity’s knowledge is the sexiest thing they can imagine. In order to find this dark matter they’ll need to develop new theories, new experiments and new observations that can help us solve the problem. They’re going to have to push themselves and their imaginations to the limits.
A good example of a problem that was eventually solved was the seemingly bizarre behavior of the Pioneer space probes. These were launched in the early 1970s to explore the outer planets and achieved spectacular results. After this was over a strange thing happened. As these probes disappeared into the depths of space it was noticed that they were slowing down a bit more than expected. The mission controllers knew that this would happen a bit because of the combined gravitational pull of the Sun and the planets but their calculations couldn’t explain why it was slowing down as much as it was.
A huge variety of explanations have been proposed but none seemed quite right. Scientists were puzzled and didn’t have a good explanation. Yet.
Now they have. After trawling through vast amounts of data they’ve worked out a very persuasive explanation. It’s not interplanetary material, it’s not aliens, in fact it’s nothing extraordinary at all. The solution is almost mundane but it’s still elegant. It turns out that the on-board power generators, like most power sources, radiate small amounts of heat, but the heat on the Pioneer probes wasn’t radiating equally in all directions. More thermal radiation was shining forwards, in the direction of travel, than backwards towards the Sun. It’s as if the probe was shining a torch ahead of itself. That tiny amount of “photon pressure” accounts for the tiny deceleration of the Pioneer probe.
I think this is a very good example of how a puzzle was eventually solved using old-fashioned scientific methods. The answer remained unknown for a while but eventually it was resolved. Like they all will, sooner or later. However, there is a point that it’s critical to understand. Unlike some so-called scientists in the distant past, who predicted that one day ALL scientific problems will be solved, I don’t agree. For every problem that science answers, at least one more emerges. It’s a constant struggle against ignorance. It’s also a constant fight against the peddlers of deliberate ignorance like religious fundamentalists, the peddlers so-called “alternative” medicine and the quacks who want your money.
One day we’ll beat them. Just not yet.
It’s one of the biggest challenges that the opponents of science face, trying to understand how scientists and the followers of the scientific approach can cope with not knowing things. It’s particularly hard for those followers of belief systems who offer fake certainty, all-encompassing but wrong explanations for life’s challenges and a bogus absence of doubt.
In fact science actually welcomes doubt and uncertainty. After all if the scientific method provided all the answers it would simply stop. There’d be nothing left to do, no more findings to find, no more fun to have.
The greatest of all the uncertainties we face at the moment is also the simplest to understand. Where the hell is everything?
 |
| c/o Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter |
And it IS a big chunk. The mathematics suggests that something over 80% of all the matter that exists is this invisible, dark matter.
This is the biggest puzzle in physics at the moment and astronomers and theoretical physicists all over the world are doing their best to come up with a suggestion about what this stuff might be. The current consensus is that it’s not matter that’s simply hiding, it must be something entirely new, something that we simply don’t know how to detect. Yet.
For scientists this is as good as it gets. The uncertainty, this gap in humanity’s knowledge is the sexiest thing they can imagine. In order to find this dark matter they’ll need to develop new theories, new experiments and new observations that can help us solve the problem. They’re going to have to push themselves and their imaginations to the limits.
A huge variety of explanations have been proposed but none seemed quite right. Scientists were puzzled and didn’t have a good explanation. Yet.
Now they have. After trawling through vast amounts of data they’ve worked out a very persuasive explanation. It’s not interplanetary material, it’s not aliens, in fact it’s nothing extraordinary at all. The solution is almost mundane but it’s still elegant. It turns out that the on-board power generators, like most power sources, radiate small amounts of heat, but the heat on the Pioneer probes wasn’t radiating equally in all directions. More thermal radiation was shining forwards, in the direction of travel, than backwards towards the Sun. It’s as if the probe was shining a torch ahead of itself. That tiny amount of “photon pressure” accounts for the tiny deceleration of the Pioneer probe.
I think this is a very good example of how a puzzle was eventually solved using old-fashioned scientific methods. The answer remained unknown for a while but eventually it was resolved. Like they all will, sooner or later. However, there is a point that it’s critical to understand. Unlike some so-called scientists in the distant past, who predicted that one day ALL scientific problems will be solved, I don’t agree. For every problem that science answers, at least one more emerges. It’s a constant struggle against ignorance. It’s also a constant fight against the peddlers of deliberate ignorance like religious fundamentalists, the peddlers so-called “alternative” medicine and the quacks who want your money.
One day we’ll beat them. Just not yet.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Weekend Post - The science and pseudoscience of weight-loss
In all the areas of health science you’ll undoubtedly find the largest quantities of claptrap, hogwash and nonsense in the marketing of weight-loss products.
Let’s start with the basics. Despite what many so-called experts and all the charlatans and frauds will tell you, there is only one way to lose weight. Consume fewer calories than you expend. That’s it, that’s all there is to it. The best way to use excess calories is to take some exercise, the best way to reduce the number you take in is to swallow less of them.
A recent study in the USA confirmed this. Surveying over 4,000 overweight adults they examined the strategies they used to lose weight and the success or failure they experienced. The only successful strategies they found were reducing fat in the diet, increasing exercise, taking certain medications prescribed by a doctor and joining a formal weight loss program. Nothing else worked. Buying “over the counter” products achieved precisely nothing.
The other key piece of truth about sustained weight loss is that it’s never easy. It takes time for this approach to work and if you want the benefits to last you need to make these changes permanently. Long-term weight-loss requires a change in lifestyle. In the US study 63% of the sample were trying to lose weight but only 40% reported losing more than 5% of their weight and only 20% of them lost more than 10%.
This is why you see such a wealth of gibberish from fraudsters offering faster solutions or solutions that require no effort. Most of us want to avoid the hard work.
