Can science be rescued?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, history of science, scientists, biographies, inquisition, polemics

At the defense of my PdD dissertation, one prominent professor growled, "This isn't geology, it is computer science." To a certain extent, he was right. I was surprised that he was the one to say it, though, for among the faculty he was the most computer-literate. I had used a great deal of computer modeling and simulation in conjunction with my research. This was 1983, and the geology faculty in general were much more comfortable out in the field with a rock hammer than they were poking at a computer terminal connected to a mainframe computer hidden away in the basement of the Electrical Engineering building. Desktop personal computers were rare. On the other hand, I was quite computer literate, and I was at that time an adjunct professor of computer science.

That wasn't the only objection to my work. I'll discuss that in a moment. The turning point from interview to inquisition began when someone asked, "Do you really believe this stuff?" I answered, "Believe? That's the wrong word. 'This stuff' cannot save my soul. I believe in Jesus. But 'this stuff' is the best scientific explanation for the phenomena we observe." Hostility ensued. I felt like St. Sebastian, who was tied to a tree where archers used him for target practice.

I had spent a few years of research to determine what effect directional heat flow in Earth's crust might have on the emplacement of "gneiss domes" such as the Black Hills of South Dakota. My supervising professor and I went all over the Black Hills to gather specimens of rocks that had originally underlain the domed structure and rocks in the lowest layers above the granitic/gneiss core of the Hills.

I needed to determine the thermal conductivity of these rocks in three directions. I used a large core drill to cut out cylinders, which I sliced into sections a centimeter or so in thickness, and then I polished the flat surfaces for use in a special press with heaters and thermocouples. I still have some of these. I call them my "hard disks".

The ratio of heat flow across the grain, versus along the grain, is the thermal anisotropy. For a pure, platy mineral such as mica, I found that this ratio could be as high as 6:1. For the shales and schists in the lower sections of the Black Hills, I measured thermal anisotropy between 1.2:1 and 1.6:1. The initial discussions of the early results with my committee were not encouraging. I did a series of computer simulations which showed that the excess heating caused just by thermal anisotropy was no more than a few degrees.

As it happened, I spent time that summer on a project about fluid flow. Another graduate student and I found that the anisotropy of fluid flow in layered rocks could be quite high, 10:1 to 100:1 and even greater. Any fluid flowing through these rocks would be very strongly affected by this directional fabric, and the solid-rock thermal anisotropy wouldn't matter at all. As a side project, the student and I dug into literature and studies about fluid flow in the crust. We determined that even in "dry rock" there is water, and it is in motion, and if there is any heat flow it is directed almost entirely by fluid flow. This was new; there was no literature on this particular point.

Therefore, I wrote a dissertation in which I stated that my initial theory was not tenable, and that further study would be needed to quantify the results of anisotropy in fluid flow. This was quite unpopular and it apparently stepped on a few toes. It was "this stuff" that caused my committee along with the other gathered faculty to reject my dissertation. I became, not a PhD, but AbD, "all but dissertation". Coda: I had an established relationship with scientists at a national laboratory in California. I passed my materials on to them, and they were glad to have them.

With such a background, I was well primed to receive Matt Kaplan's historical survey of scientific mavericks in I Told you So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed and Imprisoned for Being Right. 

The book is in part a biography of Ignaz Semmelweis, the best-known of those who learned how necessary it is to clean a doctor's hands and equipment before treating a patient. Semmelweis was also the one who seems to have suffered the most for it. The various parts of his life story are woven with others. The book opens with a scene in which a graduate student named Alison, at a poster session, is being shouted into submission by a gaggle of offended professors. Her sin? Being right. Theirs? Feeling threatened by the truth. It costs something to learn something new that reveals the flaws in older ideas.

One scientist who didn't fall prey to this phenomenon was Louis Pasteur. He had the political acumen to make sure he had powerful friends when needed, he was a showman who used public demonstrations (thoroughly prepared beforehand) to publicize his ideas, and he was careful to tailor his presentations to make it seem like his discoveries came as flashes of insight, where in reality he labored long and hard upon them.

The author tells stories of others, including friends and acquaintances, who survived being right only because of more established mentors, and by finally "being right" in a sufficiently public way that could not be denied. Katalin (Kati) Karikó and Drew Weissman received the Nobel Prize in 2023 for working out the therapeutic use of mRNA agents, which led to the "vaccines" used during the Covid-19 pandemic. But Kati had rough going for many years, suffering abusive supervisors and disdainful department heads. Somehow, she plowed through, and collaborations such as that with Dr. Weissman kept her work going. Many others have been less fortunate. Alison left science, as have several others mentioned in the book.

Being right is not enough to ensure being received. Max Planck is known for saying that science proceeds one funeral at a time. My father used to speak of the "Moses Effect", meaning that it takes 40 years in the wilderness for a generation to die out so a new generation can make progress.

Semmelweis seems to have had no such advantages, and many disadvantages. He was not the only doctor to learn the value of chlorine-laced wash water for disinfection. But in his own hospital, he seems to have had the knack for presenting his findings in a way that didn't just challenge other doctors, including his supervisor, he actually indicted them along with himself for killing thousands of young mothers through ignorance.

Arthur C. Clarke's "first law of science" is, "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." The trouble is, the distinguished and elderly scientists usually stopped having good ideas half a lifetime ago and feel threatened by the next generation.

These days, it may seem we have moved beyond the times of Galileo, who had to stand before the Holy Office of the Inquisition for saying that Earth moves. Scientists these days don't have the rack or a team of archers to deal with mavericks. But they do have powerful weapons to destroy us anyway. Today, money runs science, in a way much more pervasive than ever before. The "old guard" controls the flow of money, which determines who can afford to do experiments, and who must find a different profession.

I think of two doctors I knew well. One, named Henry, was a radiation oncologist. He once said he could cure most cases of breast cancer, at lower cost than chemotherapy. However, most patients get steered toward chemo rather than radiation. When I asked why, he just rubbed two fingers together, the sign for "money". The other doctor, named Benjamin, is a friend I once asked about how thyroid issues affect fertility. He said, "One third of infertility cases are due to low thyroid, but it is the last thing tested, when it is tested at all." Of course I asked why, and he said, "Treating low thyroid is the cheapest remedy."

In the last chapter the author discusses possible remedies for the prejudice-dominated grant-awarding process. While he has some good ideas, including ideas that are being used on a small scale, he recognizes that government action would be needed to motivate widespread change. Given the huge pharmaceutical and medical lobbying that goes on, useful change is unlikely. I fear that Max Planck was only partly correct, because he said "one funeral at a time." It takes several.

I think of Ignaz Semmelweis and the other pilloried scientists as being like Jeremiah: never wrong; never believed.

Is a female Mike Tyson possible?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sports, sociology, gender issues, women's issues, polemics

Korfball is a coed version of basketball that arose in the Netherlands in 1902. Each team sends four players on court. It is the only international coed team sport, so far.

At the end of The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us About the Power of the Female Body, author Starre Vartan presents korfball as an example of the possible, a truly coed sport. The primary sex-based rules of the game are that men guard men and women guard women, and that each on-court team consists of two of each. Other than that, both men and women pass the ball (dribbling isn't allowed) freely to team members of either sex, both men and women guard, both men and women shoot and score, and so forth.

This book drops right into the middle of the controversies over "men in women's sports," and the debates about why (or where) it might or might not be fair. Ms Vartan's thesis: give girls the same opportunities to learn sports as the boys have, beginning in toddlerhood, and we'll find out if they can compete on the same level. At the moment, systemic sexism is infinitely more prevalent than systemic racism (my language, not hers, but I think she'd agree).

Let me say that the great majority of those who "identify" as this or that "gender" are lying or insane. They are making it harder for the truly trans to receive compassionate counsel and care. They are very few. The number of those who are now detransitioning (or want to) probably greatly outnumbers those who make a successful transition. But after a full transition, surgery and all, successful transitioners will never reproduce.

There is a turning point in every life, a process we all pass through, that is expressed in the pairs of words, "boy - man", "girl - woman". It is puberty. Some time between age 10 and 16 (for me it was 12), hormone production ramps up and secondary sex characteristics develop over a span of 3-5 years. Before that, boys and girls can develop equal skills and equal strength. Afterwards, nothing is the same. Some child athletes become adult klutzes; some awkward children grow into athletic adults; but more likely, the sporty kids become sportier adults, and the rest become spectators…and some, like me, do our best to ignore sports, from birth to death (when our son played on various teams, I would attend the games and cheer him on. Otherwise, I don't care).

