Russian politics have always been tumultuous even in the best of times, and now, with Medvedev and Putin’s unabashedly open game of musical chairs drawing public fury and mass protests in a land where all political matters are almost always met with withering cynicism and disgusted apathy by the general populace, all the important people behind the scenes are worried. Propaganda campaigns are spreading across Russian TV at a rate even worse than the sloganeering and conspiracy theories I remember from my childhood, though it was during Perestroika and the government was a little more honest about its shortcomings. But as the party operatives of United Russia (which I just call the CPSU 2.0) and their handlers take to the news to denounce the supposed American conspiracy to destabilize their nation, they trotted out rock stars of ATS and Prison Planet like David Icke, and demonized the new American ambassador Michael McFaul for trying to meet with democracy and voter rights advocates soon after taking his new post. And now it seems they have yet another idea for promoting their conspiratorial narrative, one involving the world’s most controversial whistleblower…
According to a press release from RT, the government funded English-language news agency located just a stone’s throw away from the Red Square, Julian Assange will be getting his own TV show in which he picks a number of those he considers to be iconoclasts to interview. Odd. After all the man blasted the Kremlin for the iron-fisted rule by Putin and his friends and threatened to post cables detailing their corrupt dealings, and a swift change of heart seems unlikely for a self-described democracy activist who became a victim of political oppression for his promotion of freedom. The documents which claimed to show that Putin secretly amassed an exorbitant fortune and built an ostentatious villa for himself never did make it to the Wikileaks site. Instead, they were released by a Russian outfit spun off from the Wikileaks community while it looks like Assange’s decision to hold back on publishing the incriminating pictures and snippets allowed him to jump in bed with some of the Kremlin’s media bigwigs and use the resources of an authoritarian regime to promote his views of international openness and transparency. Then again, as we’ve seen time and time again with him, it’s all about politics and money, and whatever noble agenda he probably had when starting Wikileaks went horribly, horribly wrong since he’s now being featured on a corrupt and ruthless strongman’s TV channel.
Of course knowing how the Kremlin operates, there has to be a reason they want Assange to have a show on their property and the first thing that comes to mind is what the whistleblower is best known for doing. After a massive release of classified documents which he and his fans say shows that the American government is supremely corrupt and is busy gleefully reengineering the world to its liking through a web of highly elaborate conspiracies aimed at destabilizing regimes it doesn’t like, it would only make sense to take his current legal problems, and possibly those of Bradley Manning, and frame the entire context of the show around this whole diplomatic mess. Considering that any country with sprawling international business interests wants to do all it can to make certain competitors go away and secure profitable ventures for its companies, the charge that a superpower has a sinister, New World Order like policy towards the world seems awfully trumped up. A much more accurate description would be that Western nations try to use whatever money and power they still have to keep tilting the global playing field in their favor. Unsavory? Yes. But it’s true and that’s what really matters in this case. It’s just that Americans tend to take such accusations very close to heart because many of them do not want to know exactly how the proverbial sausage gets made when geopolitics get complicated.
Still, an evil America hell bent on world domination through a combination of jingoism and military might built to handle world wars and execute massive invasions, fits right into the story the Kremlin desperately wants to convince its citizens to be true. No, the United Russia officials weren’t caught stuffing ballot boxes and paying for votes across the nation, they cry, it’s all an American conspiracy to destabilize Russia for oil and to control our immense nuclear stockpile. Here, look, one of their victims is on TV telling his story and talking to people who share his view about true democracy and freedom! Never mind the crackdowns on opposing politicians, the widespread stuffing of the Duma with celebrities, blatant theft, corruption, and cronyism on a scale which even the sleaziest K Street lobbyist would find appalling and unbecoming, and forget about all those leaks in which they’re detailed held by Assange after his partnership with The Guardian went down in flames. Like a tragicomic plot device, a whistleblower who wanted to make the world a better place naively barged into a very convoluted and treacherous realm he didn’t quite understand, turned into an authoritarian who suppressed all intra-group dissent, and may now end up as a puppet of foreign strongmen spreading conspiracy theories to justify their oligarchy. That’s how sticking it to The Man can end up with you working for The Man…
Every time an experiment manipulating evolution hits the news, there’s always an eager throng of people who insist that the very fact that the biologists intervened and steered the forces of selection or mutations to doing the experiment means that we now have proof of a designed involved in evolution. Just take yesterday’s study on the possible emergence of multicellularity. According to the creationist crowd, if the biologists didn’t trigger the selective influences on the yeast, it would’ve remained the same and their meddling is therefore proof that without an external force, multicellularity wouldn’t have happened. Remember the study cited by Lehrer in his indictment of scientists’ seemingly slow progress? That’s exactly where it applies. Just because a biologist shook a beaker or changed a few genes to see what will happen according to the rules of evolution today isn’t proof that someone else also shook the beaker or changed a few genes billions of years ago, but it’s a rather neat and tidy story that’s easy to digest and hence it gets cited by those who are looking to justify a belief. It’s a backward and very self-centered approach, one that essentially promotes a two-tiered fallacy as a fact.