Anyone who uses Facebook may have recently seen an advertisement for "HCG Ultra Diet Drops" showing a picture of two small medicine bottles. These drops, the suppliers claim, have some remarkable qualities. They claim that if you buy these the drops you can:
This is, of course, complete nonsense. HCG is a hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin, that is produced by women during pregnancy but also by a growing embryo and by its placenta. As a result of some pretty dubious logic an otherwise respectable scientist, Albert Simeons, came up with a theory half a century ago that small doses of HCG, in conjunction with an extremely low calorie diet could aid weight loss. The obvious observation is that it was the absence of calories that achieved the weight loss, not the hormone but obvious facts have never deterred frauds from selling bogus cures.
The problem with this theory about HCG is simple. It’s not true. There is precisely no evidence that it is effective. Various trials have shown that it has absolutely no effect whatsoever.
What’s more the US Food and Drug Administration have instructed several companies marketing HCG products for weight-loss to stop it. They’ve also issued public warnings, one of which described the products as “Fraudulent HCG Products for Weight Loss” and another that was entitled “HCG Diet Products Are Illegal”. They say, very clearly, that “HCG products marketed as weight loss aids are unproven and illegal”. Well they are in the USA but that doesn’t stop the crooks marketing them here in Africa.
Of course one option for the fraudsters is to market these bogus products as “homeopathic” which would mean they contain no HCG at all. That’s what they say in their advertisement but it’s not what they claim when you ask them. When I emailed the Facebook advertiser, who’s based in Namibia, she told me that her drops do indeed:
Let’s start with the basics. Despite what many so-called experts and all the charlatans and frauds will tell you, there is only one way to lose weight. Consume fewer calories than you expend. That’s it, that’s all there is to it. The best way to use excess calories is to take some exercise, the best way to reduce the number you take in is to swallow less of them.
A recent study in the USA confirmed this. Surveying over 4,000 overweight adults they examined the strategies they used to lose weight and the success or failure they experienced. The only successful strategies they found were reducing fat in the diet, increasing exercise, taking certain medications prescribed by a doctor and joining a formal weight loss program. Nothing else worked. Buying “over the counter” products achieved precisely nothing.
The other key piece of truth about sustained weight loss is that it’s never easy. It takes time for this approach to work and if you want the benefits to last you need to make these changes permanently. Long-term weight-loss requires a change in lifestyle. In the US study 63% of the sample were trying to lose weight but only 40% reported losing more than 5% of their weight and only 20% of them lost more than 10%.
This is why you see such a wealth of gibberish from fraudsters offering faster solutions or solutions that require no effort. Most of us want to avoid the hard work.
"Loose 0.4kg to 1kg per day safely with an all natural homeopathic product."Firstly that claim is just stupid. It’s impossible to lose 1kg per day, let alone safely. They go further and suggest that:
"HCG is like no other diet you have tried before. It burns the unwanted, deep tissue fat that no other diet can reach but leaves structural and normal fat."
This is, of course, complete nonsense. HCG is a hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin, that is produced by women during pregnancy but also by a growing embryo and by its placenta. As a result of some pretty dubious logic an otherwise respectable scientist, Albert Simeons, came up with a theory half a century ago that small doses of HCG, in conjunction with an extremely low calorie diet could aid weight loss. The obvious observation is that it was the absence of calories that achieved the weight loss, not the hormone but obvious facts have never deterred frauds from selling bogus cures.
The problem with this theory about HCG is simple. It’s not true. There is precisely no evidence that it is effective. Various trials have shown that it has absolutely no effect whatsoever.
What’s more the US Food and Drug Administration have instructed several companies marketing HCG products for weight-loss to stop it. They’ve also issued public warnings, one of which described the products as “Fraudulent HCG Products for Weight Loss” and another that was entitled “HCG Diet Products Are Illegal”. They say, very clearly, that “HCG products marketed as weight loss aids are unproven and illegal”. Well they are in the USA but that doesn’t stop the crooks marketing them here in Africa.
Of course one option for the fraudsters is to market these bogus products as “homeopathic” which would mean they contain no HCG at all. That’s what they say in their advertisement but it’s not what they claim when you ask them. When I emailed the Facebook advertiser, who’s based in Namibia, she told me that her drops do indeed:
"contain the HCG hormone and is a real HCG product. The market is being flooded with fake HCG products but HCG Ultra Diet Drops are not one of them."So it’s clear. Anyone selling these drops in the USA would be fined or put behind bars but, as always, they think they can get away with it in Africa. Not only are these HCG drops useless, they’re peddled by charlatans, crooks and frauds. Isn’t it time that they were stopped from selling dangerous, pseudoscientific miracle products here as well?
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Weekend Post - Straight or gay? Why?
I was asked recently, as someone who firstly has an interest in science, but also had a brief academic background in psychology, why some people are gay. I confessed that I wasn’t entirely sure but the answer can probably be found by also asking why other people are straight.
It’s a bit like asking why some people are left-handed. You can’t separate the question from it’s sibling, why are most people right-handed?
The problem with the question is that there are many influential bodies and belief systems who think they know the answer, not from a scientific point of view, but from a “so-called” moral one. Unfortunately that’s not good enough for a scientist. A scientist is interested in evidence, not pre-formed opinions based on faith, ancient texts or something instructed by someone in pretended authority. A scientist, and indeed anyone interested in the truth, will actually be interested in facts, not opinions, whoever they come from.
The first fact that has to be faced when considering homosexuality is that it’s by no means a new phenomenon. There are records of same sex attraction and activity as far back as historical records go. It existed on every continent, including Africa, and certainly before colonialism reared it’s ugly head. There are historical records of established same-sex relationships and also more fluid attitudes towards marriage in countries as far apart as Egypt, Nigeria and Lesotho. It’s certainly NOT something new, and certainly not something introduced to Africa any more than colonialism gave us left-handedness.
Africa is no exception. Similar histories can be found in every other continent. What’s more it’s not even just humans that do it. Same-sex behavior has been recorded in species as varied as penguins, giraffe, dolphins, lions and elephants. However the most enthusiastically homosexual of our animal relatives are the Bonobo chimpanzees. Bonobos are renowned for being incredibly sexually active. They also don’t seem to care terribly what sex their partner is and use sexual behavior for a variety of social purposes, not the least of which is having some fun. Bonobos are also, whether people like it or not, our closest animal relatives. They’re not much more than a very distant cousin.