When our son was about eight he took gymnastics classes for about a year. In the end, he preferred running sports (soccer, track, and roller hockey). But I noticed something while observing his gymnastics classes. Puberty messes up the kids, but in different ways. Both boys and girls get more awkward. Boys' legs seem to shoot out ahead of their torsos, and it takes them a couple of years to relearn balance and coordination. Girls' hips thicken and their busts get heavier, which throws off their balance in a different way; it takes them the same couple of years to accommodate. The "lucky" girl gymnasts (if you want to call it that) retain a boyish body into adulthood with small busts and narrow hips. These are the most likely to become career athletes.

Excuse me if this seems crass: A woman whose bra has F cups is not going to be a talented athlete. You male athletes, try this: F-size breasts weigh five pounds each; strap two five-pound pot roasts to your chest and go exercise. Instant Klutz! Curiously, nowhere in Stronger Sex did I find a word about the effect of breast mass on athletic performance.

The great value in the book is the mass of data the author has gathered, or more frequently, gleaned, about the various strengths of female bodies. Briefly, nature has endowed women with extra "powers" to ensure they can carry, bear, nurture and raise offspring successfully. Where they stand out is in endurance, in the ability to bear pain even though they seem to feel it more intensely, in a stronger immune system, and in fueling exercise differently from men. But one significant fact must be kept in mind: A fit male body contains on average 15% fat, while a fit female body contains on average 25% fat. 

Putting that into practical terms, a woman of a given height and strength must weigh more than a man of the same height and strength. For example, consider a welterweight boxer, a man who weighs 144 pounds. He may have less than 15% body fat, but let's assume he actually has 15% fat; that comes to 21.6 pounds, leaving 122.4 pounds of lean body mass. A woman of equal strength and lean body mass, who has 25% body fat, will have 36 pounds of fat and weigh 158.4 pounds. That pushes her into the next weight class. In order to compete as a welterweight she would need to starve herself below 147 pounds, which would probably cause her periods to stop. It would also weaker her overall. But if she and the man were to box together with her weighing 158 pounds to his 144 pounds, she would still be at a disadvantage because moving the extra mass around would tire her out sooner. From this I conclude that boxing is not a sport in which men and women can compete on equal terms. Biochemistry and physiology make that impossible.

Let's jump to the top of the scale. In the 1980s Mike Tyson weighed 220 lbs (100 kg) and had 7% body fat. Probably no woman in history has equal vital statistics. What is the ultimate strength of a woman's body? I was in the mining town of Battle Mountain, Nevada with a team of geologists. We stayed in a hotel across the street from a saloon. The others went to the saloon. I stayed in the room. Late in the evening there was a commotion across the street. I glanced out to see two men fly out and land in the street. When my colleagues returned I got the story. Miners are typically smallish men. These two weighed in the 150# range. They got into a fight. The saloon owner, a very large woman of late middle age, stepped over, grabbed the two by their belts, picked them up and clashed them together like cymbals. Then she carried them to the door, one in each hand, and threw them into the street. I don't know how she would stand up to a heavyweight boxer, but I know I wouldn't care to cross her!

I agree with the author that there are sports at which men and woman can compete on an equal footing. There are others that this is not so. What needs to change is a pervasive culture of "no, they can't" without data or experience to back it up…and very often, "no, they can't" runs contrary to past experience! Sport in particular lends itself to extreme opinions, none of which are correct or even useful. Since the coming of age of the X Generation, X has meant eXtreme. It's time to chill, folks.

So much of Ms Vartan's writing in this book is polemical in nature that it can be hard to read. I'll forbear complaining further, because of its value. Get this book, tighten your belt, and read it for that value.

Can we be replaced?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, AI, SI, christian perspective, polemics, gospel

What is your attitude towards AI? Do you fear it or yearn for it? I looked up poll results online and the "AI Summary" offered by DuckDuckGo is:

"Surveys show that the American public is generally more pessimistic about artificial intelligence, with 52% expressing more concern than excitement, while only 17% believe AI will have a positive impact on the U.S. in the next 20 years. In contrast, AI experts are significantly more optimistic, with 56% expecting a positive impact from AI during the same period."

Let's look closer at the numbers. More than half of Americans had "more concern than excitement", and only one person in six expects mainly good. Even more telling, 56% of "experts" (not otherwise defined) are optimistic, but that means that, even among experts, 44% are not so optimistic. I suspect their attitudes range from mild concern to utter pessimism.

It was with much anticipation that I obtained the book 2084 and the AI Revolution: How Artificial Intelligence Informs Our Future by John C. Lennox, one of my favorite Christian advocates. In speeches he has made regarding the subject, I note that he often prefers the term "simulated intelligence," a term I also prefer. Wherever I can, I write of SI rather than AI. There is another attribute that is very meaningful to me, which I'll get to later on.

Dr. Lennox is a mathematician, so he is an orderly thinker. Below, I quote more from this book than I have done previously. He begins by surveying the history of totalitarianism, for this is the clear direction that technology is leading. Thus, in Part 1: Mapping Out the Territory, Chapter 1 is titled "Developments in Technology." Two early thinkers wrote novels that forecast authoritarian use of technology: In 1931 Aldous Huxley published Brave New World and in 1948 George Orwell published 1984. Both books forecast the destruction of the human character, but in different ways. The year after 1984 had come and gone, in 1985 Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which we find, as Dr. Lennox quotes, 

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture."

I will return to the subject of the populace welcoming the agent of their demise, which is Postman's point.

In Chapter 2, "What is AI?", the author asks how we define or recognize intelligence. He lists a number of terms that are associated with intelligence: perception, imagination, capacity for abstraction, memory, reason, common sense, creativity, intuition, insight, experience, and problem-solving. A word I find missing: wisdom. In Chapter 6 ("Narrow Artificial Intelligence: The Future is Bright?"), the author points out how most agree that technology is developing faster than the ethics needed to guide it. He quotes Isaac Asimov, "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." As much as I appreciate Dr. Asimov, and I have read at least half of the 400 books he has written, I sadly observe his own rather marked lack of wisdom. In fact, among the very intelligent people I know, who are very competent in their fields of expertise, I have observed a near-universal lack of intelligent understanding in other areas. It seems that, just as the current AI tools are said to have "ANI" or "Artificial Narrow Intelligence," humans also tend to exhibit "Natural Narrow Intelligence." Furthermore, there is no hint that any SI tool so far developed genuinely embodies any of the 11 items listed above. Let me be clear:

SI (ANI at present) does not present intelligent results. It presents an amalgam of various bits of human intelligence found in its databases, with no comprehension of their meaning.

The real issue is this: Will ANI ever develop into AGI, Artificial General Intelligence? Or will there instead be some kind of agglomeration of dozens (thousands?) of ANI tools into a seeming AGI? And how would we know that this has been achieved? How can we define success in this enterprise, when we don't know how to define its goal?

Thus, it is well to consider that we do not yet have any idea how to define, let along unerringly recognize, the other psychological attributes that surround intelligence: emotions, senses, empathy, sympathy, a sense of purpose or meaning, will and willfulness, and others that are often gathered under the rubric "qualia".

Part 2 is titled "Two Big Questions", comprising Chapters 3 and 4, "Where Do We Come From?" and "Where Are We Going?" Clearly, to Dr. Lennox, these are theological questions, not philosophical ones, and I agree. I will not comment on these chapters beyond saying that by this point the subject of transhumanism has arisen and is woven into the entire narrative; here the author narrows the point further. Thus in the middle of Part 3 ("The Now and Future of AI"), in Chapter 10 ("Upgrading Humans: The Transhumanist Agenda") he points out that the goal of transhumanism is to make humanity obsolete. Further, the whole enterprise has come under the sway of the deception of the serpent recorded in Genesis 3, "You will be like God, knowing good and evil." Human history demonstrates that the result of receiving this deception has been a deep descent into intensive, personal, subjective, heartfelt knowledge of both good and evil, in a way that we cannot adequately handle. Sadly, the evil has typically far outweighed the good.

Consider a bit of wisdom from Solomon, Proverbs 25:2, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and it is the glory of a king to search out a matter." The lesson of the early chapters of Genesis is that we are worse off for having searched into "the knowledge of good and evil." When we understand that the more a ruler can know about what his (or her) subjects are doing, the more thoroughly they can be controlled, we see that the universal surveillance society that the whole world is rushing towards is a most pernicious enterprise. 

I remember a story from 1951, "And then there were none," by Eric F. Russell. A society develops in isolation, and is found (when later discovered) to have a very strong privacy ethic, such that the people tend to reply to most questions with the mysterious word, "Myob". This is found to mean "Mind your own business." Would that we could develop more of this!

