Showing posts with label Neil deGrasse Tyson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Neil deGrasse Tyson. Show all posts

Tuesday 12 May 2020

Ancestral tales: why we prefer fables to fact for human evolution

It seems that barely a month goes by without there being a news article concerning human ancestry. In the eight years since I wrote a post on the apparent dearth of funding in hominin palaeontology there appears to have been some uptake in the amount of research in the field. This is all to the good of course, but what is surprising is that much of the non-specialist journalism - and therefore public opinion - is still riddled with fundamental flaws concerning both our origins and evolution in general.

It also seems that our traditional views of humanity's position in the cosmos is often the source of the errors. It's one thing to make such howlers as the BBC News website did some years' back, in which they claimed chimpanzees were direct human ancestors, but there are a key number of more subtle errors that are repeated time and again. What's interesting is that in order to explain evolution by natural selection, words and phrases have become imbued with incorrect meaning or in some cases, just a slight shift of emphasis. Either way, it seems that evolutionary ideas have been tacked onto existing cultural baggage and in the process, failed to explain the intended theories; personal and socio-political truths have triumphed over objective truth, as Neil deGrasse Tyson might say.

1) As evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould use to constantly point out, the tree of life is like the branches of a bush, not a ladder of linear progression. It's still fairly common to see the phrase 'missing link' applied to our ancestry, among others; I even saw David Attenborough mention it in a tv series about three years' ago. A recent news article described - as if in surprise - that there were at least three species of hominins living in Africa during the past few million years, at the same time and in overlapping regions too. Even college textbooks use it - albeit in quotation marks - among a plethora of other phrases that were once valid, so perhaps it isn't surprising that popular publications continue to use them without qualification.

Evolution isn't a simple, one-way journey through space and time from ancestors to descendants: separate but contemporaneous child species can arise via geographical isolation and then migrate to a common location, all while their parent species continues to exist. An example today would be the lesser black-backed and herring gulls of the Arctic circle, which is either a single, variable species or two clearly distinct species, depending where you look within its range.

It might seem obvious, but species also migrate and then their descendants return to the ancestral homeland; the earliest apes evolved in Africa and then migrated to south-east Asia, some evolving into the ancestors of gibbons and orangutan while others returned to Africa to become the ancestors of gorillas and chimpanzees. One probable culprit of the linear progression model is that some of the examples chosen to teach evolution such as the horse have few branches in their ancestry, giving the false impression of a ladder in which a descendant species always replaces an earlier one.

2) What defines a species is also much misunderstood. The standard description doesn't do any favours in disentangling human evolution; this is where Richard Dawkins' oft-repeated phrase 'the tyranny of the discontinuous mind' comes into play. Examine a range of diagrams for our family tree and you'll find distinct variations, with certain species sometimes being shown as direct ancestors and sometimes as cousins on extinct branches.

If Homo heidelbergensis is the main root stock of modern humans but some of us have small amounts of Neanderthal and/or Denisovan DNA, then do all three qualify as direct ancestors of modern humans? Just where do you draw the line, bearing in mind every generation could breed with both the one before and after? Even with rapid speciation events between long periods of limited variability (A.K.A. punctuated equilibrium) there is no clear cut-off point separating us from them. Yet it's very rare to see Neanderthals labelled as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and much more common to see them listed as Homo neanderthalensis, implying a wholly separate species.

Are the religious beliefs and easy-to-digest just-so stories blinding us to the complex, muddled background of our origins? Obviously, the word 'race' has profoundly negative connotations these days, with old-school human variation now known to be plain wrong. For example, there's greater genetic variation in the present-day sub-Saharan African population than in the rest of the world combined, thanks to it being the homeland of all hominin species and the out-of-Africa migrations of modern humans occurring relatively recently.

We should also consider that species can be separated by behaviour, not just obvious physical differences. Something as simple as the different pitches of mating calls separate some frog species, with scientific experiments proving that the animals can be fooled by artificially changing the pitch. Also, just because species appear physically similar doesn't necessarily mean an evolutionary close relationship: humans and all other vertebrates are far closer to spiny sea urchins and knobbly sea cucumbers than they are to any land invertebrates such as the insects.

3) Since the Industrial Revolution, societies - at least in the West - have become obsessed with growth, progress and advance. This bias has clearly affected the popular conception that evolution always leads to improvements, along the lines of faster cheetahs to catch more nimble gazelles and 'survival of the fittest'. Books speak of our epoch as the Age of Mammals, when by most important criteria we live in the era of microbes; just think of the oxygen-generating cyanobacteria. Many diagrams of evolutionary trees place humans on the central axis and/or at the pinnacle, as if we were destined to be the best thing that over three billion years of natural selection could achieve. Of course, this is no better than what many religions have said, whereby humans are the end goal of the creator and the planet is ours to exploit and despoil as we like (let's face it, for a large proportion of our existence, modern Homo sapiens was clearly less well adapted to glacial conditions than the Neanderthals).

Above all, these charts give the impression of a clear direction for evolution with mammals as the core animal branch. Popular accounts still describe our distant ancestors, the synapsids, as the 'mammal-like reptiles', even though they evolved from a common ancestor of reptiles, not from reptiles per se. Even if this is purely due to lazy copying from old sources rather than fact-checking, doesn't it belie the main point of the publication? Few general-audience articles admit that all of the earliest dinosaurs were bipedal, presumably because we would like to conflate standing on two legs with more intelligent or 'advanced' (a tricky word to use in a strict evolutionary sense) lineages.

The old ladder of fish-amphibian-reptile/bird-mammal still hangs over us and we seem unwilling to admit to extinct groups (technically called clades) that break our neat patterns. Incidentally, for the past 100 million years or so, about half of all vertebrate species have been teleost fish - so much for the Age of Mammals! No-one would describe the immensely successful but long-extinct trilobites as just being 'pill bug-like marine beetles' or similar, yet when it comes to humans, we have a definite sore spot. There is a deep psychological need to have an obvious series of ever-more sophisticated ancestors paving the way for us.

What many people don't realise is that organisms frequently evolve both physical and behavioural attributes that are subsequently lost and possibly later regained. Some have devolved into far simpler forms, frequently becoming parasites. Viruses are themselves a simplified life form, unable to reproduce without a high-jacked cell doing the work for them; no-one could accuse them of not being highly successful - as we are currently finding out to our cost. We ourselves are highly adaptable generalists, but on a component-by-component level it would appear that only our brains make us as successful as we are. Let's face it, physically we're not up to much: even cephalopods such as squid and octopus have a form of camera eye that is superior to that of all vertebrates.

Even a cursory glance at the natural history of life, using scientific disciplines as disparate as palaeontology and comparative DNA analysis, shows that some lineages proved so successful that their outward physiology has changed very little. Today, there are over thirty species of lancelet that are placed at the base of the chordates and therefore closely related to the ancestors of all vertebrates. They are also extremely similar in appearance to 530-million-year-old fossils of the earliest chordates in the Cambrian period. If evolution were a one-way ticket to progress, why have they not long since been replaced by later, more sophisticated organisms?

4) We appear to conflate success simply with being in existence today, yet our species is a newcomer and barely out of the cradle compared to some old-timers. We recently learned that Neanderthals wove plant fibre to make string and ate a wide variety of seafood. This knowledge brings with it a dwindling uniqueness for modern Homo sapiens. The frequently given explanation of our superiority over our extinct cousins is simply that they aren't around anymore, except as minor components of our genome. But this is a tautology: they are inferior because they are extinct and therefore an evolutionary dead end; yet they became extinct because of their inferiority. Hmmm...there's not much science going on here!

The usual story until recently was that at some point (often centred around 40,000-50,000 years ago) archaic sapiens developed modern human behaviour, principally in the form of imaginative, symbolic thinking. This of course ignores the (admittedly tentative) archaeological evidence of Neanderthal cave-painting, jewelry and ritual, all of which are supposed to be evidence of our direct ancestor's unique Great Leap Forward (yes, it was named after Chairman Mao's plan). Not only did Neanderthals have this symbolic behaviour, they appear to have developed it independently of genetically-modern humans. This is a complete about-turn from the previous position of them being nothing more than poor copyists.

There are alternative hypotheses to the Great Leap Forward, including:
  1. Founder of the Comparative Cognition Project and primate researcher Sarah Boysen observed that chimpanzees can create new methods for problem solving and processing information. Therefore, a gradual accumulation of cognitive abilities and behavioural traits over many millennia - and partially inherited from earlier species - may have reached a tipping point. 
  2. Some geneticists consider there to have been a sudden paradigm shift caused by a mutation of the FOXP2 gene, leading to sophisticated language and all that it entails.
  3. Other researchers consider that once a certain population size and density was achieved, complex interactions between individuals led the way to modern behaviour. 
  4. A better diet, principally in the form of larger amounts of cooked meat, led to increased cognition. 
In some ways, all of these are partly speculative and as is often the case we may eventually find that a combination of these plus other factors were involved. This shouldn't stop us from realising how poor the communication of evolutionary theories still is and how many misconceptions exist, with the complex truth obscured by our need to feel special and to tell simple stories that rarely convey the amazing evolution of life on Earth.



