tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10219244662171901342024-03-12T19:19:29.689-07:00Non-Consensual ScienceScience in revolution, dispute, and other compromising positionsMichael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-78693886873797831242010-11-29T02:02:00.000-08:002010-11-29T02:09:50.680-08:00"Flow" by Philip Ball<div class='post-quote'>A study of the science of flow that offers many pleasures to the reader (but a clear statement of the book's aims is not one of them)</div><div style='height: 10px';></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJr1amwLcMDyBZ8IZVnG-OcjWgYIKZQ0yeqyyISsPFJzFtlA-S3-p3LHnYHVfTYvZAdNjPE9N6RY-Fq92qHKsRHcD5mP9-mRdlRSz3V1osyaUbiKvDcP07zmq0rFEtkQeCQUatvJgwV3s/s1600/flow.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 304px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJr1amwLcMDyBZ8IZVnG-OcjWgYIKZQ0yeqyyISsPFJzFtlA-S3-p3LHnYHVfTYvZAdNjPE9N6RY-Fq92qHKsRHcD5mP9-mRdlRSz3V1osyaUbiKvDcP07zmq0rFEtkQeCQUatvJgwV3s/s400/flow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5544911698029706722" /></a>This is another of Philip Ball's quirky, scholarly, illuminating studies of the patterns of nature, the second in a trilogy. The others deal with shapes and branches; this one deals with flow of all kinds, from convection in the sun to avalanches in a pile of rice. <br /><br />Ball has struck popular science gold with this trilogy, because he has a subject matter that is at the same time scientifically intriguing, visually engaging, and easy for the layperson to grasp. Fluid flow -- the paradigm of flow in this book -- is a typical case. Eddies and turbulence are interesting for scientists because they are horribly complicated. But because they are horribly complicated, the only hope of understanding many features of fluid flow is through a kind of simple qualitative modelling, the kind that is easy to explain to a popular audience. The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, for example, is a mechanism by which flowing water forms wavy currents. It is a simple mechanism, communicable in a picture, and it creates delicate plumed patterns in water that make great images. And like most of the patterns in this book, it crosses mediums easily -- it is present in clouds as well as rivers.<span id="fullpost">It turns out, as Ball reveals in the last chapter of the book, that real turbulence is not susceptible to any simple models like the Kelvin-Helmholtz model. But this is a rare exception. And even with turbulence Ball finds a pretty way of illustrating the science: he concludes as he began the book, with a work of art. This artistic theme -- the first chapter is about representations of fluid flow in Western and Eastern art, with a focus on Leonardo Da Vinci -- is typical of Ball's playfulness in this trilogy, his fondness for interesting diversions. These are indeed diverting, but they can also be disorientating. In the case of this volume, I finished the first chapter without having much idea of what the book would be about.<br /><br />This book is certainly about something, though, even if it that something is hard to pin it down. It's about fluid motions, of course: aside from the conventional topics of water flow and convection, we have intruiguing chapters on the collective behavior of grains (in dunes, piles, and sheets) and on the movement of flocks of animals, crowds of people, and lines of traffic. But it's also about deeper themes, which Ball mentions now and then but explains systematically. It's about trying to describe and understand a wide class of phenomena through a single parameter -- whether it is Rayleigh's number for describing the tendency of fluids to give convection patterns, or Reynold's number for describing the eddy-forming habits of a liquid stream. In a vague way it is about self-organisation, the capacity of macroscopic entities to form complex patterns with no outside help except a steady influx of energy. And in a fleeting way it is also about self-organising criticality, the quality that some phenomena have of spontaneously entering highly unstable states -- a quality that the now-legendary sand-pile is supposed to have.<br /><br />Readers who are not interested in these themes, perhaps because they would rather see them treated front-on rather than in the occasional sidenote, will still find plenty to enjoy in this book. The simplest pleasure it offers is to witness similar patterns in disparate phenomena: lane-forming on human footpaths and in the trails of army ants; convection not just in boiling water but inside the earth, in clouds, in cereal packets, and in the regularly-spaced circular craters that shape some landscapes in Norway and Alaska. Another of the book's pleasures is its narration of the process of science, the sequence of attacks by different scientists, using different methods, on the same problem. In Flow, Ball's account of successive attempts to explain sand dunes is typical of his blow-by-blow coverage of the process of discovery.<br /><br />The breadth and detail of Ball's interests in this book means there are many other pleasures besides, from the historical (Faraday's prescient thoughts on convection in grains) to the domestic (an explanation of why shaking a cereal packet drives the chunky bits to the top). The downsides are that the scientific detail is sometimes heavy-going, and that the underlying themes of the book (aside from the general idea of fluid motion) are nebulous. On a more specific note, Ball's discussion of self-organising criticality did not ease much of my confusion about that topic. On the whole, however, Flow deserves its place in Ball's trilogy -- and that is high praise.</span><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-12424175890009005992009-11-18T00:55:00.000-08:002009-11-18T01:01:30.878-08:00Are all environmentalists hypocrites?<div class='post-quote'>Maybe, but it's better to be hypocritically active than honestly inactive</div><div style='height: 4px';></div><br />Hypocrisy is a useful tool for environmentalists. Show the world that Shell is tearing up the sands of Alberta and the world shrugs. Show the world that Shell is tearing up the sands of Alberta, and at the same time advertising themselves as a green company, and the world pricks up its ears. Dishonest wrong-doing carries more weight than mere wrong-doing. <br /><br />But hypocrisy is one of those tools that can easily turn on its users. Those who make moral claims are expected, on pain of hypocrisy, to back them up with unambiguous action -- environmentalists included. <br /><br />This is fair enough, but sometimes it seems to go too far. <span id="fullpost">Tell someone you've quit meat to reduce carbon emissions, and friends and foes alike will wonder aloud why you are still driving a car, buying imported fruit, etc. etc. Spend a year <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2009/oct/28/live-without-money">living cashfree</a> and a mob of commenters will call you a hypocrite for submitting a blog post by broadband. It seems that people who try to do good, and succeed imperfectly, are more guilty than people who don't try at all. Is this fair?<br /><br />The hypocrisy of some actions is indisputable, and indisputably a vice. Shell's hypocrisy is worse than mere wrong-doing because it is a lie designed to downplay the extent of their wrong-doing. Is it just as bad to be a selective environmentalist, one who picks and chooses their good works depending on what is convenient for them (assuming that leaving a Western-sized carbon footprint is a wrong-doing)?<br /><br />There has been a lot of scholarly ink spilt on the nature of lying and on whether or not wrong-doers forfeit their right to complain about the actions of others. Which is to say that it would be easy to get one's knickers in a philosophical twist on the topic of hypocrisy.<br /><br />But the following points seem to me salient, obvious, and within the grasp of people (like me) who want to think about this issue but do not want to think too hard.<br /><br />Firstly, it is not a good thing for an individual to be deluded about the extent of the harm he inflicts on the world, for the simple reason that such an individual is less likely to reduce the harm they inflict. <br /><br />Secondly, in at least some cases it is wrong for an individual to deceive others about the extent of his wrongdoing. If I put it about among Ethiopians that I was down to 1.2 tonnes of CO2 a year when in fact I was not, then I would be a lot like Shell when they put it about among Britons that they are a clean company when in fact they are pumping Alberta's dirt into the atmosphere.<br /><br />Thirdly, a person who takes some action to reduce their carbon footprint, but not all possible action, does not automatically deceive himself or anyone else. It might be perfectly clear in his mind that his actions are of real but limited use, and he may never lead anyone to believe otherwise. <br /><br />Fourthly, it is better to take some good action on climate change, and be a bit deluded or dishonest about the value of those actions, than to take no action at all now or in the future. A population of frank and knowing individuals is not much use if none of them reduce emissions.<br /><br />Fifthly, and finally, the fear of being called a hypocrite should not stop people from making incremental changes to their lives in the interests of the environment (or in the interests of any other worthwhile cause). The fear of being a selective environmentalist should not turn people into timid environmentalists. The alternative is damaging, absurd, and selfish. <br /><br />It would be damaging because most environmentally-friendly action by individuals will be step-by-step action. Wipe out incremental action and you wipe out most action. <br /><br />It would be absurd because the charge of hypocrisy assumes that the accused party has some wrong-doing to hide: I would be a lier, but not a hypocrite, if I said I would do five handstands but only did three. So if the fear of being hypocritical has any bite, it should urge us to take more action, not less. <br /><br />And it would be selfish, because -- if Lord Stern and the IPCC are even half-way right -- the social inconvenience of being called a hypocrite is minute compared to the harm that will be avoided if individuals take real action on climate change. Hypocrisy on climate change is a bad thing, from Shell or anyone else. But inaction is much worse.<br /></span><br /><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-81483489071730875512009-11-16T06:26:00.000-08:002009-11-16T06:39:57.403-08:00"Science and Islam" by Ehsan Masood<div class='post-quote'>An accessible and enlightening survey of Islamic science during the so-called Dark Ages and beyond</div><div style='height: 6px';></div><blockquote>"Animals engage in a struggle for existence [and] for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed...Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to [their] offspring."</blockquote><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ZOiVwxzvWo62SM:http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/files/imagecache/review/files/reviews/science_islam.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 106px; height: 119px;" src="http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ZOiVwxzvWo62SM:http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/files/imagecache/review/files/reviews/science_islam.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Is this Richard Dawkins writing in the 21st Century? Or Lamarck in the 19th? Or some godless renegade in 17th Century Europe? Not even close. The author is al-Jahiz, a science writer from 9th Century Baghdad. The surprising thing is not that an Islamic author could write such a thing so early, but that we are surprised to learn that he could -- that's what Ehsan Masood would say, at any rate. And readers of <span style="font-style:italic;">Science and Islam</span> will probably agree with him by end of this lively and user-friendly book on Islamic science during the so-called Dark Ages and beyond.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />Part 1 of the book mixes a potted history of Islam with descriptions of the patrons, institutions and practitioners of science in each major regime from 700AD to 1300AD. The story is long but compactly told. In the space of four chapters and seven centuries, Islamic science flowers in Damascus, Baghdad, and Egypt before being cut down by the Mongols and Tartars. Along the way Masood sketches some of the many colourful figures of the time, like the bird-man ibn-Firnas and the scientific advisor who is unable to build a damn on the Nile and feigns madness to avoid the wrath of his caliph.<br /><br />Part 2 hones in on the science of this "staggering renaissance." Masood covers medicine, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, and engineering, in that order, with a post-script on evolution, optics, and Islamic universities. When describing the heroes of Islamic science and their remarkable work, Masood keeps one eye on their Greek heritage and another on their European successors. Comparisons are odious, but illuminating: Islamic scientists are all the more impressive when we learn that they questioned Galen on medicine, challenged Ptolemy on cosmology, and made direct contributions to the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Fermat, Newton, and the engineers of the industrial revolution.<br /><br />Part 3 looks at Islamic science in the 19th and early 20th century, and draws some lessons for the future. This is not just an epilogue. It asks what the scientific revolutionaries of the 17th Century thought about Islamic science, whether the Ottomans were wise to borrow from Western science in the 19th Century, and whether imperialist science was a good thing for India. These are all delicate questions with ambiguous answers, and Masood gives a balanced survey. To end, he picks up a thread that runs right through the book, the violence of pro-science Islamic rulers. "If science is to return to the nations of Islam," Masood concludes, "it must do so without interfering with people's freedom to believe."<br /><br />This conclusion is wrong if taken too literally. Surely a belief in evolution (for example) will interfere with a person's freedom to believe that the earth was created 6000 years ago -- and rightly so. Still, Masood does well to remind us that dictatorial rule does not help the cause of science, even if the dictator is pro-science. This book also reminds us of another easy-to-forget truth: for most of its history, Islamic science flourished alongside the teachings of Muhammad, not in spite of them -- and sometimes, as for medicine, it flourished because of those teachings. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Science and Islam</span> has some gaps. Sometimes Masood left me hanging after skipping past what seemed to be key achievements in Islamic science. One is the passage quoted at the top of this review, which summarises not just evolution but also a mechanism for evolution that resembles evolution by inherited characteristics; another is the controlled clinical trial conducted by the medic al-Razi to test the theory of bloodletting. Clinical trials and evolution are such monuments of modern science that I expected Masood to say more about their role in Islamic science. Also, Islamic science from 1300 to 1800 gets little attention -- which is fine for such a small book, but Masood does not explain the omission.<br /><br />Topics that require equations or diagrams are not well-covered. When it comes to Islamic optics Masood gives 4 pages to theories of sight -- which are easy to describe qualitatively -- and only 2 paragraphs to refraction, reflection, and other theories of how light travels. The chapter on number gives a good survey of Islamic mathematicians but is light on algebra, perhaps their most important contribution in this field. A diagram or two in the chapter on astronomy may have clarified concepts such as the "Tusi couple", a mathematical tool for simplifying Ptolemy's model of the heavens. However, in place of technical detail the book has up-to-date scholarship, an asset for understanding the Islamic influence on Copernicus, the water clocks of al-Jazari, and numerous other topics. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Science and Islam</span> faces the dual challenge of covering a technical subject (science) and a neglected period of history (the East during the Dark Ages). The book is aimed at a general audience, the majority of which will be unfamiliar with one or both of these topics. Masood answers both challenges well. His smooth prose and bite-sized format are easy on the novice palate (there is a new sub-chapter every 2 pages or so). All but the most learned readers will come away with their image of both science and Islam refreshed.<br /></span><div style='height: 4px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-4121376561528883992009-11-16T01:46:00.003-08:002010-11-29T02:12:08.648-08:00"The Origins of Meaning" by James H. Hurford<div class='post-quote'>A detailed and scholarly, but accessible, survey of the evolution of linguistic meaning</div><div style='height: 10px';></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOIvZoHYt18ESs431v0_zDs5JuEXyDRroo4m-z7ocw795vvnwPUhgt4cCa7VUFvz-RK1NYw5LZpG6VcKV1YnTWWJE7Gsd7AcUluvo19kqgsCQ8JLAKoOWkLXEzhGaCr-HQNSNfg679gY4/s1600/Origins+of+meaning.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 140px; height: 212px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOIvZoHYt18ESs431v0_zDs5JuEXyDRroo4m-z7ocw795vvnwPUhgt4cCa7VUFvz-RK1NYw5LZpG6VcKV1YnTWWJE7Gsd7AcUluvo19kqgsCQ8JLAKoOWkLXEzhGaCr-HQNSNfg679gY4/s400/Origins+of+meaning.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5544909277449417602" /></a>This is unmistakably an academic book, more useful to the layperson as a reference than a bedtime read. But it is saved from 2 stars by the down-to-earth style of the author, which means that non-scientists can come to grips with its fascinating subject matter without too much effort.<span id="fullpost">The grand-sounding title shows just how ambitious is the task that Hurford sets himself in this volume. His aim is nothing less than to show how the "semantic" and "pragmatic" sides of human language -- roughly, concepts and conversations -- grew out of the non-linguistic abilities of our distant ancestors. But anyone who expects a blow-by-blow narrative of how this happened, with the dates of each key development, will be disappointed. Instead Hurford describes the cognitive and behavioral abilities of non-humans that stand out as precursors to language, and then describes the evolutionary mechanisms that could have transformed these primitive capacities into the rich array of concepts and conversational skills that humans have today. The result is more flow-chart than timeline, a schematic account of how psychology, biology, and ecology combined to give modern-day linguistic meaning. <br /><br />Hurford, Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, cuts no corners in surveying the theory and evidence that decades of scientific research have brought to bear on his topic. This makes the writing dense at times, as Hurford runs through studies, counter-studies, and rival interpretations of data. But it also makes the book an excellent starting point for anyone interested in exploring the topic further. Also, Hurford's comprehensiveness means he covers not just the evolution of language but also some large areas of general interest, like animal cognition and the evolution of cooperation. <br /><br />The book is driven by academic rather than popular aims, but Hurford's prose makes it much more accessible than it could have been. The book covers an impressive range of specialty fields, from philosophy of mind to kin selection theory, so Hurford can't afford to lapse into the jargon of any one of these specialities. And he does a good job of keeping all readers in the loop, spelling out the meanings of technical terms and describing in plain language how each chapter fits into the bigger picture.<br /><br />While readable, the book will be dry to anyone used to popular science writing. But the reward for the patient reader is a steady flow of probing questions, clever experiments, and curious findings. In what way is language a cooperative exercise? If language evolved by sexual selection, why are human males and females equally competent at language? What happens in a monkey's mind when it responds to an alarm call from a fellow monkey by running away? Is this behavior hard-wired, or does the momkey form a concept of "predator" in its mind and respond to that concept? What came first: pure speech acts that expressed sentences like "hello" or "I'm here", or descriptive statements like "That plant is poisonous"? Scattered among the answers to these and many other questions are quirky phenomena such as mice who dream, humans who understand lip-pointing but not finger-pointing, and pigeons who can distinguish between works from the Picasso and Monet schools of painting.<br /><br />The argument running through the book is that non-human animals have more mental capacities than previously thought, and hence that the gap between the language abilities of humans and non-humans is smaller than previously thought. For a lay reader this is probably the most engaging and surprising aspect of the book: from the multiple alarm calls of the ververt monkey to the idea of "opposite" possessed by great apes, animal concepts and conversations are richer than we usually give them credit for. Of course sometimes the limits of non-humans is also clear -- for example, even a basic communication device such as pointing to refer to an object is very rare among our closest relatives in the wild.<br /><br />This book is gristly and unsweetened, not recommended as light reading. But digested slowly, over many sittings, it is a feast of insights into the nature of language, animal cognition, the social role of communication, and the evolution of all three.