An Excellent Example of Science vrs Pseudoscience
The website atheism.about.com has a really good article examining if astrology is pseudoscience or science. While I agree that astrology is bullshit, that is not what, I think, is the real take away point from the article. You could easily subsitute any number of questionable practices such as “psychic powers” or “homeopathy” for astrology.
The real importance of the article is how well it explains the scientific method. The reason this is important is that so many people have no concept of what the scientific method is and how it works. This leads to a gross misunderstanding and mistrust of science. This is bad because it leads to the undermining of scientific advancement in our society, a society that, more and more, is very dependent on the technology that science gives us.
There is a sad and firghtening trend in this country of mistrust, and even hostility, toward science. This kind of anti-science belief used to be confined to the radical right or left wing movements. The religious right fights against science when it contradicts the Bible (which is does the vast majority of the time). The radical left distrusts it because it is not “natural”, and they fear the possible misuses of science. Now, however, anti-science beliefs and rhetoric have become the norm. We see this in the current election cycle where Republican candidates are falling all over themselves to see who can be more anti-science than the rest.
It used to be that the GOP trumpeted the benefits of science as a way to make our society stronger, better, and safer. Does anyone remember the “Star Wars” program of the Reagan era? How about the Space Race? In this country, the military has always been a major driving force in advancing science and technology. It will be interesting to see how the military responds to the ever growing hostility of the GOP to science, considering that most of the military leadership has tended to be republican, as evidinced by the many generals who have gone into politics after retiring from their military careers.
This country used to be a leader in science and technology and that is what made it a great economic and military power. If this anti-science trend continues, we can only sit back and watch as our scientific technological leadership slips away and our economy because a totally consumer driven one, dependent on the technology of other countries who put science above superstition.
It’s Ada Lovelace Day!
Today is Ada Lovelace Day. For those of you who don’t who Ada Lovelace was, she was Charles Babbage’s assistant while he was working on his mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She wrote the first algorithm for the engine becoming the first computer programer.
The purpose of Ada Lovelace Day is to call attention to the contributions of woman in technology and science and, hopefully, inspire more woman to enter these fields.
So to everyone out there, especially all the girls and woman who are interested in science and technology, happy Ada Lovelace Day!
Women in Science
There is a very cool article on the Smithsonian web site called Ten Historic Female Scientists You Should Know. It is a wonderful example of the contribution of women to the sciences throughout history.
There are, of course (since they only listed 10), many more women who have played important role in the history of science. Here are just a few of them:
Hypatia (b. ca. AD 350–370, d. March 415) was a Greek scholar from Alexandria, Egypt, head of the Platonist school at Alexandria and mathematician. As head of the Platonist school at Alexandria, she also taught philosophy and astronomy. As a Neoplatonist philosopher, she belonged to the mathematic tradition of the Academy of Athens, as represented by Eudoxus of Cnidus; she was of the intellectual school of the 3rd century thinker Plotinus, which encouraged logic and mathematical study in place of empirical enquiry and strongly encouraged law in place of nature. Hypatia lived in Roman Egypt, and was murdered by a Christian mob which accused her of causing religious turmoil.[9] Kathleen Wilder proposes that the murder of Hypatia marked the end of Classical antiquity, while Maria Dzielska and Christian Wildberg note that Hellenistic philosophy continued to flourish in the 5th and 6th centuries, and perhaps until the age of Justinian. (Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_of_Alexandria.)
Ada Byron – Considered by many as the first computer programer, man or woman. She assisted Charles Babbage on his analytical engine, creating the first ever computer program for it that could calculate Bernoulli numbers.
