Thoughts Arise

"Moneyball" - The Rise of the Planet of the Quants

2011-10-08T09:51:00.000-04:00

Imagine a situation characterized by fierce competition over valuable, but limited, resources. The rich few, with the deepest pockets, indifferent to questions of cost, have no problem paying for and monopolizing the best that is available. Meanwhile those in the middle, not to mention those at the very bottom of the economic ladder, are locked out from participation, and must content themselves with the scraps that the wealthy leave behind.

Along comes a man, armed with reason and with numbers, daring to apply dispassionate analysis to this vexing problem in a last-ditch effort to level the playing field for everyone involved. His deliberate, calculated approach, though, is decried as soulless and is called a desecration of tradition, an attack on the established way of doing things that, according to those well-off, is "working just fine, thank you."

Ironically, the abundant criticism leveled at him includes that from the ranks of the disadvantaged, who, it would seem, would be his natural allies. So besotted are they with the mythology that surrounds the status quo, that they fail to appreciate that the system, as it is constructed, is pushing them to the margins more and more each day.

Theodore Roosevelt

Undeterred, our hero presses on, like Theodore Roosevelt's man in the arena, "who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

The above, which could have been a description of Barack Obama championing his health care reform plan in the more promising days of the spring of 2009, works well as a set-up for the events that unfold in the baseball bio-pic Moneyball, directed by Bennett Miller.

The man in the arena here is Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), and the arena is the world of baseball at the end of the 2001 season, a world in which rich teams like the New York Yankees raid lesser ones, like Billy's, luring away superstar talent with offers of astronomical salaries that owners of teams like the A's could never dream of matching.

As Moneyball opens, we find a desperate Billy seeking guidance from his "wise men" council of baseball scouts - a gaggle of aging men who look like a misplaced assembly of Mafia consiglieri and sound like a post-modern Greek chorus fated to intone endless baseball cliches in response to Billy's pleas for useful advice. Frustrated by their disregard to the peril that confronts them - and the game of baseball itself - Billy heads off to Cleveland, home of baseball's Indians, in a hail-Mary attempt to wheel and deal his way to a team that will keep him in contention.

Jonah Hill as Ptere Brand
in Moneyball

There he encounters an unlikely muse in the person of 24-year-old Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, in a breakout role worthy of a supporting-actor Oscar nod). Peter is a recently minted Yale economics graduate and a savant of baseball statistics and finance, a major-league quant, if there ever was one. He has been spinning his wheels working in the Cleveland front office where his insights about the game have been largely ignored. Unlike his Cleveland counterpart, though, who is sitting flush, Billy's mind is keenly focused by the impending execution of his 2002 playoff hopes, and so he is open to ideas from any quarter. A passing remark by Peter in a crowded meeting draws him to Billy's attention, and the rest, as they say, is history - baseball history.

What Peter has figured out, to put it simply, is that you don't need stars to put together a winning team. Indeed, a roster players each of whom gets on base a significant fraction of the time will generate, in aggregate, the number of runs necessary to win games. Their skills on the field, it turns out, are not of much consequence. What is more, such often overlooked or cast-aside players - hobbled by injury or long past their prime, but eager to stay in the "show" - are available at bargain-basement prices.

Billy, who is one smart cookie himself - we learn that he turned down a scholarship at Stanford to pursue his ill-fated major-league dream - groks Peter and his new thinking and is able to see beyond the received baseball wisdom which blinds his own scouts and coaches to the statistical truth. And thus is born a professional partnership between the two men, as well as a burgeoning friendship. Their Mutt and Jeff relationship adds a nice buddy-movie wrinkle to Moneyball, and the story, in a small way, becomes a rite of passage for Peter, providing the young man with the opportunity to be taken seriously for the first time in his life, but also forcing him to confront the burdens that come with leadership.

What I liked most about Moneyball, though, is that it is a refreshing and welcome inversion of what I call the American heart-head parable. These are tales in which embattled heroes triumph by choosing to rely on feelings instead of brains when facing challenges and vanquishing foes.

Luke Skywalker on his final approach
in "Star Wars"

Perhaps nowhere is this elevation of heart over head better captured in a film, than the in the climatic battle scene in the first Star Wars movie in which Luke Skywalker, at the urging of his mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi, turns off the targeting computer in his X-wing fighter and "uses the Force" in order to direct the shot that will destroy the planetocidal Death Star.

"Liberty Valence" movie poster

Yet the heart-head trope has a distinguished pedigree in American cinema, supported by both an enduring distrust of (dithering) intellectuals and a admiration for (determined) men of action in the culture at large. A notble example is the classic 1962 Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, in which Jimmy Stewart plays an educated and earnest, yet ultimately ineffectual attorney, committed to the rule of law, and John Wayne, a rancher and his school-of-hard-knocks doppelganger, who understands that there are times when, the law be damned, a man's got to do what a man's got to do.

For the generation coming of age during the Cold War this film served as a cautionary tale of the inadequacy of law and, by extension deliberative analysis, in confronting genuine evil in the world. Its lesson was one well heeded by those, like Dick Cheney, who advocated for such scurrilous tactics as unwarranted surveillance, water-boarding and extraordinary rendition in response to the 9/11 attacks on this country.

Sadly, the American love affair with political figures who are suspicious of book-learnin' and rely on God and guts as lodestones for their decision-making catapulted the intellectually incurious George W. Bush to the highest office in the land. Hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths and the undermining of the international legal order testify to the destruction left in the wake of this two-term cowboy President. Lest we think that Bush's abject failures at home and abroad have led Americans to reassess the relative value they assign to heart and head when selecting their leaders, Sarah Palin's exhortation to the Tea Party Convention in February, 2010, that "we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern," demonstrates the currency that the world view of Liberty Valence has in American politics.

Doctor and Boy Looking at Thermometer
(Norman Rockwell, 1954)

Erstwhile presidential hopeful Palin herself figures prominently in our ongoing Moneyball moment, that is the debate over healthcare reform, which calls us as a nation to come to grips with the increasingly inequitable distribution of an increasingly costly shared resource, namely medical services. Educated and caring men and women, seeing the failure and imminent collapse of the current system, have entered this arena armed with numbers and with reason. Their approach has been decried as cold and unfeeling, and their plans to allocate resources based on a compassionate weighing of costs and benefits - replacing the arbitrary and unregulated rationing in effect - have been shamelessly misrepresented by Palin and her supporters as "death panels." Furthermore, these champions of rational health care policy have been called out as iconoclasts, intent on undermining the cherished close personal relationship between doctor and patient, a tradition which persists in the paintings of Norman Rockwell's idealized version of mid-twentieth-century America life, complete with house calls, but nowhere else today.

So Moneyball proudly steps up to the plate and, for a change, celebrates a man, Billy Beane, who, when faced with a seemingly intractable problem, is not afraid to turn to numbers and analysis when traditional approaches have failed. Billy represents of a new kind of American hero, one who feels passionately about thinking things through, an intellectual, who, like Roosevelt's man in the arena, is not afraid to "dare greatly." In a time when it is crucial for America and its leaders to abandon gut feelings and received wisdom as ways to address the dire problems that we face and, instead, to bring to bear innovative thinking based on a scientific understanding of the world, Moneyball offers us a sorely needed updating of our long-discredited heart-head mythology.

"Moneyball" - The Rise of the Planet of the Quants by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

"Contagion"- An Ode to Public Health and Medical Science

2011-09-10T16:29:00.000-04:00

Steven Soderbergh's Contagion is one of that rare breed of films that succeeds as both a compelling drama and as a rich and informative movie about science.

At the heart of the drama here are the stories of the three women who are Contagion's scientists heroes: a World Health Organization disease detective played by Marion Cotillard, who works coolly and systematically to piece together the puzzle of the origin of a rapidly spreading viral illness; an Epidemic Intelligence Service boots-on-the-ground, brave first-responder (a studiouly understated Kate Winslet) who puts into place the critical early public health care measures to deal with the emerging pandemic; and the luminous Jennifer Ehle, as a smart CDC virologist who labors tirelessly behind the scenes to understand the nature of their deadly opponent and to devise a vaccine to defeat it.

What makes these stories so engaging is not only that they weave important and realistic medical science roles into the multifaceted plot of the ensemble film, but also that the woman executing them do so with compassion and unassuming self-sacrifice, keeping their heads while those about them are losing theirs, creating a calm, efficient working center at the eye of the swirling global disease storm. It is also interesting to note, reversing conventional gender roles, that it is the CDC head honcho, played convincingly by Laurence Fishburne, who fumbles the ball by letting his personal attachments get in the way of his doing his job.

Off hand, I can think of only one other popular film that delivers so much unvarnished science, and that is Contact, which also happens to feature a brilliant, fearless female scientist (Jodie Foster, of course). The fact is that we learn a lot from Contagion, and the science it communicates rings true, even allowing for the concessions made to narrative compression. (For example, vaccines, in real life, do not confer immediate immunity.) This level of detail and concern for accuracy I attribute largely to director Soderbergh, whose goal was clearly to offer us an ode to medical science and to public health workers. The movie pauses for a quiet exposition on epidemiology - Winslet takes to a whiteboard to explain the mathematics of disease transmission, complete with variables and subscripts, no less - and for a meditation by Ehle at her father's bedside - a short discourse on a Nobel prize won for determining the true cause of ulcers. Can you imagine?

These digressions into the nuts and bolts of science - and there are many of them - would not have made it into a lesser script, much less the final cut of most films.That they survive and are showcased here are a testimony to Soderbergh's independence as a film maker and to his ability to realize Contagion as the remarkable personal vision that it appears to be.

Some Reflections on Holly Tucker's "Blood Work"

2011-07-13T12:23:00.026-04:00

What follows are some reflections on Holly Tucker's fascinating recent book Blood Work, which explores a 5-year period in seventeenth century England and France during which bold and dangerous experiments involving blood transfusion were first attempted.

The Heart is a Pump
The heart is a pump. This seems such an obvious statement of fact that it is startling for me to contemplate that its truth was contested as recently as the seventeenth century. I say this with full awareness that hindsight in science, as with other human affairs, is 20-20, or perhaps here one should say 120 over 80.

It does not confound me that Europeans at the time of Copernicus believed the Earth to be the center of the universe. I do not scratch my head wondering how the role oxygen in animal respiration went unnoticed prior to Antoine Lavoisier's demonstrations in the eighteenth century. That a comprehensive theory of biological evolution by natural selection awaited elucidation by a genius such as Charles Darwin comes as no great surprise to me.

But I am astounded when I am reminded that the beating of the heart was not recognized by the ancients as the means by which blood is impelled in a circuit around the body and that, as Tucker emphasizes in early chapters of her book, the description of the circulatory system by William Harvey was still a matter of heated dispute some 30 years after its publication.

I would have thought that the battlefields and abattoirs of the world would have yielded, over countless centuries, abundant and detailed evidence of the ins and outs of the flow of blood, in spite of the near invisibility of capillaries that connect arteries to veins. Why did it take so long to for a coherent understanding of this central feature of our own physiology to emerge?

Tucker answers this question - and, in the process, allays my puzzlement - by explaining how the theories of Claudius Galen, a Roman medical authority of the early common era, continued to dominate thinking about the nature of the workings of the human body more than 1500 years after his death.

For Galen the heart was first and foremost a furnace, not a pump, involved in regulating the heat and moisture balance of the four bodily humors, black bile, yellow bole, phlegm and blood. To say otherwise during most of the common era was to be considered a fool.

We like to think that science is a bold adventure propelled by new discoveries. As Blood Work illustrates it is often a cautious undertaking whose tentative advances require first shaking off the blinders of received wisdom.

Wren's plans for rebuilding the City of
London after the "Great Conflagration"

Christopher Wren
It was intriguing to see Christopher Wren make an appearance early in Blood Work, featured, not as the architect of London's Saint Paul's Cathedral, which is how I know him, but as a pioneering "blood worker" in his own right.

Motivated by Harvey's De motu cordi, Wren conducted experiments that involved injecting alcohol, emetics and opiates into the veins of animal subjects. These trials anticipated using the circulatory system as means of delivering drugs throughout the body some two hundred years before the invention of the modern hypodermic needle.

But, perhaps more significantly, Wren, the visionary city planner, was soon to apply Harvey's model of blood circulation in his formulation of plans proposing how London could be rebuilt in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666. It is remarkable to ponder that, with Wren, the metaphor of thoroughfares as free-flowing "arteries" was entirely new to the world.

A Continuation of War by Other Means

The nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clauswitz, is famously quoted as saying, "war is the continuation of politics by other means." Tucker illustrates that, with the cross-Channel superpower duel between England and France, science, perhaps for the first time in history, becomes a continuation of war by other means.

John Kennedy addressing Congress in 1961,
announcing the goal of sending a man to the
Moon before the end of the decade

For those like myself who came of age during the focal decade of the Soviet-American space race to reach the Moon, that nation states might use competition in the scientific arena as a surrogate for more costly and more deadly armed conflict is not an unfamiliar idea. It is, though, surprising to learn that such international competition appeared soon after the emergence of science in a recognizably modern form.

Indeed, Blood Work documents not only the rivalries between early English and French transfusionists, but also how this "blood race" became, for a brief period of time, a matter of national prestige, enough so that heretofore private, independent "philosophical clubs", such as the Montmor Academy, became institutions securely under the supervision of the state, as was the case of the founding of the French Academy of Sciences in late 1666. The predecessor of the Royal Society of London had undergone a similar transition a half dozen years before.

It may well be that the institutionalization of these philosophical clubs - as well as the appearance of the regular publications which they issued and with that, no doubt, the seeds of peer review - was as an essential step in science becoming the enormously successful intellectual enterprise it is today. (I touched on this theme in a blog post, Is "Flat" Science "Real" Science?, a couple of years ago.)

The Ethics of Experimentation on Humans

More than two years passed between Richard Lower's first transfusion experiments on dogs and Jean-Baptiste Denis' animal-to-human trials performed in June of 1667. The English, it appears, were deterred by "some considerations of a Moral Nature" from proceeding more quickly, but they did not seem to daunt the reckless, self-aggrandizing Denis, whose initial test subjects included not only an ailing 15-year-old boy, but also a healthy middle-aged man.

It was not that shocking for me to learn that blood transfusion was offered as a therapy of last resort for those suffering from severe and otherwise untreatable illness, since even today exceptions are made for the use of untested procedures in circumstances where patients are deemed to be terminally ill and conventional treatments have failed. It was, though, disconcerting to realize that the early transfusionists based their hopes for the improvement of their patients on the flimsiest of notions, most of which were grounded in the very humoralist conception of human physiology which had recently been partially discredited by Harvey's investigations of the circulatory system.

As much as I had naively hoped that Blood Work would be the story of heroes of an early phase of the scientific revolution, I was left with the unsettled feeling that the medical tinkering of Lower and Denis and their colleagues was in many ways little more than an variation on blood manipulations then in common use. Of course, my presentist biases are showing here. If I had my druthers, the entire lot would have set themselves the goal of conducting large-scale controlled clinical trials to determine whether bloodletting treatments had any beneficial effects whatsoever. Dream on.

Doctor drawing blood from one of the
Tuskegee test subjects

But when it comes to rules for human experimentation, it is sad to observe that the limited "moral considerations" of the seventeenth century remained very much in force well into the twentieth. That is to say that human subjects were, and continued to be, selected from the ranks of the destitute, the disenfranchised and the demented. The shameful Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which poor black men in rural Alabama went untreated for that disease in spite of readily available antibiotics, only came to an end in 1972. It is hard to fault the transfusionists for their ethical lapses, when the requirement of, say, informed consent is such a recent innovation.

A Not So Distant Mirror
In the tradition of Barbara Tuchman's classic history of fourteenth-century Europe, A Distant Mirror, in which the author draws parallels between the death and suffering of that age and of her own, Tucker in Blood Work offers an account of the controversy that surrounded the first blood transfusion experiments as an opportunity for us to reflect on similar disputes over biomedical research that rage today, specifically the acrimonious debates over scientific studies that make use of human stem cells and other human genetic material.

We have become so accustomed to an updated version of Christopher Wren's "urban planning" model of the circulatory system, one in which arteries serve as thoroughfares for the delivery of oxygen and nutrients - as well as the occasional hormone - to the various parts of the body and veins provide avenues through which the byproducts of metabolic activity are ferried to suitable exits, that we have to be reminded that blood was once regarded as something other than physiological rolling stock.

Quite to the contrary, blood had long been thought to be a determining component of character in a very real sense - vestiges of this stance survive in our language, if not in our biology textbooks - so the transfer of blood between an animal and a human being raised the frightening prospect that bodies, personalities, even souls, could be polluted in some macabre and irreversible way. Indeed, it was in part the apprehension that blood transfusion might result in the "transmutation" of recipients into chimeras, bizarre creatures possessing a mixture of human and animal characteristics, that led the French parliament in December of 1669 to put the kibosh on transfusion in that country, a ban which had a chilling effect on experiments in England, as well.

A chimeric mouse with its pups,
which carry the agouti coat color gene

Similar concerns circulate today, and it has to be acknowledged that the creation of chimeras through the application of genetic engineering has, in fact, been achieved. We are not, though, much troubled that bacteria equipped with recombined human DNA are employed routinely in the production of human insulin. Yet some do find it a bit disconcerting to learn that mice outfitted with the the human variation of FOXP2, a gene which plays a critical role in the our capacity for speech, vocalize differently. Needless to say, the prospect of creating hybrids that combine large-scale features of human and non-human species, raises alarm from almost all quarters.

Fear that scientists would arrogate the powers of God for themselves in bold, but disastrously misguided, ways were established well enough less than 150 years after the first transfusion experiments that Mary Shelly's Frankenstein achieved immediate popular success when it was published. (See related thoughts in my blog post Splice the Movie - Paradise Fail.) The never-ending debate over the teaching of the theory of evolution by natural selection in American public schools is a prominent contemporary example of this conflict between science and "the sacred". Lest we conclude that these disagreements have only to do with the sanctity of human life (and putative human souls), it should be noted, as an example, that much of the opposition to the genetic modification of plants for agricultural purposes originates in a philosophy that holds Nature, itself, to be sacred and views scientifically engineered attempts to alter it as abominations.

In many respects the seventeenth-century flirtation with blood transfusion detailed in Blood Work, can be seen as a first intrusion by "modern" science into the realm of the sacred. There is much for us to learn from this early skirmish in a war that continues to this day.

Some Reflections on Holly Tucker's "Blood Work" by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

The Alternate Universe of "Larry Crowne"

2011-07-06T13:44:00.004-04:00

"Larry Crowne" movie poster

Larry Crowne, the Tom Hanks feel-good vehicle that doubles as a feature film is so unrelentingly positive in its outlook that it may define a new genre in its own right, the lobotomy flick. Indeed, when the quite surreal closing credits rolled, I paused in my seat before standing up, wanting to make sure that I didn't walk off with the Valium drip planted firmly - too firmly - in my arm.

The title character. Larry Crowne (Hanks), leads a life into which a little - very little - rain must fall, and even then it serves the purpose of watering the seed of his glorious personal reawakening. Larry's unwelcome summer shower arrives at the beginning of the film in the form of an unexpected layoff from a Walmart-like big box store where he has worked for several years. That Larry has thrived, even frolicked, there is made all too evident in an opening video paean to workplace camaraderie that would have been excessive in a Stalin-era Soviet film touting the joys of collectivized agriculture.

"Forrest Gump" movie poster

Hanks has decided to reprise his role as Forrest Gump here, playing an indefatigable, not-a-mean-bone-in-his-body optomist, a character more suited to the story of mildly-retarded man buffeted about Zelig-like from one momentous event of the 20th century to another, than that of a middle-aged, retired Navy cook down on his luck. One would think that such naiveté would make Larry an easy target in any neighborhood this side of Mister Rogers', but Larry conveniently lives in an alternate universe tailored especially for him.

It is an off-kilter male fantasy universe where beautiful young women (such as the fethcing Gugu Mbatha-Raw) take older lost boys like Larry under their wings, style their hair, redo their wardrobes, redecorate their homes and initiate them into "mild bunch" gangs of scooter-riding twenty-somethings, whose rituals include low-speed drive-bys up and down the endless retail roads of Southern California in search of - of all things - yardsales.

It is a formulaic sitcom universe of pristine post-racial suburban streets populated by eccentric next-door neighbors, such as Lamar (Cedric the Entertainer), whose perpetual yardsale provides Larry with a golden opportunity to prove his worth to his new-found yardsale-seeking scooter posse.

It is a forgiving universe of soft knocks, where Larry quickly recovers his financial footing, finding part-time work as a cook at a diner run by his long-time friend Frank, and finding a kind of personal liberation in handing over the keys to his home to the bank as part of a voluntary foreclosure that will wipe his fiscal slate clean.

Jimmy Stewart in the movie "Harvey"

But most importantly it is a Jimmy Stewart, nice-guys-finish-first universe in which an unassuming, guileless 55-year-old man walks into his very first college class to find that his professor is a woman, looking an awful lot like Julia Roberts, whose marriage is on the porno-fueled skids and whose sarcastic and cynical heart is ripe to be warmed, if only her everyman prince would come.

Julia Roberts! Sign me up. Just give me a second or two to roll up the other sleeve.

The Alternate Universe of "Larry Crowne" by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

"Page One" - Profits and Prophets and the Survival of the New York Times

2011-06-30T11:22:00.017-04:00

Page One: Inside the New York Times, a behind-the-scenes documentary about the New York Times, asks the question: in a world of declining advertising revenue and declining readership, thanks to the inexorable rise of new media, such as blogs and Twitter and social networks, why should we be concerned about the survival of a relic of the age of "paper" papers? What does the so-called mainstream media have to offer that makes it so much more valuable than the gaggle of gawkers out on the street doing the people's business?

The film answers these questions, poignantly, in just two words: David Carr.

Carr is a New York Times reporter and columnist whose personal story of emergence from a life ravaged by years of drug and alcohol abuse to become among the premier journalists of our day is well known. Page One uses Carr as a thread to weave together the disparate - and remarkable personalities - who labor day in and day out at the "Gray Lady" to make it the newspaper of record not only for our country, but for the world.

A less wizened David Carr, from his
bio page at the New York Times

The toll that Carr's damaging early years has taken on him is evident in the creases of his wizened face, his stooped posture and his cracking and raspy voice. But his bright eyes reveal the fire that burns within, and when his voice rises, as it does with words eloquently both profane and poetic, Carr takes on the mien of an Old Testament prophet, speaking profound - and unwanted truths - to a world turning away from the old-time religion of quality journalism - a tradition steeped in thoughtful, carefully researched writing - and rushing headlong toward that brave new one of tweets and likes, all the digital ephemera that pass for news these days.

Yet Page One presents us with more than a picture of Carr the man, but also of Carr the reporter, restlessly dogging a story, piecing together disparate scraps of information, on the telephone, speaking with often reluctant sources, but always endeavoring to be scrupulously fair. In this regard he and his colleagues at the Times distinguish themselves not only by the stories they produce, but also by the process that they engage in. In a media cultural of ever-breaking news, it's heartening to realize that some "outlets" pause to reflect on what they are about to report, wrestling with professional and ethical concerns which might result in a promising - and crowd pleasing - story being moved off of much sought-after "page one" and even abanndoned entirely.