Friday 21 December 2018

The Twelve (Scientific) Days Of Christmas

As Christmas approaches and we get over-saturated in seasonal pop songs and the occasional carol, I thought it would be appropriate to look at a science-themed variation to this venerable lyric. So without further ado, here are the twelve days of Christmas, STEM-style.

12 Phanerozoic periods

Although there is evidence that life on Earth evolved pretty much as soon as the conditions were in any way suitable, microbes had the planet to themselves for well over three billion years. Larger, complex organisms may have gained a kick-start thanks to a period of global glaciation - the controversial Snowball Earth hypothesis. Although we often hear of exoplanets being found in the Goldilocks zone, it may also take an awful lot of luck to produce a life-bearing environment. The twelve geological periods of the Phanerozoic (literally, well-displayed life) cover the past 542 million years or so and include practically every species most of us have ever heard of. Hard to believe that anyone who knows this could ever consider our species to be the purpose of creation!

11 essential elements in humans

We often hear the phrase 'carbon-based life forms', but we humans actually contain over three times the amount of oxygen than we do of carbon. In order of abundance by mass, the eleven vital elements are oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine and magnesium. Iron, which you might think to be present in larger quantities, is just a trace mineral; adults have a mere 3 or 4 grams. By comparison, we have about 25 grams of magnesium. In fact, iron and the other trace elements amount to less than one percent of our total body mass. Somehow, 'oxygen-based bipeds' just doesn't have the same ring to it.

10 fingers and toes

The evolution of life via natural selection and genetic mutation consists of innumerable, one-off events. This is science as history, although comparative studies of fossils, DNA and anatomy are required instead of written texts and archaeology. It used to be thought that ten digits was canonical, tracing back to the earliest terrestrial vertebrates that evolved from lobe-finned fish. Then careful analysis of the earliest stegocephalians of the late Devonian period such as Acanthostega showed that their limbs terminated in six, seven or even eight digits. The evolution of five-digit limbs seems to have occurred only once, in the subsequent Carboniferous period, yet of course we take it - and the use of base ten counting - as the most obvious of things. Just imagine what you could play on a piano if you had sixteen fingers!

9 climate regions

From the poles to the equator, Earth can be broadly divided into the following climate areas: polar and tundra; boreal forest; temperate forest; Mediterranean; desert; dry grassland; tropical grassland; tropical rainforest. Mountains are the odd region out, appearing in areas at any latitude that contains the geophysical conditions suitable for their formation. Natural selection leads to the evolution of species suited to the local variations in daylight hours, weather and temperature but the labels can be deceptive; the Antarctic for example contains a vast polar desert. We are only just beginning to understand the complex feedback systems between each region and its biota at a time when species are becoming extinct almost faster than they can be catalogued. We upset the relative equilibrium at our peril.

8 major planets in our solar system

When I was a child, all astronomy books described nine known planets, along with dozens of moons and numerous asteroids. Today we know of almost four thousand planets in other solar systems, some of a similar size to Earth (and even some of these in the Goldilocks zone). However, since 1996 our solar system has been reduced to eight planets, with Pluto amended to the status of a dwarf planet. Technically, this is because it fails one of the three criteria of major planets, in that it sometimes crosses Neptune’s orbit rather than sweeping it clear of other bodies. However, as there is at least one Kuiper belt object, Eris, almost as large as Pluto, it makes sense to stick to a definition that won’t see the number of planets continually rise with each generation of space telescope. This downgrading appears to have upset a lot of people, so it’s probably a good to mention that science is as much a series of methodologies as it is a body of knowledge, with the latter being open to change when required - it’s certainly not set-in-stone dogma! So as astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson and author of the best-selling The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet put it: "Just get over it!"

7 colours of the rainbow

This is one of those everyday things that most of us never think about. Frankly, I don't know anyone who has been able to distinguish indigo from violet in a rainbow and yet we owe this colour breakdown not to an artist but to one of the greatest physicists ever, Sir Isaac Newton. As well as fulfilling most of the criteria of the modern day scientist, Newton was also an alchemist, numerologist, eschatologist (one of his predictions is that the world will end in 2060) and all-round occultist. Following the mystical beliefs of the Pythagoreans, Newton linked the colours of the spectrum to the notes in Western music scale, hence indistinguishable indigo making number seven. This is a good example of how even the best of scientists are only human.

6 mass extinction events

Episode two of the remake of Carl Sagan's Cosmos television series featuring Neil DeGrasse Tyson was called 'Some of the Things That Molecules Do'. It explored the five mass extinction events that have taken place over the past 450 million years. Tyson also discusses what has come to be known as the Holocene extinction, the current, sixth period of mass dying. Although the loss of megafauna species around the world has been blamed on the arrival of Homo sapiens over the past 50,000 years, the rapid acceleration of species loss over the last ten millennia is shocking in the extreme. It is estimated that the current extinction rate is anywhere from a thousand to ten thousand times to the background rate, resulting in the loss of up to two hundred plant or animals species every day. Considering that two-thirds of our pharmaceuticals are derived or based on biological sources, we really are shooting ourselves in the foot. And that's without considering the advanced materials that we could develop from nature.

5 fundamental forces

Also known as interactions, in order from strongest to weakest these are: the strong nuclear force; electro-magnetism; the weak nuclear force; and gravity. One of the most surprising finds in late Twentieth Century cosmology was that as the universe expands, it is being pushed apart at an ever-greater speed. The culprit has been named dark energy, but that's where our knowledge ends of this possible fifth force. Although it appears to account for about 68% of the total energy of the known universe, the label 'dark' refers to the complete lack of understanding as to how it is generated. Perhaps the most radical suggestion is that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is incorrect and that an overhaul of the mechanism behind gravity would remove the need for dark energy at all. One thing is for certain: we still have a lot to learn about the wide-scale fabric of the universe.

4 DNA bases

Despite being one of the best-selling popular science books ever, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything manages to include a few howlers, including listing thiamine (AKA vitamin B1) as one of the four bases, instead of thymine. In addition to an understanding how the bases (adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine) are connected via the double helix backbone, the 1953 discovery of DNA's structure also uncovered the replication mechanism, in turn leading to the development of the powerful genetic editing tools in use today. Also, the discovery itself shows how creativity can be used in science: Watson and Crick's model-building technique proved to be a faster way of generating results than the more methodical x-ray crystallography of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins - although it should be noted that one of Franklin's images gave her rivals a clue as to the correct structure. The discovery also shows that collaboration is often a vital component of scientific research, as opposed to the legend of the lonely genius.

3 branches of science

When most people think of science, they tend to focus on the stereotypical white-coated boffin, beavering away in a laboratory filled with complex equipment. However, there are numerous branches or disciplines, covering the purely theoretical, the application of scientific theory, and everything in between. Broadly speaking, science can be divided into the formal sciences, natural sciences and social sciences, each covering a variety of categories themselves. Formal sciences include mathematics and logic and has aspects of absolutism about it (2+2=4). The natural or 'hard' sciences are what we learn in school science classes and broadly divide into physics, chemistry and biology. These use observation and experiment to develop working theories, but maths is often a fundamental component of the disciplines. Social or 'soft' sciences speak for themselves, with sub-disciplines such as anthropology sometimes crossing over into humanities such as archaeology. So when someone tells you that all science is impossibly difficult, you know they obviously haven't considered just what constitutes science!

2 types of fundamental particles

Named after Enrico Fermi and Satyendra Nath Bose respectively, fermions and bosons are the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The former, for example quarks and electrons, are the particles of mass and obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle, meaning no two fermions can exist in the same place in the same state. The latter are the carriers of force, with photons being the best known example. One problem with these particles and their properties such as angular momentum or spin is that most analogies are only vaguely appropriate. After all, we aren't used to an object that has to rotate 720 degrees in order to get back to its original state! In addition, there are many aspects of underlying reality that are far from being understood. String theory was once mooted as the great hope for unifying all the fermions and bosons, but has yet to achieve absolute success, while the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson is only one potential advance in the search for a Grand Unifying Theory of creation.

1 planet Earth

There is a decorative plate on my dining room wall that says "Other planets cannot be as beautiful as this one." Despite the various Earth-sized exoplanets that have been found in the Goldilocks zone of their solar system, we have little chance in the near future of finding out if they are inhabited as opposed to just inhabitable. Although the seasonal methane on Mars hints at microbial life there, any human colonisation will be a physically and psychologically demanding ordeal. The idea that we can use Mars as a lifeboat to safeguard our species - never mind our biosphere - is little more than a pipedream. Yet we continue to exploit our home world with little consideration for the detrimental effects we are having on it. As the environmental movement says: there is no Planet B. Apart from the banning of plastic bags in some supermarkets, little else appears to have been done since my 2010 post on reduce, reuse and recycle. So why not make a New Year’s resolution to help future generations? Wouldn’t that be the best present for your children and your planetary home?

Thursday 27 September 2018

The anaesthetic of familiarity: how our upbringing can blind us to the obvious

In the restored Edwardian school classroom at Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT) there is a notice on the wall stating 'Do not ask your teacher questions.' Fortunately, education now goes some way in many nations to emphasising the importance of individual curiosity rather than mere obedience to authority. Of course, there are a fair number of politicians and corporation executives who wish it wasn't so, as an incurious mind is easier to sway than a questioning one. As my last post mentioned, the World Wide Web can be something of an ally for them, since the 'winner takes all' approach of a review-based system aids the slogans and rhetoric of those who wish to control who we vote for and what we buy.

