The Lippard Blog

Joel Garreau on radical evolution

2009-11-19T08:54:00.007-07:00

Yesterday I heard Joel Garreau speak again at ASU, as part of a workshop on Plausibility put on by the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO). I previously posted a summary of his talk back in August on the future of cities. This talk was based on his book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies--and What It Means to Be Human.

Garreau was introduced by Paul Berman, Dean of the Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law at ASU, who also announced that Garreau will be joining the law school faculty beginning this spring, as the Lincoln Professor for Law, Culture, and Values.

He began by saying that we're at a turning point in history [has there ever been a time when we haven't thought that, though?], and he's going to present some possible scenarios for the next 2, 3, 5, 10, or 20 years, and that his book is a roadmap. The main feature of this turning point is that rather than transforming our environment, we'll be increasingly transforming ourselves, and we're the first species to take control of its own evolution, and it's happening now.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, he said, your kid may come home from school in tears about how he can't compete with the other kids who are more intelligent, more athletic, more attractive, more attentive, and so forth--because you haven't invested in the human enhancement technologies coming on the market. Your possible reactions will be to suck it up [somebody's still gotta do the dirty jobs in society?], remortgage the house again to make your kid competitive, or try to get the enhanced kids thrown out of school. What you can't do is ignore it.

He then asked people to raise their hands who could remember when things were still prevalent:

The Sony Walkman
When computer screens were black and white. (An audience member said "green and black!")
Rotary dial phones
Mimeograph machines and the smell of their fluid
Polio

This shows, he said, that we're going through a period of exponential change.

His talk then had a small amount of overlap with his previous talk, in his explanation of Moore's Law--that we've had 32 doublings of computer firepower since 1959, so that $1 of computing power is about 2 billion times more than it was then, and an iPhone has more computing power than all of NORAD had in 1965. Such doublings change our expectations of the future, so that the last 20 years isn't a guide to the next 20, but to the next 8; the last 50 years is a guide to the next 14. He pulled out a handkerchief and said this is essentially the sort of display we'll have in the future for reading a book or newspaper.

He then followed Ray Kurzweil in presenting some data points to argue that exponential change has been going on since the beginning of life on earth (see P.Z. Myers' "Singularly Silly Singularity" for a critique):

It took 400 million years (My) to go from organisms to mammals, and

150My to monkeys
30My to chimps
16My to bipedality
4My to cave paintings
10,000 years to first settlements
4,000 years to first writing

At this point, culture comes into the picture, which causes even more rapid change (a point also made by Daniel Dennett in his talk at ASU last February).

4,000 years to Roman empire
1800 years to industrial revolution
100 years to first flight
66 years to landing on the moon

And now we're in the information age, which Garreau identified as a third kind of evolution, engineered or radical evolution, where we're in control. [It seems to me that such planned changes are subject to the limits of human minds, unless we can build either AI or enhancement technologies that improve our minds, and I think the evidence for that possibility really has yet to be demonstrated--I see it as possible, but I place no bets on its probability and think there are reasons for skepticism.]

Garreau spent a year at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the organization that invented the Internet (then the ARPANet), which is now in the business of creating better humans, better war fighters. [DARPA was also a subject of yesterday's Law, Science, and Technology class. It's a highly funded organization that doesn't accept grant proposals, rather, it seeks out people that it thinks are qualified to give funding to for its projects. It has become rather more secretive as a result of embarrassment about its Total Information Awareness and terrorism futures ideas that got negative press in 2003.]

Via DARPA, Garreau learned about their project at Duke University with an owl monkey named Belle, that he described as a monkey that can control physical objects at long distances with her mind. Belle was trained to play a video game with a joystick, initially for a juice reward and then because she enjoyed it. They then drilled a hole in her head and attached fine electrodes (single-unit recording electrodes like the sort used to discover mirror neurons), identified the active regions of her brain when she operated the joystick, and then disconnected the joystick. She became proficient and playing the game with the direct control of her brain. They then connected the system to a robotic arm at MIT which duplicated the movements of her arm with the joystick.

Why did they do this? Garreau said there's an official reason and a real reason. The official reason is that an F-35 jet fighter is difficult to control with a joystick, and wouldn't it be better to control it with your mind, and send information sensed by the equipment directly into the mind? The real reason is that the DARPA defense sciences office is run by Michael Goldblatt, whose daughter Gina Marie (who recently graduated from the University of Arizona) has cerebral palsy and is supposed to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. If machines can be controlled with the mind, machines in her legs could be controlled with her mind, and there's the possibility that she could walk.

Belle first moved the robotic arm 9 years ago, Garreau said, and this Christmas you'll be able to buy the first toy mind-machine interface from Mattel at Walmart for about $100. It's just a cheap EEG device and not much of a game--it lets you levitate a ping pong ball with your mind--but there's obviously more to come.

Garreau said that Matthew Nagel was the first person to send emails using his thoughts (back in 2006), and DARPA is interested in moving this technology out to people who want to control robots. [This, by the way, is the subject of the recent film "Sleep Dealer," which postulates a future in which labor is outsourced to robots operated by Mexicans, so that they can do work in the U.S. without immigrating.]

This exposure to DARPA was how Garreau got interested in these topics, which he called the GRIN technologies--Genetics, Robotics, Information science, and Nanotechnology, which he identified as technologies enabled by Moore's Law.

He showed a slide of Barry Bonds, and said that steroids are sort of a primitive first-generation human enhancement, and noted that the first uses of human enhancement tend to occur in sports and the military, areas where you have the most competition.

Garreau went over a few examples of each of the GRIN technologies that already exist or are likely on the way.

Genetics
Dolly the cloned sheep. "Manipulating and understanding life at the most primitive and basic level."

"Within three years, memory pills, originally aimed at Alzheimer's patients, will then move out to the needy well, like 78 million baby boomers who can't remember where they left their car, then out to the merely ambitious." He said there's already a $36.5 billion grey market for drugs like Ritalin and Provigil (midafonil), and asked, "Are our elite schools already filling up with the enhanced?" [There's some evidence, however, that the enhancement of cognitive function (as opposed to staying awake) is minimal for people who already operate at high ability, with the greatest enhancement effect for those who don't--i.e., it may have something of an egalitarian equalizing effect.]

He said DARPA is looking at ways to end the need for sleep--whales and dolphins don't sleep, or they'd drown, but they do something like sleeping with one half of the brain at a time.

DARPA is also looking at ways to turn off hunger signals. Special forces troops burn 12,000 calories per day, but can't carry huge amounts of food. The body carries extra calories in fat that are ordinarily inaccessible unless you're starving, at which point they get burned. If that switch to start burning fat could be turned on and off at will, that could be handy for military use. He observed that DARPA says "the civilian implications of this have not eluded us."

Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, started by David Sinclair of the Harvard Medical School, aims to have a drug to reverse aging based on resveratrol, an ingredient from grapes found in red wine. [Though Quackwatch offers some skepticism.]

Garreau looks forward to cures for obesity and addiction. He mentioned Craig Venter's plan to create an organism that "eats CO2 and poops gasoline" by the end of this year, that will simultaneously "end [the problems in] the Middle East and climate change." [That seems overly optimistic to me, but ExxonMobil has given Venter $600 million for this project.]

He said there are people at ASU in the hunt, trying to create life forms like this as well. [Though for some reason ASU doesn't participate in the iGEM synthetic biology competition.]

Robotics
Garreau showed a photo of a Predator drone, and said, "Ten years ago, flying robots were science fiction, now it's the only game in town for the Air Force." He said this is the first year that more Air Force personnel were being trained to operate drones than to be pilots. 2002 was the first year that a robot killed a human being, when a Predator drone launched a Hellfire missile to kill al Qaeda members in an SUV in Yemen. He said, "while there's still a human in the loop, philosophical discussions about homicidal robots could be seen as overly fine if you were one of the guys in the SUV."

"We're acquiring the superpowers of the 1930s comic book superheroes," he said, and went on to talk about a Berkeley exoskeleton that allows you to carry a 180-pound pack like it weighs four pounds, like Iron Man's suit. He asked the engineers who built it, "Could you leap over a tall building in a single bound?" They answered, "yes, but landing is still a problem."

Functional MRI (fMRI) is being used at the University of Pennsylvania to try to determine when people are lying. Garreau: "Then you're like the Shadow who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men."

Cochlear implants to give hearing to people for whom hearing aids do nothing, connecting directly to the auditory nerve. Ocular implants to allow the blind to have some vision. Brain implants to improve memory and cognition. Garreau asked, "If you could buy an implant that would allow you to be fluent in Mandarin Chinese, would you do it?" About half the room raised their hands. [I didn't hear a price or safety information, so didn't raise my hand.]

Information
He showed a photo of a camera phone and said, "Fifteen years ago, a machine like this that can fit in your pocket, with a camera, GPS, and MP3 player, and can send email, was science fiction. Now it's a bottom-of-the-line $30 Nokia."

He asked, "Does anyone remember when music players were three big boxes that you put on your bookshelves? Now they're jewelry. Soon they'll be earrings, then implants."

Close behind, he said, are universal translators. "Google has pretty good universal translation on the web, and see it as moving out to their Droid phones." He observed that Sergey Brin was talking in 2004 about having all of the world's information directly attached to your brain, or having a version of Google on a chip implanted in your brain. [I won't get one unless they address network security issues...]

Nanotechnology
Garreau said, "Imagine anything you want, one atom or molecule at a time. Diamonds, molecularly accurate T-bone steaks." He said this is the least developed of the four GRIN technologies, "so you can say anything you want about it, it might be true." It's estimated to become a $1 trillion/year market in the next 10 years. There may be nanobots you can inject into your bloodstream by the thousands to monitor for things about to go wrong [see this video for the scenario I think he's describing], hunter-killers that kill cancer cells. "When you control matter at a fundamental level, you get a feedback loop between the [four] technologies."

At this point, Garreau said he's really not all that interested in the "boys and their toys" so much as he is the implications--"where does this take culture and society and values?" He presented three possible scenarios, emphasizing that he's not making predictions. He called his three scenarios Heaven, Hell, and Prevail.

Heaven
He showed a chart of an exponential curve going up (presumably something like technological capacity on the y axis and time on the x axis).

He said that at the NIH Institute on Aging, there's a bet that the first person to live to 150 is already alive today. He mentioned Ray Kurzweil, said that he pops 250 pills a day and is convinced that he's immortal, and is "not entirely nuts." [I am very skeptical that 250 pills a day is remotely sensible or useful.]

For the last 160 years, human life expectancy has increased at about 1/4 of a year every year. He asked us to imagine that that rate improves to one year per year, or more--at that point, "if you have a good medical plan you're effectively immortal." [I questioned this in the Q&A, below.]