Chapters 12 through 17 comprise Part 4, the last section of the book, titled "Being Human." They constitute a gospel message. Based on superintelligent mechanisms, the transhumanists wish to produce a Homo Deus, a god-man. Dr. Lennox demonstrates that the true superintelligent being is already quite involved with the human race: The LORD God, who is called by some, including myself, Jehovah God, in a more literal way. The name Jesus is the Greek translation of Jeho-shua, which means "Jehovah the Savior". Jesus is Jehovah, who came in the flesh as a human to live among us and to die for us, and to resurrect to release His life to those who believe in Him. He already has a plan to make His people into the real Homo Deus, in resurrection, not by some mechanical process but through divine power, which we can no more comprehend than we can discern the makeup of our own minds.

While AI is seen by some (probably no more than 1/6th of us, by the polling mentioned above) as a pathway to increased freedom and eternal prosperity, a much larger number of people fear a boundless increase in machine intelligence as the most destructive force the human race has yet encountered. A generation ago people loved ET. Today many profess love for AI. Beware: it does not love you. It cannot.

The last chapters of the book are a summary of the likely wedding of computational intelligence with the final program of the great dragon, Satan, who will empower a fateful human to be the Beast of the book of Revelation. Dr. Lennox calls this being The Monster, a terminology I appreciate and have decided to adopt (this is the second item I mentioned above). 

I note that the term "antichrist" is not used in 2084, except in a reference to an anti-Christian diatribe by Friedrich Nietzsche. The vast majority of Christian teachers call the Beast of Revelation "the antichrist," but the term is never used in that book. It is used by the apostle John in two of his letters, where it refers to certain heretics who deny the deity of Jesus. The Greek word therion means "wild beast", where "wild" means uncontrollable. The word is used 37 times in Revelation to refer to this personage or the False Prophet, while in nine other instances it refers to dangerous animals like lions or venomous snakes. To yield the emotional force that Greek readers of John's books would have felt, the term "The Monster" is appropriate.

In contrast to the technical deification offered by transhumanists, the Bible presents a genuine theosis, being "transformed by the renewing of the mind" (Romans 12:2), by which the people of God grow to full sonship and conformation to the image of Christ. They are then qualified to reign with Him in the kingdom of God in eternity. This is infinitely better than the best that technology will ever have to offer.

I should note that when the Monster takes control of some kind of world government, to most people it will come as a relief. He will be seen as s superior statesman or diplomat, able to unite warring factions; the number Ten may be literal, or perhaps it is symbolic for "all", the way 10 is used in scripture to mean completion in human affairs. Of him it is written that he will "change times and laws," apparently overruling the legal codes of all the (former) nations under his sway. Many will profess that they love him. Perhaps children will be named for him, in the brief time (less than four years) of his suzerainty over the world. Whatever the "mark of the Beast" refers to, it will be gladly accepted by nearly everyone.

The work of the False Prophet (the "other therion") to "give breath" to the image of The Monster may be accomplished via something akin to deepfakes, which are already quite sophisticated, or perhaps by animating a compelling robotic construction. Either way, the driving anima will be whatever passes for AGI at the time.

It will be only those with spiritual understanding who will see the Monster for what he really is: the incarnation of Satan. Whatever the seven heads and ten horns represent, they are best seen with the eyes of the heart, where we have spiritual understanding. 

The last few years that this world experiences before the manifestation of Jesus Christ at His coming will be terrible indeed; Jesus called it a time of "great tribulation".

May we be among those who repent, who declare to God that we know we are sinful and ask His forgiveness, a forgiveness given so freely because of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. May we be counted worthy to escape the terrible events of the closing of this age, to be among those who "follow the Lamb wherever He goes." Those who belong to Jesus, the Lamb of God, have nothing to fear from mechanical intelligence of any level.

Mathematics and wokeness don't mix

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, mathematics, education, polemics

When education becomes indoctrination, genuine learning vanishes. I had high hopes for this book when I saw it: Is Math Real? How Simple Questions Lead Us to Mathematics' Deepest Truths by Eugenia Cheng. As I read, I soon found my thinking sidetracked by hints of lunacy. Then on page 33 the text swerved into a sudden diatribe against white supremacy. Barely a dozen pages later the author, writing of logical reasoning and logical arguments, takes on the "straw man fallacy" (which she retitles the "straw person fallacy") by decrying sundry arguments against the notion of "white privilege". Hmm.

I looked at the profile photo and thought a while. Dr. Cheng is a British-born Chinese, rather young-looking (she's not yet 50, so a generation younger than I am). I lived Jim Crow before she was born; I know genuine white supremacy and white privilege. They hardly exist any more. The constant barrage of accusations regarding these things began during the Obama Presidential campaign in 2007, and continues to this day (it continues despite the fact that this Black activist was elected twice to the Presidency…or maybe because it's him behind the scenes egging it on). Then, along with many other false allegations, they were braided together into "wokeness", which is a slew of anti-white, anti-tradition, anti-family, anti-liberty trends that culminated in "cancel culture."

Muffling my discomfort, I continued reading. In the next chapter a similar tirade erupted, and I had had enough, not even a quarter of the way though the book. Either this math wizard is utterly suborned by leftism, or she's afraid if she doesn't kowtow to woke dictates she'll also get canceled. Either way, she fits the prompt that generated this image: "Defeated female wizard"

Here is my definition of WOKE: Wicked, Obfuscating, Kleptocratic Extortioners. And while we are at it, two of the left's favorite acronyms also belong on the chopping block: DEI = Devilish, Elitist Inversion of truth; and ESG is a total inversion, Environmental mismanagement + Social repression + utter misGovernance.

To be quite clear: Every element of wokeness is evil. The recent election is in part a mandate by a clear majority of the electorate to de-wokify America. Let's laugh the Leftocrats off the stage!!

When I decide not to finish reading a book it is my usual practice to not mention it; just to set it aside and read the next book and review it here. This time I have to pan it. The writing is mediocre but tolerable, the puppyish enthusiasm for topics hardly anyone has heard of is cute but distracting, and while the author's wish to calm the fears of mathophobes is laudable, her methods are off-putting. Far too many times, on rather simple subjects, she urges us to "think really hard about" something or other. Talks about tone deaf! There are many better books about math for those who fear math. This book is most likely to turn math-fearing folks into math-haters.

An overly preachy health book

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, health, wellness, advice, polemics

The Dewey Decimal code for The Book of Animal Secrets: Nature's Lessons for a Long and Happy Life, by David B. Agus, MD, is 590. That number means "Zoological Sciences". It didn't take me long to realize that a more appropriate classification would be 613 (Promotion of Health) or 614 (Prevention of Disease), with a sub-classification meaning "polemic".

Ordinarily, if I decide not to read a book, I don't review it; I don't mention it. In this case, there may be some folks who can benefit from it, so I won't hide its existence. But it is not for me. There are a number of facts about different animals, although I don't think it is enough to get it a 590 classification.

The pattern is this: A story about what some animal experiences is presented, or a few facts about the lives of an animal, followed by a page or more of preaching. If the author could draw a simple conclusion without feeling the need to belabor the point to exhaustion, the book would be one-third the size…or less.

A fine mind ruined by Marxism

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biological evolution, philosophy, social justice, polemics

I was raised to care for what people can do, not what they look like. This was during the era of Jim Crow. I was 15 when Dr. King made his "I have a dream" speech. Once it was fairly reported (a chancy thing in 1963), I embraced its core idea: to judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. For most of the sixty years since, I have seen the systemic racism I grew up within gradually abated. Progress in this area halted sometime after 2008 when our first black President showed by his actions that he liked to poke a stick in the eyes of anyone who wasn't a Leftist or Marxist. Overt racism began to rise again.

Judged against the past 15 years, racism in America has been on the rise. Judged against the prior 45 years, tremendous progress was followed by a significant pullback. However, there was a parallel trend that I have watched for more than the past 60 years, of creeping leftism that has gradually taken over the Democratic Party.

When I was in college during "the Sixties" there was radical activity all over the country, particularly on campuses. It was very visible for a few years, and then seemed to vanish. Later I realized that the wiser radicals didn't go on the stump, they went to Law school. Bill and Hilary Clinton exemplify them. They also exemplify the utter amorality of leftism.

I am a classical liberal, which means "conservative" in America. I am for smaller government, the greatest amount of freedom for the greatest number of people, for the rule of law and not by fiat ("executive orders" for example), and for a strong social attitude that supports personal responsibility and eschews blaming others for our own errors. The Left is against all these.

I was taught to be color blind; now that's called racism. It is the opposite of racism!

I was taught to treat everyone fairly; a few percent of people demand to be treated better than fairly. I decline.