An applicable old cliché would be the one often used by creationists regarding a paining and a painter. If they see a painting, someone must have painted it since paintings don’t paint themselves. Therefore, since we’re not seeing stones turn into bacterial film out of the blue, someone must have created life. Airtight logic, right? Well, no, not at all. We know that paintings have a painter because we’ve seen painters make paintings. If we doubt a painting’s origins, we could always perform a chemical analysis on them and see that yes, it’s canvas with paint on it and we know that there’s a group of painters out there who do similar work. We can even track down the original painter of a more recent work and ask her to replicate her efforts. With life, matters are much less cut and dry because we’ve never seen a designer or an architect of living things. How do we confirm that living things are made rather than self-organizing? Where do we find the designer? No, in our hearts and in a spiritual universe all around us are not valid answers because they don’t pinpoint a culprit we could ask about the creation of life. And just because scientists did something interesting in the lab doesn’t mean that the very same experiment also happened in nature, much less that a hyper-intelligent being was behind it.
Having dealt with the non-sequitur we can now move on to the argument by assertion on which this entire line of thinking is based. Just like all intelligent design talking points, which are now living well past their sell by date and never actually worked, this one relies on asserting that there must be an entity capable of creating living things and that this entity is singular. This proposition alone requires a few hundred lines of evidence to establish in any way, shape or form, and merely asserting that there’s a singular designer is not proof. If your goal is to work backwards from the standpoint that some unnamed designer (or you could just say save both the time and the trouble and say God since this "designer" facade isn’t fooling anyone), created all life and we have to work backwards form this premise, the assertion that manipulating evolution for experiments is proof of your deity makes sense. But that’s not a valid point with which to start. We have to work from what we know onwards, otherwise we’re just deluding ourselves by inventing ways to wedge evidence into a predetermined conclusion. Under this pretense, a scientist tweaking evolution the lab has to be proof that a deity had to have done something similar in the past because if he didn’t, then the chain of events don’t match what we want to believe happened. That’s not a reasonable or logical argument. It’s just wishful thinking.
According to string theorists, our universe is just one of many in an otherwise infinite cosmos and that all the different universes don’t just sit quietly in a vacuum, but actively interact with each other when space and time bend and fold to create the right conditions for different forces and particles to jump between them. While the exact number of all these cosmoses is pretty much impossible to estimate with any certainty, evidence for just one or two other universes would provide a very solid pillar for string theory and the multiverse hypothesis in general. And to that end, cosmologists have been looking at such anomalies as the mysterious dark flow, measuring the various oddly shaped blotches in the CMBR, and using some very creative mathematics to picture universes imploding into black holes to catch a hint of another universe acting on our own. But since all of the macro observations collected so far have been rather far from definitive, a team of physicists based in Belgium decided to scale their search down to the subatomic level, measuring the decay rates of neutrons trapped with well established techniques for studying their motion, then hit with a laser for good measure.
Basically, the idea is that neutrons should decay at a certain rate as they bounce around trapped in magnetic fields or by gravity, and imperfections in how these fields contain them usually result in a slightly faster rate of decay than expected. But while most of the accelerations in decay rates would be due to the containment, an infinitesimal number of these decays may be caused by the neutrons switching universes. Mind you, this will happen only a handful of times during an experiment but the math says that it can happen, and it has in a few previous experiments they’ve reviewed. What’s even more interesting, they could affect the probability of such flips between universes by using a laser in the neutron trap, usually known as a bottle. After firing very precise and carefully monitored pulses at decaying neutrons, the physicists say, they should see a slight increase in how many neutrons departed for another universe using a fairly straightforward formula derived from the math they used to arrive at the conclusion that neutrons can switch cosmoses. Sounds fairly straightforward. Trap a few quadrillion neutrons, chill them to temperatures found on the icy moons of the outer solar system to slow them down a little, then fire a few laser pulses and see whether their decay rate increases ever so slightly.
