Does He Think We're Dumb?

I have fuzzy memories of someone spending his State of the Union speech talking about sending a live human to Mars.

That doesn't jive very well with this:

Mar 24th, 2008 | LOS ANGELES -- Scientists plan to put one of the twin Mars rovers to sleep and limit the activities of the other robot to fulfill a NASA order to cut $4 million from the program's budget, mission team members said Monday.

The news comes amid belt-tightening at NASA headquarters, which is under pressure to cover cost overruns of a flagship Mars mission to land a Hummer-sized rover on the Red Planet next year.

The solar-powered rovers Spirit and Opportunity have dazzled scientists and the public with findings of geologic evidence that water once flowed at or near the surface of Mars long ago.

Both rovers were originally planned for three-month missions at a cost of $820 million, but are now in their fourth year of exploration. It costs NASA about $20 million annually to keep the rovers running.

"This is Your Brain on Violent Media"

Via Slashdot, this press release:

Although research has shown some correlation between exposure to media violence and real-life violent behavior, there has been little direct neuroscientific support for this theory until now.

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center’s Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Research Center have shown that watching violent programs can cause parts of your brain that suppress aggressive behaviors to become less active.

I've long been of the opinion that repeated viewings of violent media do desensitize one to real-life violence. I consider this evidence for that.

UPDATE: The writing on the rest of this post is horrible. It's been deleted until I figure out where I went wrong.

Pills

Via friend CA, this BBC story:

The natural "high" produced by exercise could one day be available in a pill that targets a gene in our brains.

The Yale University experts say that experiments on mice could show why regular exercise can help people suffering from depression.

Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, they say it could lead to more effective drugs.

Mental Health charities in the UK already back exercise programmes as a way of lifting depression.

I would like more context - is this to be proposed in addition to exercise? Because at face value, it seems like exercise itself would be a good antidote.

Plus, there is some irony in the creation of pills that mimic a result of exercise... though I do acknowledge the legitimate use of the proposed pills.

Massimo Pigliucci on Teaching Science (with special thanks to PZ Myers)

I took a course once from someone who had co-wrote a book, maybe two with Pigliucci. The prof I had was one of the smartest people I've ever met, so I start with a healthy respect for Pigliucci (who, if I remember right, holds two PhDs, one American and one European).

It just got bigger. Lots bigger (warning: PDF):

ABSTRACT. The creation-evolution “controversy” has been with us for more than a century. Here I argue that merely teaching more science will probably not improve the situation; we need to understand the controversy as part of a broader problem with public acceptance of pseudoscience, and respond by teaching how science works as a method. Critical thinking is difficult to teach, but educators can rely on increasing evidence from neurobiology about how the brain learns, or fails to.

(Side note: The abstract is also in French - how awesome is that?! I know - not as awesome as if the whole article was in both languages, that's how awesome.)

PZ Myers helpfully summarizes the suggestions Pigliucci goes on to offer in the article, and I've excerpted a few here. Make sure to at least read the Myers post, as it has lots more and they are written very clearly:

There must be mandatory continuing education for teachers. He's referring to public school teachers, and yes, that would be a good idea. It would help the teachers, and I would hope would get them enthused about the science if they aren't already, but also it would be a way to correct those huge numbers of creationist science teachers (see Randy Moore's article for more on that).

Training in teaching must be provided to university faculty and graduate assistants. My first year in grad school, we fresh new students were simply parceled out to courses that need TAs. I remember being assigned a cell biology lab my first term, and genetics my second, and no, I'd never stood up in front of a class and taught anything before. After my first year, I landed a genetics training grant and didn't have to teach again. I did two post-docs, all research, no teaching. Then I got my first professorial job, and I not only have to teach, I have to design the whole course. This is typical. Most of us are thrown cold and unprepared into the job of teaching, which is genuinely disrespectful to the discipline.

Go read; they are some really, really good suggestions.

via Hullabaloo.

New Study "Shows" That Liberals Are More Open to New Ideas

From the LA Times:

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

OK. That's a doozy, and a dangerous one. So we can now just ascribe our politics to our biology?

That'll never lead to a bad outcome. Never. Honestly.

Except that:

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

My first reaction to this was to be very, very surprised that the researchers would draw the conclusion they did from the experiment they performed. I have a comment and a question:

1) Journalists are under pressure to sensationalize study results in order to make them more "readable" or something. I hope that's what happened here.

2) Unless there is more proof, either in the study or in previous studies, that this sort of experiment is a valid way to measure something, color me skeptical.

Also, I guess, I'm not convinced from the study that causation was proved, merely correlation.

Oh yeah - it's almost impossible to translate one's political beliefs into neat categories like "liberal" and "conservative" since such categories are shorthand for a whole set of interlocking beliefs, values, issue positions, and worldviews, not all of which agree. I wonder if they let students self-identify...

Then there's this quote, buried at the very end of the story:

"Does this mean liberals and conservatives are never going to agree?" Amodio asked. "Maybe it suggests one reason why they tend not to get along."

Um, what? Who said anything about not being able to agree? I thought the study was about reacting to conflict and change, not agreement.

My larger point in posting this is simply that I think physiological and/or biological differences like that can develop over time in response to one's experiences. Because of that, even if the results of this study turn out to be accurate, I think it in no way indicates a predisposition or that one's political leanings are largely unavoidable.

Get Off My Lawn, Part VI

If I'm reading the paper, and I see an editorial written by the lovely Mr. Hering, and it has the title of "Keep science in its place," what do you think happens?