</span><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-73476135464575223162009-11-16T01:46:00.001-08:002010-11-29T02:11:21.492-08:00"Machine Intelligence" by Ashwin Srinivasan<div class='post-quote'>An enjoyable collection of writings by a pioneer of AI and IVF</div><div style='height: 10px';><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrYVfec6AQe0K5v0DvquMG2ZajHLCOlvIsFfCSPjiUcPOFrIvOWb_ojdQzgPlA01yQpxWRwOJIgywn0Dea2NcPcfJwpeJjzIivMQpJgMQMQ_0mio1pfoPs9j_u7jdmII-SznblZxOsImI/s1600/Machine+intelligence"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 129px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrYVfec6AQe0K5v0DvquMG2ZajHLCOlvIsFfCSPjiUcPOFrIvOWb_ojdQzgPlA01yQpxWRwOJIgywn0Dea2NcPcfJwpeJjzIivMQpJgMQMQ_0mio1pfoPs9j_u7jdmII-SznblZxOsImI/s400/Machine+intelligence" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5544907551015643282" /></a></div>This is an eclectic collection of writings by and about Donald Michie, the Scottish-born scientist whose career spanned over half a century and covered many topics, most notably computer science and reproductive biology. Michie died in a car accident in 2007, aged 84, and "Machine Intelligence" is a tribute to his life and work compiled by the eminent computer scientist Ashwin Srinivasan.<br /><br />The book varies widely in style and subject matter, but it is interesting and readable throughout. It comes in three parts, "Machine Intelligence," "Biology," and "Science and Society." Each section is divided into chapters containing 3-5 pieces, with helpful introductions to the chapters by Srinivasan. <span id="fullpost">The writing is aimed at the non-specialist reader, and specialists may be disappointed by the absence of any of Michie's many ground-breaking scientific papers. The upside is that experts and novices alike are treated to insider accounts of Michie's code-breaking at Bletchley Park during WWII, reflections by Michie on how scientists work and the role of government in science, and thoughtful discussions of big topics in AI -- such as the Turing test and the role of subconscious or "inarticulate" thought in cognition. Especially worthwhile are Michie's thoughts on the difference between brute-force solutions to computing problems and truly intelligent solutions.<br /><br />Michie was much more than a scientist, and some of the most witty and enjoyable writing in the book sees Michie as science administrator, social commentator, and popular science writer. Some of my favourites are his cutting comments on the Lighthill Report (the government report in the early 1970s that almost killed Britain's nascent AI industry), his article about the reading habits of scientists (they do surprisingly little), and his account of a bizarre trek from London to Moscow that Michie undertook at the height of the Cold War.<br /><br />"Machine Intelligence" is not a detailed or systematic treatment of Michie's ideas -- it's a series of snapshots rather than a portrait. Articles on the same theme (like the difference between clever and intelligent computers) are sometimes scattered through the book rather than grouped together. And there are too many typographical errors. But "Machine Intelligence" succeeds as a readable tribute to a remarkable man, giving many glimpses of Michie's insight, humour, and wide-ranging enthusiasm for science.</span><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-14200282384152174772009-11-16T01:45:00.000-08:002010-11-29T02:15:29.184-08:00Three Degrees: Botswana dunes, Indian monsoon...<div class='post-quote'>More consequences of global warming, according to peer-reviewed science cited in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/0007209045">Mark Lynas' book</a>. (<a href="http://disputedscience.blogspot.com/2009/10/six-degrees-our-future-in-six-posts.html">But why?</a>)<br /></div><div style='height: 4px';></div><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Botswana sand dunes.</span> Large parts of the Kalahari desert are covered in a layer of brush and scrub, and can be farmed. At least two studies, the latest in 2005, have suggested that by the time the globe hits 3 degrees the Kalahari hills will have "remobilized": a combination of high winds, high temperatures and low rainfall will strip them of their fertile cover, making then unsuitable for crops and animals. <br /><br />Thomas, D., et al, 2005: 'Remobilization of the southern African desert dune systems by twenty-first century global warming,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Nature</span>, 435, 1218-1221<br /><span id="fullpost"><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Pliocene warming.</span> 3m years ago the Arctic and Antarctic seas were clear of summer ice, shrubs grew in the Transantarctic mountains, 500km from the south pole, and were around 25m higher than today. Scientists think CO2 is mainly responsible for the temperature rise. The overall temperature at this time was around 3 degrees higher than today. CO2 concentrations were about the same as they are today. Thousands of years passed before this temperature and concentrations warmed the poles, but the similarity to today's figures is alarming.<br /><br />Francis, J., and Hill, R., 1996: 'Fossil plants from the Pliocene Sirius Group, Transantarctic Mountains; evidence for climate from growth rings and fossil leaves,' <span style="font-style:italic;">PALAIOS</span>, 11, 4, 389-396<br /><br />Haywood, A., and Williams, M., 2005: 'The climate of the future: clues from three million years ago,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Geology Today</span>, 21, 4, 138-143<br /><br />Haywood, A., and Valdes, P., 2004: 'Modelling Pliocene warmth: contribution of atmosphere, oceans, and cryosphere,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Earth and Planetary Science Letters</span>, 218, 363-77<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Forest fires in Australia.</span> The CSIRO Atmospheric Research has predicted that 35 degrees days in Queensland could occur 2 to 7 times more often than they do today. Higher winds, and up to 25% less rainfall, would also add to the fire risk in the state. This would lead to more events like the 2003 conflagaration outside Canberra, which killed 4 people, destroyed 500 buildings, and in ten minutes released more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.<br /><br />Hennesseym K., et al., 2004: 'Climate Change in New South Wales: Part 2 -- Projected changes in climate extremes,' <span style="font-style:italic;">CSIRO</span>, November 2004, 7pp<br /><br />Fromm, M., et al., 2006: 'Violent pyro-convective storm devastates Australia's capital and pollutes the stratosphere,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Geophysical Research Letters</span>, 33, L05815<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Arctic again.</span> A 2000 study predicted that around 80% of Arctic sea ice would disappear once the mercury hit 3 degrees. A more recent study (in 2007) concluded that Arctic melting was running 30 years ahead of its forecast rate. <br /><br />Johannessen, O., et al., 2004: 'Arctic climate change: observed and modelled temperature and sea ice variability,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Tellus</span>, 26A, 328-41<br /><br />Stroeve, J., et al, 2007: 'Arctic sea ice decline: Faster than forecast,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Geophysical Research Letters</span>, 34, L09501<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Central America. </span> Drought is forecast for Central America, with the Hadley Centre predicting a rainfall decline of 1-2mm per day in this region. This would leave the area vulnerable to calamities like the drought in 2001, which led to food shortages among around 1.5 million people. Severe warming could lead to droughts on the scale of those that laid waste to the illustrious Mayan civilisation in the early Medieval period.<br /><br />Johns, T., et al., 2003: 'Anthropogenic climate change for 1860-21-- simulated with the HadCM3 model under updated emission scenarios,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Climate Dynamics</span>, 20, 583-612'<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Indian Monsoon.</span> The monsoon over the subcontinent is expected to become heavier but less regular, leading to more extreme flooding in India and Bangladesh and a greater likelihood of dry periods in the region. Given the vast populations in the area, and their reliance on agriculture, "The reliability of the Monsoon is...a matter of life and death for millions of people" (Lynas' words).<br /><br />May, W., 2004: 'Simulation of the variability and extremes of aily rainfall during the Indian summer monsoon for present and future times in a global time-slice experiment,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Climate Dynamics</span>, 22, 183-204<br /><br />Ueda, H., et al., 2006: 'Impact of anthropogenic forcing on the Asian summer monsoon as simulated by 8 GCMs,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Geophysical Research Letters</span>, 33, L06703<br /><br />Dairaky, K., and Emori, S., 2006: 'Dynamic and thermodynamic influences on intensified daily rainfall during the Asian summer monsoon under doubled atmospheric CO2 conditions,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Geophysical Research Letters</span>, 33, L01704<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Drying of the Indus river.</span> The Indus river runs from the Karakoram range that straddles Pakistan and south-west China. Karakoram is the largest glaciated area outside the poles. According to a 2005 WWF study, all of the major ice-capped areas in the Karakoram and Himalayan region are melting at an accelerated rate. A study commissioned by DFID concluded that after a period of high flows due to meltwater, the Indus will contain 20 to 40 percent less water by 2080. With few other sources of water available to it, either inside or outside the coutry, Pakistan could plunge into a food and water crisis.<br /><br />WWF Nepal Program, 2005: <span style="font-style:italic;">An Overview of Glaciers, Glacial Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India, and China, WWF</span>, March 2005, 70pp<br /><br />Rees, G., and Collins, D., 2004: An Assessment of the Potential Impacts of Deglaciation on the Water Resources of the Himalaya, <span style="font-style:italic;">DFID KAR Project No. R7980</span>, 54pp and Annexes<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">New York floods.</span> The New York metropolitan area has 20 million people, 2,400km of coastline, and a network of rail, tunnel and airport facilities whose entrances lie 3m or less above sea level. In a 3 degree world the sea level is expected to rise between 25cm and 1m, so that today's one-in-100-year flood could be a one-in-4-year event by 2080. Floods in 1992 and 1999 crippled the NYC transport system and left areas of Lower Manhatten under 1m of water.<br /><br />Gornitz, V., et al., 2002: 'Impacts of sea level rise in the New York City metropolitan area,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Global and Planetary Change</span>, 32, 61-88<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">North Sea storms.</span> A 2001 study based on Hadley Centre models mirrors the predictions for New York weather: "In the southern North Sea," one of the authors wrote, "by the 2080s, a typical return period for what is now a 150-year event will be seven or eight years." The 1953 flood that caused 300 deaths in the UK and 1,800 in the Netherlands, and has been called UK's worst-ever natural disaster, was described at the time as a one-in-150-year event.<br /><br />Lowe, J., et al., 2001: 'Changes in occurrence of storm surges around the United Kingdom under a future climate scenario using a dynamic storm surge model driven by the Hadley Centre models,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Climate Dynamics</span>, 18, 179-188<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The "sixth mass extinction of life."</span> "Living dead" is the name ecologists give to populations whose numbers are so low they are doomed to extinction. A paper published in Nature in 2004 concluded that between a half and a third of species alive today will join the "living dead" by 2050 if the planet warms by over 2 degrees by that date.<br /><br />Thomas, C., et al, 2004: 'Extinction risk from climate change,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Nature</span>, 427, 145-148<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Deserts in the Amazon.</span> A 2000 paper from the UK's Hadley Centre (a world leader in climate modeling) predicted that a 3 degree temperature rise would commit the globe to another 1.5 degree increase by 2100 -- even if human carbon emissions stabilised once we hit 3 degrees. According to the Centre's models, 3 degrees of warming would "put the carbon cycle into reverse," as Lynas puts it: trees and plants would stop absorbing CO2 and start releasing it as they withered and died. The Amazon, 7 million km2 of lush vegetation, would be particularly vulnerable to this feedback effect: the Hadley models predict that by 2100 rainfall will drop to almost zero in some areas of the jungle, with temperatures soaring to 38 degrees on average.<br /><br />[It must be said -- and Lynas says it -- that there is no consensus on the question of whether Amazon rainfall will drop low enough to trigger the feedback effect. A 2007 survey concluded that nearly half of the studies on the topic predicted an <span style="font-style:italic;">increase</span> of rainfall for the Amazon. I include this topic because Amazon collapse is often cited as a key tipping point, and because if it did happen the consequences would be enormous.]<br /><br />Cox, P., et al, 2000: 'Acceleration of global warming due to carbon cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Nature</span>, 40, 184-7<br /><br />Li, W., et al, 2007: 'Future precipitation changes and their implications for tropical peatlands,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Geophysical Research Letters</span>, 34, L01403<br /></span><br /><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-19904961979035982122009-10-31T10:02:00.001-07:002009-11-17T01:44:57.975-08:00Two Degrees: China, South America, Europe...<div class='post-quote'>More grim predictions from climate scientists, courtesy of <a href="http://www.marklynas.org/">Mark Lynas</a> and his <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/0007209045">book</a></div><div style='height: 4px';></div><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Droughts in Northern China.</span> In a 1999 study, Chinese scientists showed that around 129 000 years ago, Northern China dried out and suffered continental-scale dust storms. China warmed by about 2 degrees during this period (the Eemian period) and the cold dry winter winds in the North responded much more quickly than the warm wet summer winds, causing massive dehydration. Lynas speculates that recent droughts in Northern China have the same root cause. <br /><br />Chen, F. et al, 2003: "Stable East Asian monsoon climate during the Last Interglacial (Eemian) indicate by paleosol S1 in the Western part of the Chinese Loess plateau," <span style="font-style:italic;">Global and Planetary Chang</span>e, 36, 171-9<br /><span id="fullpost"><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Ocean acidification. </span> Carbon dioxide dissolves in water to give carbonic acid. When there is enough CO2 in the atmosphere to raise temperatures by 2 degrees, there will also be enough to make large areas of the Southern Oceans and part of the Pacific effectively toxic to organisms with calcium carbonate shells. Affected organisms will include some varieties of plankton, the most important food source for ocean-dwellers. (Lynas likens this to spraying weedkiller over most of the world's land vegetation.)<br /><br />Orr, J., et al, 2005: 'Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the twenty-first century and its impact on calcifying organisms,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Nature</span>, 437, 681-6<br /><br />The Royal Society, 2005: Ocean acidification due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, <span style="font-style:italic;">Policy Document 12/05</span><br /><br />Gazeau, F., et al, 2007: 'Impact of elevated CO2 on shellfish calcification,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Geophysical Research Letters</span>, 34, L07603<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Withering vegetation in Europe.</span> The European heat-wave of 2003 caused -- among many other things -- a 30% drop in plant growth across Europe. Dying plants released an amount of carbon equivalent to one twelfth the annual carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Averaged across Europe, temperatures in Summer 2003 were 2.3 degrees above the norm.<br /><br />Ciais, Ph., et al, 2005: 'Europe-wide reduction in primary productivity caused by the heat and drought of 2003,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Nature</span>, 437, 529-33<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Greenland melt.</span> 115 000 years ago, melting ice meant that the sea level was 5-6 metres higher than today, yet average global temperatures were only 1-2 degrees warmer than today. Debate continues about how fast such melting can occur. But a 2007 study shows that sea levels are rising at 3.3mm a year, 50% faster than the 2007 IPCC report assumed.<br /><br />Rohling, et. al., 2002: 'African monsoon variability during the previous interglacial maximum,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Earth and Planetary Science Letters</span>, 202, 61-75<br /><br />Tarasov, L., and Richard Peltier, W., 2003: 'Greenland glacial history, borehole constraints, and Eemian extent,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Journal of Geophysical Research</span>, 108, B3, 2143<br /><br />Rahmstorf, S., et al, 2007: 'Recent climate observations compared to projections,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Science</span>, 316, 709<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Drying India.</span> A modelling study has concluded that a 2 degree increase in temperatures over India would decrease the agricultural yeild by 8%.<br /><br />Kavi Kumar, K., and Parikh, J., 2001: 'Indian agriculture and climate sensitivity,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Global Environmental Change</span>, 11, 147-54<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">South American water loss.</span> In dry seasons the Rio Santa in Peru draws almost all of its flow from glacial melt. The melt from the glaciers is expected to drop by 40-60% by 2050. The Rio Santa powers hydroelectric turbines that are responsible for large-scale irrigation, 5% of Peru's electricity, and the drinking water for over a million people in the cities of Chimbote and Trujillo. (The 8 million people in Lima are also drawing for water on glaciers that are expected to dwindle in a 2-degree world, but no scientific studies have been conducted on Lima's glaciers.)<br /><br />Kaser, G., et al, 2003: 'The impact of glaciers on the runoff and the reconstruction of mass balance history from hydrological data in the tropical Cordillera Blanca, Peru,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Journal of Hydrology</span>, 282, 1, 130-44<br /><br />Chevallier, P., et al., 2004: 'Climate change impact on the water resources from the mountains in Peru,' paper presented to the <span style="font-style:italic;">OECD Global Forum on Sustainable Development: Development and Climate Change</span>, Paris, 11-12 November 2004<br /><br />Juen, I., Kaser, G., and Georges, C., 2006: 'Modelling observed and future runoff from a glacierized tropical catchment (Cordillera Blanca, Peru),'<span style="font-style:italic;"> Global and Planetary Change</span>, 59, 1-4 37-48<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">California melting.</span> California relies for its water on rivers stemming from the Sierra Nevada, Cascades and Rocky Mountains. During winter, more of this water is stored in "snowpack" in these mountains than in man-made reservoirs. A 2004 study predicted that this snowpack will decline by between a third and three-quarters in a 2 degree world. One study (Ruby Leung et al.) concludes: "Current demands on water resources in many parts of the West[ern US] will not be met under plausible future climate conditions, much less the demands of a larger population and larger economy."<br /><br />Hayhoe, K., et al, 2004: 'Emissions pathways, climate change, and impacts on California,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Proceedings of the National Academy of Science</span>s, 101, 34, 12422-7<br /><br />Ruby Leung, L., et al., 2004: 'Mid-century ensemble regional climate change scenarios for the western US,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Climatic Change</span>, 68, 153-68<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Crop failures.</span> Crop failures are expected to be widespread in a hotter world, though failures in the tropics will be partially offset by successes at higher latitudes. In Mali, losses of maize crops are expected to leave up to three quarters of the population at risk of hunger, up from a third today. In Botswana, up to a third of the maize and sorghum crop could be wiped out due to a declining rainfall. A 2003 study predicts that North Sea cod population will disappear with around two degrees of warming.<br /><br />Butt, T., et al., 2005: 'The economic and food security implications of climate change in Mali,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Climatic Change</span>, 68, 355-78<br /><br />Chipanshi, A., et al., 2003: 'Vulnerability assessment of the maize and sorghum crops to climate change in Botswana,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Climatic Change</span>, 61, 339-60<br /><br />Clark, R., et al, 2003: 'North Sea cod and climate change -- modelling the effects of temperature on population dynamics,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Global Change Biology</span>, 9, 1669-80<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Large-scale extinction.