Hell
He showed a chart that was an x-axis mirror of the Heaven one, and described this as a case where technology "gets into the hands of madmen or fools." He described the Australian mousepox incident, where researchers in Australia found a way to genetically alter mousepox so that it becomes 100% fatal, destroying the immune system, so that there's no possible vaccine or prevention. This was published in a paper available to anyone, and the same thing could be done to smallpox to wipe out human beings with no defense. He said the optimistic version is something that wipes out all human life; the pessimistic version is something that wipes out all life on earth. [In my law school class, we discussed this same topic yesterday in more detail, along with a similar U.S. paper that showed how to reconstruct the polio virus.]

The problem with both of these scenarios for Garreau is that they are both "techno-deterministic," assuming that technology is in control and we're "just along for the ride."

Prevail
He showed a chart that showed a line going in a wacky, twisty pattern. The y-axis may have been technological capacity of some sort, but the x-axis in this case couldn't have been time, unless there's time travel involved.

Garreau said, if you were in the Dark Ages, surrounding by marauding hordes and plagues, you'd think there wasn't a good future. But in 1450 came the printing press--"a new way of storing, sharing, collecting, and distributing information," which led to the Renaissance, enlightenment, science, democracy, etc. [Some of those things were rediscoveries of advancements previously made, as Richard Carrier has pointed out. And the up-and-down of this chart and example of the Dark Ages seems to be in tension, if not in conflict, with his earlier exponential curve, though perhaps it's just a matter of scale. At the very least, however, they are reason to doubt continued growth in the short term, as is our current economic climate.]

Garreau called the Prevail scenario more of a co-evolution scenario, where we face challenges hitting us in rapid succession, to which we quickly respond, which creates new challenges. He expressed skepticism of top-down organizations having any capacity to deal with such challenges, and instead suggested that bottom-up group behavior by humans not relying on leaders is where everything interesting will happen. He gave examples of eBay ("100 million people doing complex things without leaders"), YouTube ("no leaders there"), and Twitter ("I have no idea what it's good for, but if it flips out the Iranian government, I'm for it.") [These are all cases of bottom-up behavior facilitated by technologies that are operated by top-down corporations and subject to co-option by other top-down institutions in various ways. I'm not sure how good the YouTube example is considering that it is less profitable per dollar spent than Hulu--while some amateur content bubbles to the top and goes viral, there still seems to be more willingness to pay for professional content. Though it does get cheaper to produce professional content and there are amateurs that produce professional-quality content. And I'll probably offer to help him "get" Twitter.]

The Prevail scenario, he said, is "a bet on humans being surprising, coming together in unpredicted ways and being unpredictably clever."

He ended by asking, "Why have we been looking for intelligent life in the universe for decades with no success? I wonder if every intelligent species gets to the point where they start controlling their own destiny and what it means to be as good as they can get. What if everybody else has flunked. Let's not flunk. Thanks."

Q&A
I asked the first question, which was whether there is really so much grounds for optimism on extending human lifespan when our gains have increased the median lifespan but not made recent progress on the top end--the oldest woman in the world, Jeanne Calment, died at 122 in 1997 and no one else has reached that age. He answered that this was correct, that past improvements have come from nutrition, sanitation, reducing infant mortality, and so forth, but now that we spent $15 billion to sequence the first human genome and the cost of sequencing a complete human genome is approaching $1,000 and personalized medicine is coming along, he suspects we'll find the causes of aging and have the ability to reverse it through genetic engineering.

Prof. David Guston of CSPO asked "What's the relation between your Prevail scenario and the distribution of the success of the good stuff from GRIN technologies?" Looking at subgroups like males in post-Soviet Russia and adults in Africa, he said, things seem to be going in the wrong direction. Garreau answered that this is one of the nightmare scenarios--that humans split into multiple species, such as enhanced, naturals, and the rest. The enhanced are those that keep upgrading every six months. The naturals are those with access to enhancements that "choose not to indulge, like today's vegetarians who are so because of ethical or aesthetic reasons." The rest are those who don't have access to enhancements, and have envy for and despise those who do. "When you have more than one species competing for the same ecological niche," he said, "that ends up badly for somebody." But, he said, that's assuming a rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer belief, "a hallmark of the industrial age." Suppose that instead of distributing scarcity, we are distributing abundance. He said that transplanted hearts haven't become cheap because they aren't abundant, but if we can create new organs in the body or in the lab in a manner that would benefit from mass production, it could become cheap. He pointed out that cell phones represent "the fastest update of technology in human history," going from zero to one phone for every two people in 26 years, and adapted to new uses in the developing world faster than in the developed world. He brought up the possibility of the developing world "leapfrogging" the developed world, "the way Europeans leapfrogged the Arab world a thousand years ago, when they were the leaders in science, math, and everything else." [I think this is a very interesting possibility--the lack of sunk costs in existing out-of-date infrastructure, the lack of stable, firmly established institutions are, I think, likely to make the developing world a chaotic experimental laboratory for emerging technologies.]

Prof. Gary Marchant of the Center for the Study of Law, Science, and Technology then said, "I'm worried about the bottom-up--it also gave us witch trials, Girls Gone Wild, and the Teabaggers." Garreau said his Prevail scenario shows "a shocking faith in human nature--a belief in millions of small miracles," but again said "I'm not predicting it, but I'm rooting for it."

Prof. Farzad Mahootian and Prof. Cynthia Selin of CSPO asked a pair of related questions about work on public deliberations and trying to extend decision-making to broader audiences, asking what Garreau thought about "DARPA driving this or being porous to any kind of public deliberation or extended decision-making?" Garreau responded that "The last thing in the world that I want to do is leave this up to DARPA. The Hell scenario could happen. Top-down hierarchical decision-making is too slow. Anyone waiting for the chairman of the House finance committe to save us is pathetic. Humans in general have been pulling ashes out of the fire by the skin of their teeth for quite a while; and Americans in particular have been at the forefront of change for 400 years and have cultural optimism about change." [I think these questions seemed to presuppose top-down thinking in a way that Garreau is challenging.]

He said he had reported a few years ago about the maquiladoras in Mexico and called it a "revolution," to which he got responses from Mexicans saying, "we're not very fond of revolutions, it was very messy and we didn't like it," and asking him to use a different word. By contrast, he said, "Americans view revolutions fondly, and think they're cool, and look forward to it." [Though there's also a strange conservatism that looks fondly upon a nonexistent ideal past here, as well.] With respect to governance, he said he's interested in looking for alternate forms of governance because "Washington D.C. can't conceivably respond fast enough. We've got a long way to go and a short time to get there. [Quoting the 'Smokey and the Bandit' theme song.]

He went on to say, "I don't necessarily think that all wisdom is based here in America. Other places will come up with dramatically different governance." He talked about the possibility of India, which wants to get cheaper drugs out to the masses, taking an approach different from FDA-style regulation (he called the FDA "a hopelessly dysfunctional organization that takes forever to produce abysmal results"). "Let's say the people of India were willing to accept a few casualties to produce a faster, better, cheaper cure for malaria, on the Microsoft model--get a 'good enough' version, send it out and see how many computers die. Suppose you did that with drugs, and were willing to accept 10,000 or 100,000 casualties if the payoff was curing malaria once and for all among a billion people. That would be an interesting development." By contrast, he said, "The French are convinced they can do it the opposite way, with top-down governance. Glad to see somebody's trying that. I'll be amazed if it works." His view, he said, was "try everything, see what sticks, and fast." [This has historically been the intent of the U.S. federal system, to allow the individual states to experiment with different rules to see what works before or in lieu of federal rules. Large corporations that operate across states, however, which have extensive lobbying power, push for federal regulations to pre-empt state rules, so that they don't have to deal with the complexity.]

There were a few more questions, one of which was whether anyone besides DARPA was doing things like this. Garreau said certainly, and pointed to both conventional pharmaceutical companies and startups working to try to cure addiction and obesity, as well as do memory enhancement, like Eric Kandel's Memory Pharmaceuticals. He talked about an Israeli company that has built a robotic arm which provides touch feedback, with the goal of being able to replace whatever functionality someone has lost, including abilities like throwing a Major League fastball or playing the piano professionally.

Prof. Selin reported a conversation she had with people at the law school about enhancement and whether it would affect application procedures. They indicated that it wouldn't, that enhancement was no different to them than giving piano lessons to children or their having the benefit of a good upbringing. Garreau commented that his latest client is the NFL, and observed that body building has already divided into two leagues, the tested and the untested. The tested have to be free of drugs, untested is anything goes. He asked, "can you imagine this bifurcation in other sports? How far back do you want to back out technology to get to 'natural'? Imagine a shoeless football league." He noted that one person suggested that football minus technology is rugby. [This reminded me of the old Saturday Night Live skit about the "All Drug Olympics."]

All-in-all, it was an interesting talk that had some overlap with things that I'm very interested in pursuing in my program, especially regarding top-down vs. bottom-up organizational structures. Afterward, I spoke briefly with Garreau about how bottom-up skeptical organizations are proliferating and top-down skeptical organizations are trying to capitalize on it, and I wondered to what extent the new creations of bottom-up organizations tend to get co-opted and controlled by top-down organizations in the end. In that regard, I also talked to him a bit about Robert Neuwirth's work on "shadow cities" and the Kowloon Walled City, where new forms of regulatory order arise in jurisdictional no-man's-lands (I could also have mentioned pirate codes). Those cases fall between the cracks for geographical reasons, while the cases that are occurring with regard to GRIN technologies fall between the cracks for temporal reasons, but it seems to me there's still the possibility of the old-style institutions to catch up and take control.

UPDATE: As a postscript, I recently listened to the episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast on human enhancement with philosopher Allen Buchanan, who was at the University of Arizona when I went to grad school there. Good stuff.

State of the world on drug decriminalization

2009-11-19T08:40:00.003-07:00

Personal possession of any drug decriminalized: Spain, Portugal, Italy, Czech Republic, Baltic states, some German states and Swiss cantons, Mexico.

Partial decriminalization/minimal criminal prosecution: England, Denmark, Slovakia, Latvia, Croatia, Poland, Austria, Germany, France, Netherlands (see chart in the Economist story linked below--it's interesting that the Netherlands has the highest percentage of prison outcomes on this list)

Unconstitutional to prosecute people for drug possession (any drug) per Supreme Court ruling: Argentina, Colombia

Marijuana decriminalized: 14 U.S. states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon)

States with some localities that have decriminalized marijuana: Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Washington, Wisconsin

Considering marijuana legalization: California, Massachusetts, possibly Oregon

Considering decriminalization (any drug): Brazil, Ecuador

Source: The Economist, "Virtually legal," November 14, 2009; state decriminalization details from Wikipedia.

William Dembski would like to use copyright to quash criticism

2009-11-17T10:13:00.004-07:00

Although when it comes to other people's works, William Dembski hasn't seen a problem with taking copyrighted material and using it wholesale, dubbing over a computer animated video from Harvard and XVIVO of the inner workings of a cell with his own intelligent design-based commentary, when it comes to his own work he has a different standard.

Mark Chu-Carroll points out at his Good Math, Bad Math blog that Dembski is talking about using threats of claimed copyright infringement to shut down criticism of a recent paper he published with Robert Marks. That criticism includes pointing out that sources cited by Dembski don't say what he says they do, and providing counterexamples to Dembski's mathematical claims. Rather than respond to the criticism, Dembski would rather shut it down.