Still there’s the nagging question of how exactly this experiment would prove that the neutrons are not simply decaying but switching universes. If anything, it sets up a situation very similar to an episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon chides Leonard’s work for being "extremely derivative" to which the slighted Leonard replies "at least I don’t have to make the particles go through 27 dimensions just to make the math work." And as usual, Sheldon counters with "well, they’re there" to complete his circular argument. The dimensions exist because the math says they exist, much like the neutrons are supposed to decay into another universe as the math shows they could, rather than by an observation extending into another cosmos to make sure they took the trip and exited the universe. Of course their trip would also raise the question of what compensates for the sudden loss of neutrinos. Even at a rate of ten per quadrillion, an occasional exodus from this universe would add up fairly quickly when we consider how small and plentiful they are. We’d need a exouniversal neutrino to make the same journey a missing neutrino in our cosmos would’ve made but since every universe can easily end up with different laws of physics and there’s no law that requires similar universes to be side by side, we now have to consider even more radical mathematics to describe the entire inter-universal ecosystem.
Doesn’t this all seem like a whole lot of assumptions and considerations for a phenomenon we can’t verify in the real world? On what basis would we say that seeing an increase in the decay rate of neutrinos points to a subatomic trip between universes rather than a correlation between certain intra-universal phenomena and a faster decay rate for the particles? As the physicists acknowledge, we really can’t. We can only see if we could observe the correlations they calculated to see if they hold up in the next few decades. And that brings us to an illustration of the big problem with some of the more exotic branches of theoretical physics. We can test if they come up with formulas fitting observational models and confirm whether the math works out. But we just can’t test whether such mathematical conveniences as hidden dimensions or other universes really exist using an extremely speculative model showing correlation while making a leap to causation. Physics cranks who very loudly decry math as a secret codex of wily scientists, use such speculations to justify their own musings, no matter how outlandish. This doesn’t mean that theoretical physicists should abandon their work to silence cranks, of course, but they should remember that the rubber has to meet the road at some point, and floating in the realm of esoteric mathematics often doesn’t translate into real world physics for many reasons…
See: Sarrazin, M., Pignol, G., Petit, F., Nesvizhevsky V. (2012). Experimental limits on neutron disappearance into another braneworld arXiv: 1201.3949v1
You may have heard of the Time Cube guy, whose real name is Gene Ray, the web’s first celebrity crackpot at large and lunatic extraordinaire, the trailblazer for the modern physics cranks praised by Margaret Wertheim in her attempts to cash in on documenting this curious species. And as all trailblazers, he has imitators like the now infamous Stuart Wilde whose theories about the origin of humans recently graced Pharyngula. Far be it from me to even attempt to summarize his ideas because they involve human dematerialization and the sort of stuff you’d expect to believe you saw during a really, really awesome acid trip, and not being well versed in hallucinogenic realms, all my efforts at paraphrasing would certainly fall far, far short of conveying the sheer scope of Wilde’s fevered imagination. So instead, I’m just going to let the man explain it in his own words…
The mystical shamans of South America call the Mirror World, the Aluna and in the Aluna, there’s a record of the origins of man on earth. In there, it is shown that man walked in naked from another dimension, but he was initially a bit of an automaton, unable to cope. It was as if his brain was not as yet activated to deal with a world of three dimensions and gravity, so he initially lay down on the ground and fell asleep.
You know, there’s something that bothers me about this whole walking in from another dimension thing. As a high school geometry class will tell you, a dimension is simply a property we use to measure features of the objects around us. We’re intimately familiar with four dimensions: length, width, height, and time. Dimensions beyond these are the stuff of rather creative mathematics used by string theorists to explain phenomena we’re not able to study in controlled conditions, mathematics that can easily become esoteric enough to part with all objective reality. Just enter "arXiv" in the search box and press enter for a few dozen examples as to how. With that, when I read a treatise about entities walking into our universe from "another dimension," or in New Agey pseudoscientific technobabble, "higher dimensions," I read it as a speculation about intelligent entities which emerge from height or width, with speculations of whether height or width have any more astral and spiritual significance than length. And that, dear readers, is absolute nonsense, much like Wilde’s concept of how our intelligence emerged. Forget the MYH16 mutation and natural selection. It was all thanks to mushrooms!