</span> A study published in Nature in 2004 argued that over a third of all species on earth would be 'committed to extinction' if temperatures reach 2 degress in 2050. The lead author said in a Univeristy of Leeds press release that 'Well over a million species could be threatened with extinction as a result of climate change.' The study was based on models of expected movements of ecological niches due to changing climate. <br /><br />Thomas, C., et al., 2004: 'Extinction risk from climate change,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Nature</span>, 427, 145-8<br /></span><br /><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-79570950985950695822009-10-28T05:34:00.001-07:002009-11-17T01:35:10.109-08:00One Degree: drought, fire, extinction<div class='post-quote'>Part one of my guide to Mark Lynas' guide to the peer-reviewed literature on the consequences of global warming</div><div style='height: 4px';></div><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">America's desert.</span> The remains of trees have been found in a river bed and lake bed in the West Walker River Canyon and Mono Lake respectively. These remains have been dated to the medieval period. Fire scars on trees in the Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks have been dated to the same period. This evidence suggests medieval California was hit by a severe drought many times more punishing than the "dust-bowl" years of the 1930s. US in medieval times was 1-2 degrees warmer than pre-industrial US.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />Stine, S., 1994: 'Extreme and persistent drought in California and Patagonia during medieval time,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Nature</span>, 369, 546-9<br /><br />Swetnam, T., 1993: 'Fire history and climate change in giant sequoia groves,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Science</span>, 262, 85-9<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Kilimanjaro forest fires.</span> Rising temperatures and diminishing rainfall have increased the risk of fires in the high forest on the sides of the mountain. This forest is responsible for 96% of the water coming off the mountain. A hit to the water supply would put fish supplies and hydroelectric turbines at risk in Tanzania.<br /><br />Agrawala, S., et al, 2003: 'Development and climate change in Tanzania: Focus on Mount Kilimanjaro,' <span style="font-style:italic;">OECD Environmental Directorate</span>, 6799<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Arctic melting.</span> In the decade up to 2001, the biggest Alaskan glaciers lost 96 cubic kilometres of ice, raising global sea levels by nearly 3mm. A recent modelling study has concluded that the Artic ocean will be free of ice in summertime by 2040. Scientists expect that a warmer Artic will push the North Atlantic storm belt north. Satellite images from the last 30 years show a 1 degree movement of the wet-weather belt towards the poles of both hemispheres. <br /><br />Arendt, A., et al.: 'Rapid wastage of Alaska glaciers and their contribution to rising sea level,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Science</span>, 297, 382-6<br /><br />Holland, M., Bitz., C., and Tremblay, B., 2007: 'Future abrupt reductions in the summer Arctic sea ice,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Geophysical Research Letters</span>, 33, L23503<br /><br />Fu, Q., et al., 2006: 'Enhanced mid-latitude tropospheric warming in satellite measurements,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Science</span>, 312, 1179<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Swiss rockfalls.</span> Meltwater from mountain snow can destabilise rocks, causing lethal and unpredictable landslides. A year after the European heat-wave of 2003, a Swiss team of scientists showed that the 2003 thaw was up to a half a metre deeper than in any of the last 40 summers.<br /><br />Gruber, S., Hoezle, M., and Haeberli, W., 2004: 'Permafrost thaw and destabilisation of Alpine rock walls in the hot summer of 2003,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Geophysical Research Letters</span>, 31, L13504<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Extinction in the Australiam Wet Tropics. </span> The Wet Tropics in Queensland Australia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, holds -- among many other things -- half of the continent's bird species and 700 plant species that are found nowhere else in the world. A modelling study of 65 species in the area concluded that 63 of the species would lose a third of their core habitat with one degree of warming. The author called this an "environmental catastrophe of international significance."<br /><br />Williams, S., et al., 2003: 'Climate change in Australian tropical rainforests: an impending environmental catastrophe,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B</span>, 270, 1887-92<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Atlantic hurricanes.</span> In a 2006 paper, two climatologists wrote that anthropogenic climate change contributed half of the warming that resulted in high ocean water temperatures in 2005. The warm surface water is thought to be responsible for the devastating 2005 hurricane season that caused damage totalling $100bn. An earlier analysis showed that the number of the strongest storms in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans nearly doubled in the period 1970-2004.<br /><br />Trenberth, K., and Shea, D., 2006: 'Atlantic hurricanes and natural variability in 2005,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Geophysical Research Letters</span>, 33, L12704<br /><br />Webster, P., et al., 2005: 'Changes in tropical cyclone number, duration, and intensity in a warming environment,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Science</span>, 309, 1844-1846<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Kilimanjaro.</span> In 2002 a US team led by scientist Lonnie Thompson concluded that 80% of the ice on Mt Kilimanjaro had disappeared in the last century, and that at the current rate there would be none at all by 2020. Similar meltrates have been recorded on peaks in other parts of the world, such as the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda. As Lynas points out, glacial melt is responsible for only 1/15 of the water coming off Kilimanjaro: a "significant, but not catastrophic" amount.<br /><br />Thompson, L., et al., 2002: 'Kilimanjaro ice core records: Evidence of Holocene climate change in tropical Africa,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Science</span>, 298, 589-593<br /><br />Taylor, R. G., et al, 2006: 'Recent glacial recession in the Rwenzori Mountains of East Africa due to rising air temperature,' <span style="font-style:italic;">Geophysical Research Letters</span>, 33, 10, L10402<br /></span><br /><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-22236060307926269262009-10-26T04:35:00.001-07:002009-11-17T02:01:49.517-08:00Six degrees: our future in six posts<div class='post-quote'>A compressed and referenced version of Mark Lynas' data-rich book on global warming</div><div style='height: 6px';></div><br />Mark Lynas' <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/0007209045">Six Degrees</a></span> is a fine book and a paradise for climate change activists, but it calls out for compression. For climate change newbies out there, the 2007 book (republished 2008) takes each degree of possible warming -- from one to six -- and catalogues the likely consequences they will bring for climate, geography, and life on earth. "Catalogue" is the right word, since Lynas (a UK journalist) based the book on a systematic study of peer-reviewed articles he found in the Oxford University Radcliffe Science Library. <br /><span id="fullpost"><br />Lynas clearly did his homework. In the 56 pages of the chapter on Three Degrees, I count 102 separate references to peer-reviewed articles and other respectable authorities (this excludes newspaper articles, press releases, and<span style="font-style:italic;"> Worldwatch Magazine</span>, but includes government, UNESCO, and WWF reports). That's almost two per page, which may not be a lot for an academic paper, but is rare for a 300-page popular book.<br /><br />Lynas' research ethic has a downside. It means that <span style="font-style:italic;">Six Degrees</span> is a bit like listening to Lord Stern talk about the economics of climate change -- you are soaked in a torrent of very informative details, but once the flood has passed you feel a bit damp and confused. Plus there is a lot of froth in the book, speculative sketches of a warming world that go beyond the published science.<br /><br />What one wants is a neat row of frozen facts that one can pick up, examine at leisure, and launch at any passing skeptics. To this end I am going to list 5-10 of the most striking and well-supported scientific results in each chapter, starting with One Degree and moving up the mercury. To be useful, the items on the list need to be:<br /><blockquote><span style="font-weight:bold;">authoritative</span>: no NYT articles or press releases<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">consensual</span>: ie. Lynas doesn't cite any contrary evidence (fallible, I know, but the best I can do here)<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">convincing:</span> a study of the extinction of six species is more convincing than a study of one<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">novel</span>: ie. I haven't heard about them before -- shockingly subjective, but again it's the best I can do<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">powerful</span>: if their predictions come true, they will effect large numbers of people and/or people close to home, where "home" is England<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">precise</span>: numbers are better than words</blockquote><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Six Degrees</span> was so successful that it is unlikely that any of the results are really novel. By now most of them, from the greening of the Sahara to the melting of Peruvian glaciers, have probably been raked over by skeptics and activists alike. But jogging the memory is an excellent form of exercise. <br /><br />Some of the results in the book may been challenged since 2007. And there is no guarantee that Lynas has given us a representative sample of the peer-reviewed literature on climate change (though I'm inclined to think he has, given the scale of his research and his willingness to report countervailing results, when they arise). So the next six posts may give a lop-sided view of the consequences of warming. But as Lynas shows -- and as the next six posts may show -- that view has a lot going for it.<br /></span><div style='height: 4px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-32393744970339857212009-10-12T03:53:00.003-07:002009-11-17T02:07:45.784-08:00"Ice, Mud and Blood" by Chris Turney<div class='post-quote'>A chirpy, detailed book that delivers on past climate but not on present climate</div><div style='height: 4px';></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.palgrave.com/products/ShowJacket.asp?ISBN=9780230553828&width=155&height=205"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 155px; height: 238px;" src="http://www.palgrave.com/products/ShowJacket.asp?ISBN=9780230553828&width=155&height=205" border="0" alt="" /></a>Anyone new to the climate change debate is bound to wonder whether a 5-6 degree increase in temperatures is really all that bad - especially if the person is cold, English, and nostalgic for summer. A good reply to this wonderment is to say that the last time the globe was 5 or 6 degrees colder, there were glaciers in the South of England, and the melting ice caused Britain to split off from France.<br /><br />Chris Turney, a geologist at the University of Exeter, knows as well as anyone that climates past have lessons for climates present. In <span style="font-style:italic;">Ice, Mud and Blood</span>, Turney's humour and expertise make for a jaunty, fascinating account of how past climates worked and how scientists find out about them. But Turney spends little time linking past climate to present climate; so, as a contribution to the climate change debate, the book doesn't live up to its promise.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />As Turney points out, it's a wonder that we know anything about past climate at all. Natural climate change occurs over vast periods, and events in the intervening millennia have played havoc with the evidence. Turney does a great job of showing how scientific detective work can, against the odds, give a clear and convincing picture of some key events in the last three-quarters of a billion years of earth weather.<br /><br />To give one example: how could we possibly know that the tropics were covered in ice between 580 and 710 million years ago? As Turney explains, certain kinds of rocks tell us that glaciers once appeared in, among other places, Namibia; and the magnetism of the rocks assures us that those glaciers did indeed form at tropical latitudes. You might object - as some scientists did - that the earth had a bigger tilt back then, so that Namibia once swung around the freezing poles. A study of 'evaporites' - salt deposits from drying lakes that only occur in hot dry areas - puts paid to that objection, as do ocean deposits of iridium. As this example hints, paleo-climatologists can get technical at times. But their work is as impressive as cosmologists probing into deep space or particle physicists getting into the guts of an atom.<br /><br />The instruments used to detect past climates have their own fascination. The ice cores of Greenland and Antarctica - pipes of ancient ice, kilometres in length, drawn from some of the world's most inhospitable climates - make for a good story, and Turney tells it well. Because these 'archives' of past climate are so hard to read, paleo-climatology is also tale of wrong turns, misinterpretations and dead-ends. Where there is just not enough data for scientists to draw solid conclusions - about the effect of climate change on cyclones in the Western Atlantic, for example - Turney is not afraid to say so. Where multiple sets of data converge on the same conclusion, he drives the point home.<br /><br />Turney's chirpy prose is helped along by sketches of the charismatic pioneers and hard-bitten explorers in the science of weather. Extra spice comes from Turney's taste for history, love of hands-on research, and nose for a big idea. The big ideas include some intriguing conjectures about the interaction of climate and early humans. For example, Turney argues that the concentration of diabetes in Northern Europe could be explained as an evolutionary response to the Younger Dyas, a cold period in the North Atlantic that ended around 10,000 BC.<br /><br />Turney is rock-solid on the science of past climates, but cracks start to appear when he draws conclusions about current climate change. The problem starts with the book's structure. It is arranged as a chronology of past climate, not as an argument for the state of current climate. Turney tries to link past to present in a final conclusion, where he asks 'What does this all mean for the future?' But it's all a bit vague and last-minute. He simply draws some general lessons from the preceding 192 pages of history: greenhouse gases can power massive changes in climate; feedback effects can amplify small changes; and human action can rearrange our land, sea and atmosphere on a large scale. Compared to the quantitative detail of the other chapters, this conclusion is just hand-waving.<br /><br />There is no doubt that, in the past, human activity, high temperatures, and high levels of methane and carbon dioxide, all caused big - sometimes cataclysmic - changes to weather and geography. But is our current situation quantitatively similar to those past changes? Turney does not give a clear case. When he asks the numbers question, his answer is a short account of the famous 'hockey-stick' study, a comparison of temperature changes in the last century with those over the previous millennium. One wonders what happened to the previous seven chapters and the previous 700 million years they cover. Do the most recent climates give the best lessons, after all?<br /><br />A determined reader might dig through the chapters to see if Turney makes the link between past climate to present climate on the run. Such a reader will find a number of hearty calls to action, but little hard-and-fast argument. For example, Turney emphasises the role of CO2 in the warming that occurred during the Eemian period around 120,000 years ago. But he also emphasises that increases in carbon dioxide lagged behind the warming. And the evidence he cites for CO2-driven warming considers just one ice core and takes up one paragraph. On some topics - such as the dynamics of melting ice - Turney makes a stronger case, but only with the help of models and evidence drawn from studies of present-day climate.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Ice, mud and Blood</span> could have been more streamlined and persuasive. As a call to action on climate change, it is a missed opportunity. But as a story of scientific ingenuity and the wonders of nature, it takes every chance - and succeeds.<br /></span><br /><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-23629855185038773602009-09-07T07:00:00.001-07:002009-11-17T02:16:35.955-08:00"The Emperor's New Drugs" by Irving Kirsch<div class='post-quote'>A persuasive debunking of anti-depressants, with eye-opening coverage of the placebo effect</div><div style='height: 4px';></div><br />They say that the <span style="font-style:italic;">Origin of Specie</span>s is "one long argument." Irving Kirsch may not share Darwin's eloquence, but in<span style="font-style:italic;"> The Emperor's New Drugs</span> he shares his passion for persuasion. Thanks to its wide scope, smooth delivery, and mastery of the data, this book is about as persuasive as a popular science book can be.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />"The belief that antidepressants can cure depression chemically is simply wrong." So Kirsch claims. A claim like this raises a host of questions. Some are easy to answer: why would drug companies exaggerate the value of their pills in an anti-depressant market worth $19 billion a year? Why would regulatory agencies that are partly funded by drug companies play along with these exaggerations? Other questions are harder: if antidepressants do not cure depression chemically, how do they do so? And if the answer is "the placebo effect", how can the placebo effect be so strong as to convince millions of patients, thousands of doctors, and dozens of editors, that antidepressants are more than just glorified sugar pills?<br /><br />Some of the tough questions turn out to have simple answers. The reason everyone was duped by the chemical-imbalance theory of depression, says Kirsch, is that the theory itself was based mainly on the (supposed) effectiveness of chemicals in treating depression. Some answers rely on clever reasoning. Clinical trials show that antidepressants are actually more effective, by a small but significant amount, than placebos. Kirsch explains this deftly as an "enhanced placebo effect": patients who detect the side-effects of antidepressants know that they are on active drugs, raising their expectations about the treatment and enhancing the placebo effect. <br /><br />What all Kirsch's answers have in common is thorough attention to the relevant data (published and unpublished) and a keen nose for interpretation. Kirsch marshals an impressive range of evidence to back his case: the bibliography runs to 25 pages and consists mainly in articles from top medical and psychology journals. If he does not have a study or meta-analysis to back up a claim, he says so. And he knows that a striking anecdote is just a striking anecdote, even if it punches for his own team. <br /><br />The book a good first course in scientific method, and a key lesson in the Kirsch curriculum is that data alone does not put a hypothesis to the test. Data, plus a dose of careful interpretation, is the only real medicine in science. Drug companies did not falsify the reports of individual patients or doctors. Nor did they (usually) fudge individual studies. The devil was not in the details but in the grand design, the way they selected out negative studies and re-hashed positive ones. In lifting the lid on the cover-up, Kirsch gives a running response to those say that meta-analysis, as a scientific technique, is indefensible; nay, says Kirsch, it is indispensible.<br /><br />The question every reader will have is partly an ethical question: given that antidepressants would no longer be effective if everyone knew they were only placebos, should the "dirty little secret" be made public? Kirsch, true to form, answers this question with a patient summary of studies and meta-studies. In doing this, he does not ignore the ethical core of the question. The aim is to cut through the empirical flesh to make the core issue as clear as possible. Kirsch shows that if you cut deftly enough, the core issue might not be ethical at all. This book asks: if we can show that psychotherapy is cheaper, safer, and more effective in the long run than anti-depressants, what ethical argument could possibly warrant the continued prescription of anti-depressants? Good question.