So the question of old- versus new-media comes down to that age-old one, often cast in terms of out-of-touch elitism versus rampant egalitarism. The new media advocates are given their due in Page One - in particular with the bloggosphere phenom turned New York Times reporter, Brian Stelter - but at the end of the day we are asked to choose: does vox populi, vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God) ring true here? Do we want to rely on people "just like us" to do this important job. Is the "Joe the Plumber" mentality that led to the election of "everyman" George W. Bush in 2000 and may very well place the reins of the most powerful office in the world in the hands of the likes of "aw, shucks" Sarah Palin in 2012 a good model for the future of journalism?

By my lights, it is not. I don't want to be getting my news from otherwise preoccupied, unseasoned people like me, running around with 1080p video cameras and tablet computers. I want to be getting my news from David Carr and people like him, people who see their work not only as a craft refined through years of diligent effort but also as a grave responsibility and a dignified form of public service.

"Page One" - Profits and Prophets and the Survival of the New York Times by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

One-Way Mission to Mars - Ethics Fail

2011-04-14T11:17:00.015-04:00

This is the final of my series of criticisms of a proposed one-way mission to Mars. They began with this introduction. The other essays detail the various ways I believe this proposal fails: as a lifeboat for humanity, as a base for scientific exploration and as a potential politically unifying force for Earth-bound humanity.

Tenuous atmosphere of Mars
visible from low orbit

My first encounter with the idea that exploration of Mars could be expedited by using a one-way mission to get people there was in an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Lawrence Krauss which ran in late August 2009. In it Krauss presents an argument for a novel approach to exploring the Red Planet: since we can't prevent the radiation injury that would be inflicted on astronaut passengers during a two-way trip, within the constraints of existing technologies and current budgets, a one-way mission offers us a practical way to accomplish many of the same mission objectives.

Although Krauss makes a reasonable technical case for this unconventional scheme, his ethical analysis it is scant, relying, more or less, on this anecdote,

"One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand. The lure of space travel remains intoxicating for a generation brought up on Star Trek and Star Wars."

"Jackass: The Movie"
movie poster

I have to admit that I found the implication of this startling, that the ethical considerations for undertaking an interplanetary mission fraught not only with grave physical risk but also with extraordinary - and entirely undetermined - psychological peril could be reduced to the observation that there would be no shortage of eager volunteers. It was as though the moral issues involved were no more complicated than those in casting an episode of the MTV stunt and prank series Jackass; apparently a raised hand and, presumably, a signed waiver would constitute due diligence on the part of mission planners.

Don't get me wrong, I was one of the generation that Krauss mentions; intoxicated by Star Trek - although less so by Star Wars - and, for the better part of my life I, too, would have eagerly raised my hand to volunteer to become a Mars pioneer, naively confident that my exuberance at the outset of such an adventure would immunize me against any hardship I encountered, no matter its duration or its severity. But I have lived long enough to realize that even the most passionately declared vows fall victim to the realities of time and circumstance, and that we turn out to be very poor prognosticators of our own capacity to persevere, especially in the face of chronic psychological insult. I imagine that Lawrence Krauss has lived long enough to have come to this realization as well.

Taken aback by Krauss's opinion piece, I submitted the following (unpublished) letter to the Times in response.

To the Editor:

Lawrence Krauss may have come up with a correct engineering solution for getting human beings to Mars by dispatching volunteers on a one-way trip, but he falls short as far as the analysis of the ethical implications are concerned.

No doubt there are many who would volunteer for such a seemingly marvelous expedition. But will they in any realistic way be able to anticipate the emotional hardship that they will have to endure? And how will we feel, having exploited their naive enthusiasm, forced to watch from a distance of more than 35 million miles, as they descend into likely depression and inevitable old age, unable to offer the consoling touch of a human hand?

Marc Merlin
Atlanta

First and foremost I take issue with Krauss's presumption that voluntary participation in a research study - and the one-way trip is proposed in order to conduct scientific research - relieves investigators of their ethical responsibility to protect the health and welfare, emotional and physical, of the subjects that they have recruited. I also wonder what could possibly constitute "informed consent" in deciding to expose people to, not only unprecedented circumstances of emotional hardship, but ones of unprecedented duration.

Tulips in bloom at the Atlanta
Botanical Garden
(credit: Marc Merlin)

It would be one thing to tell enthusiastic volunteers, "you are going on a one-way trip to Mars for the advancement of science" and quite another to say, "you are going on a one-trip to Mars for the advancement of science, and you will be undergoing the kind of isolation and confinement, away from sources of solace and companionship, that may very well will leave you depressed, perhaps insane or suicidal, within a matter of months; that you and at most a handful of colleagues will be confined to close quarters for years, even decades, without the possibility of the briefest separation; that you will never again enjoy a stroll through a garden in springtime or a dinner out with friends at a favorite restaurant. "

A view of the current Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station

Our experiences with other long-duration missions, such as research tours at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station or expeditions to the International Space Station (IIS), offer a flimsy basis for estimating the psychological demands that would be placed on one-way Mars astronauts. The IIS missions, for example, are not more than a few hundred days long, and, even then, the members of the space station crew are aware of a scheduled return to a normal life on the Earth's surface and are also in frequent communication - with only a marginal time delay - with colleagues, friends and family there. (Distance and the finite speed of light makes such Mars-Earth "conversations" forever impossible.) Shamefully, perhaps the best data available with regard to the ability of highly motivated people to survive periods of severe isolation - cut off from family and friends for years - with little hope for eventual return to a normal life may come from that gathered from observations of the psychological deterioration of U.S. "War on Terror" detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. It does not paint a promising picture for our rushed one-way Martian pioneers.

Magellan's ship Victoria,
detail from a map of Ortelius (1590)

The proponents of a one-way mission to Mars see themselves as latter-day Magellans, taking up the mantle of the Age of Discovery, and they cast those that oppose their efforts as representatives of a "culture of caution" that is so preoccupied with the minimization of risk that no bold plan for exploring space ever gets off the ground. They prefer to replace it, apparently, with their own culture of caution to the winds.

Before we endorse the Mars mission they propose, we should convince ourselves that we aren't consigning noble volunteers to (short) lives suffused with sadness and torment. Their initial excitement about serving the grand interests of science cannot immunize them from these possible outcomes, no matter what they say or hope.

Afterword
It may come as a surprise to readers of this series that I do not oppose the manned exploration and eventual colonization of Mars. I imagine that, barring a collapse of our global civilization, it will begin sometime in the latter half of this century or early in the next one. This will mark a wonderful turning point in human history!

What I do oppose is the manufactured urgency that surrounds the proposed one-way mission to Mars; that it is a necessary component in our scientific investigations of that planet; that it is a critical step to insure our survival as a species; that it will in any way offer a common purpose which will help to remedy political disunion and conflict here on Earth.

Empty bottle with mail
(credit: Larry Yuma)

Indeed, for the immediate future, we can better explore Mars by expanding our program of robot missions whose capabilities to work intelligently and autonomously under even the harshest conditions are growing at an exponential rate; we can better protect people here from possible devastation by asteroid strike by investing relatively small sums of money in refining our nascent surveillance programs and developing reliable deflection technologies; and we can better unify the nations of this planet by working diligently to eradicate endemic diseases and taking affordable steps to make sure that children are properly nourished and everyone has access to clean drinking water.

As a message in a digital bottle of sorts to those first unharried one-way pioneers who will become the first long-term inhabitants of the Red Planet, I want to say from decades past how much I admire you for your courage, since I know that even the most carefully planned space missions will never eliminate risks to life and limb. And I want to thank you for your willingness to endure hardship, especially the first among you to arrive, since the going will be particularly rough for you. But I take consolation in imagining that your isolation will be short lived and that you will be buoyed in your work knowing that you are preparing the ground for a larger number of compatriots who will be arriving soon after you do, allowing you to once again assume your role in the ranks of a human community large enough and vibrant enough to ensure your emotional and psychological well-being as your bold colony grows and thrives.

May you live long and prosper!

One-Way Mission to Mars - Ethics Fail by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Safe Under the Covers of Superstition

2011-03-14T11:00:00.002-04:00

I started posting videos on my YouTube channel a few weeks ago and where I think it's appropriate I'll cross-post them here. Here are my thoughts about the recent spate of "blaming the victim" that has all too predictably stalked the Japanese people in the wake of their ongoing national disaster.

A common belief, even among my non-religious friends, is that "everything happens for a purpose". It's hard to get people, even some very intelligent people, to shake this attitude about the world.

The alternative is to accept the fact that there is a randomness in and unpredictability to everyday life that results not only in harm to others, but also to ourselves. So these people imagine that there are rules to follow that will somehow exempt them from such tragedies, and they seize on the occurrence of a disaster, such as the one that has befallen Japan, as an opportunity to figure out what these rules are and why these poor souls were singled out for punishment and they, themselves, were not.

Sometimes this effort is tinged with malice or driven by an interest in settling old scores; dispensing Karmic comeuppance for past crimes. But more often than not this casting about for explanations is a way for these confused and benighted folks, behaving as frightened children would, to reassure themselves that they will be safe under the covers of superstition, and that they can return to sleeping soundly in the enveloping darkness.

Safe Under the Covers of Superstition by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

One-Way Mission to Mars - Kumbaya Fail

2011-02-16T10:00:00.025-05:00

In this fourth part of my critique of a recently proposed one-way mission to Mars I address whether a kick-start colonization of Mars can be justified on political grounds. My third post disputes whether such a colony is either a safe or a cost-effective way to pursue important scientific goals. You can find the introduction to the series here.

In their November 2010 paper in the Journal of Cosmology, along with other reasons for pursuing an expedited one-way mission to Mars, Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies assert that

establishing a permanent multicultural and multinational human presence on another world would have a major beneficial political and social implications for Earth, and serve as a strong unifying and uplifting theme for all humanity.

It is hard to see how they derive confidence in such a claim.

Independence Day
movie poster

Space and space missions are a standard of science fiction when it comes to creating story lines that unite humanity in spite of centuries-old divisions. This unification is often accomplished most efficiently when planet Earth is in imminent danger of being destroyed by an asteroid impact or being conquered by an alien armada.

Nowhere is this better exemplified than at the climax of the 1996 movie Independence Day, where the American president, played by Bill Pullman, delivers a speech that rallies his troops for a last-ditch airborne counterattack on an invading force, with identical calls to arms being enacted simultaneously around the globe by people of all races and all creeds and all colors, apparently.

Earthrise, December 1968

I came of age during the the Apollo program and, as a 14-year old, watched enraptured as Neil Armstrong placed his booted foot on lunar soil. Old enough to appreciate what this meant as a national achievement and as an engineering tour de force, I was also old enough to be aware of the promise that it offered to be a unifying force for "all mankind", one beautifully anticipated in the earthrise Christmas Eve image taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8 less than a year before.

Although that day in July 1969 was celebrated the world over, the moon landings themselves failed to have any long-term impact as far as bringing people closer together. The Cold War and its proxy conflicts raged on, indifferent to these wondrous technological achievements.

International Space Station from
the Space Shuttle Atlantis

Another example of an unmet promise of political uplift offered by a costly space mission, this one closer to home, is that embodied by the International Space Station (ISS). Touted as a permanent multicultural and multinational human presence in low-earth orbit, it, too, was to provide Earth-bound humans with a transcendent unifying theme.

Yet, resplendent, orbiting above the planet at an altitude of 350 km (220 miles), it goes largely unnoticed by the world below. This is not to say that the Space Station has not called into being a remarkable intergovernmental collaboration on an unprecedented scale, but to note that, although an engineering triumph, it has resulted in few if any discernible "major beneficial political and social implications" of the type advertised by the one-way Mars mission proposal. If the tepid public reaction to the ISS is any indication, then it's not clear that such expectations should weigh in favorably in our evaluation of Schulze-Makuch and Davies's scheme to establish a human settlement on Mars post haste.

As with other motivations for the proposed expedited colonization of Mars - that it serve as a science outpost and as a lifeboat for humanity - rational analysis demands that we consider how alternative approaches compare as far as promoting a more positive political and social climate here on Earth. In other words, given that a one-way mission would cost hundreds of billions of dollars or more, how might similar - or even significantly smaller sums - be spent to foster feelings of union and brotherhood.

Jimmy Carter tries to comfort a 6-year-old
at Savelugu (Ghana) Hospital as a
Carter Center technical assistant dresses
her painful Guinea worm wound.

Although little can be done directly to bridge the divides of malignant ideologies, religious fanaticism and misguided nationalism that separate us, it has been long understood the alleviation of much of human suffering is within our grasp and that the result of doing so would yield unquestionable major political and social benefits. An example of an immediately attainable objective would be the eradication of endemic diseases such as guinea worm. A more ambitious challenge would be to commit to insure that every person on the planet is provided with adequate daily nutrition as well as access to a reliable source of drinking water.

U.S. F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
with a $110 million per unit cost

Without a doubt, goals such as these are politically daunting, but they are technically and economically feasible, particularly if countries like the United States expand their vision of international security - and with it the application of their annual one trillion dollars of "defense" spending - to encompass important non-military threats to world order and human well-being. Indeed, mobilizing the nations of the planet to mitigate the damage anticipated as a result of disruptive climate change this century, provides a ready-made unifying goal for humanity, one which we are morally obligated to address and, to the extent that we prevail in our efforts, one which could both unite and ennoble us.

Suffice it to say, we don't need to go shopping around for extraterrestrial projects, such as an ill-considered one-way mission to Mars, in order to concoct challenges to inspire and unify us, when working in broad international coalitions against terrestrial scourges, such as disease, hunger, global warming, not only would generate a much greater sense of unity and common purpose, but also would offer desperately needed material advances to billions of people here on Earth.

Part 5: One-Way Mission to Mars - Ethics Fail

One-Way Mission to Mars - Kumbaya Fail by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

One-Way Mission to Mars - Science Fail

2011-02-04T10:50:00.029-05:00

In this third post of a series which criticizes a recently proposed one-way mission to Mars, I address whether a kick-start colonization of Mars can be justified on scientific grounds. My second post disputes whether such a colony is a cost-effective way to insure the survival of our species. You can find the introduction to the series here.

Martian avalanche and debris falls captured
by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
in 2008

A manned base for scientific research?

Without a doubt the the possibility of life on Mars existing today or in its distant past, is a scientific question of the highest order, worthy in my opinion of the significant expenditure of our treasure, although not, carelessly, of our blood.

Accordingly, I find myself in agreement with Schulze-Makuch and Davies when they claim in their Journal of Cosmology paper in November,

a scientific facility on Mars might therefore be a unique opportunity to study an alien life form and a second evolutionary record, and to develop novel biotechnology therefrom.

I strongly disagree, though, with whether such a facility need be - or even should be - manned by human scientists, at least anytime soon. Indeed, a case can be made that far more science could be gleaned at far less expense by factoring human participants out of the equation for any early Mars mission planning.

Robots everywhere, 24.65/7 instead?

In the past dozen years or so we have begun to enjoy the scientific fruits of extended human-robot collaborations, conducted using reconnaissance satellites orbiting Mars as well as stationary and roving laboratories on the surface of the planet. Employing these exquisitely engineered systems, we have made monumental discoveries concerning the geology and climate of Mars, at a fraction of the cost of our current human spaceflight budget. Given the expected advances in computational power (compounded by the fact that our best Martian efforts so far are representative only of the cutting edge technology of the late 1990s) one thing is certain and that is the future probes that we dispatch to explore Mars will be dramatically more capable than the ones we have sent there so far.

Artist's rendering of a Mars

Exploration Rover

One does not have to subscribe to Ray Kurzweil's predictions of an impending technological singularity to accept the likelihood that within the next several decades - a time frame consistent with the preliminary phase of any one-way mission plan - highly-mobile, environmentally-rugged, fully-autonomous, cognitively-advanced, robots will be available to walk on, roll across, fly over and tunnel into the surface of the Red Planet. Indeed, a critical feature of the Schulze-Makuch and Davies one-way mission proposal is that robots, sharing at least some of these capabilities, would be put to work preparing a Mars base to welcome the first human arrivals.

With this in mind, it's hard to imagine how a human-centered research effort on Mars could begin to compete with that of an exclusively robot-based one. The latter places dozens, perhaps hundreds, of robot research assistants scouring the planet as technically adept geologists and meteorologists, laboring sol in and sol out, indifferent to its tenuous atmosphere and largely unaffected by its frigid temperatures, regularly conferring with human supervisors on Earth to evaluate recent finds and to identify the most promising new targets for investigation.

Wearing the NDX-1 (North Dakota) space suit,
a student uses a sample-gathering tool.

A human-oriented approach to Martian science would rely on a limited number of relatively vulnerable human beings, venturing outside their subsurface habitats, but never far from safe haven, challenged by hazardous terrain, encumbered by protective clothing and life-support equipment, and able to work outside their habitats or vehicles only for short periods of time and only under favorable conditions.

A MQ-9 Reaper flies above Creech AFB

during a local training mission

To the extent that these Martian colonists chose to employ robots to make forays into the Martian environment in their place, they become little more than very expensive substitutes for Earth-based counterparts that could supervise these very same robot assistants from a greater distance. One need look no further than the shift in the U.S. Air Force to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for reconnaissance and attack missions to appreciate the cost / effectiveness benefits of a division of labor between humans and robots in which (selected) humans are kept safely out of harm's way.

Bee Gees - "Stayin' Alive" video

Stayin' Alive

The fact of the matter is that humans, whether orbiting the Earth or living beneath the surface of Mars, although promoted as workers for the cause of science, must be preoccupied with one task, and that is, to put it simply, staying alive. We are fragile - and precious - space and planetary cargo, and an extraordinary price must be paid to keep us fed, comfortable, safe and happy in dangerous environments. Every kilogram of payload that is diverted for these purposes could better be put to use dedicated to the immediate scientific objectives of a mission or else eliminated from the flight manifest, thus permitting more efficient use of fuel and other valuable mission resources.

The well-intentioned, although strained, representation of astronauts as pioneering space scientists, used to garner support for the early space program, becomes an out-and-out fraud when human missions are now proposed that dramatically diminish the scientific return on our investment, especially in a day and age when so much more can be accomplished so much more cost-effectively and so much more safely by locating men and women away from the front lines of space exploration and, instead, leveraging our remarkable advances in robotic technology.

Part 4: One-Way Mission to Mars - Kumbaya Fail

One-Way Mission to Mars - Science Fail by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

One-Way Mission to Mars - Lifeboat for Humanity Fail

2011-02-02T17:40:00.019-05:00

This is the second in a series of posts presenting my analysis and criticism of a proposed one-way mission to Mars. You can find the introduction here.

Illustration of an impact event
(courtesy of NASA)

There goes the neighborhood
Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies open their case for using a one-way mission to Mars to kick-start a human colony there by observing,

[W]e are a vulnerable species living in a part of the galaxy where cosmic events such as major asteroid and comet impacts and supernova explosions pose a significant threat to life on Earth, especially to human life.

and suggesting that it would offer humanity a "lifeboat" in the event of such mega-catastrophes.

Since recognition in the 1980s that the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65.5 million years ago that led to the demise of the dinosaurs was likely due to an asteroid impact, humanity - and Hollywood - have been put on notice that such "planet-killing" collisions are statistical possibilities, whose likelihood approaches a near certainty over time, that is without effective intervention.

Asteroid deflection, survival on the cheap?

Admittedly, having humans living on Mars would mean that some of our species would be safely out of harm's way in the event of such a catastrophe. Their long-term survival, though, would be far from certain. As a matter of prospective cost and potential benefit, the question is not whether a Mars colony, if successful, would guarantee that a few humans would survive for some period of time, since it does, but whether an expedited colonization program compares favorably with alternative approaches for accomplishing a similar or even vastly more desirable result.

Near-Earth asteroid discoveries as
a function of time

For example, expanded investment in surveillance efforts - such as NASA's Near Earth Object Program - intended to identify potential collisions, coupled with the development of technologies to deflect space rocks heading our way by finessing their orbits years, if not decades, in advance of a too-close encounter would appear to be a immensely more cost-effective solution, one in which the survival not of 150 isolated souls on a cold, barren planet, but of billions of human beings on a globe teaming with life could be more predictably assured.

Artist's conception of a Mars
settlement with a cut-away view
(courtesy of NASA)

Subsurface habitats here instead?
With regard to an explosion of a nearby supernova, it should first be noted that humans on the surface of Mars may well suffer much the same fate as their counterparts on Earth. To the extent that specially designed subsurface human habitats on Mars would offer a significant amount of protection, then the same could be constructed on Earth and made available to a vastly larger number of people at a mere fraction of the cost of those used for a Mars colony.

Indeed the only reliable way to develop, verify and refine kind of habitats to be used by one-way Martian colonists would be to design, build and inhabit comparable structures here. So, far from representing an additional cost, fully-functioning terrestrial habitats would appear to be a useful, if not a necessary, step in successfully engineering counterparts on Mars.

In addition, a permanent underground terrestrial communities manned by a multinational force, composed of volunteers serving staggered, limited-term tours of duty, not only would provide significantly more assurance of our survival as a species in the event of a catastrophe of astrophysical origin, but also would serve to promote exactly the kind of international cooperation that the authors state is one of the desirable side-effects of the effort to colonize the Red Planet.

Former NASA astronaut
Lisa Nowak, charged
with attempted murder

Mars, a disease and discord free zone?
Other threats that motivate Schulze-Makuch and Davies include "global pandemics, nuclear or biological warfare, runaway global warming [and] sudden ecological collapse." Mars colonists would be placed at a safe remove from the first two types of these catastrophes, but would nonetheless be subject to the dangers posed by disease as well as to the kinds of political, not to mention interpersonal, discord that could lead to the annihilation of their "civilization" in a matter of minutes. On Mars a jilted lover with a hammer and access to critical life-support systems becomes that planet's Kim Jong Il.

As far as large-scale environmental degradation wrought by the likes of devastating climate change goes, it should be noted that even the most dreadful envisioned outcomes here would leave Earth-bound humans with an ecosystem infinitely more hospitable than any that they will ever find on Mars.

A lifeboat to nowhere

A scene from Alfred Hitchcock's
1944 film Lifeboat

More generally, the problem with the portrayal of a Martian colony as a putative lifeboat for humanity is that, as a metaphor, it is all too apt. Lifeboats by their nature are transitional places of refuge; they are meant to convey passengers from a situation of rapidly deteriorating safety to one of predictable security; they are not sanctuaries in and of themselves. Far from it, lifeboats are risky environments, recommended only by the fact that the certainty of going down with the ship is a far less attractive option.

Such would be the case with human presence on Mars, founded imprudently as a falsely desperate one-way mission, a lifeboat continuously in peril and without the glimmer of a hope of ever reaching another shore.

