Tag Archives: Science

General Science

Texas Repulicans

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Yesterday the Texas Republican Party released their platform. It’s terrifying. It starts out innocently enough saying that they plan to uphold the constitution and that everyone is created equally. However, that’s the end of the good stuff. As I tweeted out yesterday there’s a portion that says that they do not support teaching children critical thinking or anything that could lead them to question their current belief system or parental authority.

I can’t think of a better definition of science than critical thinking, questioning current beliefs and authority. When a scientist makes a discovery that doesn’t conform to the current scientific paradigm(program) accepting the results for the experiment REQUIRE these abilities. Looking at the faster than light neutrino fiasco of the past year is a perfect example of this. Scientists saw a result that was highly suspect (faster than light speeds), but they were willing to accept it, if it passed enough tests. They were critical of the results, didn’t accept it on face value, they were willing to question the current paradigm (relativistic physics) and the authority of nearly 100 years of work based on that paradigm.

This is also a case of biting the hand that feeds. Texas’s growth has been fueled through science, technology and research at businesses. With Houston as the center of the oil world, which is driven by better science of getting oil out of the ground, new technologies to do so and the research for increasing the conversion rates from crude oil to gasoline and other goods, you’d think that Texas would understand why it’s important to have scientists. While Texas doesn’t have as many Tier 1 research universities as California (3 vs 9) these three are extremely powerful and wealthy. UT is the 3rd richest in the country and Texas A&M is the 10th. They are both research powerhouses in the academic world. Creating policies that negatively impact the education system that feeds these schools is only going to hurt their abilities to compete in the future.

The Texas Republicans also want to “Teach the Controversy” with equal air time for every side of the argument. In this case when they get to evolution I hope the controversy they discuss is the recent disagreement between Evolutionary Biologists Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson, because that’s the biggest one going on in Evolution right now. However, I know this is not what they mean. They plan to teach the “controversy” of creationism in science class. This is as dangerous as not teaching critical thinking.

If you couple the lack of critical thinking with teach the controversy approach, you have a recipe for disaster. You create students that are unable to really understand the differences and take what the teacher believes at face value. If the “biology” teacher is a creationist (which has happened in some states) then they will not adequately teach evolution and the students will not understand why creationism is wrong and evolution is scientifically accurate. They will be unable to critically reason the differences. This is a terrifying prospect.

These are not the only areas that Texas Republicans are showing that they are out of touch with the youth of America. The DailyKOS has further analysis  a lot of the bad policy stances that are coming down the road in Texas from Republicans.

Climate change more than melting ice caps

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Yesterday I heard a report on NPR about how climate change is interacting with natural wild fires. I found an article about the paper, which was published originally in Ecosphere, which discusses some of the long term impacts of the climate change on wild fires. To do this, the group used 16 different climate models which ranged from very favorable emission numbers to catastrophic emissions numbers. This allowed for a wide range of different types of human activities and reflective climate changes in the area to be tested. This is important as it gives the article much more validity than if they had simply decided to use the worst case, or best case. Of course, there will be people that will argue that man has nothing to do with the climate and we aren’t impacting it. However, that’s sticking your head in the sand. We know we have impacted the climate in the past (hello Acid Rain) and have actually fixed it though changing our behavior (Acid Rain again).

Just using the climate models isn’t enough to really predict how and where wildfires will occur in the future. The wild fire itself had to be modeled as something where the conditions it could exist in can be tested. The group decided to model wild fire in the same way that movement of animals are modeled. Under certain circumstances it’s likely that an animal group will move into a specific type of environment. This is based on the amount of water, the amount of vegetation and the temperature. Wildfires need the exact same resources to exist. However instead of being lush and moist, the area needs to be dry, but with enough water to have had plant growth to a certain size.

By combing the two techniques the team was able to show that the West is going to be burning a lot more frequently than they are not. This of course creates a serious problem. People like to live in those areas. People don’t like to leave their houses when there are disasters, which means that we’re going to have more people burning, like the one in Colorado.

