The Limits of Science

The success of science is indisputable. One only needs to look at modern medicine and technology for convincing evidence that science works. In the approximately 400 years since the birth of what we might recognize as modern science we have undoubtedly gained considerable knowledge of the natural world and its inner workings. In that time science has become a central part of our culture and, in many ways, has replaced religion as a major source of authority.

Since the Enlightenment there has been a steady trend of secularization in public life. Where once the Church wielded tremendous social and political power to uphold their own dogmas (e.g. the flat earth; just kidding, they actually never said that), some critics allege that the scientific establishment has in some ways taken the Church's place, forming a kind of scientific priesthood.

In fact, one famous proponent of science in the Victorian age and one of the first professional scientists, Thomas Huxley, had exactly that in mind. To Huxley and his supporters, science needed to replace religion as the supreme source of cultural authority. Historian Peter Bowler observes that the great museums of natural history built in Britain and America during the 1800s are rather cathedral-like (see the London museum above), and that this "helped confirm the role that science had usurped as the source of moral authority in the modern world."

Leaving aside the problem of "science" being a source of moral authority, what does this mean for us? One thing it means is that science's dominant position in our culture can cause people to accept pronouncements or conclusions uncritically. No doubt it was common in earlier centuries for people to uncritically accept what religious authorities told them, and we can have the same problem with scientific authorities now. In fact, in some ways it is probably worse today because science has become so specialized that it is sometimes hard for other scientists, nevermind lay people, to make sense of theories and concepts outside of their own fields.

As a former science educator, I am interested in helping people achieve science literacy, part of which includes being able to critically evaluate scientific claims and evidence as well as being aware of the nature and history of science. Over the next few weeks I intend to write further on these topics because while science is clearly an important source of knowledge, science (and especially scientists) are hardly infallible. Let's not accord to scientific theories the same blind faith and adherence to dogma that rationalists are so quick to criticize in our religious forebears.

Science and Culture, or, who needs kingdoms and phyla anyway?

I recently finished reading The Earth Encompassed, a history of the environmental sciences by Peter Bowler. A major theme in the book is to show how all sorts of things can influence the development of scientific knowledge. Commonly viewed as having a lofty epistemic status and often claimed to be the sole source of objective knowledge, science is in fact strongly influenced by culture, political ideologies, religious ideologies, and even geography.

I plan on posting more on these topics later, but I'll start with an interesting discovery made by philosopher Michel Foucault while he was looking through an ancient Chinese encyclopedia. While discussing the history of classification (i.e., the different ways that different cultures have categorized parts of the natural world), Bowler relates the story of how Foucault became interested in questions of language and representation in the first place.

We are probably all reasonably familiar with the Western approach to taxonomy in which we divide plants and animals primarily according to their physical characteristics (kingdoms, phyla, genus, species, etc.). As Foucault discovered, however, the ancient Chinese apparently had a very different approach to classification which resulted in placing animals in the following categories: a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.

Anyone have a good mnemonic to help memorize that?

Quantum Physics and...the Iraq War?

The other day I was listening to the radio and heard a surprising story about the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in Baghdad. This event was one of the most memorable of the Iraq War and was replayed ad nauseam by the media (Fox replayed it every 4 minutes or so for almost an entire day). The story has an interesting parallel to one interpretation of quantum physics: that observers have a direct effect on the events they are witnessing.

Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, was aware of how absurd some descriptions of the world at the quantum level were. At the quantum level, reality stops making sense. Electrons, for example, the little bits of mass that “orbit” around the nuclei of atoms, seem to be able to do something that most of us are incapable of: be in more than one place at once doing more than one thing at once. Physicists call this being in a superposition of states; the electron has multiple speeds, directions, and spins at the same time. If that’s not strange enough, it turns out that when a human observer is present the electron “collapses” into a more normal state of only being in one place and doing one thing at a time. In order to illustrate this paradox, Schrodinger came up with his famous thought experiment that has become known as Schrodinger’s cat.