<br /><br />When it comes to writing clear prose, it is not always advantageous to be a scientist. But for Kirsch, it is so. He is no wordsmith (or doesn't want to be), and if you are looking for blazing rhetoric then this not the book for you. But if you want to understand what a balanced-placebo test is and why it works, how neurotransmitters are meant to explain depression, and the difference between "response-rate" and "average improvement" in clinical trials, Kirsch is a lucid guide. His prose might read dryly for some. But the result is that if you can understand a bar graph, you can understand this book. <br /><br />What Kirsch lacks in verbal charisma, he makes up for in arresting content. His chapters on the placebo effect make for fascinating reading. My favourite is the man who swallowed all his pills and collapsed in a heap on his GP's floor -- only to find, when he came round, that he had overdosed on fake pills. Equally striking are the basketball-players whose knee problems were fixed using placebo surgery, and the angina, dermatitis, and electro-shock victims who were all cured or assuaged by the power of belief. Kirsch describes lots of experiments designed to tease out the details of the placebo effect. The methods are clever, and the results run a skewer through our intuitions about physiological cause and effect. The results seem like voodoo, but the methods do not. As this book reminds us, implicitly but forcefully, it is the methods that matter.<br /><br />Kirsch is sometimes not as methodical as he might be. One defence of anti-depressants is that they have both a placebo effect and a real chemical effect, but that these two effects are not additive. Kirsch describes how this hypothesis might be tested, but admits that no such tests have been done. He tells us that drug companies, who would otherwise sponsor such tests, are running scared. Fair enough; but the fact remains that the tests have not been done. Also, a bullet-point summary would be useful to tie up the threads of evidence against anti-depressants; sometimes the same thread turns up in widely separated chapters, making it hard to keep track.<br /><br />Kirsch could do better to explain the weirdness of the placebo effect. How can the mind restore the cartilage in a bad knee just by expecting the knee to be cured? Kirsch suggests that this is easily explained as a purely physical causation, the brain acting on the knee. But it seems just as weird for the brain to cure cartilage as for the mind to do it. It also seems weird to say that the brain "expects" something. Lastly, it seems weird for positive expectations to have a positive effect. Why don't positive expectations just make the brain more complacent, and therefore idle? Kirsch seems complacent about explaining the placebo effect, even if (or because) the evidence for its existence is overwhelming.<br /><br />These quibbles do not threaten Kirsch's argument. In the epilogue Kirsch says he enjoys "rocking the boat." And the evidence suggests he has knocked antidepressants into the water. He reports a recent survey of UK clinicians showing that almost half will (or have) changed their practices because of Kirsch's work. He has also made waves in the murky waters of drug regulation, helping to bring about proper tracking of drug trials. But he is a placid revolutionary, and his easy prose and wide knowledge make for a smooth ride – and a persuasive one.<br /></span><br /><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-85771522260048015732009-07-31T09:43:00.000-07:002009-07-31T10:15:58.294-07:00WCSJ 09 interviews<div class='post-quote'>A little feedback on the World Conference of Science Journalists</div><div style='height: 13px';></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnhmpCxyTP6LOPu6G4bRpdtyZWTvArYO3N29P5x-ObParn3qySCZP-QE3OmsqUoCb6OMhornRSSfMe7PiBoHLRaleL-xYQ0MFtApoG48qHjUfaksXBw-w0E0_C0EO5_I41WDe8wnn1jl4/s1600-h/wcsj09_logo.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0px 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 160px; height: 88px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnhmpCxyTP6LOPu6G4bRpdtyZWTvArYO3N29P5x-ObParn3qySCZP-QE3OmsqUoCb6OMhornRSSfMe7PiBoHLRaleL-xYQ0MFtApoG48qHjUfaksXBw-w0E0_C0EO5_I41WDe8wnn1jl4/s400/wcsj09_logo.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5364673431358717522" /></a>After a few months of deplorable inactivity on this site*, here are some notes on the sixth World Conference of Science Journalists, which happened at the end of June this year.<br /><br />All the people, sessions, events, and controversies at the conference are much better covered by the dedicated people at the <a href="http://www.wcsjnews.org/">WCSJ news site</a> than I can do so here. But before rushing off to those sites, take a look at some of these nuggets from interviews we conducted with some of the many journalists (mainly from developing countries) who attended the conference on the scholarships programme.<span id="fullpost"><br /><br />Names are suppressed but the countries of the interviewees are not....<br /><br /><blockquote>"I know so many people now. I have so many great contacts, and that is what is important to me as a journalist” - Cameroon<br /><br />"[Saleemul] Huq is known worldwide, and he will very useful in the future to answer my questions about climate change...this will improve the quality my articles” – Algeria<br /><br />"Once researchers interact with science journalists, [we have] a new era in science journalism" - Rwanda<br /><br />"I am going to use these skills and impart them to others. I have a network of five radio stations [in Tanzania] that immediately I will impart knowledge to…it is really needed [in Tanzania]." – Tanzania<br /><br />“I want to organise and campaign to make science journalism real and accurate in the Ukraine" – Ukraine<br /><br />"WCSJ was essentially a well-timed kick up the backside for me. I have returned home determined to be more proactive in my day-to-day work. From now on, I will be putting more effort into seeking out good science stories and selling them." -- UK<br /><br />The conference "has really helped to broaden my view of science journalism, and [has given me] a whole lot of new perspectives on how to tell my tale, how to reach an audience with science." -- Netherlands<br /><br />The conference provided "better strategies to survive in hard economic circumstances, gave an idea of new trends in science, and [helped me to] find more accuracy and unbiased attitudes in my stories. A memorable place [in which to] learn." - Pakistan<br /><br />"Loads of concrete information provided about how to pitch to specific publications: what to pitch, what not to pitch, who to pitch to, what to expect in the editing process, rates of pay, etc.... The ultimate bluffers' guide. Have returned home determined to be more proactive about pitching and widening my client base. I expect to be sending pitches to several of the publications featured at this breakfast during the next 3-12 months and getting at least some of them accepted. I particularly like the idea of being paid by [major UK magazine on science] to travel around the globe, and then return home to write-up a mega-feature. All sounds terribly glam (I'm sure the reality isn't quite as cushy but I won't know until I give it a go....)" - UK<br /><br />"For me, the green energy workshop was very important. I talked to Giovanni de Santi, director of European Commission's Institute of Energy, and he gave me more detailed information about EU plans on renewable energy. Ethanol is big business in Brazil, so this is an important issue for my readers" - Brazil</blockquote><br /><br /><br />*Disclaimer: the main reason for the inactivity on this site recently is that I worked for the conference. This blog is not an official outlet of the conference, and the contents of this post and this blog do not necessarily reflect the views of the organisers of the World Conference of Science Journalists, the World Federation of Science Journalists, or the Association of British Science Writers</span><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-48093644348518244752009-03-01T06:16:00.000-08:002009-03-01T11:44:52.601-08:00Anyone for a journalism prize?<div class='post-quote'>The Newswise journalism award listings are interesting reading, up-to-date or not.</div><div style='height: 6px';></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi61Q5SLiAEfDphLZ85YH8mTqLg347GRPvTYofXT0-VU4jiRAVWok6aTzrRIh5IS1jG5edT2nhFSf8L3tsTrqAnkBmazdN33JCMmIq2DCpt-QaSUMO2Kl7dIRtnt383wERw5mZVts3AXq4/s1600-h/awards,+newswise+logojpeg"><img style="float:left; margin:4px 15px 0px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 155px; height: 31px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi61Q5SLiAEfDphLZ85YH8mTqLg347GRPvTYofXT0-VU4jiRAVWok6aTzrRIh5IS1jG5edT2nhFSf8L3tsTrqAnkBmazdN33JCMmIq2DCpt-QaSUMO2Kl7dIRtnt383wERw5mZVts3AXq4/s400/awards,+newswise+logojpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5308231415883197378" /></a>If you ask a science journalist how they earn a living, they might point you, with a mix of hope and desperation, to <a href="http://www.newswise.com/resources/j_awards/">this page</a>. It's the Newswise list of journalists prizes, the most respected list of its kind.* Newswise is a service in "knowledge-based news", so you an expect them to be biased towards science and environment reporting. Even so, they list a surprisingly large number of prizes for science journalists. I trawled through the list of links and found that some are quirky, some are lucrative, and some are broke (and not just the links).<span id="fullpost"><br /><br />One of the most lucrative prizes is broke. That's the <a href="http://http://www.pirelliaward.com/">Pirelli INTERNETional Award</a>, which until 2007 gave a total of 80,000 Euros each year to those who helped "promote the spread of scientific and technological culture." The Pirelli website has a marvellous euphemism for the award's current state. They call it a "sleeping initiative", as if it is busy initiating things while dormant, and could spring into life any second. I'm skeptical -- 80,000 euros doesn't just appear overnight.<br /><br />The <a href="http://www.granthamprize.org">Grantham Prize</a> is the US's answer to Pirelli. It is one of the youngest prizes and probably the richest: $75 000 a year going all the way back to 2005. It is for Excellence in Environmental reporting, and last year it went to the New York Times for "Choking on Growth," a series on China's pollution problems. So what kind of story gets $75 000 from Mr. and Mrs. Grantham? Extrapolating from a modest sample of one, they want a story about large-scale environmental damage and human suffering, industrial misdeeds, political intrigue, and brave but beleaguered activists. Some sharp photography [see below] or <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2007/10/14/world/asia/choking_on_growth_3.html#story4">eerie slide-shows</a>* wouldn't go amiss either.<br /><blockquote>* see "A Lake in Crisis" tab on this page.</blockquote><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8EeBMyp4AH1pXn06i_YjzHeK48LWQ1wkCItiyo0vyxRqbta-4gZ8g8qW0kVoqrivXhCJrlmG9_hc3MdLN9MepULNgf0EQ0AQUImzCmecE3YO364BVsMwHauMjx_mayWAcX3LNIsPTfXo/s1600-h/awards,+china+imagedamn.jpg"><img style="float:none; display: block; margin:5px 15px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 152px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8EeBMyp4AH1pXn06i_YjzHeK48LWQ1wkCItiyo0vyxRqbta-4gZ8g8qW0kVoqrivXhCJrlmG9_hc3MdLN9MepULNgf0EQ0AQUImzCmecE3YO364BVsMwHauMjx_mayWAcX3LNIsPTfXo/s400/awards,+china+imagedamn.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5308228214357497042" /></a><br />Money doesn't necessarily correlate with prestige, of course. Awards from the <a href="http://www.aip.org/aip/writing/">American Institute of Physics</a> and the <a href="http://http://www.aaas.org/aboutaaas/awards/sja/index.shtml">American Association for the Advancement of Science</a> both look a bit tight, each giving a $3000 money prize. Nevertheless, the AAAS believes its prize "represent the pinnacle of achievement for professional journalists in the science writing field" -- and it's hard to argue with an award that goes back to 1945. And who could resist the engraved Windsor chair that goes along with the AIP cash? <br /><br />Nor does fame correlate with age -- well, not exactly. The AAAS prize and the <a href="http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/x3287.xml">Gerald Loeb</a> prize (for economics, business and finance reporting) both have a strong lineage -- the latter goes back to 1957. (Incidentally, the Loeb prize seems to include a crystal globe [see image]. I'm not sure what globes have to do with finance, or what crystal has to do with journalism. But the award would certainly brighten up the mantelpiece.)<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj51iV0B3X6oKbBlWwzLk13-RCwP-A-AnkLEHKF_zZJReLo2aXF-URb7QU5h9vmGcVbM89bcvYGG979gdsFzRBmmaG3kVBz8bJ6O6RQKy5uiGFWC9T4-Mmwe645zUzgrTf1lfWB3WSDQuQ/s1600-h/awards,+loeb+crystal.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:10px 0px 10px 20px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 235px; height: 172px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj51iV0B3X6oKbBlWwzLk13-RCwP-A-AnkLEHKF_zZJReLo2aXF-URb7QU5h9vmGcVbM89bcvYGG979gdsFzRBmmaG3kVBz8bJ6O6RQKy5uiGFWC9T4-Mmwe645zUzgrTf1lfWB3WSDQuQ/s400/awards,+loeb+crystal.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5308228500948941330" /></a><br />Is the <a href="http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=1319&content_id=CTP_004537&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=ede793e3-3c58-4714-82cc-98f1a1f0e224">American Chemical Association famous</a>? Perhaps it is. Still, it has an impressive history for a single-discipline award. It goes back to 1957; past winners include Isaac Asimov and (most recently) Roald Hoffman. And it has a name to match: The American Chemical Association James T. Grady and James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public.<br /><br />Then there are the smaller heroes of journalism awards. If you had won the <a href="http://www.asaging.org/awards/awards05/media.cfm">Images of Aging Communication Award</a>, the Association for Geriatric Psychiatry will give you a plaque and a mention at their annual do. It won't buy you lunch, but it should give you a warm feeling in your writing fingers.<br /><br />But there are some prizes on this list that won't warm any journalistic souls, because they (the prizes) no longer exist. The Aging Communication Award is one of many to fall over in recent times. There are some ominous signs in the UK. The <a href="http://royalsociety.org/landing.asp?id=6317">Royal Society</a> has suspended this year's Junior Book Prize for lack of funding. And the Association of British Science Writers has not caught enough funding fish this year, so the "Oscars of the science writing world" are on hold. Where the 2008 winners should be listed in all their glory, there is a <a href="http://www.sciencewritersawards.co.uk/science/index.htm">sad message</a> from the prize organisers. <br /><br />(As for all of these awards, the list of past winners of the ABSW award is a useful guide to the best science writing of the last few years. The ABSW prize goes back to 1967, which makes their downfall all the sadder and their backlist all the more interesting.)<br /><br />Money problems seem to have hit some smaller awards as well. The International Osteoperosis Foundation (IOP) will no longer give out its Osteoperosis Journalism Award. And the National Multiple Sclerosis Society has updated its website but not its Public Education Award -- the award has vanished on the new site. These small, specialist awards may not be gravely missed by the journalism profession. But perhaps there are bone stories not being written, and MS scandals not being aired, for lack of professional recognition for journalists.<br /><br />The list of broken links and lost prizes on the Newswise page is almost as long as the list of active ones. This may have as much to do with Newswise's lack of systematic updating. According to their website, the list is continously refreshed (as of today, the last update was 2 days ago). But Newswise are only as good as the information they receive from prize-giving institutions. And one expects that a media officer for the IOP (say) would have more enthusiasm for logging an award than logging its downfall.<br /><br />But Newswise must be updating <span style="font-style:italic;">something</span>, and if it's not the dead prizes it must be the living ones. So the best route to science writing glory -- apart from sending imploring emails to Pirelli, joining the New York Times staff, or donating your salary to the ABSW -- is to keep an eye on the new awards that keep appearing <a href="http://www.newswise.com/resources/j_awards/">over at Newswise</a>.<br /><br />Or for an up-to-date list of science-related awards, see my next post....<br /><blockquote>* journalism.co.uk has a <a href="http://www.journalism.co.uk/30/">similar list</a>, but there's not much on the Newswise site that you can't find on its British equivalent.</blockquote></span><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-24010858349409958622009-02-16T13:36:00.000-08:002009-02-18T04:58:54.601-08:00Does "Are Angels OK" re-invent the wheel?<div class='post-quote'>No, it doesn't</div><div style='height: 3px';></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJz3loUGSesegeiCdjKiptWQiuujtmKUFOuQc15BeQUFB9mplVgM2d17lvHLq9M3VFLoVDowtq_zDHMWxZyTYDzUBkGsb-LZBa9LpH4Lw2Xdv4vaI1CqhXMAdy2WTBvN3V4VMO0f80GT4/s1600-h/are+angels+ok+2,+image,+light+shower.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:4px 15px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJz3loUGSesegeiCdjKiptWQiuujtmKUFOuQc15BeQUFB9mplVgM2d17lvHLq9M3VFLoVDowtq_zDHMWxZyTYDzUBkGsb-LZBa9LpH4Lw2Xdv4vaI1CqhXMAdy2WTBvN3V4VMO0f80GT4/s400/are+angels+ok+2,+image,+light+shower.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304120752754447266" /></a>David Larsen thinks that Are Angels OK? "re-invents the wheel." Here is an extract from his <a href="http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3454/artsbooks/6595/heat_light_and_sound.html">review</a> of the book.<br /><blockquote>"It’s curious that Manhire, in his lively and thoughtful introduction, fails to mention the large existing body of fiction and related criticism inspired by the sciences; fails, in fact, even to whisper the term that best describes this book. This is a science fiction anthology, and a damn good one."</blockquote><br />I agree that it is a damn good book, but not that it re-invents the wheel. The collection is not just normal science fiction, and nor is it just unusually well-written science fiction.<span id="fullpost"><br /><br />To be sure, <span style="font-style:italic;">Are Angels OK?</span> is unusual for its literary fire-power. All of the authors here are first-class literary figures, respected in their own community (New Zealand) and internationally. By way of comparison, imagine if Ian McEwan, AS Byatt, Martin Amis, and John Banville were joined up with Martin Reese, Stephen Hawking, and Lord Robert Winston. The result might be science fiction, but it would hardly be "re-inventing the wheel." (The comparison also shows how unlikely the collaboration is except for a community like New Zealand, which is big enough to have first-class writers and scientists but small enough and relaxed enough to undertake such a daring experiment as <span style="font-style:italic;">Are Angels OK?</span>)<br /><br />The thing to note is that this choice of authors effects the substance of the writing, making it different from typical science fiction. I take it that mainstream science fiction, of the Asimov and Clarke kind, is less about writing science into fiction than about writing fictional science ie. writing an imaginative account of the effects of advanced technology. There are other sorts of science fiction, of course, but advanced technology and its human consequences are the main planks of the genre.<br /><br />Some of the authors in this book do treat science in this way. Elizabeth Knox and Witi Ihimaera both write stories where a piece of technology is the central character (time travel and end-of-the-universe space travel respectively). But even these stories have a twist to them that puts them on the borders of the category. Knox's story is "more about family than time-travel", and about the process of scientific discovery and not just the impact of technology on our lives. Witi Ihimaera's short story is probably the most recognisable piece of science fiction in the collection, but it has an unusual amount of scientific input. Ihimaera's collaborator was David Wiltshire, a distinguished working cosmologist with high standards of realism: "the rule of the game," he wrote to Ihimaera, "is that whatever you create has to be reconciled to the known laws of physics." And the story contains whole pages of abstruse equations.<br /><br />On the whole, however, science and fiction interact differently in this collection than they do in standard science fiction. In some cases the science is neither futuristic nor technology-oriented. In Margaret Mahy's story the microscopic account of the human body draws only on mainstream chemistry, biology and physics -- the trick is that Mahy describes the science in vivid terms, and uses it as a metaphor for an old man's emotional state. Lloyd Jones' short story is a literary meditation on a loosely interpreted idea from physics (time cones and the "Elsewhen" outside the cone). Vincent O'Sullivan's poems are about science in general rather than any particular technology. Colquhoun's poems do refer to specific bits of science, but they deal with real equations rather than futuristic innovations like cryogenic preservation or DNA screening. Catherine Chidgey touches very lightly on science, using it as an inspiration for her images rather than her setting.<br /><br />So if <span style="font-style:italic;">Are Angels OK?</span> reinvents the wheel, it does so with enough variety and imagination that the result deserves to be called an innovation. After all, even the wheel is open to worthwhile advances. Are Angels OK combines science and fiction in new ways -- like train tracks and hovercrafts, it puts a new slant on an old product.</span>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-3943026764441800862009-02-13T03:54:00.000-08:002009-02-13T11:30:31.717-08:00Review of "Are Angels OK?"<div class='post-quote'>Writers going bravely where science has already been - and vice versa</div><div style='height: 13px';></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC3L7k3tWnEYWH6nfkmwmU_Q5SCv-p0y-rj5xbHa3pDHTObLNbk5Aq0ytxEQre2UB0K3BpD5ZByI_nYL7LjUJa_DN2Rr4umw7khjbkNpItuDOHefrQCO-MqiZqM7F63y7hWFAbTg0XN5E/s1600-h/are+angels+ok,+image,+cover.