Wednesday, 2 July 2008 by bbbeard.

Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

It is a hallmark of the culture in which we live that this particular scientific theory so offends the majority.

Darwin’s theory of evolution through variation and natural selection has been controversial among some religious groups since its introduction. To some, it represents a mortal challenge to a literal reading of Genesis — but then, so does the standard cosmology of modern physics, the theory of plate tectonics, and indeed much of the unified structure of modern science. A more serious threat is that, by fully integrating homo sapiens with the rest of the living world, it could be interpreted as undermining any worldview that gives special precedence to humanity.

I am not a subject matter expert when it comes to evolutionary biology. However, I am a scientist. The defective products that emerge from places like the Institute for Creation Research and the Discovery Institute bears so little resemblance to actual science that I find it baffling that any schooled person could be fooled. Conversely, I have read On the Origin of Species and found it awe-inspiring.

But for me, the crux is the method.  The scientific method has proven its effectiveness countless times. It is not a democratic method. It is one where reason and evidence prevail over tradition and faith. Conversely, the legalistic and political strategies pursued by the creationist camp are obscurantist and sterile.

The scientific method is naturalistic. It is inconceivable that a Physical Review Letter will ever conclude “God is Responsible for Superconductivity in Laminar Cuprates”. To creationists, this appears to be a “chink in the armor”, their reasoning being that if science assumes there is no deity, then science’s reasoning about the non-existence of deities is circular. Some scientists try to compromise, and say that the hypothesis of the existence of God is testable. Good luck getting that past peer review. I am perfectly comfortable accepting that science has literally no contribution to the discussion of the supernatural, other than to provide explanations for phenomena that otherwise might tempt us to resort to superstition and religion. If there are supernatural phenomena that require explanation, I’m happy to let the shamans deal with it.

Steven Jay Gould popularized the notion that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria“,  a view he dubbed NOMA. I can’t quite purchase this epistemology. Science has inarguably invaded mindspace once occupied by priests and shamans, and seems poised to continue to do so. I think science will continue to generate new knowledge at an exponentially growing rate, but that it will be a long, long time before it can adequately address the questions of human individual and social behavior that are the bastion and bailiwick of religion, tradition, and superstition. We have only recently become equipped to explain the composition and interactions of atomic nuclei. Biology has only in the last generation become organized enough to support mathematical analysis. But even the idea that the practice of medicine should be based on evidence, and not anecdote, does not have universal support. And social sciences are struggling for legitimacy and a place of respect in the scientific community. I doubt this will come in my lifetime.

So, to all the creationists out there, I’m really not interested in your speculations on why God designed the eye so that we become presbyopic, or your criticisms of Darwin’s understanding of the mechanism of heritability. Your sin is the undermining of the method, and until you stop trying to legislate your results and start learning how to do real science, no one is going to take you seriously.

[h/t Rand Simberg]

Posted in Science | Print | 1 Comment »

Wednesday, 2 July 2008 by bbbeard.

The Atlantic is confused when social pathologies follow poor people to new neighborhoods.

In this article,  Hanna Rosin tells a sad story of unintended consequences: the dismantling of “the projects” in favor of dispersal and integration has brought crime to middle-class neighborhoods. In the liberal Weltanschauung, such an outcome is “surprising” (their word), one can guess because liberal doctrine stipulates that social pathologies are a result of social conditions. Take the pauper out of ghetto and send them to middle-class schools, and they will become middle-class, or so liberals have thought since Thomas More, if not before. A broad swath of conservatives disagree, anticipating this entirely predictable result. That race is a correlate of this phenomenon makes a sane discussion extremely difficult.

That this dilemma is a social tragedy cannot be denied. I am reminded of the tragedy of the American Indians. The unfolding of the American tapestry on this continent necessarily triggered the disruption and destruction of the native way of life. The panoply of treatments for the “Indian problem” included genocide, apartheid, integration, sovereignty, segregation, and, most recently, gaming (?!). I wonder if there is a “gaming” solution to America’s “original sin” of slavery. Until then, this story may not have a happy ending.

Posted in Politics & Society | Print | 1 Comment »

Tuesday, 1 July 2008 by bbbeard.

Jerry Pournelle should know better.

He writes once again of his confusion about how the universe used to be in a state of lower entropy but now is in a state of higher entropy, yet one in which Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Sagan trod the Earth.

The narrow technical question is easy to answer. Free expansion increases entropy. That this is true for an ideal gas is an exercise that any undergraduate engineer or physics student can demonstrate. In fact, the increase in specific entropy for a fixed mass of ideal gas is the gas constant times the natural log of the volume ratio:

since the temperature of the gas is constant for a free expansion. The more general case of a relativistic fluid requires more sophisticated mathematical machinery, but the principle is the same.

I also feel obligated to dispense with a common fallacy: “The Second Law of Thermodynamics only applies to closed systems.” Again, any undergraduate engineer should have been forced at gradepoint to learn the “flow” version of the second law:

In plain English, the amount of entropy inside a control volume can increase or decrease, depending on mass flows and heat flows into and out of the control volume,  but — since the entropy transfer through the control surface is conservative — the total amount of entropy in the universe can only increase and never decrease. This observation does not depend on the system being closed.

The not-so-narrow technical question is related to what Sean Carroll was commenting on. I would say the interesting question is: “Why does the ’state vector’ of the universe wander into regions of larger entropy?” Actually, though, Sean seems to be asking a slightly different question, which is why the universe wasn’t created in a state of really really high entropy — and what if there are alternative ways for the universe to be? Frankly I’m skeptical of the utility of this line of thinking, but I have to admit one line in Sean’s SciAm essay caught my imagination: “Whereas we can relate the entropy of a fluid to the behavior of the molecules that constitute it, we do not know what constitutes space, so we do not know what gravitational microstates correspond to any particular macrostate.” I have no idea what he’s talking about, but it sounds like there might be a there there, as it were. Is there a statistical mechanics of quantum gravity? I suppose we’ll only know once we have the quantum gravity part worked out. In the meantime, I suspect that speculations about universes in which omelots unmake themselves are sterile.

My own personal preference for a grand cosmological theory is Andrei Linde’s “self-reproducing inflationary universe“. In this view, the Big Bang was one little knot in a much larger tapestry, a not-so-singular event that only seems unphysical in the absence of a clear understanding of inflation. This approach seems to resolve some problems of long standing, in particular addressing the puzzles of the singularity and the apparent lack of prior cause. On the other hand, like many cosmological speculations, it borders on unverifiability, and thus risks losing its status as a scientific hypothesis.

Full disclosure: Sean Carroll and I were at the CTP at the same time; we knew each other tangentially, though he was several years ahead of me in grad school. I always enjoyed his lectures.

UPDATE: Jerry says I have misunderstood his concern. He writes: “My only point was that the explanation of Time’s Arrow was more glib than persuasive.” Fair enough. I have always been suspicious of the implication that the direction of entropy increase has anything more than the obvious connection to the direction of time.

Posted in Science | Print | 1 Comment »

Tuesday, 1 July 2008 by admin.

A message of hope and change:

I hope I can change this message.

Posted in General | Print | 2 Comments »