The immune system is an unsung hero most days of our lives. We would all quickly die without its efficient functioning. But how complex is it. Take a look at this animation which is an extremely simplified version of this incredibly complex system. Then thank your immune system for doing a good job today. For another animation focusing only on the production of antibodies, see the following:
I know I'm late to the game on this Google incident, but this is such a good illustration about how we, as a society, are unable to talk and think about serious issues except through our ideological filters. Further, some questions that can be explored through science apparently should no longer be even raised. First, a comment from a Gizmodo article by Melanie Ehrenkranz, who characterizes former Google Engineer James Damore as follows: "The man thinks women are inferior to men as engineers." That is typical of a lot of how Damore has been treated on the Internet. Now consider the basic facts about what Damore wrote at Google:
Calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber", the memo says that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination. Instead, it argues that male/female disparities can be partly explained by biological differences. According to research he cited, those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait). Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination.Damore has given detailed interviews about what happened at Google and why he wrote his comments. That includes this interview with Joe Rogan:
From The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea by Robert Wald Sussman, from an long excerpt published in Newsweek:
For the past 500 years, people have been taught how to interpret and understand racism. We have been told that there are very specific things that relate to race, such as intelligence, sexual behavior, birth rates, infant care, work ethics and abilities, personal restraint, lifespan, law-abidingness, aggression, altruism, economic and business practices, family cohesion, and even brain size. We have learned that races are structured in a hierarchical order and that some races are better than others. Even if you are not a racist, your life is affected by this ordered structure. We are born into a racist society. What many people do not realize is that this racial structure is not based on reality. Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race. There are no major complex behaviors that directly correlate with what might be considered human “racial” characteristics.
Good article in Scientific American reminding us that those who are science-adverse or science-ignorant in some ways embrace science in other ways. That should be obvious, in that creationists are willing to fly in airplanes and those who reject vaccines love to use their smart phones. But this article goes further, and warns us that slapping people with with a general anti-science label risks driving them further into scientific ignorance.
People’s relationship with science is much more complex and nuanced than "pro-science" or "anti-science." We need to correct some of the misconceptions we have and show that what is often labeled as "anti-science" or “science denial” is often better understood as isolated incidents of motivated bias. In general, trust in science is much higher than we often realize, in part because it includes a lot of people we might often consider “anti-science.”
The conclusions of this article:
NASA just published photos of Pan, one of Saturn's moons. Such an unusual shape!
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Pan - Moon of Saturn. Photo by NASA[/caption]