There are just a few problems with that--first, the criticism may well be fair use. Although it does quote a great deal of the paper by Dembski and Marks, it does so for the purpose of putting commentary and criticism side-by-side with quotations from the paper. Second, papers published by the IEEE require that copyright be transferred to the IEEE, so Dembski lacks standing even if there were infringement.

Check out the RationalWiki critique of the Dembski and Marks paper.

Daniel Dennett, The Evolution of Confusion

2009-11-16T09:56:00.002-07:00

Daniel Dennett's talk from the 2009 Atheist Alliance International convention (link is to my summary) is now online:

Richard Carrier on the ancient creation/evolution debate

2009-11-08T13:26:00.005-07:00

Richard Carrier, an independent scholar with a Ph.D. in Ancient History from Columbia University, gave a talk this morning to the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix titled "Christianity and Science (Ancient and Modern)." He argued that there was a creation/evolution debate in ancient Rome that had interesting similarities and differences to the current creation/evolution debate.

He began with Michael Behe and a short description of his irreducibly complexity argument regarding the bacterial flagellum--that since it fails to function if any piece is removed, and it's too complex to have originated by evolution in a single step, it must have been intelligently designed and created. He observed that 2,000 years ago, Galen made the same argument about the human hand and other aspects of human and animal anatomy. Galen wrote that "the mark of intelligent design is clear in those works in which the removal of any small component brings about the ruin of the whole."

Behe, Carrier said, hasn't done what you'd expect a scientist to do with respect to his theory. He hasn't looked at the genes that code the flagellum and tried to identify correlate genes in other microbes, for example.

In the ancient context, the debate was between those who argued for natural selection on random arrangements of features that were spontaneously generated, such as Anaxagoras and atomists like Democritus and Epicurus, vs. those who argued for some kind of intelligent design, like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Galen. Carrier set the stage by describing a particular debate about the function of the kidneys between Asclepiades and Galen. Asclepiades thought that the kidneys were either superfluous, with urine forming directly in the bladder, or was an accidental sieve. Galen set out to test this with a public experiment on an anesthetized pig, which had been given water prior to the operation. He opened up the pig, ligated (tied knots in) its ureters, and they started to balloon and the bladder stayed empty. Squeezing the ureter failed to reverse the flow back into the kidney. When one ureter was cut, urine came out. Thus, Galen demonstrated that the kidneys extract urine from the blood and it is transported to the bladder by the ureters. The failure of the flow to operate in reverse showed that the kidneys were not simple sieves, but operated by some power that only allowed it to function in one direction. This, argued Galen, was demonstration of something too complex to have arisen by chance, and refuted the specific claims of Asclepiades.

Galen's 14-volume De Usu Portium (On the Usefulness of Parts) made similar arguments for intelligent design about all aspects of human anatomy--the nerve transport system, biomechanics of arm, hand, and leg movement, the precision of the vocal system, etc. He also asked questions like "How does a fetus know how to build itself?" He allowed for the possibility of some kind of tiny instructions present in the "seed," on analogy with a mechanical puppet theater, programmed with an arrangement of cogs, wheels, and ropes.

Galen also investigated the question of why eyebrows and eyelashes grow to a fixed length and no longer, and found that they grow from a piece of cartilage, the tarsal plate. He concluded that while his evidence required an intelligent designer, they entailed that God is limited and uses only available materials. Galen, a pagan, contrasted his view with that of Christians. For Christians, a pile of ashes could become a horse, because God could will anything to be the case. But for Galen, the evidence supported a God subject to the laws of physics, who was invisibly present but physically interacting to make things happen, and that God realizes the best possible world within constraints.

Which intelligent design theory better explains facts like the growth of horses from fetuses, the fact that fetuses sometimes come out wrong, and why we have complex bodies at all, rather than just willing things into existence via magic? If God can do anything, why wouldn't he just make us as "simple homogenous soul bodies that realize functions by direct will" (or "expedient polymorphism," to use Carrier's term)?

The difference between Galen's views and those of the Christians was that Galen thought of theology as a scientific theory that had to be adjusted according to facts, that facts about God are inferred from observations, and those facts entail either divine malice or a limited divinity. What we know about evolution today places even more limits on viable theories of divinity than in Galen's time. (Carrier gave a brief overview of evolution and in particular a very brief account of the evolution of the bacterial flagellum.)

Galen's views allowed him to investigate, conduct experiments to test the theories of his opponents as well as his own, and make contributions to human knowledge. He supported the scientific values of curiosity as a moral good, empiricism as the primary mode of discovery, and progress as both possible and valuable, while Christianity denigrated or opposes these. The views of early church fathers were such that once Christianity gained power, it not only put a halt to scientific progress, it caused significant losses of knowledge that had already been accumulated. (Carrier later gave many examples.)

Tertullian, a contemporary of Galen, asked, "What concern have I with the conceits of natural science?" and "Better not to know what God has not revealed than to know it from man."

Thales, from the 6th century B.C., was revered by pagans as the first natural scientist--he discovered the natural causes of eclipses, explained the universe as a system of natural causes, performed observations and developed geometry, made inquiries into useful methods, and subordinated theology to science. There was a story that he was so focused on studying the stars that he fell into a well. Tertullian wrote of this event that Thales had a "vain purpose" and that his fall into the well prefigured his fall into hell.

Lactantius, an early Christian writer and tutor of Constantine the Great, denied that the earth was round (as part of a minority faction of Christians at the time), said that only knowledge of good and evil is worthwhile, and argued that "natural science is superfluous, useless, and inane." This despite overwhelming evidence already accumulated of a round earth (lighthouses sinking below the horizon as seen from ships sailing away, astronomical observations of lunar eclipses starting at different times in different locations, the fact that different stars are visible at different latitudes, and the shadow of the earth on the moon), which Lactantius simply was uninterested in.

Eusebius, the first historian of the Christian church, said that all are agreed that only scriptural knowledge is worthwhile, anything contrary to scripture is false, and pursuing scientific explanations is to risk damnation. Armchair speculation in support of scripture, however, is good.

Amid factors such as the failure of the pagan system, civil wars in the Roman empire, and a great economic depression, Christianity came to a position of dominance and scientific research came to a halt from about the 4th century to the 12th-14th centuries.

Carrier compared these Christian views to specific displays at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum in Kentucky, which compared "human reason" to "God's word." One contrasted Rene Descartes saying "I think therefore I am" to God saying "I am that I am." Galen wouldn't have put those into opposition with each other.

Another display labeled "The First Attack--Question God's Word" told the story of Satan tempting Adam to eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which highlights the "questioning" of Satan for criticism, and argues that putting reason first is Satanic.

Another diagram comparing "human reason" to "God's Word" showed evolution as a 14-billion-year winding snake-like shape, compared to the short and straight arrow of a 6,000-year creation.

Carrier noted, "It doesn't have to be that way. Galen's faith didn't condemn fundamental scientific values; Galen's creationism was science-based."

He then gave numerous examples of knowledge lost or ignored by Christianity--that Eratosthenes had calculated the size of the earth (a case described in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series), Ptolemy's projection cartography and system of latitude and longitude, developments in optics, hydrostatics, medicine, harmonics and acoustics, pneumatics, tidal theory, cometary theory, the precession of the stars, mathematics, robotics (cuckoo clocks, coin-operated vending machines for holy water and soap dispensing), machinery (water mills, water-powered saws and hammers, a bread-kneading machine), and so on. He described the Antikythera mechanism, an analog computer similar to WWI artillery computers, which was referred to in various ancient texts but had been dismissed by historians as impossible until this instance was actually found in 1900.

Another example was the Archimedes Codex, where Christians scraped the ink from the text and wrote hymns on it, and threw the rest away. The underlying writing has now been partially recovered thanks to modern technology, revealing that Archimedes performed remarkably advanced calculations about areas, volumes, and centers of gravity.

Carrier has a forthcoming book on the subject of this ancient science, called The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire.

A few interesting questions came up in the Q&A. The first question was about why early Christians didn't say anything about abortion. Carrier said it probably just wasn't on the radar, though abortion technology already existed in the form of mechanical devices for performing abortions and abortifacients. He also observed that the ancients knew the importance of cleanliness and antiseptics in medicine, while Jesus said that washing before you eat is a pointless ritual (Mark 7:1-20). Carrier asked, if Jesus was God, shouldn't he have known about the germ theory of disease?

Another question was whether Christianity was really solely responsible for 1,000 years of stangnation. Carrier pointed out that there was a difference between Byzantine and Western Christianity, with the former preserving works like those of Ptolemy without condemning them, but without building upon them. He said there are unerlying cultural, social, and historical factors that explain the differences, so it's not just the religion. He also pointed out that there was a lost sect of Christianity that was pro-science, but we have nothing of what they wrote, only references to them by Tertullian, criticizing them for supporting Thales, Galen, and so forth.

Another questioner asked how he accounts for cases of Christians who have contributed to science, such as Kepler, Boyle, Newton, and Bacon. Carrier said "Not all Christians have to be that way--there's no intrinsic reason Christianity has to be that way." But, he said, if you put fact before authority, scripture will likely end up not impressing you, being contradicted by evidence you find, and unless you completely retool Christianity, you'll likely abandon it. Opposition to scientific values is necessary to preserve Christianity as it is; putting weight on authority and scripture leads to the anti-science position as a method of preservation of the dogma.

It was a wonderfully interesting and wide-ranging talk. He covered a lot more specifics than I've described here. If you find that Carrier is giving a talk in your area, I highly recommend that you go hear him speak.

You can find more information about Richard Carrier at his web site.

Philosophy Bites podcast

2009-11-08T13:10:00.004-07:00

I've been listening to past episodes of the Philosophy Bites podcast, and I highly recommend it--they are short (about 15 minute) discussions with prominent philosophers about specific philosophical topics and questions. I've found them to be consistently of high quality and interesting, even in the one case where I think the philosophical argument was complete nonsense (Robert Rowland Smith on Derrida on forgiveness). Even there, the interviewers asked the right questions.

I particularly have enjoyed listening to topics that are outside the areas of philosophy I've studied, like Alain de Botton on the aesthetics of architecture. Other particularly good ones have been Hugh Mellor on time, David Papineau on physicalism, A.C. Grayling on Descartes' Meditations, and Peter Millican on the significance of Hume. I've still got a bunch more past episodes to listen to; I'm going to be somewhat disappointed when I catch up.

Robert B. Laughlin on "The Crime of Reason"

2009-11-07T10:24:00.004-07:00

The 2009 Hogan and Hartson Jurimetrics Lecture in honor of Lee Loevinger was given on the afternoon of November 5 at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law by Robert B. Laughlin. Laughlin, the Ann T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Physics at Stanford University and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics (along with Horst L. Stormer and Daniel C. Tsui), spoke about his recent book, The Crime of Reason.