Given all of this it’s reasonable to assume that homosexuality isn’t a recent invention, not a product of colonialism and not foreign to Africa. It’s remarkably similar to being left-handed.
So why are most people straight and some gay? The simple answer is that nobody knows but what is well accepted is that it’s certainly not a choice that people make. A person’s sexual orientation seems to be a core part of their identity, again just like being left-handed. I remember a teacher in my primary school beating a child with a ruler on the back of her left hand every time she wrote or drew with that hand in a feeble effort to make her right-handed. That was just as unsuccessful as the efforts by certain evangelical church groups to “correct” or “reform” homosexuals. It simply doesn’t work. All the evidence suggests that this just causes nothing but unnecessary hardship and guilt to the recipients of the efforts made to change them.
The common question in psychology about the origins of any personal attribute is “nature versus nurture”. What in your environment or in your body’s development brought about that attribute? Much as the political left would like us to believe that all things are environmental and the right’s feeling that it’s all fate, life isn’t that simple. A small number of things are wholly environmental, such a boy’s preference for blue and a girl’s for pink, others are purely innate like eye color or handedness. Everything else seems to be a complex mixture. Despite this the current evidence is that sexual orientation is almost entirely innate. You’re simply born that way. That’s known, but the exact mechanism isn’t. It might be genetic, something you inherit, but where the evolutionary advantage comes from we don’t know. It’s certainly no advantage not to be able to have children although almost every gay man or lesbian I know has children from an earlier heterosexual relationship. They've certainly passed on their genes.
It might instead be a group genetic phenomenon where the genes of the group have to be considered. One study showed that the female relatives of homosexuals, the ones connected to the person's mother were more likely to have lots of children, but that was just one study.
A lot of current research is looking at the hormonal influences on babies as they develop in their mother’s womb. One fascinating observation is that gay men are more likely to have older brothers than straight men. This doesn’t mean that big brothers turn their little brothers gay but that as a mother gestates more and more boys something might be changing slightly in her body as time goes by. The most bizarre element of this is that this effect is only apparent when the younger brother is right-handed.
So in short we don’t currently know exactly how it works. But we do know this. Being gay or straight isn’t a choice. No normal, sane person decides what sexual orientation to have. It’s just the way they are.
It’s a bit like asking why some people are left-handed. You can’t separate the question from it’s sibling, why are most people right-handed?
The problem with the question is that there are many influential bodies and belief systems who think they know the answer, not from a scientific point of view, but from a “so-called” moral one. Unfortunately that’s not good enough for a scientist. A scientist is interested in evidence, not pre-formed opinions based on faith, ancient texts or something instructed by someone in pretended authority. A scientist, and indeed anyone interested in the truth, will actually be interested in facts, not opinions, whoever they come from.
The first fact that has to be faced when considering homosexuality is that it’s by no means a new phenomenon. There are records of same sex attraction and activity as far back as historical records go. It existed on every continent, including Africa, and certainly before colonialism reared it’s ugly head. There are historical records of established same-sex relationships and also more fluid attitudes towards marriage in countries as far apart as Egypt, Nigeria and Lesotho. It’s certainly NOT something new, and certainly not something introduced to Africa any more than colonialism gave us left-handedness.
Africa is no exception. Similar histories can be found in every other continent. What’s more it’s not even just humans that do it. Same-sex behavior has been recorded in species as varied as penguins, giraffe, dolphins, lions and elephants. However the most enthusiastically homosexual of our animal relatives are the Bonobo chimpanzees. Bonobos are renowned for being incredibly sexually active. They also don’t seem to care terribly what sex their partner is and use sexual behavior for a variety of social purposes, not the least of which is having some fun. Bonobos are also, whether people like it or not, our closest animal relatives. They’re not much more than a very distant cousin.
Given all of this it’s reasonable to assume that homosexuality isn’t a recent invention, not a product of colonialism and not foreign to Africa. It’s remarkably similar to being left-handed.
So why are most people straight and some gay? The simple answer is that nobody knows but what is well accepted is that it’s certainly not a choice that people make. A person’s sexual orientation seems to be a core part of their identity, again just like being left-handed. I remember a teacher in my primary school beating a child with a ruler on the back of her left hand every time she wrote or drew with that hand in a feeble effort to make her right-handed. That was just as unsuccessful as the efforts by certain evangelical church groups to “correct” or “reform” homosexuals. It simply doesn’t work. All the evidence suggests that this just causes nothing but unnecessary hardship and guilt to the recipients of the efforts made to change them.
The common question in psychology about the origins of any personal attribute is “nature versus nurture”. What in your environment or in your body’s development brought about that attribute? Much as the political left would like us to believe that all things are environmental and the right’s feeling that it’s all fate, life isn’t that simple. A small number of things are wholly environmental, such a boy’s preference for blue and a girl’s for pink, others are purely innate like eye color or handedness. Everything else seems to be a complex mixture. Despite this the current evidence is that sexual orientation is almost entirely innate. You’re simply born that way. That’s known, but the exact mechanism isn’t. It might be genetic, something you inherit, but where the evolutionary advantage comes from we don’t know. It’s certainly no advantage not to be able to have children although almost every gay man or lesbian I know has children from an earlier heterosexual relationship. They've certainly passed on their genes.
It might instead be a group genetic phenomenon where the genes of the group have to be considered. One study showed that the female relatives of homosexuals, the ones connected to the person's mother were more likely to have lots of children, but that was just one study.
A lot of current research is looking at the hormonal influences on babies as they develop in their mother’s womb. One fascinating observation is that gay men are more likely to have older brothers than straight men. This doesn’t mean that big brothers turn their little brothers gay but that as a mother gestates more and more boys something might be changing slightly in her body as time goes by. The most bizarre element of this is that this effect is only apparent when the younger brother is right-handed.
So in short we don’t currently know exactly how it works. But we do know this. Being gay or straight isn’t a choice. No normal, sane person decides what sexual orientation to have. It’s just the way they are.