While he slept, a being came to him from another world, and it placed six psilocybin mushrooms on his chest, three down one side and three down the other. When the man woke, he found these mushrooms and being hungry, he ate them. Awhile later, the mushrooms’ affect took hold of him, and his brain that was previously dormant, clicked into action, and the man rose and stumbled off to find other humans, who had also walked into this three dimensional plane on exactly the same day. I would presume women got here in the same way, at the same time as the men.
What amazes me is the astonishing level of willful ignorance it takes to be able to spout gibberish like this in this day and age, when you can get a basic freshman college-level education on most topics online from vast university websites and their regionally accredited online courses which are open to anyone who’s willing and able to study a topic that catches his or her interest. Sure, I’ve been on the receiving end of a far more insane and elaborate worldview, but Dr. Depperman actually seemed to be certifiably, DSM V insane and trying with all the oomph his severely skewed mental faculties could possibly summon to use the ingorantly grandiose jargon deployed in post-modern platitudes. Wilde just comes off as incredibly ignorant and unwilling to even pretend that he’s ever read a popular science publication, much less took a college level course in physics or biology as one would expect from someone who decided to try and elaborate on the story of human origins. If others at least try to mention genetics, evolutionary principles, and anatomy, he gives us New Age fluff and an encounter with magic mushrooms, and thinks it’s perfectly sufficient to leave it at that.
Many space operas tend to treat empires spanning multiple solar systems much like we would treat empires on our own world, complete with borders and territorial maps included on the characters’ computers. Just one look at the surrounding stars and they know that they’re in alien territory, ready to be greeted by a space-borne version of the interstellar empire’s border patrols. But considering that not only is space three dimensional, it involves stunning distances between objects, could a species carve out a large territory in space and be able to control the borders to its territory? Would it even be able to define them? And would it even matter to have a firmly delineated border between their space and the rest of the galaxy’s? Maybe borders of an alien empires would be extremely porous, extending for dozens of light years, a sort of a buffer or transition zone throughout which their presence becomes more and more prominent and they have a chance to detect intruders? And if they do spot a wandering craft, will it be worth it to them to send out an encounter team to figure out what this craft is, then drive it off rather than try to study it? In other words, how could an alien empire be defined?
One idea of how to define ownership of multiple planets may be as simple as counting only the planets which house outposts of a space-faring species. Rather than be marked by invisible lines, aliens may jumble each others’ holdings and three planets within the same solar system, or three solar systems side by side may be alternatively claimed by one of two species. For example, let’s say that future humans would lay claim to Mars, Titan, Triton, Europa, Mercury, along with the Earth and the Moon, and own several planets around two nearby stars. At the same time, another species claims Venus, Pluto, Ganymede, plus several planets around other stars. The idea is to count the worlds on which you actually have a presence and are actively inhabiting, which makes the idea of sovereign borders relatively easy to enforce. You set up patrols only around the worlds you inhabit and watch for incoming species rather than safeguarding empty space. Plus, by giving worlds to other species if you have no use for them could facilitate a sort of unspoken truce. Everyone gets want they want as long as they don’t start flashing lasers and kinetic kill vehicles and should be willing to trade for any common resource both require. Of course such commonalities could also start conflicts, but more on that in a bit.
The other, more science-fiction like scenario is one where territory is marked by considering the beginning of sovereign cosmic holdings to be the farthest outposts patrolled or explored by a species. In this scenario, any future humans landing on a planet 25 light years away have now claimed the entire target solar system along with all the solar systems along the way to their destination. It doesn’t matter how many of the worlds they will actually inhabit, all that matters is their extent. But of course this would also allow intelligent species to hold a vast cosmic empire each because the distances between them are likely to be very significant. There’s a very strong possibility that two advanced, space-faring species could live thousands of light years apart with many thousands of years separating their rise to power and acquisitions. Suddenly, as they begin to explore, rather than having to share space with hundreds of competing species, they can lay claim to several thousand cubic light years of space without the slightest challenge. Of course the big question is how they’ll mark it as theirs, especially in a way a completely alien entity would recognize as a territorial claim. One can’t just build a Great Space Wall and line it with turrets and watch towers, and detecting incoming craft with probes would require a vast swarm of robots numbering in the billions if not trillions. It could well be practically unfeasible.