Most particularly, I learned from the Bible that the people of God are not called to destroy the wicked (Jesus called them "tares", or "weeds") but to leave that to God. The Left is intent on destroying the good, and they began by demonizing everything that is good about America and vilifying "ordinary Americans" who happen to not be leftist. Leftism is the enemy of all that is good.

There is huge hue and cry about "white supremacy" and "institutional racism". One would think that all white Americans (except, of course, the Left) are arrayed in a crusade against all "people of color". Not so. Consider this: All the "institutions" have been taken over by the Left, including most news organizations, universities, and a growing number of businesses. If there is institutional racism, guess who is running the institutions? Not conservatives.

During World War II my father trained a squad of primarily black soldiers. He and they were all in the Corps of Engineers. His previous squad was primarily white. He told my brothers and me that the white soldiers were better educated, but neither squad had any engineering background. The two groups learned equally fast. Having grown up in a racist family, Dad got re-educated that "race" didn't mean anything, from his own experience. He took that lesson to heart.

Let me also mention that I am about as White as they come, without being Scandinavian. Most of my ancestors that immigrated to America were from England, Ireland or Scotland; none that I know of were Celtic. Throw in a bit of German and Welsh, and that almost completes the picture. I also have a grandfather who was between a quarter and half Cherokee, and a great-grandfather who had a black grandfather or great-grandfather. European Americans who don't hail from the British Isles are descended from Roman citizens and Roman slaves, which in both cases were 10% African. My nonwhite ancestry is about 15%. I am neither proud of it nor shamed by it. I am descended from serfs and kings, merchants and pirates, soldiers and criminals. What I am is what I am, no more, no less.

This is just a taste of my background, so you have a chance to understand my reaction to A Voice in the Wilderness: A Pioneering Biologist Explains How Evolution Can Help Us Solve Our Biggest Problems by Joseph L. Graves. The book is half memoir and half social observation with a strong "social justice" flavor.

Dr. Graves is the first African American to earn a PhD in Evolutionary Biology. He is seven years younger than I am, so when I was on campus heckling leftist radicals, he was in Jr. High School, not yet sure if he would go to college. As he tells it, he experienced pervasive racism all his life. Interestingly, his primary mentors were white; of course, there were nearly no black role models for him. Once he did enter college, before long he read Karl Marx and became a Marxist. It seems he still is.

I reserved judgment through the whole book. By the end, though, I became clear. Dr. Graves is a brilliant biologist, a leader and mentor in his field. Equally clearly, he is politically blind. The only sources of news he cites are CNN and other outlets of genuinely Fake News. He claims that the fakery is all on the right, but I've observed every trace of truth drain out of the "mainstream media" since midway through the broadcasting career of Walter Cronkite, about the time the Huntley-Brinkley Report went off the air in 1970. By the time Cronkite retired, the decline of "the media" was well under way.

The last chapters of the book are full of diatribes against Donald Trump and those who voted for him. This is what I would expect of a Marxist, and of someone who believes the extremely gross and misleading caricature of Trump found in nearly all the media. In one sentence he groups Trump with Stalin and Hitler. Seriously?!?!? Stalin assassinated several political opponents and upon achieving power he exiled hundreds to Siberia, where most soon died. He was later responsible for the deaths of more than 15 million Russians. And we all know Hitler's history. 

If Donald Trump were actually the man "the media" (and Joe Graves) think he is, the day after his inauguration he would have had Nancy Pelosi, both Clintons, James Comey, Chuck Shumer and probably several others arrested and summarily executed. Three years later, after his first weaselly speech about COVID-19, Dr. Fauci would have "disappeared". I could go on, but what's the point? Here's a plain fact that seems to have escaped Dr. Graves: During the Trump administration, unemployment fell to the lowest level is decades, and to record low levels for people of color. Donald Trump was the best thing that ever happened to "the Blacks and Browns among us", to use an oft-repeated phrase. Biden and the Left are their worst enemies. Those whom they can't gaslight they denigrate, sideline, and if possible indict.

I am wholly opposed to Marxism in all its manifestations. Of the four biggest mass murders of the 20th Century, three were committed by Marxist rulers (Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot), and the fourth was perpetrated by "national socialists", abbreviated Nazi. The other genocides of the same Century were nearly all by Marxists. Dr. Graves wrote, "…Karl Marx was probably one of the greatest theorists of human social activity…" Idiocy! Mark's "theories" have always been carried out via enormous bloodshed and oppression.

I was hoping that the phrase in the title, "explains how evolution can help", would be followed up by a clear, cogent explanation with workable suggestions. That ought to have been the subject of the last 2-3 chapters, not diatribes against conservatives. What a pity. The idea that evolutionary thinking can help us solve great problems is a good one. A proper treatment of the subject would be very helpful. But the book is instead a screed in favor of Socialism. As Churchill wrote, "Capitalism is the worst system, except for all the others." Socialism is a formula for misery. Always has been, always will be.

No bugs, no us

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, ecology, insects, polemics

I've been reading a lot of natural history lately. It is one of my great loves. Having read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson when it appeared in 1962 (I was 14), when I saw Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse by Dave Goulson, I just had to read it. Goulson's message is as timely and urgent for our generation as Carson's was for its time. Perhaps it is more urgent.

I think to most people, all the little creepy-crawlies—insects, spiders, centipedes, and so forth—are "bugs", to be squashed or sprayed with something immediately upon detection. The primary impetus and funding for research about insects and related animals is aimed at killing them, mainly supported by the pesticide industry.

Dr. Goulson wants to reset our understanding of insects (et cetera). Perhaps some large number of people realize that bees and other pollinating insects are "good". Their understanding of insect benefits stops there. I wonder, though, how many stop to think what we would miss if the bees vanished.

I got this image from a page at Izismile.com titled Imagine Our World Without Insects. They have short pieces about 8 kinds of insects, including cockroaches (most roach species speed up the recycling of nitrogen in forests) and ants (although many ants eat seeds, many of the seeds they carry are dispersed, spreading plants faster).

Fun fact: According to Dr. E.O. Wilson, the world famous "ant man", ants are the only major group of insects that don't carry any diseases. They are so beneficial, he claims it is OK to let them invade your kitchen; they will kill and eat many other kinds of small insects that DO carry disease, making your house a healthier place to live.

At the end of the Izismile page, they picture mosquitos, saying they can't think of anything good about them. I can: Food for bats and fireflies and many, many species of small bird. Some species of hummingbird eat mostly mosquitoes and gnats. They are not all nectar-sippers.

Much of Silent Earth records what we have been doing with insects. Mostly, killing them. As a matter of fact, the number of insects on Earth today is about 1/10th what it was when I was a child. And the use of DDT had already reduced them, as Ms Carson outlined in Silent Spring. Have you heard of the "windshield indicator"? In the 1960's and before, taking a road trip required a stop every 50-100 miles to wash the dead insects off the windshield, and sometimes out of the grille. Not any more.

The core conclusion of both books is the same: There is no "focused" insecticide. Every insecticide kills every kind of insect. DDT was intended to kill flies. It also killed bees, and even birds, indirectly. Modern pesticides may be less lethal to birds and mammals, but they have already gone a long way towards making many beneficial insects extinct. Sadly, flies and other "more pesky pests" seem to develop resistance to pesticides more rapidly than wholly beneficial insects. If we manage to make all insects extinct, the last ones to go will be flies.

Further, if we manage to make all insects extinct, we are next on the list. Their "ecosystem services" are not well known, but they are worth tens of trillions. Maybe much, much more. We truly cannot exist without insects.

Can this juggernaut be turned? Possibly. In time? possibly. There are no guarantees.

Too few of the little things

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, insects, invertebrates, conservation, rewilding, polemics

I have read that there are about 1/4 to 1/3 fewer insects on the Earth than there were half a century ago. For some insect groups, the remaining amount must be much lower. I remember driving cross-country in the 1960's, when we needed to wipe or clean the windshield of the car, and the grill, at the end of the day, and sometimes at midday also. That doesn't happen much anymore.

It's harder to collect butterflies than it was when I was a kid. I grew up in several places across the country. Whether in California, Utah, or Ohio, during the warmer months there were always several different kinds of butterflies in view. I just had to pick which one(s) I might like to add to my collection. 

Once, at age eleven, I picked up a praying mantis that was on a tree, where we were taking a walk in the forest. It was more than five inches long. It fought back a little—those spikes on the front legs can draw blood! But when it was warmed by my hand it settled down. I wondered if I could make a pet of it, so I tied kite string to it, just a bit loosely in the middle of the thorax where it wouldn't slip off. I tied the other end to my bedpost that night. In the middle of the night I awoke. Hearing a small noise I sat up, and nearly jumped out of my skin when the mantis flew right into my face. With wings and clawed "arms" outspread, it looked the size of a dinner plate! When I regained my composure, I untied it and let it out my window. Whew!