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 120px; height: 173px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC3L7k3tWnEYWH6nfkmwmU_Q5SCv-p0y-rj5xbHa3pDHTObLNbk5Aq0ytxEQre2UB0K3BpD5ZByI_nYL7LjUJa_DN2Rr4umw7khjbkNpItuDOHefrQCO-MqiZqM7F63y7hWFAbTg0XN5E/s320/are+angels+ok,+image,+cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5302252636976082994" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">Bill Manhire and Paul Callaghan (eds.).<span style="font-style:italic;"> Are Angels OK?: The Parallel Universes of New Zealand Writers and Scientists</span>, Victoria University Press 2007.</span><br /><br />This brave and playful book is a collection of stories and poems with a scientific theme. This is not science fiction, however, and nor is it science education. It is a collaboration between scientists and writers -- as well as doing research and attending science lectures, each writer was teamed up with a group of (very good) working scientists. As science, the collection is not at all distinguished, and it was never meant to be. As a commentary on science, on its methods and spirit and motivations, it is interesting but not ground-breaking. As literature, it has some fine moments and some awkward ones, where the science jars. But as an experiment in a new genre it is marvelous. It is best read as an attempt to answer the question: in what ways science contribute to literature? The answer may be: not many ways. But this collection a courageous attempt to find as many ways as possible, with varied and charming results.<span id="fullpost"><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Writers tackling scientists -- in the nicest possible way</span><br /><br />The challenge for these authors is not to put science in a poem or short story. It is to have lots of science in a short story, and to make it an active participant in the writing, an element that adds literary value to the work. The items in this collection show different degrees of interaction between their science bits and their non-science bits. And they have different ratios of science to non-science. Some take an idea from science, interpret it loosely in human terms, and make a story out of it. Others have real equations and real worm-holes. The authors also find different modes of interaction between science and non-science in the collection -- the science performs different roles in different pieces. Science serves as a setting, a source of metaphors, material for history lessons, and a target for explanation or description. The second of these is probably the most common, and it shows the lop-sidedness of the collection: by and large, science is used by writers to further the usual aims of literature, not the other way round. <br /><br />Lop-sided does not mean biased or narrow-minded or ignorant. The book comes with a rich set of authors' notes, and these show the respect the authors have for science, their awe and admiration for scientists, and the amount of thought and background reading that went into their writing. Witi Ihimaera read Simon Singh's <span style="font-style:italic;">Big Bang</span>; Elizabeth Knox swallowed Richard Gott's <span style="font-style:italic;">Time Travel in Einstein's Universe</span>; Lloyd Jones got his teeth into Eratosthenes and Godel. Many of these writers had a prior interest in some aspect of science. Margaret Mahy wrote <span style="font-style:italic;">The Catalogue of the Universe</span>; Elizabeth Knox has written on time travel in her <span style="font-style:italic;">Dreamhunter Duet</span>; Witi Ihimaera wrote an opera called <span style="font-style:italic;">Galileo</span>. So it pleasant, but not surprising, to see the writers looking on the scientists with a mixture of deference and camaraderie. Vincent O'Sullivan wonders what poets, those "feathery dancers" and "rhythmic stompers", could know about science. But to him, both writers and scientists "turn to our separate mirrors for what/ whatever the ending, starts the same." Margaret Mahy writes that she is intimidated by the thought of reading a book on mathematics; but she sees the work of novelists and physicists as part of the "flow of human conjecture." The title of the collection does well to capture its mood: tentative but friendly.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Sketchy science, fine art: Lloyd Jones and "Elsewhen"</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Image: Lloyd Jones, time writer</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDOshchneZK6wXMpMhlmuWaBh_Yqe5RHgPe024qcfRdOctrGbEXKmrDeIWY8HUVKlsBVykOpWjNd6g5PvikX5ffjHdqsmvToVaDTcIE7J9HVNRwL5myoGb8NDsla-afrsWWEeyDB5GZzI/s1600-h/are+angels+ok,+image,+Jones.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:20px 20px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 134px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDOshchneZK6wXMpMhlmuWaBh_Yqe5RHgPe024qcfRdOctrGbEXKmrDeIWY8HUVKlsBVykOpWjNd6g5PvikX5ffjHdqsmvToVaDTcIE7J9HVNRwL5myoGb8NDsla-afrsWWEeyDB5GZzI/s200/are+angels+ok,+image,+Jones.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5302266534882307666" /></a><br /><br />The lop-sidedness of the collection does not mean the work is of poor literary quality, or that science has nothing to do with it. Lloyd Jones' short story is a case in point. It is no more a work of science than it is a short story, but it is nevertheless a joy to read. It also owes something to Jones' exposure to science. He takes his cue from Godel and a lecture on time cones -- those diagrams, like sharp-edged hourglasses, that physicists use to describe where an object can and can not move through space-time. The story gets its title from the lecturer's whimsical reference to "Elsewhen", the points in space-time where an object cannot go (because it would have to travel faster than the speed of light to get there).<br /><br />Jones takes Elsewhen to be a kind of limbo or side-line, a place (or time) that is away from the main action, a diversion from the events that usually hold our attention; all the better if the diversion changes dramatically the course of the official event. Jones' treatment of the idea is as important as the idea itself. He does not draw any diagrams of Elsewhen, but sets out to "find this place in the everyday transactions of life." Traffic jams; moments of death, when "time stops, then kicks on"; the intermission of a film; the life-histories of inanimate objects, like letter-boxes; the man who glances up at the window, while going to table-tennis, and sees his future wife: these are all sightings of Elsewhen. <br /><br />The work is not really a story but a series of sketches. "Snapshots" might be a better metaphor, and the challenge to the reader is to make a film out of this flow of still images. This is hard to do when the snapshots are scattered across time and space, and appear together by accident. Jones' fine metaphor for a jumble of memories is the tip-face, "where the bits of life circulate," discarded but full of significance. "You can find anything", Jones concludes, "absolutely anything at all...by simply joining the dots in a whole new way never seen before."<br /><br />What does all this have to do with space-time and world-lines? Not much, I think, except in a loose metaphorical way. Moreover, Jones' notion of Elsewhen as a particular kind of moment, where things stand still and accidents happen, may be based on a misunderstanding of physics. Physically, Elsewhen consists in all points in space-time that cannot be reached from a given point in space-time. So what counts as Elsewhen is relative to the given point. By choosing the right reference points, you can make anywhere (and anywhen) an Elsewhen. The literary analogue might be that any moment, no matter how typical or uneventful it seems, can appear novel and significant if we look at it in the right way. Perhaps Jones had this idea in mind. But I'm not sure that he did, because then (for example) the intermission of a film would be no more Elsewhen than the normal flow of the film itself. <br /><br />Of course, whether or not Jones got the physics right is irrelevant from a literary point of view. The story would convey the same theme, with the same lyricism, if Jones cut out his references to Demeritus, Godel and a physics lecture. Perhaps he could also have hit on the theme without going to any physics lectures himself. The connection to physics in the story seems loose enough that any passing reference to Elsewhen, scientific or otherwise, would have set of the train of thought to which we owe this charming bit of writing.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Fishing for connections</span><br /><br />Still, "Elsewhen" shows that, whatever else they have in common, writers and scientists are interested in some common topics. Time is one of them. Jones writes in his end-note that he is grateful to his scientific collaborators for "wrenching me out of worn cracks." But the reason Elsewhen works well as a topic for Jones, I think, is not because it breaks new literary ground, but because time is a standard theme of literature. Poets and novelists have no equations for time, of course, and have no theory of space-time entanglement. But they are interested in the different ways time can pass, and how passing time affects people and ideas. Time is linked to other standard literary themes, like memory, history, and death. These are important for writers because they are important for people. And it is no surprise that Jones' short story is joined by a story about time travel by Elizabeth Knox.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3m6gMJazQzsYcO66AUTN_Gs33dDZeSbap9rLV12aaZTlSrgODUl_OE5h_uSmZcZt8xuXlqxTmy00Qc4jD5yB5FxlmGR8U4d1c0DbzWE-xUkSgM7FceE1LqUreOVWyXre2UtkmxnshCic/s1600-h/are+angels+ok,+image,+stars.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:10px 15px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 132px; height: 125px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3m6gMJazQzsYcO66AUTN_Gs33dDZeSbap9rLV12aaZTlSrgODUl_OE5h_uSmZcZt8xuXlqxTmy00Qc4jD5yB5FxlmGR8U4d1c0DbzWE-xUkSgM7FceE1LqUreOVWyXre2UtkmxnshCic/s400/are+angels+ok,+image,+stars.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5302261942053608338" /></a><br /><br />But it pays to be careful in searching out the common ground between scientists and writers. There is a fair bit of this searching in <span style="font-style:italic;">Are Angels OK?</span> Bill Manhire and Paul Callaghan do it, in the introduction and afterword respectively. And a few authors take up the topic in their concluding notes. Between them they cover a lot of ground. Here, commonly cited links between writers and scientists are the use of the imagination, the use of language, and the "hunt for metaphors" (as Colquhoun puts it). Callaghan says that physics and novel-writing both require "constrained creativity": innovation guided by pre-existing standards. Manhire writes that poets and physicists have a common interest in paradox (quantum mechanics gets a good airing here). And Glen Colquhoun thinks that both use "compact forms of language." <br /><br />Whatever the deeper links might be between the disciplines, science is a fruitful source of metaphors for the writers in this collection. Lloyd Jones plays loose with his analogy to light-cones. Margaret Mahy does for space what Jones does for time, linking the thoughts of a dying man, his decrepitude and longing for freedom and a "way out", to a downward scale of physical objects -- from the skin to blood cells to atoms to quarks. Catherine Chidgey's story about a precocious weight-lifter is less explicit about its physics analogies, but just as reliant on them. "Pressure, load, weight, force, how much a person can bear," Chidgey writes in her end-note. "Thinking about the meanings of these terms told me about my main character's nature and relationships as well as his special physical talent." <br /><br />But there are dangers in fishing for connections, and some of them come to the surface in this book. One danger is that you cast the net too widely, and draw in too much. Margaret Mahy writes that science and science "are not closed-off compounds, but in their various ways are part of the human flow of conjecture." But it is hard to think of any mental activity that is *not* part of the "human flow of conjecture". So Mahy's observation hardly sets physics and writers apart as a promising couple. Another danger is to focus on aspects of science (or writing) that are present in, but not distinctive of or essential to, the disciplines in question. Manhire makes something of the "resonant power of words" in science and literature. He quotes with approval the Nobel Prize-winning physicist (and poet) Roald Hoffman: "[In science] words are being made to describe things that seem indescribable in words...[so] the language of science is inherently poetic." Paul Callaghan's response to this is a gentle rebuke, noting that although the language of physics has its moments, the words and their poetry are not the "nub" of science. "Scattering amplitudes" and "temporal surprise" may be loaded with rhythm, significance, and other forms of literary cash. But the scientist trades in a different currency.<br /><br />A third danger, perhaps the biggest one, is to ignore the *differences* between science and literature. Neither Manhire, Callaghan, or Mahy fall into this trap. All of these authors recognise that scientific claims are subject to reality in a way that literary statements are not (though of course literary statements may be subject to constraints of other kinds, perhaps even other kinds of empirical constraint). And they all observe that, although the physicist and the poet both use language, their languages are completely different from one-another. To use Colquhoun's phrase, not many of us know the "secret handshakes of mathematics."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Nice tool, wrong job: Jo Randerson's "Everything We Know"</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR1IAFAH02e8PwCe3vbUIQJmnzYdbYsSmp_Yyekx6O8RYptx-Ea-5ejtw3E9Q-QA9OBqh-VJDgC1vmThE3Zjay7BXVM5TLsvQyTnUU7IXmd-7PBdfjmDZG4gE4exYo_cj_XDYIjWTkV08/s1600-h/are+angels+ok,+image,+sandpile.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:10px 0 10px 15px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 106px; height: 115px;border: none;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR1IAFAH02e8PwCe3vbUIQJmnzYdbYsSmp_Yyekx6O8RYptx-Ea-5ejtw3E9Q-QA9OBqh-VJDgC1vmThE3Zjay7BXVM5TLsvQyTnUU7IXmd-7PBdfjmDZG4gE4exYo_cj_XDYIjWTkV08/s400/are+angels+ok,+image,+sandpile.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5302262465289746242" /></a><br /><br />In some places the authors overestimate the combatibility of science and literature, and it tells in the results. Literature encourages a distinctive style of thought, as does science. In <span style="font-style:italic;">Are Angels OK?</span>, friction between the two tell us as much about the value of the literary style as it does about its shortcomings. Consider first a shortcoming. The kinds of associations that writers make are not always helpful in framing rigorous arguments. It may not be true in general that free association is better than rigorous argument, or vice versa. But it is true for particular tasks. It is worth contrasting Lloyd Jones' short story with an essay by play-wright and comedian Jo Randerson, called "Everything We Know." Where Jones applies the literary style to a scientific concept, Randerson applies it to an argument about the nature of science and ethics. Randerson's piece is less successful, and part of the explanation for this is that it uses literary tools to do a non-literary job.<br /><br />Randerson's theme is "relationships", and the goal is to find a pattern in natural relationships and apply them to human affairs. Randerson takes the "sandpile phenomenon" as her natural pattern. Apparently, if you drop sand into a pile and measure the size of each sandslide that occurs, you find that the frequency of any possible sandslide is inversely proportional to the size of that sandslides. Lots of small ones, a few medium-sized ones, and very few large ones. Nevertheless, it is hard to predict the size and timing of each sandside. For Randerson, this is a launching-pad for a meditation on the fundamental interrelatedness of all things. "Everything is connected in life", so connectedness is good. Therefore conflict is bad. And it follows (somehow) that heirarchies are bad. Boundaries are bad too. After all, "when you put a wall in a body, you get a clot. Blood gathers together in a thickened lump, which would then move fatally through the body." What follows from this Paracelsean logic? According to Randerson, "my testing disproves the hypothesis."<br /><br />No doubt we should share Randerson's spirit of tolerance and affection for the diversity of things. But if the aim is to come up with sound political and ethical principles, we should be more precise than she is ("Everything is connected in life" is, by itself, not a very meaningful claim. It has a certain aphoristic ring to it, but no more than, say, "Real connections are rare.") And we should not be convinced by Randerson's style of argument, which is rich in imagery but poor in critical reflection. In a different context, her movement from sandpiles to blood clots to human wars would strike us as the light step of an accomplished writer. In this case it looks like a wobbly polemic. <br /><br />"This lecture is like a flock of pigeons," Randerson writes, "and my goal, rather than caging them, is to liberate them and observe the patterns as they flutter out of sight." This captures Jones' piece nicely. There, an idea from science releases a flock of images, memories, jokes, phrases, incidents, and other literary things. Randerson tries to do the same thing, but the result is unconvincing. Why? I think it is because they have different goals: Jones to explore an area of human experience, Randerson to justify a political position. There's nothing wrong with doing either of those, but only the first one can be done well with just the tools of literature.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The gift of writing</span><br /><br />The literary style is not good at rigorous argument, but it is good at dealing with concrete human situations: the "everyday transactions of life", in Jones' terms. Study the human voice in this collection and the special power of writers becomes clear. Even Margaret Mahy's story, with its rich descriptions of subcutaneous life, is at its best when describing human life. What is interesting about the science in the story, the musings on space and place and gravity, is not the science itself but what it tells us about the old man who is musing on them. For all the detail about lipids and unfolding proteins, the detail that catches in my mind are about human gestures and instincts and mannerisms, carefully observed by the author:<br /><blockquote>"The old man's slow fingers were pinching a fold in his bed cover, and rubbing it slowly backwards and forwards. His eyes opened."</blockquote><br />Elizabeth Knox's short story "Unobtanium" is especially notable in this respect, because she treats human relationships in some detail. The details of time travel in her story are interesting and valuable, but it the real talent of the story is to take human foibles and eccentricities and give them color. For example, Mark is the gifted but wayward brother of Knox's narrator. Here, in the hospital just before his mother's death, Mark argues with a doctor. The passage neatly captures his misdirected brilliance.<br /><blockquote>"Mark flinched and snatched is arm back. He began to tremble, but he kept on talking. He had dredged up the name of the new drug. His voice cranked up a notch and in it, just detectable, was a hint of a boast about his recall, about what he knew -- an eagerness completely out of keeping with the deathbed.<br />The doctor said, plainly, that the drug wasn't suitable in these kinds of cases.<br />Mark went on as though he hadn't heard."</blockquote><br />The special skill of these writers is not just to describe human psychology. They also appeal to human psychology in their descriptions of natural phenomena. Scientists, as scientists, have no interest in making nature vivid or easy to grasp to ordinary readers. But this is just what the likes of Knox and Jones are good at. Here is Jones writing on time:<br /><blockquote>"I never knew that time could bend like sheet metal. I sort of accepted that time came packaged in clocks and watches. I never realised that there was such a thing as big time and little time. Little time belongs to us. It sits on our shoulder from the time we are born and rides us all the way to the grave. Big time belongs to the cosmos. Big time is showtime -- space is a fat boy who just gets fatter."</blockquote><br />This sort of writing is useless as science. And insofar as it lacks rigour or precision, it falls short of communicating science. True, it describes natural phenomena in terms that people can understand -- we all know what a "fat boy" is, and the metaphor of "riding to the grave" will move most of us. But the "fat boy" metaphor conveys nothing of scientific substance except the notion of perpetual expansion. All the other associations of "fat boy", rich as they may be, don't help us to understand the nature of the cosmos. In the trade-off between rigor and accessibility, Jones puts all his money on accessibility.<br /><br />Is the literary style *necessarily* at odds with communicating science, with its precise concepts and detailed arguments? Is it better able to communicate science than, say, Richard Dawkins' style of writing? I'm not sure of either answer. What <span style="font-style:italic;">Are Angels OK?</span> reminds us is that, whatever the answers, the literary style gives us something that science does not: a feeling for human psychology, how it plays out in real life and how it responds to words and images. <br /><br />To conclude, here are a few lines from one of Vincent O'Sullivan's poems in the collection:<br /><blockquote>I like the stories, although the stories<br />are not what it's about...