Bibliophilia, Evolution

Bloggers of the 1930s

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I wonder if it’s true that you can only be a starry-eyed youngster once. I discovered the science fiction of Isaac Asimov when I was a ninth-grader, so far out of the social whirl that I didn’t even expect I was missing anything. I had my books and my BASIC compiler, and a few friends who shared my tastes in both, so what need had I for cheap beer? I collected the whole “Greater Foundation” series, from the Robot stories to the last Foundation book; Robots and Empire (1985) was the hardest to get, only turning up in my relatives’ used-book store in Seldovia, Alaska. Looking back through them in more recent years, big chunks don’t hold up that well, but I find myself inclined to view even the clunky and dated parts of, say, Pebble in the Sky (1950) with favor. Is it just sentiment at work? Do we each get a quota of one author we read through rose-tinted spectacles, just because they were the first we discovered?

When I try to put sentiment aside, I find that some stories still work, chief among them The Caves of Steel (1954). Still, if I want a book to read for “comfort food,” or to give myself an emotional pick-me-up and reinvigoration, I’m more likely to turn to Asimov’s non-fiction, from which there is plenty to choose. (I’d actually discovered the nonfiction first, several years before beginning my love affair with the Robot stories. For years, the only Asimov fiction I knew was the English-language screenplay of Gandahar (1988).) Among his best nonfiction is, funnily enough, his autobiography, of which there is also no shortage, as it comes in two strictly chronological volumes carrying his story through the 1970s, followed by a memoir published after his death and a book of his letters published after that.

All this is added value to make the passage I’m quoting today somewhat more admissible under “Fair Use” law. One of the fascinating things about Asimov’s autobiography is that it begins with his family history in Czarist Russia, on the borders of Belarus, then follows his nuclear family through Ellis Island into slum living in Brooklyn, then public school during the Depression, on through World War II. . . right the way to Watergate and, in the third volume, to glasnost and the TRS-80. One human life can cover a great deal of territory. Then come the odd moments of synchrony, when a bit of 1930s New York springs out at you and gains a strange relevance. To that end, here is In Memory Yet Green (1979), p. 209, describing the background to the Greater New York Science Fiction Club’s splitting into the Queens Science Fiction Club and the Futurian Science Literary Society, all the way back in 1938:
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Evolution, Wobosphere fun

Hiaasen on Florida Education

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Listen up, Alabama, because you’re next:

Over the years the Legislature has worked tirelessly to keep our kids academically stuck in the mid-1950s. This has been achieved by overcrowding their classrooms, underpaying their teachers and letting their school buildings fall apart.

Florida’s plucky refusal to embrace 21st century education is one reason that prestigious tech industries have avoided the state, allowing so many of our high-school graduates (and those who come close) to launch prosperous careers in the fast-food, bartending and service sectors of the economy.

By accepting evolution as a proven science, our top educators would be sending a loud message to the rest of the nation: Stop making fun of us.

Is that what we really want?

Come to think of it, I wonder how much money the Alabama State Board of Edumacation spent — in time, labor and materials — putting those “don’t you worry your purty li’l head” stickers in all our biology textbooks. It might have been a substantial amount of cash, but it probably wouldn’t have been enough to pay somebody other than the basketball coach to teach our biology class.

Video

A Bill Hicks Interlude

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Mister DNA worries that he has lost a couple million brain cells after watching a video clip of horrid and ignorant “Christian comedy,” so I figured that in the interests of science, we should see if a little Bill Hicks can promote neurogenesis. Sit back in your fMRI machine, wire up your cortical electrodes and enjoy. Yes, the language is roughly as coarse as what you’d hear in any middle-school cafeteria on an average day.

The joke about Jackie Onassis and the sniper-rifle pendant may have to be updated for a younger audience. A variation on the following might work:
Continue reading A Bill Hicks Interlude →

Wobosphere fun

Another Math “Joke”

Sum 1 to N writes the following:

A math professor is proving some general theorem, and ends up with a result involving [tex]x[/tex]’s and [tex]y[/tex]’s. One student raises his hand and asks, “Can you show us a special case of that theorem?”. In other words, the student wanted a specific application of the theorem. The professor proceeds to erase the [tex]x[/tex]’s and [tex]y[/tex]’s and replace them with [tex]x_0[/tex]’s and [tex]y_0[/tex]’s. The student replies, “Ah! That makes more sense.”