Children have a natural affinity for insects and small animals, if their parents and others don't drive it out of them. That affinity is the first emotion Vicki Hird draws upon in her book Rebugging the Planet: The Remarkable Things That Insects (and Other Invertebrates) Do – And Why We Need to Love Them More. While insects are the main "stars" of the book, the author expands the common term "bug" to include earthworms, garden snails, and other small, invertebrate animals.

Perhaps you know that most almonds are grown in California's central valley. Did you also know that keeping that almond crop pollinated every spring requires the services of most (some say 80-90%) of the honeybees in the U.S.? Millions of beehives and billions of bees are trucked to and from California every year. That by itself may have a lot to do with "colony collapse disorder", which leads to ever-increasing losses of honeybees across the country.

For several years I participated in the Great Sunflower Project, growing a certain species of sunflower each spring and counting how many native bees, and what kinds, would visit a particular plant during a daily 15- or 30-minute viewing session. Near the end of the season, when most of the flowers had ripening seeds, I had the added bonus of seeing goldfinches come for the seeds; I seldom see goldfinches otherwise. This endeavor is important because, if our honeybees fail, native bees must take up the slack! Fortunately, most sweat bees and mason bees and bumblebees are even more diligent pollinators than honeybees. There just aren't as many of them. One of the suggestions in Rebugging has to do with making homes for mason bees and other native bees, to increase their numbers in our gardens. In our case, we grow garlic chives, which has white flowers that draw bumble bees and at least 15-20 other species of bees (and hoverflies and certain wasps) for 2/3 of each summer.

Going through the book, one learns that pollination is not the only "service" provided by insects. Another has to do with rot. You may know that fungi work at breaking down fallen plant matter, from tree trunks to leaf litter. Fewer know that fungi are just one part of the "cleanup crew", which includes insects, slugs and snails, and earthworms. Some years ago I learned why, in pre-Colonial America, the natives ("Indians") were so famed for moving silently through the forest. There were no earthworms in North America before the 1600's, when some arrived in soil brought with plants from Europe. The forests before about 1650 were deep with leaf litter, which was only slowly decomposed by fungi and native snails and beetle grubs. Modern forests are almost litter-free because of European earthworms. The soil in my garden has one or two dozen per shovelful of dirt.

Another "service" is that insects in particular are "served up" to birds and mice and other small animals. A Little Brown Bat, for example, eats 1/4 to half its body weight in insects each night. Some portion of those will be mosquitos, though the bats prefer moths and "meatier" flies when they can get them. I've observed on farms that chickens will run down grasshoppers and crickets, which are big, fatty and calorie-rich.

Much of the book is advice about "rebugging" here, there and everywhere. So much so that it has a preachy tone that grows more and more intense. That's unfortunate, because nobody responds well to nagging. The last chapter or two are so exhortation-dense that I could hardly stand to read them. I remember reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, the quintessential environmental polemic. It was so very influential because it exposed the huge problems with pesticide use without adopting a nagging tone. Vicki Hird is tilting at the "windmill" of the big pesticide companies and Agribusiness. So was Rachel Carson. Ms Hird will have better success if someone with Carson's sensibility helps her produce a major rewrite of  Rebugging.

The deep sea – salvation or ruin?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, oceanography, sea life, bioluminescence, seabed mining, polemics

The red tide can be beautiful at night. The tiny animals, so toxic in large concentrations, are also luminescent, flashing when they are disturbed. In the red tide season—when it isn't safe to swim anyway—the best time to watch the surf is late at night, when the waves flash and glow with green and blue colors. That's the only kind of bioluminescent sea life I have seen.

Oceanographers and marine biologists (such as my supervising curator at the DE Museum of Nature and Science) get to see much more, at least through the video eyes of underwater robotic vehicles (ROV's), such as this one shown in an advertising image. Studies using ROV's are finding entire ecologies that nobody knew could exist, and they exist right down to the bottom of the deepest trenches in the sea floor, up to seven miles down.

But in midwater, where it is safe to do so, when they turn off the lights, it isn't all the stygian darkness of the deep ocean. They see sparks of light everywhere. It may be that bioluminescence is the rule, not a rarity, among sea creatures.

This montage of images shows some of the branches of the tree of life that include well-lit creatures. Clockwise from top left, a "firefly squid", one of many squids that light up (and other cephalopods such as cuttlefish can also do so); a jellyfish; a small shark, with lights that help it "vanish" against the light from above; and a siphonophore, of the same phylum as jellyfish but sort of like a coral colony without the rocky shell (this species gets more than 100 feet long, longer than the largest whale).

The discovery of deep water habitats and the creatures that live there are lovingly described in Part One of The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean and the Looming Threat That Imperils It, by marine biologist Helen Scales. It is interesting that species of fish and insects that become permanent inhabitants of caves have lost their eyes, yet deep in the ocean, most creatures have eyes, and in some cases, eyes that can see in not just three colors (as we can), but ten or more. In the deep ocean, they don't see by sunlight, but they see each other.

Deeper than 200m (~650 feet) in clear ocean water, there isn't enough light for our eyes to see, but some ocean creatures have eyes that see by the trickle of light that reaches as deep as a kilometer (~3,300 feet). The upper 200m includes just 7% of the oceans, and the upper kilometer contains about 30%. Yet in the deep abyss, from 1km to 11km, there are eyes everywhere, and there is plenty for them to see, including friend and foe, mates and prey. There are squid that, when threatened, squirt a blob of glowing ink, turn off their own lights, and jet away. Anglerfish bob glowing lures to draw in prey, while hatchetfish put on a variety of light shows, which some think could be communication. Some animals light their whole body and then darken smaller areas, like characters on a computer screen.

Part Two of the book describes the slow flow of ocean currents, and then discusses the possibility that cellular life arose in the deep sea, at or near places where the heat from below breaks through at the deep-ocean ridges and hot spots such as the one that has formed Hawaii and its island chain for millions of years. The author goes on to tell of medicinal uses for chemicals found in deep sea life. In the chilly depths, where food is more sparse, we find corals and other creatures that are hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years old. Living slowly, but persistently. Some have special proteins that help them resist incredible pressures that literally bend the molecules of life out of shape (and shape is what makes a protein do its job). Some have other components that heal wounds, protect tissues from decay, or fight microbes, and some of these have found pharmaceutical uses.

Part Three delves through the history of our "use" of the oceans, both extractive (fishing and whaling, for example) and as a repository for our waste. That latter isn't just the oceans; when I lived in Cleveland in 1961, the "sewage system" consisted of pipes five miles long that took raw sewage into the middle of Lake Erie! A north wind would bring turds ashore. Coastal cities worldwide used to do the same. There are areas of dumped radioactive waste. Do you fancy eating fish caught in those waters?

The third and last chapter of Part Three introduces seabed mining. Interesting "stuff", potentially valuable "stuff" has been found in three areas:

• The abyssal plains, at an average depth of several kilometers, include large areas carpeted with nodules made up of metallic oxides. The most abundant metal is manganese, which isn't particularly valuable, and iron is second in abundance, but they also contain cobalt, nickel and copper, and a little chromium. These are valuable, but make up only a few percent. A typical nodule the size of a walnut took several million years to form. Their composition varies from place to place, depending on what is available in the regional seawater.
• The "caps" of seamounts, their upper few meters, contain a similar suite of metal oxides. There may be a million or more seamounts, most of which are extinct volcanoes. Although their "caps" constitute only one or two percent of the sea floor, they are thick and would be easier to mine for minerals, compared to the abyssal plains.
• Vent communities form on and near the crests of the midocean ridges, which form a chain 40,000 miles long, or 65,000 km. The superheated, mineral-laden water that flows from "black smokers" and "white smokers" (in cooler areas) builds up "chimneys" of metal sulfides and metal oxides, which are like concentrated ores.

Each of these is being considered as mining targets for future exploitation, and some experiments have been performed. So far, the economic story isn't all that attractive, but that hasn't stopped the momentum of the undersea mining interests.

The biggest targets are the nodule fields on the abyssal plains. This area near Tonga is about average. Some places are so densely covered one can hardly see the sand between the nodules.

Just as on land, however, areas that contain desirable "stuff" are already inhabited. A careful look at this image shows whitish spots and blobs, which are some of the larger creatures that live, not just among, but rooted onto, nodules. I carefully scanned a larger version of this image, and found about 100 creatures. Many more are smaller or have a darker color. Most likely, every nodule has something living on it.

Part Four discusses the need to preserve the deep sea and all the habitats included within it. This montage, from a scientific article in ResearchGate, shows some of the creatures that live among metallic nodules in the Clipperton Fracture Zone, a prime target of mining interests.