He began with a one-sentence summary of his talk: "A consequence of entering the information age is probably that we're going to lose a human right that we all thought we had but never did ..." The sentence went on but I couldn't keep up with him in my notes to get it verbatim, and I am not sure I could identify precisely what his thesis was after hearing the entire talk and Q&A session. The main gist, though, was that he thinks that a consequence of allowing manufacturing to go away and being a society based on information is that "Knowledge is dear, therefore there has to be less of it--we must prevent others from knowing what we know, or you can't make a living from it." And, he said, "People who learn on their own are terrorists and thieves," which I think was intentional hyperbole. I think his talk was loaded with overgeneralizations, some of which he retracted or qualified during the Q&A.

It certainly doesn't follow from knowledge being valuable that there must be less of it. Unlike currency, knowledge isn't a fungible commodity, so different bits of knowledge have different value to different people. There are also different kinds of knowledge--know-how vs. knowledge that, and making the latter freely available doesn't necessarily degrade the value of the former, which is why it's possible to have a business model that gives away software for free but makes money from consulting services. Further, the more knowledge there is, the more valuable it is to know where to find the particular bits of knowledge that are useful for a given purpose, and the less it is possible for a single person to be an expert across many domains. An increasing amount of knowledge means there's increasing value in various kinds of specializations, and more opportunities for individuals to develop forms of expertise in niches that aren't already full of experts.

Laughlin said that he is talking about "the human rights issue of the 21st century," that "learnign some things on your own is stealing from people. What we think of as our rights are in conflict with the law, just as slavery is in conflict with human rights." He said that Jefferson was conflicted on this very issue, sayng on the one hand that "knowledge is like fire--divinely designed to be copyable like a lit taper--I can light yours with mine, which in no way diminishes my own." This is the non-rival quality of information, that one person copying information from another doesn't deprive the other of their use of it, though that certainly may have an impact on the commercial market for the first person to sell their information.

"On the other hand," said Laughlin, "economics involves gambling. [Jefferson] favored legalized gambling. Making a living involves bluff and not sharing knowledge." He said that our intellectual property laws derive from English laws that people on the continent "thought ... were outrageous--charging people to know things."

He put up a photo of a fortune from a fortune cookie, that said "The only good is knowledge, and the only evil ignorance." He said this is what you might tell kids in school to get them to study, but there's something not right about it. He then put up a drawing of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster (Laughlin drew most of the slides himself). He said, we're all familiar with the Frankenstein myth. "The problem with open knowledge is that some of it is dangerous. In the U.S. some of it is off-limits, you can't use it in business or even talk about it. It's not what you do with it that's exclusive, but that you have it at all."

His example was atomic bomb secrets and the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which makes it a federal felony to reveal "nuclear data" to the public, which has been defined very broadly in the courts. It includes numbers and principles of physics.

Laughlin returned to his fortune cookie example, and said there's another problem. He put up a drawing of a poker game. "If I peeked at one guy's cards and told everyone else, the poker game would stop. It involves bluffing, and open access to knowledge stops the game." He suggested that this is what happened last year with the world financial sector--that the "poker game in Wall Street stopped, everyone got afraid to bet, and the government handled it by giving out more chips and saying keep playing, which succeeded." I agree that this was a case where knowledge--specifically knowledge of the growing amounts of "toxic waste" in major world banks--caused things to freeze up, it wasn't the knowledge that was the ultimate cause, it was the fact that banks engaged in incredibly risky behavior that they shouldn't have. More knowledge earlier--and better oversight and regulation--could have prevented the problem.

Laughlin said "Economics is about bluff and secrecy, and open knowledge breaks it." I don't think I agree--what makes markets function is that price serves as a public signal about knowledge. There's always going to be local knowledge that isn't shared, not necessarily because of bluff and secrecy, but simply due to the limits of human capacities and the dynamics of social transactions. While trading on private knowledge can result in huge profits, trading the private knowledge itself can be classified as insider trading and is illegal. (Though perhaps it shouldn't be, since insider trading has the potential for making price signals more accurate more quickly to the public.)

Laughlin showed a painting of the death of Socrates (by Jacques-Louis David, not Laughlin this time), and said that in high school, you study Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes, and learn that knowledge is good. But, "as you get older, you learn there's a class system in knowledge." Plato etc. is classified as good, but working class technical knowledge, like how to build a motor, is not, he claimed. He went on to say, "If you think about it, that's exactly backwards." I'm not sure anyone is ever taught that technical knowledge is not valuable, especially these days, where computer skills seem to be nearly ubiquitous--and I disagree with both extremes. From my personal experience, I think some of my abstract thinking skills that I learned from studying philosophy have been among the most valuable skills I've used in both industry and academia, relevant to both theoretical and practical applications.

Laughlin said that "engines are complicated, and those who would teach you about it don't want to be clear about it. It's sequestered by those who own it, because it's valuable. The stuff we give away in schools isn't valuable, that's why we give it away." In the Q&A, a questioner observed that he can easily obtain all sorts of detailed information about how engines work, and that what makes it difficult to understand is the quantity and detail. Laughlin responded that sometimes the best way to hide things is to put them in plain sight (the Poe "purloined letter" point), as needles in a haystack. But I think that's a rather pat answer to something that is contradictory to his claim--the information really is freely available and easy to find, but the limiting factor is that it takes time to learn the relevant parts to have a full understanding. The limit isn't the availability of the knowledge or that some of it is somehow hidden. I'd also challenge his claim that the knowledge provided in schools is "given away." It's still being paid for, even if it's free to the student, and much of what's being paid for is the know-how of the educator, not just the knowledge-that of the specific facts, as well as special kinds of knowledge-that--the broader frameworks into which individual facts fit.

Laughlin went on to say, "You're going to have to pay to know the valuable information. Technical knowledge will disappear and become unavailable. The stuff you need to make a living is going away." He gave as examples defense-related technologies, computers, and genetics. He said that "people in the university sector are facing more and more intense moral criticism" for sharing information. "How life works--would we want that information to get out? We might want to burn those books. The 20th century was the age of physics, [some of which was] so dangerous we burned the books. It's not in the public domain. The 21st century is the age of biology. We're in the end game of the same thing. In genetics--e.g., how disease organisms work. The genetic structure of Ebola or polio." Here, Laughlin seems to be just wrong. The gene sequences of Ebola and polio have apparently been published (Sanchez, A., et al. (1993) "Sequence analysis of the Ebola virus genome: organization, genetic elements and comparison with the genome of Marburg virus," Virus Research 29, 215-240 and Stanway, G., et al. (1983) "The nucleotide sequence of poliovirus type 3 leon 12 a1b: comparison with poliovirus type 1," Nucleic Acids Res. 11(16), 5629-5643). (I don't claim to be knowledgeable about viruses, in the former case I am relying on the statement that "Sanchez et al (1993) has published the sequence of the complete genome of Ebola virus" from John Crowley and Ted Crusberg, "Ebola and Marburg Virus: Genomic Structure, Comparative and Molecular Biology."; in the latter case it may not be publication of the complete genome but is at least part.)

Laughlin talked about the famous issue of The Progressive magazine which featured an article by Howard Moreland titled "How H-Bombs Work." He showed the cover of the magazine, which read, "The H-Bomb Secret--How we got it--why we're telling it." Laughlin said that the DoJ enjoined the journal from publishing the article and took the issue into secret hearings. The argument was that it was a threat to national security and a violation of the Atomic Energy Act. The judge said that the rule against prior restraint doesn't apply because this is so dangerous that "no jurist in their right mind would put free speech above safety." Laughlin said, "Most people think the Bill of Rights protects you, but this case shows that it doesn't." After the judge forbid publication, it was leaked to a couple of "newspapers on the west coast," after which the DoJ dropped the case and the article was published. According to Laughlin, this was strategy, that he suspects they didn't prosecute the case because the outcome would have been to find the AEA unconstitutional. By dropping the case it kept the AEA as a potential weapon in future cases. He said there have only been two cases of the criminal provisions of the AEA prosecuted in the last 50 years, but it is "inconceivable that it was only violated twice. The country handles its unconstitutionality by not prosecuting." The U.S., he said, is like a weird hybrid of Athens and Sparta, favoring both being open and being war-like and secretive. These two positions have never been reconciled, so we live in an unstable situation that favors both.

He also discussed the case of Wen Ho Lee, a scientist from Taiwan who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who took home items that were classified as "PARD" (protect as restricted data), even though everyone is trained repeatedly that you "Don't take PARD home." When he was caught, Laughlin said, he said "I didn't know it was wrong" and "I thought they were going to fire me, so I took something home to sell." The latter sounds like an admission of guilt. He was put into solitary confinement for a year (actually 9 months) and then the case of 50 counts of AEA violations was dropped. Laughlin characterized this as "extralegal punishment," and said "we abolish due process with respect to nuclear data." (Wen Ho Lee won a $1.5 million settlement from the U.S. government in 2006 before the Supreme Court could hear his case. Somehow, this doesn't seem to me to be a very effective deterrent.)

Laughlin said that we see a tradeoff between risk and benefit, not an absolute danger. The risk of buildings being blown up is low enough to allow diesel fuel and fertilizer to be legal. Bombs from ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel are very easy to make, and our protection isn't hiding technical knowledge, but that people just don't do it. But nuclear weapons are so much more dangerous that the technical details are counted as absolutely dangerous, no amount of benefit could possibly be enough. He said that he's writing a book about energy and "the possible nuclear renaissance unfolding" (as a result of need for non-carbon-emitting energy sources). He says the U.S. and Germany are both struggling with this legal morass around nuclear information. (Is the unavailability of nuclear knowledge really the main or even a significant issue about nuclear plant construction in the United States? General Electric (GE Energy) builds nuclear plants in other countries.)

Laughlin said that long pointy knives could be dangerous, and there's a movement in England to ban them. Everybody deals with technical issue of knowledge and where to draw lines. (Is it really feasible to ban knives, and does such a ban constitute a ban on knowledge? How hard is it to make a knife?)

At this point he moved on to biology, and showed a photograph of a fruit fly with legs for antennae. He said, "so maybe antennae are related to legs, and a switch in development determines which you get. The control machinery is way too complicated to understand right now." (Really?) "What if this was done with a dog, with legs instead of ears. Would the person who did that go to Stockholm? No, they'd probably lose their lab and be vilified. In the life sciences there are boundaries like we see in nuclear--things we shouldn't know." (I doubt that there is a switch that turns dog ears into legs, and this doesn't strike me as plausibly being described as a boundary on knowledge, but rather an ethical boundary on action.) He said, "There are so many things researchers would like to try, but can't, because funders are afraid." Again, I suspect that most of these cases are ethical boundaries about actions rather than knowledge, though of course there are cases where unethical actions might be required to gain certain sorts of knowledge.

He turned to stem cells. He said that the federal government effectively put a 10-year moratorium on stem cell research for ethical reasons. Again, these were putatively ethical reasons regarding treatment of embryos, but the ban was on federally funded research rather than any research at all. It certainly stifled research, but didn't eliminate it.