And this brings us to a dilemma. What good are borders when they’re going to be that porous and the odds of another species showing up to deliberately challenge them are so remote? This is especially true when we’re dealing with immense territories claimed to unchallenged species. Thousands of light years means millions of planets around millions of stars and an empire that big simply cannot be policed. Just like some of the vast empires on our planet learned, laying claim to an enormous territory doesn’t mean you’ll ever control it. Maybe you can reach it and survey what goes on, but odds are that anything outside of your immediate habitat would just develop on its own with little to no input from you. Species could rise, leave their cradles, and fall within a wide swath of space you claim without you knowing they exist and without them ever learning that they’re your subjects, evolved on a planet you claimed millions of years ago. Even more interesting would be the question of how you would submit your claim and actually have it recognized and announced. On Earth we have maps, international organizations, and authoritative bodies which maintain official border designations, and yet even here borders are contested. What central authority would mediate border disputes between aliens, especially when, as we’ve just seen, a cosmic border is so hard to define and locate in the first place?
With the well-deserved drama over SOPA and its sister bill, which are akin to taking a nuke to the web so an organization of huge content producers can protect their business model, Matthew Yglesias decided to make an impassioned defense of online piracy, arguing that it’s actually good to have a little of it because not every download means a lost sale and a number of these illegal downloads could translate into paying customers down the line. While it’s certainly true that a million illegal downloads of a $0.99 track doesn’t mean a loss for the studio that released it to the tune of $1 million, and it’s possible that a few thousand people who decided to download the track not because they knew the artist but didn’t want to pay but because it was free, went out and bought more of the artist’s music in the future, this odd logical calculus forgets about those who will only download because they don’t want to spend any cash. And while this seems like an omission, Yglesias’ leap of logic in positing that illegal downloads actually generate money gets truly bizarre in this example…
[E]ven when copyright infringement does lead to real loss of revenue to copyright owners , it’s not as if the money vanishes into a black hole. Suppose Joe Downloader uses BitTorrent to get a free copy of Beggars Banquet rather than forking over $7.99 to Amazon, and then goes out to eat some pizza. In this case, the Rolling Stones’ loss is the pizzeria’s gain and Joe gets to listen to a classic album. It’s at least not obvious that we should regard this, on balance, as harmful.
Why would we even regard this as a balance? The Rolling Stones are in music because it’s a business. The music they create is what pays their bills. Declaring that because they’re rich, they must’ve had enough and it would be just fine to pirate it (as many downloaders do) and spending money on pizza while getting the work they did for free, is not a balance. No one from the local pizza place is going to give the Rolling Stones a cut of the profits made on selling to Joe or Jane Downloader unless they own the pizza places in question. It’s very doubtful that Yglesias actually wants to say that it’s ok to download whatever you want as long as you spend a few bucks on a snack while you enjoy your pirated acquisition, but that is indeed what he seems to be saying and by the same logic, we could say that’s perfectly fine to download his book rather than buy it as long as we pay a visit to the grocery store after we do and get something for dinner between reading the result of months and months of his work. I’m sure he intended the proceeds from the book to be used to pay his mortgage and take his family on vacation, but hey, it’s ok. The money he doesn’t get will be spent elsewhere, right?
One of the big problems with the attitude that we should be able to download what we want because we want to and the content owners will often act like bullies, is that it opens the door to abuse. New artists trying to get into the entertainment industry have their efforts pirated and even though the downloaders praise them for an innovative or well executed song or movie, these artists don’t see a dime and never get on the radar of major corporations that could make them new household names. As a result, piracy perpetuates the status quo, the sequel, the remake, and the rehash along with an online entitlement culture which says that because of bad business habits or bad faith on the part of the content owners, you are now entitled to have whatever you want for free. Just try that with a nasty car dealer and see how far you’ll get with declaring that the car you wanted to buy is too expensive and the dealer is too shady, therefore you’ll be taking it free of charge. You’d expect to end up in jail of course. But in the digital world, this kind of behavior seems to be tolerated. And come to think of it, if music and movies today are all crap, why do you even want to download them in the first place? Why not let the studios and labels release crap and fail because no one buys it or listens to it? Surely we’d be able to get something new and exciting made or produced then, something worth paying to see and hear.
We all know someone who only listens to what she wants to hear, the devoted Fox News or MSNBC viewer, a dedicated Red State or Daily Kos reader, and the periodic fire breathing comment section dragon armed with the latest string of talking points and partisan accusations. Nowadays, we’re not restricted to the same highly regulated news channels and papers. We have thousands of channels, hundreds of major blogs, and entire ecosystems of news sites. You would think that if anything, we’d be exposed to something different virtually all the time and have much more diverse viewing and reading lists, right? After all, this was the thinking behind a repeal of the Fairness Doctrine which was an FCC mandated measure to give equal time to opposing views, intended to curb propagandizing on behalf of political candidates when there were just five or six channels on everyone’s TV and people got their news from just a dozen papers. But as it turns out, we use the exact set of technologies meant to expose us to more ideas to throttle the torrent of content to what we find palatable.