Here the author becomes quite polemical, in a very good way. We must admit that we know only a tiny fraction of what is going on in the deep sea. We do know that it regulates global temperature, buffers the rise and fall of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and either preserves or destroys the great ice caps in north and south. Do we know enough to disrupt it with impunity?

The author points out the few very valuable pharmaceuticals that have been found in deep sea creatures, and the promise of whole new classes of antibiotics, for example. I find it a shame that the "Save them to make future drugs" argument is used so frequently, by many, many authors, not just De. Scales. Is there none other? Is there no way to persuade mining interests to hold off, besides trying to counter one financial interest with another? Is money the only bottom line that matters?

Sea bed "resources" are not renewable, not on a human scale. Vent communities take thousands or tens of thousands of years to form; a potato-sized nodule took 10-20 million years to form; the "cap" of a seamount may have grown over 100 million years. Every extractive technology grows exponentially. What is costly and difficult today gets easier and cheaper with time. People always say, "We won't take everything." It's a lie. Of course we will.

There's an apocryphal story of a Canadian chief talking with a geologist who is exploring in his tribal area. He said, "When white men first came to Canada, they shot all the big game and hauled away the meat. Later, more white men came to trap all the smaller animals, and they hauled away the furs. The next time white men came, they cut down the big trees and hauled them away for lumber. Then, other white men came to cut down the smaller trees, and hauled them away to make pulp for paper. And now here you are, coming for the rocks!"

To a scientist, the only reasonable path is study first, before mining anything. I don't expect that to happen.

Give it to me straight, Doc

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, publications, research, fraud, bias, negligence, hype, polemics

When I was a chemistry major, taking organic chemistry, we had a lab exercise called The Martius Yellow Competition. It's a famous experiment, designed at Harvard, in which we had to produce seven compounds, one of which was the famous dye Martius Yellow. The dye is protein-specific, making it useful for staining certain cell preparations for microscopy. That also makes it problematic if you get it on you. It stains your skin bright yellow, and the stained skin takes about a month to grow out. A few of my fellow students finished that lab day with big yellow blotches on their hands and even faces.

What is of interest here is that two of the compounds—all are crystalline solids at room temperature—are hard to crystallize. To get one of them to precipitate out of solution, we had to cool the solution on an ice bath and then scratch the bottom of the flask, carefully, with a metal spatula. The other needed exposure to UV light, which we accomplished by putting the flask on a window sill for an hour or so.

Of course, if you already have a little bit of the target material on hand, in crystalline form, you can get a solution to crystallize quickly by seeding it with a bit of dust from crushing a tiny crystal of the same stuff. And here the professor told us a story. One of his mentors was an elderly chemist who had a beard. Once in a while one of his students would be having a hard time getting a solution to crystallize. He would call the professor over for advice or help. The professor would look at the flask, scratching his beard, and then the desired crystals would begin to form! As we heard the story we first thought the old professor must have poor hygiene habits. But No: Then he told us the old fellow knew what to anticipate, and early in the morning of such a day, he would put a bit of solution on his beard and let it dry. The scratching would release a few seed crystals into the air. When any of them fell into the flask in question, it would start the crystallization!

Such playful tricks aside, during my extended education (14 years at four universities and colleges), I learned that some scientists play fast and loose with their "science." Not all published "science" is genuine, and some of it is downright dangerous. I knew professors who were, quite simply, frauds. I don't wish to mention any names, because others have already exposed the worst of them, or their "work" has been superseded anyway. But I learned that there are several ways to get results into print even if you have no useful results to report. It's the fruit of the perverse motivation system called "Publish or Perish".

Thankfully, I don't need to get into detail, because a real scientist, Dr. Stuart Ritchie, has written a great book about how science goes wrong: Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. Dr. Ritchie is a real scientist, in contrast to myself: I got the degrees, but spent almost half a century writing software for scientists, without doing any science. Much of my value was making sure they got their math right, because I remembered all the calculus they had forgotten. I am particularly adept at statistics, so I know deeply how easily they can be misused to cook up a result almost out of thin air.

As an illustrative aside: I am an amateur radio operator (a Ham). On one occasion the members of a radio club I was part of visited an amateur who specialized in moon-bounce communication. He had a steerable antenna the size of a barn door, fed by a thousand-watt transmitter. It was just barely capable of getting a signal to the Moon and hearing it when it came back. The signal was noisy and barely discernable above background noise. Sometimes a Morse code "dah" would be broken up and sound like two "dits". (The dah is three times as long as the dit). Our host told us that sometimes the signal is so buried in the noise, and you listen so hard, that you can imagine an entire conversation out of random noise.

This is relevant. Many, many published results are based on something called "statistical significance", which has a criterion called the p value, with a "significance threshold" of 0.05. As long as the p value is less than 0.05, the result is considered "significant". It requires backward thinking to understand a p value. It is the probability that the "result" you obtained could have happened completely at random. Sometimes you will hear it said that there's only one chance in twenty, or less, that the conclusion you have drawn is incorrect.

That is not a very strict criterion. If you peruse scientific literature that includes statistical analysis, you are likely to find that most of the papers show results with a p value only a little below the threshold: 0.048, 0.04, 0.045, and so forth. Sometimes a "more robust" result will be reported, with a p value of 0.01 or even 0.005. To me, that is more like it. Because if you have thirty or so publications, all touting a p value just below 0.05, you have to say to yourself, "At least one of these is likely to be false. Maybe more than one." Then you should ask, "How can I find out which?"

The "how" is to replicate the experiment. Some experiments aren't too hard to replicate. What if the new experiment gets a different result? You can't stop there and say "It was wrong." It requires digging deeper, and nailing it down, then finding a journal to publish your counter-article (which can be remarkably hard; see the author's first story). In Science Fictions you'll read about some of the ways one can follow up.

What is more serious is the practice of hiding results that didn't work out, often called Null results. This is called the File Drawer Bias. For some kinds of experiments, particularly in psychology and medicine, there may be five or ten times as many "results" in the file drawer as the ones that were published. Automatically, we have to realize that a quarter to a half of the published reports are probably incorrect. Again, replication might be able to clear the matter up. However, doing experiments takes time and money. Our author reports a partial solution that is being implemented by many funding bodies, both governmental and private: They will only support the experiment if it is pre-registered and the results are guaranteed to be published. Such as system can still be gamed, but it is harder.

All this shows up close to halfway into the book, where the author tackles the issue of Publication Bias. Earlier, he takes on Fraud, as the most dangerous, and paradoxically, often the hardest to deal with in any timely way. A few heartbreaking stories are told, such as a surgeon who claimed he had perfected an artificial trachea to replace one damaged by accident or cancer. All of his patients died, usually after only a few months. Yet he was protected by the institution where he worked because of his fame. But eventually it all blew up. Far too many charlatans get famous enough (based on little substance!), that they are protected this way. And let us not forget the "accepted science" of the late 1700's, which resulted in the physicians for retired President George Washington bleeding him nearly dry because of a bad cold, such that he died.

Fortunately, we are more likely to encounter various kinds of bias. We are all biased. I was fortunate enough to take a class in literary discernment (I don't recall its actual title). We read articles from a great many publications. Some journals that I remember were The Wall Street Journal, Commonweal, National Review, The New Republic, The London Times, and The New York Times. We learned that every writer is biased, as is every editor. We learned to determine the bias of each writer and, from multiple articles, the likely bias of the editorial board for some of the publications. We also learned how to tell if a writer or editor is aware of the bias and has tried to mitigate it to any degree. Hint: Look for the number of modifiers (adjectives and adverbs) and their "flavor" (for example, "The company reached a compromise with the plaintiff" compared to "…reached a risky compromise…" or "…reached a satisfactory compromise…", and also compare to "…barely reached…"). Honest editors remove as many modifiers as possible, keeping only those that bear their weight in meaning.

I don't know how much Negligence is a problem. The stories didn't stick with me. Hype was of greater interest. Who remembers (from 1989) Cold Fusion? Lots of hype. Eventually, a total fizzle. The first story in the "Hype" chapter of Science Fictions tells of a supposed bacterium that used arsenic instead of phosphorus in its biochemistry. It turned out to be a story of contamination in the lab, not novel biochem in the field. It seems to be accepted today for a scientist with any kind of result to issue a press release long before submitting an article for peer review and publication. Perhaps the Snake Oil guy above would fit better alongside this paragraph!