<br />..Rutherford as a boy when his mother<br />tells him, through a storm, what makes <br />lightening strike, he answers politely,<br />'No, no it doesn't, mum'<br /> But that<br />is like liking the wrapping wrapped around<br />the gift, the gift as much in the dark<br />as the famous cat...</blockquote><br />O'Sullivan is quite right that stories are not what science is about. Focus on the stories and you miss out on the real gift of science. But nor is science the nub of a story. Focus on the science in a story and you miss out on the real gift of literature. A stern critic would say that Are Angles OK? fails because it does not give us the best of science and the best of literature in one shot. But if the collection fails in that respect it is because the natures of science and writing do not allow it, not because of any weakness in Knox or Callaghan or Randerson. Where the collection succeeds is in exploring the many ways in science can sit side-by-side with literature. In doing so it traces out the limits of that project, and tells us something about the strength and weaknesses of the people on both sides of the lab door. The collaborative spirit wins out, even if some of the combinations look clunky. Scientists and writers may not be best friends, this book says, but they can make excellent neighbours.</span>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-65609539291767927752009-01-28T04:31:00.000-08:002009-02-12T07:39:44.926-08:00Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist<div class='post-quote'>A rich narrative of the “billionare of bizarre facts”</div><div style='height: 15px';></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQq9EWvaJJKbFxxA1KDP-I0CsqPve1tLNtdI76d05mqSSL3-_zvM3btSZmJw9Vi4NRkmdo45_q_H99gnxdWgDLMaHbE0AUawULGeuZhYn2EHrhtFVVF_JjjQ3MuRCqTu-WgD4t3h1UJy8/s1600-h/darwin+review+image,+book+cover.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 87px; height: 141px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQq9EWvaJJKbFxxA1KDP-I0CsqPve1tLNtdI76d05mqSSL3-_zvM3btSZmJw9Vi4NRkmdo45_q_H99gnxdWgDLMaHbE0AUawULGeuZhYn2EHrhtFVVF_JjjQ3MuRCqTu-WgD4t3h1UJy8/s200/darwin+review+image,+book+cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5301912402856099778" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist</span>, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Penguin 1992</span><br /><br />“The full enigma of Darwin’s life has never been grasped.” In their biography of Charles Darwin, this observation leads Desmond and Moore in two directions. One is to show that Darwin’s life really was enigmatic, that is was filled with confusion, conflict, and inconsistencies. The other is to make those enigmas less mysterious by relating them to his social and political environment. Their method fits their goal: they want to open up Darwin’s inner life by sorting through his voluminous personal writings, making use of recent volumes of his letters, manuscripts, commentaries, and memoranda. On the whole the book is a marvellous success, though its richness causes it to raise new enigmas as well as settling old ones.<span id="fullpost"><br /><br />What is the enigma? Darwin’s ambiguous attitude towards evolution, especially his long delay in publicizing his ideas on the topic. And how do Desmond and Moore explain this? Darwin’s science drove him towards a radical and godless doctrine; but his upbringing, his wife’s faith, his Cambridge connections, and many of his scientific acquaintances, coupled with his “instinctive reverence for rank”, all forced him into secrecy. <br /><br />The book uses Darwin's “social context” as a framing device rather than a set of theories about Darwin’s life and work. It contains remarkably little analysis of its subject matter. Except for the introduction, authorial comments are thin on the ground, either in the form of moral or intellectual judgments, generalizations, or scrutiny of secondary sources. Insofar as the authors draw parallels between Darwin’s thought and political events (French uprisings, the Reform Bill, Chartism, the Vivisection Bill, the Crimean War….) they do so implicitly, by showing not by telling. Sometimes this pared-back approach is the opposite of enlightening. For example, we never get a clear explanation of why Darwin, the gentle white-supremist, could upbraid his own son about the evils of slavery. And we do not find out whether Darwin’s ill-health was primarily physical or psychological in origin.<br /><br />The upside of the book’s narrative form is that it licenses the authors to explore every aspect of Darwin’s life in great detail, and to recall them in a fresh and vivid way. In this sense the book resembles Darwin himself, that “billionaire of bizarre facts.” We already know that Darwin dropped out of medical school: what this book tells us is what Darwin and his brother ate when they arrived in Edinburgh, and the stench and horror of Darwin’s first dissection. We know that Darwin disagreed with Owen: but in this book we see Owen drilling with the Honourable Artillery Company, and Darwin, the closet transmutationist, breakfasting with the Owens in London. The writing helps a lot here. In this story, events move swiftly on the back of snappy prose.<br /><br />Desmond and Moore reveal Darwin’s inner life indirectly, through his responses to outside events, so it is no surprise that the authors offer no summary assessment of Darwin’s character. Instead of a portrait we get a gallery of sketches: Darwin the heartbroken father, the calculating suitor; the grumpy recluse, the jolly companion; the impressionable youth, the grand old genius; the hater of Owen, the magnanimous rival of Wallace; the brave man of science, going forward alone; the timid Darwin, hanging on the approval of friends. Here are more enigmas. Desmond and Moore leave them hanging.<br /><br />What of Darwin’s science? It is true that Desmond and Moore show (for example) Darwin developing the principle of “division of labour” by analogy with industrial workshops, and the bloody Crimean war informing his chapter on the Struggle for Existence. But the “enigma” that this book helps us to grasp is emotional and social, not intellectual. What “tortured” Darwin were not the implications of believing his theory of evolution (Lyell suffered the most from this kind of torture), but the implications of publicizing it. If this is what the authors want us to grasp then the book is an outstanding success, even if it leaves some of the interpretative work in the hands of the reader. </span><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-10826419752368013622009-01-26T00:05:00.001-08:002009-02-12T08:24:58.825-08:00The 'P' Word<div class='post-quote'>Making sense (insofar as it is possible) of Kuhn</div><div style='height: 6px';></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKhotne8EGhwL9xL7aUYAPyLcKfWVvy6c7WH2VPGFIPN0yJ90kUlEvkLcFXxQA0X1bQHFHEzE7tFh_F34EXtvAEHIgB3MOlGJI53onH9TxJs3tTDzK1CSd4UR3TtAmxwwxnlHcTFLRVK4/s1600-h/the+p+word+image,+kuhn.jpeg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 97px; height: 122px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKhotne8EGhwL9xL7aUYAPyLcKfWVvy6c7WH2VPGFIPN0yJ90kUlEvkLcFXxQA0X1bQHFHEzE7tFh_F34EXtvAEHIgB3MOlGJI53onH9TxJs3tTDzK1CSd4UR3TtAmxwwxnlHcTFLRVK4/s200/the+p+word+image,+kuhn.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5301896662567803586" /></a>Journalist Waleed Al-Shobakky <a href="http://wshobakky.wordpress.com/2008/12/19/the-p-word-thomas-kuhn-and-i/">has a post</a> on "the 'p' word": paradigm. He professes guilt at using this term in the past, and tells how it got him into trouble recently at the first conference of Arab science journalists. Al-Shobakky frames the post as a warning about the dangers of using this "too beautiful and brilliant" term of Kuhn's. It can land you in deep water, he says, because it's too easy to think that the "Western paradigm of science" is universal, whereas in fact it may not be. <br /><br />But the post unwittingly gives a different warning.<span id="fullpost">The main danger of the 'p' word is not that it will lead you into factual error but that it will lead you to make unhelpfully vague claims about science and culture. The best weapon against "the 'p' word" is not empirical research but the analytic knife. So here are some sources of vagueness in the post, and some warnings about them.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">"I’ve written several articles about science initiatives in the Arab Gulf; would I have written them differently had I had a different, well, paradigm?"<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span><br /><br />There is no specific form of vagueness here, just undifferentiated vagueness in the use of the term "paradigm." There are lots of ways in which two people could write an article "differently", and these differences could be due to numerous background facts about the writers. If they went to different schools then one might indent the first sentence of each paragraph, and the other not. If one was working for the political section of the paper and one for the economic section, they would focus on different aspects of science in the Arab Gulf. And if one took the bible literally and the other did not, they would differ over the merits of an study in evolutionary psychology. Some of these differences are trivial from the point of view of philosophy of science; some may not be. It's important to distinguish between them because otherwise it's to easy to extrapolate falsely from one sort to another sort. So, for example, there is probably no sense in saying that one writer is "wrong" to use indents. But we shouldn't leap to the conclusion that there is no sense in saying that the creationist (or the evolutionist) is "wrong."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">"In Islam and Science, Muzaffar Iqbal writes that the Islamic view is that there is a unified human knowledge domain where knowledge of the worldly is tributary to knowledge of the divine. So we know God better, for instance, by investigating how trees grow or why dinosaurs disappeared."<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span><br /><br />Best to distinguish between the methods of scientists and their motives, because different motives need not imply different methods. People can (and do) do science to earn a living, please their partners, discover the truth about nature, and get closer to their chosen god. But these differences in purpose need not mean they all carry out science in a different way -- indeed, they may all be working in the same lab, on the same problem. This is because their different ultimate goals can be served by the same proximate goal -- that of getting a sound understanding of some aspect of nature. So the fact that some scientists see science as "tributary to knowledge of the divine" may not lead to any relevant differences in the way they do science. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">"The secular-sacred dichotomy, deeply established in Western thought, may actually not have an equivalent in the Islamic worldview." [Al-Shobakky takes this as a good challenge to the claim that "the conclusions of a paper in Nature are equally valid, and replicable, in China and Egypt, by a Buddhist or a Muslim researcher".]<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span><br /><br />The point to make here is that different ways of doing science need not be incommensurable -- they need not lead to irreconcilable disagreements about nature.<br /><br />Suppose Islamic researchers do in fact do science differently as a result of their faith. They might use different equipment, make different assumptions, use a different form of maths. This would not be a ground-breaking discovery, nor would it interest Kuhn very much. What is ground-breaking is the idea that they could be completely different from other scientists yet their conclusions be just as correct. <br /><br />Suppose that Islamic scientists and Western scientists disagree about (say) the formation of stars. Now suppose that no arguments from Western scientists could rationally oblige Islamic scientists to change their conclusions about the formation of stars. And suppose that the same is true about arguments from Islamic scientists directed at Western scientists. That would be interesting. That is what Kuhn argues for. It is a much stronger claim than just the claim that different communities do science differently, and get different results. According to the stronger claim, the conclusions of a sound Nature paper may not actually be replicable by a Buddhist or a Muslim researcher -- even by a very sound one, using the same instruments as the Nature researcher.* But if only the weaker claim is true, then the existence of cultures that have different methods and different conclusions from Nature researchers is not enough to challege the (quite plausible) claim that a sound Nature paper will be confirmed by any sound scientist who happens to be Buddhist. <br /><br />The point is that to challenge the universality of a Nature paper it is not enough to point to cultures that have a different "worldview" from the Nature researchers. You need to show (at least) that the other worldview is sound. And in doing so you would need to come to terms with Kuhn's big idea: that paradigms can at the same time be different and right.**<br /><br /><blockquote>*Of course, even Kuhn could admit that some paradigms are bad ie. even the members of some paradigm can be convinced that it is false, by members of another paradigm. So even if incommensurability is possible, it may not be a omnipresent.<br /><br />**in the most rigorous sense possible of "right."</blockquote><br /></span><div style='height: 1px'></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-37630449750199033702009-01-21T12:25:00.001-08:002009-11-16T06:25:52.766-08:00Royal Institution Young Scientist Centre<div class='post-quote'>Why you should go: Science education that is both scientific and educational. Why you want to go: Portable labs.</div><div style='height: 4px';></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:zkKD3YkDOJn9BM:http://www.infobritain.co.uk/Royal_Institution.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 130px; height: 73px;" src="http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:zkKD3YkDOJn9BM:http://www.infobritain.co.uk/Royal_Institution.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>A new strain of science education is growing in the basement of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The Young Science Centre, up and running this September, is designed to make science fun (which is not unusual for this form of outreach) but also to make it intellectually stimulating (which is unusual). <br /><span id="fullpost"><br />To get to the Centre, make your way through the black Jaguars on Albemarle Street, Westminster, enter the Royal Institution, go past the plush lecture halls and glass cases, and drop down into the lower floors. Already there are a few eye-catching things on display. There are lots of bright lights in primary colours, and some big projection films featuring old labs. One curious thing is an empty white room. This is where working scientists come down to....work as scientists. Not a bad way to show kids how science works.<br /><br />But the most interesting stuff will be behind a blue door marked: "Young Scientist Centre." At the moment the YSC looks very much like a museum basement in the middle of renovations. The main room is the size of a tennis courts and houses a lot of boxes, old books, and empty frames. <br /><br />The room looks quite different in the mind of David Porter, who is managing the new project. In the blueprints it is cross between a lab and a moon-base. The furniture is a series of white circular benches, neatly tesselated and arranged in rings and lines. They have taps and power sockets like ordinary lab benches. But these benches are much more interesting. You can push each one around the floor to make new rings and clusters. You can adjust their heights, from waist level upwards. And nearby there is a smaller room filled with tiered, rounded sofas, the interior decorator's version of a bouncy castle.<br /><br />This unusual decor is the backdrop for a series of interactive projects that Porter hopes to roll out once the Centre opens. The manoeverable and height-adjustable benches mean that students of all ages (and heights) can use them for many different kinds of hands-on projects. The bouncy break-out room is for planning and discussing the results of tests and experiments carried out in the laboratory. And Porter expects there will be more to discuss than playdough, dinosaur posters, and plastic models of the solar system, because the educational tools in the lab will be the tools of real scientists, from pipettes to microscopes to Geiger counters.<br /><br />Porter also wants to equip the lab, and the students, with a scientific attitude -- something that they may not get at school. After 30 years working as a science teacher, he thinks he has a good idea of what works and what does not in science education. And he hopes that the combination of sleek instruments, funky decor, hands-on discovery, and inspired teaching, will illuminate science - real science - in a way that routine science classes cannot. The Centre will be a ray of light for teachers as well as students, if Porter has his way. Let's hope he does.<br /></span><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-58407217142261476482008-11-28T13:47:00.000-08:002009-02-12T07:42:13.402-08:00One more look at the people of the screen<div class='post-quote'>Why English profs shouldn't lose sleep over the Kindle</div><div style='height: 15px';></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYGW-9wEB175Tdv0t6Bustn-buNonD9MsikrLP0OqHiw0JlCmOIKzz2bUi7eI3gHcJ4BxkRs83VDpairBDIHe88-deCoxiEkzJFn14gbynZB1XidCBeUelHvJ_hqtY-65LqdotMEIIZeM/s1600-h/people+of+the+screen,+image,+kindle2.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 120px; height: 119px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYGW-9wEB175Tdv0t6Bustn-buNonD9MsikrLP0OqHiw0JlCmOIKzz2bUi7eI3gHcJ4BxkRs83VDpairBDIHe88-deCoxiEkzJFn14gbynZB1XidCBeUelHvJ_hqtY-65LqdotMEIIZeM/s320/people+of+the+screen,+image,+kindle2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5301934921678810210" /></a>To recap the previous post, Christine Rosen from <a href="http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/people-of-the-screen">The New Atlantis</a> is deeply concerned about technologies like the Kindle that encourage people to read online. She fears that "the paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information." I think her intentions are good but her fears are exaggerated. <br /><br />Rosen's conclusions sit on a pile of different complaints, some anecdotal and some drawn from science: Ipods and idle chatter in the British Reading Room, the failure of e-readers for young children, the "outer-directedness" of screen-readers, librarians getting jobs entitled "media and information specialist". But Rosen's most interesting worries are that screen-readers (unlike novel readers) are not submissive but controlling, and that the internet is constantly distracting. Neither of these worries is as great as Rosen makes out, I think. The first is a bit bizarre and the second is easily fixed.<span id="fullpost"><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Master and student</span><br /><br />James Paul Gee, a loud advocate of video games in education, thinks they help learning because they encourage user participation. The user makes choices, acts on them, and experiences the consequences; hence they learn strategic thinking and accountability. Rosen takes this to be a "profound misunderstanding" of books and the learning process, and outlines probably the most insistent and specific (and odd) of her concerns.<br /><blockquote>[When reading a novel] you enter the author’s world on his terms, and in so doing get away from yourself. Yes, you are powerless to change the narrative or the characters, but you become more open to the experiences of others and, importantly, open to the notion that you are not always in control. In the process, you might even become more attuned to the complexities of family life, the vicissitudes of social institutions, and the lasting truths of human nature. The screen, by contrast, tends in the opposite direction. Instead of a reader, you become a user; instead of submitting to an author, you become the master.</blockquote><br />Historian David A. Bell draws the same link between submission and learning: “Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns."<br /><br />This idea doesn't bear the weight that Rosen puts on it. For one thing, it is at odds with a standard argument against watching videos, which is that the user is a passive absorber of data rather than an active participant. Many defenses of literature emphasise the amount of "engagement" a book gives us, the imaginative reconstruction and moral contemplation etc. that goes on in the mind of a reader. The argument goes back at least to Plato, who preferred the spoken to the written word (and dialogues to monologues) because the former is more likely teach the audience in the best way possible: by doing. More recently, David Novitz is one philosopher of art who has emphasised the value of literature in helping people imagine new scenarios and walk through them in our heads. It's hard to see why users of video gamers are less likely to develop these skills just because they get to decide which alley to go down and where to build your next city. Since when was spectatorship a better teacher than participation? <br /><br />Insofar as Rosen's objection holds weight, it is thanks to the content and verisimilitude of video-games rather than user participation. Most video games test strategy rather than empathy. You could imagine games that test the latter, but I expect they would need a great deal more detail and sophistication than they currently do -- they'ld need novelists and psychologists, not graphic artists.