My version goes something like this: a cat has been placed in a high-tech box. Inside this box is a laser gun pointed at the cat’s head. A fancy contraption that monitors an electron’s spin controls the trigger on the laser gun. Electrons can either spin “up” or “down,” and the contraption will cause the gun to shoot if the electron is spinning up but will not shoot if it is spinning down. According to quantum theory, the electron is spinning up and down at the same time, so the gun is both shooting and not shooting, and the cat is both alive and dead. That is, until someone opens the box and looks inside.

The presence of an observer changes the reality. A similar thing seems to have happened in Firdos Square in Iraq in 2003. We all saw the footage where crowds of Iraqis toppled the statue of Saddam, a symbol of liberation and victory for the people there. Unfortunately, the real story is somewhat different. Rather than an area full of jubilant Iraqis knocking over a symbol of oppression, it was actually a mostly empty area with a large number of reporters, some Iraqis near the statue, and some American soldiers around the perimeter.

A handful of Iraqis decided that they wanted to topple the statue, but were unable to do so. An American commander noticed what they were trying to do and, seeing the crowds of reporters in the square, thought about how it would look if TV stations showed footage of Iraqis trying in vain to knock over the statue of Saddam. He ordered some soldiers to help them out and, voila, reporters zoomed in on the event and broadcast it around the world. An iconic moment in the war, seen as a symbol of victory by many, was actually more or less manufactured because of the presence of reporters. A full view of the area would have shown that the reporters outnumbered the active participants. This would have lessened the drama, to say the least. Some have speculated that the way the media portrayed this event, as well as the number of times it was replayed, led to a false sense of victory and ultimately disappointment as it became clear that there was a long road ahead for both Americans and Iraqis.

While maybe not as complicated or surprising as quantum physics, it is interesting to think about how the presence of observers changed what happened, how it was reported, and ultimately ended up influencing how many of us saw the war in Iraq.

Can "green" apps save the planet?

Last Spring I was listening to an On Point program about our ecological footprints and the hidden environmental costs of many of the products we buy. For example, manufacturing an e-reader like an iPad has the same impact on climate change as about 100 old-fashioned books; count the electricity you use for the life of the iPad (which mostly comes from coal-burning plants) and it becomes clear that, as Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris say, the most ecologically friendly thing to do is to walk to your local library.

Anyway, the show also discussed some "green" apps that are now available for your iPhone which rate various products based on a calculation of their impact on the environment. So, for example, it might suggest buying this brand of vacuum over another because the former company uses more recycled plastic. Now, I have no problem with educating people about the ecological impact of the products they buy (in fact, I'm quite convinced this is a great idea), but, one person who called in to the radio program reminded me of the larger problem we face.

I'm kind of assuming a lot, but from the way it sounded to me, the caller was probably a wealthy suburban housewife who drives a Lexus SUV, goes shopping a couple of times a week, and who purchases the latest, greatest smartphones for herself and her family every couple of months. She described how wonderful the new green apps were and how much they helped when she was shopping for that new vacuum or phone or flatscreen TV and she was very excited that she could be "green" while doing this. Unfortunately, she has completely deluded herself: the problem is not just that we buy new vacuums made without any recycled plastic, or that we buy a new car that gets 5 miles per gallon less than another one; the main problem is all of the constant buying itself. We are consumers through and through, and, while I'm too lazy to look up the exact statistic, Americans have consumed more of the earth's resources in the last century than the rest of the world has throughout all of history, or something crazy like that.

There is something amusing about us driving around consuming everything in sight but patting ourselves on the backs while we do it because we have some "green" apps on our smartphones.

God and Sex

A few months ago I was listening to a local radio program on my way to a job site. It was one of the morning talk programs where a few guys and one girl talk about and offer un-informed analyses of news and current events. Aside from serving as a strong reminder of the reason I usually only listen to NPR, the chatter that day also offered another example of an amusing / annoying lack of Biblical literacy.

Somehow the topic of God and sex came up, and the three (or maybe four) of them starting going off about how God hates sex and how the Bible teaches this and that about how sex is bad. This belief seems to be very common (Philip Pullman makes it a major issue in his anti-clerical but pretty good series His Dark Materials) yet, as is true of many beliefs about Christianity, it is false.