Next he discussed the "Millennium Digital Copyright Act" (sic). He said that "people who know computers laugh at the absurdity" of claiming that computer programs aren't formulas and are patentable. He said that if he writes a program that "has functionality or purpose similar to someone else's my writing it is a violation of the law." Perhaps in a very narrow case where there's patent protection, yes, but certainly not in general. If he was arguing that computer software patents are a bad idea, I'd agree. He said "Imagine if I reverse-engineered the latest Windows and then published the source code. It would be a violation of law." Yes, in that particular example, but there are lots of cases of legitimate reverse engineering, especially in the information security field. The people who come up with the signatures for anti-virus and intrusion detection and prevention do this routinely, and in some cases have actually released their own patches to Microsoft vulnerabilities because Microsoft was taking too long to do it themselves.

He said of Microsoft Word and PDF formats that they "are constantly morphing" because "if you can understand it you can steal it." But there are legal open source and competing proprietary software solutions that understand both of the formats in question--Open Office, Apple's Pages and Preview, Foxit Reader, etc. Laughlin said, "Intentional bypassing of encryption is a violation of the DMCA." Only if that encryption is circumvention of "a technological measure that effectively controls access to" copyrighted material and the circumvention is not done for the purposes of security research, which has a big exception carved out in the law. Arguably, breakable encryption doesn't "effectively control access," though the law has certainly been used to prosecute people who broke really poor excuses for encryption.

Laughlin put up a slide of the iconic smiley face, and said it has been patented by Unisys. "If you use it a lot, you'll be sued by Unisys." I'm not sure how you could patent an image, and while there are smiley face trademarks that have been used as a revenue source, it's by a company called SmileyWorld, not Unisys.

He returned to biology again, to talk briefly about gene patenting, which he says "galls biologists" but has been upheld by the courts. (Though perhaps not for many years longer, depending on how the Myriad Genetics case turns out.) Natural laws and discoveries aren't supposed to be patentable, so it's an implication of these court decisions that genes "aren't natural laws, but something else." The argument is that isolating them makes them into something different than what they are when they're part of an organism, which somehow constitutes an invention. I think that's a bad argument that could only justify patenting the isolation process, not the sequence.

Laughlin showed a slide of two photos, the cloned dog Snuppy and its mother on the left, and a Microsoft Word Professional box on the right. He said that Snuppy was cloned when he was in Korea, and that most Americans are "unhappy about puppy clones" because they fear the possibility of human clones. I thought he was going to say that he had purchased the Microsoft Word Professional box pictured in Korea at the same time, and that it was counterfeit, copied software (which was prevalent in Korea in past decades, if not still), but he had an entirely different point to make. He said, about the software, "The thing that's illegal is not cloning it. If I give you an altered version, I've tampered with something I'm not supposed to. There's a dichotomy between digital knowledge in living things and what you make, and they're different [in how we treat them?]. But they're manifestly not different. Our legal system['s rules] about protecting these things are therefore confused and mixed up." I think his argument and distinction was rather confused, and he didn't go on to use it in anything he said subsequently. It seems to me that the rules are pretty much on a par between the two cases--copying Microsoft Word Professional and giving it to other people would itself be copyright infringement; transforming it might or might not be a crime depending on what you did. If you turned it into a piece of malware and distributed that, it could be a crime. But if you sufficiently transformed it into something useful that was no longer recognizable as Microsoft Word Professional, that might well be fair use of the copyrighted software. In any case in between, I suspect the only legally actionable offense would be copyright infringement, in which case the wrongdoing is the copying, not the tampering.

He put up a slide of Lady Justice dressed in a clown suit, and said that "When you talk to young people about legal constraints on what they can do, they get angry, like you're getting angry at this image of Lady Law in a clown suit. She's not a law but an image, a logos. ... [It's the] root of our way of relating to each other. When you say logos is a clown, you've besmirched something very fundamental about who you want to be. ... Legal constraints on knowledge is part of the price we've paid for not making things anymore." (Not sure what to say about this.)

He returned to his earlier allusion to slavery. He said that was "a conflict between Judeo-Christian ethics and what you had to do to make a living. It got shakier and shakier until violence erupted. War was the only solution. I don't think that will happen in this case. [The] bigger picture is the same kind of tension. ... Once you make Descartes a joke, then you ask, why stay?" He put up a slide of a drawing of an astronaut on the moon, with the earth in the distance. "Why not go to the moon? What would drive a person off this planet? You'd have to be a lunatic to leave." (I thought he was going to make a moon-luna joke, but he didn't, unless that was it.) "Maybe intellectual freedom might be that thing. It's happened before, when people came to America." He went on to say that some brought their own religious baggage with them to America. Finally, he said that when he presents that moon example to graduate students, he always has many who say "Send me, I want to go."

And that's how his talk ended. I was rather disappointed--it seemed rather disjointed and rambling, and made lots of tendentious claims--it wasn't at all what I expected from a Nobel prizewinner.

The first question in the Q&A was one very much like I would have asked, about how he explains the free and open source software movement. Laughlin's answer was that he was personally a Linux user and has been since 1997, but that students starting software companies are "paranoid about having stuff stolen," and "free things, even in software, are potentially pernicious," and that he pays a price for using open source in that it takes more work to maintain it and he's constantly having to upgrade to deal with things like format changes in PDF and Word. There is certainly such a tradeoff for some open source software, but some of it is just as easy to maintain as commercial software, and there are distributions of Linux that are coming closer to the ease of use of Windows. And of course Mac OS X, based on an open source, FreeBSD-derived operating system, is probably easier for most people to use than Windows.

I think there was a lot of potentially interesting and provocative material in his talk, but it just wasn't formulated into a coherent and persuasive argument. If anyone has read his book, is it more tightly argued?

Roger Pielke Jr. on climate change adaptation

2009-11-07T09:17:00.002-07:00

A few hours after hearing Roger Pielke Jr. speak on climate change mitigation to CSPO, I heard him speak about climate change adaptation to a joint meeting of my seminar on human dimensions of climate change and another seminar with Dan Sarewitz, CSPO's director.

Like his previous talk, Pielke began this one with a slide on his positions, which was something like this:

Strong advocate of mitigation and adaptation.
He accepts the science of the IPCC.
There are other reasons behind impacts of climate--effects of inexorable development and growth.
The importance and challenge of climate change does not justify misrepresenting the science of adaptation--yet this happens on a regular basis (I’ll give a few examples).
We might choose to mitigate, but we will adapt.

He said (as he did in the earlier talk) that he has no disagreements with the science of IPCC working group I, lots of agreements with the economics and mitigation arguments of working group III (covered in the earlier talk), and some disagreements with the impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability arguments of working group II, which will be covered in this talk.

He then gave a slide of the outline of this talk:

The concept of adaptation is contested.
How we think about adaptation shapes how we think about research and policy.
Under the FCCC (Kyoto Protocol), adaptation is defined narrowly--as adaptation to climate change caused by the emissions of greenhouse gases.
The narrow definition creates a bias against adaptation.
Regardless, the primary factors underlying climate impacts on society are the resut of development and growing wealth and vulnerability.

There are different definitions of "climate change" used between the IPCC and the UN FCCC. The IPCC defines it as "...change arising from any source," while the FCCC defines it as "...a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods."

On the former definition, if the sun causes the earth to warm, which causes climate change effects, that's a climate change. On the latter, it's not. The latter definition restricts climate change to impacts caused by human-caused changes to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Adaptation under the logic of the FCCC is that any increase of atmospheric carbon above 450 ppm (a 2 degree Centigrade temperature increase) is "dangerous" climate change that requires human adaptation. If we happen to stabilize at 449 ppm, then no adaptation at all is required. Under this definition, the more adaptation we need, the more we have failed in climate policy.

Under the IPCC's cost-benefit analysis, adaptation is considered a cost with no benefits.

Al Gore's Earth in the Balance calls adaptation a "laziness."

Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers, says that adaptation is "genocide."

IPCC's working group I uses the IPCC definition of climate change; working group III uses the FCCC definition; working group II shifts back and forth between the two.

But climate impacts are caused by a combination of effects: vulnerability (with sociological and ecological components) and by climate change and variability (which includes natural internal and natural external components, human greenhouse gas changes, and non-human greenhouse gas changes). In order to deal with those impacts, you can back up the causal chain to each of those causes, from the IPCC perspective. But from the FCCC perspective, it's as though none of those other factors are available except for the human contribution to greenhouse gases.

Why did the FCCC use this definition? Because the UN already has other frameworks for disaster preparedness, water management, desertification prevention, and biodiversity prevention, and they didn't want any overlap of responsibility.

Choice of definition of climate change can thus create a bias against adaptation, and puts science in impossible situations (requiring conclusive attribution of cause on human greenhouse gases). In reality, adaptation has broad benefits, such as contributing to sustainable development.

The Global Environment Facility of the UN, which releases funds for adaptation, will only pay out in proportion to effects caused by human greenhouse gases. Because of this requirement for attribution of cause, very little has been paid out. Oxfam said that the UNFCCC's global spending from the GEF is equal to what the UK spends annually on flood defense. If a developing nation has a disaster attributable to climate change and asks for funds, it is required to provide evidence for the percentage of damage attributable to climate change caused by human-produced greenhouse gases. One effect of this is that governmental spokespersons are likely to make such attributions in the media.

Swiss Re did a report on adaptation in the broad sense, without regard to attribution of cause, and added up deaths from natural disasters to get a total of $50T and 850,000 lives over 50 years; CNN reported this as meaning that human greenhouse gases caused all of that damage and death.

Another problem with the narrow definition is illustrated by malaria scenarios. Jeffrey Sachs, 2003, projects that without malaria, African GDP might be 3%/year higher. If you plug that into the Kaya Identity, emissions would be about 17 GtC vs. less than 1 today, by 2050. Without malaria mitigation, emissions will not even hit 6 GtC by 2050. The IPCC's projections presuppose that malaria will be unmitigated, which seems to be NOT how we should be thinking about climate policy.

Pielke argued that the broader notion of climate change and broader notion of adaptation are more useful. Adaptation is not in opposition to mitigation, and it has benefits as well as costs. In reality, we don't care just about greenhouse gases, we care about the impacts regardless of cause. By drawing a circle around human contributions to greenhouse gases and setting goals that focus only on that, we've engaged in "goal substitution," where addressing a single cause has become our goal instead of addressing the effects.

He then put up a slide of various book and magazine covers, as well as the poster for "An Inconvenient Truth," and said that "hazards are a centerpiece of the climate debate." One of the magazine covers, an issue of Newsweek from January 1996 with a cover story labeled "The Hot Zone: Blizzards, Floods, and Hurricanes, Blame Global Warming," was what got Pielke interested in doing research. The period 1991-1994, before that story, was a very quiet period for hurricanes hitting the U.S., but also the most expensive in terms of damage. Although he didn't study blizzards, he did study floods and hurricanes, and said he found that "the biggest signal in disasters wasn't climate."

Pielke then wanted to explain how his research has been used by the IPCC and the Bush and Obama administrations, looking at two reports: Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability from the IPCC (the report of working group II), and the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) Report, Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate, Regions of Focus: North America, Hawaii, Caribbean, and U.S. Pacific Islands.