But, seriously, what, oh what, can be done about it? Dr. Ritchie knows science from the inside. His last two chapters plus the Epilogue have suggestions that look workable to me. They primarily deal with incentives. Some of the current incentives seem designed to reward bad science. The simplest example is the Publish or Perish atmosphere in which tenure is only to be had by publishing at a superhuman level. This rewards "salami slicing", in which work that has several results will be published as several small papers rather than one that links them all together.

A family proverb is the "Moses method": To change the system, get everyone into the wilderness and wait 40 years for the older generation to die off. I hope the suggestions of Dr. Ritchie can make great inroads into the mess we are presently in, a lot quicker than 40 years.

Special bonus feature:

I sometimes tell scientists I know my suggestion for getting lots of good science done:

• Do a sketchy experiment to test an outlandish hypothesis. Drag it out until you get some kind of publishable result.
• Publish, with much fanfare.
• Based on the publication, trawl for funding to do more experiments to "confirm" your finding.
• Publish again; two papers if possible. Many more, if you can.
• Produce plenty of fanfare, including "stick in your eye" statements to rile up the establishment.
• Repeat as much as possible or until you can't get more funding.
• Some angered scientists will publish rebuttals. Some may even try to replicate your result.
• Answer every rebuttal, vociferously, in multiple venues if possible.
• Publish a "synthesis" of the entire matter. Be sure to cite all your prior work. Your "citation index" gets you noticed more.

This will get a lot of scientists to work their butts off to prove you wrong. One side effect is likely to be some unexpected, good science. Then, if you want to retain a shred of reputation, publish again, "de-biasing" your results, with more modest conclusions and a bit of mea culpa about the "little bit of overreach" in which you formerly indulged.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program. It's a great book!

AI is misnamed

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, polemics

Mechanical brains, they called them. Starting with ENIAC, dubbed the Giant Brain when it was made public in 1945, computing machinery has been compared to our brain, and computers were often called "thinking machines" in the first few decades of their existence. That's ironic. The one thing they most definitely do NOT do is Think! They are not thinkers, they are computers. They Compute.

ENIAC was indeed a giant: a row of cabinets 3 feet thick, 8 feet high, 98 feet long, wrapped around the walls of a big room. Running it took 150 kW. Much has been said about its speed: It performed ballistic calculations 2,400 times as fast as a human using pencil and paper, though I never saw it compared to a skilled operator of a Marchant mechanical calculator (my father's company had one of those; running a division problem made a wonderful noise!). Since that time, various computers have been compared to human speeds. Not once has anyone mentioned that arithmetical calculations are what the human brain is worst at! A very few people are "lightning calculators", able to use a bit of their brain to calculate rapidly. They are hundreds to thousands of times as fast as the rest of us. But even ENIAC was faster.

I began programming computers, initially using FORTRAN, in 1968. I've watched speeds increase, by a factor of a million between then and now, for single-processor machines, and much more than that for machines that incorporate stacks and stacks of processors, in the tens of thousands for the fastest weather-forecasting supercomputers. Before 1970 I read predictions that one day computers would be able to "program themselves". Nobody ever predicted how a computer would know what to program, unless a person "gave it the idea". To this day, no computer has "had an idea."

These are just a few of the reasons I look at all claims of "artificial intelligence" with a jaundiced eye. For more than 50 years, "human scale" AI has been touted as "no more than 10-20 years away." I always say, "Nonsense."

Finally, someone with a finger to the pulse of the AI community has written a book exposing the hype: Not only does the AI Emperor have no clothes, it has no mind either. computer scientist Erik J. Larson's book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do proves that case, quite handily. His point is not that they "don't" think the way we do, but that they can't do so. Not now, and not ever.

Dr. Larson shows, in a stuffed handful of ways, that nearly all arguments in favor of AI becoming a superhuman superintelligence run the same way: This or that program can do deductive inferences, and such-and-such a program can do inductive inferences, and if we just put enough computing muscle behind some collection of such programs, they will "evolve" or "develop" into a conscious entity that can outthink any human. The few arguments that don't follow this schema are based on efforts like Blue Brain, which used a supercomputer to simulate the activities of neurons and all their connections in a segment of a mouse or rat brain. Such projects have uniformly failed, although their promoters have tried in vain to cover up the failure by waving their hands and talking about "making a pivot" (pick your buzzword for hyping a consolation prize) in some other direction.

The characteristic of both deductive inference and inductive inference (things we all do many times daily) is their reliance on a knowledge base. Whichever kind of inference is to be performed, the entity (brain or machine) making the inference is limited to the domain of knowledge stated in the initial problem, plus any related knowledge the entity can access. More succinctly: both brands of inference can look only backward, never forward, because there is nothing in the process of inference that anticipates the future.

A key word in this book: Abduction. Abductive inference is "what if" thinking. We call it "getting an idea." Also called "counterfactual", an abductive inference follows the exhortation of Jack Kennedy, "Others look at what is and say, 'Why?' Let us consider what might be and say, 'Why not?' " (a paraphrase from memory; it's been a long time since I heard him say it.)

Nobody knows how abduction works. Until they do, there is no theory we can use to develop a machine that can do it. Abduction isn't some automatic offspring of deduction plus induction. It is something different. Only abduction can look forward. Without it, there is no progress, no invention, and literally, "nothing new under the sun." (Solomon was wrong, and he'd be the first to admit it if he were to see a typewriter, an auto, or a smart phone. But he wasn't talking about technology anyway. Hi-tech for him was a spear head made of iron instead of bronze.)

Here is a side thought I had, on a different line from the book: A brain produces and consumes Meaning. Language (Dr. Larson's specialty) is based on what words Mean. A key concept is the difference between a word's Denotation (dictionary definition under a specific usage) and its Connotation (shade of meaning depending on context, tone of voice, and other tacit matters). I connect this thought with another: Computers excel at detecting Differences; Brains excel at detecting Similarities. Based primarily on this latter principle, I built a 40-year career as a computer programmer upon writing programs that did what brains do badly, while facilitating people's ability to use their brains to do what computers do badly.

I want to dig into this idea of simulating a brain's neurons. Many brain theorists use the "column" hypothesis to understand how our cerebral cortex works. The cortex apparently consists of 50-100 million "mini-columns" made up of 100-300 neurons each, arranged in larger columns that number around a million or so. What would it take to simulate the action of about 200 neurons, in real time?

The various synchronized pulses that we can detect with EEG range as high as 40 Hz, with a lot taking place in the 10-20 Hz range. Thus, whatever you simulate, the cycle time has to be in this range or faster.

A neuron is not a transistor. A transistor has three connections, and is basically an on-off switch. A neuron has between a few hundred and 10,000 inputs, and from thousands to as many as 100,000 outputs. The 200 neuron mini-column we want to simulate will thus have thousands of connections just within itself, and 2-5 million connections with other parts of the brain. Further, each neuron, under the influence of its inputs, emits a train of pulses to its thousands of outputs, at variable rates.

A base-level simulation must first proceed by assuming the column is isolated, so we can ignore a few million connections, except for perhaps one, to be used to trigger the system to see what happens.

To simulate a single neuron requires all the processing power of a modest microprocessor such as a single-core Pentium CPU (in the 1990's they ran with cycle times of about 50 MHz). These days, it is no problem to string together CPU power equivalent to 200 Pentiums. Collecting the data just from all the internal connections will generate about 100 kbytes, each 1/10th to 1/40th of a second. During "beta wave" heavy thinking, that's around 40 Mbytes/sec. That's not so enormous; it's about half the write speed of a magnetic disk. But now let's remember the 2-5 million outputs from, and an equal number of inputs to, these 200 neurons and other parts of the brain. You really have to consider the whole cortex, and a few other things, to begin to simulate a human brain. Each mini-column in apparently connected to at least 1-2% of the entire brain, a few million other mini-columns.

Bottom line: to simulate the entire cerebral cortex of about 16 billion neurons, with the tens of trillions of connections between them, requires the computing power of 16 billion Pentium-class CPU chips, or something like, by my estimation, 300 million processor cores running 4-5 GHz. They would need about 40 million hard disks to handle the throughput, or about 5 million solid state drives (SSD's). At least during setup and testing you need to record it all to see what is happening. Later less of it needs to be kept.

Will processing speed and disk speed and capacity "save the bacon" in another decade or so? Not really. Do you remember Moore's Law? As originally stated, the number of transistors on a CPU chip doubled twice every three years. Amazingly, this held true for decades. A modern Intel I7 chip has several "cores" (separate CPU's), each containing about 3 billion transistors. But this hasn't changed much in the past 15 years. Clock speeds maxed out around 5 GHz before 2005. Modern supercomputers just stack larger and larger numbers of multicore processors together. The electronic brain described above would need 300 million such cores, and that isn't going to change much. And we are decades to centuries away from "quantum computers" that can exceed the power of today's CPU's, if that ever happens.