Grace Hopper - Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy officer. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.[1][2][3][4][5] She conceptualized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages. She is credited with popularizing the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches (motivated by an actual moth removed from the computer). Because of the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as “Amazing Grace”. (Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper)
These are just a small sample of woman scientists. If you are interested in find out more about all the wonderful woman who have had a major impact on science, visit these links:
http://www.women-scientists-in-history.com/historia.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/airspacesciencemath/tp/Famous-Women-Scientists.htm
The Power of Prayer and the Slippery Slope Toward Irrelevancy
PZ Meyrs has a nice little post about the (in)efficiency of prayer. What I love about it is that it shows up Rick Perry’s inane religiously inspired ideas as being just as idiotic as many say they are. Here, praying for rain had no effect on the drought in Texas. If anything, one could conclude that it made things worse. Perhaps they just weren’t doing it right and that made God upset which caused him to make the drought worse. Of course, this wasn’t a scientific study so it is really meaningless. Still, if the power of prayer were really as strong as Christians make it out to be, you’d think that by now there would be obvious, undeniable evidence for it. The fact that there isn’t, and that any supposed results, positive or negative, are purely subjective, seems to suggest that prayer isn’t effective.
There have been several well know studies on the effect of prayer. One looked at the effect of prayer on the recovery of cardiac patients and found no evidence that being prayed for had a positive effect on the outcome of the patient’s condition. In fact, the study showed that those who knew they were being prayed for actually had worse outcomes than those who didn’t know. There was no difference between those who didn’t know they were being prayed for and those who were not prayed for at all. This study indicates that prayer offers no benefit, and in the cases where people knew they were being prayed for, could actually cause harm.
The reality is that scientists can run a thousand rigorous studies on prayer that show that there really is no effect, and Christians will always find excuses and rationalizations to support their view that prayer really does work. The fact is that all the evidence in the world against the prayer being effective means nothing to those of faith. Faith trumps evidence and truth every step of the way, which is why religious faith is so insidious is its ability to keep people enslaved under the yoke of misbelief. It is one of the main reasons that the U.S. is quickly losing its scientific and technological superiority to places like Europe and China. When your faith makes you suspicious of science, makes you push for teaching religious faith in the guise of science in public schools, makes you abandon one of the best hopes of fighting disease since the invention of antibiotics, then you will soon find yourself living in a second world economy dependent on other countries for your technology.
If we continue on this track, the U.S. will become an completely consumer driven economy where almost every technology and most goods will come from outside the U.S, leaving us completely vulnerable to the fluctuations in fortunes and whims of other nations. Our economy has always been the bedrock of our ability to promote our power and to lead the word in almost every important field imaginable. Surrendering our lead in science and technology to the ineffectiveness of religious faith will only being about the weakening of our economy and our decent into irrelevancy in the world.
A Science Teacher Stands Up For Science
From PZ Myers comes the story of a science teacher who wasn’t afraid to stand up for science and critical thinking. The best part is that a judge in a lawsuit against the teacher by a Christian student defended the right, and the necessity, of promoting critical thinking and questioning dogma. It is good to see the fundgelicals called on the mat for their attempts to insert their archaic, tribal beliefs into our educational system. Yea for science and critical thinking!
Science and Relition are NOT Compatible
Ophelia Benson at Butterflies & Wheels reviewed an interview with Chris Mooney in which he discusses the compatibility of science and religion. In talking about the Catholic Church’s support of evolution and its contention that god intervened by giving humans souls, Chris Mooney supports this stance as being perfectly compatible with science.
“Mooney says that’s all right provided it’s a supernatural claim, because science can’t say nuffink about that. If the Catholic church said humans have souls and we can prove it and here’s the data, then it would be a scientific claim and science could say No, but as it is, it’s not, so science can’t, and that means science and religion are compatible.”
Basically, what Mooney is saying is that as long as you can come up with any concept, idea, or belief that is falsifiable then it is compatible with science. This kind of argument breaks down very quickly though. The classic example of how this is nonsense is Carl Sagan’s, “Dragon in his garage”, argument. I will quite it in its entirety:
“”A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage”
Suppose (I’m following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!“Show me,” you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle — but no dragon.
“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.
“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely. “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.”
You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.
“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.”
Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.
“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”
You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.
“Good idea, but she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.” And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.
Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you’ve really learned from my insistence that there’s a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You’d wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I’ve seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don’t outright reject the notion that there’s a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you’re prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it’s unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative — merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of “not proved.”
Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons — to say nothing about invisible ones — you must now acknowledge that there’s something here, and that in a preliminary way it’s consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.