As it is trivially obvious to the most casual observer, the extension of the theorem to [tex]x_1[/tex] and [tex]y_1[/tex] is left as an exercise to the interested reader.

And it will be on the test.

BPSDB, Cosmology, Pseudoscience, Quantum mechanics

Science Illiteracy of the Day

BPSDBToday’s installment of “We’re so ignorant about basic science you couldn’t make up the crap we say if you tried” comes from Y-Origins Connection, a magazine which uses “dramatic photos and contemporary graphics” to explain “both sides of the intelligent design debate,” namely the creationist side and the creationists’ view of the scientists’ side. This comes from their website, right up top:

Quantum mechanics has revealed that our material world is based upon an invisible world of subatomic particles that is totally non-material. And over 95% of our universe consists of dark matter and energy that is beyond scientific observation. Also, scientists are openly discussing dimensions beyond ours where walking through walls and teleportation could be realities. The dilemma for materialists is that these areas are beyond the purview of science.

They managed to pack at least one kind of wrong in each sentence. I’m impressed. The overall theme seems to be taking discoveries of science and claiming them to be beyond science. When that well of inspiration runs dry, they take bits of overheard science jargon (hep talk like “extra dimensions” or “quantum teleportation,” let’s say) and throw them together without regard to their meaning. Truly they are strong in the art of nonsense-fu.

Neuroscience, Transhumanism, Video

Kurzweil’s Predictions for 2009

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Apropos an announcement from the AAAS annual meeting, Steve Novella ponders the task of reverse-engineering the human brain. For those of us who share a materialistic view of the brain — i.e., for people who subscribe to actual science instead of woo — this task is likely to seem possible in principle, although daunting in practice. If the mind is the activity of the brain, and a finite number of genes can direct the growth of a brain in a finite amount of time, and the molecules which make up the brain are being exchanged in and out all the time anyway, it’s reasonable to speculate that we’ll be able to mimic the process in another medium. Novella argues that the “software” part of this task will be harder than the “hardware” side:

Sure, we may run into unexpected technological hurdles, but so far we have been able to develop new approaches to computing technology to keep blasting through all hurdles and keep Moore’s Law on track. So while there is always uncertainty in predicting future technology, predicting this level of computer advancement at the least can be considered highly probable.

The software extrapolation I think is more difficult to do, as conceptual hurdles may be more difficult to solve and may stall progress for a undetermined amount of time.

Broadly speaking, I agree. The exact amount of processing power needed to implement the brain in a Linux box is as yet unknown; it depends on things like the complexity of an individual synapse, and how much data is required to represent the state of a neuron. Then, too, for every hardware advance on Moore’s side of the ledger, Gates is there to bloat the software by a corresponding amount, and the applications of computer technology which have most radically affected life in recent years have depended not on raw cycles-per-second, but on networking and mass storage, neither of which necessarily improves at the same rate as processor speed.

Ray Kurzweil may be the most famous evangelist of the view that explosive increases in computer power will give us artificial intelligence on a par with our own in the near future. He has elaborated upon this idea in several books, a couple of which I used to have on my shelf; a commenter at NeuroLogica, Sciolist, still has The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) close at hand.

Kurzweil claims that man’s merger with machine is inevitable, because the pace of evolution has been increasing exponentially — when we reach the edge of biological evolution, we must transition into artificial substrates so that can continue traveling up that exponential curve into binary godliness. This, he predicts, is inevitable. That’s at least a misreading of the theory of evolution; I’d argue it’s also a bit kooky.

Indeed, Kurzweil’s attempts to anchor his “Law of Accelerating Returns” in geological deep time are singularly silly, to steal PZ Myers’ phrase. They rely upon condensing multiple historical events into single data points to get a pretty curve, and instead of reflecting any deep truth about evolutionary processes, the curve you get reveals a recentist bias — the “proximity of the familiar.”

