the fish with the transparent head

How to sell evolution

Darwin probably had the best idea any one has ever had. His main theory is so elegant, explaining so much with so little. (His other theory, sexual selection, is also pretty hot stuff.)

I'm not getting into the evolution/creationist debate because a debate needs two sides, and, in purely scientific terms, this 'debate' doesn't have that.

Worryingly, despite the vast importance of this account of life there is a staggering level of ignorance about it.

In my experience with children, teenagers, undergrads and adults:

• some know nothing about it;
  
• some hold a Lamarckian view (the idea that acquired characteristics can be passed on);
• some have a really weird version where frequency of use begets a trait (my favorite example is that smokers' children will be born with their index and middle finger as one uber-finger with a hole in it for the cigarette);
• lots think in terms of the Great Chain of Being, where there is a linear progression from things like amoeba up to us, stopping off at monkeys along the way. This idea is probably given legs because of Rudy Zallinger's much parodied "The March of Progress" in paleoanthropologist F. Clark Howell's book, Early Man.
  
  
  This is wrong because, as Pinker says, "evolution did not make a ladder; it made a bush" [p. 343]. That is, we did not evolve from chimpanzees: chimpanzees and humans both evolved from a common ancestor.
  

I was never taught about evolution at school. I taught myself at University. This is the biggest betrayal of my education. Now, I don't know about how it's being done in schools now but if the children I know are representative, it's not being done well.

One thing that might be really, really useful is computational modelling of evolution (like Paegel, B.M. & Joyce, G.F. (2008). Darwinian evolution on a chip. PLoS Biol.) This brings natural selection to life, in a way that when made a wee bit simpler should wipe away all the misconception in a lovely interactive, tamagotchi-like way.

Evolution - and all complex scientific ideas - should be sold in the digital space. It's where children can interact with, test and better understand such ideas. Given a choice between a dull classroom lecture by a teacher, who will likely be worse than the top teachers used to develop a videogame, and such a videogame, the choice is obvious.

Now without cancer!

(from ArtWerk)

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.

from Woody Allen's Sleeper

Researchers for smoking giant Philip Morris are trying to genetically modify tobacco to be non-carcinogenic. See the paper here in the Plant Biotechnology Journal. Amazing what the profit motive can do. In a subtle change to Woody's nod to the capricious nature of knowledge, genetics could mean instead of avoiding the bad, the bad is just removed.

Touching taste

(Meredith Farmer @ Flickr)

Packaging is peripheral by definition. Nevertheless, I like it and probably like the thing it houses a bit more if it is good.

This is true of flavour. According to a new study, The Perceptual Transfer of Product Container Haptic Cues in next month's Journal of Consumer Research, the feeling of packaging affects taste. Specifically, increasing firmness brought about better taste perception.

Contravesy, truth and experts

Had another thought about experts and the media.

In the last post, Rethinking Expertise (here), I said the "media forged and perpetuated a scientific controversy [about MMR and autism] where none existed".

Sadly, this is good business. It is in the interests of commercial news outlets to perpetuate (and even serve up) illusory controversy.

Fox, ever reliable for being unreliable, admit to this. Although they may be operating ideologically as well here, Murdoch says there are business reasons for his network's radical stance on climate change.

Another reason why experts must be allowed to shout louder than ordinary people.

Rethinking Expertise

Who's better? An expert or many ordinary people?

As scientists observe the universe and its contents other academics observe the scientists. Prof. Harry Collins is one of these scientific voyeurs who peers through the crack in the ceiling of knowledge-building and records how it is done. My girlfriend and I went to a little talk of his in the Exeter quays last week.

Having spent a long time with gravitational-wave physicists he has given man-birth to Gravity's Shadow (2004), the sort of book you could knock an ox out with, running to some 870 pages. During his experience with these experts he started thinking about the nature of expertise. This is the subject of his (and Robert Evans') most recent (pithier) offering, Rethinking Expertise (2007).

His talk was a summary of one of the book's points. In his forthright, laddish way he sketched a quick and basic history of the philosophy and sociology of science. Without technical labels, which I add back in here, he covered falsification (Popper, 1959, esp. pg. 27–48) and the problems with it (Kuhn, 1977; Lakatos, 1970, 1974; Maxwell, 1972; Meehl, 1978, 1990; Putnam, 1974) including the problem of facts (who is to know if it is the fact or the method to get to that fact that is wrong?). With this breakdown in philosophical robustness so trust in experts dwindled.

In a nod to Feyeraband’s (1975) Dadaistic 'anything goes' idea, the suggestion was that all trust was lost. In a Feyerabandian world science is no different to other things like Jade Goody's opinions or reading the future by dropping fruit on the floor and examining the patterns. Peer-reviewed science has no great difference in terms of methodological soundness to that of personal experience in this scenario. I strongly agree with Collins that a society like this is "not one you would like to live in"; hell is Feyeraband's world.

His concern is that despite the intellectual repugnance of this scenario, it is gaining some currency under the idea that "ordinary people are wiser than experts in some technical areas". For an example he cited the case of MMR and autism where a dodgy paper (Wakefield et al, 1998) and the media forged and perpetuated a scientific controversy where none existed. In his words, the link between these two on the available evidence is "zero" (he is right). To this one woman in the audience shouted "That's not true"; she knew someone whose child had both MMR vaccine and autism.

The whole force of Collins' point was evident in this little bit of heckling. It is stunningly simple (as basic as common-sense gets some might think), but no less important for that: All else being equal we should listen to "those who know what they are talking about". In this case, the evidence said there was no link, the co-occurrence of the MMR vaccine and autism in this child she knew was irrelevant. If she had retorted, "What, it is just coincidence that the child has autism and had the vaccine?", the answer can only be "Yes, precisely that: a coincidence."

I was reminded of an episode of House where House lambasts a junior for choosing the a treatment option on personal factors despite the fact it saved the patient's life. This is because statistically more people would be killed using that particular treatment over time than the evidence-based option.

Had the junior doctor used the evidence-based (correct) option the patient would have died. Nevertheless, it would have been the right option. Experts must be allowed to be experts, even if they are wrong occasionally because the cost of having no experts is far too great. In the case of MMR, lives are at risk.

Collins and Evans call expertise "the pressing intellectual problem of the age". It's certainly a biggie. And as the number of opinions on technical issues froth up with more user-generated content online I think their point, although simple, is very important. No one is cleverer than everyone. But that does not mean everyone is cleverer than experts.

Design and the Elastic Mind

Wish I could get to this exhibition in the MoMA which looks fascinating. There's about 3000km of water stopping me though. When will museums have online exhibitions?

No sweat

According to this study, air conditioning may exacerbate global warming by creating a feedback loop: the hotter it gets, the more AC is used, and the hotter it gets.

Solution to this problem has been put forward in the newly established International Journal of Sustainable Design. The paper suggests a natural way of cooling buildings through nifty architecture instead of energy hungry machines.

Capturing Lightning

These beautiful dendritic patterns are made by injecting a piece of insulating material with a high speed beam of electrons. The fractals are thought to extend right down to the molecular level. Here's a vid of a Litchenberg figure being created and the subsequent light fizz:

Scientifically proven

This is the most annoying phrase in advertising because it is totally meaningless. For one, science doesn't prove anything; it supports or rejects a theory. Two, even if we relax and say that prove can mean ‘demonstrated’ or ‘supported by’, how can anything be unscientifically proven?