Tag Archives: science

People who “believe in science” are willfully blind  

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Remember the virtue-signaling yard signs a few years ago? In rainbow colors, they shouted self-congratulatory platitudes like:

“HATE DOESN’T LIVE HERE”

Except that the residents of the house hated anyone who disagreed with them.

“NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL”

As if the phrase “illegal immigrant” is synonymous with the phrase “illegal human.”

“BLACK LIVES MATTER”

In view of the colossal rip-offs committed by the organization of that name, this one didn’t age well.

“WATER IS LIFE”

Except it’s not; water is a simple molecule of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Saying “water is life” is like saying “aluminum is an airplane.”

“SCIENCE IS REAL”

I’ll leave aside the irony of someone blathering something scientifically incorrect like “water is life” and in the next breath preaching “science is real.” It’s this last platitude that I want to focus on.

I have no objection to the phrase “science is real,” per se. “Science” is a methodology of observing, collecting data, developing theories to explain the data, testing the theories, and adopting the theories that pan out – while discarding or modifying the ones that don’t. That method is indeed real.

The problem with “science is real” as a slogan, as opposed to science as a methodology, is that the sloganeers don’t understand the methodology. Rather, they believe – very strongly, as believers are wont to do – that “science” is not a method but an authority. When people disagree with them, they cudgel them with “science” to shut down the debate.

Real scientists don’t do that. Real scientists instead talk about the theories that the methodology of science has developed. You would never hear a real scientist say “Science says . . .” 

Real scientists don’t have nonsensical yard signs shouting “SCIENCE IS REAL.”

Over thousands of years, the methodology of science has led to immense knowledge and enrichment for humanity. From that methodology, we’ve learned that the earth travels around the sun, that many diseases are caused by living pathogens that we can control, that water is a molecule of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (none of which are alive), that we can split other atoms to release tremendous energy that may someday supply endless electricity to run artificial intelligence machines that will enable us to forget everything we learned in those thousands of years.

But along the way, we’ve gone down many dead ends.

For millennia, scientists including Aristotle thought that life was created spontaneously in suitable settings. It was supposed that tadpoles were created by mudpuddles.

Scientists believed that the earth was a static place, and resisted the concept of continental drift and plate tectonics long into the last half of the 20th century, well after the proof became overwhelming.

Scientists thought that all the great problems of physics had been solved by the end of the 1800s, until an obscure dabbler in the Swiss Patent Office unveiled theories that changed everything. Albert Einstein had a brilliant and creative mind unimpeded by the rigors of running a laboratory or raising NIH grants. In fact, he had no laboratory and did no experiments.

Einstein’s successors in physics never disproved his theories, but their theories of quantum mechanics in the infinitesimal stand awkwardly alongside Einstein’s theories of the universe at large.

His successors accepted Einstein better than Einstein accepted them. He dismissed quantum mechanics theories of uncertainty with “God does not play dice with the universe.” Late in life, Einstein was one of the continental drift deniers.

But the continents do drift, and God does seem to play dice.

In geology, scientists thought the age of the earth was maybe a few million years. Not until the middle of the last century did they theorize correctly (we currently think) that it’s more like 4,500 million years – or 4.5 billion.

At the time scientists came up with the 4.5 billion figure for the age of the earth, that figure was older than the widely accepted age of the universe. It was as if you were determined to be older than your mother. Talk about awkward.

The “science is real” crowd of non-scientists have even more reckoning ahead. Here’s a brief punch list of what the methodology of science has still left unanswered:

We don’t know why things fall. We have a name for it – gravity – and we can predict how things react to this gravity stuff (though our predictions get squirrely when we take them to a large scale and start moving things fast) but we don’t know what it is. It behaves like a force by drawing things toward one another, but we cannot isolate or identify that force. We’re left with the unsatisfying conclusion that it’s just an artifact of the shape of the universe. Hmm.

About 90% of the universe is unaccounted for. We call it “Dark Matter,” which is not to be confused with Darth Vader. Our observations say it has to be there, but we can’t find it or even describe it. Given that it’s 90% of the universe, it’s not like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s more like looking for hay in a haystack. Here we are, deep in the haystack, and we can’t find the hay.

The universe began with a bang, says our best theory. Before this big bang, there was nothing – no time, no things, not even empty space. Then everything came out of nothing. We don’t know why and we don’t know how.

Back to quantum mechanics. Scientists have experimentally proven that there can be “action at a distance.” If two protons (or other objects) are “entangled,” then a change to one simultaneously effectuates a change to the other even if it’s a million miles away.