The authors, in the NPR interview, argued that this means we need to learn how to live with wildfire in the same way that we’ve learned how to live with floods and earthquakes. How can we do that though? It is likely to be more difficult than flooding because you can’t just build a mound of dirt as a ridge to prevent fire from moving further. With water you can do this with varying success. With fire, that mound of dirt will eventually grow grass on the mound and would just as easily catch fire. Even stone walls would be passable as a strong wind could blow embers over the wall or heat the wall to the point of material catching on the other side.

These are issues that we will have to resolve in the next 10-30 years. This seems like a long way off, but time has a habit of sneaking up on you and before you know it we’ll be having wildfires like we had in Texas last year and are having in Colorado and New Mexico now. I’m glad we’re aware of the extent of the risk now though.

Is Scientism the problem?

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I just finished reading an article in The New Republic which argues that history and the humanities are knowledge too. At times it felt like the author was yelling at his brother begging to be noticed. Personally, I feel that in general the author is correct, that history and humanities do plan an important role and can be considered as knowledge. However, the author makes one glaring mistake, he is equating the unified theories of everything in physics with everything, where it typically means a combination of all physical laws within physics both particle and cosmic, which would then move into chemistry and likely into biology. However, this type of theory of everything would stop there. It couldn’t really combine natural selection as functions of chemicals in a specific manager do not necessarily mean a truer understanding of evolution. It would be able to explain how phenotypes are changed with genotypes, but not why one genotype/phenotype pair was selected over another without an understanding of the specifics of the environments at a time. A true theory of everything at that level would essentially be a simulation of the universe. It would be impossible to model in a series of equations beyond the fundamental laws of physics.

For the evolution of biological systems you have to understand the natural history of the world that the organisms develop and evolve. This is why when you read Sagan, Dawkins or any other biologists or cosmologist they argue that if you rewound the tape of history you’d get a different present day. Some things may have happened just slightly different enough and you’d have no humans. The understanding of the history of our world allows us to understand where the future of it is going.

In the same way, history does matter. There are branches of economics, such as evolutionary economics that use complexity models and work to ensure that the history of events are included in their models. What the major difference between typical theories of history and psychology and newer models of economics and complex systems of physics, is that we’re able to test them using simulations. It is likely that in the future we’ll be able to do the same thing with history. This will give us a deeper understanding of why our societies have developed as they have. One heavily contested aspect of evolution, which is mentioned in the article, is cultural inheritance, which is where the theory of memes came from. This approach doesn’t suggest one type of people is better than another or one lifestyle is better than another, it simply says that in the environment that the culture resides it’s more capable of surviving than others. This can go down deeper to smaller niches within the culture and how well they adapt to their environment.

Other aspects the author argues discusses is the differences in the acceptability (or perhaps the perception) of radical paradigm shifts in science compared to the humanities and history. He mentioned specifically Freud in psychology and Galileo in physics. He argues that Galileo was able to make changes in physics because he tackled an “easy” problem that had minimal level of complexity. He went after the theory of gravity and how objects fall at the same rate while Freud went after the entirety of the human psyche. I agree there is a difference of complexity, however the key differences between Galileo and Freud is that he was better able to explain the state of the world and when new scientific theories were produced they continued to explain what Galileo found but with more accuracy and expanded on them. When Freud was discredited it was more like discrediting Alchemy than going from Newtonian physics to Relativistic physics.

The key difference between many theories in humanities and in the rest of science is the lack of continuum between two major theories. Yes, Relativistic physics completely obliterated the value of Newtonian physics and created a new world (universe) view, but it solved the same problems or proved that many of the old problems were only problems because the theory wasn’t complete enough.

The key that needs to be remembered in either science or humanities is that all models are wrong, but some are useful. Freud was wrong in how he looked at the human psyche, but his models allowed other theories to be tested and used and likely spawned Neuroscience and the bridging between neuroscience and many of psychological problems.

Evolution and Synthetics

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An amazing scientific announcement has recently occurred, we have been able to show that synthetic DNA, XNA, is capable of evolving. This is interesting for several reasons. First, it’s just more evidence of evolution, which should be a rather no brainer at this point. Second, it shows that there are other materials that can function similarly to DNA and RNA. Finally, we can make these structures and they will behave in a similar fashion to DNA and RNA.