He gave this quote from the IPCC report:

1.3.8.5 Summary of disasters and hazards
Global losses reveal rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s. One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the value of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend.

He pointed out that the reference to "one study" is interesting, because he has published dozens of studies in this area, none of which show such a trend. The study in question mentioned here is "Muir Wood, et al., 2006," which is by R. Muir Wood, S. Miller, and A. Boissonade, titled "The search for trends ..." which is one of 24 papers commissioned as background by Peter Hoppe and Pielke for a workshop they conducted with experts from multiple countries, Munich Re, the Tyndall Centre, NSF, etc. The plan for that workshop was to be a "dissensus consensus," to identify areas of disagreement for further study, but they ended up reaching consensus on 20 statements.

The motivation for the workshop was a graph from Munich Re that showed that the cost of disasters, adjusted for inflation, has been increasing. The workshop wanted to find out what was causing this to happen and whether any percentage of it could be attributed to climate change.

The types of disasters in question were:

Earthquake, tsunami, and volcano, which couldn't be attributed to climate change.
Windstorms and floods, which could possibly be attributed to climate change and have been responsible for most of the increasing damage.
Disasters of temperature extremes such as heatwaves, drought, and wildfires, which could also be attributed to climate change, but which aren't responsible for most of the increasing damage.

Three of the consensus statements agreed to by all participants, including Muir Woods, were:

Analyses of long-term records of disaster losses indicate that societal change and economic development are the principal factors responsible for the documented increasing losses to date.
Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions.
In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.

The first statement is accurately reflected in the IPCC statement, but the second is exactly the opposite of what it says.

The Muir Woods paper itself says that if you look at the period 1970-2005, you have an upward trend that can't be attributed to just societal factors. But 2005 was the year of Hurricane Katrina, and 1970-1974 was a period when the Atlantic was very quiet. If you look at 1950-2005, there is no trend, Pielke said. The IPCC not only took a single background paper from the workshop, they actually took a subset of the paper's data to draw their conclusion.

Pielke argued that the damage trends can't be due to storm intensity alone, based on a graph of major category 3, 4, and 5 hurricanes vs. year. The 177 U.S. coastal counties have seen huge population growth--for example, the population of Harris County, Texas in 2005 was equal to the entire U.S. coastal population from Florida to South Carolina in 1955.

He showed comparison photos of Miami Beach in 1926 vs. 2006, and then a graph of the estimated amount of U.S. damage per year if every hurricane season had occurred with 2005 population levels. That graph shows a huge spike in 1926, when a big hurricane hit Miami; it would have been 1.5 to 2 times the damage of Katrina. 2004 and 2005 were also years of very high damage, though not as high as 1926.

The trend, Pielke said, is no statistical change in damage since 1900, and is consistent with the physical characteristics of hurricanes at landfall over that same time period. Other signals show up in the data, such as El Nino. When the Pacific is cold you get more hurricanes, when it's warm you get fewer. 1927-1969 were very active for hurricanes, the 1970's and 80's were not very active. He said there have been two independent replications of the same results with different data sets and methodologies, and that insurance and reinsurance companies use this for their pricing models.

His summary slide said this:

Raw damages are increasing.
Normalized damages show no trend, consistent with the lack of trend in landfall
Increases in inflation, wealth, and development along the coastline account for increasing damages.
While coastal development in hurricane-prone regions is increasing, in aggregate it appears to be proportional to the rest of the United States, with large local variations.

It occurred to me that one factor that might counteract a genuine increase in storm intensity with respect to damage would be better construction, but I didn't raise the issue since I figured it would have been unlikely for such a factor to exactly offset storm intensity increases so that there was no trend. Afterward, though, I found this paper by Judy Curry (PDF) which argues that improvements in building codes have just such an effect, and that the pre-1930 data Pielke uses was a time of inflated property values before the Great Depression, and if you take it out you get an upward trend again.

In response to a student question about whether probabilities of landfall have changed, Pielke said that the overall odds of hurricane landfall are unchanged within the data set (though there are subsets where it is different) and that studies of the west coast of Mexico, South Korea, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Madagascar show no regions where hurricane landfalls have increased.

He reported three other studies which have shown no upward trend in normalized weather losses--a study of his own done with the head of the Cuba Weather Service, for 1900-1998 (Pielke et al., 2003), one for Australia for 1965-2005 (Crompton & McAneney, 2007), and one for India for a time period I didn't catch (Raghavan & Sen Sarma, 2003). He said there are about 15 other studies of the same sort, and that Lawrence Bauer of the Free University of Amsterdam has a review paper of all of these studies that is under review for publication.

When you look at U.S. flood losses, after adjusting for societal factors, there has been a slight (not statistically significant) downward trend in losses.

Pielke then said that he took a bunch of weather loss data sets, standardized them, took ten-year averages and overall averages, and then put them all on top of each other. These data sets included Munich Re's global losses for 1979-xx (I didn't catch the end year), U.S. flood losses, and Australian weather losses. While Munich Re's global losses correlate strongly with U.S. hurricane losses (0.80, 64% of the variance in global losses explained by U.S. losses), Pielke said, "there's no secular trend over the time period for which we have these data sets."

Regarding hurricanes, however, Pielke said his data is consistent with hurricanes becoming more intense. He referred to Kerry Emanuel's 4 August 2005 paper in Nature, titled "Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years," which was featured in "An Inconvenient Truth." He showed a graph from the paper which shows windspeed cubed, or power dissipation index (PDI), has increased. Pielke noted that this is not a measure of "destructiveness," and the paper says nothing about destruction caused by hurricanes. He broke the Atlantic basin into five equal compartments with an equal number of observations of hurricane intensity (windspeed measurement) from the 1880s to the present, for all named storms, 39 knots and higher. He found that the strongest upward trends are farthest out to sea, and no trends in the locations where damage actually occurs.

He said he did the same with Emanuel's graph and got the same result, that all of the trends are out to sea. So, he argued, Emanuel's results could be due to real changes in storm intensity as a result of ocean temperature changes, or they could be due to increased storm counts due to more and better data collection out at sea. He submitted a letter to Geophysical Research Letters reporting his result, which was rejected with negative reviews that said "everybody already knows this." But, Pielke said, Emanuel didn't know it until he pointed it out to him.

Next, Pielke talked about the U.S. CCSP Report, which spanned the Bush and Obama administrations. This report said the following about U.S. extreme weather events:

Over the long-term U.S. hurricane landfalls have been declining.
Nationwide there have been no long-term increases in drought.
Despite increases in some measures of precipitation, there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows (>90th percentile).
There have been no observed changes in the occurrence of tornadoes or thunderstorms.
There have been no long-term increases in strong East Coast winter storms, called Nor’easters.
There are no long-term ...

With these conclusions, he said, you'd expect no claims of increasing losses from damage. But the report says:

Extremes are already having significant impacts on North America. ... both the climate and the socioeconomic vulnerability to weather and climate extremes are changing (Brooks and Doswell, 2001; Pielke et al., 2008; Downton et al., 2005).

Two of the three papers cited have Pielke as author or co-author, and the third applies his sort of methodology to tornadoes. The Harold E. Brooks and Charles A. Doswell III 2001 paper says: "We find nothing to suggest that damage from individual tornadoes has increased through time, except as a result of the increasing cost of goods and accumulation of wealth in the United States." The Pielke et al. 2008 paper finds no trends in absolute data or under a logarithmic transformation. The Downton, Miller, and Pielke 2005 paper talks about the National Weather Service flood loss database, says absolutely nothing about climate change, and shows a drop in losses. So of the three cited papers for the claim, two say the opposite of the claim and one is silent. Pielke says there is no published study that supports the claim. When he made a stink about this, he said he ended up being called a climate change denier. The IPCC and CCSP are supposed to be places we go to get reliable information, he said, and "I'm much more willing to listen to others who say their work was misrepresented since I know mine was."

In 2000, he co-authored an article with Dan Sarewitz on "Breaking the Global Warming Gridlock" in The Atlantic Monthly that argued for getting people engaged with adaptation rather than focusing exclusively on mitigation. After that came out, he says he was told privately by a representative of an environmental group that "we agree with what you say, but it's not helpful now because we're trying to win a [political] battle on mitigation."

He pointed out two recent cases of people in government being silenced for speaking out contrary to policy--David Nutt, the UK drug policy advisor, who was fired for saying that ecstasy use was of comparable risk to riding horses (and ecstasy is safer to give to a stranger than peanuts), and Clive Spash, an economist for Australia's CSIRO, who submitted a paper to a journal critical of cap and trade, which was accepted for publication but withdrawn when his supervisor wrote to the journal and asked for it to be retracted.

He asked, "If the public loses faith in the connection between authoritative scientific statements and policy, then what do we rely upon to make decisions?"

He suggested that we need to improve processes where there is potential for intellectual conflicts-of-interest, such as where people with a stake in an assessment highlight their own research over other research they don't favor. He thinks this doesn't seem to be a problem with IPCC working group I, but has been a problem with both working groups II and III and with the CCSP. In both of the cases he referred to regarding his own work, above, he said a single person was responsible (not the same person in both cases, but one in each).

I left about ten minutes before the end of the class and so missed any further wrapup, as I had to get to the opposite side of campus for another talk, by Robert B. Laughlin, one of the winners of the 1998 Nobel prize in physics.

Roger Pielke Jr. on climate change mitigation

2009-11-06T18:43:00.009-07:00

Yesterday I heard Roger Pielke Jr. speak twice at Arizona State University, first in a talk to the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) on climate change mitigation, and second in a class lecture on climate change adaptation. This post is about the former.

His talk was entitled "The Simple Math of Emissions Reduction," and began with a quote from Steve Raymer of Oxford University:

Wicked Problems
have Clumsy Solutions
requiring Uncomfortable Knowledge

which he then followed up with a slide on "Where I stand," which included the following bullet points (nearly, but probably not exactly verbatim):

Strong advocate for mitigation and adaptation policies
Continuing increase in atmospheric CO2 could pose large risks, as described by IPCC
Stabilizing concentrations at low levels can’t succeed if we underestimate the challenge (and we have)
Mitigation action will not result from elimination of all scientific uncertainty
Poisonous politics of the climate debate serves to limit a broader discussion of options
Ultimately technological innovation will precede political action, not vice versa

Regarding the IPCC, he says he has no debate with working group I on the science, some disagreements with working group II on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, and lots of debate with working group III on economics and mitigation, which this talk covers.