Part 3: One-Way Mission to Mars - Science Fail

One-Way Mission to Mars - Lifeboat for Humanity Fail by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Does a One-Way Mission to Mars Make Sense? - Introduction

2011-02-01T10:41:00.010-05:00

This is the introduction to a multi-part critique of a proposal that has been under consideration the last couple of years to send human pioneers on a one-way trip to Mars.

"Jurassic Park" movie poster

In Steven Spielberg's 1997 science-fiction film The Lost World: Jurassic Park chaos theorist Ian Malcolm, commenting on the decision to move genetically-resurrected dinosaurs off the island where they have been safely contained, says to the scientist-entrepreneur responsible for creating the creatures and placing them in a theme park, that this "is the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas and I'm going to be there when you learn that."

When I read an op-ed piece in the New York Times by physicist Lawrence Krauss at the end of August, 2009 proposing A Once-Way Ticket to Mars, I was reminded that the history of bad ideas marches on, specifically those bad ideas derived from a technological vision of the future not anchored in human reality. Of course, bad ideas come and bad ideas go, but this one appears to have legs, as the publication in November of this study, To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars, by Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies in The Journal of Cosmology would indicate.

Having little hope of being around myself when and if this ill-considered idea is implemented, much less when it either reaches fruition or unravels, I take the opportunity to state my objections now.

Why a one-way trip?

John Kennedy before a joint session
of Congress, May 25, 1961

The proposal of a one-way Mars mission is not without technical merit. Our 50 years of space-faring experience have equipped us with the engineering know-how to get human beings to the surface of Mars. But unlike John Kennedy's speech before Congress in 1961 calling on Americans to take up the challenge of landing men on the Moon by the end of the decade, the possibility of returning these explorers of this new frontier safely to Earth made exceed our financial, if not our technological, grasp.

Schematic of the Earth's magnetosphere
with the solar wind flowing from the left

The primary reason for this has to do with the fact that outside the protective envelope of the Earth's magnetosphere, astronauts are exposed continuously worrisome levels of background cosmic radiation and occasionally to devastating levels inflicted by solar flares. Tolerable risks associated with brief excursions to the Moon by the Apollo astronauts become unacceptable ones when spaces voyages extend for many months, as would be required by a round-trip mission to Mars. Unacceptable that is if conventional safety recommendations concerning radiation exposure are at all respected.

As we might guess from the lead-lined aprons that are provided for our protection when we undergo dental x-rays, there are indeed ways to shield passengers during a long space voyage. Unfortunately the increase in the weight of a spaceship by including such shielding adds significantly to the cost of the mission. To make matters worse, the weight of fuel and provisions required by a two-way trip make the cost even more prohibitive, at least in our contemporary political and fiscal climate. So, first and foremost, a one-way journey is proposed to reduce the cost of a manned Mars mission, with the intention of putting it within practical reach relatively soon.

2001: A Space Odyssey anticipated
challenges posed by long-duration
space flight

The approach avoids another problematic consequence of long-duration space travel, namely the lengthy rehabilitation required for astronauts to adjust to Earth's gravity that is a result of their extended stay in reduced- or zero-gee environments. In addition, the risks to life and limb associated with taking off from Mars, reentering the Earth's atmosphere and landing here are eliminated by a one-way mission, not to mention the additional weight penalties required by the spacecraft systems responsible for accomplishing those demanding tasks.

Motivations for a Mars colony
According to the authors there are several motivations for the establishment of a permanent human presence on Mars, whether using a one-way Mars mission as a kick-start or not. They are in brief:

to offer humanity a "lifeboat" in the event of a mega-catastrophe here on Earth,
to provide a base of operations for the scientific study of Mars, especially in the search for life forms that it might harbor, and a springboard for exploration of the outer solar system,
and to serve as a "strong and uplifting theme for all of humanity" with all the political and social benefits that would supposedly imply.

I would concur, that each of these reasons is good - even noble - on its face. It is not at all clear, though, that these objectives can not be accomplished - perhaps better accomplished - using alternative approaches, at far lower cost and with far less risk to human life.

General Reservations
That said, my criticisms of the scheme outlined in the Schulze-Makuch / Davies paper have less to do with whether a one-way mission achieves their stated limited technical goals, and more to do with whether it represents either a cost-effective or an ethical way to go about colonizing or even exploring Mars. I am also skeptical whether the imagined urgency that drives their dubious solution is in the least bit well-founded. These will be the concerns that I will address in the parts of this essay to follow.

Part 2: One-Way Mission to Mars - Lifeboat for Humanity Fail

Does a One-Way Mission to Mars Make Sense? - Introduction by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Climb Every Mountain - Sam Harris's "The Moral Landscape"

2011-01-06T11:05:00.029-05:00

Book cover, courtesy of
samharris.org

The market for manifestos isn't what it used to be. Take The Communist Manifesto for example, first published as a book in 1848 and serialized in a German-language newspaper in London, it was within a few years translated into several languages and reprinted many times. Yet it's hard to imagine a publisher picking it up today, not so much because of its explosive political content, but because it weighs in at under 100 pages, at least that's about the size of the 1998 Signet Classics edition.

So even a best-selling author like Sam Harris had some finagling to do to get his recent, The Moral Landscape, which is at its core a short manifesto calling for science to re-engage in the debate over human values, published as a book. What would have been a clarion cry of "to the barricades" to dislodge the religious monopoly over the divining and devising of moral frameworks, becomes, as a result of market necessities, a longer and less focused work. Harris's central premise does shine through, even somewhat obscured by the extras that he tosses in to bring the book to a requisite, consumer-friendly 300 pages or so.

The author states clearly at the outset what he aims to accomplish: "The goal of this book is to begin a conversation about how moral truth can be understood in the context of science."

Sam Harris, courtesy of
samharris.org

If all Harris had hoped to do was to start a conversation, then I would have to confess that he would have had me at "hello". Harris, of course, is best known as one of the quaternion of celebrity atheists who have collectively reframed the discussion concerning the role of religion in society and have called into question the legitimacy of all versions of that God-centered enterprise. Smart, handsome and well-spoken, he reflects the particular strengths of his three comrades-in-non-belief: part scientist, as is The Selfish Gene biologist Richard Dawkins, part philosopher, as is Breaking the Spell scholar Daniel Dennett and part rhetorician, as is God is Not Great pugilist Christopher Hitchens.

As it turns out, Harris is interested in much more than simply starting a conversation about human values. In the first chapters of Landscape he outlines a program for seizing the moral high ground from those who have traditionally occupied it, namely theologians and religious leaders, and to do so in spite of the dismissive criticism of moral relativists in academia and elsewhere, who feel that any claim of universal moral truth is fundamentally misguided and that the search for such truth violates some prime directive of anthropological studies which grants equal moral status to all cultures unconditionally.

David Hume, historian and
philosopher (1711-1776)

It is an uphill battle Harris has taken on, made even more difficult since the likes of Enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume, who is famous for his early identification of the so-called is-ought problem, and of 20th century philosophers, such as G. E. Moore, who would characterize Harris's thinking as a naturalist fallacy, stand in his way.

So, how does Harris address these considered criticisms from philosophical quarters? He, first and foremost, unabashedly embraces moral realism, insisting that propositions about ethics refer objectively to the properties of things, specifically that "meaning, values, morality and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures - and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain."

What distinguishes Harris from his predecessors in their pursuit of a long-sought grounding of a utilitarian system of ethics is his insistence that the field of neuroscience, in which he holds a recently minted Ph.D., will assist us in finally separating the chaff of mere opinion about the nature of human and animal suffering from the wheat of scientific fact. This is the tantalizing promise that Landscape, as manifesto, provisionally holds forth, but, unfortunately, one on which Landscape, as a book, ultimately fails to deliver.

Harris's article (PDF) in
Annals of Neurology

Only well into the final chapter does the author concede, "I have said very little in this book about the current state of psychological science as it relates to human well-being." This comes as a remarkable and belated admission. Much neuroscience has indeed been discussed in the course of the book, but it is the neuroscience of belief and not of happiness that has occupied Harris's attention in the intervening pages. Why this is so is less of a surprise when one learns that Harris's dissertation research has been used extensively in Landscape, as he notes in his acknowledgement. Now Harris's scientific investigation of the neural correlates of belief, disbelief and uncertainty is unquestionably interesting stuff, but it is only marginally related to the argument concerning a theory of values that he is supposed to be making.

[Doctoral students dream that their dissertations will see widespread publication. Best-selling authors such as Harris, though, have the means to make this dream come true by including that work in a larger book. As an erstwhile graduate student I must say that I sympathize with this temptation.]

Official portrait of NIH
Director Francis Collins

The other significant diversion results from Harris's decision to include an extended critique of religion here as well, very much a continuation of the carefully crafted assault that he launched with his first book, The End of Faith. Again, it is not for disagreeing with Harris about the failings of religion that I object, but because I don't find much of what he has to say in this regard relevant to his the stated thesis of Landscape.

Take for instance the protracted excoriation of Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and a former leader of the Human Genome Project, who also happens to be an "unrepentant" (as far as science is concerned) born-again Christian. To be sure, it is perplexing how a scientist as accomplished as Collins can reconcile his reliance on a rational system of understanding the world with his conviction that God has specifically meddled in the process of human evolution. Nonetheless, whether Collins is simply a misguided thinker or whether, by setting a bad example, he disqualifies himself from holding a position of significant scientific authority, has little to do with presenting the case for the science-based values agenda that Harris has proposed as his stated goal.

In spite the structural flaws resulting from this kind of padding, I feel that Landscape succeeds as an important political tract. To see why I say this it is useful to reflect on a brief history of the "values" debate that rages between science and religion.

Charles Darwin by Julia
Margaret Cameron

For the better of the past several millennia, religion has ruled the roost as far as pronouncements on morality goes. It still does. Inroads have been made by science, beginning most notably in the Renaissance when the view of the universe centered on Earth and on man was called into question. Not explicitly an attack on the existing moral order, the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo cast doubt on the legitimacy of religion's claims to exclusive authority over important philosophical matters.

With the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, Charles Darwin brought this simmering confrontation to a head. In one respect the appearance of his theory of evolution signaled the beginning of the utter routing of religion as an arbiter of claims concerning the physical world, although, admittedly, keepers of the faith such as Francis Collins persist in offering a significant "God of the gaps" rearguard resistance. Yet the near elimination of religion from the battlefield of science, left believers ensconced as the uncontested rulers of the realm of morals and values.

In an attempt to settle the issue once and for all and to thwart the reintroduction of religion into the U.S. secondary school curriculum under the guise of a so-called theory of Intelligent Design, in 1997 Stephen J. Gould fashioned a truce of sorts, that goes by the name non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA). Gould's division of the world into separate domains - one with morality and values as the province of religion, and one with nature as the province of science - was widely accepted in a Rodney King, "can we all just get long?" kind of way.

Missouri Compromise Line

The problems that plague NOMA, though, are not unlike those that beset the Missouri Compromise after it was enacted into law in 1820. For those unfamiliar with this episode of American history, the smoldering disagreement over slavery, hardly resolved by the concessions of the Constitution of 1787, flared up again as the status of that "peculiar institution" in the newly acquired territories had to be finalized. By partitioning the map according to agreed upon free and slave-holding domains - the non-overlapping magisteria of that day and age - the Solons of the U.S. Congress had hoped to forestall, if not prevent, a catastrophic internecine conflict. As the eruption of the Civil War 40 years later demonstrated, they had succeeded only in delaying the inevitable.

In this regard I see Harris with Landscape playing a role similar to that of a firebrand American abolitionist pamphleteer of the mid-19th century, disdainful of a compromise which he feels inappropriately concedes vast territory to the control of forces whose judgement and integrity he considers faulty, and not the least bit interested in seeking accommodation, he has decided, in no uncertain terms, to undermine a flawed and fragile truce.

Although Harris's new book may fail in certain ways as an entirely coherent treatment of the question of the the scientific basis of human values, it succeeds quite well as a political and intellectual broadside, shots fired marking the end of a ineffectual "gentlemen's agreement" ceasefire over disputes of moral legitimacy. In a world where the Taliban and the Tea Party do not demur in staking their own claims on the moral landscape, I for one am very glad that Sam Harris has taken up the battle.

Climb Every Mountain - Sam Harris's "The Moral Landscape" by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Black Swan - Mirror, Mirror

2010-12-27T11:01:00.011-05:00

Black Swan movie poster,
courtesy of Fox Searchlight

This essay is taken from a note that I posted on FaceBook about Darren Aronofsky's recent film, Black Swan. It does not contain spoilers.

The films that I have always found most compelling are those that present an intriguing character, one with whom identification is a difficult, but a rewarding, struggle, and send that character off on a journey of personal discovery. Their appeal, in part, has to do with the fact that the hero's quest for transcendence or, as is often the case, redemption suggests the possibility of our own transformation. They offer us a distorted but beguiling mirror in which the hero's hopes and fears and doubts become our own.

Darren Aonofsky's film, Black Swan, succeeds wonderfully as such a film.

The Aronofsky films I have seen - Pi, The Fountain, The Wrestler and now Swan - invite us to enter personally uncharted territory and there to step into the shoes - or slippers, as the case may be - of, respectively, an unhinged mathematician, a disillusioned conquistador, a dissipated professional wrestler and a psychologically scarred aspiring prima ballerina. It is a testimony to the director's skill and his uncanny selection of players, that we quickly begin to identify with these lost souls, in spite of the fact that their lives and their occupations are entirely foreign to us - an accomplishment all the more remarkable in a movie industry that relies on cookie-cutter characters and characterizations for commercial success.

In each of these works Aronofsky dispatches his reluctant hero on a quest, an attempt both to come to terms with a damaging personal history and to transcend the past by reconciling the demands of art or profession or craft with the reality of the world as it is.

For Swan, this journey of transcendence is rooted in a universal artistic challenge, how to move beyond the technical mastery of a medium and take the risk involved in opening oneself up to messy and often unwelcome psychic forces that are the heart of profound artistic expression.

On one level the film is the story of Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), a beautiful and talented young ballerina who is poised to become the principal dancer of an unnamed New York company, and must overcome her slavish good-girl commitment to mechanical virtuosity and tap into dangerous emotional currents that emanate from her unexplored sexuality and a toxic relationship with a controlling, ever-watchful mother (played magnificently by Barbara Hershey).

On another level, Swan is a tale of the director's own struggle to put his mastery of the medium of film in service to the telling stories that are not only exquisitely crafted, but also emotionally compelling. Aronofsky's abundant skills are on display as he demonstrates a cinematic range that encompasses both the glossy presentation of lavishly staged ballet as well as the gritty exposition of the intimate details of Nina's personal ordeals. In doing this Aronofsky reminds us that for him the life of genius - and not only artistic genius - is a ongoing flirtation with insanity, a ceaseless effort to locate and occupy the razor's edge that is the wellspring of creativity.

Finally, Swan is a mirror of Natalie Portman's own trajectory as an actor. Poised, as her character Nina is, at a juncture in her career where accomplishment beyond mere technical excellence beckons, Portman has dared to take on a very different role, one that demands that she expose herself, both emotionally and sexually, in order to discover her true potential. This actress is determined to put away childish things - like so many stuffed animals tossed down a trash chute - and declare herself as a performer who can draw on both the light and the dark aspects of her nature.

So Black Swan is all of these, a story about a troubled young ballerina, a story about its director, Aronofsky, and a story about its star, Portman. It is a hall of mirrors, which teases and disorients us by confusing the real world with the imagined. Perhaps most importantly, it is a hall of mirrors in which we are invited - every now and then - to catch a glimpse of ourselves. In this regard, in a small way, it is also a story about us.

Black Swan - Mirror, Mirror by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

A Conceptual Introduction to the Measurement Problem of Quantum Physics

2010-12-14T10:35:00.019-05:00

This is the fourth and last in a series of essays to be used as background for the Atlanta Science Tavern discussion Quantum Physics and Consciousness. It began with this introductory post.

At the heart of the controversy concerning quantum physics and consciousness - raised by the What the Bleep Do We Know!? movie - is a conundrum that goes by the name the measurement problem. My intention here is to introduce this problem to people not steeped in quantum physics. I will try to do this while remaining faithful to the concepts that I believe are central to the discussion at hand..

Sextans A, member of the
Local Group

Systems
One of the pervasive concepts in physics is that of a system. It is an abstraction that is used to refer to something as small as an electron orbiting the nucleus of a hydrogen atom or something as large as our own Milky Way orbiting the gravitational center of the Local Group of more than 30 galaxies. It can represent something as simple as a pair of photons, particles of light, entangled in a quantum pas de deux, or as complex as a human brain, a wet, warm, messy computational engine, sporting over 1,000 trillion synaptic connections. Even (Austrian) cats have been recruited in the service of constructing such hypothetical systems.

There is an important assumption regarding a system and that is that it can be regarded as independent or free-standing. In other words, it is meaningful to discuss a system, at least for limited purposes, as though it exisits in isolation from the rest of the world. Without this idealization the scientific enterprise as we know it would be doomed, mired in complexity. Nonetheless, we should keep in mind that it is an approximation.

A gyroscope as a
demonstration of angular
momentum

Properties and States of a System
Ultimately the goal of a physical theory is to offer an accurate description of the behavior of a system over a period of time. Such a description emphasizes what are considered to be significant properties, features either of the system as a whole or of its constituent parts.

Most notable among these properties of a system (or its parts) are its position and its velocity. Less concrete, but no less significant, is the property of a system which we call as its energy. Other properties include mass and electrical charge and quantities having to do with a system's rotational motion, namely its angular momentum or spin. Modern physics has added a large number of much less familiar properties to this list of quantities used to describe systems.

For our purposes, it is not so much important to know what each of these properties means individually, as it is to understand that they can be used collectively to create a "snapshot" of a system, which defines what is called its state. One can think of the state of a system as way to designate an enumeration of its properties and their corresponding values at a particular instant in time.

Measurement in General
Measurement can be seen as the process by which the properties, and hence the state, of a system are discovered. We typically imagine this as involving some sort of measuring device or apparatus, a ruler, a telescope, a radar gun, or a thermometer, for example, but in a very austere sense measurement may involve any kind and any size of physical "probe", used to determine a value for a property of a system.

Measurement in Classical Physics
In classical physics the measurement of the properties of a system, although perhaps technologically challenging, is philosophically straightforward. A measuring device can, in theory, be refined to obtain an arbitrarily precise value for a property, while at the same time inducing an arbitrarily small amount of disruption to the system as a whole.

Collectively these measured properties, drawn from a continuously-varying range of values, define the state of the system, which is, in principle, indifferent to the effect to the act of measurement.

Bohr atom with
energy levels

Measurement in Quantum Physics - First Twist
Quantum physics adds some unexpected twists to the classical theory of measurement.

For purposes of concreteness, but without loss of generality, we will use the example of a hydrogen atom consisting of a lone electron in orbit around a single proton.

It turns out that when we measure the energy of the orbiting electron we obtain not a continuous range of values, but a discrete set of values, the so-called energy levels of the system. These fixed amounts, or quanta, of energy - from which the theory derives its name - represent a departure from the classical view of the world in which quantities like energy were assumed to vary continuously

Interestingly enough, and consistent with classical theory, repeated measurements of the energy of the electron yield the very same answer. Furthermore, measurements of certain "compatible" properties, such as its angular momentum, leave the system undisrupted, and subsequent measurements of the electron's energy are unaffected.

All hell breaks out, though, when you go to measure something else.

Measurement in Quantum Physics - Second Twist
For example, if you start with a hydrogen atom in a known energy state and measure, say, the position of its electron, then the result of a subsequent measurement of its energy is no longer determined, but may take on any value from the range of allowed energy levels.

In fact the measurement of an "incompatible" property, no matter how carefully made, disrupts the system. Contrary to classical expectations, the disrupted electron is described as then occupying not one but a multiplicity of energy states, and its amount of "participation" in each of these states determines the probability that the corresponding energy level will be measured the next time around.

Troubling as this is finding may be for measurements of energy, it is even more unsettling to consider that this inevitable mixing of states also applies to measurements of position, the implication being that the electron can find itself, to a greater or lesser degree, at a multiplicity of locations!

DVD cover for Tom
Stoppard's "Rosencrantz
& Guildenstern" Are Dead

Measurement in Quantum Physics - Bottom Line
Unlike measurement in classical physics which can be consigned to a secondary - and diminishing - role, measurement in quantum physics insists on playing a leading one. The choice of which properties to measure and the order in which these measurements are conducted unavoidably effect the system under observation.

It turns out that the act of measuring specific properties, most significantly energy, places a system in a stable state, referred to as a stationary state or eigenstate, in which values of those properties and compatible ones persist indefinitely. Intervening measurements of incompatible properties, though, force the system into a configuration that is a mixture of these stationary states, called a superposition. Although the outcome of individual measurements on a system described by a superposition is unpredictable, their statistical distribution is entirely determined.

A digital multimeter

The Measurement Problem
Since measurement is not a particularly important process in classical physics, it hardly commands a lot of attention. But in quantum mechanics, measurement is a first class feature of the theory and so this activity has to be much more carefully considered.

First and foremost, what does it mean to say that a measurement has occurred? Does this happen when a measuring device interacts with the system being investigated? What distinguishes these "measurement" interactions from other routine interactions between the system and its environment?

To the extent that the act of measurement is, itself, a causal chain of events described, ultimately, by quantum theory, when, if ever, can we say that it concludes? Does a measurement end, for example, when photons of light refelected off an LCD display strike the the retina of the experimenter working in her lab? What if the experimental data is collected autonomously and stored on-line? Does the measurement finally occur when the data is downloaded and viewed by the experimenter on a remote computer?

Furthermore, what is the detailed mechanism involved in transforming the quantum mechanical superposition of states into a single eigenstate state, which is characterized by the measured value of a property such as energy? How does this collapse of the wave function (an alternative name for this superposition of states), take place?

Enter Consciousness
These are some of the puzzling questions that have given rise to the variety of interpretations of quantum physics in circulation. Consciousness enters the picture because some people believe that it may be the critical feature that distinguishes measurement from other physical processes.

So consciousness is, to some extent, reasonably offered as a potential "solution" to the measurement problem of quantum mechanics. Be that as it may, it is one thing to suggest that consciousness is implicated in the collapse of the wave function, and quite another to insist it is a mechanism that allows us to project our will and desires on the physical world. This is the leap that the movie What the Bleep takes and this is why its claims are so controversial.

A Conceptual Introduction to the Measurement Problem in Quantum Physics by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Adventures in Quantum Tourism

2010-12-05T13:04:00.020-05:00

This is the third in a series of informal posts to be used as background for the Atlanta Science Tavern discussion Quantum Physics and Consciousness.

Cover of Anne Tyler's
"The Accidental Tourist"

Imagine yourself a young person - or an unworldly adult - about to embark on a first-ever trip abroad. You arrive by plane at your destination and are immediately overwhelmed by the strangeness of the place.