While one could certainly argue that there’s great diversity of views across the web and point to sites ran by a myriad of corporations offering mainstream news reports, to forums curated by those who believe that we are all unwitting subjects of sinister Satanic aliens and demons, we can also make the argument that as the web grew and the the initial torrent of content online grew into a tsunami, it began to be corralled into cozy, uniform echo chambers connected to each other through a shared ideology. A big part of the reason why is that we’re dealing with too much data to process. Do you really read every Facebook update in your feed? Can you really look through all the 1,100+ sources Google News gives you for a top story? At some point you have to narrow the information coming to you into a manageable stream. And that’s when political biases begin to play a very significant role. Software doesn’t really care whether you’re an open-minded moderate or a partisan zealot, its only concern is to make sure that it brings you exactly what you want and nothing else. Likewise, Google and any other company offering to filter the web for you also have little care about how diverse your worldviews are and simply want to offer ads specifically customized to appeal to people with your exact preferences.
So here’s the question. Should these companies start caring? According to one paper, offering a few articles in a custom-filtered news stream does prompt some people to read something new which helps them form a more nuanced and well-rounded idea of the subject matter, exactly what one would expect after someone has read multiple viewpoints on the same issue. That doesn’t mean that the subject changed his or her opinions, just that new points were considered and factored into the thought process. Considering the furious, foaming at the mouth partisan rants across far too many sites nowadays, that alone sounds like a big step towards a more civil public discourse that leads to a small emphasis on partisan loyalty and dogmatism. However, this paper’s data set was gathered from 140 college students and the topic in question was an abstract one, with most subjects indicating they knew very little about it. Had the topic been something that hits partisan frictions rather than the transhumanist-sounding "neuro-enhancement," the results would’ve been more applicable to the context where these preference-inconsistent recommendations would matter most. We don’t know if we’d really be able to get the same students to read an article opposing their ideological stance and show at least recognition of its points, if not an outright appreciation and discussion of the opposing arguments.
So may all come down to whether you find people willing to get out of their comfort zone every once in a while, and how much their identity with a certain movement means to them. If they prize conformity and believe that a new idea is a threat rather than an opportunity to see what others thing, well-meaning inconsistencies in their filtered lists of search results and news feeds will be treated as a nuisance and ignored. If they are fine with a periodic exploration of divergent opinions, they’ll be willing to click on ideologically inconsistent matches every once in a while. Again, the goal here would be just to make sure that other opinions are not filtered out of view and the web doesn’t turn into a search engine and social media enabled collection of echo chambers where ideological dissent is met with punitive action. But it seems much more likely that we can’t do it through being sneaky with technology. That willingness has to come from the person first and foremost, and that could turn out to be either the easiest thing to change, or the hardest. Giving the open-minded a new option is more than enough, but when dealing with the most close-minded, filter-happy denizens of the web, our only recourse will be to incentivize reading ideologically opposing content. And how does one incentivize open-mindedness?
See: Schwind, C., et al. (2012). Preference-inconsistent recommendations: an effective approach for reducing confirmation bias and stimulating divergent thinking? Computers & Education, 58 (2), 787-796 DOI 10.1016…
Science is apparently failing us. Rather than discovering new realms of possibility, it’s been reduced to using observational tools and computer models to take apart every individual process down to its most basic levels after which scientists simply assume they can make conclusions based on what molecules are involved, not how the entire system actually fits together because doing so would be too hard and expensive. At least that’s the dismal view of the scientific process to which we’re treated by Jonah Lehrer’s last month’s feature piece in Wired Magazine, starting with the saga of a failed statin designed to boost HDL cholesterol. The drug had the intended effect but with an unexpected increase in heart failure and potential heart attacks, which meant a punitive $21 billion drop on market value for Pfizer on top of the $1 billion sunk into research. Rather than take this failure to mean that something fiendishly complex was not yet known and has to be worked out in the lab, Lehrer uses it as a jump-off point to indict all scientists of focusing on the basics to such a fault that they lose the forest for the trees, and surmises they adopt such narrow perspectives due to their mental limitations.