His slide for the outline of his talk looked like this:

Understanding the mitigation challenge
Where do emissions come from?
Decarbonization
The UK as a cautionary tale for U.S. policymakers
The U.S. situation and Waxman-Markey/Boxer-Kerry
How things might be different

Understanding the mitigation challenge

Although climate change involves other greenhouse gases besides CO2, he focused on CO2 and in this part of the talk gave a summary of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere as a stock and flow problem, using a bathtub analogy. The inflow of CO2 into the atmosphere is like water pouring out of the faucet, there's outflow going out the drain, and the water in the tub is the accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere. The inflow is about 9 GtC (gigatons of carbon) per year and growing, and expected to hit 12 GtC per year by 2030. The current stock is a concentration of about 390 parts per million (ppm), increasing by 2-3 ppm/year. And the outflow is a natural removal of about 4 GtC/year. To stop the stock increase, the amount going in has to equal the amount going out. If we reach an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050, that is expected to limit the stock to 450 ppm.

Emissions have been growing faster than expected by the IPCC in 2000, with a 3.3% average increase per year between 2000 and 2007. While the economic slump has reduced emissions in 2009, it's expected that recovery and continued growth in emissions will occur.

Where do emissions come from?

Pielke used the following four lines to identify policy-relevant variables:

People
engage in economic activity that
uses energy
from carbon-emitting generation

The associated variables:

Population (P)
GDP per capita (GDP/P)
Energy intensity of the economy (Total Energy (TE)/GDP)
Carbon intensity of energy (C/TE)

The total carbon emissions = P * GDP/P * TE/GDP * C/TE.

This formula is known as the "Kaya Identity."

The policy tools available to reduce emissions by affecting these variables are: (1) population management to end up with fewer people, (2) limit the generation of wealth to have a smaller economy, (3) do the same or more with less energy by increasing efficiency, and (4) switch energy sources to generate energy with less emissions.

And that's it. Cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, etc. are designed to influence these variables.

Pielke then combined the first two variables (P * GDP/P) to get GDP, and the second two (TE/GDP * C/TE) he identified as Technology.

He argued that reducing GDP or GDP growth is not a policy option, so Technology is the only real policy option. Regarding the former point, he put up a graph very much like the Gapminder.org graph of world income, and observed that the Millennium Development Goals are all about pushing the people below $10/day--80% of the world's population--on that graph to the right. Even if all of the OECD nations were removed from the graph, there would still be a push to increase the GDP for the remainder and there would still be growing emissions.

He quoted Gwyn Prins regarding the G8 Summit to point out how policy makers are conflicted--they had a morning session on how to reduce gas prices for economic benefit, and an afternoon session on how to increase gas prices for climate change mitigation.

With this kind of a conflict, Pielke said, policy makers will choose GDP growth over climate change.

So that leaves Technology as an option, and he turned to the topic of decarbonization.

Decarbonization

Pielke put up a graph of CO2 emissions per $1,000 of GDP over time globally, which showed that there has been a steady improvement of efficiency. In 2006, emissions were 29.12 GtC, divided by $47.267 trillion of GDP, gives 0.62 tons of CO2 per $1,000 GDP. In 1980, that was above 0.90 tons of CO2 per $1,000 GDP.

Overall emissions track GDP, and the global economy has become more and more carbon intensive.

He looked at carbon dioxide per GDP (using purchasing power parity (PPP) for comparison between countries) for four different countries, Japan, Germany, U.S., and China (that's ordered from most to least efficient). Japan hasn't changed much over time, but is very carbon efficient (below 0.50 tons of CO2 per $1,000 GDP). Germany and the U.S. are about the same slightly above 0.50 tons of CO2 per $1,000 GDP, and both have improved similarly over time. China has gotten worse from 2002-2006 and is at about 0.75 tons of CO2 per $1,000 GDP.

He put up a slide of the EU-15 countries decarbonization rates pre- and post-Kyoto Protocol, and though there was a gap between them, the slopes appeared to be comparable. For the first ten years of Kyoto, then, he said, there's no evidence of any improvement in the background rate of decarbonization. The pre-Kyoto rate was from above 0.55 tons of CO2 per $1,000 GDP to about 0.50 tons of CO2 per $1,000 GDP. The post-Kyoto rates went from about 0.50 tons of CO2 per $1,000 GDP to below 0.45 tons of CO2 per $1,000 GDP.

At this point, Clark Miller (head of my program in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology) pointed out that given Japan, there is no reason to assume that there should have been a continuing downward trend at all, but Pielke reiterated that since the slopes appeared to be the same there's no evidence that Kyoto made a difference.

The UK as a cautionary tale for U.S. policymakers

Pielke identified the emissions targets of the UK Climate Change Act of 2008:

Average annual reductions of 2.8% from 2007 to 2020, to reach 42% below 1990 levels by 2020.

Average annual reductions of 3.5% from 2020, to reach 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

The former target of 42% below 1990 levels is contingent upon COP15 reaching an agreement this December; otherwise the unilateral target is 34% below 1990 levels.

Pielke showed a graph of the historical rate of decarbonization for the UK economy, and compared it to graphs of manufacturing output and manufacturing employment, observing that the success of decarbonization of the UK economy from 1980-2006 has been due primarily to offshoring of manufacturing, something that's not sustainable--once they reach zero, there's nowhere further down to go.

He then used France as a point of comparison, since it has the lowest CO2/GDP output of any developed country, due to its use of nuclear power for most of its energy--it's at 0.30 tons of CO2 per $1,000 GDP, and a lot of that is emissions from gasoline consumption for transportation.

It took France about 22 years, from 1984-2006, to get its emissions to that rate.

For the UK to hit its 2020 target, it needs to improve to France's rate in the next five years, by 2015. That means building 30 new nuclear power plants and reducing the equivalent coal and gas generation; Pielke said he would "go out on a limb" and say that this won't happen.

That will only get them 1/3 of the way to their 2020 goals.

The UK plan calls for putting 1.7 million electric cars on the road by 2020, which means doubling the current rate of auto sales and selling only electric cars.

For the entire world to reach France's level of efficiency by 2015 would require a couple of thousand nuclear power plants.

The U.S. situation and Waxman-Markey/Boxer-Kerry

The U.S., said Pielke, has had one of the highest rates of sustained decarbonization, from 1980-2006, going from over 1.00 tons of CO2 per $1,000 GDP to the current level of about 0.50 tons of CO2 per $1,000 GDP.

The Waxman-Markey target is an 80% reduction by 2050, not quite as radical as the UK.
The Boxer-Kerry target is a 17% reduction by 2020.

Pielke broke down the current U.S. energy supply by source in quadrillions of BTUs (quads), and pointed out that he got all of his data from the EIA and encouraged people to look it up for themselves:

Petroleum: 37.1
Natural gas: 23.8
Coal: 22.5
Renewable: 7.3
Nuclear: 8.5

Total energy was about 99.2 quads in 2007, of which 83.4 came from coal, natural gas, and petroleum.

Emissions by source:

Coal: 95 MMt CO2/quad
Natural gas: 55 MMt CO2/quad
Petroleum: 68 MMt CO2/quad

Multiply those by the amount of energy produced by each source and add them up:

95 * 22.5 + 55 * 23.8 + 68 * 37.1 = 5,969 MMt CO2

The actual total emissions were at about 5,979, so the above back-of-the-envelope calculation was pretty close.

In 2009, U.S. energy consumption will be about 108.6 quads, of which 21 quads will come from renewables and nuclear (40% growth from 2007), which leaves 87.2 quads from fossil fuels, a 4.6% increase from 2007.

If we substituted natural gas for all coal, then our 2020 emissions would be 5,300 MMt CO2, higher than the 2020 target and 12% below 2005, and would still lock us into a carbon intensive future.

In order to meet targets, we need to reduce coal consumption by 40%, or 11 quads, and replace that with renewables plus nuclear, plus an additional 3.8 quads of growth by 2020.

One quad equals about 15 nuclear plants, so 14.8 quads means building 222 new nuclear plants (on top of the 104 that are currently in the U.S.).

Or, alternatively, assuming 100 concentrated solar power installations * 30 MW peak per quad, 1,480 such installations for 14.8 quads, or one online every two days until 2020.

Or, assuming 37,500 * 80 kW peak wind turbines per quad, 555,000 such wind turbines for 14.8 quads, or one 150-turbine wind farm brought online daily until 2020.

To reach these targets with wind and solar would require increasing them by a factor of 37 by 2020; Obama has promised only a tripling.

Could we meet the targets by increasing efficiency of our energy consumption? We would have to reduce total energy consumption to 85.5 quads by 2020 (rather than 108.6), about equal to U.S. energy consumption in 1992, when the U.S. economy was 35% smaller than in 2007. That would be improving efficiency by about a third.

How fast can decarbonization occur? We don't know, because no one has really set out to intentionally do that. Historical rates have been 1-2% per year by developed countries; for short periods, some countries have exceeded 2% per year. Japan, from 1981-1986, improved by over 4% per year.

Pielke argued that these targets are not feasible targets in the U.S. or UK, and so policy makers are adding safety valves, offsets, and other mechanisms to allow some manipulation to give the appearance of success. Achieving 80% reduction in global emissions by 2050 requires > 5% decarbonization per year.

The problem, Pielke argued, is that the policy logic of targets and timetables is backwards, and we should focus on improving efficiency and decarbonization rather than emissions targets.

How things might be different

Pielke's suggested alternative strategy was presented in a slide something like this:

Focus policy on decarbonization of the economy (not simply emissions)
Efficiency gains (follow the Japanese model, “frontrunner program” by industry, look at best performer and set it as regulatory standard)
Expand carbon free energy (low carbon tax, other policies--subsidies, regulation, etc.)
Innovation-focused investments
To create ever advancing frontier of potential efficiency gains
Air capture backstop
Adaptation

The Japanese "frontrunner" program was where the government went industry by industry, identified the most efficient company in each industry, and set regulations to make that company the baseline standard for the other companies to meet.

Pielke argued that there should be a carbon tax of, say, $5/ton (or whatever is the "highest price politically possible"), with the collected funds (that would raise about $700B/year) used to promote innovation in energy efficiency.

If we find that we're stabilizing at 635 ppm, we may want to "brute force" some removal of carbon from the atmosphere (e.g., geoengineering).

In the Q&A session, Clark Miller questioned Pielke about the impossibility of replacing our energy infrastructure quickly--if it costs $2.61B for a 1400 MW nuclear plant, we'd need 65 of them (fewer than Pielke's number, he assumed smaller plants) at a cost of $260B. Since there is capital floating around causing asset bubbles in the trillions, and the energy industry is expected to become a $15T industry, surely there would be some drive to build them if they're going to become profitable. (Not to mention peak oil as a driver.) He agreed that it would take longer to construct these, but asked what the upshot would be if this was done by, say, 2075.

Also in the Q&A, Pielke pointed out that in a previous presentation of this talk, a philosophy professor had suggested that the population variable could be affected by handing out cyanide pills. (Or by promoting the growth of the Church of Euthanasia.) What I didn't mention above was that Pielke also briefly discussed improvements to human lifespan, and in his other talk (summary to come), he talked about how the IPCC's projections assume that we will not try to eradicate malaria...

ADDENDUM (November 7, 2009): I've seen estimates that U.S. carbon emissions will be about 6% lower in 2009 as a result of the recession, which amounts to considerable progress towards the Boxer-Kerry target. Projections of an economic recovery in 2010 strike me as overly optimistic; in my opinion there's a strong possibility that we haven't hit bottom yet and there's worse to come. Still, though, I think Pielke's probably right that energy consumption will go right back up again unless the recession becomes a depression and results in significant changes in consumption habits.