For example, the language you hear at the gate sounds less like human speech than like dogs barking. How could anyone understand what's being said?

The signs you see posted as you make your way down the concourse are inscrutable. It's not clear whether the symbols are letters or words, or whether the script is intended to be read right-to-left or top-to-bottom. It all looks so unnecessarily complicated.

Somehow you find your way to a shuttle bus and, as it departs for your hotel, you are alarmed to discover that everyone is driving on the wrong side of the road! Whose crazy idea was this dangerous scheme?

At the hotel, weary from your travel but wanting a bite to eat before you go settle down for a well-deserved nap, you decide to visit the restaurant off the lobby which, mercifully, has photos to accompany the utterly unintelligible text on its menu. Little consolation that, since not one of the items depicted is a dish recognizable to you. To make matters worse, when your meal is served, what appears to be the entrée is unexpectedly sweet and what appears to be the dessert is not sweet at all, but unexpectedly spicy. This is a gratuitously cruel reversal of the correct culinary order of things, as far as you are concerned.

Exhausted from dealing with this onslaught of the unfamiliar, you retire to your room, where, although sleep beckons, you lie awake struggling to come up with explanations for the disconcerting experiences of your day. You are convinced that if only you had the intellectual chops to think long enough and hard enough about the strange things you had seen and heard and read and tasted, then the reasons why they are the way they are would become clear. But struggle as you might, no realization emerges and you finally succumb to sleep, your last thought being, "I'll never understand this place, it makes no sense at all."

The Twice-Told Allegory of the Bewildered Traveler
The above tale is an allegory for the frustration - and sometimes despair - everyone feels when first introduced to the mysterious world of quantum physics. The story continues, of course, taking one of two divergent paths.

In the first variation, the traveler wakes and beats a hasty retreat back to the airport, where she catches the first flight home. There she regales friends, family and colleagues of the bizarre details of her misadventure and the absolute impossibility of living abroad.

With the second telling, the traveler, refreshed by her nap, pauses and then decides to explore a bit before considering whether to cut her trip short. (It seems like the prudent thing to do, since she has come so far.) Fortunately she makes the acquaintance of an expatriate, a fellow from her home country no less, who helps her to understand a useful phrase or two in the local language and to appreciate a couple of tasty offerings of the local cuisine.

Intrigued, she vows to extend her stay, even going so far as to purchase a bicycle which she, with some trepidation, learns to ride on the "wrong" side of the road. Feeling increasingly comfortable in her new environment, she contemplates the possibility of establishing a second home here, and laughs when she reminds herself that she still has no answer as to why this place is so strange, a once pressing question that no longer seems relevant at all.

The Fallacy of Extrapolation

Terra Incognita (BBC Archive)

There's a category of misguided reasoning that goes by the name "the fallacy of extrapolation". Typically it is used to describe the mistake that people make when they assume that a current trend will continue, unchanged, into the future. But it also is a good way to characterize an error that results from imagining that the rules that govern our everyday lives should be the same as those that apply to a novel situation, one for which we have no first-hand experience.

This is exactly the kind of mistake late-19th century physics made when initially confronted with the uncharted territories of the "very fast" (speeds close to that of light) and of the "very small" (distances on the scale of atoms and molecules). And it is the mistake that we all repeat when we are first exposed to the ideas of special relativity or of quantum mechanics, the theories used to describe those two unfamiliar realms.

But, like seasoned travelers, we can benefit from knowing that, if we are open-minded and patient, then the confusion and dissonance that we feel with the first encounter a strange new world will slowly dissipate, and that through acceptance and immersion we can come to enjoy a new home away from home.

Adventures in Quantum Tourism by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Does Anyone Understand Quantum Mechanics?

2010-12-04T15:48:00.016-05:00

This is the second in a series of informal posts to be used as background for the Atlanta Science Tavern discussion Quantum Physics and Human Consciousness.

Richard Feynman, Los
Alamos ID badge

Richard Feynman, one of the great physicists of the 20th century, offered this somewhat discouraging claim in his book, The Character of Physical Law, "I think I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics." Given that Feynman was not only a technical but also an intuitive master of the subject - the likes of which will seldom be seen again, I might add - it would be pointless for me to try to contradict him. But I think it is reasonable to suggest that this oft-quoted statement might benefit from some clarification.

Certainly, as a practical endeavor, many, many thousands of scientists and engineers around the world today understand quantum mechanics. They use it routinely in their work, whether designing computer circuits or predicting the outcome of the collisions of the protons that hurtle toward each other at near light speed at the intersections of the beam lines of the Large Hadron Collider outside of Geneva, Switzerland. Indeed, the related theory of Quantum Electrodynamics, of which Feynman was a pioneer, is, hands down, the most successful physical theory ever devised as far as the precision of its predictions is concerned. It would be hard to beat.

Compact Muon Solenoid at
the LHC at CERN

Yet it comes as a surprise to lay people, who find themselves beguiled by the mystery of quantum physics, to learn only a fraction of physicists are troubled, at least professionally, with the philosophical questions that it raises. The dictum. "shut up and calculate!" holds sway in laboratories and universities, with the meaning of the theory being no more and no less than its thoroughly demonstrated correctness and utility.

And this is where, to a certain extent, they part company with Feynman, whose discouraging words might more accurately - and perhaps more hopefully - be expressed as, "no one understands yet what quantum mechanics means." The fact of the matter is that, after almost nine decades of earnest striving, there is no agreed upon interpretation of what quantum physics says about the very nature of the world it so successfully models. Some have more currency than others, but none has proven so superior that it has vanquished its competitors.

In my opinion it is our failure to formulate a convincing interpretation that fuels the controversy that surrounds the question of quantum physics and consciousness which has motivated the discussion at hand. The absence of a conclusive answer to the stubborn question of meaning has been an invitation for all contending interpretations of quantum mechanics, of whatever stripe, to enter the fray.

That said, I do think that the central concepts of quantum physics are in fact understandable by "ordinary" people, that is if they are willing to let go of preconceptions and to imagine themselves, instead, as inquisitive travelers to an unexplored country. This will be the topic of the next post in this series.

Does Anyone Understand Quantum Mechanics? by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Quantum Physics and Consciousness - Why this Discussion?

2010-12-02T08:31:00.017-05:00

This is the first in a series of informal posts to be used as background for the Atlanta Science Tavern discussion Quantum Physics and Human Consciousness.

Why this Discussion?
When a handful of science enthusiasts get together to share their thoughts on the "big" questions, the conversation often turns to the mysterious world of quantum physics. Indeed, in a cursory survey of the interests of members of the Science Tavern meetup, the subject ranks near the top of the list of stated science interests.

We are drawn to quantum physics for many reasons, but primarily because it tells us a fascinating and unexpected story, that the world as we experience it is an illusion, and that a deeper reality exists, full of marvels and wonders, accessible to those with the determination to look beyond mere appearance.

The Cave: An Adaption of
Plato's ;Allegory in Clay

In this regard quantum physics arrives as a concrete realization of Plato's Allegory of the Cave and the alluring prospect that knowledge can truly set us free. It also represents the last best hope for the existence of any kind of magic, a possibility that had been all but banished from consideration by the thoroughly deterministic program of classical physics that began with Newton and reached its apogee at the end of the 19th century. Likewise, the overthrow of determinism by quantum physics offers hope to some for a theory of free will compatible with our scientific understanding of the world.

"What the Bleep" movie
poster

It is not surprising that these intriguing ideas have found there way into popular culture. The treatment that motivated the discussion at hand is a movie from 2004, What the Bleep Do We Know?, which sparked a brief, but heated exchange, on our meetup website recently. As a result of the way it interprets the relationship between quantum mechanics and human consciousness, the film has become both a manifesto for adherents of so-called quantum mysticism and a target for derision by the scientific community at large.

Our purpose is to probe the origins of this controversy and to try to come to a common understanding about the physics that is at its core.

Two Questions in One
I should note in closing this introduction that the question of quantum physics and consciousness - I will refrain from using the somewhat parochial qualification "human" consciousness from here on - divides itself, not so neatly, into two.

The first has to do with metaphysics - in the strict sense of that word. Does a comprehensive theory of physics require consciousness as a fundamental feature? This is the quandary at the center of the What the Bleep dispute.

The second question has to do with the origin of consciousness and the role that quantum physics plays in the emergence of it as a physical phenomenon. In this case the question, on its face, is not so controversial; brains, at least from a materialistic perspective, are physical entities describable, ultimately, in quantum mechanical terms. There is, though, much active discussion and disagreement about the variety of schemes that have been proposed as possible answers.

The two questions are not entirely independent, but for the time being, I will focus on the first as this series continues.

Quantum Physics and Consciousness - Why this Discussion? by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

The Wealth of Hominids - Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist"

2010-09-20T09:45:00.041-04:00

This is the first of several essays inspired by Matt Ridley's new book, The Rational Optimist.

Every so often a book comes along that punctuates the relative equilibrium of my understanding of the theory of evolution, dramatically altering my appreciation of the processes by which life on this planet has changed over time.

In 1976 Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, with its startling premise that the gene, and not the individual organism, was the fundamental unit of natural selection, made me aware that Darwin's then more than century-old theory was not gathering dust, but was being actively refined, and its details even debated.

About the same time E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology appeared, assuring me that knowledge of biology can indeed inform our understanding of the behavior of animals, including ourselves, all in the face of a bitter opposition, which, to this day, mistakenly conflates Wilson's scientific description of biological tendencies with political prescription for biological determinism.

In 1981 with Lucy, Donald Johanson introduced me to the nuts and bolts of the practice of paleoanthropology and helped me realize that the study of human origins involves not only the reconstruction of the skeletons of our ancient ancestors and cousins, but also the reconstruction of their lives.

And of course there are the books by Stephen Jay Gould, too numerous to mention, many collections of his essays for Natural History magazine, in which he disabused me of the received wisdom concerning the pace and direction of evolution and replaced it with stories of accident and contingency, calling my attention to the modest evolutionary spandrels nestled between the showy arches that, together, constitute the cathedral of this wonderful life.

More recently, Daniel Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea opened my eyes to the fact that the central thesis of Darwin's On the Origin of Species - that is that remarkably complex systems could evolve from simple beginnings, without direction, according only to the dictates of selective forces - operates beyond the domain of biology and that, because of its universal applicability, occupies a singular position in our intellectual firmament.

I now count Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist in this list of important influences.

The War Room, a documentary
of the 1992 Clinton campaign

Optimist opens with a bold proposal, an assault on a persistent question about our beginnings, that is, what exactly was it, a little more than 100,000 years ago, give or take, that stirred us - even by then long fully-formed humans beings - from eons of technological lassitude and launched us onto a trajectory of ever-increasing material prosperity?

Ridley's answer, always acknowledging a debt to his hero Adam Smith, could well be expressed as a variation on that watchword of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, "it's the economics, stupid."

A startling, and unexpected, implication of his thesis is that our humanity, contrary to conventional thinking, is not a legacy bequeathed to us, something that we possess unconditionally, but a dynamic process, one for which we are specifically suited, a glorious dance, but one which lasts only so long as the music plays, and that music, according to Ridley, is the activity of barter and exchange.

Creatures that we would recognize as modern humans have been around for some time, the better part of 200,000 years. Not only do we share the same basic body plan and, from all indications, cognitive capabilities with these predecessors, but so did they with their own hominid contemporaries, the unfairly maligned Neanderthals, who, if cranial capacity is any indication, may have been a tad smarter.

Obsidian handaxe from the
Ethiopian Acheulean period
(courtesy of Melka Kunture
Museum)

Speech is unlikely to have distinguished these first cousins from one another; genetic analysis indicates that both species possessed a variant of the FOXP2 gene, which is an established marker for that facility. Indeed, their common ancestor, homo heidelbergensis, dating back half a million years or more was likely to have been a talker, too. And speech is not all that they had in common with heidelbergensis. The archeological record demonstrates that both predecessor and successor species, separated by tens of thousands of generations, employed, with minor modifications, the same set of tools. In particular, the centerpiece of their technology, the Acheulean handaxe, itself, had remained largely unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years.

Why then, after a near eternity of tiresome technological sameness, does a new, expanded and far more capable toolkit appear and begin to become established 100,000 years ago?

Was it some dramatic change in climate that triggered this great leap forward? According to Ridley, likely not; such climatic swings occurred in preceding geological epochs and, yet, there is no indication that they prompted advances in human intelligence or, for that matter, that they should have. Perhaps a propitious genetic mutation was responsible? As the author points out, though, the evidence for new tools appears erratically, distributed both in space and in time, a pattern hardly consistent with the diffusion of a favorable trait from a single point of origin. And, once these innovations take hold, they point toward a process of escalating technological progress whose rate, nonetheless, varies from place to place, a phenomenon not indicative of an "intrinsic" new human capability.

Instead, Ridley proposes that, having been equipped with a knack for specialization, itself an artifact of our inculcated roles as hunters and gatherers - a division of labor that, it appears, Neanderthals did not practice - and having reached sufficient population densities so that contact with neighboring groups became commonplace, these early modern humans began to exploit such encounters as opportunities to offer things that they were relatively adept at creating or acquiring in exchange for things, which if they had produced themselves, would have distracted them from making the best use of their skills and available resources. This kind of varied, asymmetric give-and-take, quite different from the acts of reciprocity that had likely been a characteristic of primate behavior for tens of millions of years, was something new to the world.

David Ricardo
(1772 - 1823)

But the magic here, if it can be called that, is not simply the appearance of barter on the human scene, but the fact that such trade itself encouraged further specialization, and that, in turn, encouraged more trade. The invisible hand at work is not so much Adam Smith's market, as it is David Ricardo's law of comparative advantage, the seemingly counter-intuitive notion that, in many circumstances, we are better off paying more for goods that we could have made ourselves, if by doing so we gain time and resources otherwise spent to do what we do best, that is, make those things that we make most efficiently. I say "seemingly counter-intuitive" because, although this abstract law of economics was not explicitly formulated until 1817, it appears to have been implicitly grasped by our forbears as early as the late Pleistocene.

So, with trade promoting more specialization and specialization, by making more goods available at lower cost, promoting more trade, a self-catalyzing cycle leading to open-ended material progress was underway, and the rest, as they say, is history, our history, a history that Ridley details in much of the remainder of his book.

Speculative theories about human origins are, of course, a dime a dozen. The requirement that they conform to the available evidence certainly reduces the number of contenders. But how, then, do we go about further winnowing? Ordinarily, in order to reconcile competing conventional scientific claims, we turn to laboratory experiments, an approach that is not typically available to historical sciences such as evolutionary biology. Interestingly enough, what sets Ridley's approach apart is that he succeeds in proposing two experimental tests for his theory, one that, it turns out, nature conducted on our behalf 10,000 years ago and another that is within our investigative reach today.

If barter is central to human progress, as Ridley suggests, then a human population once isolated should, at best, stagnate technologically. Indeed, if forces are at work that deplete its reserves of expertise, such a population, cut off from exchange, might well be expected to regress.

Landsat photo of the
island of Tasmania

The stage was set for Ridley's historical experiment some 35,000 years ago, when human beings first arrived on the island "laboratory" of Tasmania, then still joined to the mainland of Australia by a land bridge. With them they brought knowledge of how to fashion a variety of things, everything from fish hooks to canoes, samples of the inventory in use in the regions from which they came. Around 25,000 years later, as the glaciers of that ice age receded and the oceans filled once again, these aboriginal pioneers were cut off from interaction with the outside world. By the time Europeans reestablished contact in the 17th century, the 5,000 or so hunter-gatherers of Tasmania had reverted to a much more limited set of tools and a much simpler way of life. Apparently, left to their own devices, so to speak, and deprived of not only the progressive, but also the rejuvenating influences of trade, the Tasmanians entered a decline which ultimately erased much of tens of thousands of years of prior technological advance, just as the author's theory predicts.

Space-filling model
of oxytocin

As a contemporary test of his thesis, Ridley proposes our taking a closer look at the genetics of the oxytocin system in humans. This neurotransmitter, sometimes called the "cuddle hormone", present in all mammals, is implicated in the regulation of a variety of behaviors, in particular those having to do with female reproduction and infant care. Recent studies in human subjects, which Ridley cites, indicate that, in addition, oxytocin facilitates a tendency to take social risks, most significantly for his purposes, the extension of trust to strangers.

For exchange to gain a foothold there had to be, at a minimum, a suspension of the hostilities that erupted as a matter of course when bands of unrelated primates, including early humans, encountered one another. Ridley speculates that, in some sense, there was just the right kind of oxytocin, trust juice, as he calls it, flowing in the veins of our ancestors - and activating appropriately tuned receptors in their brains - to make a critical amount of social risk taking possible.

Once even a marginal inclination to barter with strangers was in place, though, it would have offered such advantages, that selective pressures favoring an even more robust "trust response" would have come into play, modifying the physiological mechanisms in humans by which oxytocin is produced and processed. If Ridley is right, we carry the biochemical markers for these behaviors with us today, and a targeted analysis of our genome should reveal a timeline for their appearance, a chronology that should be consistent with significant modifications beginning around 100,000 years ago.

It should be noted that by proposing this experiment, Ridley not only offers a test that could substantiate his hypothesis, but also one that could potentially undermine it. In a world replete with just-so stories masquerading as evolutionary biology, it is refreshing to have a theory to consider that flirts with falsifiability, a criterion that serves to differentiate serious science from plausible conjecture.

Frescoes of dolphins from
bronze age excavations
on the island of Crete

Although Rational Optimist does not directly address the age-old question of human uniqueness - that is, what feature of our biology or of our behavior sets up apart qualitatively, not only from our hominid ancestors, but also from extant species, most notably dolphins and other great apes - much of what Ridley has to say about the critical importance of social risk taking, as evidenced by the extension of trust to unrelated individuals, in the origin of barter and exchange would seem to have significant bearing on that issue.

Of course, the question of human exceptionalism is, itself, problematic; perhaps it is simply the case that we differ from other animals in a large number of small ways, something that, in fact, could be said about the standing of most any creature on this planet; and, understandably, it is difficult, if not impossible, to see beyond our anthropocentric biases in forming an "objective" determination about whether we occupy a special status in the biological world.

Whac-a-mole arcade game
(courtesy of Sakura)

Nonetheless, attempts to answer this provocative question have proven to be instructive, if not conclusive, with the call-and-response argument coming to resemble a version of the Whac-a-mole arcade game. In this variation the moles are candidate distinguishing human traits (e.g. bipedalism, pair-bonding, tool use, brain size, culture, language, symbolic thinking or empathy). In the course of play each contender pops its head out of its hole, hoping to dodge the ever-looming mallet of contemporary or ancestral counterexample. Suffice it to say, historically, moles have not fared well in this competition, although one would have to concede that some do battle on, battered but unbowed.

Sylvio Tuepke / New York Times

To the extent that there is a "last mole standing" in the aftermath all this whacking, that title might go to the characteristically human activity recognized broadly as "cooperation". As noted above for barter, complex collaboration, much richer than simple in-kind reciprocity, is well outside the the prosocial repertoire practiced by other primates. Indeed, the simple act of sharing food with strangers, a behavior that emerges, apparently without training, in human infants, and one wonderfully documented in Michael Tomasello's book, Why We Cooperate, finds no correspondent among our great ape brethren. It is, at a minimum, intriguing that this cooperative disposition of ours, in some sense an urge to help, which sets us apart us from other living species, also closely resembles the willingness to extend trust to strangers that Ridley proposes was instrumental in enabling the process of exchange that set us apart from our hominid ancestors.

Going out on a limb a bit, I might argue that Ridley's insight points us toward a different sort of resolution to the question of human exceptionalism. Perhaps it is the case that, on one hand, deprived of the opportunity to engage in exchange with outsiders, human groups - to borrow a phrase used by Darwin in Origin - revert to a state of nature, a condition in which they are much like a proverbial third chimpanzee, an admittedly interesting, but unexceptional, bipedal primate. Yet, on the other hand, it could be that, when the distribution of human bands makes routine contact possible over an extended period of time, the full potential of our facility for cooperation is realized and, we, as a result, do attain a stature that is unique in the animal kingdom.

Lasius niger - black garden ant
(courtesy of
Jens Buurgaard Nielsen)

From this perspective, our oxytocin-fueled inclination toward taking social risks can be seen as a genetic trait, but, in the sense of Richard Dawkins' extended phenotype, one that only finds meaningful expression when the geographical arrangement of human populations conforms to a critical configuration that allows barter to take hold. E. O Wilson has observed that individual ants, in some sense, don't exist outside the context of the colony to which they belong. Perhaps an analogous claim could be made for human beings, not so much that they don't exist outside of systems that support barter and exchange, but that, when they are isolated from such, their humanity is not fully expressed.

I'll close by noting that this line of thinking is not without practical, although not immediate, consequence. Since the dawn of the atomic age and, with it, the prospect of "assured destruction", followed in short order by our first tentative steps toward becoming a space-faring people, much has been made of the proposition that, in order to insure our survival as a species, we must dispatch some brave souls from among our ranks to self-contained orbiting cities or to settlements on nearby, or even distant, planets. More recently, the possibility of environmental collapse or asteroid impact has increased the sense of urgency that surrounds these proposed missions, with no less a great thinker than Stephen Hawking - the go-to commentator on all matters existential these days - recommending that it's time for us to start preparing "to go to a another star".

Artist impression of a Mars
colony with a cutaway view

I, for one, hope that the planners of these noble ventures keep Matt Ridley's hypothesis in mind when they go to their drawing boards, in particular, that they think carefully about how to maintain an exchange of ideas, if not goods, between far-flung human communities or devise some sort of technological or sociological fix to make up for its absence. It is sad to contemplate that we might indeed survive as a species, but not as the species we are, that any extraterrestrial colony, bereft of the progressive and rejuvenating influences of trade, in the broadest sense of that word, might as well be christened "New Tasmania".

I would like to thank my friend Bill Shropshire for many stimulating discussions that went into helping me prepare this essay.

The Wealth of Hominids - Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist" by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Dinesh D'Souza, in the Dark about Dark Matter and about Science

2010-07-25T10:00:00.061-04:00

Of all the attacks leveled against science by the religious faithful, the most insidious are the ones that cast religion and science as comparable approaches to understanding natural the world. In a debate with Christopher Hitchens at Notre Dame this past January conservative author and speaker Dinesh D'Souza showcased a variation of this kind of "we're just two peas in a pod" claim and, in doing so, succeeded in demonstrating a genuine failure to understand how science really works. In the process, he does no great service to religion, either.

In making his case for a faith-based approach to science, D'Souza proposes that the existence of God can be employed as a working hypothesis much like any other. And, as with any provisional hypothesis, he says it should be embraced when it helps account for phenomena which have otherwise resisted explantion. Seeking confirmation of this God of the gaps argument - familiar to us from the Intelligent Design controversy - D'Souza turns to astrophysics for an illustration of how science relies on the same kind of speculative thinking that religion does. Here is the background on the example he finds there to exploit.