Even the most liberal of nations and cultures face self-imposed hurdles centered round which is the best solution and which is just the most familiar one from our formative years. This post therefore looks at another side of the subjective thinking discussed earlier this month, namely a trap that Richard Dawkins has described as the "anaesthetic of familiarity". Basically, this is when conventions are so accepted as to be seen as the primary option instead of being merely one of a series of choices. Or, as the British philosopher Susan Stebbing wrote in her 1939 book Thinking to Some Purpose: "One of the gravest difficulties encountered at the outset of the attempt to think effectively consists in the difficulty of recognizing what we know as distinguished from what we do not know but merely take for granted."

Again, this mind set is much loved by the manufacturing sector; in addition to such well-known ploys as deliberate obsolescence and staggered release cycles, there are worse examples, especially in everyday consumerism. We often hear how little nutritional value many highly processed foods contain, but think what this has done for the vitamin and mineral supplement industry, whose annual worldwide sales now approach US$40 billion!

Citizens of developed nations today face very different key issues to our pre-industrial ancestors, not the least among them being a constant barrage of decision making. Thanks to the enormous variety of choices available concerning almost every aspect of our daily lives, we have to consider everything from what we wear to what we eat. The deluge of predominantly useless information that we receive in the era of the hashtag makes it more difficult for us to concentrate on problem solving, meaning that the easiest way out is just to follow the crowd.

Richard Dawkins' solution to these issues is to imagine yourself as an alien visitor and then observe the world as a curious outsider. This seems to me to be beyond the reach of many, for whom daily routine appears to be their only way to cope. If this sounds harsh, it comes from personal experience; I've met plenty of people who actively seek an ostrich-like head-in-the-sand approach to life to avoid the trials and tribulations - as well as the wonders - of this rapidly-changing world.

Instead, I would suggest an easier option when it comes to some areas of STEM research: ensure that a fair proportion of researchers and other thought leaders are adult migrants from other nations. Then they will be able to apply an outside perspective, hopefully identifying givens that are too obvious to be spotted by those who have grown up with them.

New Zealand is a good example of this, with arguably its two best known science communicators having been born overseas: Siouxsie Wiles and Michelle Dickinson, A.K.A. Nanogirl. Dr Wiles is a UK-trained microbiologist at the University of Auckland. She frequently appears on Radio New Zealand as well as undertaking television and social media work to promote science in general, as well as for her specialism of fighting bacterial infection.

Dr Dickinson is a materials engineering lecturer and nanomaterials researcher at the University of Auckland who studied in both the UK and USA. Her public outreach work includes books, school tours and both broadcast and social media. She has enough sci-comm kudos that last year, despite not having a background in astronomy, she interviewed Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson during the Auckland leg of his A Cosmic Perspective tour.

The work of the above examples is proof that newcomers can recognise a critical need compared to their home grown equivalents. What is interesting is that despite coming from English-speaking backgrounds - and therefore with limited cultural disparity to their adoptive New Zealand - there must have been enough that was different to convince Doctors Wiles and Dickinson of the need for a hands-on, media savvy approach to science communication.

This is still far from the norm: many STEM professionals believe there is little point to promoting their work to the public except via print-based publications. Indeed, some famous science communicators such as Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould were widely criticised during their lifetime by the scientific establishment for what were deemed undue efforts at self-promotion and the associated debasement of science by combining it with show business.

As an aside, I have to say that as brilliant as some volumes of popular science are, they do tend to preach to the converted; how many non-science fans are likely to pick up a book on say string theory, just for a bit of light reading or self-improvement (the latter being a Victorian convention that appears to have largely fallen from favour)? Instead, the outreach work of the expat examples above is aimed at the widest possible audience without over-simplification or distortion of the principles being communicated.

This approach may not solve all issues about how to think outside the box - scientists may be so embedded within their culture as to not realise that there is a box - but surely by stepping outside the comfort zone we grew up in we may find problems that the local population hasn't noticed?

Critical thinking is key to the scientific enterprise, but it would appear, to little else in human cultures. If we can find methods to avoid the anaesthetic of familiarity and acknowledge that what we deem of as normal can be far from optimal, then these should be promoted with all gusto. If the post-modern creed is that all world views are equally valid and science is just another form of culture-biased story-telling, then now more than ever we need cognitive tools to break through the subjective barriers. If more STEM professionals are able to cross borders and work in unfamiliar locations, isn’t there a chance they can recognise issues that fall under the local radar and so supply a new perspective we need if we are to fulfil our potential?

Sunday 15 July 2018

Minding the miniscule: the scale prejudice in everyday life

I was recently weeding a vegetable bed in the garden when out of the corner of my eye I noticed a centipede frantically heading for cover after I had inadvertently disturbed its hiding spot. In my experience, most gardeners are oblivious to the diminutive fauna and flora around them unless they are pests targeted for removal or obliteration. It's only when the likes of a biting or stinging organism - or even just a large and/or hairy yet harmless spider - comes into view do people consciously think about the miniature cornucopia of life around them.

Even then, we consider our needs rather greater than theirs: how many of us stop to consider the effect we are having when we dig up paving slabs and find a bustling ant colony underneath? In his 2004 essay Dolittle and Darwin, Richard Dawkins pondered what contemporary foible or -ism future generations will castigate us for. Something I consider worth looking at in this context is scale-ism, which might be defined as the failure to apply a suitable level of consideration to life outside of 'everyday' measurements.

I've previously discussed neo-microscopic water-based life but larger fauna visible without optical aids is easy to overlook when humans are living in a primarily artificial environment - as over half our species is now doing. Several ideas spring to mind as to why breaking this scale-based prejudice could be important:
  1. Unthinking destruction or pollution of the natural environment doesn't just cause problems for 'poster' species, predominantly cuddly mammals. The invertebrates that live on or around larger life-forms may be critical to these ecosystems or even further afield. Removal of one, seemingly inconsequential, species could allow another to proliferate at potentially great cost to humans (for example, as disease vectors or agricultural pests). Food webs don't begin at the chicken and egg level we are used to from pre-school picture books onwards.
  2. The recognition that size doesn't necessarily equate to importance is critical to the preservation of the environment not just for nature's sake but for the future of humanity. Think of the power of the small water mould Phytophthora agathidicida which is responsible for killing the largest residents of New Zealand's podocarp forests, the ancient coniferous kauri Agathis australis. The conservation organisation Forest and Bird claims that kauri are the lynchpin for seventeen other plant species in these forests: losing them will have a severe domino effect.
  3. Early detection of small-scale pests may help to prevent their spread but this requires vigilance from the wider public, not just specialists; failure to recognise that tiny organisms may be far more than a slight nuisance can be immensely costly. In recent years there have been two cases in New Zealand where the accidental import of unwanted insects had severe if temporary repercussions for the economy. In late 2017 three car carriers were denied entry to Auckland when they were found to contain the brown marmorated stink bug Halyomorpha halys. If they had not been detected, it is thought this insect would have caused NZ$4 billion in crop damage over the next twenty years. Two years earlier, the Queensland fruit fly Bactrocera tryoni was found in central Auckland. As a consequence, NZ$15 million was spent eradicating it, a small price to pay for the NZ$5 billion per annum it would have cost the horticulture industry had it spread.
Clearly, these critters are to be ignored at our peril! Although the previous New Zealand government introduced the Predator Free 2050 programme, conservation organisations are claiming the lack of central funding and detailed planning makes the scheme unrealistic by a large margin (if anything, the official website suggests that local communities should organise volunteer groups and undertake most of the work themselves!) Even so, this scheme is intended to eradicate alien mammal species, presumably on the grounds that despite their importance, pest invertebrates are just too small to keep excluded permanently - the five introduced wasp species springing to mind at this point.

It isn't just smaller scale animals that are important; and how many people have you met who think that the word animal means only a creature with a backbone, not insects and other invertebrates? Minute and inconspicuous plants and fungi also need considering. As curator at Auckland Botanic Gardens Bec Stanley is keen to point out, most of the public appear to have plant blindness. Myrtle rust is a fungus that attacks native plants such as the iconic pōhutukawa or New Zealand Christmas tree, having most probably been carried on the wind to New Zealand from Australia. It isn't just New Zealand's Department of Conservation that is asking the public to watch out for it: the Ministry for Primary Industries also requests notification of its spread across the North Island, due to the potential damage to commercial species such as eucalyptus. This is yet another example of a botanical David versus Goliath situation going on right under our oblivious noses.

Even without the economic impact, paying attention to the smaller elements within our environment is undoubtedly beneficial. Thinking more holistically and less parochially is often a good thing when it comes to science and technology; paradigm shifts are rarely achieved by being comfortable and content with the status quo. Going beyond the daily centimetre-to-metre range that we are used to dealing with allows us to comprehend a bit more of the cosmic perspective that Neil deGrasse Tyson and other science communicators endeavour to promote - surely no bad thing when it comes to lowering boundaries between cultures in a time with increasingly sectarian states of mind?