Yup. I have a mental image of science in the kitchen in the 1950s, baking a pie, complete with apron.

Then I get annoyed.

Hering's latest attempt at making his readers dumb is on the decision made in 2001 regarding water levels in the Klamath River Basin.

(Note: Go read the first comment below the editorial. It's pretty good.)

This is his key point:

Science can never be allowed to substitute for political decision making. If it ever is, we might as well call off any further elections and turn every national question over to the people running the National Academy of Sciences.

In the case of the Klamath Basin and water levels, what's coming out is that the science regarding the necessary water levels for fish survival said that if the water level got low enough, farmers were going to have to lose some of the water they usually got to keep the fish alive. They didn't like it, and what happened is that Dick Cheney intervened. The result? The farmers got their water and something like 70,000 fish died that year because they didn't have enough water. The fishing industry is still recovering from that, six years later. Oh, and Cheney's political intervention resulted in bad science being used to create policy. (See this Washington Post story for more on Cheney's intervention.)

Getting back to Hering's point, I think he's quite consciously misrepresenting what happens when science and policy collide. In the Klamath case, this is what he says:

In 2001 federal agencies cut off irrigation water to the farming economy of the Klamath Basin. The farmers complained bitterly that they were losing their farms. They didn’t complain to the agency scientists; they complained to the people in elected federal offices. In 2002 the farmers were allocated more water, and there are continuing discussions among various interests on how to resolve the situation in the long run.

That’s the way our system is supposed to work.

Um, notice anything missing? I do - the fact that the result was the die-off of a massive number of fish. And the "discussion," as he labels it, is one of the most bitterly contested fights over water rights in the United States. I have a friend who was the first person in a long time to actually get all the parties to sit down and talk, and this is nowhere near over, and for a long time was nowhere near as civil as he makes it sound.

Anyway, Hering's strange conception of a system in which science is ignored when making policy - because that's what he describes as the system working in the above paragraph - is not good. There is one very, very big reason that scientists should be listened to when making policy: They are experts in their fields. I don't know very much about endangered species, or the science behind global climate change, and neither do elected public officials. That's why they rely on scientists to craft policy, especially at the minute level. "Saving endangered species" is a policy goal. Legislation that relies on science to determine when a species is endangered is a pretty straightforward result of that. But apparently that's not a good thing:

But some of our laws are not written that way. They require certain actions — such as listing a species as threatened, for example — in response to what the data show, not what the people want.

But voters still expect their elected officials to look out for them. An official can’t afford to say: “I’d like to help and I think you should have help, but the scientists tell me I should let you starve, so don’t bother me anymore.”

First of all, I'd be really surprised to see that Hering actually believes that "what the people want" matters. He only believes it when it matches his opinion. So that's just populist grandstanding.

Second, there's that strawman again. I can't believe I'm actually going to have to say this, but Hasso, no elected official is going to listen to a scientist that tells them they have to let people starve; for that matter, no scientist is going to say that - and certainly that's not what happened here with the Klamath farmers. That's just a stupid misrepresentation of what happened. I'm sure that in the case of an actual disaster for farmers, the federal government could provide aid in the form of emergency relief funding and subsidies to the farmers in the case they weren't able to irrigate. You know, like the aid that went to the fishing industry after the massive die-off that was the result of Cheney influencing policy to help his base?

Oh. Right. That. What about this:

The data show what they show, and unless they are manipulated, they should be taken as fact. But that doesn’t mean that politicians should have to do what the data show.

Do not wish for a country in which science rules without a political process that can act regardless of what the data show. In such a tyranny, science might say that the country can sustain 150 million people but not 300 million, and 150 million of us would have to go. (hh)

The first sentence....yes, Hering, you are correct. No one has to listen to the scientists, especially when they say things that make you feel bad and want to go to your room and cry. Just be aware that there can be massive consequences for ignoring science. Honestly, how can he expect people to believe this dreck? If we're supposed to ignore scientists when they say something we don't like - because that's all the rationale Hering ever provides for his "argument" - then how does he explain that computer he's typing on? The medications he takes? The glasses he wears? Any major scientific breakthrough is usually subject to attack and ridicule when it's new, since it usually requires people to change and/or challenges an established orthodoxy. By Hering's logic, we'd all by dead by now.

And don't even get me started on that last paragraph and its gas-chamber allusion. Let me ask this question: Hypothetically, what if the scientists who say that the carrying capacity of 150 million for the US land mass are correct? We'll ignore the science because it requires us to take radical, uncomfortable action, and then we'll all die due to resource depletion.

Hasso Hering is an idiot.

Doomed By Science

More like the lack of science, actually. The Guardian's got a nice essay (via BB) on the increasing lack of understanding the average person has of even basic science.

There's also some talk of two distinct cultures - a 'science' culture and a 'humanities' culture.

I'm not sure I like that. In some ways, I think the idea is right on; in others, I think it's stupid. There's plenty of material at the link, and more here, so I'm going to be brief.

The above reminds me of Jurgen Habermas, a German philosopher, who once wrote that he fears that humanity is in trouble because while we've accumulated massive amounts of technical knowledge (I think he called it technical-rational) about how the world works, we're real short on other knowledge, what I would call wisdom - knowledge on how to live.

I'm not sure Habermas' claim and the Guardian article are related, but my instinct is to say they are. How? I need to think about that for a bit.

Also, this whole thing reminds me of Idiocracy, by Mike Judge of Beavis and Butthead fame.