An Exercise in Sanity

I’ve said it once, I’m sure I’ll be saying it the rest of my life. Correlation does not imply causality. Why is it so hard for people to understand this? Here’s a great example in sports: The home team wins 67% of playoff games in the NBA. The author writes this as if it’s a huge revelation and this is an indicator of how strong home field advantage is.

Gah! No — these two (home field advantage and winning) are correlated, but that doesn’t mean one causes the other. Home field advantage doesn’t cause winning. Instead, home field advantage and winning are caused by a third thing — namely, actually being better than the other team. A team has home court advantage if they performed better over the course of the regular season, and are thus also more likely to win. There’s nothing mystical about it. Yes, home court is an advantage, but it shouldn’t at all be surprising or warrant a two page “investigation” that the home court correlation is more pronounced in the playoffs.

Social Darwinism is the name given to the vile philosophy of “might makes right” on a social level and generally used to exploit and oppress large classes and races of people in the early half of the 20th century. Proponents of social Darwinism believed they had the right to “succeed” by virtually any means necessary over their fellow men. There has been much hoopla recently from the creationists drawing the conclusion that because social Darwinism is bad, the theory of evolution must therefore be wrong. Evolutionary biologists have had to spend far too much time distancing the real science from the stupidity of social Darwinism, which isn’t even held by anyone currently alive and in power. On the other hand, I do believe that evolutionary principles can lead help us discover our inherent basis for morality and ethics and help us refine those to make a better, more just society.   Continue reading ‘Darwinian Society and Morals’

Well, Kenneth Miller’s lecture at UT last night was awesome. Even better was that I got there very early and got to talk to him. He was generous enough to talk to me for about 20 minutes. I didn’t think it was possible to like him more than I already did, but he was very cool. I asked him what he thought about PZ getting thrown out of the Expelled movie, and he just laughed. We talked a little bit about the “framing” issue (see here, or just go to ScienceBlogs and search). I also asked him how he got along with Dawkins, and he told me a great story about Dawkins correcting part of Finding Darwin’s God (something very minor about physics), and how much Dawkins liked the book in general. Of course, Dawkins disagreed with almost the entire thing. But it’s positively great that rational people can disagree about such things (I exclude fundamentalists from the “rational” categorization). The world would be boring otherwise.

The lecture itself was very entertaining. Dr. Miller is very funny, and his presentation was very slick and well-done. I can easily believe that his biology classes would be excellent. You can watch online here. I highly recommend it — if you aren’t familiar with the creation/evolution debate, this is a good primer. I couldn’t stay for the Q&A period though, which seemed like it got off to a good start.

Ah, I love people who don’t understand science or statistics. This CNN article is about how some parents believe that vaccines have caused their children’s autism. For example:

Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, says the connection between vaccines and autism is nothing more than a sad coincidence… “The studies compared autism rates among populations of children who did and did not receive the MMR vaccines, and among those who did and did not receive vaccines containing thimerosal. It’s been asked and answered: Vaccines don’t cause autism,” Offit says.

Michelle Cedillo’s parents disagree. “I think there is a link,” says Theresa Cedillo, Michelle’s mother.

Wow. She disagrees. Personally, I go through the day disagreeing with facts all the time. No, wait, that would be the definition of insanity.

Dr. Miller will be at UT this Friday, April 4th at 7:00pm in Welch Hall. Full details here.

While I don’t agree with Dr. Miller on religion, I respect his work and his writing a lot, so I’m looking forward to hearing him talk. And getting my book signed.

After doing some additional reading about various fusion projects (as a follow up to this article on Michio Kaku’s book), I’ve uncovered my own misunderstanding. I’ve always taken “cold fusion” to mean “controlled fusion”; that is, I understood “cold” to essentially mean “not a bomb”. But I was wrong. “Cold fusion” actually refers to room-temperature fusion; Prof. Kaku was clearly referring to “controlled fusion at high temperatures” as being possible within a few centuries. I’ve made edits to my original article to rectify this.

On the other hand, I’m glad for my mis-labelling, because it seems to have attracted an actual cold-fusion crank, Jed Rothwell, which has been an interesting diversion. While I am no where near qualified (as evidence I give you the first paragraph of this post) to judge the scientific merits of the research he is propagandizing, I can still point out several characteristics that smack of quackery to me.