Understanding anything a little out of the humdrum can be interesting in and of itself. As Brian Cox's BBC documentary series Wonders of Life showed, a slight change of scale can lead to apparent miracles, such as the insects that can walk up glass walls or support hundreds of times their own weight and shrug off equally outsized falls. Who knows, preservation or research into some of our small-scale friends might lead to considerable benefits too, as with the recent discovery of the immensely strong silk produced by Darwin's bark spider Caerostris darwini. Expanding our horizons isn't difficult, it just requires the ability to look down now and then and see what else is going on in the world around us.

Thursday 9 November 2017

Wonders of Creation: explaining the universe with Brian Cox and Robin Ince

As Carl Sagan once you said: "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." A few nights' ago, I went to what its' promoters bill as ‘the world's most successful and significant science show', which in just over two hours presented a delineation of the birth, history, and eventual death of the universe. In fact, it covered just about everything from primordial slime to the triumphs of the Cassini space probe, only lacking the apple pie itself.

The show in question is an evening with British physicist and presenter Professor Brian Cox. As a long-time fan of his BBC Radio show The Infinite Monkey Cage I was interested to see how the celebrity professor worked his sci-comm magic with a live audience. In addition to the good professor, his co-presenter on The Infinite Monkey Cage, the comedian Robin Ince, also appeared on stage. As such, I was intrigued to see how their combination of learned scientist and representative layman (or 'interested idiot' as he styles himself) would work in front of two thousand people.

I've previously discussed the trend for extremely expensive live shows featuring well-known scientists and (grumble-grumble) the ticket's to Brian Cox were similarly priced to those for Neil deGrasse Tyson earlier this year. As usual, my friends and I went for the cheaper seats, although Auckland must have plenty of rich science fans, judging by the almost packed house (I did a notice a few empty seats in the presumably most expensive front row). As with Professor Tyson, the most expensive tickets for this show included a meet and greet afterwards, at an eye-watering NZ$485!

When Cox asked if there were any scientists in the audience, there were very few cheers. I did notice several members of New Zealand's sci-comm elite, including Dr Michelle Dickinson, A.K.A. Nanogirl, who had met Ince on his previous Cosmic Shambles LIVE tour; perhaps the cost precluded many STEM professionals from attending. As I have said before, such inflated prices can easily lead to only dedicated fans attending, which is nothing less than preaching to the converted. In which case, it's more of a meet-the-celebrity event akin to a music concert than an attempt to spread the wonder - and rationality - of science.

So was I impressed? The opening music certainly generated some nostalgia for me, as it was taken from Brian Eno's soundtrack for the Al Reinert 1983 feature-length documentary on the Apollo lunar missions. Being of almost the same age as Professor Cox, I confess to having in my teens bought the album of vinyl - and still have it! Unlike Neil deGrasse Tyson's show, the Cox-Ince evening was an almost non-stop visual feast, with one giant screen portraying a range of photographs and diagrams, even a few videos. At the times, the images almost appeared to be 3D, seemingly hanging out of the screen, with shots of the Earth and various planets and moons bulging onto the darkened stage. I have to admit to being extremely impressed with the visuals, even though I had seen some of them before. Highlights included the Hubble Space Telescope's famous Ultra-Deep Field of the earliest galaxies and the montage of the cosmic microwave background taken by the WMAP probe.

The evening (okay, let's call it a cosmology lecture with comic interludes) began as per Neil deGrasse Tyson with the age and scale of the universe, then progressed through galaxy formation and a few examples of known extra-solar planets. However, the material was also bang up to date, as it included the recent discoveries of gravitational waves at LIGO and the creation of heavy elements such as gold and platinum in neutron star collisions.

Evolution of the universe

Our universe: a potted history

Professor Cox also took us through the future prospects of the solar system and the eventual heat death of the universe, generating a few "oohs" and "aahs" along the way.  Interestingly, there was little explanation of dark matter and dark energy; perhaps it was deemed too speculative a topic to do it justice. Black holes had a generous amount of attention though, including Hawking radiation. Despite having an audience of primarily non-STEM professionals (admittedly after a show of hands found a large proportion of them to be The Infinite Monkey Cage listeners), a certain level of knowledge was presupposed and there was little attempt to explain the basics. Indeed, at one point an equation popped up - and it wasn't E=MC2. How refreshing!

Talking of which, there was a brief rundown of Einstein's Special and General Theories of Relativity, followed by the latter's development into the hypothesis of the expanding universe and eventual proof of the Big Bang model. Einstein's Cosmological Constant and his initial dismissal of physicist-priest Georges Lemaître's work were given as examples that even the greatest scientists sometimes make mistakes, showing that science is not a set of inviolable truths that we can never improve upon (the Second Law of Thermodynamics excluded, of course). Lemaître was also held up to be an example of how science and religion can co-exist peacefully, in this case, within the same person.

Another strand, proving that Cox is indeed deeply indebted to Carl Sagan (aren't we all?) was his potted history of life on Earth, with reference to the possibility of microbial life on Mars, Europa and Enceladus. The lack of evidence for intelligent extra-terrestrials clearly bothers Brian Cox as much as it did Sagan. However, Cox appeared to retain his scientific impartiality, suggesting that - thanks to the 3.5 billion year plus gap between the origin of life and the evolution of multi-cellular organisms - intelligent species may be extremely rare.

For a fan of crewed space missions, Cox made little mention of future space travel, concentrating instead on robotic probes such as Cassini. The Large Hadron Collider also didn't feature in any meaningful way, although one of the audience questions around the danger of LHC-created black holes was put into perspective next to the natural black holes that might be produced by cosmic ray interactions with the Earth's atmosphere; the latter's 108 TeV (tera electron volts) far exceed the energies generated by the LHC and we've not been compressed to infinity yet.

Robin Ince's contributions were largely restricted to short if hilarious segments but he also made a passionate plea (there's no other word for it) on the readability of Charles Darwin and his relevance today. He discussed Darwin's earthworm experiments and made short work of the American evangelicals'  "no Darwin equals no Hitler" nonsense, concluding with one of his best jokes: "no Pythagoras would mean no Toblerone".

One of the friends I went with admitted to learning little that was new but as stated earlier I really went to examine the sci-comm methods being used and their effect on the audience. Cox and Ince may have covered a lot of scientific ground but they were far from neglectful of the current state of our species and our environment. Various quotes from astronauts and the use of one of the 'pale blue dot' images of a distant Earth showed the intent to follow in Carl Sagan's footsteps and present the poetic wonder of the immensity of creation and the folly of our pathetic conflicts by comparison. The Cox-Ince combination is certainly a very effective one, as any listeners to The Infinite Monkey Cage will know. Other science communicators could do far worse than to follow their brand of no-nonsense lecturing punctuated by amusing interludes. As for me, I'm wondering whether to book tickets for Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss in May next year. They are slightly cheaper than both Brian Cox and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Hmmm…

Tuesday 29 August 2017

Cerebral celebrities: do superstar scientists harm science?

One of my earliest blog posts concerned the media circus surrounding two of the most famous scientists alive today: British physicist Stephen Hawking and his compatriot the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. In addition to their scientific output, they are known in public circles thanks to a combination of their general readership books, television documentaries and charismatic personalities. The question has to be asked though, how much of their reputation is due to their being easily-caricatured and therefore media-friendly characters rather than what they have contributed to human knowledge?

Social media has done much to democratise the publication of material from a far wider range of authors than previously possible, but the current generation of scientific superstars who have arisen in the intervening eight years appear party to a feedback loop that places personality as the primary reason for their media success. As a result, are science heroes such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox merely adding the epithet 'cool' to STEM disciplines as they sit alongside the latest crop of media and sports stars? With their ability to fill arenas usually reserved for pop concerts or sports events, these scientists are seemingly known far and wide for who they are as much as for what they have achieved. It might seem counterintuitive to think that famous scientists and mathematicians could be damaging STEM, but I'd like to put forward five ways by which this could be occurring:

1: Hype and gossip

If fans of famous scientists spend their time reading, liking and commenting at similarly trivial levels, they may miss important material from other, less famous sources. A recent example that caught my eye was a tweet by British astrophysicist and presenter Brian Cox, containing a photograph of two swans he labelled ‘Donald' and ‘Boris'. I assume this was a reference to the current US president and British foreign secretary, but with over a thousand 'likes' by the time I saw it I wonder what other, more serious, STEM-related stories might have been missed in the rapid ebb and flow of social media.

As you would expect with popular culture fandom the science celebrities' material aimed at a general audience receives the lion's share of attention, leaving the vast majority of STEM popularisations under-recognised. Although social media has exacerbated this, the phenomenon does pre-date it. For example, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time was first published in 1988, the same year as Timothy Ferris's Coming of Age in the Milky Way, a rather more detailed approach to similar material that was left overshadowed by its far more famous competitor. There is also the danger that celebrities with a non-science background might try to cash in on the current appeal of science and write poor-quality popularisations. If you consider this unlikely, you should bear in mind that there are already numerous examples of extremely dubious health, diet and nutrition books written by pop artists and movie stars. If scientists can be famous, perhaps the famous will play at being science writers.

