Sunday 10 March 2013
science
Friday 8 March 2013
Tuesday 28 August 2012
We are all saddened when we look at the world and see what few accomplishments we have made, compared to what we feel are the potentialities of human beings. People in the past, in the nightmare of their times, had dreams for the future. And now that the future has materialized we see that in many ways the dreams have been surpassed, but in still more ways many of our dreams of today are very much the dreams of people of the past. Richard Feynman ☀
Thursday 9 August 2012
For many of us, science has supplanted religion. We harbor a naive faith in the godlike power of science. Since scientific knowledge is cumulative, albeit morally neutral, it gives the illusion that human history and human progress also are cumulative. Science is for us what totems and spells were for our premodern ancestors. It is magical thinking. It feeds our hubris and sense of divine empowerment. And trusting in its fearsome power will mean our extinction. The 17th century Enlightenment myth of human advancement through science, reason and rationality should have been obliterated forever by the slaughter of World War I. Europeans watched the collective suicide of a generation. The darker visions of human nature embodied in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and Frederick Nietzsche before the war found modern expression in the work of Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett, along with atonal and dissonant composers such as Igor Stravinsky and painters such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Human progress, these artists and writers understood, was a joke. But there were many more who enthusiastically embraced new utopian visions of progress and glory peddled by fascists and communists. These belief systems defied reality. They fetishized death. They sought unattainable utopias through violence. And empowered by science and technology, they killed millions. Chris Hedges ☀
Saturday 14 July 2012
Steven Pinker’s unconvincing debunking of group selection ☀
One man’s “manipulations” are another’s group selection. The story I’ve always heard, and which makes sense to me, is that different groups have different social organizations, and some are more successful than others. It all depends on the environment, but in some environments an every-man-for-himself (or, every-man-for-himself-and-his-kin) society won’t be so economically successful. A famous example is the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies; it’s said that the latter dominate economically even while being worse for most of the individuals involved.
Pinker might argue at this point that this has nothing to do with natural selection and has everything to do with wasteful ritualizing, mythologizing, and coercion. But I don’t see how that shoots down the group-selection story, in which the qualities that help a social structure expand and be copied are not necessarily those that benefit each individual or kin. The story is that many of our social norms arise because we are part of societies that exist partly from the development of such norms.
To me, Pinker’s arguments seem inappropriately normative. Anything having to do with genes is “instinctive”, while more generally social attitudes are dismissed using words such as “faux,” “simulacra,” “myths,” “illusions,” and “manipulations.”
A clue to Pinker’s attitude comes from his statement, “the term ‘group selection’ adds little to what we have always called ‘history.’” I’m reminded of the notorious statement that all science is physics or stamp collecting. The study of history is hugely important, and what history is about (to me) is nailing down the facts. History is the ultimate descriptive social science. What happened when, who said what to whom. Sure, interpretations are central to historical work (consider, for example, A. J. P. Taylor’s “Origins of the Second World War”), but what historians contribute in particular is the particularity of history.
Friday 13 July 2012
Naming 'the God Particle' ☀
Judging from the flurry of headlines over the past week, one might be tempted to think that proof positive of God’s existence (or lack thereof) had just appeared out of a 27-km-tunnel buried beneath the Swiss-French border. This frenzy of news headlines and blog titles hailed the recent news that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has discovered a brand new particle of a mass of 125-126 GeV, which is assumed to be the Higgs boson, or the so-called “God particle.” The discovery of the Higgs boson would certainly be a breakthrough for particle physics and cosmology, but would such a finding also radically redefine theology’s understanding of God or challenge the existence of such a deity? Is there actually any theological or religious significance in Higgs physics at all?
The short answer is “no,” which becomes apparent when one considers the widely-reported story of how it got named. In 1993, Nobel Laureate physicist Leon Lederman, along with science writer Dick Teresi, wrote a book detailing the history of particle physics starting with Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy Democritus and culminating with the hunt for the Higgs boson. Until this latest discovery, the Higgs boson was the elusive final missing piece of the puzzle known as the Standard Model—a collection of the fundamental particles that constitute our universe and the complex and mathematically-sophisticated relationships between them. Considering how incredibly difficult finding the Higgs boson was proving to be, Lederman wanted to name the book after that “goddamn particle,” according to some of his collaborators. His editor, however, would not allow it and so the name was shortened to “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What is the Question?” And thus ‘the God particle’ was born, carrying with it more than enough social baggage for such a miniscule particle.