Sunday, April 08, 2012
Weekend Post. We're not alone
We’re not alone
No, I don’t mean that aliens have been found, either here on Earth or anywhere else. Despite what many of the lunatics on the internet will tell you, there’s no evidence that aliens are here on Earth. Much as I like science fiction movies about alien invasions and extra-terrestrial conspiracies I recognize that they’re just fiction. Honest, they are. Also, there’s precisely no credible evidence that they’ve EVER been here. Despite what some will say, the stories about us being created by visitors from other parts of the universe are just hogwash.
However, our planet is not alone. As well as our neighbor planets in our solar system, the other planets we see in the sky, from Mercury out as far as Neptune, it seems that other stars also have planets, perhaps even some like ours.
For several years astronomers have been able to detect signs of planets orbiting distant stars. These stars, although they are close by galactic standards, are nevertheless staggeringly far away. I suspect that it’s impossible to truly comprehend how far away they are but let’s try.
A beam of light travels at an astonishing 300,000 km/s. It could travel round the Earth seven times in a second. The light you see reflected by the moon took just over a second to reach your eyes. The light from the Sun took 8 minutes to reach you. At the moment the light from Venus takes just over 5 minutes. Light from Jupiter, the biggest planet in our system, and the one you can currently see to the left of Venus just after dark, took about 45 minutes to get here. [See here for fantastically nerdy live distances to our neighbours in our solar system.]
So far everything is measured in seconds and minutes. When you consider the distances to other stars the numbers become even more extraordinary. The light from the nearest star to the Sun took more than 4 years to get here.
These other planets that have been discovered are even further away. The nearest that’s been discovered is more than 20 light-years away, meaning that the light from it takes 20 years to get here. It’s more than a million times further away from us than the Sun.
Despite them being so far away, astronomers do have firm evidence that they’re there. A small proportion has actually been seen directly but the majority have only given us indirect evidence of their existence. Some can be identified because as they rotate around their distant star they regularly pass in front of it and the amount of light we see dips slightly as a result. Others can be inferred because as they rotate around their star the star wobbles very slightly. Our most sensitive instruments can detect that miniscule wobble.
So far, using a variety of techniques, astronomers have detected over 750 of these “extrasolar planets” orbiting over 700 stars. Many of them are so massive that they’re probably gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn and are probably uninhabitable by any form of life we’d be familiar with. Others appear to be so close to their star that they’d too hot to support life. Others are probably too cold.
Although it might sound egocentric (or perhaps geocentric?), most scientists thinking about these things expect that life can only exist in conditions a bit like those on Earth, most importantly on planets where liquid water can exist. They’re looking for extrasolar planets that are just the right distance from their star, in the so-called "habitable zone". So far they’ve found just a handful.
However a recent survey of the galaxy suggests that we should expect to find more. A lot more.
The majority of stars in our galaxy are “red dwarves”, stars are generally smaller than our sun and that burn more slowly. A survey of just over 100 of these stars showed that nine of them had rocky planets like ours circulating them. Given that our galaxy contains something like 160 billion red dwarf stars and that our methods of detecting planets remain primitive, the number of planets is probably going to be measured in billions. Some have estimated that it might be as much as 40% of them. They reckon that perhaps a hundred are within 30 light years of us.
Even if a small proportion are in the realm where liquid water is possible that still leaves a very large number where life as we know it is possible. Given that life seems so abundant on Earth it would be surprising if it didn’t emerge elsewhere. We might never meet them but that doesn’t mean there aren’t aliens reading a newspaper on a distant planet right now, just like you.
No, I don’t mean that aliens have been found, either here on Earth or anywhere else. Despite what many of the lunatics on the internet will tell you, there’s no evidence that aliens are here on Earth. Much as I like science fiction movies about alien invasions and extra-terrestrial conspiracies I recognize that they’re just fiction. Honest, they are. Also, there’s precisely no credible evidence that they’ve EVER been here. Despite what some will say, the stories about us being created by visitors from other parts of the universe are just hogwash.
However, our planet is not alone. As well as our neighbor planets in our solar system, the other planets we see in the sky, from Mercury out as far as Neptune, it seems that other stars also have planets, perhaps even some like ours.
For several years astronomers have been able to detect signs of planets orbiting distant stars. These stars, although they are close by galactic standards, are nevertheless staggeringly far away. I suspect that it’s impossible to truly comprehend how far away they are but let’s try.
A beam of light travels at an astonishing 300,000 km/s. It could travel round the Earth seven times in a second. The light you see reflected by the moon took just over a second to reach your eyes. The light from the Sun took 8 minutes to reach you. At the moment the light from Venus takes just over 5 minutes. Light from Jupiter, the biggest planet in our system, and the one you can currently see to the left of Venus just after dark, took about 45 minutes to get here. [See here for fantastically nerdy live distances to our neighbours in our solar system.]
So far everything is measured in seconds and minutes. When you consider the distances to other stars the numbers become even more extraordinary. The light from the nearest star to the Sun took more than 4 years to get here.
These other planets that have been discovered are even further away. The nearest that’s been discovered is more than 20 light-years away, meaning that the light from it takes 20 years to get here. It’s more than a million times further away from us than the Sun.
Despite them being so far away, astronomers do have firm evidence that they’re there. A small proportion has actually been seen directly but the majority have only given us indirect evidence of their existence. Some can be identified because as they rotate around their distant star they regularly pass in front of it and the amount of light we see dips slightly as a result. Others can be inferred because as they rotate around their star the star wobbles very slightly. Our most sensitive instruments can detect that miniscule wobble.
So far, using a variety of techniques, astronomers have detected over 750 of these “extrasolar planets” orbiting over 700 stars. Many of them are so massive that they’re probably gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn and are probably uninhabitable by any form of life we’d be familiar with. Others appear to be so close to their star that they’d too hot to support life. Others are probably too cold.
Although it might sound egocentric (or perhaps geocentric?), most scientists thinking about these things expect that life can only exist in conditions a bit like those on Earth, most importantly on planets where liquid water can exist. They’re looking for extrasolar planets that are just the right distance from their star, in the so-called "habitable zone". So far they’ve found just a handful.
However a recent survey of the galaxy suggests that we should expect to find more. A lot more.