As any science writer worth his salt, Lehrer tries to underpin his assertion with a study, in this case a study on how people tend to craft narratives based on visual cues, concluding that because humans look for cues that will tell let them build causal relationships between events and objects, we can get the story wrong. Well, yes, we certainly can, but how this supports the notion that scientists have now engaged in oversimplification isn’t exactly clear. Granted, the age of the polymath is over and scientific fields are so fiendishly complex that you’ll end up specializing in a branch of a branch for your entire research career and only the very rare few will get to explore beyond that. However, that doesn’t mean that no scientist will ever integrate any of the domain specific knowledge at higher levels and investigate how entire systems work. To use an example from my area, there isn’t all that much left to be mined from fine-tuning artificial neural networks because we’ve had the math for a number of them since the 1970s. The goal is how to make them grow and interact into large networks where discrete components grow and interact to become something more than just the sum of their parts, much the same way as astronomers studying stars and galaxies help feed models created by cosmologists.
Getting down to the basics is important because we need to know how each node in the system works before we can reassemble the whole thing and start affecting it with full knowledge of how every individual node may react to the changes. And just like Lehrer points out, that’s not an easy task. If you identify 20 components in a particular system, you could be looking at as many as 400 ways they may interact in just a preliminary sweep and testing all those interactions will take a lot of time and money. To acknowledge this fact and then strongly imply that scientists are just skipping this investigative step because it’s so expensive and time-consuming is not even wrong. And it’s even more outlandish to consider that scientists are now working with immense and complex, dynamic networks that stretch from the realm of molecules, to entire ecosystems is a failure since a discovery takes longer and tends to be less profound than say, the laws of gravity, or evolution, or genetic drift, since we’re now tackling a level of detail that would’ve been incomprehensible to any scientist working even a century ago. Science at its heart is about trial and error, and as we test more and more complex hypotheses, we’re bound to see the failure rate go up while a success opens the doors to more profound ideas and tools than ever before. If we’re always terrified of being wrong, how will we ever find what actually works?
[ illustration by Schuhle Lewis ]
One of the big predictions made by evolutionary theory is that if given the selective pressure to do so, colonies of unicellular organisms will combine into multicellular organisms and start forming divisions of labor. Going from single cell, to cooperative colony, to a macroscopic organism with differentiated cells had to happen over several billions years to make the Cambrian Radiation possible. But how does this process work? For years, biologists tried to induce certain single celled organisms to merge into multicellular ones and came up with a number of interesting cooperative entities. However, actual multicellular behavior, i.e. the organisms acting as one being rather than a big colony, eluded them until now. After steering the selective pressures for a strain of yeast, a team of biologists from the University of Minnesota managed to evolve multicellular organisms which showed growth phases and simple cell differentiation, key traits of true multicellularity. While this experiment can’t show us how the very first multicellular organisms evolved, it does prove that it can happen, and that an environment that encourages something as simple as clumping can trigger a profound evolutionary shift.
Here’s what happened. Yeast growing in nutritious broth was allowed to get relatively comfortable and to start clumping into potential colonies. Then, every once in a while, the mixture was shaken and only the clumps of yeast that managed to stay together were kept. Finally, to induce multicellularity, the scientists focused on the clumps that best stayed together and took longer to reproduce as they grew. Within two months, there was an easily identifiable juvenile stage which the multicellular yeast had to complete before reproduction, and some of the cells adopted a faster lifecycle than others, decreasing in size and serving as reproductive cells. With a smaller size and shorter lifespan, they provided more spores even though it necessitated a shorter life. They were essentially adapting to die faster for the benefit of the larger organism of which they were now a part, an extremely important trait of differentiation in multicellular life. Of course there’s a huge difference between this and completely different cellular shapes and structures tasked with very specific jobs, but as the authors note in their paper, this is just after 60 days. The level of differentiation we see in macro life had to take millions of years to even become possible. Seeing specialized precursors of gametes evolving in months is a really big deal already, especially when coupled with the fact that the resulting yeast had a juvenile phase.