Particle physicist Dr. Zosia Krusberg is visiting assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Vassar College and thinks “the term ‘god particle’ is unfortunate. The Higgs boson is no more (or less) divine or spiritually significant than any other elementary particle within the standard model of particle physics.” It may be fundamental to explaining one of the most basic characteristics of the universe—namely the existence of matter and mass in addition to energy—but “it is no more (or less) important than any other physics principle underlying the Standard Model.”
Last week’s discovery was monumental in that it may have finally provided experimental evidence for the Higgs Mechanism and defined the specific energy of the resulting Higgs boson, but even this “breakthrough” for particle physics leaves many scientific questions unresolved. Finding the Higgs boson completes the Standard Model, but it does not do away with many other questions and shortcomings of the current state of particle physics, such as the constituent particles of dark matter, a quantum theory of gravity, and other “mathematically subtle problems.” Not to mention that there is still significant work to be done to determine the exact nature of this newly-found particle. According to Dr. Krusberg, this particle might behave just as the Standard Model predicts or it could instead be “a Higgs-like particle that will serve as a gateway into explorations of physics beyond the Standard Model.” Krusberg continued, “And I guarantee that it is this latter scenario that most of us are hoping for: physicists love nothing more than discovering the shortcomings of their theories, since this is the first step toward more fundamental theories with even more predictive power!”
Wednesday 11 July 2012
The Good Fight ☀
What would it take for you to give your life to save another? The answer of course is two siblings or eight cousins, that is, if you’re thinking like a geneticist. This famous quip, attributed to the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane, is based on the premise that you share on average 50% of your genes with a brother or sister and 12.5% with a cousin. For altruism to be worth the cost it should ensure that you break even, genetically speaking.
This basic idea was later formalized by the evolutionary theorist William Hamilton as “inclusive fitness theory” that extended Darwin’s definition of fitness–the total number of offspring produced–to also include the offspring of close relatives. Hamilton’s model has been highly influential, particularly for Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins who spent considerable time discussing its implications in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. But in the last few years an academic turf war has developed pitting the supporters of inclusive fitness theory (better known as kin selection) against a handful of upstarts advocating what is known as group selection, the idea that evolutionary pressures act not only on individual organisms but also at the level of the social group.
The latest row was sparked by the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, which followed up on his 2010 paper in the journal Nature written with theoretical biologists Martin Nowak and Corina Tarniţă. In both cases Wilson opposes kin selection theory in favor of the group selection model. For a revered scientist like Wilson–a Harvard biologist, recipient of the Crafoord Prize (the Nobel of the biosciences) and two-time Pulitzer prizewinner–to adopt a marginal and widely disputed concept has received a lot of attention and caused other prominent scientists to step forward and defend the mainstream point of view.
For example, writing at The Prospect magazine, in what The Guardian newspaper called “a searingly critical review,” Dawkins argued that the proposal in Wilson’s book was based on “erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory.” Joining him at the website Edge was Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker who wrote that group selection was a “false allure” and “a loose metaphor, more like the struggle among kinds of tires or telephones.” Likewise, University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne dismissed group selection on his blog as “a fuzzy and nebulous concept” and one that merely “has an innate appeal to those with a penchant for the religious and the spiritual.” It should go without saying that online commenters were considerably less kind (a notable exception being at Edge, where scholars were invited to comment independently).
Monday 18 June 2012
So how might the universe do us in? Well, there are solar superflares, supernovae, and giant black holes that might veer past our sun. Or micro black holes, colliding with the Earth and gobbling us from within. Or getting caught in the searchlight sweep of a magnetar or gamma-ray burst, or a titanic explosion in the galactic center. Or what if our solar system slams at high speeds into a dense molecular cloud, sending a million comets falling our way? Or how about classics? Like collision with an asteroid? (More on that, later.) Then there are those supervolcanos, still building up pressure beneath Yellowstone and a dozen other hot spots — giant magma pools at super-high pressure, pushing and probing for release. Yes we had a scare already. But one, medium-sized belch didn’t make the threat go away. It’s a matter of when, not if. David Brin ☀
Imagination: The Rocket Fuel of Science ☀
Question: What is the role of imagination in science?
