Recently in The nature of science Category
Scientists understand the world first by noticing regularities and second by explaining them. Linnaeus noticed that living things could be grouped into hierarchical categories more than a century before Darwin provided the explanation. Mendeleev noticed that elements could be grouped into a periodic table more than a century before the atomic theory explained why.One of the challenges we always face is figuring out what patterns make sense. Take a bunch of nucleotide sequence data from a bunch of different nuclear genes within a large population of an outcrossing species, throw it into your favorite phylogeny program, and you'll get out a tree, one tree1 -- even if each gene has a different evolutionary history.2 Or take a bunch of data from a single gene and a bunch of different populations and throw it into the same programs, and you'll get out a tree -- even if the populations show a linear cline or isolation by distance.
Wouldn't it be great if you could throw your data into a program and have it figure out whether a tree is the best way to structure your data or if some linear order or a dominance hierarchy or something else made more sense? Well, hang on to your hats. There's a recent paper suggesting that it might just be possible.
No, this isn't about ScienceDebate2008. Nor is it about recent challenges to the integrity of science. It's about drawing a lesson from recent events that illustrates an important wy in which the process of reasoning science is different from our everyday reasoning, a difference that is often poorly understood.
If you're a Democrat, your candidate won in Wednesday night's presidential debate -- that was obvious, and most neutral observers would recognize that. But the other candidate issued appalling distortions, and the news commentary afterward was shamefully biased....
To understand your feelings about Wednesday night's debate, consider the Dartmouth-Princeton football game in 1951. That bitterly fought contest was the subject of a landmark study about how our biases shape our understanding of reality.
Psychologists showed a film clip of the football game to groups of students at each college and asked them to act as unbiased referees and note every instance of cheating. The results were striking. Each group, watching the same clip, was convinced that the other side had cheated worse – and this was not deliberate bias or just for show.
“Their eyes were taking in the same game, but their brains seemed to be processing the events in two distinct ways,” Farhad Manjoo writes in his terrific new book, “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.” (Nicholas Kristof, Divided they fall, The New York Times, 17 April 2008)
From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s Congress had something called the Office of Technology Assessment.
The congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) closed its doors September 29, 1995. For 23 years, the nonpartisan analytical agency assisted Congress with the complex and highly technical issues that increasingly affect our society. (source)
OTA issued reports on topics ranging from addiction, aging, and agricultural technology to waste management, and women's health (see the full list at http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/ns20/topic_f.html). Those of you who've been around for awhile will recognize 2005 as the first year of the “Gingrich revolution.” The Republicans in charge of Congress apparently decided that they didn't need non-partisan advice on complicated technical issues.
Wrong! As I've written elsewhere, “Science can describe the outcomes associated with different policy choices, but the choice between those outcomes is determined by what we value” (source). But to make the right policy choices, policy makers need to know the consequences of their policy choices.
Mark Hoofnagle started a campaign a little over a week ago to bring back the OTA. When I checked this morning I found links to 24 blogs that have joined the campaign. I may be slow on the uptake, but I'm in now. Expect posts periodically describing some of OTA's past accomplishments to provide ammunition for the campaign.
Timothy Sandefur and Ed Brayton have long posts on an article published in the law review of the Chapman University law school:
Trask, S. W. 2006. Evolution, science, and ideology: why the establishment clause requires neutrality in science classes. Chapman Law Review 10:359.
The article isn't available on line, and I haven't seen a hard copy, so you'll have to refer to the posts above for a detailed analysis. I just want to point out that Sandefur gets the title of his post right, “All epistemologies are not created equal.” It's right because, as Sandefur notes, the scientific method has proven itself unequaled as a method of learning about the observable world. And it's right because Sandefur correctly locates the argument about the status of revelation, religious belief, and other ways of knowing as an argument about epistemology, i.e., an argument in philosophy, not science.
In that sense, Sandefur's argument goes even further than is necessary. He argues that science and reason are the only legitimate source of knowledge about the world. But to show that creationism doesn't belong in science classes we don't need to deny the legitimacy of religious belief, and we don't need to claim that science is the only legitimate source of knowledge about the world. We only need to show that creationism doesn't follow the norms and practices of science, a task that's been repeated innumerable times.
On Tuesday I began discussing the questions Kieran Healy posed about the ability of a future intelligent species detecting our involvement in producing the mosaic genomes of geneticall modified organisms that might survive after we and any evidence of our existence is gone. He asked whether internal evidence derived from the sequences would allow this future species to infer our existence.
Using the example of the genetic mosaicism within our own cells – the distant evolutionary relationship pf mitochondrial and nuclear genomes and the transfer of many mitochondrial genes to the nuclear genome – I concluded that these future scientists (a) would certainly be able to recognize the mosaic origin of of any GMOs that survived, (b) would certainly argue a lot about the mechanisms that could produce such mosaics, and (c) would certainly not take the gene shuffling they found as evidence that we existed.
Why not? Click through for my explanation.
Last week, Kieran Healy posed an interesting problem:
[W]hat if, long, long after our disappearance, some other species arose on earth at least as intelligent as us and eventually started doing evolutionary and molecular biology. Let’s say they have a working theory of evolution much like our own. Now say for the sake of argument that a bunch of transgenic organisms produced by humans have survived and prospered in the interim. So our future biologists find things like a bacteria that produces insulin, or a plant that secretes insecticide, or rice that is high in beta carotene, or more exotic stuff as needed.
I’m wondering, would such organisms even present themselves as empirical anomalies? (That is, how much would you have to know about genomes and evolution for them to seem odd?) And if they did seem odd, how would they be explained? That is, would the evidence of their intelligent design by a previous, now-extinct species be clear? You can see that I’m just irony-mongering here. Would some Arthropod-staffed functional-equivalent of the Discovery Institute point its claw at some of these organisms, saying they were anomalies that could only be explained by the intervention of a divine intelligence? Would Charles Crustacean find a story that could account for their evolution by natural selection? I’m particularly interested in whether the artificial provenance of transgenic organisms would be clear on internal evidence alone. I don’t know anything about this stuff, so probably the answer is “Yes” for reasons obvious to experts. But if it weren’t …
I've been think about Kieran's questions since reading them, and I've concluded that unless traces of our existence and evidence of our technology persisted, the answer is probably “No.”
I explain why the answer is “No,” below the fold, and I'll explore the implications of this answer later tonight or on Thursday.