The majority of stars in our galaxy are “red dwarves”, stars are generally smaller than our sun and that burn more slowly. A survey of just over 100 of these stars showed that nine of them had rocky planets like ours circulating them. Given that our galaxy contains something like 160 billion red dwarf stars and that our methods of detecting planets remain primitive, the number of planets is probably going to be measured in billions. Some have estimated that it might be as much as 40% of them. They reckon that perhaps a hundred are within 30 light years of us.
Even if a small proportion are in the realm where liquid water is possible that still leaves a very large number where life as we know it is possible. Given that life seems so abundant on Earth it would be surprising if it didn’t emerge elsewhere. We might never meet them but that doesn’t mean there aren’t aliens reading a newspaper on a distant planet right now, just like you.
Monday, April 02, 2012
I get a quantum comment
Following Saturday's Weekend Post Science article on "Quantum claptrap", I received an email.
It went like this:
I'm not sure that I agree with "nothing in this world is absolutely certain". There are things I think we can agree that are convincing enough to be "certain". 2 + 2 = 4, for instance. Gravity exists. Evolution happens. X-rays exist. Precisely how how we explain these certain things might change but that doesn't affect the certainty that they exist.
The QXCI machine is a piece of worthless but expensive rubbish. Of that I'm certain.
It went like this:
"hey i am following you, i have just read this article on weekend post.I feel absolutely no need to be tolerant of rubbish. The QXCI machine and almost everything you see in the media containing the word "quantum" is rubbish.
ok, my comment is that your using words like rubbish to discredit views you don't agree with is a bit intolerant. nothing in this world is absolutely certain including even our precious science. wisdom whispers: "when you feel most certain, you should doubt yourself more". pride leads leads to a rapid fall, lucifer can testify to that."
I'm not sure that I agree with "nothing in this world is absolutely certain". There are things I think we can agree that are convincing enough to be "certain". 2 + 2 = 4, for instance. Gravity exists. Evolution happens. X-rays exist. Precisely how how we explain these certain things might change but that doesn't affect the certainty that they exist.
The QXCI machine is a piece of worthless but expensive rubbish. Of that I'm certain.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Quantum claptrap
There are certain words that whenever you hear them you should expect to be exposed to nonsense. They include “lifestyle”, “authentic” and “opportunity”. Whenever you see or hear these words you can rest assured that very soon someone is likely to ask you to separate yourself from your hard-earned money.
However the word that irritates me the most, because it’s almost ALWAYS used to talk rubbish is “quantum”. About half the time it’ll be news stories in the papers or on TV about a new discovery in the science of quantum mechanics, the study of sub-atomic particles. Almost always these news stories are rubbish. Some miniscule finding from a laboratory will be misinterpreted by reporters with no understanding of science and before you know it the papers will be full of stories of time travel, human invisibility and creating black holes in Switzerland. I’m not making any of these up by the way, all of these have been mentioned in recent news stories. Not one of them is a true representation of what really happened and is likely to happen.
That’s partially because quantum mechanics is difficult to understand. It’s counter-intuitive. Much of it seems to contradict our common sense. It relies on assumptions that are difficult for us to understand. You need to accept that light, for instance, is simultaneously a wave and a particle. It relies on us imagining staggeringly low or high temperatures, speeds and pressures. Like much of advanced mathematics it relies on us trying to imagine the unimaginable. But that doesn’t make it untrue.
This is usually the time that religious people start making comparisons between advanced physics and religious faith. Both, they will say, rely on belief in things that can’t be seen. This is a distortion and a rather desperate attempt to steal legitimacy for fictitious beliefs. The difference is simple. Even though quantum physics relies on imagining unimaginable things there is concrete evidence that they are true. The satellite navigation device in your car, your cellphone, the computer you use at work and the devices in hospitals that diagnose and treat cancer all rely on quantum physics. All of these things came from our understanding, and the FACTS of physics. Although we can’t see quantum events ourselves we can see their effects. It’s like a police officer investigating a car accident. He wasn’t there at the time of the collision but he can see the skid marks on the road, the trail of broken glass and where the broken vehicles ended up. He can work out what must have happened. In exactly the same way scientists can see the real-life effects of sub-atomic particle collisions.
Unfortunately that’s not the only time you see the word “quantum” being abused. The other time is when quacks, charlatans and frauds try and use the word to describe their bogus devices, treatments and cures.
At various places around Botswana there are bogus “therapists” offering their health-related services using a device often called the QXCI. This is no more than a box of simple electronics that makes some remarkable claims. The initials stand for “Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface”. There’s that word. You can tell this is going to be claptrap, can’t you?
A South African web site that markets this device claims that it:
This is all monumental claptrap, rubbish and nonsense and the purveyors of this hogwash must know this.
They’re not the only ones. The importation of these devices is banned by US authorities because of the dangerous claims the producers make. A spokesman for the FDA said “This is pure, blatant fraud. The claims are baloney. These people prey in many cases on consumers who are desperate in seeking cures for very serious diseases.”
As I’ve mentioned before, the inventor of this machine is the self-styled “Professor” Bill Nelson, an American with an impressive range of fake qualifications. Hilariously (you couldn’t make this up) Nelson also performs as a tranvestite singer under the name Desiré Dubounet and lives in Hungary, a fugitive from US justice, on the run from fraud charges.
This is a good example of the dangerous and fraudulent use the word “quantum”. It’s dangerous because of the chance someone with a real disease will use it instead of seeing a real doctor. It’s fraudulent because the purveyors of this silliness want your money in return for lying about their claim to be able to cure disease.
However the word that irritates me the most, because it’s almost ALWAYS used to talk rubbish is “quantum”. About half the time it’ll be news stories in the papers or on TV about a new discovery in the science of quantum mechanics, the study of sub-atomic particles. Almost always these news stories are rubbish. Some miniscule finding from a laboratory will be misinterpreted by reporters with no understanding of science and before you know it the papers will be full of stories of time travel, human invisibility and creating black holes in Switzerland. I’m not making any of these up by the way, all of these have been mentioned in recent news stories. Not one of them is a true representation of what really happened and is likely to happen.
