The Bewilderness

Cry Wolf for Money

Dylan Evans, writing in The Huffington Post (UK), talks about the post-apocalyptic scenario that he was working upon as a Phd student at the LSE in the 1990s. It envisaged a crisis of peak oil and climate change. Pushed by Nick Bostrom (of simulation theory expertise), Evans gave a figure of 50% as a probable outcome. Evans had already set up a small settlement in Scotland to ride out these prospective troubles. However, the experiment was abandoned by him (perhaps it is best to enjoy comforts whilst they are still available?)

Now the very scenario that Evans imagined all of those years ago is evident in the hands of the Doomsday Clock moving towards midnight. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists adds environmental dystopia to its list of things that could go wrong. So, such far off disasters which we cannot model very well, if at all, become the basis for a world sitting at five minutes to midnight. In their own words, they state a lack of movement towards nuclear disarmament, no climate change treaty and an unwillingness to immediately bomb all coal stations and convert them into wind stilts or some such nonsense.

They should stick to their nuclear knitting. However, this does nuance Evans's point on our culture's view of the future: given a choice between better or worse, people choose worse and then start acting to make it so.

We live in strange times, caught between two opposing views of the future. On the one hand, the believers in technology and progress promise a world of ever increasing prosperity, a science-fiction scenario in which huge advances in technology have made material abundance and long healthy lives possible for people all over the world. On the other hand, the doomsayers warn us that climate change and the end of cheap oil will put an end to the stupendous economic growth we have seen in the past hundred years, and usher in a new dark age of poverty, disease and war. There are some middle positions, it is true, but they seem less convincing than the two extremes.

Recently, the doomsayers have been gaining the upper hand. On the surface, they may appear more sober, more realistic, and more courageous than the optimists. They want to stare the apocalypse in the face, which seems better than denying it could possibly happen. But thinking too intensely about the end of civilisation can be just as dangerous than denying the possibility of such a danger. It's important to consider such worst-case scenarios when planning for the future, but the point of considering them is to help one plan how to avoid them. If you dwell on them too much, you can begin to forget that this is just one possible future out of many, and start to think of it as an inevitable occurrence. And from there, it is not such a big step to start idealising this dark future. It's an extreme version of the 'sweet lemons' phenomenon.

What Evans does not yet grasp is that the ideology of dystopia or, more accurately, the politics of fear, is used to justify any number of rent-seeking coercive policies. Tied into funding networks and political legitimation, the pessimists need to clamber aboard scientific authority whilst avoiding counterthrusts of accountability or transparency that could derail the gravy train. 

A potential quantum leap in software

A timely reminder that improvements of a radical nature depend upon the next breakthrough. Especially if the roadmap is marked out by teleologies like Moore's Law. For some years, quantum computing has been touted as the saviour once contemporary technologies run their course.

Work on certain algorithms has the theoretical potential for equalling quantum computing's speed in certain areas, if the software can capitalise on this advance.

The strange sexual selection of the condemned politician

Daniel Finkelstein writes in The Times on the futility of trying to empower or constrain human choice when running against the grain of human nature. It is an old argument. It is a conservative argument.

It is, in a twisted sort of a way, almost amusing to watch us try to change human nature with a government scheme or the banning of fatty food adverts during Jackanory.

British governments are renowned, in recent years, for their ambitious attempts to change human behaviour with the crash and burn of political careers. Attempts to limit such vaulting ambition should be adopted where they rest upon a foundation of reliability.

Finkelstein references evolutionary psychology as the key discipline for supporting the rigid and defined course of human behaviour:

The idea that one wouldn’t bother if it weren’t for the women and the booze is actually more complicated than the basic theory of evolutionary psychology. For in evolutionary psychology the booze doesn’t come into it. Only the women.

The notion that the origin of all human behaviour is that it helped our ancestors to have sex is controversial. Some people even argue that it isn’t proper science. But I have always found it pretty convincing. Is it likely that humans are the one animal whose behaviour cannot be explained mainly by its evolution? And if not evolution, what does explain the universality of so many human traits? 

But the most useful thing that studying evolutionary psychology has taught me is humility about how much politics can really change us. So much of human behaviour is innate, hard-wired, the result of adaptations made thousands of years ago.

Finkelstein relates this reading of evolutionary psychology to our political scene suggesting that gossip, scandal, deception and other political traits are part of human nature. Indeed, his claim is that we are political animals. These behaviours derive from evolved, innate characters. And sex selection curiously disappears. Kinship does not get a reading, though we have political families!

The problem with such an argument is that psychology, culture, institutions and society fall by the wayside. Alternative explanations, like perverse institutional incentives, are discounted. Complexity is traded for simplicity by an overarching appeal to the Pleistocene and sex selection.

But if you take this argument at value, should we not constrain politicians from their bad instincts. Indeed, isn't politics then a problem? If we cannot reform or change, then we are left with fear and the Prince as limitations on human behaviour.

Fortunately, evolutionary psychology is not a settled science, its explanations of modern behaviour controversial and without proof with such assertions. Columnists should avoid science and evolution, since its relationship to politics and culture is difficult at best, impossible to prove at worst.

If we want to look at such matters, Labour and the Miliband brothers provide a more interesting story to read.

Enviroporn and pseudoscience

A good introduction to the political economy of scares is the article in Forbes on the subject of enviroporn. Environmental activists undertake media-friendly acts that appear to approximate science and are then taken up and publicised by sympathetic media. Essential is the public appearance of scientific activity that confers authority.

How else to explain a book in which the authors, two longtime Canadian environmentalists, expose themselves to products containing chemicals such as phthalates and then have their blood analyzed to show how dangerous putting on cologne is?