Another result of this media hubbub is that in order to be heard, some scientists may be guilty of the very hype usually blamed on the journalists who publicise their discoveries. Whether to guarantee attention or self-promoting in order to gain further funding, an Australian research team recently came under fire for discussing a medical breakthrough as if a treatment was imminent, despite having so are only experimented on mice! This sort of hyperbole both damages the integrity of science in the public eye and can lead to such dangerous outcomes as the MMR scandal, resulting in large numbers of children not being immunised.

2: Hero worship

The worship of movie stars and pop music artists is nothing new and the adulation accorded them reminds me of the not dissimilar veneration shown to earlier generations of secular and religious leaders. The danger here then is for impressionable fans to accept the words of celebrity scientists as if they were gospel and so refrain from any form of critical analysis. When I attended an evening with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson last month I was astonished to hear some fundamental misunderstandings of science from members of the public. It seemed as if Dr Tyson had gained a personality cult who hung on each utterance but frequently failed to understand the wider context or key issues regarding the practice of science. By transferring hero worship from one form of human activity to another, the very basis - and differentiation - that delineates the scientific enterprise may be undermined.

3: Amplifying errors

Let's face it, scientists are human and make mistakes. The problem is that if the majority of a celebrity scientist's fan base are prepared to lap up every statement, then the lack of critical analysis can generate further issues. There are some appalling gaffes in the television documentaries and popular books of such luminaries as Sir David Attenborough (as previously discussed) and even superstar Brian Cox is not immune: his 2014 book Human Universe described lunar temperatures dropping below -2000 degrees Celsius! Such basic errors imply that the material is ghost-written or edited by authors with little scientific knowledge and no time for fact checking. Of course this may embarrass the science celebrity in front of their potentially jealous colleagues, but more importantly can serve as ammunition for politicians, industrialists and pseudo-scientists in their battles to persuade the public of the validity of their own pet theories - post-truth will out, and all that nonsense.

4: Star attitude

With celebrity status comes the trappings of success, most usually defined as a luxury lifestyle. A recent online discussion here in New Zealand concerned the high cost of tickets for events featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, David Attenborough, Jane Goodall and later this year, Brian Cox. Those for Auckland-based events were more expensive than tickets to see Kiwi pop star Lorde and similar in price for rugby matches between the All Blacks and British Lions. By making the tickets this expensive there is little of chance of attracting new fans; it seems to be more a case of preaching to the converted.

Surely it doesn't have to be this way: the evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro, author of How to Clone a Mammoth, gave an excellent free illustrated talk at Auckland Museum a year ago. It seems odd that the evening with Dr Tyson, for example, consisting of just himself, interviewer Michelle Dickinson (A.K.A. Nanogirl) and a large screen, cost approximately double that of the Walking with Dinosaurs Arena event at the same venue two years earlier, which utilised US$20 million worth of animatronic and puppet life-sized dinosaurs.

Dr Tyson claims that by having celebrity interviewees on his Star Talk series he can reach a wider audience, but clearly this approach is not feasible when his tour prices are so high. At least Dr Goodall's profits went into her conservation charity, but if you consider that Dr Tyson had an audience of probably over 8000 in Auckland alone, paying between NZ$95-$349 (except for the NZ$55 student tickets) you have to wonder where all this money goes: is he collecting ‘billions and billions' of fancy waistcoats? It doesn't look as if this trend will soon stop either, as Bill Nye (The Science Guy) has just announced that he will be touring Australia later this year and his tickets start at around NZ$77.

5: Skewing the statistics

The high profiles of sci-comm royalty and their usually cheery demeanour implies that all is well in the field of scientific research, with adequate funding for important projects. However, even a quick perusal of less well-known STEM professionals on social media prove that this is not the case. An example that came to my attention back in May was that of the University of Auckland microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles, who had to resort to crowdfunding for her research into fungi-based antibiotics after five consecutive funding submissions were rejected. Meanwhile, Brian Cox's connection to the Large Hadron Collider gives the impression that even such blue-sky research as the LHC can be guaranteed enormous budgets.

As much as I'd like to thank these science superstars for promoting science, technology and mathematics, I can't quite shake the feeling that their cult status is too centred on them rather than the scientific enterprise as a whole.  Now more than ever science needs a sympathetic ear from the public, but this should be brought about by a massive programme to educate the public (they are the taxpayers, after all) as to the benefits of such costly schemes as designing nuclear fusion reactors and the research on climate change. Simply treating celebrity scientists in the same way as movie stars and pop idols won't help an area of humanity under siege from so many influential political and industrial leaders with their own private agendas. We simply mustn't allow such people to misuse the discipline that has raised us from apemen to spacemen.

Friday 28 July 2017

Navigating creation: A Cosmic Perspective with Neil deGrasse Tyson


I recently attended an interesting event at an Auckland venue usually reserved for pop music concerts. An audience in the thousands came to Neil deGrasse Tyson: A Cosmic Perspective, featuring the presenter of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and radio/tv show StarTalk. The 'Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive' presented his brand of science communication to an enormous congregation (forgive the use of the word) of science fans aged from as young as five years old. So was the evening a success? My fellow science buffs certainly seemed to have enjoyed it, so I decided it would be worthwhile to analyse the good doctor's method of large-scale sci-comm.

The evening was split into three sections, the first being the shortest, a primer as to our location in both physical and psychological space-time. After explaining the scale of the universe via a painless explanation of exponents, Dr Tyson used the homespun example of how stacking the 'billions' (which of course he declared to be Carl Sagan's favourite word) of Big Macs so far sold could be stacked many times around the Earth's circumference and even then extend onwards to the Moon and back. Although using such a familiar object in such unusual terrain is a powerful way of taking people outside their comfort territory, there was nothing new about this particular insight, since Dr Tyson has been using it since at least 2009; I assume it was a case of sticking to a tried-and-trusted method, especially when the rest of the evening was (presumably) unscripted.

Billions of Big Macs around the Earth and moon

Having already belittled our location in the universe, the remainder of the first segment appraised our species' smug sense of superiority, questioning whether extra-terrestrials would have any interest in us any more than we show to most of the biota here on Earth. This was a clear attempt to ask the audience to question the assumptions that science fiction, particularly of the Hollywood variety, has been popularising since the dawn of the Space Age. After all, would another civilisation consider us worthy of communicating with, considering how much of our broadcasting displays obvious acts of aggression? In this respect, Neil deGrasse Tyson differs markedly from Carl Sagan, who argued that curiosity would likely be a mutual connection with alien civilisations, despite their vastly superior technology. Perhaps this difference of attitude isn't surprising, considering Sagan's optimism has been negated by both general circumstance and the failure of SETI in the intervening decades.

Dr Tyson also had a few gibes at the worrying trend of over-reliance on high technology in place of basic cognitive skills, describing how after once working out some fairly elementary arithmetic he was asked which mobile app he had used to gain the result! This was to become a central theme of the evening, repeated several times in different guises: that rather than just learning scientific facts, non-scientists can benefit from practising critical thinking in non-STEM situations in everyday life.

Far from concentrating solely on astrophysical matters, Dr Tyson also followed up on topics he had raised in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey regarding environmental issues here on Earth. He used Apollo 8's famous 'Earthrise' photograph (taken on Christmas Eve 1968) as an example of how NASA's lunar landing programme inspired a cosmic perspective, adding that organisation such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency were founded during the programme. His thesis was clear: what began with political and strategic causes had fundamental benefits across sectors unrelated to space exploration; or as he put it "We're thinking we're exploring the moon and we discovered the Earth for the first time."

The second and main part of the event was Tyson's discussion with New Zealand-based nanotechnologist and science educator Michelle Dickinson, A.K.A. Nanogirl. I can only assume that there aren't any New Zealand astronomers or astrophysicists as media-savvy as Dr Dickinson, or possibly it's a case of celebrity first and detailed knowledge second, with a scientifically-minded interviewer deemed to have an appropriate enough mindset even if not an expert in the same specialisation.

The discussion/interview was enlightening, especially for someone like myself who knows Neil deGrasse Tyson as a presenter but very little about him as a person. Dr Tyson reminisced how in 1989 he accidentally become a media expert solely on the basis of being an astrophysicist and without reference to him as an Afro-American, counter to the prevailing culture that only featured Afro-Americans to gain their point of view.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: A Cosmic Perspective

Dr Tyson revealed himself to be both a dreamer and a realist, the two facets achieving a focal point with his passion for a crewed mission to Mars. He has often spoken of this desire to increase NASA's (comparatively small) budget so as reinvigorate the United States via taking humans out from the humdrum comfort zone of low earth orbit. However, his understanding of how dangerous such a mission would be led him to state he would only go to Mars once the pioneering phase was over!

His zeal for his home country was obvious - particularly the missed opportunities and the grass roots rejection of scientific expertise prevalent in the United States - and it would be easy to see his passionate pleas for the world to embrace Apollo-scale STEM projects as naïve and out-of-touch. Yet there is something to be said for such epic schemes; if the USA is to rise out of its present lassitude, then the numerous if unpredictable long-term benefits of, for example, a Mars mission is a potential call-to-arms.

The final part of the evening was devoted to audience questions. As I was aware of most of the STEM and sci-comm components previously discussed this was for me perhaps the most illuminating section of the event. The first question was about quantum mechanics, and so not unnaturally Dr Tyson stated that he wasn't qualified to answer it. Wouldn't it be great if the scientific approach to expertise could be carried across to other areas where people claim expert knowledge that they don't have?

