Category Science

Irrational Scientists

Overcoming Bias has a good article about scientists holding unscientific beliefs outside the lab. The gist of it is, if a scientist throws out science when he leaves work, does he really understand what it’s for and how it works?

Why? Well, suppose that an apprentice shepherd is laboriously trained to count sheep, as they pass in and out of a fold. Thus the shepherd knows when all the sheep have left, and when all the sheep have returned. Then you give the shepherd a few apples, and say: “How many apples?” But the shepherd stares at you blankly, because they weren’t trained to count apples – just sheep. You would probably suspect that the shepherd didn’t understand counting very well.

(HT Pharyngula.)

Unexpected Science Song

We all knew that They Might Be Giants
know stuff,
but even so, I was pleasantly surprised, while listening to
this month’s episode
of their podcast, to hear
Cut the Strings:

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The Evolutionary Basis of Religion and Consciousness

Daniel Dennett has proposed what he calls the
intentional stance, which is basically the way that when we interact with other people or animals (and sometimes things), we act as if there’s a mind there that intends to behave in a certain way. If confronted with an angry dog, we behave as if that dog is an agent that intends to do us harm or to chase us off of its property, rather than, say as if it were a machine for barking.

We humans are good at this. In fact, one of the things our minds are very good at is modeling other minds. It’s easy to see why this would have arisen: it’s very useful to be able to predict how elements of one’s environment are going to behave, whether those elements are bricks, trees, tigers, or other people. Animals, whether predators, prey, domestic animals, or companions, often behave as if they have a mind that wants things, pursues goals, and avoids harm. This is even more true of people. So being able to predict how a herd of antelope will react to a sudden noise, or how a woman will react to a gift, provides an evolutionary advantage, and would have been selected for.

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Dinosaur Pr0n!

Someone on talk.origins asked how dinosaurs had sex. One of the replies pointed to
this Straight Dope column, which mentions
a painting by Luis Rey of carnotaurs having sex, which I’ve reproduced here for your enjoyment and edification. (See also this article in Cosmos.)

Apparently the late paleontologist Beverly Halstead did some research in the area of dinosaur sex, but apparently he couldn’t come up with anything conclusive. A major problem is that animals’ naughty bits also tend to be soft bits, which means they don’t fossilize easily, so we’re not sure what dinosaurs’ reproductive organs looked like. The best guess I’ve seen is that, like birds, they had a cloaca, basically an all-purpose rear orifice for eliminating urine and feces, laying eggs, and emitting sperm. So most likely dinosaurs didn’t distinguish between “regular” sex and anal sex.

(Update: PZ Myers informs me that like Carol, Chris, and Leslie, Beverly is a man’s name. Thanks for the correction.)

Gil Dodgen: Uncommonly Dense

Gil Dodgen posted the following over at Uncommon Descent:

All computational evolutionary algorithms artificially isolate the effects of random mutation on the underlying machinery: the CPU instruction set, operating system, and algorithmic processes responsible for the replication process.

If the blind-watchmaker thesis is correct for biological evolution, all of these artificial constraints must be eliminated. Every aspect of the simulation, both hardware and software, must be subject to random errors.

Of course, this would result in immediate disaster and the extinction of the CPU, OS, simulation program, and the programmer, who would never get funding for further realistic simulation experiments.

All I can say is “wow”. Either Dodgen is having us all on (which I doubt, since he’s started a new thread to respond to the charge that he doesn’t know WTF he’s talking about), or he honestly doesn’t understand the difference between the simulated environment and the machine doing the simulating.

Presumably he also believes that when NOAA simulates the effect of a hurricane hitting the Florida coast, they have to pour rain onto their computers. And that every time an orc dies in World of Warcraft, a real orc dies in some distant land.

I know that I’m often too rooted in the concrete and have trouble going from a collection of facts to a general principle, but damn!

Dark Matter Exists

One of the things that’s got to be frustrating about astronomy is just how little astronomers have to work with. They can’t walk up to a star and stick a thermometer in it or weigh it on a scale. They can’t even go around a star and look at it from a different angle. They can’t go anywhere the Earth doesn’t want to go, and the instruments on space probes don’t go very far or very fast. They can’t collect matter samples from distant stars and planets because matter, traveling at less than the speed of light, hasn’t had nearly enough time to get here. That leaves them with pretty much nothing but light. Okay, electromagnetic radiation of all frequencies, but it’s still just photons. Basically, all they can do is stand in one spot and watch.

And what’s amazing is that they keep coming up with ways of teasing unbelievable amounts of information out of the light that reaches us. They can see what its frequency distribution is, what spectral lines have been added or removed, which tells them what atoms and molecules are involved, and also whether that matter’s moving toward or away from us, and how fast. And a million other bits of information beyond that.

To illustrate, Sean Carroll (no, not
Sean Carroll the biologist,
Sean Carroll the cosmologist)
explains how scientists recently demonstrated that dark matter really exists.

Go read
the whole thing, because it’s clearly explained, with cool pictures.

In a nutshell, though, it’s an example of what I was talking about above, of teasing out all sorts of information out of light.

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Teaching Kids Science

The Pensacola News Journal has
an article
about a program called
I LOVE Science,
in which volunteers teach school children science with hands-on activities.

“Science is fun, and you get to do things that are new to you,” said Ryan Gilley, 10. “You get to know how things work and the way they are made.”

If they can instill a love of learning and science in young kids, that’s great.

But the irony of it all is that this is happening right in Kent Hovind’s back yard.

Why Science Matters

At my last job, my commute was about an hour each way, on a typical day. At times I would amuse myself by trying to figure out how much time I could save if I drove at 70, 75, 80, 85 miles per hour. Interestingly (or depressingly) enough, it never amounted to more than ten minutes — and that was assuming that I never slowed down, never got stuck behind someone who was only doing 70. In practice, the only times I ever made those 35 miles in less than 50 minutes was when I was returning home after midnight.

It also meant that if I had a 10 o’clock meeting, I had to be on the road by 9:00 at the very latest. It was very odd, the first time I woke up at 8:45, thought that even in emergency panic mode and with the sort of ruthless optimization that only a life-long geek would concoct, there was no way I could get dressed, cleaned enough to pass for presentable, make a cup of coffee so I wouldn’t crash on the highway, and make it behind the wheel in less than 20 minutes. I realized with a Cold Equations chill that I was already late, even though the meeting wouldn’t begin for more than an hour.

There’s a saying that “what you don’t know won’t hurt you” and it’s obvious nonsense: the cancer eating away at your liver, the distracted driver coming around the blind curve on the road, the mercury in your salmon steak, all can hurt or kill you, whether you know they’re there or not, whether you believe in them or not.

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Art of Science

The
winners of the 2006 Princeton Art of Science competition are online.

Go look! Pretty pictures!

The Drake Equation, Creationist Version

(I didn’t write this. To the best of my knowledge, it’s by a guy who posts as astronomer on invisionfree.com’s Creation Vs. Evolution board. I just reformatted and tweaked it a bit):

(For those who don’t know, the
Drake equation
is an estimate of the number of extraterrestrial civilizations out there with which we can communicate.

The Drake Equation

N* * fs * fp * ne * fi * fc * fl = N

Where:
N* = number of stars
fs = fraction of sun-like stars
fp = fraction of stars with planets
ne = number of planets in habitable zone
fi = fraction of habitable zones where life does arise
fc = fraction of planets inhabited by intelligent beings
fl = percentage of the lifetime of a planet that is marked by presence of a communicative civilization

The Drake Equation, Creationist Edition

NG

Where:
NG = Number of places chosen by God.