<br /><br />David Bell puts a different slant on the notion of audience submission. What books encourage, he says, and what the internet dissipates, is the discipline of sustained reading. At best, the people of the screen are distracted readers; at worst, they make ad-hoc jumps from one bit of data to another, without trying to link them together. A standard response to this criticism is to say that our minds are in fact stimulated by the challenge of linking together disparate bits of data -- we do more "cognitive work" with <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> than with <span style="font-style:italic;">I Love Luc</span>y. <br /><br />The key here is to distinguish between fragmentation and reorganisation. It's the difference between a brainstorm and an essay. The first is a set of ideas randomly gathered and displayed. The second is no less a collection of bits of data, it's just that they are deliberately selected bits of data, thoughtfully arranged. <br /><br />So far so obvious (at least since Johnson made it obvious). But the bibliophile can just respond that there is still something much different in the novel. All this ideas-networking is one thing, but the quiet, sustained contemplation of a novel is altogether different. But this response is weaker than it looks. Productive book-reading is not, by and large, a simple matter of moving linearly through a long series of ordered sentences. There's lots of zig-zag and cross-reference. <br /><blockquote>*The example is taken from Boris Johnson's book <a href=" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000SOTQB2?ie=UTF8&tag=the-new-atlantis-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B000SOTQB2">Why Everything Bad is Good For You</a>, which introduced this idea of the stimulating confusion of popular culture.</blockquote><br />A lot depends on the genre, of course. Consider the historian or philosopher who reads a book like the internet, checking one passage against a separate one, looking for occurences of the main idea or statements of the main claim, looking up unfamiliar terms or arguments, checking the references behind claims, going back to the primary documents, considering a passage from the book alongside a critic's comment on it. This sort of cross-referencing is not the same as a random walk through Wikipedia -- it's reorganisation versus fragmentation again. But the internet makes both of those tasks easier, not just the latter. <br /><br />But perhaps Rosen is worried mainly about the novel reading. This is where she gets her examples from (Dostoevsky, <span style="font-style:italic;">Little Dorrit</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Middlemarch</span>). It also seems to be a point of difference between Rosen and Johnson, the latter using computer programming and political knowledge as examples of digitally-enhanced fields. Yet most of the real understanding I get from a book -- even a novel -- is not from the first reading but from the later analysis: the search for common themes, recurring symbols, for key passages that illuminate a character. The typical University English tutorial resembles more the zig-zag of an internet search than the marathon of novel-reading. The English zig-zag is not just random flitting, guided by taste. It takes concentration and memory to search for six appearances of stained-glass windows in <span style="font-style:italic;">David Copperfield</span>, and find their common meaning. <br /><br />An electronic search can do the same. Except the internet does all the mechanical searching for you -- the student is left to do the really worthwhile bit, the close contextual reading and study of common themes of the various "hits." One might argue that the internet search is too efficient. It gives exact hits without allowing the user to go down any creative sidetracks. If you electronically search <span style="font-style:italic;">David Copperfield</span> for "stained-glass window", you won't accidently bring up a page that has no stained-glass windows but does have a "rose window" or a scene with a sunset seen through a window. But, as Rosen frequently reminds us, the internet has no shortage of creative side-tracks....<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Distraction</span><br /><br />Here is Rosen's round-up of the problems with the Kindle:<br /><blockquote>"...the tactile pleasures of the printed page versus the screen; the new risks of distraction posed by a device with a wireless Internet connection; the difference between reading a book in two-page spreads and reading a story on one flashing screen-display after another."</blockquote><br />Of these concerns, the first and third seem to be mainly aesthetic, and I don't understand the third one at all (what difference does it make to read with two pages visible and not just one?). The second one makes more sense. Clearly it's easier to (say) click on your Youtube bookmark, while on the computer, than it is to go and read the mag in the kitchen, while sitting reading in your favorite chair. A caricature, perhaps. But it's what we would expect, the computer and the internet being designed for easy access and convenience. The internet age is also the age of handy time-wasters.<br /><br />But this is not a problem if it's easily fixed. So why not have a "anti-distraction" device on the Kindle? Activate it and you lose the internet for an hour or two, either completely or in strategic chunks -- lose Wikipedia, lose facebook or other top time-wasters, lose email. There would be an emergency bail-out, as there always is for a real book. But the bail-out option would be as inconvenient as getting out of a comforting chair to get to the phone. Perhaps a password kept in the shed or loo or letterbox, or a number you have to dial on the real phone. Or, to keep it digital, some laptop chore that the user has specified in advance, like sending an awkward email or organising your Documents folder. More simply, there could be no built-in bail-out, and your last resort is a connected computer in another room. <br /><br />There are drawbacks to this anti-distraction idea. No anti-distraction plan is proof against a sufficiently determined ditherer. And for the reader to activate such a plan they would have to have a firm commitment to sustained reading in the first place. But both of these drawbacks apply just about as well to ordinary book-reading. That is, anyone who would otherwise be a good book-reader would have the skill and dedication to overcome them.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Conclusion</span><br /><br />The internet does certain things very well. It searches for things, links things together, and makes it easy to follow the links. It's also pretty good at just displaying raw language. Hard-copy books are only really good at the latter. If we have a choice between the two, we should take the one that does more useful things. So why worry that the internet is replacing hard-copy books? <br /><br />The answers that Rosen gives us are a) the new function of the internet (all that linking) is bad for us and b) the internet is not very good at the old role (displaying raw language as a book does). To a) I say: all that linking is a valuable thing that we do anyway (only slower) when reading a book. And to b) I say: the problems with the screen as a book could be solved, with a bit of thought and technology, by anyone who has the skill and discipline to read an ordinary book. <br /><br />There remain concerns about the aesthetics of books (the roughed edges, the smell of the binding). But somone who doesn't share a bibliophile's taste can still be a perfectly good reader of Dickens -- at least, I don't see any good reason to otherwise in Rosen's article. Personally, I'ld prefer to read books in hard-cover. But I think that other people can read them just as well on the screen.</span><div style='height: 2px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-79153166221423452412008-10-18T16:21:00.001-07:002009-02-12T09:49:11.727-08:00Another look at the people of the screen<div class='post-quote'>Two points of method in the debate about online reading</div><div style='height: 15px';></div><blockquote style = "margin-top: 0px">Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.</blockquote><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqAPRncZ7RXA0g8kygXaj7PAUEe2lhrSjiSjq8IQGyYR7HoTFrTbB3F1ZHI6GJnmsD9gyKQuulGP4qFL_w90n5ldKy0Pw8H81VDsHDADaVWDVKC0avCkz9PwMZPQkCMgvBOGyaHac2i2I/s1600-h/people+of+the+screen,+image,+logo.jpeg"><img style="float:left; margin:10px 12px 6px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 100px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqAPRncZ7RXA0g8kygXaj7PAUEe2lhrSjiSjq8IQGyYR7HoTFrTbB3F1ZHI6GJnmsD9gyKQuulGP4qFL_w90n5ldKy0Pw8H81VDsHDADaVWDVKC0avCkz9PwMZPQkCMgvBOGyaHac2i2I/s200/people+of+the+screen,+image,+logo.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5301927333335556146" /></a><br />This is Christine Rosen writing in <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/people-of-the-screen">The New Atlantis</a></span> on the fate of reading in a digital age. Needless to say, it's not a very happy article. Rosen means the article as a counterweight to the work of "techno-utopians", who see the digitisation of books as an unalloyed good. But Rosen doesn't just balance things out -- she slides them into gloom. Screen-reading won't just be book-reading in a new medium, she says. It'll be a new activity altogether, where reading is shallow and aimless and readers are numb to their own humanity.<br /><br />I'll look at Rosen's main worries in the next post. But first, here's a couple of general points about the debate, inspired by Rosen's article: compare like with like, and don't let differences of medium obscure similarities of function.<span id="fullpost"><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Compare like with like</span> <br /><br />To be fair, Rosen scolds a "technophile" (<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/07/internet.literacy">Steven Johnson in the London Guardian</a>) for failing to compare like with like -- for comparing computer programmers with book readers in terms of their likely economic success in the digital climate. As Rosen points out, "Johnson would have done better to compare obsessive novel writers and obsessive computer programmers...Most of the people immersed in screen worlds are not programmers. They are consumers who are reading on the screen, but also buying, blogging, surfing, and playing games."<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3x13fL3cIWzJcRQolbLUCKRS4ZnsdeFsZ8Y88HOfN1tdWox35v1RNRKMz5WWKnko7TsjcKcwTc850aIC_DowKWIcHdKPk52LKgfzIzkTXlk5TfZ2-EE2mvQoEPfPg9F6_Z5TNzlYe0dM/s1600-h/people+of+the+screen,+image,+kindle.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 220px; height: 159px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3x13fL3cIWzJcRQolbLUCKRS4ZnsdeFsZ8Y88HOfN1tdWox35v1RNRKMz5WWKnko7TsjcKcwTc850aIC_DowKWIcHdKPk52LKgfzIzkTXlk5TfZ2-EE2mvQoEPfPg9F6_Z5TNzlYe0dM/s320/people+of+the+screen,+image,+kindle.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5301927593212623586" /></a><br /><br />That's fair enough, but it rubs both ways. Rosen is as misguided as Johnson when she compares the book-reading community with the entire web community, in all its moods and activities. It's more plausible to compare the web community to the entire non-web community, where the latter includes (along with book-readers) its fair share of shallowness, idleness, and wasted time. The online community, like the offline community, has its disciplined and intelligent suburbs and its more scruffy one. The real question is whether the internet will give a net outflow from the former to the latter.<br /><br />So if Rosen is right, and cognitive content of normal reading has been replaced by, and not just supplemented by, a "vaguely defined screen savvy", that's something to worry about. But if we do an equivalent of quality reading on the internet now, as before, there's no immediate concern. Importantly, this means that we may be OK even if we spent the majority of our internet time in the aimless, shallow, "power search" mode that Rosen laments.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Different medium, same function</span><br /><br />Rosen scolds Johnson again for failing to distinguish between the values of the digital world and values within the digital world. Computer programmers might earn a lot in the "digital climate", she says, but that's no use if the climate itself is wrong. And there's truth in that. But the overall lesson of Johnson's article, in seems to me, is not just that techies achieve techie goals. It's rather that they achieve goals that everyone wants to achieve -- like professional success and political awareness. Activities in the digital medium can serve the same function as different activities in other media -- even if the difference of medium tends to obscure the similarity of function. In Johnson's words: "Are you not exercising the same cognitive muscles because these words are made out of pixels and not little splotches of ink?"<br /><br />With this in mind, the following claim from the article looks fishy: "People who read regularly for pleasure are more likely to be employed, and more likely to vote, exercise, visit museums, and volunteer in their communities; in short, they are more engaged citizens."* Perhaps your average blogger is less likely to go to museums or help out in the local soup kitchen. But they become engaged citizens in ways that are peculiar to the internet -- online donations, political awareness, writing open source code, getting involved in decent online forums.<br /><blockquote>*To be fair, the claim comes from a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) study, not from Rosen. And she counters it with Harold Bloom's skeptical view of the link between books and civic engagement.</blockquote></span><div style='height: 1px'></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-72393786334042355262008-10-18T16:21:00.000-07:002009-11-16T05:25:05.473-08:00Review of "Lords of the Fly" by Robert E. Kohler<div class='post-quote'>A fine book about flies and scientists</div><div style='height: 10px';></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNogPd7TEH6-ErQF6roZjCPCJSpijqarmQSNYnJdWdFCyb8m7TlKUtd-WdpVx2eT_ed8vSyTd6QJq97_t-dZ9P9S1AmBxhNkZv4rzROwl5aeqgMWDR4V4cX8r3NJXPhzg-Gk8CGiw8TvA/s1600-h/lords+of+the+fly,+image,+cover.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:4px 15px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 69px; height: 109px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNogPd7TEH6-ErQF6roZjCPCJSpijqarmQSNYnJdWdFCyb8m7TlKUtd-WdpVx2eT_ed8vSyTd6QJq97_t-dZ9P9S1AmBxhNkZv4rzROwl5aeqgMWDR4V4cX8r3NJXPhzg-Gk8CGiw8TvA/s400/lords+of+the+fly,+image,+cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5302282524423133666" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Robert E. Kohler. <span style="font-style:italic;">Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life.</span> University Of Chicago Press, 1994.</span><br /><br />First of all, <span style="font-style:italic;">Lords of the Fly</span> is an excellent book. It is readable, thorough, vivid and original. It contains enough technical detail to guide the reader, but not too much to confuse him. It describes, in a novel way, an important and much-studied period in the history of biology: the rise of genetics in the first half of the century. It contains considerable detail about the everyday working lives of the “Drosophilists,” the men and women who worked with the fruit fly Drosophila. But it always tries to link those details to the actual science they produced. “I hope to persuade the readers of this book,” writes Kohler, “that experimental sciences have been shaped by their material cultures.” Kohler succeeds.<span id="fullpost"><br /><br />The challenge is to explain that success. What lessons does the book contain for those who would write laboratory-based histories of science? One lesson is that comparison works. Kohler uses the comparative approach to illuminate two separate but similar historical episodes: the early years of research based on <span style="font-style:italic;">Drosophila</span>, led by T.H. Morgan at Columbia University; and the work, led by Beadle, on <span style="font-style:italic;">Neurospora</span>. <br /><br />Kohler also shows that structure works. Throughout the book, Kohler treats <span style="font-style:italic;">Drosophilia</span> and the Drosophilists in three different ways: as technological devices, with the Drosophilists manipulating their flies to create scientific instruments; as an episode in natural history, with the human and animal organisms migrating, specialising, adapting, selecting; and as an example of a “moral economy,” a human community with a set of values, procedures, and penalties. These themes serve as a map, opening up a field of inquiry and setting its elements into clear array.<br /><br />Kohler also makes good use of metaphor and analogy. At times her analogy between experimental life and ecological life is merely decorative. But often it is illuminating, casting descriptive and explanatory light. For example, he writes: “Intragroup conflict, by isolating Dobzhansky from the traditional practice of his American colleagues, cleared the way for the rapid evolution of a new species of experimental practice.”<br /><br />The subtitle of the book is a nod to Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's <span style="font-style:italic;">Leviathan and the Air Pump</span>, the ground-breaking study of experimental science in the seventeenth century. Kohler only takes what he needs from Shapin and Schaffer, which is an interest in the details of experimental practice. He does not pick up Shapin and Schaffer's task of pricking the pretensions of scientists. By showing (for example) that Morgan and his students “constructed” a new fly by manipulating its genotype, Kohler means to show how scientists work, not to challenge the integrity of their results. In one sense this approach limits the force of Kohler's book, since he does not enable himself to explain the resolution of disputes about ultimate results. But it also opens up room to explain many other features of experimental life, such as choices of research topics, the pace of research, the harmony or otherwise of the “moral economy,” and the failure of interdisciplinary efforts.<br /><br />Sometimes Kohler pushes his aims too hard. He suggests, for example, that material practices were the “controlling factor” in the rapid expansion of Dobzhansky's project of mapping the phylogenies of naturally occurring <span style="font-style:italic;">Drosophila pseudoobscura</span>. From Kohler's account, however, it seems that a theoretical breakthrough (the discovery of a link between phylogenetic maps and chromosomal inversions) was just as important. Also, one might protest that Kohler does not fully capture the amount of repetition and long-term drudgery that was involved in processing <span style="font-style:italic;">Drosophilia</span>. But the reader gets glimpses of this aspect, as in Dobzhansky slaving over mounds of flies. Kohler might have turned the glimpses into a full view by including more technical detail and literary evocation. But those two features are not on the book's agenda. As for Kohler's actual aims, he meets them in style.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Fly-Drosophila-Genetics-Experimental/dp/0226450635"><span style="font-style:italic;">Lords of the Fly</span> on Amazon</a></span>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-7903521929512206862008-10-08T04:34:00.001-07:002009-11-16T06:16:26.854-08:00"Representing Electrons" by Theodore Arabatzis<div class='post-quote'>An ambitious and pretty successful biography of the electron</div><div style='height: 10px';></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaEZYsrgofbmQQJrL0z086kLo0-z04NQ_t41JD0o5o2HT-r7hxSIZ81Uy13AxwB81fQt41mGpdOCX4Qnof2VFAu9gJrjOizIn1stI095p69waos8nDpE2owEimy4HRZng6BI9a8_RrvtQ/s1600-h/representing+electrons,+image,+book.jpeg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 96px; height: 142px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaEZYsrgofbmQQJrL0z086kLo0-z04NQ_t41JD0o5o2HT-r7hxSIZ81Uy13AxwB81fQt41mGpdOCX4Qnof2VFAu9gJrjOizIn1stI095p69waos8nDpE2owEimy4HRZng6BI9a8_RrvtQ/s320/representing+electrons,+image,+book.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5301964759248574418" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">Theodore Arabatzis, <span style="font-style:italic;">Representing Electrons: A Biographical Approach to Theoretical Entities</span>. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006</span><br /><br />In <span style="font-style:italic;">Representing Electrons</span>, Theodore Arabatzis gives a detailed account of scientific inquiry into the electron, covering roughly the years 1891-1824. The main message is that scientific entities have a "life of their own": they can act independently of theory, theoreticians, and experimenters. In delivering this message, Arabatzis makes a bold and largely successful attempt to bring the historical and philosophical approaches into a mutually stimulating relationship.<span id="fullpost"><br /><br />You can see Arabatzis’ dual interest in the history and philosophy in his choice of advisors and collaborators. While at Princeton University Arabatzis came into contact with the philosopher Bas van Fraassen, and numerous other philosophers are energetically deployed in the body of the book: Karl Popper, Larry Laudan and Thomas Nickels are quoted on the topic of “problem situations”, Paul Feyerabend and Ian Hacking on scientific realism, and Hilary Putman on theories of reference. Also featured in the author's acknowledgments are prominent historians of science, including Jed Buchwald, Warwick Taylor and Ernan McMullin. <br /><br />In <span style="font-style:italic;">Representing Electron</span>s, Arabatzis puts his multi-layered background to good use. Three themes dominate the book: realism and meaning change; the "discovery" of scientific entities; and the autonomy of theoretical entities. In Arabatzis's account, each of these themes has a historical and a philosophical dimension.