Galaxy cluster ACO 3341, located
almost 500 million years away
(European Southern Observatory)

The Mystery of the Missing Mass
In the 1920s, not long after galaxies outside our own Milky Way were first identified, they were seen to arrange themselves into clusters, orbiting about one another, presumably, under the influence of their mutual gravitational attraction. Indeed, the working of gravity in these far, far away places was not unexpected. Contrary to popular conception, Isaac Newton's stroke of genius had not been in observing a falling apple - he was hardly the first to notice that things fall - but in his bold conjecture that the force responsible for causing his proverbial knock on the head was the very same force responsible for the motion of the planets about the Sun. Newton's theory proposed that gravity was universal, applying uniformly to everything, everywhere; to the objects of our everyday experience; to the planets and moons of our solar system; and, presumably, to galaxies, each consisting of hundreds of billions of stars, located millions of light-years away.

What took astronomers of the 1930s by surprise was that, when the amount of stuff in these galactic clusters was finally tallied, gravitational accounts did not balance. A census of the visible matter contained within them - stars and dust clouds and other such "luminous" things - resulted in a total mass insufficient to bind them in their mutual orbits. According to calculations the galaxies in these clusters should be flying apart at breakneck speed. The physicists faced a quandary: either Newton had got it wrong, and the force of gravity he proposed was, in fact, not universal, or their exhaustive attempts to catalog the constituents of these galactic clusters had left a significant amount of matter unaccounted for.

Bullet Cluster, best evidence
to date for the existence of
dark matter.

At first this astrophysical mystery went by the name "missing mass" and it was presumed to be an artifact of limitations of the observational techniques available at the time. Perhaps, for example, large numbers of dead or dormant stars had gone unobserved and, therefore, uncounted in the celestial tally. But even when astronomers refined their efforts at detection, their gravitational bookkeeping kept coming up short. To make matters worse, after a few decades passed, new astrophysical puzzles were encountered that also hinted at the existence of missing matter in other astrophysical contexts. Finally, and reluctantly, a working hypothesis came to be accepted. The vexing missing mass was assumed to be bound up in a heretofore undetected kind of "dark matter" which was characterized solely by its heft and its failure to shine. Of what it was actually composed, no one had a clue.

Next generation detector,
Xenon Dark Matter Project

Desperately Seeking Dark Matter
Now, according to D'Souza, in the same way that physicists have proposed the existence of dark matter as an explanation for an enigmatic phenomenon, the stability of galactic clusters in spite of an apparent insufficiency of mass, so too can we rely on the hypothesis of God to explain other mysteries of the physical world. He contends that such "presuppositions" are valid elements in the construction of scientific theories because they yield immense explanatory payoff; disconnected pieces of a puzzle fall into place and suddenly everything makes sense.

Is D'Souza right? Are "materialist" scientists and those who defer to faith-based hypotheses playing by the same rules? To see how the their approaches differ, consider this observation from a recent physics arXiv blog post - First Evidence That Mirror Matter May Fill the Universe? - regarding ongoing efforts to solve this problem.

Astronomers call this hidden mass 'dark matter' and physicists around the world are engaged in an increasingly desperate race to find evidence of it here on Earth. [emphasis added]

Now imagine, for a moment, an analogous report on the state of current investigations into some phenomenon or other "explained" by D'Souza's God presupposition:

Scientists call this hidden cause 'God' and researchers around the world are engaged in an increasingly desperate race to confirm His existence.

This comparison, of course, strikes us as ridiculous on its face; no one has ever embarked upon a search for God in order to confirm or refute a physical theory. Good Lord, how could such a search even be conducted? Perhaps more significantly, no teams of researchers have ever engaged in a desperate race to reveal God's existence.

What D'Souza fails to appreciate in his casting dark matter as just another presupposition is how unpalatable resorting to such a hypothesis is to physicists, one which they entertain reluctantly because the alternative, a rejection of Newton's theory of universal gravitation, would be even more distasteful. They tolerate "dark matter" as a convenient fiction, but won't rest easy until the composition of this mysterious substance is revealed, or until a more acceptable explanation steps up to replace it.

History confirms how earnest physicists have been in wrestling similar "presuppositions" to the mat. Interestingly enough, three examples involve a search for missing mass of one variety or another.

Neptune from the Voyager 2
flyby (1989).

A Missing Planet Found
The first hidden matter search came about with the discovery of Uranus by Sir William Herschel in 1781. With Newton's theory in hand, astronomers were able to calculate the orbit of the newly discovered planet, but by the early 19th century it had become clear that discrepancies existed between the predicted trajectory of Uranus and that which had been meticulously observed. These scientists were presented with a dilemma not unlike the one that their counterparts would face a century later: either Sir Isaac had gotten things wrong with his theory of gravity or a very significant mass had gone missing. Perhaps it took the form of a yet undetected outlying planet which was perturbing the motion of Uranus in its path around the Sun?

As disagreement between theoretical calculations and observational evidence became more and more convincing, a desperate race ensued. The hidden culprit, the planet Neptune, was revealed by Urbain LeVerrier in 1846.

First neutrino detection
in a bubble chamber (1970).

A Missing Particle Detected
In a second example of a missing mass mystery, by 1930 the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei into constituents components had been long-observed and carefully measured, yet, as a result, a vexing question arose. When the energies of all the particles emerging from the site of such a decay were added up there was an unexpected energy shortfall. Either a new kind of particle had fled the scene undetected, carrying with it just the right amount of energy (and, according to Einstein, mass) or the long-cherished principle of conservation of energy - far more fundamental for physics than even Newton's universal gravitation - would have to be abandoned.

This fugitive particle, dubbed the neutrino by Enrico Fermi in 1934, eluded capture for more than two decades; science did not breathe a sigh of relief until Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines detected it directly in 1956.

Schematic of Earth moving
through the hypothetical aether.

The Aether goes Missing - with a Payoff
As a final example of the search for a missing substance - and an illustration that presuppositions demand verification - consider the state of the physics of electromagnetic radiation - i.e. light - in the late 19th century. About the time of the American Civil War James Clerk Maxwell, in what has become to be regarded as the first unified field theory of physics, demonstrated mathematically that light traveled as a wave, not unlike the way waves spread across the surface of a body of a water. In much the same way that other wave phenomena required a supporting medium - for example, some gas or mixture of gases for sound - it was presupposed that a medium was necessary for the propagation of light, something that pervaded every nook and cranny of space. Confident in this hypothesis, physicists even gave the conjectured substance a name; it was called the luminiferous (light-bearing) aether.

An ingenious experiment to detect the existence of this mysterious stuff was undertaken by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in 1887. It failed utterly, but with that failure was planted the seed of Einstein's theory of special relativity which would blossom less than 20 years later.

As these examples illustrate, what Dinesh D'Souza does not understand is that for scientists a presupposition, better characterized as a working hypothesis, is not the end of an investigation, but a starting point. Presupposing the existence of God as an explanation, as D'Souza suggests, offers no avenue for further research, it is nothing more than prescription for investigative complacency; one might as well hang a "gone fishin'" sign on the laboratory door. Regardless of the spiritual rewards that some derive from a belief in God, as a scientific hypothesis it is worse than a blind alley; positing God as an explanation discourages further research, sometimes benignly, by declaring, falsely, that a difficult problem has been solved, and at other times malignly, by intimidating those who dare to seek honest answers based in physical law.

It is important to point out that D'Souza's attempt to exploit the dark matter hypothesis as evidence of the comparability of scientific and religious reasoning about the world is just the latest round in the assault on science by those who, like him, feel that a purely materialist view of nature is incompatible with their deeply held religious beliefs. In the late 1980s they took aim at the theory of evolution with their Intelligent Design hypothesis and were, in short order, discredited. Probing for vulnerabilities elsewhere they have recently turned their sights on astrophysics and neuroscience, hoping for more favorable battlefields.

But, as Ken Miller, professor of biology at Brown University and a practicing Roman Catholic, noted in his essay, The Flagellum Unspun, which convincingly refutes claims of "irreducible complexity", the cornerstone of Intelligent Design theory,

... the struggles of the intelligent design movement are best understood as clamorous and disappointing double failures – rejected by science because they do not fit the facts, and having failed religion because they think too little of God.

Sadly, Dinesh D'Souza seems compelled to repeat this same mistake, looking for confirmation of his belief in God in the wrong places, misrepresenting the enterprise of science and futilely struggling to insert the Deity in the forever-narrowing gaps in our understanding of the natural world.

Dinesh D'Souza, in the Dark about Dark Matter and about Science by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Splice the Movie - Paradise Fail

2010-06-16T13:50:00.029-04:00

This is my take on some of the ideas touched upon in the recently released science-fiction movie, Splice. Do not mistake it for a review. It does contain spoilers.

"Just imagine what we could learn!" With this seductive, and in some ways desperate, plea Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) implores her partner in love and in science and, potentially, in crime, Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody), to join her in the tasting of the tree of the knowledge of trans-human possibility. Even as the plot of Splice is sparked to life by this Faustian offer, it is already clear that this prideful duo of rock-star genetic engineers is heading for a most certain fall.

So, in some respects, Vincenzo Natali's serviceable sci-fi / horror flick is a variation of the story of The Exile from Eden, with a Generation X Eve and Adam arrogating the power of God to themselves, tampering with the primal forces of nature and discovering in the process that the knowledge of good and evil tends to be almost exclusively about the latter. Paradise fail, to use the vernacular.

Splice works also as an allegory of sorts for the trials of contemporary parenting: the agonizing over whether to have children and, once they appear, how to fit them into demanding professional lives; the hard-to-dispel worry that the sins of our fathers, and of our mothers, as painfully recognized in the flaws in our own upbringing, will be visited upon our own sons and daughters; and that we, heaven forfend, will "become" our own parents and thus be compelled to repeat the mistakes they made with us.

To make matters worse, there is the additional burden peculiar to the current crop of moms and dads, that is that children not only be reared, but also, in some sense, perfected; that parents are duty-bound to orchestrate the development of their progeny, even in utero, so that they may emerge as Baby Einsteins. Little do Elsa and Clive realize that all their prenatal fretting and fussing will result in something more akin to Baby Frank-einstein.

Which brings us to the main storyline of Splice, an updating of the Mary Shelly gothic-horror, proto-science-fiction classic. It is interesting to recall that Shelley's Frankenstein was subtitled "The Modern Prometheus". Its protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, had not set out to create a monster, but to benefit humanity by conquering death. Elsa and Clive, our post-modern Prometheans, somewhat less ambitiously, have set their sights on the conquest of disease - diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and the like - yet they nonetheless reap the unintended - and unwanted - consequences that are payback for their act of hubris.

The morally questionable experiments central to both the novel and the film are quite similar, new life is assembled out of inanimate biological bits and pieces. Shelley's homo novus is cobbled together from freshly-exhumed human body parts; in Splice it is the strands of DNA from disparate species that are woven to craft a new being, with human genes, bearing the taint of the propensity for predation as well as, it appears, that of original sin, tossed into the mix. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, though, who is thoroughly disgusted by his creation and abandons it in remorse, Elsa and Clive respond with a confused mixture of caring and revulsion, uncertain as the story progresses whether to nurture or to kill their new child.

Splice adds a new twist to the complicated relationship between the scientists and their creature, and that is the - sometimes mutual - feeling of sexual desire. It's not clear what writer-director Natali intends by this unexpected turn, which is disturbing more because of its implications of pedophilia and incest than the violation of a taboo having to do with inter-species love. Perhaps it represents the ultimate table-turning comeuppance for its "parents", Elsa and Clive, in a concrete "who's your daddy?" demonstration of dominance by their genetically misbegotten offspring. Or maybe it is the pretext for a Splice sequel, as suggested by a Rosemary's Baby moment at the end of the movie. It looks like we'll have to wait and see.

Splice the Movie - Paradise Fail by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

"Crazy Heart" - Just Duet

2010-03-05T13:59:00.004-05:00

This is a reposting of my short Facebook note on Crazy Heart. It does contain spoilers.

In a milestone role to rival his iconic turn in The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges gives us in Crazy Heart the character Bad Blake.

Bad, a 57-year-old country-music singer-songwriter in the process of personal and professional self-destruction, believes that a long-sought duet with sideman, now rival, Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) is what he needs to resuscitate his more than moribund career. Little does Bad realize that his true redemption lies within the constellation of other duets that define his life.

- There is the well-rehearsed, bickering call-and-response standard that pampered-star Bad belts out with his long-time manager, like the profane, but choreographed, squabbling of an old married couple, which hardly conceals the affection that has bound them together over the course of decades.

- There are the tawdry pas de deux that lothario Bad performs with his adoring female fans, middle-aged woman who seek him as a last opportunity to taste the passion that the everyday world has denied them, as he seeks in them refuge from the pain and loneliness of his life on the road.

- There is the reassuring ballad of friendship that wayward Bad shares with Wayne (Robert Duvall), a steadfast beacon in his storm-tossed life, who stands ever ready to guide him home and, ultimately, to safe harbor.

- There is the ancient song of invocation that poet Bad sings to beckon his muse, Jane (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a beautiful younger woman who stirs the creativity buried within his misery, and then, as muses must, returns to the realm of his dreams.

- There is the lullaby that erstwhile daddy Bad coos lovingly to Jane's 4-year-old son, Buddy, a moment of grace that allows him to imagine, if only briefly, the possibility of second chance at fatherhood, his first having been squandered in the recklessness of his youth.

- And then there is the true father-son duet which Bad eventually does perform with his one-time apprentice Tommy, a hard-fought lesson that genuine success for Bad has to do with finally learning how to yield center stage and share the spotlight.

What Jeff Bridges and director Scott Cooper have done In Crazy Heart is to orchestrate this chorus of pair-wise songs - each moving in its own way - to create the compelling and memorable character of Bad Blake, and, in doing so, they remind us, how each of our lives is composed, fundamentally, of a similar arrangement of intimate duets.

"Crazy Heart" - Just Duet by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

The Politics of "Avatar" - Pandora in Retrograde

2010-03-02T11:50:00.068-05:00

This is the final in my series of posts about James Cameron's recent science fiction blockbuster Avatar. Be advised, it contains spoilers.

Apparently the United States of America of the 22nd century - or some hardly distinguishable successor state - is still without a program of universal healthcare, is still engaged in military adventures in Latin America, and is still so unilateralist in its approach to global problem-solving that it has undertaken a planet-saving expedition across an interstellar expanse without assistance from other nations or their citizens.

Welcome to the terrestrial world of the year 2154 that James Cameron offers as the political context for his extraterrestrial science fiction action-adventure film Avatar, set on Pandora, a paradisaical moon of a gas-giant planet orbiting a nearby star and inhabited by an ancient, wise and noble race of blue-skinned humanoids, the Na'vi, who live in harmony with their pristine environment.

A more forgiving critic would say that such seeming anachronistic false steps were intended by the writer-director as commentary on contemporary American politics, but a case can be made that Cameron, visionary though he may be at creating imagined future landscapes, is a dinosaur when it comes to developing stories that unfold there.

As the buzz that surrounded the run-up to the release of Avatar let us know, Cameron had begun mulling over the ideas for his latest blockbuster since the mid-1990s, only a few years after Kevin Costner's Academy Award winning Dances with Wolves (1990) demonstrated the sustained box-office viability of the even-then recycled tale of a disillusioned white soldier who forsakes his own decadent kind and finds common cause with an ancient, wise and noble indigenous race who live in harmony with their (once) pristine environment.

Cameron has done Costner one better with Avatar and managed to incorporate elements from Tarzan mythology into his movie, having his white hero become not only a champion, but a god of sorts, to the adoring natives. In defense of Edgar Rice Burroughs, his Tarzan was reared by apes from infancy and, as a consequence, learned their ways and the ways of neighboring African tribes over the course of years. Cameron's alienated, dispirited ex-marine, Jake Sully, controlling the body of a human-Na'vi meat puppet, masters the world of Pandora and emerges as its great blue hope, after a course of study that would hardly constitute a semester abroad on planet Earth.

Honestly, I cringed at the point in the film when Sully in his Avatar skin, like some besotted cruise ship tourist, rallies the Na'vi troops before the climatic battle of the film with this call to arms, "we will send them the message, that this, this is our land!" Leaning forward in my seat in the theater, I strained, hoping to hear some lone voice cry out from the ranks of the assembled Na'vi army, "what do you mean we, Kemosabe?"

What I found even more insulting than this warmed-over "dances with Avatars" storyline was the tired old "despairing gimp" setup that Cameron uses in Avatar to launch Sully on his mission to outer space.

When we first meet our would-be hero we learn that he is a survivor of American military action in Venezuela - be warned, future Hugo Chávez - and has been wounded so severely that he has lost the use of his legs. Since it appears that employment opportunities for paraplegics on Earth in the 22nd century are bleak, our protagonist has opted to throw his lot in with some new-fangled version of the French Foreign Legion, mobilized to assist in the corporation-led plunder of Pandora, 6 light-years away.

Not fit for "real" soldiering, Sully has signed on to operate the body of an avatar, one engineered to his genetic specifications, and, using it, to go undercover as a member of the expedition's science team to spy on the Na'vi. This assignment will provide him with the opportunity not only to serve the cause of his dying home planet and that of his human comrades in arms on Pandora, but also, since the link that connects him with his avatar is utterly realistic, for all practical purposes, to walk again.

As unsettling as it is to contemplate that U.S. foreign policy of the future would offer little more than a continuation of its centuries-old failed gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, it defies credulity to propose that medical advances in the next century and a half will have been so meager that those suffering even devastating spinal-cord injuries would be left wheelchair-bound, without recourse to the benefits of either sophisticated prosthetics or mobility-restoring surgery.

In fact, Cameron acknowledges the likelihood of such progress, and suggests that such assistive technologies and restorative medical procedures do exist in 2154, but he indicates that they will be out of the financial reach of working class grunts like Sully, a disabled combat veteran, no less. So much for the prospects of universal healthcare anytime soon.

What is troubling about Cameron's decision to use Sully's paralysis as a critical plot device in Avatar is not so much his predictions about future medical advances or his opinions on contemporary healthcare policy, but the decision to cast Sully's story, in some respects, as a flight from physical disability. Without minimizing the hardships that accompany severe handicaps, the notion that disability makes life less than worthwhile is one that our society has struggled to get beyond for a couple of decades now. Yet in abandoning Earth for Pandora, it seems that Sully wants more than simply to forget, the traditional motivation for Legionnaires; he seeks a kind of corporeal oblivion, which Cameron grants, allowing Sully to toss aside his broken, and by implication useless, human body at the end of the film. Using disability as veritable death sentence as a premise for a movie would seem to be an idea whose time had come - and gone - some fifty years ago.

And who is this Jake Sully, destined to lead the Na'vi in an uprising against their human oppressors? What qualifies him to be the only dream walker, as the remotely controlled avatars are called, to be fully accepted by the natives? There are scientists who have donned hybrid human-Na'vi bodies, who have studied the ecology of Pandora, who have learned the ways and the language of the locals, and who have come to identify with their plight in the face of the inexorable expansion of the corporation-lead mining operation that is threatening their world. They have failed to gain that acceptance. Why has Sully been deemed worthy and these engaged researchers have not?

Well, it turns out that Sully, who couldn't locate Alpha Centauri B, Pandora's sun, on a star map to save his life, is distinguished from the brainy researchers by the fact he has a "strong heart". Apparently intellectual curiosity and a humane regard for other cultures don't mean a whole hell of a lot to the Na'vi. When it comes to picking friends, and, as it turns out, leaders, all you've got to have is heart.

I am not so naive as to imagine Hollywood and its mass market are prepared to embrace some eggheaded scientist-hero, but the fact is that Avatar has been characterized by commentators on the left and on the right as being critical of the contemporary American political scene. Far from this being the case, the film seems to endorse the cherished American delusion that true leadership derives from the heart and not from the head. Sarah Palin brought the recent National Tea Party Convention to its feet with the exhortation, "we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law." If the sentiments regarding leadership celebrated in Avatar are any indication, James Cameron could have written that line.

Interestingly enough, Avatar is widely perceived to be a criticism of contemporary American foreign policy because, with its mercenary expeditionary army and the gun-metal-gray, hermetically-sealed fortress city which serves as their base of operations on Pandora, Cameron has constructed a microcosm of the contract security forces hired by the U.S. government in Iraq and the Green Zone of Baghdad which serves as their headquarters and as their haven, fortified in such a way as to keep danger at a distance but also to make humanizing interaction with the local population impossible. But does Cameron's recreation of this state of affairs really constitute a political commentary, much less a scathing criticism?

In some respects James Cameron's Pandora recapitulates Bush-era Iraq all too well. By that I mean that, as with the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and the criminal misdeeds of Blackwater Worldwide and Halliburton, culpability for mistreatment of the Na'vi and the exploitation of their world lies not with real Americans like Jake Sully, but with sadistic "bad apples" and greedy, malevolent corporations. Far from criticizing the arms-length arrangement through which we have subcontracted our ethical responsibilities to those chartered to act in our name, Cameron perpetuates the notion that the American public is exempted from blame because, although willfully ignorant, we were, nonetheless, well-intentioned. Caught unawares, our noble cause was hijacked by miscreants and scoundrels.

I am not saying that Cameron could have told this part of his story otherwise - a commercial film that proposed to depict members of the armed forces of a future United States as heartless killers and elected political leaders as unapologetic war criminals would never see the green-light of day - but I am saying that his Avatar is little more than a recasting of a familiar anodyne fable in which the usual suspects - soldiers of fortune and evil corporations - are rounded up, presenting nothing of substance to upset the moral complacency of American audiences.

It's hard to know whether to attribute this kind of by-the-numbers storytelling to the out-sized ego of the director or a cynical approach to movie-making - after all, the box-office success of a James Cameron movie hardly hinges on the quality of its screenplay. Whatever the case, my primary criticism of Cameron in Avatar, and that is that he seems to think that transposing conventional - and often out-dated - story lines to a future time and a far-away place is the same as creating an interesting work of science fiction. His exquisitely realized fantasy worlds deserve better than to be used as backdrops for lackluster and retrograde stories from days gone by.

The Politics of "Avatar" - Pandora in Retrograde by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Sustainable Transportation Forum: Swiss Hit, Swiss Miss

2010-01-26T10:20:00.031-05:00

As a committed transit bicyclist and an occasional advocate for pedestrians in Atlanta, I was eager to attend last week's Sustainable Transportation Forum hosted by Georgia Tech and the local Consulate General of Switzerland, a 2-day public policy symposium which promised "to explore solutions to Georgia's growing traffic congestion."

I enjoy going to these kind of symposiums, and I imagine the excitement that I feel about them is in some way like the excitement my father felt at the prospect of making the trip from Atlanta to visit the City of Tomorrow at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

After attending the better part of the first day of the forum, I could confidently report that I had seen the future, and it was the Swiss national transportation network.

But like the Futurama of the 1939 Fair and similar exhibits at later world expositions, this is an elusive future, always beckoning, but forever out of reach; a tantalizing future city, draped in a facade of technological hopes but unanchored in any foundation of social and political reality, at least as far as transportation in metro Atlanta is concerned.