That’s partially because quantum mechanics is difficult to understand. It’s counter-intuitive. Much of it seems to contradict our common sense. It relies on assumptions that are difficult for us to understand. You need to accept that light, for instance, is simultaneously a wave and a particle. It relies on us imagining staggeringly low or high temperatures, speeds and pressures. Like much of advanced mathematics it relies on us trying to imagine the unimaginable. But that doesn’t make it untrue.
This is usually the time that religious people start making comparisons between advanced physics and religious faith. Both, they will say, rely on belief in things that can’t be seen. This is a distortion and a rather desperate attempt to steal legitimacy for fictitious beliefs. The difference is simple. Even though quantum physics relies on imagining unimaginable things there is concrete evidence that they are true. The satellite navigation device in your car, your cellphone, the computer you use at work and the devices in hospitals that diagnose and treat cancer all rely on quantum physics. All of these things came from our understanding, and the FACTS of physics. Although we can’t see quantum events ourselves we can see their effects. It’s like a police officer investigating a car accident. He wasn’t there at the time of the collision but he can see the skid marks on the road, the trail of broken glass and where the broken vehicles ended up. He can work out what must have happened. In exactly the same way scientists can see the real-life effects of sub-atomic particle collisions.
Unfortunately that’s not the only time you see the word “quantum” being abused. The other time is when quacks, charlatans and frauds try and use the word to describe their bogus devices, treatments and cures.
At various places around Botswana there are bogus “therapists” offering their health-related services using a device often called the QXCI. This is no more than a box of simple electronics that makes some remarkable claims. The initials stand for “Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface”. There’s that word. You can tell this is going to be claptrap, can’t you?
“is an incredibly acurate (sic) biofeedback stress reduction system, combining the best of biofeedback, stress reduction, Rife machines, homeopathic medicine, bioresonance, electro-acupuncture, computer technology and quantum physics”The web site explains how this device works. Its “multi-layer faclity enables dysfunction unravelling” which, they claim, is “equivalent to radonic operation”. Best of all it explains that “Most computers are binary: 1 or 0. Quantum software is trinary - basis for artificial intelligence”.
This is all monumental claptrap, rubbish and nonsense and the purveyors of this hogwash must know this.
They’re not the only ones. The importation of these devices is banned by US authorities because of the dangerous claims the producers make. A spokesman for the FDA said “This is pure, blatant fraud. The claims are baloney. These people prey in many cases on consumers who are desperate in seeking cures for very serious diseases.”
This is a good example of the dangerous and fraudulent use the word “quantum”. It’s dangerous because of the chance someone with a real disease will use it instead of seeing a real doctor. It’s fraudulent because the purveyors of this silliness want your money in return for lying about their claim to be able to cure disease.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Weekend Post - Einstein seems to have been right all along
I don’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed. It looks like Einstein’s theories are still safe. His suggestion that the speed of light can never be exceeded seems still to be true.
Last year, amongst huge fanfare, some Italian scientists published results suggesting they had been able to break one of the fundamental laws of nature. They claimed that they had managed to force a beam of particles to travel faster than the speed of light. Admittedly only very slightly faster than light, but even a little bit would have been enough. Their beam of neutrinos had travelled all the way from the CERN laboratory in Geneva across the border into Italy, a trip of 730km, and they had arrived 60 billionths of a second earlier than light would have covered the same distance. If this was true, if something really could travel faster than light, faster than 300,000 kilometers per second, then our understanding of the universe would have been wrong. After the results were announced the international media was full of headlines asking “Was Einstein wrong?” The internet remains full of conspiracy theorists, alien abduction theorists and every single psychotic-with-a-website who thought this vindicated their bizarre theories. This was a great day for them.
However the scientific world was split. A small number of scientists took the results and went on long, fantastic imaginative journeys. If this is true then reverse time travel is possible, we can reach the stars and every science fiction book you’ve ever read could become true. Well, that’s what the newspapers, TV news shows and the internet said.
The better scientists were skeptical. That is, of course, how scientists are MEANT to be. Just because another scientist has suggested something, that doesn’t make it true. The skeptics said that if this was shown to be true then clearly it’s remarkable but, they said, let’s slow down for a moment. Let’s see if these results are true before we jump to any conclusions. The results had to be exposed to the most critical, skeptical and demanding of all of science: peer review.
To their credit the Italian scientists did just that. They published their results and gave the international scientific community the opportunity to tear them to pieces. That’s the nature of the scientific process. You have an idea, you test it, you publish your results and your colleagues do their best to find a flaw in what you’ve done. It’s not a competition, it’s just a rigorous way of testing ideas. Most importantly you give other scientists the opportunity to try and repeat your experiment.
Here’s an experiment I did at home to illustrate this. Three members of my family all measured the height of my youngest son. They all did it in different rooms but using exactly the same technique. He stood against a wall, we rested a book on his head, marked his height against the wall and then measured the distance to the floor. The results were all different. All three measurements were slightly different. He hadn’t grown in between the measurements, gravity hadn’t changed and we all used the same tape measure. This crude experiment demonstrated that there are always tiny variations in experiments, tiny flaws, tiny mistakes that lead to tiny differences in results.
I’m not saying that the Italian scientists were this incompetent in their measurements, I’m just pointing out that experiments have to be repeated many times to be certain they’re measuring things correctly.
That has now happened. A different group of scientists at exactly the same lab in Italy have repeated the experiment. Remember that last time the neutrinos were a mere 60 billionths of a second faster than light. That’s one forty-thousandth faster than expected. This time? They travelled at exactly the same speed as light.
Of course it’s perfectly possible that this repeat of the experiment is wrong and the first one was correct. That’s why they should probably do it again. However, it’s safe to assume for now that Einstein’s theories and propositions are still ok for now. They’ve worked perfectly well for almost a century and they’re no reason to kick them out yet.