If we can create something that evolves under stress, it indicates that evolution is still extremely robust. If this type of material did not evolve, it would have made scientists look at both that material itself and check a few things. First, would we expect this material to evolve. Second, if yes, why doesn’t it evolve. If we are developing a material that is expected to mimic DNA/RNA, it is likely that we would expect it to evolve in a similar fashion. If it doesn’t evolve, then this could have serious consequences. This would not disprove evolution, as DNA/RNA both evolve, it would indicate that either we have the wrong material or that only DNA/RNA can evolve. It would explain why only DNA/RNA have been found on earth and not any other type of xNA material.

Since this material can evolve it leads to interesting questions itself. Did evolution occur  between DNA/RNA and other xNA’s? Did the RNA/DNA combination beat out every other stain of xNA’s? This would be interesting to understand. If RNA/DNA did evolve because it was better suited to Earth’s early environment does that mean that our current environment still suits it best? Could we evolve completely new life forms based on these structures? Only time and more research will allow us to answer these questions. But we do know that these new strains could allow us to develop treatments and other solutions to biological problems.

One way we could answer these questions is if we discover alien life that is based off of non-RNA/DNA combination. This could be in the form of anything from bacteria to full blown organisms. At this point, it is more likely we’ll find a bacteria life form based on another XNA than anything else as they are capable of surviving exposed space transportation, such as on an asteroid.

The fact that we’re able to create XNA is an amazing accomplishment. It indicates that we understand biochemicals required for life to an extent that we are able to create new enzymes that mimic RNA/DNA. We also understand that the most important metric for this experiment is not the fact that we could make a stable XNA, but that it must evolve. A stable or static XNA would not be interesting as it would have no ability to adapt in an environment where there is competition. The ability to change as the conditions change is what separates RNA/DNA from other proteins and enzymes. Only the best combinations are able to change and develop over time.

I’m excited to see how these changes will impact us. I think there are some significant long term implications for this, but at this time I’m not sure what they are. The fact that we’re capable of doing this is an incredible step.

The difficulty of science

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As reported in Science Insider yesterday, apparently the faster than light neutrinos may have been caused by a loose fiber optics cable. To me this also begs the question, were other results impacted by this loose fiber opitc cable?

This is where the difficulty in science lies. First, CERN had to admit that there was a faulty detector which could have caused the result invalidating what likely was the greatest finding in physics recently. Secondly, they are going to have to run the same tests again to make sure the results were bad. Finally, a bunch of other locations invested in their capabilities and will be able to test the results for themselves too. I think the last two are important. At one point Fermi lab indicated that they had seen faster than light neutrinos but it was beyond their capabilities to reach the required level of statistical significance.

I think that this does show an important factor within science. First, scientists have the ability to referee themselves on important earth (speed of light) shattering results. It indicates that the system works. Secondly, it shows there is integrity in scientists, as something like this essentially will make careers and set this group up for the rest of their lives somewhere. As they admitted what caused the error and are working to correct it in testing, it indicates they care more about the results than about their career. Although, lying about this after finding it would have ruined their careers just as quickly.

Why is that important though? Let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Most scientists are trained in a very similar fashion. You are taught the basics during high school, moving to more advanced topics in college and finally many become experts by pursuing a PhD. All are taught about the idea of falsifiablity of hypothesis and theories as the cornerstone for scientific progress. Of course there are debates of if this is how things actually work in science, but typically it is. There are points where a major shift in scientific discourse but this can take a long time and must answer questions of the previous scientific perspective and answer questions the other perspective could not. A perfect example of this is Newtonian physics and Relativistic physics. Newtonian physics gives you Force = Mass x Acceleration, it’s not really fully accurate, but it works well enough for daily activity. Under certain circumstances it’s simply wrong. That’s where Einstein came in and fixed it. It took a while for the shift of acceptance for this theory, but it’s now the prevailing theory.

From a scientists point of view their incentives are oriented towards yearly output of papers that are accepted into high quality peer reviewed journals, such as Science and Nature and whatever is the best in their field. There are no incentives for making hoax theories. They would lose funding and eventually be jobless.

I think that this error at CERN can bring that into the discourse over topics such as evolution and climate change. It’s indicative of the ethics that prevail in science today and that when theories are wrong work is done to find out why or how. Once that has been answered, new theories are suggested and eventually accepted. Understanding how this works will make topics like climate change and evolution less threatening.