<br /><br />Take the topic of scientific discovery. Here, Arabatzis corrects the commonly-held view that J.J. Thomson “discovered” the electron. In doing so he uses the historian’s tools, probing scientists’ ideas through their scientific papers (such J.J. Thomson’s Cathode Ray article in <span style="font-style:italic;">Philosophical Magazine</span>) and other writings (Lorentz’s Nobel Prize speech, for example. In later chapters he uses interviews conducted by Thomas Kuhn.) But this historical spade-work is guided by a philosophical discussion of “discovery” that draws on Hacking, Kuhn and Nickles. Here Arabatzis argues for the possibility of an account of discovery that is realism-neutral, and stresses the gradual, consensual nature of discovery: what we call “discoveries” are usually something more like “constructions.”<br /><br />A similar pattern emerges in the next four chapters. Here, Arabatzis goes into considerable detail when dealing with the key episodes in the evolution of ideas about the electron, following the concept as it moves between various stages within physics (from classical to quantum and relativistic physics) and between disciplines (physics and chemistry). But his account is held together by the broad idea that the electron had a "life of its own," a capacity to throw up problems and suggest solutions. <br /><br />Throughout the account, Arabatzis keeps a close eye on the stability of the "electron" concept through time and between practitioners. This conceptual stability comes to the fore in the concluding discussion about meaning change and realism in science. Arabatzis goes over some responses to Paul Feyerabend, who argued from meaning change to the non-existence of unobservable entities. When these responses fail, what is left for the realist? Arabatzis gives a two-fold answer. First, the case for realism can be supported by reference to the "writings" of the putative entity: if multiple observations give evidence of the same unobservable entity, you can be pretty sure the entity is real. Secondly, the case for realism can be supported by a historical account of a concepts' stability over time. <br /><br />The final paragraph of the book draws out the implications of these arguments for historical accounts of the electron. Hence the attempted union of history and philosophy is carried right to the end of the book. Is this attempt successful? On the whole, the answer must be “yes.” There is a danger here of artificially gluing different disciplines together, but Arabatzis largely avoids this danger. The philosophical discussion in the concluding chapter draws on examples from the author’s historical account; during the historical discussion the reader is constantly reminded of the philosophical questions at hand; and the philosophy comments not only on the science of microphysics but also on the methodology of historians of physics. <br /><br />One might complain that the philosophical discussion about realism and meaning change is independent of the “biographical approach” that Arabatzis takes to the electron. At least, Arabatzis seems to be in two minds about this. On the one hand, he pursues the “historicist” approach to discovery precisely because it does not require any prior commitment to realism or anti-realism: it keeps everyone happy. On the other hand, he writes the concluding chapter (on meaning-variance and realism) largely to justify his historical methodology: “for those who disbelieve in the existence of unobservable entities...a historical approach devoted to its representation may seem vacuous.” <br /><br />In Arabatzis' defense, the final chapter does explore the implications of the historical account for the realism debate (not just the other way round). And his equivocation here may be just another sign that historians and philosophers (not just Arabatzis) have inconsistent aims. To a historian, who is worried about what happened in the past, the key criterion for existence of an entity is whether the entity was significant for past scientists. To a philosopher, the key criterion is whether it is, in fact, right to think that the entity exists. If Arabatzis is in two minds here, the problem does not lie with him, for being inconsistent, but with the two disciplines, for being different; Arabatzis' only real fault is not to clearly acknowledge this difference.<br /><br />In the well-tilled field of historical research into the electron, novelty is crucial to a book’s success. The chief novelty in <span style="font-style:italic;">Representing Electrons</span> is is the idea that concepts have a "life of their own." This idea does give rise to a fresh retelling of the atomic story: a vivid picture emerges of the electron standing on the outside of theory, teasing physicists into dead-ends and leading them on to unexpected new insights. <br /><br />But Arabatzis has only given us a new picture insofar as he has applied it to a new entity: the ideas behind the picture are unexciting. For example, Arabatzis writes about Sommerfeld's selection rules, and how his “struggle to discipline the electron in a principled way ran into difficulties with its writings.” But do these metaphors convey anything more than the mundane fact that Sommerfeld had trouble matching his theory about the electron to his observations about it? A similar question may be asked about the fact that physicists found heuristic value of theories, and that they had trouble making the concept of the electron internally coherent. If the answers to these questions are “no”, this is not to say that there is no value in Arabatzis' biographical approach. It just means that the value lies in its contribution to the narrative structure of the book, and not to its philosophical depth.<br /><br />One can always make quibbles about exposition, especially when an author tries to describe technical paths of reasoning. Overall Arabatzis does a good job here: a basic knowledge of maths is required to understand the derivations, but most of the discussion is within the reach of the ordinary reader. However, the book would benefit from more images of the relevant theories (eg. of atomic structure) and experimental results (especially spectral patterns). This would not just aid reader understanding. Copies of original diagrams of the electron would give a better idea of how physicists "represented" the electron to eachother and to themselves.<br /></span><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-41042314315506397962008-09-27T16:11:00.001-07:002009-11-16T06:00:30.084-08:00Notes on ACAAPNZ 2008 II<div class='post-quote'>A third selection from the 2008 annual conference of the NZ division of the Australasian Association of Philosophy</div><div style='height: 4px';></div><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Tool Use and Life History of Early Homos. Ben Jeffares (ANU)</span>.<br /><br />How to account for human cognitive and social evolution? One approach is to focus on the physical evidence of human evolution (skeletons, tools, drawings, etc.) and on the periods where this physical evidence indicates dramatic changes in human life, thought and behavior. This is Jeffares' approach, and in this talk he concentrated on a dramatic change in human tool use that seems to have taken place around 1.5 million years ago. <br /><span id="fullpost"><br />1.5mya is a hotspot for archaeologists because it's meant to be the great coming of age of our species – the point where we stopped being walking chimps and became hairy humans. And a jump in tool use is the main marker of this shift. Jeffares thinks tools were around well before the point where the first appear in the archaological record. Skeletal remains indicate that early bipeds had a hand structure suitable for tool-use well before 2.5mya. Be that as it may, tools became more refined around 1.5mya, being more symmetrical and sophisticated and more likely to be “time travellers”: made in advance and for repeated use.<br /><br />How to account for this change? It's really quite interesting, but the evidence is fragmentary. Studies have suggested that homos started living differently around the time that tool-makers sharpened their act. The started having longer childhoods, longer periods of learning and maturing: the age of the teenager had begun. They also had patchier resources, had to kill away from home and in unknown places. So they had to plan ahead, making tools at home using secure resources. And, crucially, the children sat around while the tool-makers worked, and the tools lay around as well. Teaching ensured that any new skills or gizmos could be passed on. And the tools that lay around acted as “templates”, finished products that young killers could copy. As Jeffares put it, students could learn from “products”, not just from “behaviors.”<br /><br />A nice story, but is it true? Jeffares is sensitive to the weaknesses of the evidence, and with good reason. It is not an exaggeraion to say that the extended-childhood data is based often based on “half a dozen teeth.” Human evolution is light on evidence and heavy on theorising – not necessarily a bad thing, and good for philosophers. There's some doubt about Jeffares' early tool-use thesis. Tools are not the only reason that manual dexteritry, of the kind found in skeletal remains, can arise. As Sterelny puts it, “it's always important to be able to scratch your bum.” Turning over rocks for food, extracting berries or flesh, forcing other animals to the ground: all would need precise and powerful grips. <br /><br />Some will also question the inference from stone-crafting to tool-use. Some of the stones in question are beautifully symmetric, crafted beyond the needs of mere huntsmen. They have the look of ornaments, icons. Jeffares insists, though, that the elegant tear-drop stones are the exception. And there's no need to worry about the fact they have a sharp edge all the way round. True, this would make them inpracticable as hammers or weapons. But they were not always like that, says Jeffares. Whenever one edge wore out, our frugal ancestors worked on another edge of the same stone -- and so on until the stone was crafted all the way around. It's only the finished product we see.<br /></span><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-24908044275013162912008-09-21T12:17:00.001-07:002009-11-16T05:54:04.034-08:00Notes on ACAAPNZ 2008 II<div class='post-quote'>A second highly selective selection from the 2008 conference of the NZ branch of the Australasian Association of Philosophy.</div><div style='height: 10px';></div><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">When not to have an Argument: the Different Explanatory Goals of Population Biology and Evo-Devo. Brett Calcott (ANU)</span><br /><br />This talk was an attempt to resolve (in so far as it can be resolved) the debate between population biologists and evolutionary developmental biologists. A persuasive talk, but Calcott may have missed something important. I should note that part of Calcott's project is to unify evo-devo explanations with pop-bio explanations by showing how they both fit into a single account of explanation -- the “difference-maker” account of explanation. But the meat of the talk comes in Calcott's account of how explanations differ between the two approaches to biology. <br /><span id="fullpost"><br />Calcott distinguishes between “population-level” and “individual-level” explanations for evolutionary change. The former uses the genetic make-up of a population, plus the mathematical theory of genetic change, to explain changes in that genetic make-up. The latter uses certain physical differences between two stages in an individual's evolution, plus a knowledge of bioengineering, to explain certain other physical differences between the same two stages. <br /><br />Calcott elaborates this distinction by saying that the former explanation is one of motive, and the other of means. Imagine an explanation of why a child got the chocolate bars on the top shelf in the kitchen. One could say that the child liked chocolate very much, so he was motivated to get it. Or one could say that he used a stool to help him reach the chocolate – he had the means. Both of these are genuine explanations of the child's behavior; whether we are satisfied with one or the other will depend on what we already know and what we want to find out. We can't ascribe motives to evolution, of course. But it seems reasonable to distinguish between what drives an evolutionary change (gene frequencies and their interactions) and what facilitates it (ie. how adaptive changes in structure to an individual are underwritten by other structural changes).<br /><br />If this distinction holds, two things are clear. First, Calcott's distinction cuts across another popular distinction that is sometimes used to account for the disagreements between evo-devo and pop-bio – that between “proximate” and “distal” explanations. How can we explain, say, the human scab? We could give a biochemical account of why blood goes hard when exposed to air, and how this helps to heal the wound underneath. We need not look to the past to do this. Or we could try to explain how the tendency to form a scab has evolved – how it has come about that humans have the kind of biochemistry that leads to scabbing. This would certainly involves studying the past. Sometimes evo-devo is said to give “proximate” and pop-bio to give “ultimate” explanations. <br /><br />Against this, Calcott insists that individual-level explanations, as he describes them, can account for how current phenotypical traits came about. After all, those explanations tell us how the structure of an individual at one point of time leads to a different structure in the same individual at another time. It tells us the mechanical means for this change. If we want a more fine-grained account of change over time, we just give a continuous series of these individual-level explanations. <br /><br />As Calcott points out, certain “lineage diagrams” do just this. The lineage diagram we all know is of human evolution: a series of imags of our species in profile, running from the hunched and hairy ancestors to the pale and upright modern human. This doesn't explain much. But a more sophisticated diagram might. To illustrate, consider a set of instructions on how to make an oragami figure. These usually consist in a series of five or six drawings of different stages along the way to the final figure. And each drawing has dotted lines and arrows that tell you how to get to the next figure – what combination of small changes are needed in order to add a wing here, an envelope there, a sharp point there. Producing these “instruction series” is one job of biologists, and Calcott has all the right slides to show that they take the job seriously.<br /><br />Calcott is clear that his distinction between individual-level and population-level explanations defuses the debate between evo-devo and pob-bio, rather than resolving it. He points out that the two forms of explanation he describes can come into conflict. That is, one form can give an explanation of a phenomenon that the other can refute. In any particular case of such a conflict, there can be a dispute about which account should hold more weight. But this is just as reconcilable as any other dispute in science between two competing explanations for a phenomenon. No two correct explanations of the two kinds could ever disagree over the facts of evolution. In this sense, they are “commensurable.” What should not be disputed is that both of them can give insight into how species have evolved. <br /><br />Now, all of this strikes me as pretty well on the right track. But I'm not convinced that Calcott has covered all the areas of serious disagreement between evo-devos and pop-bios. As I understand them, evo-devos do in fact propose a new population-level process of evolution. The don't just give us, for each evolutionary event, an account of how certain structural changes are grounded in other structural changes. They give us an alternative view of how natural selection occurs. On the old view, genotypes fix phenotypes. And evolution occurs when a new and better genotype is randomly produced and outlasts the other ones. On the new view, genotypes have a very loose hold on phenotypes. Evolution occurs when the environment changes and phenotypes change in response to it, without any genotypical adjustments occuring. Genes only change further down the line. They help to ground the new phenotype, but the new phenotype arose earlier and independently, as an adaptive response to the environment. In a phrase, phenotypes lead genotypes, and not the other way around.<br /><br />One can argue about whether this new picture is really new, or just a new angle on the old one. But it is a matter of sociological fact (I thought, perhaps wrongly), that the evo-devo picture was, and is, new enough in appearance to cause a big split between the evo-devos and the pop-bios. And this really does seem to be a split about the way in which evolution occurs, not about two different patterns of explanation that can be applied to evolution. Hence Calcott's distinction does not help to heal this particlar split, even if it can heal others.<br /></span><br /><div style='height: 0px';></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1021924466217190134.post-19570052777413333022008-09-18T09:19:00.001-07:002009-11-16T05:41:28.178-08:00Notes on ACAAPNZ 2008<div class="post-quote">ACAAPNZ = annual conference of the New Zealand branch of the Australasian Association of Philosophy</div><div style="height: 10px"></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="data:image/jpg;base64,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"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 62px; height: 78px;" src="data:image/jpg;base64,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" border="0" alt="" /></a>Naturally, the Australasian Association of Philosophy has a New Zealand branch and (just as naturally) this branch has a regular conference that takes place in New Zealand. Oddly, though, the 2008 conference had a lot of Australians. But there's a natural explanation for this. The Australian National University can't find enough top Australian philosophers to fill their gaduate programs, and New Zealanders get first pick of the international scholarships at the ANU. Couple this with the fact that some top thinkers at ANU have dual careers in the big and small islands of the South Pacific, and you get quite a lot of inter-breeding. And when the man with the dual careers is Kim Sterelny, the scruffy luminary of cognitive evolution, you get quite a lot of Australian philosophers of biology at your New Zealand conference. This is all to the good, of course. But it means there's lots of philosophy of biology in the following notes on the conference, and not a whole lot else. So in here (in this and the following two posts) is my very selective list of conference talks, and some thoughts on them.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Presidential Address: On Turing on Intelligence as an Emotional Concept. Diane Proudfoot</span><br /><br />A curious talk with drama, video, and a spiky question-time. The puzzle about the Turing Test is that Alan Turing's original version of the test seems needlessly complex. It consists in a jurer who asks questions of two hidden objects. One is a real person and the other is either a real person or a computer imitating a person. The jurer's task is to judge whether the second object is a real person or not. But it seems like one could just as well get rid of the first hidden object, and ask the jurer to judge whether it is a human or not.<br /><br />Proudfoot thinks that the more complex test was better for Turing because he thought of mind as an “emotional” and not just an “intellectual” concept. Which is to say that whether we judge an object to be thinking or not depends on “our own state of mind and training”, which can vary between judges.<br /><br />Proudfoot drew on three bodies of data, two sociological and one historical, to make her case. One is that humans are naturally credulous when interacting with computers. This can be nicely demonstrated by quirky videos of humans led into conversation with blocks of moving metal. Another is that humans guard their uniqueness jealously. We don't like being taken in by mere metal. At the annual Turing test Olympics, humans are more often mistaken for computers than the other way round. The historical fact is that Turing did indeed say that thinking is “emotional” in the way described above.<br /><br />What to say about these bodies of data? The audience consensus seemed to be that they are interesting, but that it is not clear how they explain Turing's preference for the more complex test. Perhaps the idea is that the complex test brings out our jealousy to counteract our credulity. But how does the complex test accomplish this? And if mind really is an “emotional” concept, then the judgements we naturally make about the intelligence of machines should be our raw data about that intelligence, not fallible hunches.<br /><br />To the second question, Proudfoot responds that according to Turing, our emotional response to a machine is only one component of the machine's intelligence, the other component being a fact about the machine itself. So Proudfoot would presumably claim that our credulity is not part of the subjective component, and is fallible. She did not give grounds for this claim -- even so, it can still form part of a how-possibly explanation for Turing's complex test.<br /><br />The drama from the talk came from a mock-up of Alan Turing's 1952 broadcast on the BBC. Not all the original listeners liked the original broadcast. One listener said it sounded as if it had been “read from a prepared script, and badly.” Others were flatly opposed to the idea that machines could think. The mock-up got a receptive audience, though, not least because it shown the hidden dramatic talents of some professors of logic – talents great enough that noone could work out who they were.<br /></span><br /><div style="height: 0px"></div>Michael Bycrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11357752389960585219noreply@blogger.com0