This simultaneous action-at-a-distance would seem to violate Einstein’s settled conclusion that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light – including information. But physicists have ideas as to why it doesn’t violate Einstein.  They call those ideas “theories.” Those theories will be tested, validated, invalidated, modified, remodified and, if appropriate, discarded.

I suspect that some of the great unanswered questions will never be answered because the applicable theories cannot be tested. How everything – the universe – came into existence from nothing, is one of those unanswerable questions. The nothingness before the big bang was empty of both time and events, and so it left no tracks. All we know and ever will know about the time before time and the nothing before everything, is nothing.

Which brings us back to that dice player.

The best we can say is this. Creation was created and, perforce, it was by a creator, the nature of which or whom is a question best left to philosophers and theologians.

Next time someone tries to win an argument by invoking “science,” have a little fun with them. Start with “Do you think water is life?” and go on from there.

Light-skinned Neanderthal Europe was conquered by dark-skinned modern humans 40,000 years ago

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When fossilized Neanderthals (or “Neandertals” if you prefer) were discovered in caves in Europe back in the mid-1800s, it was assumed that they were stupid, ape-like brutes. Indeed, they did possess compact, muscular bodies with short legs.

We’ve learned in the past few decades that our stereotype of Neanderthals was wrong. These were fully human creatures who hunted with spears, created art, made boats, fished, ceremonially buried their dead, and almost certainly spoke to one another. They were as advanced as any other hominid of the time period.

They were the related to, but not direct descendants of, Homo Erectus, which had migrated out of Africa and into Eurasia over a million years ago. By the time they got to Europe, they had evolved.

Neanderthals, alone, owned Europe for nearly half a million years, through the course of multiple ice ages.

The living wasn’t easy. Much of their diet was the resident megafauna of mammoths, bison, elk, and mastodons, and whatever other protein they could kill and eat. Their stone-age existence was probably not much different than the pre-Columbian existence of the plains Indians in North America.

“Modern” humans finally arrived in Europe around 45,000 years ago. For about 5,000 years thereafter, or more, the two subspecies shared Europe and shared their cultures.

And shared body fluids. Neanderthal DNA accounts for about 1-2% of today’s human DNA outside Africa.

Neanderthals finally died out. Another way of looking at it, however, is that the newcomers overwhelmed the Neanderthals with their sheer numbers. If a population of, say, 20,000 Neanderthals is absorbed into a population of one million modern humans, the Neanderthal DNA will account for only 2% of the resulting population – without any Neanderthals being harmed in the process.

What actually happened is probably somewhere in the middle. To some extent, Neanderthals were simply absorbed. And to some extent, they were out-competed and even killed.

The visual appearance of Neanderthals is debated. Some scientists contend that they could be dressed in a suit and stroll down Madison Avenue without getting a second look (other than looks from people wondering why anyone would wear a suit these days). Other scientists contend that their heavy brow ridges and musculature would surely merit a second look, regardless of their garb.

But giving a person a second look for his appearance is not the same as shrieking “Yikes, a caveman!” Many modern humans have an appearance that is outside the normal range.

Here’s something interesting about Neanderthals’ appearance that we do know. We know from DNA analysis of their remains that they were light-skinned and probably had blond or red hair.

This should be no surprise. Human skin uses sunshine to manufacture vitamin D. In the northern latitudes, such as Europe, the reduced sunshine results in less manufactured vitamin D. Light skin is a natural adaptation, because it permits more sunshine to penetrate the skin.

Here’s another skin pigmentation fact that did come as a surprise, at least to me. While Neanderthals had light skin for hundreds of thousands of years from living in northern latitudes, light skin in modern humans did not develop until much more recently.

Light skin is a complex phenotype for which no single gene is responsible, but the general view is that the various genes did not produce light skin in modern humans until about 10-30,000 years ago – sometime after the migration of modern humans out of Africa.

That more recent time – 10,000 years ago – barely puts it prior to the advent of agriculture and cities in the Levant.

Moreover, both the recent time of 10,000 years ago for the development of light skin in modern humans and the more distant time of 30,000 years ago put it after modern humans migrated into Europe, the domain of the Neanderthals.

The upshot is this. The meeting between the original Europeans – the Neanderthals – and modern humans was a meeting between light-skinned European Neanderthals and migrating dark-skinned modern humans.

It’s tempting to conclude that the source of the light-skin genes in modern humans was the Neanderthals with whom they interbred after arriving in Europe. But paleo-geneticists say that’s not the case. The genes for light skin are different between Neanderthals and modern humans, which suggests that the two lines of humans developed light skin independently – but for the same reason of optimizing vitamin D synthesis in northern latitudes.

What’s all this have to do with immigration along the southern border, conservative wins in the German election, and The Aspen Beat? Nothing, but I thought it was interesting.