Representatives of Swiss rail and transportation agencies had been enlisted to introduce the "gathering of regional planners, advocates, policy makers, business leaders, and political decision-makers" to the remarkable Swiss transportation system and to highlight some of its most significant engineering and logistical achievements as the central parts of the program.

First and foremost among the featured projects was the Gotthard Base Tunnel, currently under construction and expected to open in 2018 at an estimated total cost of $8.7 billion. When completed, at 35.5 miles in length, it will be the longest tunnel - of any type - in the world and will not only cut passenger travel time between Zürich and Milan by an hour, but also significantly reduce the amount of through-traveling truck traffic on Swiss roads.

No less impressive than how well the Swiss have built their transportation network is how well they operate it. By manipulating the times trains arrive and depart and the speeds they travel between stops, Swiss Federal Rail is able to insure that trains leave regularly every half hour and are synchronized with not only other trains, but also buses, at some 28,000 stations around the country. An integrated national timetable stitches together all publicly- and privately-owned transport services; everything from high-speed trains to sight-seeing ships is included in this schedule. The level of planning required to coordinate the operation of this system, which functions as precisely as, shall we say, a fine Swiss watch, is phenomenal.

Ironically though, the most significant words spoken with regard to the reality of the future of public transportation in the Atlanta region were not those of the Swiss representatives in their technical presentations, but of Michael Meyer, Professor of Civil Engineering at Georgia Tech, a member of the introductory panel, and the person who had been asked to characterize the transportation problems to be addressed by the symposium - that is, the current and projected levels of traffic congestion in the Atlanta region - in order set the stage for the discussions to follow.

Having completed his assigned task with a few minutes to spare, Dr. Meyer struggled - out loud - with a difficult personal decision: should he wrap up and keep his commentary within his limited charter or should he take the opportunity to say important things that needed to be said, even at the risk of offending his hosts and souring the optimistic mood established by the opening speakers. Erring on the side of integrity, Meyer chose to speak his potentially discordant truths. It was like watching the story of a minor "profile in courage" in the making.

Professor Meyer began by noting that he had lived in Atlanta for more than 20 years and that, during that time, he has seen many fine transportation plans come and go. Indeed, he said that he had contributed to a number of them, and that, truth be told, had any of those plans been fully adopted, we would not be in the transit mess that we find ourselves in today. Finally, he concluded that the sad fact of the matter was that we had failed at providing citizens of this region with a quality transit network not because of any lack of good planning or shortage of technological know-how, but because we have lacked the leadership and the political will to get the job done.

What Meyer had to say with these cautionary words was an unexpected, but an oddly appropriate, kickoff for a transportation forum that could otherwise well be described as a dog-and-pony show for Swiss good planning and technological know-how.

Interestingly enough, the better lesson that the Swiss had to offer Atlanta and, by extension, the United States, was how central the principle of mobility as a basic human right is to the success to their national transportation enterprise. Each of the speakers touched on this point, but one in particular, Michaela Stoeckli, the general manager of the Swiss Rail Industry Association, spent some time with the issue. She explained that, because it was long agreed among the Swiss that residents, regardless of their level of income should have access to the kind of transportation services that support them in their practical and leisure activities, transportation initiatives, even expensive ones, were routinely approved in popular referendums by overwhelming majorities.

Now, admittedly, convincing Georgians that mobility is a basic human right - given that they and other Americans are hardly persuaded that access to life-saving medical care is a basic human right - is a hard sell. To add to this challenge, it is especially difficult for "outsiders" to participate in our national debates without being perceived as either patronizing or condescending.

But, as Professor Meyer observed, all the proposed engineering solutions for our transportation problems are for naught, absent the political will to follow through with them, and, it would seem, that progress here must start with a reorientation of our values.

In this respect, it is interesting to note that this particular forum was part of an ongoing program to promote exchanges of know-how between the U.S. and Switzerland called ThinkSwiss. Perhaps that is exactly what we need to learn how to do - "think Swiss" - and by that I mean recognize the benefits in store for us if we promote the right of mobility for everyone - so that we can once and for all realize the promise of the City of Tomorrow for transportation in the Atlanta area.

Sustainable Transportation Forum: Swiss Hit, Swiss Miss by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Game Over, "Avatar" Dude

2010-01-17T20:40:00.102-05:00

This is the third in a series of essays on James Cameron's recent landmark science-fiction film Avatar. Unlike the preceding posts, this one does contain spoilers.

Immediately lauded as a masterpiece of technical film-making and, simultaneously, disparaged for its lackluster story-telling, James Cameron's Avatar offers us something else to consider.

Although reviews often mention that the title is taken from the term for the character an individual adopts as a representative in a multi-user game or simulated community - avatar itself is the Sanskrit work for the descended incarnation of a Hindu deity - not much has been said about how thoroughly the director has fashioned a story that recreates many of the features of a video game.

Avatar is set in the year 2154 on the world of Pandora, a paradisaical moon of a gas-giant planet orbiting a nearby star and inhabited by race of tall, graceful, blue-skinned anthropoids, the Na'vi. There our hero, ex-marine Jake Sully, a paraplegic as a result of a combat injury on Earth, has been tasked to control - more aptly, to inhabit - a hybrid human-Na'vi body, genetically tailored especially for him. This "meat puppet", to borrow a coinage from William Gibson, enables Sully to pursue his assigned mission in the hostile Pandoran environment without the use of life-support equipment and to insinuate himself within the native population.

The perfect projection of Sully's consciousness into the body of his avatar over arbitrary distances is accomplished by use of what could reasonably be described as an electronic sarcophagus. When Sully climbs into this high-tech cocoon, lies down, empties his mind, and closes his human eyes, a seamless "psionic" connection is instantly formed, and his blue-skinned alter ego opens his eyes - in a literal flash.

So begins one of many cycles of digital death and rebirth for Sully, as his avatar ventures deeper and deeper into the world of Pandora, there to refine his physical prowess, to expand his knowledge of the Na'vi and their habitat and, bit by bit, to heal his war-ravaged soul.

The correspondence of Sully's hero's journey to that of a player in a fantasy role playing game is almost exact: Sully's avatar is his character in the game; the electronic sarcophagus is his exquisitely engineered game controller; each of his excursions into the world of the Na'vi is a turn of the game, and an opportunity to acquire knowledge or a skill that is critical to the advancement to the next level of play. Likewise, Sully's progress is marked by the kind of achievements that are the expected rewards which come with mastering a video game: the ability to travel safely through and fight adroitly in a challenging new environment, a facility with novel types of weapons, the recognition of admiring peers - and defeated rivals - leading to enhanced status within a community of worthies; and, of course, the coveted sexual relationship with the most desirable of the native females, Neytiri, who is herself an accomplished warrior.

In addition, much like an adept in a video game, as a result of his diligent striving, Sully gains access to the esoteric spiritual wisdom of his guest world. Armed with this knowledge he is able to lead the Na'vi to victory in the climatic battle of the film and, as final reward, shake off his damaged mortal coil, leave the community of venal, small-minded humans behind, and take up his rightful place - restored in body and purified in spirit - on Eden-like Pandora among the noble Na'vi. Game over, Dude!

What is striking in Cameron's realization of this premise is not only the way he uses his film to create parallels with on-line games, such as World of Warcraft, but also the way he suggests similarities with the cultural context in which these games are played. In this, our ordinary world, (mostly) adolescent males, debilitated not as a result of war wounds but due to persistent coach-potato inactivity, build their own makeshift electronic coffins out of available materials - such as sofa cushions and closed bedroom doors - into which they then climb to escape the demands of social interaction and the nagging of parents or girlfriends. With only modest exertion and the assistance of state-of-the-art game controllers, they are reborn as rampaging heroes in an alternate digital universe.

As compensation to the (mostly) real-world women cast aside by these self-exiled virtual combatants, Cameron offers this, the prospect of profound and effortless communion with their men by use of luminous bundles of exposed neural fibers which the Na'vi sport as ponytails and which function as a sort of digital biological interface for unmediated person-to-person connection. Given the solitary nature of on-line gaming - which makes conversation with already emotionally unavailable partners effectively impossible - this is a ray of hope that the game world itself will provide relief from the frustration with the failed conventional approach to building relationships, one which relies on spoken words to communicate thoughts and feelings and states of mind. Surprisingly, because of the appeal of this fantasy solution to girlfriends left behind, it appears that Avatar succeeds in a small way as something of a chick-flick, too.

And so, with Avatar James, Cameron has delivered not only an imagined world which is, in many respects, the realization of a video game, but also one which is a reflection of the effects this on-line gaming phenomenon has had on contemporary culture.

Game Over, "Avatar" Dude by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

"The Da Vinci Holmes" / "The Sherlock Code"

2010-01-04T12:17:00.022-05:00

This is a note I first posted to FaceBook motivated in part by the recent Guy Ritchie film Sherlock Holmes. I am re-posting it here also so that it can appear with my other film essays. It is a commentary on a genre of insipid, hyperkinetic action-mystery movies that has - sadly - been growing in popularity in recent years.

Egad, Watson, I could write one of these movies.

Essential Ingredients
- Pick a hero sleuth, an academic or intellectual outsider who knows how to throw a punch.

- Pick a sidekick, a loyal friend or brother and / or, perhaps, a woman of mystery.

- Pick a friendly cop on the inside, someone whose superficial disdain for hero sleuth masks a burgeoning respect.

- Pick a villainous cabal led by an evil master as an adversary.

- Pick a setting, cities with recognizable / picturesque locations work best because they are compact, making scurrying (see below) very practical; large amounts of money can be poured into period recreation and location shooting and the cost of writing the screenplay can, thus, be kept to a minimum.

Once these elements are in place, set the plot in motion with some requisite crime, the murder of a tertiary character or the theft of a something of historical or artist value, and let the scurrying begin!

Scurrying 101
- Have hero sleuth and sidekick scurry from recognizable / picturesque location to recognizable / picturesque location, ostensibly to nab evil master or thwart the progression of his nefarious, yet inscrutable, scheme.

- Have scurriers arrive too late at said locations - too late, that is, to nab evil master, but not too late to avoid a dust-up with members of villainous cabal or their brawny minions, allowing scurriers to demonstrate feats of derring-do and their not inconsiderable talents at punch throwing.

- Have friendly cop, optionally, arrive at said locations even later than hero sleuth and sidekick - too late that is to help out with the dust-ups, but not too late to demonstrate growing respect for hero sleuth and, occasionally, to place him under arrest.

- Have hero sleuth surmise something or other as a result of each visit to a recognizable / picturesque location, not to advance the plot in any significant way, mind you, but to insure that the selection of the next recognizable / picturesque location on the agenda can be announced so that the scurrying can continue uninterrupted.

- Repeat.

Planning Ahead
Make sure that recognizable / picturesque locations geographically form the outline of some sort of geometrical figure or hokey religious symbol so that hero sleuth can divine - from a hastily drawn map - the last the recognizable / picturesque location to which to scurry for the climax and denouement.

Climax and Denouement
- Have hero sleuth, sidekick and, optionally, friendly cop, whose undying respect for hero sleuth is now firmly established, converge on the final recognizable / picturesque location where they engage in an urgent battle with evil master and / or members of villainous cabal and / or brawny minions as the objective of the nefarious scheme is announced and some sort of doomsday clock ticks away.

- Have hero sleuth, sidekick and, optionally, friendly cop vanquish evil master, but not necessarily all members of villainous cabal; there are, after all, sequels to be considered.

- Have hero sleuth deliver three-minute extemporaneous just-so-story speech, accompanied by flashbacks of scurrying to and from recognizable / picturesque locations, that explains evil master's nefarious scheme in excruciating scientific and scholastic detail so as to dispel any notion that magic or supernatural forces were implicated in its execution and to seal hero sleuth's reputation as the renaissance man extraordinaire who can throw a punch.

An Alternative Recipe
Invest a small fraction of the not insubstantial production budget for the film in hiring writers who can develop characters fully, can write dialog that is more than an exchange of a handful of quips, and understand that the art of presenting a mystery lies in enlisting the audience as witnesses to its being solved and not as a classroom of schoolchildren to be assembled for a final lecture.

"The Da Vinci Holmes" / "The Sherlock Code" by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

"Avatar" - Nature Blue in Tooth and Claw

2010-01-03T14:00:00.041-05:00

This is the second of in a series of posts about James Cameron's new film Avatar.

As Luke Skywalker might say, finding fault with the science in science fiction films is about as challenging as bull's-eying womp rats from a T-16 back on Tatooine.

Yes, every now and then a science fiction film takes as a central premise an intriguing theory and expands upon it using plausible extrapolations of current technology and scientific knowledge. The movie Contact (1997) and its treatment of the search for and discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life shines in this regard.

More often, the science of a science fiction film serves as a device used to transport a conventional story to a dramatically different setting, where, stripped of the distractions of our everyday world, its themes can be amplified and so stand out in starker relief. This kind of borrowing is as old as the visionary 1927 silent science fiction masterwork Metropolis and its "scenes from the class struggle", set in a near-future urban dystopia.

It would be fair to say that Avatar falls squarely, and respectably, into this second category. Its narrative is so similar to Kevin Costner's 1990 Academy-Award winning film, that I began to refer to it as "Dances with Avatars" after only seeing the theatrical trailer. Director James Cameron re-situates this story of the American West, itself many times retold, to the Eden-like world of Pandora, where the encounter of a rapacious, imperialistic human culture with a noble indigenous people, living in harmony with their ecosystem, unfolds, in part, as a work of contemporary political commentary and, in part as cautionary environmental tale.

Science enters the picture, so to speak, in several ways.

Cameron has gone to some length in the early scenes to fashion a realistic spacecraft to be used to transport his human characters to Pandora, a moon orbiting a Jupiter-like gas giant planet of a presumably nearby star. The passengers, themselves, have been placed into some sort of cryogenic sleep, the better to endure the apparently lengthy voyage. Echoes of the technologies of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) are quite vivid here, and they remind us how diligently Stanley Kubrick labored - 40 years ago - to imagine realistic long-duration space travel. It makes the scientifically-minded among us wistful for the days before the invention of warp drive.

The Macguffin that drives the human plunder of Pandora is a mineral named - in the best self-mocking science fiction tradition - unobtanium. We are told little about other than that it is extraordinarily valuable, and that its mother lode lies directly beneath the arboreal habitat that is the hub of the community of the tall, blue-skinned, anthropoid natives called the Na'vi.

Although it would be hardly sensible to send a ship into deep space to obtain a "precious" resource that - given the technological advances that would make such a mission feasible - could be manufactured much more cost-effectively here on planet earth, this plot device has become such a fixture of the science fiction canon that it was long ago exempted from being considered a threat to the suspension of disbelief.

Oddly enough, Avatar's significance not only as a science fiction film but as a science film has little to do with technological gimmicks, like interstellar travel and a rare superconducting mineral, and everything to do with the unprecedented detail with which Cameron has crafted the biology - both flora and fauna - of the hypothetical world which serves as the setting for his film.

As the credits rolled at the end of Avatar I turned to my friend Carol Potter, a high school biology teacher in Gwinnett County, Georgia, a state not known for holding Darwin in particularly high regard, and said, "if it weren't for all the tall, lithe, athletic, semi-nude blue bodies, this movie could make a great addition to your curriculum on the theory of evolution." *

By that comment I did not mean to endorse Cameron's wide-eyed vision of an alien biosphere so interconnected that it behaves as though it were a single organism (in accordance with the speculative and widely-criticized Gaia hypothesis), but to point out that the director had sketched the outline of an intriguing version of an alternative Galápagos, a world in which familiar ecological niches are occupied by strange and exotic creatures related, mostly, by common descent. **

Unfortunately, the scientists of Avatar - exoanthropologists, one might call them - are consigned to secondary roles. What a difference it would have made had James Cameron seized the opportunity - in the very year that marked the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species - to position a scientist-explorer, and not a disillusioned imperial soldier, front and center as the hero of his movie. With more artistic daring this recycled tale of thwarted neocolonial conquest could have been replaced by a bold re-imagining of Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. Avatar could have taken its place as not only a technical tour de force of film production but also, by making a scientific adventure the center of its story, a work of science fiction of the highest order.

* Depiction of the naked human form, I imagine, is even less welcome in Georgia classrooms than the notion that we, as a species, are descended from apes.

** I say "mostly" here, because the humanoid Na'vi have 2 arms and 2 legs, unlike the 6-limbed creatures with whom they share Pandora. This concession to commercial necessity - that the Na'vi appeal to general audiences - is best captured by a quote from an interview with James Cameron in Playboy in which he says of the native heroine Neytiri that he knew from the start, “she’s got to have tits.”

"Avatar" - Nature Blue in Tooth and Claw by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

"Avatar" - James Cameron Dreams of Electric Actors

2009-12-22T16:30:00.022-05:00

This is the first of in a series of short posts about James Cameron's new blockbuster Avatar.

Make no mistake about it, out of the gate Avatar is a landmark science fiction film. People may argue whether it succeeds as a work of story-telling, but no one can deny that Cameron has orchestrated a combination of cutting-edge movie-making techniques to realize a vision of an alien world in a realistic and compelling way that will serve as the standard of comparison for science fiction films for years to come.

In this regard Avatar springs into the world full-blown, much as Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey did in 1968 - so different from its predecessors that it startles us, and demands we revise our expectations for the medium. Everything that came before is revealed to have been nothing more than cardboard spaceships sporting sputtering sparklers and bow-legged actors cavorting in foam-rubber monster costumes.

It's important to keep in mind that science fiction films, as much as they aspire to be movies about ideas, first and foremost strive to fabricate believable visions either of the future of our own planet or of the landscapes of others light-years away. With Avatar Cameron has triumphed by creating a marvelous new world for both his characters and his audience to inhabit.

In addition Avatar will likely establish itself as a watershed in the relentless march of cinema from its reliance on flesh-and-blood actors to the routine use of what may come to be called "synthetic" players. The melding of live action and CGI (computer generated imagery) through the use of motion-capture technologies will give way to the construction of genuinely autonomous virtual actors, informed, perhaps, by the smoky voice of Marlene Dietrich or the smoking curves of Marilyn Monroe.

So, with Avatar James Cameron has allowed us to glimpse another future world, one in which the film director has become a painter of characters, methodically composing actors from a palette of performers, some living, some dead, and some drawn solely from his or her imagination.

"Avatar" - James Cameron Dreams of Electric Actors by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

2012 - Who Lost Tibet?

2009-11-30T20:08:00.041-05:00

The world as we know it pretty much comes to an end by the end of Roland Emmerich's new globe-busting block-buster 2012. My apologies if this comes as a spoiler, but, honestly, revealing that an Emmerich film finds a way to decimate the population of the planet - flora and fauna - is like revealing that a romantic comedy winds up with its initially mismatched, bickering couple entwined in each others arms as the closing credits roll. Not exactly a surprise.

Apparently. such is the power of cataclysmic crustal displacement that no tectonic plate will be left unturned, as an infelicitous planetary alignment and a stampede of mutant solar neutrinos conspire to wipe every nation, save one, from the face of the earth. One nation is spared this particular fate, but not because it miraculously survives the natural disasters that Emmerich serves up, but because it has met an untimely editorial demise long before 2012 went into production. That nation is the nation of Tibet.

To watch this film is to be taken by an odd sense of geographical "dislocation", in a very literal sense of that word.

Scenes of Tibet and its people appear early on. Indeed, images of Tibet, including one of an iconic maroon-and-yellow-robed Tibetan Buddhist monk gazing meditatively as a tsunami sweeps across the mountains of the Tibetan Plateau and a Tibetan monastery is engulfed by waves in the distance, have been used to promote the movie. It is a Tibetan family whose acts of compassion and heroism deliver the American Curtis family, the featured characters, to a safe haven in the final act of the film, which unfolds on the crucial high ground surrounding Mount Everest, which itself lies near the border of present-day Tibet and within the land claimed by the ancestral Tibetan kingdom.

But the word "Tibet" is never uttered in the film. It is even absent from the map that is used by the Curtis family to direct their flight across a crumbling continent and a tsunami-riddled ocean to safety. Their destination is China, only China, a vast, monolithic China. It is as though, for purposes of 2012, Tibet has become "the province that dare not speak its name".

Now, what may appear, superficially, to be an act of omission is anything but. The elimination of references to Tibet in the film is the result of a high-level financial calculation, and it is also an illustration of what happens when the standing of a culture perched on the roof of the world runs afoul of the bottom-line of one of the most expensive movies ever made.

The fact of the matter is that the cost for making and marketing 2012 is estimated to exceed a quarter of a billion dollars. There is no way on God's green earth - or on Roland Emmerich's lava-riven one - for the people and corporations who invested in that film to turn a profit without massive international ticket sales. Critical participants in that prospective box-office are tens of millions of Chinese movie-goers. And there is also no way, given the current political climate, that the People's Republic would tolerate the distribution of a mass-market film that placed Tibet or Tibetans anywhere near front and center.

Be that as it may, I must admit to being taken aback that Emmerich's kowtowing in response to either actual or to anticipated editorial demands by the Chinese authorities would result in the removal of every mention of Tibet from the 2012 screenplay. Sadly, given the money at stake, some amount of obsequiousness on the part of the director could have been expected, but what Emmerich has done here by tossing Tibet under the bus - or the ark, as the case may be - approaches the Orwellian.

The phrase "memory hole" was devised by George Orwell in Nineteen Eight-four, his classic dystopian novel set in a near-future totalitarian state, as a nickname for the chutes into which potentially damaging or embarrassing political documents - even scraps of paper - were tossed to be incinerated and thus expunged from the historical record.

From all appearances, every allusion to Tibet was excised from the production documents of 2012 by is creators, and the resulting scraps of paper were collected and tossed down a Tibetan memory hole, one made to order for the film.

Admittedly, artists make compromises to realize their most cherished visions. But what artistic vision was realized by Roland Emmerich in making of 2012 that was so worthy that it demanded that he purge the words "Tibet" and "Tibetans" from his movie, inconvenient bits of truth, jettisoned in the pursuit of globe-busting box-office receipts? Unfortunately, the answer is, "none at all."

2012 - Who Lost Tibet? by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

District 9 - Yes, We Need Another Hero

2009-11-21T16:29:00.022-05:00

I've been working on a essay about Neill Blomkamp's "District 9" since late summer and it has morphed into a dissertation. What follows is a summary - my take on the movie as a first installment in a film saga that a re-imagines the "hero's journey" in new and interesting ways.

Cutting-edge science fiction films are expected to be technically ambitious, to employ the latest in computer-generated imagery and bring to life alien creatures, other-worldly environments and marvels of engineering which previously existed only on the printed page or in a director's imagination.

Neill Blomkamp's District 9 succeeds in this regard. And it does so in a way that reminds us that special effects are most - shall we say - effective when, like accomplished supporting actors, having been introduced with modest fanfare, they retreat from the limelight and allow the lead performers to get on with the show, all the while laboring diligently, but unobtrusively, in service of the production.