I discussed the negative effects that the cult of celebrity could have on the public attitude towards science back in 2009 so it was extremely interesting to hear questions from several millennials who had grown up with Star Talk and claimed Neil deGrasse Tyson as their idol. Despite having watched the programmes and presumably having read some popular science books, they fell into some common traps, from over-reliance on celebrities as arbiters of truth to assuming that most scientific theories rather than just the cutting edge would be overturned by new discoveries within their own lifetimes.

Dr Tyson went to some lengths to correct this latter notion, describing how Newton's law of universal gravitation for example has become a subset of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Again, this reiterated that science isn't just a body of facts but a series of approaches to understanding nature. The Q&A session also showed that authority figures can have a rather obvious dampening effect on people's initiative to attempt critical analysis for themselves. This suggests a no-win situation: either the public obediently believe everything experts tell them (which leads to such horrors as the MMR vaccine scandal) or they fail to believe anything from STEM professionals, leaving the way open for pseudoscience and other nonsense. Dr Tyson confirmed he wants to teach the public to think critically, reducing gullibility and thus exploitation by snake oil merchants. To this end he follows in the tradition of James 'The Amazing' Randi and Carl Sagan, which is no bad thing in itself.

In addition, by interviewing media celebrities on StarTalk Dr Tyson stated how he can reach a far wider audience than just dedicated science fans. For this alone Neil deGrasse Tyson is a worthy successor to the much-missed Sagan. Let's hope some of those happy fans will be inspired to not just dream, but actively promote the cosmic perspective our species sorely needs if we are to climb out of our current doldrums.

Monday 8 May 2017

Weather with you: meteorology and the public perception of climate change

If there's one thing that appears to unite New Zealanders with the British it is the love of discussing the weather. This year has been no exception, with New Zealand's pre-summer forecasts - predicting average temperatures and rainfall - proving wildly inaccurate. La Niña has been blamed for what Wellingtonians have deemed a 'bummer summer', January having provided the capital with its fewest 'beach days' of any summer in the last thirty years. Sunshine hours, temperature, rainfall and wind speed data from the MetService support this as a nationwide trend; even New Zealand flora and fauna have been affected with late blossoming and reduced breeding respectively.

However, people tend to have short memories and often recall childhood weather as somehow superior to that of later life. Our rose-tinted spectacles make us remember long, hot summer school holidays and epic snowball fights in winter, but is this a case of remembering the hits and forgetting the misses (meteorologically speaking)? After all, there are few things more boring than a comment that the weather is the same as the previous ten comments and surely our memories of exciting outdoor ventures are more prominent than being forced to stay indoors due to inclement conditions?

Therefore could our fascination with weather but dubious understanding - or even denial - of climate change be due to us requiring personal or even emotional involvement in a meteorological event? Most of us have had the luck not to experience extreme weather (or 'weather bombs' as the media now term them), so unless you have been at the receiving end of hurricanes or flash floods the weather is simply another aspect of our lives, discussed in everyday terms and rarely examined in detail.

Since we feel affected by weather events that directly impact us (down to the level of 'it rained nearly every day on holiday but the locals said it had been dry for two months prior') we have a far greater emotional response to weather than we do to climate. The latter appears amorphous and almost mythical by comparison. Is this one of the reasons that climate change sceptics achieve such success when their arguments are so unsupported?

Now that we are bombarded with countless pieces of trivia, distracting us from serious analysis in favour of short snippets of multimedia edutainment, how can we understand climate change and its relationship to weather? The standard explanation is that weather is short term (covering hours, days or at most weeks) whilst climate compares annual or seasonal variations over far longer timeframes. Neil deGrasse Tyson in Cosmos:A Spacetime Odyssey made the great analogy that weather is like the zigzag path of a dog on a leash whereas its owner walks in a straight line from A to B. So far so good, but there's not even a widespread designation for the duration that counts as valid for assessing climate variability.

As such this leads us to statistics. Everyone thinks they understand the word 'average' but averages can represent the mean, median or mode. Since the period start and end date can be varied, as can the scaling on infographics (a logarithmic axis, for example), these methods allow a single set of statistics to be presented in a wide variety of ways.

The laws of probability rear their much-misinterpreted head too. The likelihood of variation may change wildly, depending on the length of the timeframe: compare a five-year block to that of a century and you can see that climate statistics is a tricky business; what is highly improbable in the former period may be inevitable over the latter. As long as you are allowed to choose the timeframe, you can skew the data to support a favoured hypothesis. So much then for objective data!

By comparison, if someone is the recipient of a worse than expected summer, as per New Zealand in 2017, then that personal experience may well be taken as more important than all the charts of long-term climate trends. It might just be the blink of an eye in geological terms, but being there takes precedence over far less emotive science and mathematics.

Perhaps then we subconsciously define weather as something that we feel we experience whilst climate is a more abstract notion, perhaps a series of weather events codified in some sort of order? How else can climate change deniers, when faced with photographs proving glacial or polar cap shrinkage, offer alternative explanations to global warming?

This is where politics comes into the mix. Whereas weather has little obvious involvement with politics, climate has become heavily politicised in the past thirty years, with party lines in some nations (mentioning no names) clearly divided. Although some of the naysayers have begun to admit global warming appears to be happening - or at least that the polar caps and glaciers are melting - they stick to such notions that (a) it will be too slow to affect humans - after all, there have been far greater swings in temperature in both directions in previous epochs - and (b) it has natural causes. The latter implies there is little we can do to mitigate it (solar output may be involved, not just Earth-related causes) and so let's stick our head in the sand and do some ostrich impressions.

As an aside, I've just finished reading a 1988 book called Prehistoric New Zealand. Its three authors are a palaeontologist (Graeme Stevens), an archaeologist (Beverley McCulloch)  and an environmental researcher (Matt McGlone) so the content covers a wide range of topics, including the nation's geology, climate, wildlife and human impact. Interestingly, the book states if anything the climate appears to be cooling and the Earth is probably heading for the next glaciation!

Unfortunately no data is supplied to support this, but Matt McGlone has since confirmed that there is a wealth of data supporting the opposite conclusion. In 2008 the conservative American Heartland Institute published a list of 500 scientists it claimed supported the notion that current climate change has solely natural causes. McGlone was one of many scientists who asked for his name to be removed from this list, stating both his work and opinions were not in agreement with this idea.

So are there any solutions or is it simply the case that we believe what we personally experience but have a hard time coming to terms with less direct, wider-scale events? Surely there are enough talented science communicators and teachers to convince the public of the basic facts, or are people so embedded in the now that even one unseasonal rain day can convince them - as it did some random man I met on the street - that climate change is a myth?

Saturday 1 April 2017

The moons of Saturn and echoes of a synthetic universe

As fans of Star Wars might be aware, George Lucas is nothing if not visually astute. His thumbnail sketches for the X-wing, TIE fighter and Death Star created the essence behind these innovative designs. So isn't it strange that there is a real moon in our solar system that bears an astonishing resemblance to one of Lucas's creations?

At the last count Saturn had 53 confirmed moons, with another 9 provisionally verified - and as such assigned numbers rather than names. One of the ringed planet's natural satellites is Mimas, discovered in 1789 and at 396 kilometres in diameter about as small as an object can be yet conform to an approximate sphere. The distinguishing characteristic of Mimas is a giant impact crater about 130 kilometres in diameter, which is named Herschel after the moon's discoverer, William Herschel. For anyone who has seen Star Wars (surely most of the planet by now), the crater gives Mimas an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star. Yet Lucas's original sketch for the battle station was drawn in 1975, five years before Voyager 1 took the first photograph with a high enough resolution to show the crater.


Okay, so one close resemblance between art and nature could be mere coincidence. But amongst Saturn's retinue of moons is another with an even more bizarre feature. At 1469 kilometres in diameter Iapetus is the eleventh largest moon in the solar system. Discovered by Giovanni Cassini in 1671, it quickly became apparent that there was something extremely odd about it, with one hemisphere much brighter than the other.

As such, it attracted the attention of Arthur C. Clarke, whose novel 2001: A Space Odyssey described Japetus (as he called it) as the home of the Star Gate, an artificial worm hole across intergalactic space. He explained the brightness differentiation as being due to an eye-shaped landscape created by the alien engineers of the Star Gate: an enormous pale oval with a black dot at its centre. Again, Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to photograph Iapetus close up…revealing just such a feature! Bear in mind that this was 1980, whereas the novel was written between 1965 and 1968. Carl Sagan, who worked on the Voyager project, actually sent Clarke a photograph of Iapetus with a comment "Thinking of you..." Clearly, he had made the connection between reality and fiction.

As Sagan himself was apt to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Whilst a sample of two wouldn't make for a scientifically convincing result in most disciplines, there is definitely something strange about two Saturnian moons that are found to closely resemble elements in famous science fiction stories written prior to the diagnostic observations being made. Could there be something more fundamental going on here?

One hypothesis that has risen in popularity despite lacking any hard physical evidence is that of the simulated universe. Nick Bostrum, the director of the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute has spent over a decade promoting the idea. Instead of experimental proof Bostrum uses probability theory to support his suppositions. At its simplest level, he notes that the astonishing increase in computing power over the past half century implies an ability in the near future to create detailed recreations of reality within a digital environment; basically, it's The Matrix for real (or should that be, for virtual?)