Continue reading ‘Crank Physics’

I really enjoyed Michio Kaku’s other books, especially Parallel Worlds, so I had very high expectations for Physics of the Impossible. To side track a bit, and to show why I appreciate books like these: I get annoyed when someone proclaims that something is “impossible” (this comes up more than I expect). I have friends either pursuing a science Ph.D. (including physics!) or already graduated with one who have argued that some things, such as faster-than-light travel, will forever be impossible. The reasoning is that we’ve discovered basic laws that indicate these things are impossible. It’s arrogance to assume that we, in all of history, have some things figured out definitively.

This kind of reasoning is on the opposite end of the spectrum from another position that I find ridiculous — that we can’t trust any scientific conclusions because science has been wrong in the past. It’s just as stupid. Isaac Asimov analyzed this kind of thinking in a book called The Relativitiy of Wrong. What we consider scientific facts or laws now may be wrong — no scientist would say that anything is “100% proven” — it’s not how science works. But it’s unlikely in the extreme that what knowledge we have now will be completely overthrown. New science that comes along is a refinement of previous theories. For example, relativity didn’t discard Newtonian mechanics, it just augmented it. Relativity may be wrong, but it is more correct than clasical physics. The neo-Darwinian synthesis may be wrong, it is certainly more correct than Darwin was in 1859, and is far, far more correct than Creationism.

So, while it is arrogance to assume that we will not discover new “laws” and open new possibilities, it is facile to take the opposite view and say that science offers nothing. I love theoretical physicists that happily consider how some things might be possible even though they seem impossible now. Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, and Stephen Hawking are all good reading for this kind of thing. Back to the book at hand: amusingly, Kaku quotes many scientists from the late 19th century who thought they had defined the limits of the possible. The book was fun. Kaku divides “impossible” things into three categories: types I, II, and III. Type I impossibilities are things that are possible within the boundaries of what we know now, but we lack the technical sophistication and/or theoretical details to implement them. This includes such things as controlled fusion, AI, and, yes, even teleportation. He expects that these technologies would be developed in the one hundred to one thousand year timeframe.

Type II impossibilities “sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world” and might be “realized on a scale of millenia to a million years”. He puts time travel and faster-than-light travel in this category. Type III are things that are in direct contradiction to the currently known laws of physics, and “surprisingly, there are very few such” things.

Aside from the overall content of the book, I think Kaku really needs a better editor and to be more precise with language. I know I’m picking nits, but I really believe that a popularization of science can be simplified, that’s not a license to play fast and loose with language. Many times in the book, he’s just … terribly imprecise. In discussing the possibility of extra-terrestrial life, he states on page 142: “huge creatures are probably not possible because of the scale law, which states that the laws of physics change drastically as we increase the scale of any object”. That’s just absurd. I know what he means (and he does spend some time explaining it) — you cannot scale an ant up to human size and expect it to work (he also uses King Kong as an example). But the laws of physics don’t change; the laws of physics gave us the scale law! The applicability just changes.

Another example of imprecision is when Kaku is discussing perpetual motion machines (free energy, a class III impossibility for sure), and applying the second law of thermodynamics (2LOT) to biology. He writes:

Biologists tell us that the aging process is the gradual accumulation of genetic errors in our cells and genes, so that the cell’s ability to function slowly deteriorates. Aging, rusting, rotting, decay, disintegration, and collapse are also examples of the Second Law.

Gah. It’s not that he’s said anything explicitly wrong, but he’s implied several things that are wrong. Many people fall into this same trap when discussing biological systems (notably moronic Creationists). It’s not that biological systems don’t obey the 2LOT, it’s just very hard to apply the 2LOT to living organisms. He seems to imply that immortality would violate the 2LOT, when it most certainly wouldn’t. Living organisms take in far more energy than they need to overcome the 2LOT, it’s just that our cellular machinery isn’t perfect (not designed) at maintenence. Further, rotting and decay aren’t spontaneous processes; they are the result of other living organisms eating dead ones. To reiterate, it’s not that Kaku is wrong, it’s just a gross oversimplification.

To quibble some more (I enjoy doing this, despite having enjoyed the book), Kaku needs a better editor. There are numerous pop culture references that are just wrong. He says that in Star Trek IV, the Enterprise crew goes back in time to the 1960’s, when every geek knows that it was the 1980’s. His description of Asimov’s Foundation series was also laughably wrong. To wrap this up, the book is well worth reading, but I thought that Krauss’ two books on this topic were better.