That is just to simulate the cerebral cortex and its 16 billion neurons. What about the rest of the brain? You might say, "Doesn't the brain have 100 billion neurons?" The actual number is closer to 86 billion, but most of them are in the cerebellum! See this diagram. (It neglects two items. The limbic system or mid-brain handles our emotional responses and mediates memory storage, using one billion neurons, and the brain stem below the cerebellum shuttles signals between the cerebellum and the body, also with about a billion neurons.) The cerebellum mainly runs the body, but that isn't all...a subject for later discussion.

A disembodied cortex, absent the rest, is not going to operate like a real brain. It'll probably go insane so fast, it will stop running in a matter of seconds. It will die a-borning. Just for one example, the visual cortex at the back of the brain takes up about 1/4 of the whole. What kind of eyes will you give your brain-in-a-warehouse? Without them, what will happen? If you want a truly disembodied brain, you just simulate the frontal lobes, but you need to communicate with them. A big, big issue.

I have a different question: What's the big deal about duplicating the human brain? Millions of natural ones are created every year, and much of their training and education is accomplished in 10-20 years. Our present computer hardware works very differently from a neuron-derived brain. Making a computer simulate a natural brain is incredibly difficult, costly, and probably would suck down electrical power like a steel plant. Can we take advantage of computing machinery in "native mode", to work out new ways of thinking? Until we have a theory of abduction, we need humans to come up with the ideas. Single, thoughtful, bright brains are better at that than any kind of hive mind, committee, or brainstorming team. Ideas need development, however, and we must focus on better and better ways to automate at least some of that.

I like SYNERGY. I built a career on it. If I were to return to work in the field, it's what I would focus on. A final key point of Dr. Larson's: there is not only wasted effort in the falsely-named AI field; effort is being diverted from things that matter, things that need doing, while natural (that is, genuine) intelligence is being denigrated, to the detriment of us all. That's the tragedy of misdirected AI.

The anti-shrink case

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychiatry, history, polemics

In my prior review, of a book about psychiatry written by psychiatrists, I wrote (perhaps more than I should have) of my experience with psychiatrists. To sum up my takeaway: of at least ten shrinks that I have worked with, all of whom accepted ComPsych "insurance", I consider only two to be "normal", and only these two were of genuine help. Furthermore, when I asked family doctors to recommend psychiatrists whom they thought weren't crazy themselves, in each case, the ones recommended wouldn't accept ComPsych referrals, and their fees were extremely high, in the $400/hour range or more.

Side note: Do you know that guy who goes in with a screwdriver and needle-nose pliers to defuse a bomb? His work is worth $400/hour, and perhaps even more. Anybody else on the planet, no matter who, should not be paid more than half that. Period.

The last one I saw, I was pretty impressed with, at first. At our first visit he reviewed my case in detail, and we talked for a half hour. Then, thinking out loud, he ran through a differential diagnosis to reach the conclusion Dr. Valentine had reached several years earlier, of Bipolar II (the milder type, but still distressing enough). He suggested Abilify, an "atypical antipsychotic", which is also useful for reducing the distress of depression, but doesn't much affect mild mania. As he put it, "We'll let you have your fun," because hypomania is a happy state, while full-blown mania is torment (as I've been told by two friends so afflicted). The main side effects of Abilify for me were a little weight gain and the need for a daily nap. Otherwise, it was pretty good. However, after a year, going in for a third visit, I was planning to ask if there might be something better. He was gone. Vanished. No trace. No sign or note on the office door. Other doctors I've had who moved away or left the business at least had the grace to inform their patients. At that point, I decided I had learned enough about mood management to live without psychoactive medications, and I have done so ever since, for almost 15 years.

Reading Psychiatry and its Discontents, by Andrew Scull, I find that the differential diagnosis used by this doctor may have sounded good, but whether it was scientific or even medically accurate is not so certain. Based on my experiences over the years, for at least this condition (Bipolar II), I think the basic criteria the doctor (and Dr. Valentine) used are useful. In other cases, perhaps not so much.

Professor Scull's book mainly consists of prior articles and book reviews, edited for coherence, and it is a historical review of the various incarnations of psychiatry. Prior to the late 1800's those who worked with the insane were called Alienists, because the older meaning of "alien" was "insane". Once the word "alien" picked up the meaning "foreign", the ambiguity gradually led some to seek a new term. The Greek word "psyche" refers to the soul or mind, so that was a good prefix, and on it went.

Whatever one calls them, those who treat the insane (and the "sorta insane" like me), have always been sort of stepchildren of the medical profession. Apparently, after decades of working empirically (at best!), in the mid-1900's psychiatrists felt the need to establish their work on a more scientific basis. The process is dealt with, over the space of several chapters, and is a sad history at best. The result was a total of eight editions of a guidebook called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. The current edition is DSM-5, a thousand-page tome. In the view of our author, the first "official" version, DSM-III, released in 1980, was "an anti-intellectual collection of categories jammed between two covers". Later editions only compounded its errors, and much greater errors were gathered to comprise DSM-5.

It is a rather difficult for a layman to consult DSM-5 to see for themselves what is going on. Firstly, it is enormous, 947 pages, covering 297 named "disorders"; it is expensive at $199, or $149 for the paperback. There is a little bit of information available without cost. I took a look at some of the Fact Sheets found at this page. One of them is titled Personality Disorder, though the sheet itself is titled Personality Disorders, and lists ten items in the first paragraph. Look at this list, mentally appending the term "personality disorder" to each item:

• paranoid
• schizoid
• schizotypal
• antisocial
• borderline
• histrionic
• narcissistic
• avoidant
• dependent
• obsessive-compulsive

If you dig into the characteristics and criteria used to "diagnose" any of these, they are nearly all rather mild extensions of ordinary tendencies we all pick up over time. In the discussion on the Fact Sheet, four of these are somewhat deprecated—frankly, they are redundant, being covered by other items dealt with elsewhere—leaving the six I have highlighted to be dealt with in the body of DSM-5. Prof. Scull states several times that most of the 297 categories in DSM-5 are inventions of the drug companies that effectively "pathologize" common behaviors so drugs can be sold to the "anxious well", people who are quite sane, but easily convinced to worry about their mental health.

Why is DSM-5 important? The insurance companies have adopted it as the "standard" upon which they are willing to pay. Shrinks everywhere have to put a diagnostic number on a prescription or treatment schedule or they won't be paid by the insurance company, and in most cases, the patient can't afford to pay. Sadly, most of the categories are, in my view (developed years ago), bogus.

The Autism Spectrum was invented, practically out of whole cloth, during the production of DSM-5, which was released in 2013, but "the spectrum" was being bandied about earlier. Before the 1990's about one child in 500 was counted as autistic. A much smaller number, formerly called "high functioning autistic" were later said to have Asperger's Syndrome. "The spectrum" produced millions of new "victims", such that one person in 90 is now "on the spectrum". I have several friends or acquaintances who are considered "on the spectrum." Actually, with one exception, they are just shy and a little withdrawn. Big deal. So was I. I suppose I could, even now, go get diagnosed and get some kid of Federal "help". I'd be mortally ashamed to do so.

My grandmother, using an old term for "mildly crazy", would say, "Everybody's pixilated except you and me. Sometimes I wonder about you." Extend that to the psychiatric profession. Most (not all!) of the psychiatrists I've known are earnest and honest, but it is certain that a significant number are just cynical enough to be willing to profit if the entire population were to be brought under their "care."

I won't get into the horrors that "mental care" entailed in the past, nor many other aspects of the book. Psychiatry has the lowest rate of "true help" of all the medical and fringe-medical professions. It did help me, even though I eventually learned how to do better without any more "help".

I don't agree with some who say there are no mental illnesses (neither does the author). There can be organic problems with the brain, which is physical, after all. Some afflictions such as schizophrenia and bipolar and chronic depression may be organically-based. Also, there are stresses, particularly if they are severe enough or chronic, that require some people to develop defense mechanisms, and defensive habits are hard to break, even though their cause is no longer present. This is how most neuroses arise. We still don't know enough to go beyond that with any pretension of scientific credibility.

The book is, then, a history of a failed profession, and a polemic against its present incarnation as a practice enslaved to DSM-5, and a polemic against DSM-5 itself. I happen to agree. The two psychiatrists that I respect had a human dimension to their practice that went far beyond totting up a checklist of my symptoms to get me in the right pigeonhole. They did their best, with both hands tied, to treat the whole person that I am. The current state of psychiatry, as seen in this book and in the prior one, is well described as a tiny candle in a dark forest. Nobody yet knows how to bring any more light on the subject. Our brain and mind are still almost total mysteries.