Now another scenario: Suppose it’s not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you’re pretty sure don’t know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages — but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we’re disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I’d rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren’t myths at all.
Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they’re never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon’s fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such “evidence” — no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it — is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.”
Just because someone believes something that cannot be proved doesn’t make it compatible with science, in fact, the scientific method demands that we reject such a hypothesis while keeping an open mind to future positive evidence.
Using this standard, there is no difference between the “Dragon In My Garage” hypothesis and the” I Believe In God hypothesis”. From a scientific point of view we must reject the God hypothesis due to no supporting evidence while keeping an open mind the possibility of future positive evidence.
When you look at it this way, science and religion are not at all compatible and to call yourself a scientist, as Mooney does, and insist that they are compatible requires either self-delusion or deceit. I’ll give Mooney the benefit of the doubt and hope that he is merely self-deluded.
A Brief History of Women in Science, Told by Marie Curie
To all the girls and woman out there with even a hint of an interest in science; listen to Marie Curie (or at least her zombie). You can change the world, as have many women before you (too bad men got all the credit, not to mention the Nobel prizes. Grr!)
Another Example of Bad Science Reporting
The newspaper, The Telegraph, has published a story with the exciting title, Large Hadron Collider rumoured to have found God Particle. What makes this bad science reporting is that the actually text of the article is more along these lines:
“It is far too early to say if there is anything to it or not. There are 3,000 scientists working on ATLAS and they divide the analysis work up between them.
“This is an internal communication that highlights something interesting, but it has to go through several stages of assessment by the scientific team before it will be released as an official result by the collaborative team.
“The majority of these things turn out to be nothing at all. It is very speculative at this stage, but there is a great deal of excitement and anticipation that something will be found which is probably why this has found its way onto the internet.”
What the story is really about is this:
Despite the official caution, there was intense speculation on internet blogs and scientific websites that the results described in the memo signalled the first discovery of the Higgs boson.
This is a story about the rumors of the discovery of the Higgs boson, not about the actually discovery it’s self. This is not science reporting, this is rumor mongering. Isn’t the current state of the general public’s science knowledge bad enough without the media having to sensationalize a non-story?
Is Philosophy of Science Dead?
“Philosophy is dead,”. So says Stephen Hawking in his new book, The Grand Design. He elaborates on this statement by stating, “Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.” This has stirred up a hornets nest in the vaunted halls of that once most noble of studies, Philosophy.
I first read about this at Skepchick.org when Jen post it in her Quickie entries. The next day Sam Ogden posted The Afternoon Inquisition (or AI) with the question, “Is Philosophy Dead?”. In that article he linked to at article in Philosophy Now which takes issue with Hawkin’s stance on philosophy.
It is an interesting article, but I think it fails to make it’s case. The reality is that science, especially biology and physics, has advanced to the point where their theories are suffciant to explain the vexing issues that philoshers have been pouring over for millenia. When we are at the point in scientific knowledge that we can reasonably answer the question, “Where did we come from?”, philosophy becomes an wasteful and pointless exercise. Philosophy now finds itself in the position of trying to answer questions that have no more relevance than, “How many angle can dance on the head of a pin?”.
In reading the article in Philosophy Now, I am reminded of that paragon of rationality and atheism, Douglas Adams, who in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has the following exchange between two philosophers and the computer Deep Thought:
MAJIKTHISE:
You just let the machines get on with the adding up and we’ll take care of the eternal verities, thank you very much.
VROOMFONDEL:
yeah.
MAJIKTHISE:
By law the quest for the ultimate truth is quite clearly the unalienable prerogative of your working thinkers
VROOMFONDEL:
That’s right.
MAJIKTHISE:
I mean what’s the use of us sitting up all night saying there may -
VROOMFONDEL:
Or may not be
MAJIKTHISE:
[Softly] …or may not be… [louder] a god, if this machine comes along the next morning and gives you ‘is telephone number?
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand that that machine not be allowed to think about this problem!
MAJIKTHISE:
We’ll go on strike!
VROOMFONDEL:
Tthat’s right. You’ll have a national philosopher’s strike on your hands.
DEEP THOUGHT:
Who will that inconvenience?
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