It might sound like the silliest science fiction, as no-one is likely to be fooled by current computer game graphics or VR environments, but with quantum computing on the horizon we may soon have processing capabilities far beyond those of the most powerful current mainframes. Since the ability to create just one simulated universe implies the ability to create limitless - even nested - versions of a base reality, each with potentially tweaked physical or biological laws for experimental reasons, the number of virtual realities must far outweigh the original model.

As for the probability of it being true in our universe, this key percentage varies widely from pundit to pundit. Astronomer and presenter Neil deGrasse Tyson has publicly admitted he considers it an even chance likelihood, whilst Space-X and Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk is prepared to go much further, having stated that there is only a one in a billion chance that our universe is the genuine physical one!

Of course anyone can state a probability for a hypothesis as being fact without providing supporting evidence, but then what is to differentiate such an unsubstantiated claim from a religious belief? To this end, a team of researchers at the University of Bonn published a paper in 2012 called 'Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation', defining possible methods to verify whether our universe is real or virtual. Using technical terms such as 'unimproved Wilson fermion discretization' makes it somewhat difficult for anyone who isn't a subatomic physicist to get to grips with their argument (you can insert a smiley here) but the essence of their work involves cosmic rays. The paper states that in a virtual universe these are more likely to travel along the axes of a multi-dimensional, fundamental grid, rather than appear in equal numbers in all directions. In addition, they will exhibit energy restrictions at something called the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cut-off (probably time for another smiley). Anyhow, the technology apparently exists for the relevant tests to be undertaken, assuming the funding could be obtained.

So could our entire lives simply be part of a Twenty-Second Century schoolchild's experiment or museum exhibit, where visitors can plug-in, Matrix-style, to observe the stupidities of their ancestors? Perhaps historians of the future will be able to run such simulations as an aide to their papers on why the hell, for example, the United Kingdom opted out of the European Union and the USA elected Donald Trump?

Now there's food for thought.

Tuesday 26 January 2016

Spreading the word: 10 reasons why science communication is so important

Although there have been science-promoting societies since the Renaissance, most of the dissemination of scientific ideas was played out at royal courts, religious foundations or for similarly elite audiences. Only since the Royal Institution lectures of the early 19th century and such leading lights as Michael Faraday and Sir Humphry Davy has there been any organised communication of the discipline to the general public.

Today, it would appear that there is a plethora - possibly even a glut - in the market. Amazon.com carries over 192,000 popular science books and over 4,000 science documentary DVD titles, so there's certainly plenty of choice! Things have dramatically improved since the middle of the last century, when according to the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, there was essentially no publicly-available material about dinosaurs.

From the ubiquity of the latter (especially since the appearance of Steven Spielberg's originally 1993 Jurassic Park) it might appear that most science communication is aimed at children - and, dishearteningly, primarily at boys - but this really shouldn't be so. Just as anyone can take evening courses in everything from pottery to a foreign language, why shouldn't the public be encouraged to understand some of the most important current issues in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), at the same time hopefully picking up key methods of the discipline?

As Carl Sagan once said, the public are all too eager to accept the products of science, so why not the methods? It may not be important if most people don't know how to throw a clay pot on a wheel or understand why a Cubist painting looks as it does, but it certainly matters as to how massive amounts of public money are invested in a project and whether that research has far-reaching consequences.
Here then are the points I consider the most important as to why science should be popularised in the most accessible way - although without oversimplifying the material to the point of distortion:

1. Politicians and the associated bureaucracy need basic understanding of some STEM research, often at the cutting edge, in order to generate new policies. Yet as I have previously examined, few current politicians have a scientific background. If our elected leaders are to make informed decisions, they need to understand the science involved. It's obvious, but then if the summary material they are supplied with is incorrect or deliberately biased, the outcome may not be the most appropriate one. STEM isn't just small fry: in 2010 the nations with the ten highest research and development budgets had a combined spend of over US$1.2 trillion.

2. If public money is being used for certain projects, then taxpayers are only able to make valid disagreements as to how their money is spent if they understand the research (military R&D excepted of course, since this is usually too hush-hush for the rest of us poor folk to know about). In 1993 the US Government cancelled the Superconducting Super Collider particle accelerator as it was deemed good science but not affordable science. Much as I love the results coming out of the Large Hadron Collider, I do worry that the immense amount of funding (over US$13 billion spent by 2012) might be better used elsewhere on other high-technology projects with more immediate benefits. I've previously discussed both the highs and lows of nuclear fusion research, which surely has to be one of the most important areas in mega-budget research and development today?

3. Criminal law serves to protect the populace from the unscrupulous, but since the speed of scientific advances and technological change run way ahead of legislation, public knowledge of the issues could help prevent miscarriages of justice or at least wasting money. The USA population has spent over US$3 billion on homeopathy, despite a 1997 report by the President of the National Council Against Health Fraud that stated "Homeopathy is a fraud perpetrated on the public." Even a basic level of critical thinking might help in the good fight against baloney.

4. Understanding of current developments might lead to reliance as much on the head as the heart. For example, what are the practical versus moral implications for embryonic stem cell research (exceptionally potent with President Obama's State of the Union speech to cure cancer). Or what about the pioneering work in xenotransplantation: could the next few decades see the use of genetically-altered pig hearts to save humans, and if so would patients with strong religious convictions agree to such transplants?

5. The realisation that much popular journalism is sensationalist and has little connection to reality. The British tabloid press labelling of genetically-modified crops as 'Frankenstein foods' is typical of the nonsense that clouds complex and serious issues for the sake of high sales. Again, critical thinking might more easily differentiate biased rhetoric from 'neutral' facts.

6. Sometimes scientists can be paid to lie. Remember campaigns with scientific support from the last century that stated smoking tobacco is good for you or that lead in petrol is harmless? How about the DuPont Corporation refusing to stop CFC production, with the excuse that capitalist profit should outweigh environmental degradation and the resulting increase in skin cancer? Whistle-blowers have often been marginalised by industry-funded scientists (think of the initial reaction to Rachel Carson concerning DDT) so it's doubtful anything other than knowledge of the issues would penetrate the slick corporate smokescreen.

7. Knowing the boundaries of the scientific method - what science can and cannot tell us and what should be left to other areas of human activity - is key to understanding where the discipline should fit into society. I've already mentioned the moral implications and whether research can be justified due to the potential outcome, but conversely, are there habits and rituals, or just societal conditioning, that blinds us to what could be achieved with public lobbying to governments?

8. Nations may be enriched as a whole by cutting out nonsense and focusing on solutions for critical issues, for example by not having to waste time and money explaining that global warming and evolution by natural selection are successful working theories due to the mass of evidence. Notice how uncontroversial most astronomical and dinosaur-related popularisations are. Now compare to the evolution of our own species. Enough said!

9. Improving the public perspective of scientists themselves. A primary consensus still seems to promote the notion of lone geniuses, emotionally removed from the rest of society and frequently promoting their own goals above the general good. Apart from the obvious ways in which this conflicts with other points already stated, much research is undertaken by large, frequently multi-national teams; think Large Hadron Collider, of course. Such knowledge may aid removal of the juvenile Hollywood science hero (rarely a heroine) and increase support for the sustained efforts that require public substantial funding (nuclear fusion being a perfect example).

10. Reducing the parochialism, sectarianism and their associated conflict that if anything appears to be on the increase. It's a difficult issue and unlikely that it could be a key player but let's face it, any help here must be worth trying. Neil deGrasse Tyson's attitude is worth mentioning: our ideological differences seem untenable against a cosmic perspective. Naïve perhaps, but surely worth the effort?

Last year Bill Gates said: "In science, we're all kids. A good scientist is somebody who has redeveloped from scratch many times the chain of reasoning of how we know what we know, just to see where there are holes." The more the rest of us understand this, isn't there a chance we would notice the holes in other spheres of thought we currently consider unbending? This can only be a good thing, if we wish to survive our turbulent technological adolescence.

Tuesday 23 December 2014

Easy fixes: simple corrections of some popular scientific misconceptions

A few months' ago I finally saw the film 'Gravity', courtesy of a friend with a home theatre system. Amongst the numerous technical errors - many pointed out on Twitter by Neil deGrasse Tyson - was one that I hadn't seen mentioned. This was how rapidly Sandra Bullock's character acclimatised to the several space stations and spacecraft immediately after removing her EVA suit helmet. As far as I am aware, the former have nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres whilst the suits are oxygen-only, necessitating several hours of acclimatisation.

I may of course be wrong on this, and of course dramatic tension would be pretty much destroyed if such delays had to be woven into the plot, but it got me thinking that there are some huge fundamental errors propagated in non-scientific circles. Therefore my Christmas/Hanukkah/holiday season present is a very brief, easy -on-the-brain round-up of a few of the more obvious examples.

  1. The Earth is perfect sphere.
    Nope, technically I think the term is 'oblate spheroid'. Basically, a planet's spin squashes the mass so that the polar diameter is less than the equatorial diameter. Earth is only about 0.3% flatter in polar axis but if you look at a photograph of Saturn you can see a very obvious squashing.