Michio Kaku: I believe that science is the engine of prosperity. Everything we see around us, the goods and services, the iPods, the internet, the GPS system, all of it comes from science. But what is the rocket fuel? What is the rocket fuel that makes science work? That makes this engine propel itself? And I think that rocket fuel is curiosity. It’s imagination. It’s the innovative spirit. That’s what keeps science alive. And I would hope that we could nourish that among our young people. But unfortunately, oftentimes, that rocket fuel is wasted.
If you take a look at our educational system, you’ll realize that all of us are born scientists. All of us are born wondering why does the sun shine? Where did I come from? What’s out there? How big is the world anyway? All of us are born scientists until we hit the danger years. When we hit about 13, 14, 15, those are the danger years and we start to lose these young scientists left and right. So, by the time they graduate from high school, we have only a tiny, tiny fraction of the original 100% of young people who are born scientists. They drop like flies. What’s wrong?
Well, many things are wrong. But among that is the way that we teach science. We teach science as a list of facts and figures to memorize and we crush, literally crush, any curiosity and spirit of innovation and imagination from young children. For example, my daughter once took the New York State Regional Exam. She took the exam in geology, and I had a chance to tutor her by looking at this manual. And I realized that the entire manual consisted mainly of memorizing the names of crystals, the names of minerals, hundreds of them, and of course, all the things that you are going to forget the day after your exam. So, it’s not that our students are stupid, they can memorize these things. They are so smart. They’ve figured out that this material is totally useless. Our students are so smart they’ve figured out they’re never going to see these things ever again. They just have to memorize it once in their life, throw away their book, and they’re absolutely right. They will never, ever see these hundreds of minerals, crystals, again in their life.
Evolution in Your Life ☀
When you hear the word evolution, you may think of iconic images of Darwin and the Beagle, representations of the “tree of life,” pictures of apes and the DNA double helix. But do you realize just how thoroughly the subject seeps into our everyday lives? To give a sense of this, we asked five experts in different fields to briefly describe an example. Listen in, and find out how evolution and the process of natural selection–the survival of those creatures that are best adapted to their environment–gives us dogs, makes us such good runners, and even helps us solve crimes.
Thursday 14 June 2012
How to Age Well ☀
In a new paper published in Science, researchers from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany, report evidence from two experiments which suggest that one key to aging well might involve learning to let go of regrets about missed opportunities. Stafanie Brassen and her colleagues looked at how healthy young participants (mean age: 25.4 years), healthy older participants (65.8 years), and older participants who had developed depression for the first time later in life (65.6 years) dealt with regret, and found that the young and older depressed patients seemed to hold on to regrets about missed opportunities while the healthy older participants seemed to let them go.
Thursday 31 May 2012
Tuesday 29 May 2012
Nobody doubts that some groups survive better than others. What is controversial is the idea that differential group survival drives evolution, as differential individual survival does. The American grey squirrel is driving our native red squirrel to extinction, no doubt because it happens to have certain advantages. That’s differential group survival. But you’d never say of any part of a squirrel that it evolved to promote the welfare of the grey squirrel over the red. Wilson wouldn’t say anything so silly about squirrels. He doesn’t realise that what he does say, if you examine it carefully, is as implausible and as unsupported by evidence. The descent of Edward Wilson ☀
Monday 28 May 2012
Wednesday 18 April 2012
Memory Foraging: When the Brain Behaves Like a Bee ☀
In search of nectar, a honeybee flies into a well-manicured suburban garden and lands on one of several camellia bushes planted in a row. After rummaging through the ruffled pink petals of several flowers, the bee leaves the first bush for another. Finding hardly any nectar in the flowers of the second bush, the bee flies to a third. And so on.
Our brains may have evolved to forage for some kinds of memories in the same way, shifting our attention from one cluster of stored information to another depending on what each patch has to offer. Recently, Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick in England and his colleagues found experimental evidence for this potential parallel. “Memory foraging” is only one way of thinking about memory—and it does not apply universally to all types of information retained in the brain—but, so far, the analogy seems to work well for particular cases of active remembering.
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