I recall that bothering me when I read the book, eight or so years ago, but eight years have gone by since then, making my memory only slightly more reliable than that of a HAL 9000 unit being fed a tapeworm. Thus it was with surprise and glee that I read Sciolist’s recounting of the predictions Kurzweil makes for one decade after the book’s publication, 2009:
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BPSDB, Evolution, Pseudoscience

A Pseudolinguist Does Pseudobiology

BPSDBM.J. Harper has a book available in your friendly local Barnes and Borders-A-Million, entitled The Secret History of the English Language. The short version of the professional critique of his linguistic claims is that they’re garbage. However, just as garbage attracts flies, so too will one kind of pseudoscience find happy companionship with another. (It occurs to me that I’m being a little unkind to flies with this metaphor.) Take what Harper says about biological evolution, in which he dredges out the old and tiresome canard that evolution is unfalsifiable:

Take the exemplar of all modern academic paradigms, the Theory of Evolution. There’s no question that the theory is valuable in so far as it has led more or less directly to the creation of the modern Life Sciences, but, true or false, the theory no less certainly contains the seeds of its own infinite survival. Having adopted a properly scientific root-and-branch model of speciation in which ex hypothesi all species must be demonstrably linked to other species, it permits the indefinite opening of new categories whenever a species cannot be demonstrably linked to other species. This has the unavoidable corollary that nothing can ever discovered from now until the end of time that can ever call the model into question.

That sound you hear is the figurative ghost of J. B. S. Haldane screaming, “Fossil rabbits in the sodding Precambrian!”

The modern understanding of evolution has multiple components, all of which are supported by countless interlocking lines of evidence. Common descent is one of these components, as is the principle of natural selection. Evidence could force us to revise our understanding of common descent, while leaving natural selection largely untouched. Other lines of evidence could conceivably challenge natural selection and show that it hasn’t operated to a significant extent over the history of life, but that evidence, to put it mildly, hasn’t yet come to light. In short, each component is falsifiable, but Nature has not falsified them.
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Relativity, Transhumanism

Happenings

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The Internet is making me feisty and argumentative (exhibit A). In my current mood, I’d be apt to fill this space with spite; fortunately, other people blag so I don’t have to.

First in a random ordering, Ben Allen asks, “How complex is a human?” Entertaining arithmetic ensues in the comments. Next, our friend gg kicks off a series of posts on Einstein’s relativity. Oddly enough, relativity has also showed up in Steven Novella’s latest debunking of Michael Egnor.

Finally, Russell Blackford has saved me the trouble of blagging about an odd story concerning religion and nanotechnology.

I’m currently supposed to be writing two different journal articles at my day job, but I’ll see if I can eke out the time to continue my supersymmetry series. There’s no better way to get myself a little peace and quiet than to post lots of equations!

Video

Randi’s Coda

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It’s Sunday morning where I am right now, the traditional time for stumbling about, cradling the head and asking, “What happened last night?” In my culture, this day is set aside to commemorate the occasion when Yahweh Elohim woke up with a strange woman in His bed and, His head splitting like that of His buddy Zeus, inquired of the heavenly host, “In the name of Me, why did I make tequila so damn strong?”

(That’s how Yahweh and Asherah got together, and why He was so eager to deny the relationship later on.)

In the spirit of contemplative reflection, then, I offer the concluding segment of James Randi’s NOVA programme, Secrets of the Psychics (1993).

I’m told he still has that cloak.

Bibliophilia, Evolution, Popularization

Hypothesis Testing

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Hypothesis: if you can take an idea which most people thought was the most hated concept in America this side of al-Qaeda’s mission statement and turn that idea into a book which stays on the New York Times bestseller list for almost a year, publishers will let you write your own ticket at least once.

Evidence: Richard Dawkins is being paid $3.5 million for his next book, Only A Theory? (to be published in 2009), which will lay out evidence for evolution.

Hypothesis: People who have a vested interest in portraying Dawkins and other “uppity atheists” as detrimental to science education and/or Western civilization will ignore or undervalue this book, along with all other attempts by “uppity atheists” to parlay their notoriety for good causes.

Evidence: Consider the reception (or non-reception) of Dawkins’s television series, The Enemies of Reason (2007). This is a lamentable oversight, since the struggle to keep pseudoscience out of medicine is surely an area on which atheists and at least some moderate theists can find a genuine common ground.

Hypothesis: I could sure have a lot of fun with $3.5 million.

Evidence: Forthcoming. Come on, in the interests of science, pretty please, with blueberries on top?

(Tip o’ the fedora to Tyler.)

"no matter how gifted, you alone cannot change the world"