With this starting point, one could imagine subjecting the new multicellular organism to nutrients best suited to feed an internal colony of mutated cells which could be induced to share the products of their digestion and thus forming a digestive tract, or coating the experimental organism in cells that will keep it insulated from an external antagonist, creating a shell, and so on. We’ve often thought that cooperating unicellular organism will be able to coalesce and work together and this experiment shows that we were right. Yes, perhaps the yeast has some mechanisms encouraging multicellularity and that’s perfectly fine because it shows that the ability to combine with other cells into a new organism can evolve in unicellular entities on its own, then lie dormant until a selective pressure makes it a net benefit. In summation, this is a very neat experiment which can start new lines of inquiry into differentiation and development, something that will better illuminate why our bodies and that of all other macroscopic animals can work and develop the way they do. Sure, this may not be a one for one repeat of how multicellular life really evolved, but that’s not the real goal here. What the scientists want to see what mechanisms are at work in creating multicellular life and whether their ideas for how we could’ve went from one cell to trillions over the span of 3.5 billion years have any merit. Increasingly, it seems like they do and while we may never know the exact sequence of events, we’ll have some really, really good ideas.
See: Ratcliff, W., et al. (2012). Experimental evolution of multicellularity PNAS DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1115323109
For all the media attention lavished on Tim Tebow about his very public religious rituals on the field, have you noticed that it’s rarely mentioned that as an NFL quarterback he is actually quite mediocre? If he takes a knee before the game to ask his deity of choice for being able to win the game, about half the time the answer is a resounding no according to the final scores. Amazingly, according to a Fox News poll, around 43% of viewers thought that God was helping Tebow win games, which would mean that not only does a deity in charge of a universe cares about one particular human playing one particular game in one particular country at one highly specific time period, but that he’s also exceedingly fickle in his support. On top of that, that also implies that a football game somehow plays into some grand divine plan for the universe itself. But of course this isn’t really some sort of statement about football or Tebow, but a statement about the place religion has in contemporary American society, how it’s put on a pedestal and gets used to justify narcissism, arrogance, and medicority.
Now, this isn’t even about one’s personal beliefs. As both civil decency and the law say, you should be free to believe what you want and have the right to voice your beliefs and practice them on private property without the police showing up at your doorstep telling you to cut it out. Of course insisting that your religious practices tell you to force everyone around you to participate in your rituals or threaten them with violence or arrest is a very, very different matter altogether as does using your professed faith to imply that you’re somehow a better, more moral person that those who don’t ascribe to your beliefs, and that by default, you have more say in what goes on around you. Unfortunately all too often, Americans allow professions of faith become professions of power and selfless charity while they’re being used as anything but. Rather than going to the poor, the homeless and the temporarily needy, large chunks of budgets for numerous churches go towards staff and maintenance. In vast megachurches, millions are spent on advertising, performance pieces, and the relentless self-promotion by pastors turned religious rock stars building their own brands and selling their books filled with inspirational fluff cribbed from self help books and peppered with Biblical quotes to make sure they sell quickly.
When sports writers talk about someone like Tebow in unflattering terms based on the fact that he is not that great of a quarterback, they cite a torrent of angry e-mails accusing them of hating a Christian athlete, as if no other quarterback in the NFL also considers himself a Christian or doesn’t thank his deity of choice after a win when being interviewed by the media. The cultural message seems to be “let’s overlook that Tebow is at best mediocre and used his outward, broadly-televised fundamentalism to build his brand, look at how much of a devoted Christian he is! He came from a very religious home, he must be a great person!” Why? It’s not like a less public profession allows one to use religion as an excuse for average performance. At work, I never hear phrases in the same vein as “his code is often buggy and he violates a number of key architectural rules, but doesn’t it just inspire you when he prays before he starts banging on the keyboard?” And odds are that I never will because we’re judged by what we produce, not how devoted to our personal beliefs we are. Other athletes in the league also know how to separate their faith from their work and wait until they win to thank their deities, rather than make a huge show of their religiosity, knowing that if anything, it cheapens the faith.
Displays of very public piety don’t say that you’re devoted to your faith. They say “here, look at me, look how I’m such a devoted member of a religious group” in much the same way a self-appointed pick up artist peacocks at a nightclub. It’s far more impressive when one’s devotion comes out in quiet actions and a willingness to sit down and hold discussions which test their beliefs. Many of my religious friends are well aware that I’m an atheist and read this blog. None of them insist that I come to church with them, that being Christian somehow makes them more moral or charitable than those around them, and ask me questions about evolution, AI, and any other topic which has philosophical implications for their beliefs. And they also get annoyed at really flashy displays of piety for show. They are a much better testament to incorporating faith into one’s life to be a better, more charitable person than any self-promoting spokesperson who uses religion to cover up his greed or his mediocrity under an untouchable, cultural third rail so he and his supporters can rush to accuse you of bigotry and discrimination should you dare to offer an objective critique of what he does and how he does it. And this is why we need less Tebows and Focus on the Family types, and more curious, open-minded moderates.