What one doesn't expect is that a science fiction film introduce us to an intriguingly different kind of hero and launch him on a remarkably different kind of journey. District 9 does just this.

We are accustomed to our cinema heroes being promoted from the ranks of rogues. They may start off as hard-boiled detectives or egoistic renegades, for example, but they are soon revealed to be fundamentally decent, and even to posses the capacity for selfless courage. Such reluctant heroes are good - even noble - men, beaten down by life's tragedy or by lost love, who have cynically turned their backs on the world of good deeds.

This is not at all the case with Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copely), the more-than-reluctant hero of District 9. We first meet him in a non-descript contemporary office setting where he is an undistinguished middle-level bureaucrat, a cog in a paramilitary corporation that goes by the name Multi-National United (MNU). (Think Blackwater Worldwide on steroids.) MNU has been contracted to manage the lives of the million or more extraterrestrial castaways, referred to disparagingly as prawns, who have been marooned in Johannesburg, South Africa since 1989.

Twenty years on, the prawns live in a squalid squatter community, the District 9 of the movie's title, on the outskirts of the city. Disliked and unwelcome, they are about to be forcibly relocated to a new home miles away, which turns out will be little more than an out-of-sight concentration camp. Possessing none of the ambition that it would take to advance on his own, Wikus has been designated by his scheming father-in-law, a high-ranking MNU executive, to lead the prawn eviction.

Although the epithet "little Eichmann" has been recklessly misapplied of late, it is hard to come up with a more fitting characterization for Wikus. Like Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's final solution, Wikus is not a bad man, at least according to any superficial reckoning. Friendly and self-effacing, he offers a ready, if somewhat nervous, bonhomie to co-workers and strangers alike. Hardly menacing, so desperate is he to avoid confrontation that he comes across as a dithering coward. And, to seal his "good man" bona fides, Wikus is a devoted husband to his beloved wife, Tania (Vanessa Haywood). So besotted is he with her, that the mere mention of her name sends him into a worshipful reverie.

But Wikus is also professionally engaged in a monstrously brutal enterprise, one which asks him to commit morally reprehensible acts as a matter of daily routine. For example, he does not hesitate to threaten the well-being of a prawn child in order to elicit compliance from its father with a relocation order. Similarly, for nominally "hygienic" purposes, Wikus orders the torching of a nursery of prawn larvae, explaining to the camera crew documenting the eviction that this approach to the problem is far more efficient than the cumbersome procedure of destroying the developing infants one-at-a-time.

What distinguishes Wikus, a veritable Eichmann manqué, from the maestro himself is that he is not the author of the oppression that he dispenses. Not much more than a rule-bound MNU functionary, he follows orders and does his job, all the while trying not to draw much attention to himself. In fact, Wikus is thrown off balance by the promotion that his father-in-law foists upon him. No company man, he would prefer, given the option, to be at home with his adored Tania, basking in the glow of their eternal puppy love.

To put it bluntly, the problem with Wikus is not so much that he is evil, the problem is that he lacks a soul.

The challenge for Blomkamp in District 9 is, therefore, to stir Wikus from his ethical torpor, to awaken him to the reality of the suffering of others, to afford him the opportunity for redemption for his sins, and to launch him on the essential hero's quest, and that is the quest for a deeper understanding of oneself and a more humane appreciation of a wider world.

In this way District 9 announces itself as the first installment of a film saga in which Wikus, an unlikely Ulysses, is forced kicking and screaming into a miserable exile - ironically in plain sight - whence he begins his own odyssey, a desperate struggle to find his way back home and back into the arms of his beloved Tania.

Blomkamp's creative re-imagining of the beginning of this epic story is both creative and exciting. I look forward to seeing how Wikus's voyage continues.

District 9 - Yes, We Need Another Hero by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Anti-Vaccination - A Real Crime with Bill Maher

2009-10-25T16:15:00.060-04:00

You know you're in trouble when Bill Frist makes a fool out of you in an impromptu scientific debate on a nationally-televised talk show, especially if it is your own nationally-televised talk show.

Frist, if you will recall, is a heart surgeon and erstwhile Republican Senate majority leader who, in 2001, damaged his reputation as a doctor, if not a politician, by challenging the accepted diagnosis that Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state based only on viewing a videotape. This "learned" opinion was offered in support of federal legislation hastily constructed to prevent the removal of a feeding tube that was keeping that brain-dead woman alive. His professional misbehavior in this case will serve for years as on object lesson in the improper application of medical authority.

That said, it appears Bill Frist knows his way around peer-reviewed medical journals and appreciates the significance of the results of well-run clinical trials. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Bill Maher, his opponent in their argument over the safety and effectiveness of the H1N1 (swine) flu vaccine. It would be an understatement to say that Frist emerged as the victor in this dust-up with Maher on Real Time with Bill Maher; to use the vernacular of YouTube where this clip of their debate has been posted, Maher was thoroughly pwned. This blog in The New York Times reaches a similar conclusion.

The combination of intellectual dishonesty and scientific ignorance exhibited by Maher in this short exchange is especially disappointing to me, since, prior to my learning about his association with the anti-vaccination movement, I had held him in high regard, both as a comic talent and as a useful instigator of public discussion on controversial issues of the day. But, by characterizing the government as being categorically untrustworthy and by asserting that vaccinations are intrinsically ineffective, Maher demonstrated a willingness to resort both to the kind of demagoguery popular with right-wing conspiracy theorists and to the kind of misunderstanding of the theory of evolution popular with know-nothing creationists.

So why single out Bill Maher for criticism? After all, there is no shortage of anti-vaccination alarmists, stirring unfounded fears about this important public health matter, although, admittedly, few with the kind of national audience that Maher commands. What makes Maher a conspicuous target for me is not his opposition to respectable medical research, per se, but the fact that, as a very public atheist, he ordinarily champions the cause for the skeptical examination of the very kind of irrational claims that support his anti-vaccination position.

Maher's atheism has probably best become known as a result of his 2008 movie, Religulous, an entertaining and, at times, thought-provoking road trip through the world of mainstream and fringe religious belief. The film consists of (mostly) friendly encounters between Maher and God-fearing folk, during which the usually iconoclastic Maher (mostly) sets aside his trademark mocking tone and, instead, engages his opponents and with bemused curiosity and a modicum of respect.

I imagine that the relative popular success of Religulous was one reason why Maher was chosen by the Atheist Alliance International to receive the 2009 Richard Dawkins Award at their convention this month. Yet, given Maher's views on vaccination, how can his selection for this honor by a group that consistently identifies itself with scientific rationalism be explained?

As far as I can tell, this misstep has something to do with a shift of the focus within the atheist community, where championing of the power of reason has been displaced, to some extent, by blanket opposition to religious belief. The resulting difference of opinion has given rise to a tension among non-believers which was featured in a recent story on NPR's Morning Edition (A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists). This dispute - not unlike the one that raged between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks in the years prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917 * - is primarily one concerning tactics with, on one extreme, the "live-and-let-live" atheists, endorsing an ecumenical form of constructive engagement with believers and, on the other, the "take-no-prisoners" atheists, advocating relentless confrontation brimming with contempt and ridicule.

What is often lost in this internecine squabble is that the fundamental intellectual program of atheism should be based not on opposition to religion, in and of itself, but on opposition to that kind of unreason upon which religion often relies, which can be at times a touchstone for harmless personal observance and at others, the cornerstone of despicable public policy.

Sometimes the purveyors of unreason emerge from within our own ranks. Or, as Walt Kelly observed in his most memorable Pogo quotation, "we have met the enemy and he is us."

Which brings me back to Bill Maher.

While the "zero-tolerance" atheist commanders have been directing a frontal assault on religious belief in all its forms, an agent of corrosive unreason, namely Maher, not only has been operating openly within their home territory, but, indeed, has been receiving citations for his meritorious service to their cause. Ironically, it would be hard to identify a religious leader in this country today who represents more of a concrete threat to the health and safety of his fellow Americans than Bill Maher. Encouraging his viewers, specifically pregnant women, not to receive the H1N1 vaccine is so reckless that it borders on the criminal.

The potential danger of such misguided advice was illustrated in an article from last week's Science Times, Flu Story - A Pregnant Woman's Ordeal, which details the story of Aubrey Opdyke, who, as a result of contracting swine flu in late June, lost her baby, was hospitalized for four months, spent five weeks in a coma, suffered six collapsed lungs and a near-fatal seizure.

Although Maher would likely dismiss Aubrey's story as an ignorable anecdote, as he did Bill Frist's report of the death of an otherwise healthy man in his thirties from an H1N1 infection, the facts of the matter are that her personal tragedy is incontrovertibly linked to H1N1 and that the threat posed by the swine flu virus to pregnant women has been established in carefully scrutinized epidemiological studies. In all likelihood, had an H1N1 vaccine been available before Aubrey was infected and had she been vaccinated with it, she and her baby would be living happy, healthy lives today.

If the insidious recommendations of Maher and other anti-vaccination crusaders are widely adopted, many more people will become infected with H1N1, some of these will experience a fate similar to Aubrey Opdyke's, and others, ones far worse.

So, now is the time for the atheist community to step up to the plate, thank Bill Maher for his service to the cause of reason in other regards, but remind him, in no uncertain terms, that the fight for rationality is not restricted to defeating dangerous religious beliefs, and that it must also confront so-called scientific claims not grounded in the results of systematic peer-reviewed research, especially claims that jeopardize public health.

* The Mensheviks were thoroughly pwned.

Anti-Vaccination - A Real Crime with Bill Maher by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

The Nobel Peace Oscar

2009-10-11T19:30:00.023-04:00

There's no way I'm going to wade headlong into the contretemps over the awarding of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. It hardly makes sense to me to engage in a debate about whether Barack Obama does or doesn't deserve that honor, when there appears to be no consistent basis for determining who the winner of the prize should be. Instead of arguing about the worthiness of this or that recipient we should be focusing our questions on what the Nobel Peace Prize is - or should be - about.

Take this quote from the Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland, for starters.

The question we have to ask is who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world.

Perhaps this is an accurate statement of some committee guideline or other - I don't know - but it strains credulity to suggest that the prize is awarded based primarily on events of the previous year, given that a cursory examination of the list of past peace prize recipients indicates everything to the contrary. Admittedly, the qualification for nomination for the prize is dictated by a submission deadline, and the prize itself is associated with the year of its award, but to confine the "eligibility" based on the calendar year is to make the Nobel Peace Prize resemble the Oscar competition. Certainly some advances in peace are of such moment that they demand almost immediate recognition, but seldom are the implications of diplomatic breakthroughs, for instance, fully realized in such a short period of time.

The comparison of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is apt in other ways. Award of the Oscars is, nominally, based only on the talent and craft of the competitors. But, of course, the politics - of both the films and the actors under consideration - influence the process and jockeying by contenders for last-minute year-end theatrical release - a brazen acknowledgement of the limited attention span of members of the Academy who vote for the awards - has become an accepted tactic. The peace prize selection seems sometimes to be subject to similar caprice, driven by perceived political opportunity and late-breaking news.

Now, of course, the work of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is necessarily political, at times even pointedly so. The award of the prize to Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991 was, in part, motivated by the immediate political interest of assuring her safety by drawing international attention to her struggle and the threat posed by the Myanmar State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC, a disaster of an acronym, if there ever was one). Using the prize for this kind of humanitarian intervention, though, stands in stark contrast to sending abstract messages of approval for the changing of administrations in the United States, for example.

The Oscars can be forgiven for their stepping outside strict guidelines - to the extent they exist - for their selection process. The Academy is, after all, a large association of member artists, and the results of their vote are little more than an collective expression of personal opinions. The Nobel Peace Prize Committee is another kind of beast entirely. It is a small, deliberative body, and we have every right to expect that their choices be based on a well-considered - and clearly stated - philosophy.

To that end, I would recommend that the committee take a careful look at their history of "successful" awards, that is those that have stood the tests of time and repeated scrutiny.

One category, which appears early on in the history of laureates, includes ambassadors and political leaders who, through their bold action and diplomatic prowess, have worked to end ongoing armed conflicts. Anwar Sadat comes to mind in this regard. Then there are the institutional winners, such organizations as the International Committee of the Red Cross or Amnesty International or Doctors without Borders, who have created and sustained non-governmental programs that labor year in and year out, over periods of decades, in the furthering of human rights and human dignity.

But, lest the Nobel Committee lose sight of their mission and hopelessly dilute the "brand" of which they are, in some sense, only temporary custodians, they must remember to turn their spotlight routinely on heroic individuals - not government officials - in the struggle for peace and justice; Martin Luther King, Jr, Albert Schweitzer, Desmond Tutu, Rigoberta Menchu, Nelson Mandela are examples. They constitute the central pillar of the peace prize. Their work - in the face of persistent personal danger and in spite of repeated personal trials and disappointments - reminds us of the fact that the struggle for peace is essentially an individual struggle, one in which we can all aspire to participate.

So, first and foremost, the Nobel Committee should see announcement of the peace prize award as an opportunity to elicit from us, not hair-splitting debate, but admiration and hope. This is, ultimately, what the Nobel Peace Prize is about. Of course, there will always be controversial choices, but people will maintain confidence in the selection process as long as it not considered arbitrary and, instead, is consistently grounded in recognizing the lesser-sung champions in the struggle for a better world.

The Nobel Peace Oscar by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Why We Fight - For Science

2009-10-06T20:00:00.042-04:00

A couple of nights ago, on the edge of the meadow at Piedmont Park, over a convivial dinner that included an appropriate amount of beer and wine, the conversation turned to science - more precisely to how to promote interest in science to the public at large. What, in conventional circles, would have been an unusual dinner-time topic, was an unexceptional one with this group, since we were members of the Atlanta Science Tavern, and we are given to talk about science every chance we get.

Enamored with science. but, somewhat blinded by our adoration, we are sometimes puzzled that others don't share our enthusiasm for the object of our affection. So, when we get together, we often wonder, "how can we encourage our friends to better support and appreciate science?"

A common answer to this question begins with a recitation of the connections between important developments in the history of science and the benefits that have accrued to modern society as a result: the double helix of DNA and cancer-fighting medical diagnosis; quantum physics and high-performance computer chips; genetic engineering and increases in agricultural productivity; Maxwell's theory of electromagnetic waves and near-instantaneous global communications; Newton's orbital mechanics and hurricane tracking. The list goes on and on. It is extraordinarily convincing.

[So as not to whitewash the matter, I readily acknowledge that science has been implicated in its share of failures and catastrophes. On balance, I believe that science comes out ahead in the cost-benefit tally, but some, notably Theodore Kaczynski - better known as the Unabomber - have constructed serious arguments to the contrary. Should, for example, the most dire predictions for global warming be borne out, Ted may well be proven right for his skepticism about technology being an unequivocal force for good, although he should never be excused for the psychotic tactics he used in trying to disrupt its advance.]

Although this kind of utilitarian argument for science is persuasive, I find it, in some respects, disingenuous and, in others, incomplete. It is less than forthright in that it fosters a misconception about why people undertake scientific careers. No doubt there are those who do so motivated primarily by their interest in benefiting mankind, but, in my experience, scientists are, more often than not, driven by an unabashedly self-centered desire to better understand the world in which they live. Public service, although a welcome side effect, is not preeminent among their personal goals. In addition, although arguing for science based on its practical applications may be the strongest hand we have to play in general, the fact of the matter is that many significant fields of scientific research have no chance of bearing technological fruit.

On the morning of the day of the informal Science Tavern dinner the New York Times had published a front-page article announcing the successful reconstruction of a skeleton nicknamed Ardi, the fossil remains of 4.4 million-year-old hominid, and a member of a likely bipedal species which may turn out to be a direct ancestor of our own. To say the least, it would be quite a stretch to come up with a justification for supporting such a masterwork in paleoanthropology based on its potential contribution to our practical technological progress.

I am no stranger, personally, to the rather quixotic pursuits that are part and parcel of basic research. As a graduate student in the late 1970s I worked with a group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) studying neutrino interactions. Neutrinos are subatomic particles notorious for having little or nothing to do with the real world. Cruising at near the speed of light, they would hardly notice planets placed in their path; the Greta Garbo of elementary particles, after all is said and done, they want to be alone. Consequently, they are seldom considered to be of much practical use, although a once-secret patent was issued for the far-fetched scheme of employing neutrinos to communicate with deep-ocean submarines. Why would anyone pay to study them?

Likewise, what is true about neutrino research in particular is true about the enterprise of elementary particle physics more generally; outside the realm of speculative science-fiction, it is hard to imagine how the knowledge revealed in the course of these investigations into the fundamental structure of matter could lead to anything of practical value. But the value, practical or not, of such basic research is a question we cannot avoid. CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a Europe-based successor to the accelerator at Fermilab, and the most ambitious instrument yet devised to advance our understanding of the submicroscopic workings of the universe, is scheduled to begin full-fledged operation within a year, at a cost of almost $6 billion. How do we begin to justify such an extravagant expense, given that there is no reasonable prospect of deriving practical benefits from the results that the experiments that will be performed there will produce?

A very similar question had been posed to post-war American researchers, during an era when that country, which had placed a high-stakes wager on the success of the Manhattan Project and had won, was eager to fund the research efforts of the generation of scientists who had participated in the development of the atomic bomb. Robert R. Wilson was not only one of the best of that wartime cohort of physicists, he was also a sculptor, an architect, and the driving force behind the development and construction of Fermilab, as well as its director for a number years, including the brief period that I worked there.

In 1969 Wilson was called before a joint congressional committee on atomic energy to give an accounting as to why the public should continue funding the building of his giant proton accelerator, which, when completed, would measure almost 4 miles in circumference and cost over $250 million, at a time, it should be recalled, when $250 million was a significant line-item in the federal budget.

It was the height of the cold war, and any relationship to military purposes could have been offered by Wilson as an explanation and would have been accepted on the spot. But Wilson, who had been deeply affected by the regret he felt for his work on the atomic bomb and had distanced himself from the defense establishment as a result, did not take this easy way out. Instead, declining to use "national security" as a justification, he said this of his Fermilab project:

It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

Promoting public appreciation of science in this way is much more challenging than appealing to concrete interests based on the expectations of advances, for example, in nutrition or healthcare or transportation or power production or consumer electronics or, in Wilson's case, national defense. But the fact of the matter is that it is the only honest way to argue for public support for many areas of basic research, and often more accurately reflects the motives of those engaged in scientific endeavors. In addition, it serves to reframe the debate about what genuinely constitutes the public interest and expands the conventional definition beyond concrete practical concerns. Ultimately the triumph of our civilization is not only the elevation of our comfort and our security, but also of our culture.

The Movie "Moon" and the Morality of the Scapegoat Bargain

2009-07-24T17:50:00.031-04:00

[If] the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which [proposed] utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far‑off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? - William James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life

In his 1891 address before the Yale Philosophical Club William James pondered the origins of our "moral perceptions" and concluded that some are likely "brain-born" and that their violation elicits an autonomic sense of revulsion in us. He uses as an illustration the scheme above in which one "certain lost soul" is forced to suffer so that, somehow, the rest of humanity might live lives of unimagined happiness.

Of course the notion of the scapegoat, traditionally one punished to purchase the redemption of a community of believers, was not new with James. The scapegoat ritual described in Leviticus has been our prototype for centuries, but the practice of animal and human sacrifice in any one of a number of ancient cultures could serve just as well as an example. What James has done in his taut rendition is to both universalize the scapegoat bargain and simultaneously magnify its moral dimension. The benefits are not restricted to the members of a particular religious group, but extend to all mankind. And the price paid by the victim is not a quick and certain death but a life of unending torture.

James was not the first modern writer to confront the essential moral questions raised by the scapegoat bargain. In his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, published 10 years before James's Yale address, Fyodor Dostoyevsky explores a similar arrangement in a passage concerning the parable of the Grand Inquisitor.

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature ... and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?

Almost one hundred years later, Ursula K. Le Guin, first crediting James and later acknowledging Dostoyevsky as a likely influence, published her short story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, in which she explores the same moral dilemma within the confines of a small universe of her own devising.*

Although these ancient and contemporary conceptions of the scapegoat bargain differ in many respects, they are similar in that they are all metaphysical in nature. In other words, there is no physical mechanism that connects the suffering of the selected victim with the benefits others derive. In the Old Testament the connection is presumed to originate as part of the covenant between God and his chosen people. In Karamazov it emerges, by fiat, from the very "fabric of human destiny".

Nonetheless, the question could be posed: Might it be possible to reformulate this metaphysical arrangement in plausibly realistic terms? With his science fiction film, Moon, writer-director Duncan Jones has done just this.

The utopia of the near-future world that Jones imagines in Moon is, unlike its 19th-century forerunners, not one predicated on the possibility of human moral perfectibility. Instead it is founded concretely upon the availability of an inexhaustible source of clean energy, an isotope of the element helium, He3, which is used to fuel thermonuclear reactors across the face of the globe. In Moon, limitless, inexpensive, carbon-free electrical power has, it appears, eliminated the contention for resources that has historically been the root of human conflict and, in turn, ushered in a golden age of plenty, for rich and poor nations alike.

Troubling moral complications arise in this brave new energy-rich world because, it turns out, precious He3 must be scraped from the surface of the far-side of the Moon - James's "far-off edge of things - by means of a vast mining operation which, in spite of advances in technology, is not entirely automated. This exquisitely engineered, thoroughly computerized He3 factory has one flaw, and that flaw is that it requires the services of a single human being to keep the extraction bulldozers running smoothly and thus insure an uninterrupted flow of utopia-sustaining fuel to planet Earth, a quarter of a million miles away.

For Moon this lone individual - James's "certain lost soul" - is astronaut Sam Bell, who, when he is introduced to us, is desperate to soon conclude his 3-year tour of duty on this lonely lunar outpost. At first glance Sam, dispirited and disheveled, strikes us more like a beaten-down refugee than a right-stuff-bearing spaceman. Separation from his wife and young daughter, not to mention utter isolation from other members of his species has taken an enormous emotional toll on Sam. We pause to wonder how any "modern" corporation could be so morally bankrupt as to contract for the kind of labor that would result, inevitably, in such severe psychological decline. Little do we know that the crimes inflicted by his employer on Sam - and, shall we say, others very much like him - are far worse than we even dare to imagine.

As the startling moral transgressions that underlie the scapegoat bargain in Moon are revealed, we come to appreciate how masterfully Jones and screenwriter Nathan Parker have taken the metaphysical problem outlined by James and Dostoyevsky and created a convincingly naturalist realization. Not only does Moon succeed in its own right - as a character study and as a suspense-thriller - it also succeeds as an exemplary work of science fiction in that it grabs hold of a profound, but abstract, philosophical question and recasts it as a flesh-and-blood human tale, brought to life by plausible speculation that ventures just beyond the limits defined by our current scientific capabilities.

* See this blog post, The Scapegoat in Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ursula K. Le Guin, and William James?, by Horace Jeffery Hodges for an insightful discussion of the treatments by these three authors.

