As If We Didn’t Know

Politics dictated FDA policy? Say it isn't so! According to this NY Times piece, the Bush Administration (they get the blame because, after all, he was the Decider) bade the FDA to meddle with contraception when it suited a certain agenda. What I find so delightful about this, as with the Dover PA decision on Intelligent Design in the classroom, is that a Republican judge, this time a Reagan appointee, made the call. The thing is, contraception and all that it implies really ought to be a conservative issue. I mean, really---it has all the hallmarks of the last 60 years of conservative philosophy built on the rights of the individual, the freedom from interference being chief among them. You would think conservatives would have leapt on this a long time ago, staking it out as exemplary of the idea of American Individualism and the freedom to act as a moral agent, dictating one's own destiny and making determinations about how one will live one's life free from government meddling. Handing both men and women the tools---provided by the free market, to boot---to manage their own lives in accordance with their formulation as individuals of the American Dream should have been a slam dunk for conservatives. They should have been cheering for it since the days of Margaret Sanger. What is more, given the attitude of the communist states, which dismissed Sanger and the entire notion of family planning as a bourgeois, capitalist plot to undermine the growth of the collective, this should have been part and parcel of rearing a generation of people cumulatively opposed to Soviet style socialism and collectivism. Everything about the Choice movement smacks of good ol' fashion American Values! It is the perversity of the debate that is ironic, that it should be those who are castigated as liberal soldiers in the march to socialism and its destruction of all things individualist and true blue American who are the champions of the idea that people ought to have full say in the when and if of having children. How did this happen?

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How to weed out junk science when discussing climate change.

George Will's recent journalistic malpractice has inspired much discussion by many people concerned about climate change. It's a critically important issue given that 41% of Americans currently think that the threat of global warming is being exaggerated by the media. The intellectual energy runs even deeper than criticism of George Will, though, leading us to the fundamental issue of how journalists and readers can distinguish legitimate science from sham (or politicized) science. The Washington Post recently agreed to publish a precisely-worded response to Will by Christopher Mooney. Here's Mooney's opener:

A recent controversy over claims about climate science by Post op-ed columnist George F. Will raises a critical question: Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic, how to recognize the real conclusions of science and how to distinguish them from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?

Mooney methodically takes Will to task on point after point. For instance, weather is not the same thing as the climate. The state of the art in 1970s climate science has been superseded by 2007 climate science. You can't determine long-term trends in Arctic ice by comparing ice thickness only on two strategically picked days. The bottom line is not surprising. If you want to do science well you have to do it with precision, measuring repeatedly, crunching the numbers every which way and then drawing your conclusions self-critically. What is not allowed is cherry picking.

Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists -- following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It's also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be -- now more than ever.

Mooney has given considerable thought to these topics. His byline indicates that he is the author of "The Republican War on Science" and co-author of the forthcoming "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future." I would supplement Mooney's well-written points, borrowing from our federal courts. They have long been faced with the struggle to determine what is real science and what is junk science, and they have settled on what is now called the "Daubert" test, (named after the case first applying the test, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 509 U.S. 579 (1993)). The Daubert analysis is applied many times every day in all federal courts (and many state courts) all across America. The problem facing judges is that the parties to law suits often produce experts who express scientific theories and explanations that are never heard outside of courtrooms. This justifiably makes judges suspicious. Is the witness doing "real" science or his he/she doing sham science to further the interests of the party paying his/her bills? The Daubert test asks the judge to serve as gatekeeper, to make sure that only legitimate science sees the light of day in courtrooms. Here are the relevant factors:
  • Does the method involve empirical testing (is the theory or technique falsifiable, refutable, and testable)?
  • Has the method been subjected to peer review and publication?
  • Do we know the error rate of the method and the existence and maintenance of standards concerning its operation?
  • Is the theory and technique generally accepted by a relevant scientific community?
Positive answers to each of these factors suggests that the witness is doing real science. Astrology would fail this test miserably. Applied to climate science, the Daubert test would require that we listen carefully to what the scientists talk about with each other, in person and in their peer-reviewed journals. Daubert would require that we know enough about the techniques of climate science to know how it makes its measurements and conclusions. Daubert would certainly require that we know the difference between the weather and the climate. Applying Daubert is not simply a matter of listening to the scientists. Quite often, the scientists are bought and paid for (e.g., scientists working for tobacco companies and corrupt pharmaceutical companies). Applying Daubert requires taking the time to understand how the science works to solve real-world questions and problems and then taking the time to see that its methodology is being used with rigor in this application. There are no shortcuts, expecially for outsider non-scientists. No shortcuts. No cherry-picking.