A spokesman for the lab, Dr Sandro Centro, sounds like a proper scientist to me. He told the BBC:
Last year, amongst huge fanfare, some Italian scientists published results suggesting they had been able to break one of the fundamental laws of nature. They claimed that they had managed to force a beam of particles to travel faster than the speed of light. Admittedly only very slightly faster than light, but even a little bit would have been enough. Their beam of neutrinos had travelled all the way from the CERN laboratory in Geneva across the border into Italy, a trip of 730km, and they had arrived 60 billionths of a second earlier than light would have covered the same distance. If this was true, if something really could travel faster than light, faster than 300,000 kilometers per second, then our understanding of the universe would have been wrong. After the results were announced the international media was full of headlines asking “Was Einstein wrong?” The internet remains full of conspiracy theorists, alien abduction theorists and every single psychotic-with-a-website who thought this vindicated their bizarre theories. This was a great day for them.
However the scientific world was split. A small number of scientists took the results and went on long, fantastic imaginative journeys. If this is true then reverse time travel is possible, we can reach the stars and every science fiction book you’ve ever read could become true. Well, that’s what the newspapers, TV news shows and the internet said.
The better scientists were skeptical. That is, of course, how scientists are MEANT to be. Just because another scientist has suggested something, that doesn’t make it true. The skeptics said that if this was shown to be true then clearly it’s remarkable but, they said, let’s slow down for a moment. Let’s see if these results are true before we jump to any conclusions. The results had to be exposed to the most critical, skeptical and demanding of all of science: peer review.
To their credit the Italian scientists did just that. They published their results and gave the international scientific community the opportunity to tear them to pieces. That’s the nature of the scientific process. You have an idea, you test it, you publish your results and your colleagues do their best to find a flaw in what you’ve done. It’s not a competition, it’s just a rigorous way of testing ideas. Most importantly you give other scientists the opportunity to try and repeat your experiment.
Here’s an experiment I did at home to illustrate this. Three members of my family all measured the height of my youngest son. They all did it in different rooms but using exactly the same technique. He stood against a wall, we rested a book on his head, marked his height against the wall and then measured the distance to the floor. The results were all different. All three measurements were slightly different. He hadn’t grown in between the measurements, gravity hadn’t changed and we all used the same tape measure. This crude experiment demonstrated that there are always tiny variations in experiments, tiny flaws, tiny mistakes that lead to tiny differences in results.
I’m not saying that the Italian scientists were this incompetent in their measurements, I’m just pointing out that experiments have to be repeated many times to be certain they’re measuring things correctly.
That has now happened. A different group of scientists at exactly the same lab in Italy have repeated the experiment. Remember that last time the neutrinos were a mere 60 billionths of a second faster than light. That’s one forty-thousandth faster than expected. This time? They travelled at exactly the same speed as light.
Of course it’s perfectly possible that this repeat of the experiment is wrong and the first one was correct. That’s why they should probably do it again. However, it’s safe to assume for now that Einstein’s theories and propositions are still ok for now. They’ve worked perfectly well for almost a century and they’re no reason to kick them out yet.
A spokesman for the lab, Dr Sandro Centro, sounds like a proper scientist to me. He told the BBC:
"We are completely compatible with the speed of light that we learn at school … In fact I was a little sceptical since the beginning … Now we are 100% sure that the speed of light is the speed of neutrinos."It looks like the alien, space travel and time travel fantasists will have to wait a little longer before their ideas come true. Perhaps a lot longer.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Weekend Post - You can't trust your eyes. Or your brain.
One of the most interesting areas of scientific investigation is the study of perception. I remember that as a teenager I became moderately obsessed by visual illusions and wondering how my brain could so easily be fooled.
The image here is a good example. Which of the two horizontal lines is longest? The surprising answer, even when you know it’s true, is that both horizontal lines are exactly the same length. But that’s not what your brain tells you. Your brain demonstrates quite how easily it can be fooled when it fails to correctly interpret this sort of illusion.
There are hundreds of similar examples of such illusions, some much more complicated than this one. They all exploit the sort of perceptual mechanisms that evolved over millions of years that might have been useful in the jungle or savannah where our species originated but aren’t useful any longer in the world of newspapers, smartphones and the Internet.
The great realization is that illusions like the “Müller-Lyer illusion” shown above are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not just our vision that can be deceived, it’s our entire brain. That’s when an illusion transforms itself into that much more dangerous animal, a delusion.
One of the most common delusions we can all easily experience is called “confirmation bias”. The Skeptic’s Dictionary describes this as “a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs.” More simply, it’s the mistake of noticing and remembering things that confirm our prejudices and ignoring, or simply not seeing the things that contradict them.
I had a conversation with someone not too long ago who suggested that religious believers are more charitable than non-believers. He seemed genuinely surprised when I pointed out that perhaps the two most charitable people in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett both describe themselves as agnostics. He admitted that he knew this but had “conveniently” forgotten it. I think it’s plausible that this was because these facts didn’t fit in with his worldview. Similarly, it’s easy enough for those of us who describe ourselves as atheists to forget that the vast majority of Catholic priests, for instance, are decent people and not child abusers. We remember what we find convenient to remember, not what’s inconvenient. That’s a delusion.
Another example is homeopathy. Every piece of scientific research into homeopathy has confirmed what common sense suggests. It’s nonsense and has no effect. However there are vast numbers of people who swear by it based on anecdotes like “I had a cold, took a homeopathic remedy and within about a week I was better!”
Of course they were better. That’s how colds work, they go away after about a week or 10 days all by themselves whether you take a bogus remedy or not. People forget that but remember the time that they took the useless homeopathic remedy. Believers in so-called complimentary therapies remember the times that the delusional beliefs were falsely “confirmed”.
We also make the common mistake of assuming that correlation implies causation. Because two things happen at the same time or in parallel we assume that they must be connected and one must cause the other. A good example is the observation that increases in medical knowledge in the last century have coincided with a dramatic increase in the number of deaths from cancer. Does this mean that better medicine causes cancer? Of course not, all that’s happening is that the greater lifespan brought about by better medicine has caused people to live longer and older people are much more likely to die of cancer. Cancer is an old person’s disease. Now that we’re much less likely to die from smallpox, typhoid or violence we’re dying of different things instead.