The activity is meaningless, but resembles the action of a political cargo cult. Replicating the skin of a science without undertaking the epistemic core (because it is too hard and they are too ignorant!), and stealing the authority to join pseudoscience with political agitation. This is even more dangerous than enviroporn.E

New UAV variants

An article showing how unmanned aerial vehicles are now entering specialised niches, with the United States leading the way. One is an updated Predator with additional quick reaction capabilities and the other will have over-water deployment for the US Coastguard.

Neither a dinoasur or a dog

The discovery of an early silesaur in Tanzania may push back the date when dinosaurs developed, though not their period of dominance. Silesaurs formed one of a number of competing but related reptilian groups, of which the dinosaurs proved the most successful. The Telegraph article is slightly scary in its treatment of dogs, though. Here is the initial description, though I miss out the illustrated nonsense:

Palaeontologists have found a four-legged ancestor of the prehistoric creatures that hails from 250 million years ago – 10 million years earlier than first thought.

The large dog sized creature, which ate meat and vegetation, is thought to be a similar relation to dinosaurs as chimps are to humans.

However, it is not really a dog now:

Each individual stood about 1.5 to 3 feet tall at the hips and were 3 to 10 feet long. They weighed about 22 to 66lbs.

So the article's terms of reference: dinosaurs (it isn't one) and dogs (it doesn't resemble one) are fairly poor. It is neither a dinosaur nor a dog.

Measuring the ancestors

Recent human studies have been undertaken on the Bushmen and the remains of an Inuit found in Greenland. The latter is important as an advance in technique and example:

Inuk’s genome, which is published in the journal Nature, is by far the oldest human genetic code yet read — all those completed previously used tissue taken from living people.

The achievement, by a team led by Eske Willerslev and Morten Rasmussen, of the University of Copenhagen, demonstrates a powerful new tool. It opens the way for other groups to use DNA from human remains to investigate past migrations and the ancestry of populations now extinct.

Perhaps other groups will be willing to allow examination of human remains that they imbue with some ancestral significance just to prove genetic descent.

Studies of bushmen also show greater genetic diversity due to stable descent froma hunter-gatherer population. The advantages of such a lifestyle are also identified:

The study is the first to sequence the genomes of individuals who still practice a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

It identified variants previously linked with higher bone mineral density, increased sprint and power performance and a greater ability to reabsorb chloride ions from the renal glomerulus, and a taste receptor gene shown to improve the ability to taste bitter compounds, which could reflect hunter-gatherers’ need to avoid toxic plants.

Genetic adaptations in the bushmen also make them ill suited to certain aspects of an agricultural lifestyle, including high-fat diets and exposure to malaria.

Hard to believe that two Bushmen have greater genetic diversity than myself and Mao Tse-Tung, but there it is.

Cell senescence explored

A useful breakthrough in understanding cell senescence.

The Newcastle team, working with the University of Ulm in Germany , used a comprehensive "systems biology" approach, involving computer modelling and experiments with cell cultures and genetically modified mice, to investigate why cells become senescent. In this aged state, cells stop dividing and the tissues they make up show physical signs of deterioration, from wrinkling skin to a failing heart.

The research, published by the journal Molecular Systems Biology , shows that when an ageing cell detects serious damage to its DNA - caused by the wear and tear of life - it sends out specific internal signals.

These distress signals trigger the cell's mitochondria , its tiny energy-producing power packs, to make oxidising "free radical" molecules, which in turn tell the cell either to destroy itself or to stop dividing. The aim is to avoid the damaged DNA that causes cancer.

This is more of a confirmation; the FT warns that this will not cause an elixir of eternal life: a gratuitous obeisance to aging and death. I am sure that this was released before, and has not been picked up by Fight Aging.

 

Climate change or 'climate change'?

Is this a pun on the part of the Torygraph correspondent, Richard Alleyne. The title of his piece reads: “Fog over San Francisco thins by a third due to climate change”.

When you read the detail within the article, none of the sources quoted refer to climate change.

"Since 1901, the average number of hours of fog along the coast in summer has dropped from 56 per cent to 42 per cent, which is a loss of about three hours per day," said the study leader Dr James Johnstone at the University of California.

He said that it was unclear whether this is part of a natural cycle of [sic = or] the result of human activity, but the fog is receding because of a reduction in the difference between the temperature of the sea and the land.

This must be an example of the phrase 'climate change' used in its literal and proper meaning, rather than as short hand for a politicised warmist interpretation. Is this bias on the part of Eichard Alleyne, or a hook to see if readers can tell the difference?

Startling science from emergent powers

According to the Financial Times, Chinese scientific research will dominate by 2020, using the metric of peer reviewed articles. Will this herald a shift in the language of scientific discovery? It was an Anglo-German enterprise prior to the First World War and is currently dominated by the English language. Will the 21^st century demand a co-dominion with Mandarin?

The success of the vast growth in Chinese research is due to an education system geared towards science, huge funding in research and an efficient use of their diaspora. This compares favourably with other emerging powers:

In contrast to China, India and Russia, whose research strengths tend to be in the physical sciences, chemistry and engineering, Brazil stands out in health, life sciences, agriculture and environmental research. It is a world leader in using biofuels in auto and aero engines.

There is only one also-ran amongst the BRICs.

At the opposite extreme is Russia, which produced fewer research papers than Brazil or India in 2008.

Just 20 years ago, on the eve of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, Russia was a scientific superpower, carrying out more research than China, India and Brazil combined. Since then it has been left behind.

The Thomson Reuters figures show not only the “awe-inspiring” expansion of Chinese science but also a very powerful performance by Brazil, much slower growth in India and relative decline in Russia.

Scientific papers do not act as a predictor of future success, but the rise of the non-Western powers is startling.