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Educational Ruins

Anyone who has actually visited and studied ruins knows that they are created from orderly structures by a particular combination of forces. First comes neglect, when people either lose appreciation for the value of the thing and stop maintaining it, or they simply abandon it. Next comes vandalism, when people actively damage the structure to scavenge materials and souvenirs, to leave their own mark, or to intentionally destroy it. The latter is usually for religious reasons, as in purging earlier figureheads like Hatshepsut, Trotsky or the Bamiyan Buddhas. But this post is about an institutional edifice. Education in the United States is falling into ruins. Sure, it still is funded in a nominal sort of way. But people have forgotten its value. They even vote against tax increases necessary to maintain current standards. Schools are closing; one K-12 building in my neighborhood is now condos. My Junior High school was razed for a housing development. Pharyngula points out how the University of Florida is now planning to shut down its geology department as a cost cutting measure. Geology is the science that gave Darwin the leg up to understand how natural selection works before anyone else. Geology and its understanding affects meteorology, biology, sociology, history, exo-planetary studies, and more. Florida is one of the states in which regular attempts are made to insert Creationism into school itineraries. And geology is the biggest stumbling block to accepting a Young Earth. But I hope that is not their underlying reason. It is simple neglect of education in general. But there is a strong vanadlism movement afoot in this country. Anti-science forces are working hard to put non-scientific ideas into science classes. Texas is a recurring battleground as school administrators attempt to keep up education credentials in spite of the onslaught. Recently, a doomed law is running the gauntlet in the Texas legislature to allow unaccreditable private schools to offer advanced degrees. See Hank's A Master’s in Creationism. If that seemed too harsh, try Pharyngula's If you fail an IQ test in Texas, do they automatically put you in the legislature? Hank is Australian. Yet he cares about how this sort of behavior is making the United States seem ever goofier. To let our once-admirable education system crumble is a step backwards for the world.

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Flooded With Data

I had an urge to think through some implications of a world-wide flood, such as the one Biblical Literalists claim happened a few thousand years ago. Let's suppose that it happened, that the entire world was inundated all at once to cover the highest mountain, and that all surviving land animals and short-range birds were preserved in a single boat. What would the ecological landscape look like? gray worldFirst, all land animals would only be found on a single connected land mass. There is no way that any crawling creature could have reached Australia or the Americas from the Middle East. Most especially tropical animals. Secondly, we expect to see floral panspermia. That is, the waters would have carried every species of seed to every land mass all at once. Vanilla and cocoa and peppercorns should all be found growing in the same places throughout human history. Same for and chile peppers and coffee and potatoes. Wheat and maize should also be seen as combined staples of every ancient diet. Or the opposite: The flood waters killed off all the seeds except what was carried on the ark. Therefore, only the plants found in the middle east could exist anywhere in the world. Also, all modern animal species should be represented in every geological flood stratum. After all, a single massive drowning event doesn't distinguish between creatures of comparable size like an allosaur and an elephant or a trilobite and a mouse. Surely there must be abundant examples of these combined fossils. So it is easy to prove that such a flood actually happened. In fact, it must have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt when Europeans first sailed to the Americas and found everything there to be just the same as back home.

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Freedom of Speech as Religion

I think it should go without saying (but of course, nothing does) that anytime someone wants to protect something from "denigration" or other forms of criticism, we should all grab hold of our rights and hang onto them with a death grip. To put this case most eloquently, I offer the following.

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