In the same way, the assumption that more and more older people are dying of cancer is somehow caused by the new presence of cellphone masts is another delusion. There is no evidence that cellphone “radiation” causes cancer. In fact the evidence suggests that it doesn’t but it’s extremely human to notice that your aged relative died shortly after the local mast was erected and that one must have caused the other. Tragically your aged relative was going to die anyway.
The good news is that simply knowing about human psychology goes a long way towards combatting these delusions. The better we understand how our brains work (and sometimes fail) the better we can avoid dangerous delusions.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Weekend Post - How good is your science and maths knowledge?
How good is your science and maths knowledge? I think the answer is simple. It’s not good enough.
There’s an online science knowledge quiz I found, hosted by the Pew Research Center, that asks visitors 12 fairly simple questions about science. None of the questions are tremendously difficult. They include questions such as “Antibiotics will kill viruses as well as bacteria. True or False?” and “Electrons are smaller than atoms. True or False?”
I know perfectly well that online surveys aren’t statistically sound, they certainly don’t represent the knowledge of the entire population but in this case I think the results tell us something. 46% of the people who completed the quiz didn’t know that antibiotics DON’T kill viruses. That’s presumably the same 46% of people who go to their doctor demanding antibiotics when they have a cold, not realizing that it will have precisely no effect.
More than half the people answering the questions did not know that electrons are smaller than atoms. Perhaps this isn’t as important as the ignorance about antibiotics and viruses but I still think it matters.
Like I said, this isn’t a representative survey of everyone in the world, just of those people who take the time to complete an American-hosted web quiz. However I suspect the results would be worse if we asked everyone else. The sort of person likely to complete the survey is someone already with access to technology, who can read English and who can understand how to click a mouse on a web page. They’re probably more science-savvy than most. It’s disappointing therefore that of all the people who completed the 12-question quiz, only 10% got every question correct.
A third of the visitors got fewer than half the questions right. The average score was between 7 and 8 out of 12 correct.
I think this is all very worrying. I’m not expecting everyone to have a comprehensive understanding of microbiology, quantum physics or stem cell research but these issues are becoming more and more important to humanity. Already we hear concerns expressed by politicians about threats of radiation from modern nuclear power stations, the perceived dangers of genetically modified foods and the risks from cellphone masts. I think the public needs to be better educated about these things so we can tell when a politician, a supposed expert or someone wanting our money makes scientific claims. We need a basic level of science knowledge to know when people talk nonsense. Like each of the three examples I gave above. All of those in fact pose no known danger but that’s not what you hear from so many so-called experts.
Of more immediate concern is our scandalously low level of mathematical understanding. I don’t know of any studies about our national levels of numeracy but the BBC recently reported on the National Numeracy campaign group in the UK. Their research showed that nearly half the working age population had numeracy skills no better than a child in primary school. They suggested that these people probably don’t even understand their own payslip at the end of the month. I don’t see a reason to suspect we’re any better in Botswana.
Chris Humphries, the chair of National Numeracy, said (and I completely agree with him):
The Chairman of the UK’s Commission for Employment and Skills, Sir Mike Rake, said:
There’s an online science knowledge quiz I found, hosted by the Pew Research Center, that asks visitors 12 fairly simple questions about science. None of the questions are tremendously difficult. They include questions such as “Antibiotics will kill viruses as well as bacteria. True or False?” and “Electrons are smaller than atoms. True or False?”
I know perfectly well that online surveys aren’t statistically sound, they certainly don’t represent the knowledge of the entire population but in this case I think the results tell us something. 46% of the people who completed the quiz didn’t know that antibiotics DON’T kill viruses. That’s presumably the same 46% of people who go to their doctor demanding antibiotics when they have a cold, not realizing that it will have precisely no effect.
More than half the people answering the questions did not know that electrons are smaller than atoms. Perhaps this isn’t as important as the ignorance about antibiotics and viruses but I still think it matters.
Like I said, this isn’t a representative survey of everyone in the world, just of those people who take the time to complete an American-hosted web quiz. However I suspect the results would be worse if we asked everyone else. The sort of person likely to complete the survey is someone already with access to technology, who can read English and who can understand how to click a mouse on a web page. They’re probably more science-savvy than most. It’s disappointing therefore that of all the people who completed the 12-question quiz, only 10% got every question correct.
I think this is all very worrying. I’m not expecting everyone to have a comprehensive understanding of microbiology, quantum physics or stem cell research but these issues are becoming more and more important to humanity. Already we hear concerns expressed by politicians about threats of radiation from modern nuclear power stations, the perceived dangers of genetically modified foods and the risks from cellphone masts. I think the public needs to be better educated about these things so we can tell when a politician, a supposed expert or someone wanting our money makes scientific claims. We need a basic level of science knowledge to know when people talk nonsense. Like each of the three examples I gave above. All of those in fact pose no known danger but that’s not what you hear from so many so-called experts.
Of more immediate concern is our scandalously low level of mathematical understanding. I don’t know of any studies about our national levels of numeracy but the BBC recently reported on the National Numeracy campaign group in the UK. Their research showed that nearly half the working age population had numeracy skills no better than a child in primary school. They suggested that these people probably don’t even understand their own payslip at the end of the month. I don’t see a reason to suspect we’re any better in Botswana.
Chris Humphries, the chair of National Numeracy, said (and I completely agree with him):
“It is simply inexcusable for anyone to say ‘I can’t do maths’”.I often hear people saying that they can’t “do maths” almost as if they’re proud of it, as if it’s some sort of achievement. It’s unthinkable that someone would say that about their ability to read or write so why is it acceptable to boast of having no maths or science knowledge?
The Chairman of the UK’s Commission for Employment and Skills, Sir Mike Rake, said:
“Poor numeracy is the hidden problem that blights the UK economy and ruins individuals’ chances in life. It’s so often overshadowed by concerns about literacy, and yet there is evidence to suggest that numeracy may be an even clearer indicator of economic and personal success.”Surely the same goes for us, in both maths and science. Our success as a nation will be based on our ability to communicate and function in a modern business world. If we’re going to be a successful nation in the future we urgently need a radically revised quality of maths and science education. Failing to do this might actually be the end of us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)