  2. Continental drift is the same thing as plate-tectonics.
    As a child I often read that these two were interchangeable, but this is not so. The former is the hypothesis that landmasses have moved over time whilst the latter is the mechanism now accepted to account for this, with the Earth's crust floating over the liquid mantle in large segments or plates.

    Geologist Alfred Wegener suggested the former in 1912 but is was largely pooh-poohed until the latter was discovered by ocean floor spreading half a century later. As Carl Sagan often said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

  3. A local increase in cold, wet weather proves that global warming is a fallacy.
    Unfortunately, chaose theory shows that even the minutest of initial changes can cause major differences of outcome, hence weather forecasting being far from an exact science.

    However, there is another evidence for the validity of this theory, fossil fuel lobbyists and religious fundamentalists aside. I haven't read anything to verify this, but off the top of my head I would suggest that if the warm water that currently travels north-east across the Atlantic from the Gulf of Mexico (and prevents north-western Europe from having cold Canadian eastern seaboard winters), then glacial meltwater may divert this warm, denser seawater. And then the Isles of Scilly off the Cornish coast may face as frosty a winter as the UK mainland!

  4. Evolution and natural selection are the same thing.
    Despite Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species having been published in 1859, this mistake is as popular as ever. Evolution is simply the notion that a population within a parent species can slowly differentiate to become a daughter species, but until Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently arrived at natural selection, there really wasn't a hypothesis for the mechanism.

    This isn't to say that there weren't attempts to provide one, it's just that none of them fit the facts quite as well as the elegant simplicity of natural selection. Of course today's technology, from DNA analysis to CAT scans of fossils, provides a lot more evidence than was available in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Gregor Mendel's breeding programmes were the start of genetics research that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis that has natural selection at its core.

  5. And finally…freefall vs zero gravity.
    Even orbiting astronauts have been known to say that they are in zero gravity when they are most definitely not. The issue is due to the equivalence of gravity and acceleration, an idea which was worked on by luminaries such as Galileo, Newton and Einstein. If you find yourself in low Earth orbit - as all post-Apollo astronauts are - then clearly you are still bound by our planet's gravity.

    After all, the Moon is approximately 1800 times further away from the Earth than the International Space Station (ISS), but it is kept in orbit by the Earth's pull (okay, so there is the combined Earth-Moon gravitational field, but I'm keeping this simple). By falling around the Earth at a certain speed, objects such as the ISS maintain a freefalling trajectory: too slow and the orbit would decay, causing the station to spiral inwards to a fiery end, whilst too fast would cause it to fly off into deep space.

    You can experience freefall yourself via such delights as an out-of-control plummeting elevator or a trip in an arc-flying astronaut training aircraft A.K.A. 'Vomit Comet'. I'm not sure I'd recommend either! Confusingly, there's also microgravity and weightlessness, but as it is almost Christmas we'll save that for another day.
There are no doubt numerous other, equally fundamental errors out there, which only goes to show that we could do with much better science education in our schools and media. After all, no-one would make so many similar magnitude mistakes regarding the humanities, would they? Or, like the writer H.L. Mencken, would I be better off appreciating that "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the (American) public"? I hope not!

Saturday 16 August 2014

The escalating armoury: weapons in the war between science and woolly thinking

According to that admittedly dubious font of broad knowledge Wikipedia, there are currently sixteen Creationist museums in the United States alone. These aren't minor attractions for a limited audience of fundamentalist devotees either: one such institution in Kentucky has received over one million visitors in its first five years. That's hardly small potatoes! So how much is the admittance fee and when can I go?

Or maybe not. It isn't the just the USA that has become home to such anti-scientific nonsense either: the formerly robust secular societies of the UK and Australia now house museums and wildlife parks with similar anti-scientific philosophies. For example, Noah's Ark Zoo Farm in England espouses a form of Creationism in which the Earth is believed to be a mere 100,000 years old. And of course in addition to traditional theology, there is plenty of pseudo-scientific/New Age nonsense that fails every test science can offer and yet appears to be growing in popularity. Anyone for Kabbalah?

It's thirty-five years since Carl Sagan's book Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science summarised the scientific response to the pseudo-scientific writings of Immanuel Velikovsky. Although Velikovsky and his bizarre approach to orbital mechanics - created in order to provide an astrophysical cause for Biblical events - has largely been forgotten, his ideas were popular enough in their time. A similar argument could be made for the selective evidence technique of Erich von Daniken in the 1970's, whose works have sold an astonishing 60 million copies; and to a less extent the similar approach of Graham Hancock in the 1990's. But a brief look at that powerhouse of publishing distribution, Amazon.com, shows that today there is an enormous market for best-selling gibberish that far outstrips the lifetime capacity of a few top-ranking pseudo-scientists:
  • New Age: 360,000
  • Spirituality: 243,000
  • Religion: 1,100,000
  • (Science 3,100,000)
(In the best tradition of statistics, all figures have been rounded slightly up or down.)

Since there hasn't exactly been a decrease of evidence for most scientific theories, the appeal of the genre must be due to changes in society. After writing-off the fundamentalist/indoctrinated as an impossible-to-change minority, what has lead to the upsurge in popularity of so many publications at odds with critical thinking?

It seems that those who misinterpret scientific methodology, or are in dispute with it due to a religious conviction, have become adept at using the techniques that genuine science popularisation utilises. What used to be restricted to the printed word has been expanded to include websites, TV channels, museums and zoos that parody the findings of science without the required rigorous approach to the material. Aided and abetted by well-meaning but fundamentally flawed popular science treatments such as Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which looks at facts without real consideration of the science behind them, the public are often left with little understanding of what separates science from its shadowy counterparts. Therefore the impression of valid scientific content that some contemporary religious and pseudo-science writers offer can quite easily be mistaken for the genuine article. Once the appetite for a dodgy theory has been whetted, it seems there are plenty of publishers willing to further the interest.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the 'evidence' put forward in support of popular phenomenon such an ancient alien presence or faked moon landings seems all the more impressive. At a time when computer-generated Hollywood blockbusters can even be replicated on a smaller scale in the home, most people are surely aware of how easy it is to be fooled by visual evidence. But it seems that pictorial support for a strongly-written idea can resonate with the search for fundamental meaning in an ever more impersonal technocratic society. And of course if you are flooded with up-to-the-minute information from a dozen sources then it is much easier to absorb evidence from your senses than having to unravel the details from that most passé of communication methods, boring old text. Which perhaps fails to explain just why there are quite so many dodgy theories available in print!

But are scientists learning from their antithesis how to fight back? With the exception of Richard Dawkins and other super-strict rationalists, science communicators have started to take on board the necessity of appealing to hearts as well as minds. Despite the oft-mentioned traditional differentiation to the humanities, science is a human construct and so may never be purely objective. Therefore why should religion and the feel-good enterprises beloved of pseudo-scientists hold the monopoly on awe and wonder?

Carl Sagan appears to have been a pioneer in the field of utilising language that is more usually the domain of religion. In The Demon-Haunted Word: Science As A Candle In The Dark, he argues that science is 'a profound source of spirituality'. Indeed, his novel Contact defines the numinous outside of conventional religiosity as 'that which inspires awe'. If that sounds woolly thinking, I'd recommend viewing the clear night sky away from city lights...

Physicist Freeman Dyson's introduction to the year 2000 edition of Sagan's Cosmic Connection uses the word 'gospel' and the phrase 'not want to appear to be preaching'. Likewise, Ann Druyan's essay A New Sense of the Sacred in the same volume includes material to warm the humanist heart. Of course, one of the key intentions of the Neil deGrasse Tyson-presented reboot of Cosmos likewise seeks to touch the emotions as well as improve the mind, a task at which it sometimes - in my humble opinion - overreaches.

The emergence of international science celebrities such as Tyson is also helping to spread the intentions if not always the details of science as a discipline. For the first time since Apollo, former astronauts such as Canadian Chris Hadfield undertake international public tours. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku and Brian Cox are amongst those practicing scientists who host their own regular radio programmes, usually far superior to the majority of popular television science shows. Even the seven Oscar-winning movie Gravity may have helped promote science, with its at times accurate portrayal of the hostile environment outside our atmosphere, far removed from the science fantasy of most Hollywood productions. What was equally interesting was that deGrasse Tyson's fault-finding tweets of the film received a good deal of public attention. Can this suppose that despite the immense numbers of anti-scientific publications on offer, the public is prepared to put trust in scientists again? After all, paraphrasing Monty Python, what have scientists ever done for us?

There are far important uses for the time and effort that goes into such nonsense as the 419,000 results on Google discussing 'moon landing hoax'. And there's worse: a search for 'flat earth' generates 15,800,00 results. Not that most of these are advocates, but surely very few would miss most of the material discussing these ideas ad nauseum?

Although it should be remembered that scientific knowledge can be progressed by unorthodox thought - from Einstein considering travelling alongside a beam of light to Wegener's continental drift hypothesis that led to plate tectonics - but there is usually a fairly obvious line between an idea that may eventually be substantiated and one that can either be disproved by evidence or via submission to parsimony. Dare we hope that science faculties might teach their students techniques for combating an opposition that doesn't fight fair, or possibly even how to use their own methods back at them? After all, it's time to proselytise!