In their discussion of how God feels about sex, one of the hosts actually said something very nearly like, "have you ever read the Bible, God doesn't want you to have sex or have any fun." Apparently she missed that part of the creation story in Genesis where God creates males and females to join together "as one flesh" and how that union (physical, social, and spiritual) somehow fully encapsulates who God is. They apparently missed the verses in Proverbs emploring young married lovers to rejoice in each other's bodies as well as that whole book of the Bible, the Song of Songs, which is essentially erotic love poetry. Paul, in the New Testament, says that husbands and wives should offer their bodies freely to one another (though he also says he thinks it is better to be single, this is a separate issue and has to do with time rather than sex).

I think this myth probably has a variety of sources. Some Christians throughout history have thought that sex itself was sinful and have even thought that sex was the original sin that occurred in the garden of Eden. However, this view was informed more by certain strains of Greek philosophy (in which physical bodies, by their very nature, were considered corrupt) than the Bible. Also, I think that many of us somehow confuse a strong set of sexual ethics (forbidding adultery, etc.) with condemnation of sex itself. There is also the stereotype (too often true, unfortunately) of Christians as prudes. Lastly, I think a big part of this is willful ignorance: people believe what they want to believe. The radio host asked "have you ever read the Bible" but clearly had not actually read it herself. I was annoyed enough that I almost wrote in to the show to helpfully point them to some relevant passages, but it probably wouldn't make any difference.

Sigh...if only they knew that God thinks rather highly of business time; heck, he created it.

Who designed the designer?

A common objection to the Judaeo-Christian view that God created the universe involves pointing out that if you explain something by appealing to God you have not really explained anything because you would then need to explain God. Richard Dawkins has often written on this topic and his position is essentially this: by explaining an event or an object through reference to God (or, more generally, a designer), the explanation becomes worthless because you have invoked something that itself would need to be explained. The question would then need to be asked, who designed the designer? It would be much better to have a simpler, natural cause that would not require further explanation.

At first this sounds about right; indeed, walking around explaining everything by saying "God did it" would be about the same as not having any explanation at all. But upon closer inspection the argument breaks down completely.

After all, every explanation requires further explanations. Imagine a simple dialogue between a scientist and a curious inquirer:

"Why did that apple fall?"
"Gravity pulled it to the Earth."
"Where did the gravity come from?"
"Gravity is the bending of space-time around objects with mass. It is governed by natural law."
"Where did the natural laws come from?"

This line of questioning could go on and on no matter what answer the scientist gives. Either the scientist would have to explain one answer in terms of another, further, explanation or at some point the scientist would have to argue that one particular, arbitrary answer was somehow final. This illustrates two main problems with Dawkins' argument. First, just because an answer may require further explanation does not mean that the answer is worthless. No one would, after hearing it explained that the Earth's gravity pulled the apple to the ground, exclaim, "you haven't explained anything, because now you have to explain where the Earth came from!"

Second, an infinite regress of causes or explanations, as philosophers have called it, is an age old problem with explanations in general, not just explanations involving God. People of all worldviews have to take something as fundamental and not requiring further explanation. Aristotle had his Unmoved Mover, Christians have God, and some scientists believe the laws of nature to be "brute facts" not requiring explanation (Neil deGrasse Tyson begins a chapter of one his books with: "In the beginning, there was physics.") It is silly to single out one specific explanation with a criticism that applies to all types of explanations.

So what can we learn from this? My suggestion would be for Dawkins to stick to zoology and maybe stop writing publicly in areas that are so clearly outside his expertise.

Evolution to the rescue: why old men can't dance

Evolutionary psychology is an attempt to explain human behavior in terms of the evolution of our ancestors. While I do not doubt that who our ancestors were and what they did influence us today, I find many of the "findings" of evolutionary psychology to be hilarious. For example, see this explanation of why men go bald or this essay for a hilarious skewering of some of the claims of evolutionary psychology.

The latest example I, truthfully, had a hard time believing. I mentally double-checked that it wasn't April 1st. But, no, it's real. A psychologist now has an answer for one of the larger questions in life: why do old men dance so poorly at weddings? See his answer here.

Thankfully there seem to be a growing number of people who are properly skeptical of such claims.