Is "Flat" Science "Real" Science?

2009-06-01T18:37:00.026-04:00

In his informative - and entertaining - talk at the May meeting of the Atlanta Science Tavern, entitled Artificial evolution: a guide for hobbyists, Ichiro Matsumura, Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Emory University School of Medicine, began by reviewing the historical patterns of general scientific progress and proceeded to focus on his research efforts which attempt to explain how complex biochemical pathways of cells originate and adapt. He concluded his presentation by discussing the emerging community of unorthodox "scientists", well outside the academic and corporate mainstream, who are pursuing experiments similar to his own, but in kitchens and basements, far removed from the luster - and expense - of state-of-the-art university laboratories.

So, in some ways Ichiro's talk was a presentation of his recent discoveries about how complex cellular processes evolve, but in other ways it was a call for science to return, at least in part, to its table-top roots. Apparently, these days an amateur with a few hundred dollars and kitchen counter space to spare can purchase the materials and equipment necessary and, in short order, alter the genetic makeup of commonly available bacteria. For Ichiro this represents a "flattening" of the scientific enterprise, a welcome alternative to the "hierarchical" restrictions of conventional science that require not only professional credentials, but large sums of money, often acquired only after running the exhausting grant application gauntlet of established funding agencies.

I share Ichiro's excitement for the opportunity that these low-cost-of-entry home laboratories have created for more people to become involved in science-oriented hobbies. Like him, I think that, within the constraints demanded by public safety, this kind of experimentation should be encouraged. Also, like Ichiro, I believe that the spread of these do-it-yourself labs is inevitable. With increasing economies of scale, the costs will only drop and, with Internet resources, the essential technical information will only become more available. The genie is out of the bottle, as they say.

Where I believe I disagree with Ichiro has to do with whether this new field of DIY genetic engineering, "flat" as it is, constitutes "real" science and whether the hierarchy problem of modern science is, in some fundamental way, avoidable.

Now, although I am not prepared here to define science in any comprehensive sense, I do think that a case can be made that hobbyism, for lack of a better word, is not science. Another way of stating my position is to say, "a laboratory does not a scientist make." By making this distinction I do not intend to demean hobbyists or, conversely, to put scientists on a pedestal, but to point out what I believe is a critical feature of the scientific enterprise, and that is the obligation to communicate the details and results of one's investigations so that they can be subjected to public scrutiny and, where appropriate, correction, and so that they may also serve as a basis for further investigation.

Consider, for historical comparison, the too-much-maligned alchemists of the middle-ages. They were hobbyists extraordinaire and, in a very real sense the proto-scientists who laid the groundwork for the science of experimental chemistry that was to follow. I doubt that they lacked the brains or the temperament to be real scientists. What I do think that they lacked, in particular, were a reliable postal system and other ready means to publicize the results of their laboratory work.

The advent of the printing press and of the establishment of a network of roads and public services that made possible the routine delivery of mail over long distances addressed these deficiencies, to some extent. But these innovations were not in themselves sufficient to transform hobbyism into the science that we know today. For this to happen, "natural philosophers" who were involved in the publication of books and the exchange of letters had also to form organizations to distribute and discuss the results of their scientific investigations. In this regard, one could argue that the founding of the Royal Society in 1660 marked the beginning of what we would call modern science. It also likely marked the beginning of the kind of hierarchy problem for science that Ichiro referred to in his talk (not to be confused with the hierarchy problem that besets physics today.)

I imagine that in the 17th century the number of reports and opinions about scientific matters - even concerning a relatively specialized area of research - far exceeded what any individual could consistently review. In a world awash in scientific findings how does one begin to decide whom to trust without resorting to expert opinion? Although our democratic inclinations tend to imbue us with a reflexive disdain for "elites", we have no choice other than to rely on people whose experience and judgment are widely recognized. Once experts are designated, either, in the 17th century, as celebrated fellows of the Royal Society, or, today, as the anonymous peers who enact the review process characteristic of the contemporary funding and publication of science, a hierarchy is created.

Of course such stratification of scientific authority is not without its perils. It brings to mind the age-old conundrum, captured by the Roman poet Juvenal with the query, "who will guard the guards themselves?" A delicate - and unavoidable - balance must be maintained between what, on one extreme, would result in lifeless orthodoxy and, on the other, in intellectual chaos. This is, in some sense, the sociological challenge of modern science, to effectively filter the vast amount of new information that is generated while not censoring well-considered novel contributions that threaten the established order. It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it.

So, once again, let's hear it for those folks who are enthusiastically working away in their at-home laboratories modifying bacterial genes. Like the alchemists before them, they are involved in a personal process of discovering fascinating new things about the nature of the world. But, until their private investigations become public ones and they engage in the kind of dialog that leads to the dissemination and review of their discoveries, they will remain hobbyists, not scientists. And, like it or not, when they choose to cross the divide which demands that they publish their findings and subject them to the criticism of their peers, gatekeepers will, of necessity, arise to manage the, otherwise, overwhelming flow of information. The problem of hierarchy will be born anew. There's no way around it.

This I Don't Believe

2009-05-18T18:29:00.021-04:00

Let's suppose you had the opportunity to interview a judge who had recently published an opinion on an important criminal case, one in which she had found, for purposes of concreteness, in favor of the defendant. Your questions turn to the matter of the judge's objectivity, and then it is revealed that the judge has had a long-standing prior relationship with the accused.

Pressing the issue you ask whether this relationship may have influenced her decision. "No, not at all," she responds. "On the contrary, my acquaintance with the defendant didn't skew my judgment, it helped to inform my decision."

At this point in the interview you may begin to doubt - not necessarily the judge's personal integrity, since she may, after all, have had no untoward interest with regard to the outcome of the case - but her judicial faculties. Does she understand the concept of objectivity well enough to realize that it requires that she distance herself from her prejudices and, most certainly, not rely on them?

Such a failure to appreciate the meaning of objectivity is illustrated in a recent interview with Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR reporter and author of the forthcoming book, Fingerprints of God, by Weekend Edition Sunday host Liane Hansen. By virtue her authorship Hagerty has positioned herself as a judge of the question, "is spiritual experience real or a delusion?" Although Hansen broaches the issue that Hagerty's upbringing as a Christian Scientist might have affected her analysis, Hagerty proceeds to insist that, in fact, "Christian Science really helped me with my research."

Hagerty goes on to claim that "Christian Science was about 100 years ahead of its time," based on her dubious equation of Mary Baker Eddy's belief in prayer-healing with the emerging field of mind-body studies called psychoneuroimmunology. In this regard, she succeeds, somehow, in demeaning both religion and science. We would all agree that Christian Science is more than simply a theory about emotional health affecting physical well-being (that was hardly breaking news in the 19th century) and, likewise, we would agree that nowhere do contemporary scientific studies of the human brain presuppose supernatural influences on neurological function.

What is, perhaps, more troubling about the interview, having nothing to do with Hagerty's particular take on the religion-science debate, is that it calls into question whether NPR is adhering to its own professional standards. Specifically, the piece opens with the statement:

The golden rule of journalism decrees that reporters take nothing on faith, back up every story with hard evidence, and question everything. NPR's religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty kept that rule in mind when she decided to explore the science of spirituality.

This is hardly borne out by the exchange between Hansen and Hagerty that follows.

Is it appropriate for NPR to bestow the imprimatur of objectivity on Hagerty's tendentious opinions about religion and science without criticism? It would be one thing if she had simply endeavored to report on the contemporary scientific understanding of the origins religious experience, but Hagerty goes much further. She concludes in the interview, explicitly, that belief in God is a rational choice. This is a profound, and profoundly contentious, question that should not be presented without challenge.

Indeed, the interview and the 5-part series that it previews, Is This Your Brain on God, could be confused with a promotional campaign for Hagerty's upcoming book. Here NPR's own standing as fair "judge" could be called into question. Is Hagerty's book being featured for its merits or is it, to some extent, receiving the spotlight based on its author's long relationship as a reporter for the news organization? To the extent that Hagerty takes a disputed position on a matter of public importance, isn't it incumbent on NPR to present alternative points-of-view? I'm not sure whether NPR, like the New York Times, has a public editor to consider such concerns, but it would seem that its own journalistic standards would demand such consideration.

Cautious Darwin, a Fossil Sneeze, and the Real Octomom

2009-04-08T13:15:00.029-04:00

Charles Darwin was a cautious scientist. More than 20 years passed between the conclusion of his voyage on the Beagle, during which he made many of the observations that would impel the development of his theory of natural selection, and the publication of his world-transforming work, "The Origin of Species". Darwin understood the potential trouble posed by the iconoclastic things he had to say, both with respect to his personal life - his wife Emma was a devout Christian - and with respect to his standing in the scientific community.

Although we imagine now that Darwin had "nailed it" when he published "Origin" in 1859, there were significant elements of his nascent theory that were subject to reasonable challenge. For one thing, Darwin had no knowledge of the mechanisms of inheritance upon which his process of natural selection relied. It would be half a dozen years before Gregor Mendel's discoveries involving plant hybridization would be published, and these would go largely unnoticed for another three decades. How, indeed, were "favored traits", so central to Darwin's hypothesis, transmitted from generation to generation? Without anything like a theory of genetics, Darwin hadn't a clue.

To make matters worse, Darwin was painfully aware of the problems presented by what he called "the imperfection of the geological record", enough so that the topic merited a chapter of its own in his book. The absence of fossil evidence for transitional species - so-called missing links - was a vulnerability that Darwin addressed as best he could. Today we can make allowances for the fact that the collection and identification of paleontological specimens was then still in its infancy as a systematic enterprise - a defense that was hardly available to Darwin at the time. Much to the chagrin of creationists, who - contrary to the wealth of discoveries made in the last 150 years - insist that these deficits in the fossil record remain, few missing-links have gone missing. In fact, the contemporary fossil record is rich in finely graduated intermediate forms.

It does turn out that Darwin was wrong about one claim he made in "Origin" with regard to fossilization, one that underscores his cautious expectations. In enumerating the many limitations of geological evidence, he despaired that "no organism wholly soft can be preserved." Shells and bones are all that we could count on, according to Darwin, and even they "can disappear when left on the bottom of the sea".

Meet Keuppia levante, a 95-million-year-old octopus, whose fossilized remains were recently discovered by Dirk Fuchs and fellow researchers from the Freie Universität Berlin and announced March of this year. Since octopuses consist pretty much of muscle and skin, what isn't eaten almost immediately by scavengers upon their demise, decays rapidly into a blob of slime. The odds of finding a fossil octopus have been compared to those of finding a "fossil sneeze". Looking at this Cretaceous-era octopus, so exquisitely preserved in Lebanese limestone, it would appear it is about time - finally - for someone offer an appropriate "fossil gesundheit".

What is, perhaps, more remarkable, according to Fuchs and his colleagues, is how closely this ancient specimen resembles its present-day descendants. Such invariance in form would have come as a surprise to Darwin, since his conception of evolution by natural selection imagined the accumulation of favored differences - gradually, but inexorably - over time. To him, the probability of a particular species remaining largely unmodified over the eons of geological time would have seemed to have been astronomically small.

(As an aside I'll note that this "error" on Darwin's part serves to remind us that, although his were the first words in the theory of evolution, they are certainly not the last. Unfortunately, there is a tendency in some quarters to equate Darwin's hypotheses in "Origin" with our current understanding of the process of natural selection. Enough confusion exists that some suggest, "let's get rid of Darwinism," declaring to the world, in all deference to the master, that we have, in the last 150 years, moved significantly beyond many of his original proposals. I think they have a point.)

But, although Darwin could possibly be faulted for not anticipating that, by dint of the hard work of 21st century paleontologists such as Dirk Fuchs, fossil sneezes, such as Keuppia levante, would ultimately be unearthed, there is a method available today to evolutionary science to probe the biological past that he could never have anticipated in his wildest dreams - namely, the analysis of the DNA of living creatures.

With this in mind, allow me to introduce Megaleledone setebos or, as I call her, the real octomom.

Thirty million years ago octomom or, more accurately, members of a species quite similar to hers, roamed the waters surrounding Antarctica. Sea ice was, for the first time, massing on the surface, removing fresh water from the Southern Ocean and leaving below it a highly saline environment enriched in oxygen - a fitting octopus habitat. As the climate continued to cool and the Antarctic ice shelf grew, streams of these salty, oxygenated waters flowed northward along the ocean floor carrying with them octomom's sisters and cousins, who would, themselves, become the founding mothers of new, distinct deep-water octopus species in other parts of the globe.

How do we know the details of this octopus "out of Antarctica" saga? Since they are so exceedingly rare, scientists couldn't use fossilized octopus remains to reconstruct this prehistoric exodus, so, absent a fossil record, they turned to the genetic one, the record written in the DNA of the cells of octopuses living today.

Thanks to the work of the Census of Marine Life, a decade-long project begun in 2000 "to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life", specimens representing a number of the living species of deep-sea octopuses were collected and delivered to researchers at Queens College in Belfast. There, by analyzing extracted DNA, biologist Jan Strugnell was able to formulate a family tree for these creatures which not only demonstrated the extent they were related to one another, but also resulted in a calculated genetic profile for their common ancestor, who, although 30 million years older, turns out to be a dead ringer, so to speak, for Megaleledone setebos, our very own octomom.

Darwin's misstep in doubting the possibility of the fossilization of organisms consisting almost entirely of soft tissue is quite understandable. How could he have anticipated the discovery of a fossil sneeze? His concerns about the deficiencies in the geological record have been - and continue to be - addressed and rectified by the diligent work of paleontologists, who, from all appearances, leave no stone unturned. To augment these traditional methods of evolutionary investigation researchers use the tools of molecular biology and genetic science now at their disposal. These allow them to peer into the deep time of the history of life on earth using DNA from the cells of living organisms - a window into the past that Darwin could not have imagined.

All said, Darwin would, no doubt, be astounded by and proud of what his scientific heirs have made of the simple - and cautious - beginnings of his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Cautious Darwin, a Fossil Sneeze, and the Real Octomom by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

An Ode to Darwin's Pigeons and to Wikimedia Commons

2009-03-18T17:27:00.014-04:00

"... from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. " With these words Charles Darwin closes his own most beautiful and most wonderful book, "The Origin of Species". But Darwin's case for his theory of natural selection therein has its own simple beginning, and not one having to do with an ancient or exotic organism, but with the species Columba livia, the humble rock-pigeon, that unremarkable denizen of our urban landscape.

I came to appreciate the importance of Columba livia to Darwin's argument only recently, as a result of undertaking a re-reading of "Origin" at the suggestion of Josh Gough, the organizer of the Atlanta Science Tavern Meetup. Although I was eager to re-familiarize myself with the famous text, to put it honestly, I wasn't looking forward to slogging my way through chapter 1, "Variation under Domestication", again. My interest in biology has always been with its most abstract concerns, so taxonomy, the naming, description and classification of animals and plants had never held much allure for me. But I had learned in the years since my first reading of "Origin" that Darwin's section on selection of domestic species, specifically pigeons, was crucial to the presentation of his greater theory. I was determined to understand why this was so, and I wanted to write about it.

This is where Wikimedia Commons came to my rescue.

In their own words, "Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to all." To my good fortune, this repository contained a photo or illustration that was representative of each of the 10 or so domesticated pigeon breeds that Darwin mentions in his book. Their ready availability made this essay possible and the images themselves allowed me to see for the first time why the variation exhibited by these pigeon breeds was so central to Darwin's argument.

Take a moment to take a look at the following slide show, created with photos from Wikimedia Commons, which I've annotated with descriptions from "Origin", and, unless you are already a student of pigeons, you will be struck, as I was, with the astonishing differences among these breeds. (If you have trouble with the slide show or want to view larger images, please follow this link.)

To understand why the variation resulting from the domestication of pigeons was essential to Darwin's presentation of his theory of natural selection, one must fully appreciate the difficulty that Darwin faced in persuading his readers of the possibility that any ancestral population could generate, over time, individuals quite unlike themselves. How could it be that organisms as different as crocodiles and crocuses are related by common descent? Without recourse to knowledge of the mechanisms responsible for the modification and transmission of biological traits - much less a theory of genetics - why should anyone believe that living things possess the kind of intrinsic malleability that such enormous variation in form would demand?

Cue the pigeons.

These breeds, so different from one another, provided Darwin with compelling evidence that the potential for evolutionary change was, in fact, present in a single species, Columba livia. The implication was that, if such variation could be achieved with pigeons by means of breeding choices over the course of human history, then, perhaps, it was not unreasonable to imagine that the enormous variety of the biological world could have been achieved by means of natural processes over the the vast expanse of geological time.

For Darwin to make his case, though, it was not enough for him to demonstrate the striking variation in breeds of pigeon, he had to convince his readers that these breeds were, in fact, breeds of rock-pigeon, and not themselves each a descendant of a different "aboriginal" pigeon species. Darwin does this through several lines of argument. He speculates that is was improbable that "uncivilized man" had undertaken the domestication of so many different pigeon species; he notes the absence of existing wild populations of the hypothetical aboriginal types; he describes how crosses within each of the breeds exhibit markings of the proposed rock-pigeon ancestor; and, anticipating the modern definition of biospecies, he observes that the various pigeon breeds are capable of producing fertile "mongrel offspring". Finally Darwin concludes, "I can feel no doubt that all our domestic breeds have descended from Columba livia."

Using these pigeons Darwin developed a plan in "Origin" to fend off the challenges faced by any scientific theory based, not upon reproducible experiment, but upon historical evidence. Variation under domestication was the closest thing Darwin had to a laboratory to "test" his ideas. He understood that this "experiment" with pigeons was the unassuming foothold he needed in his book before he could begin his ascent to his bold and comprehensive view of the origin of the range of living organisms. The highly-varied domestication of Columba livia was Darwin's simple beginning, and his theory evolution by natural selection was its beautiful and wonderful descendant.

An Ode to Darwin's Pigeons and to Wikimedia Commons by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

The Physics of Silly Names

2009-03-06T22:35:00.045-05:00

Physicists are a silly lot, especially when it comes to naming things. Given some of the humdingers that they have come up with, you might think that they might have their very own Ministry of Silly Names (MoSN), something like the Ministry of Silly Walks, featured in a 1970 sketch from the "Monty Python's Flying Circus" television show.

Take, for example, the names given to the various types of quarks, those reclusive, fractionally-charged, point-like particles that are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. First, it would have to be conceded that the name quark, itself, is pretty silly - not surprising, given that the it was selected because it sounds like the call of a duck. This silliness is only compounded when one notes that quarks don't come in types, they come in flavors - as though specifying a fundamental characteristic of some of the tiniest bits of matter was akin to ordering an ice cream cone at the neighborhood Baskin Robbins.

A little dignity is restored by the fact that the two "original" quark flavors have the unremarkable names up and down. To a good approximation, protons are constructed from 2 up quarks, designated, conventionally, by the letter 'u', and one down quark, designated by 'd'; neutrons, likewise, from 2 down quarks and one up quark.

The second generation of quarks flavors - more massive than up and down, so it took collisions created by high-energy particle accelerators to produce them in abundance - were given the apparently silly names, strange ('s') and charm ('c').

Strange, it turned out, was not all that silly a choice. When particles called K-mesons, or kaons, were first created, they were observed to decay into a triplet of garden-variety pions, but they took their good time doing so. Something "strange" was keeping them from decaying as quickly as had been expected. A special property was proposed, strangeness, to account for the kaon's longevity. Such a property, called a conserved quantity, is difficult, if not impossible, to shed - sort of like a bad cosmological penny. Thus, the kaon is stymied in its routine attempts to self-destruct, and must resort to slow-as-molasses assistance from the feeble weak interaction to get the job done. You see, the weak interaction doesn't hold strangeness in any special regard and would just as soon eradicate it as keep it around, of course taking in its own sweet time.

I wish I could say that there was a similarly dignified story to account for the origin of the designation charm as a quark flavor, but, to be frank, once strange found its way into the particle physics lexicon, a kind of silliness mania took hold. Indeed, the flavors of the third generation of quarks, then yet to be discovered, were christened beauty and truth by some silly researchers. There were fears - smirking hopes in some quarters, actually - that it would just be a matter of time before newspaper headlines would appear proclaiming such things as: "Beauty Revealed by Fermilab Scientists" or "Particle Physicists Seek Truth with New Accelerator". Something had to be done.

As a result, the Ministry of Silly Names put its foot down and a silly-name reformation was launched. When the quark dust settled, charm, old enough to sound quaint, was, graciously, grandfathered in, but beauty and truth were sent packing, replaced with the names bottom ('b')and top ('t'). How the silly how fallen!

Not going down without a fight, the forces of silliness mounted a rear guard action, so to speak. When the b quark was first created in particle collisions, it was always produced in conjunction with its antimatter counterpart, the b antiquark. So, given the way matter and antimatter cancel each other out, the particle that they formed possessed no net "bottomness". This was just the kind of opening that the silliness resistance needed. The search was on for creating a so-called B meson, a particle containing a single, unbalanced b antiquark, one that would brazenly show its "bare bottom". It was a last hurrah for quark name silliness.

Well, silly or not, the sextet of quarks - up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top - have now all been detected, advancing the cause of the Standard Model of elementary particles, if not the cause of respectable physics names, considerably. This is as close as physicists have come so far to a long-sought theory of everything (ToE), and by that I mean a comprehensive theory of matter and energy and (most of) the forces of nature that has undergone rigorous experimental tests.

There is, though, one important piece still missing from from the Standard Model puzzle and it is called the Higgs particle, an eponym, named for the theoretician Peter Higgs, so hardly a silly name. Unfortunately, because of the pivotal role the Higgs plays in bestowing mass on other particles in the Standard Model, Leon Lederman, who, it turns out, was a co-discoverer of the b quark, nick-named it the God Particle. No doubt this nickname will be the inspiration for silly headlines when the Higgs is detected, as is likely to be the case, in the next couple of years. There's not much that can be done to avoid this embarrassment. Particle nicknames - much like Bush-era financial markets - are pretty much unregulated.

To put things in perspective, and to give the silly physicists their due, let's turn to the book of Genesis for some guidance about the challenge posed by naming things.

In the creation myth of the first chapter, after creating man in His image, God grants him dominion over every living thing. And in the creation tale of chapter 2, immediately after fashioning Adam out of dust,

the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

How formidable a task for Adam - himself just now created - to be called upon to name things, things not only unfamiliar to him, but things entirely new to the world!

I imagine that Adam, struggled and stumbled, yet persevered, and came up with names for the animals, as commanded. No doubt, some of these names were fitting and clever, while others were out-and-out silly. But, what choice did Adam have? To have dominion over a thing means you have to call it by name.

To the list of attributes that have been used to characterize to our species - "thinker", "tool maker", "culture bearer" - perhaps, "namer" should be added. Physicists, as scientists, have taken on the task of discovering things entirely new to the world and, with that assignment, they have taken on the responsibility of giving names to the things they discover. We can hardly fault them for struggling and stumbling. We can hardly fault them, now and then, for coming up with silly names.