My summary of Pielke's lecture on climate change adaptation is here.

ADDENDUM (November 9, 2009): It should be noted that Roger Pielke, Jr. is a somewhat controversial figure in the climate change debate, and believed by many in the climate change blogosophere to be in the climate change skeptic camp, or to be biased towards them in terms of where he levels his criticisms. A post titled "Who Framed Roger Pielke?" from the Only In It For the Gold blog links to a number of opinions expressing these views.

Charles Phoenix's retro slide show--in Phoenix

2009-11-06T07:43:00.002-07:00

Tonight and tomorrow night at 8 p.m., Charles Phoenix will bring his Retro Slide Show Tour to the Phoenix Center for the Arts at 1202 N. 3rd St.

I've not seen his show before, but I've enjoyed his blog's slide-of-the-week feature and plan to go see this.

Here's the official description:

A laugh-out-loud funny celebration of '50s and '60s road trips, tourist traps, theme parks, world's fairs, car fashion fads, car culture and space age suburbia, will also include a selection of vintage images of the Valley of the Sun.

Click the above link for more details or to buy tickets.

Where is the academic literature on skepticism as a social movement?

2009-11-04T10:55:00.003-07:00

Here's all I've been able to find so far, independent of self-descriptions from within the movement (and excluding history and philosophy of Pyrrhonism, Academic Skepticism, the Carvaka, the Enlightenment, British Empiricism, and lots of work on the development of the enterprise of science):

George Hansen, "CSICOP and the Skeptics: An Overview," The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research vol. 86, no. 1, January 1992, pp. 19-63. I've not seen a more detailed history of contemporary skepticism elsewhere.
Stephanie A. Hall, "Folklore and the Rise of Moderation Among Organized Skeptics," New Directions in Folklore vol. 4, no. 1, March 2000.
David J. Hess, Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, Its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture, 1993, The University of Wisconsin Press.

I note that Paul Kurtz's The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge (1992, Prometheus Books) puts contemporary skepticism in the lineage of several of the other forms of philosophical skepticism I mentioned above, identifying his form of skepticism as a descendant of pragmatism in the C.S. Peirce/John Dewey/Sidney Hook tradition (and not the Richard Rorty style of pragmatism). But I think that says more about Kurtz than about the skeptical movement, which also draws upon other epistemological traditions and probably doesn't really have a sophisticated epistemological framework to call its own.

There's a lot of literature on parallel social movements of various sorts, including much about advocates of some of the subject matter that skeptics criticize, and some of that touches upon skeptics. For example:

Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, "The Construction of the Paranormal: Nothing Unscientific is Happening," in Roy Wallis, editor, On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge, 1979, University of Keele Press, pp. 237-270.
Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, Frames of Meaning: The Social Construction of Extraordinary Science, 1982, Taylor & Francis.
Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, 2nd edition, 2006, Harvard University Press.
Christopher P. Toumey, God's Own Scientists: Creationists in a Secular World, 1994, Rutgers University Press.

The Toumey book doesn't really have anything about skeptics, but is an anthropological study of creationists in the United States which describes the connection between "creationism as a national movement" and "creationism as a local experience" that seems intriguingly similar to the skeptical movement, especially in light of the fact (as I mentioned in my previous post) that national skeptical organizations are independent of established institutions of science that provide the key literature of the movement and at least implicitly assume that the average layman can develop the ability to discern truth from falsehood, at least within a particular domain, from that literature.

In some ways, the skeptical movement also resembles a sort of layman's version of the activist element in the field of science and technology studies, based on positivist views of science that are the "vulgar skepticism" dismissed in this article:

Michael Lynch, "Expertise, Skepticism and Cynicism: Lessons from Science & Technology Studies," Spontaneous Generations vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 17-24.

I think if contemporary skepticism wants to achieve academic respectability, it will need to develop a more sophisticated view of science that comes to terms with post-Popper philosophy of science and post-Merton sociology of science; my recommendation for skeptics who are interested in that subject is to read, as a start:

Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science Without Legend, Objectivity Without Illusions, 1995, Oxford University Press.

There's an enormous relevant literature on those topics, an interesting broad overview is:

R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie, and M.J.S. Hodge, Companion to the History of Modern Science, 1990, Routledge.

I welcome any new revelations about sources of relevance that I've missed, particularly if there is other academic work specifically addressing the history, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology of the contemporary skeptical movement--three sources ain't much.

What are the goals of Skepticism 2.0?

2009-11-04T07:35:00.006-07:00

Yesterday I listened to D.J. Grothe's interview with Ben Radford on the Point of Inquiry podcast about the latest issue of the Skeptical Inquirer (November/December 2009) about "Skepticism 2.0," the bottom-up grassroots expansion of the skeptical movement through Internet communications tools like blogs, podcasts, online videos and forums, and the real-world activities that have become possible through them, like meetups and SkeptiCamps.

Near the end of the podcast, D.J. asked Ben what he thought would be the results of Skepticism 2.0 in five years time. He said (1) more skeptics and (2) more cooperative projects between the three major U.S. skeptical groups, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the James Randi Educational Foundation, and the Skeptics Society.

That struck me as a rather disappointingly modest set of goals, as well as rather "old school" skepticism thinking, and insular. Surely we can come up with ideas for something more exciting, interesting, and useful than merely the self-perpetuation and growth of the skeptical movement and cooperation among the traditional top-down skeptical organizations over the next five years.

A few thoughts that came to my mind:

If skeptics want to promote public understanding of science and critical thinking, why not partnerships with other organizations that also have those purposes? The National Academies of Science, the National Center for Education, teacher's groups and school groups at a local level?
If skeptics want to promote the activity of science, why not look at ways to help motivate students to enter science as a career, and support them in doing so? I've previously suggested to Phil Plait that JREF might partly model itself after the Institute for Humane Studies, an organization which provides support for undergraduate and graduate students who favor classical liberal political ideals, in order to help them achieve success in careers of thought leadership, including academics, journalists, filmmakers, public policy wonks, and so on. In order for skepticism and critical thinking to have a significant impact, it's not necessary that everyone become a skeptic, only that a sufficient number of people in the right places engage in and encourage critical thinking.
If skeptics want to see more diversity in the skeptical movement, why not look at ways to reach out to other communities? The podcast did mention the SkepTrack at Dragon*Con, which is one of the most innovative ideas for outreach for skeptical ideas since the founding of CSICOP in 1976.
If skeptics want to act as a form of consumer protection against fraud and deception, why not try to find ways to interact with regulators, investigators, politicians, and the media to get fraudulent products and services off the market? The UK complaints against chiropractors making false claims on their websites as a response to the British Chiropractic Association libel lawsuit against Simon Singh, or the Australian complaint against bogus claims by anti-vaccinationists (though see my comment on that blog post for some reservations) might suggest some ideas.

It seems to me that the skeptical movement should be concerned about more than just increasing its own numbers and getting the existing national groups to work together. I think that Skepticism 2.0 has and will continue to force the existing groups to cooperate with each other and with the grassroots movement if they don't want to become obsolete and irrelevant. And at this point growth is, at least for the near-term, a foregone conclusion. But in order to continue to grow and thrive, there should be some goals that have something to do with being useful and making the world a better place, by which the skeptical movement can measure its effectiveness and success.

I'm sure readers of this blog have further suggestions. What else?

Addendum:

By the way, with regard to my first suggestion, here's a question that may provide some motivation and food for thought: Why do the Parapsychological Association and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine have better and more formal ties to official institutions of science than any skeptical organization? The PA is a member of the AAAS, and NCCAM is an agency within the National Institutes of Health. The main difference between those organization and skeptical organizations is that they actually do and publish peer-reviewed scientific research.

More Scientology exposure from the St. Pete Times

2009-11-03T07:55:00.002-07:00

The St. Petersburg Times has published another three-part exposé on the Church of Scientology based on interviews with former high-level members. (The first three-part series from June is discussed here; I missed the second three-part series from August about new defectors; all three series may be found on the SP Times website here.)

Part 1 (October 31): "Chased by their church: When you leave Scientology, they try to bring you back"

An overview of this new, third series of exposures based on information from former high-ranking members of the Church of Scientology such as Mark "Marty" Rathbun and Mike Rinder.

The story of how the church commands and controls its staff is told by the pursuers and the pursued, by those who sent spies and those spied upon, by those who interrogated and those who rode the hot seat. In addition to Rathbun, they include:
• Mike Rinder, who for 25 years oversaw the church's Office of Special Affairs, which handled intelligence, legal and public affairs matters. Rinder and Rathbun said they had private investigators spy on perceived or potential enemies.
They say they had an operative infiltrate a group of five former Scientology staffers that included the Gillham sisters, Terri and Janis, two of the original four "messengers" who delivered Hubbard's communications. They and other disaffected Scientologists said they were spied on for almost a decade.
• Gary Morehead, the security chief for seven years at the church's international base in the desert east of Los Angeles. He said he helped develop the procedure the church followed to chase and return those who ran, and he brought back at least 75 of them. "I lost count there for awhile.''
Staffers signed a waiver when they came to work at the base that allowed their mail to be opened, Morehead said. His department opened all of it, including credit card statements and other information that was used to help track runaways.
• Don Jason, for seven years the second-ranking officer at Scientology's spiritual mecca in Clearwater, supervised a staff of 350. He said that after he ran, he turned himself in and ended up locked in his cabin on the church cruise ship, the Freewinds. He said he was held against his will.

Part 2 (November 2): "Scientology: What happened in Vegas"

How ex-members Terri and Janis Gillham, who had been Sea Org "messengers" for L. Ron Hubbard and whose legal guardian had been Hubbard's wife Mary Sue, had their mortgage business in Las Vegas infiltrated by spies working for the Church of Scientology to keep tabs on what they were up to. Mark Fisher, Scientology head David Miscavige's aide de camp for seven years, was spied on by the man he thought was his best friend.

Part 3 (November 3): "Man overboard: To leave Scientology, Don Jason had to jump off a ship"

After leaving the Church once and returning, Don Jason was put aboard the Freewinds, a Scientology ship, and monitored constantly. He managed to get off the ship in the Bahamas by effectively zip-lining down a cable with a home-made device, and getting on a plane to Milwaukee by way of Tampa and Atlanta. Someone from the Church booked the seat next to his, and Rathbun (still in the Church at the time) met him at Tampa, and then bought a ticket on his flight, to try to talk him into returning.

More apparent plagiarism from Ian Plimer

2009-11-01T13:34:00.003-07:00

Eli Rabett and Pieter Tans identified some errors in Ian Plimer's book's claim of selective data reporting from Mauna Loa measurements of atmospheric carbon, which Tim Lambert at the Deltoid ScienceBlog tracks to climate change skeptic Ferdinand Engelbeen. But Plimer doesn't cite Engelbeen, perhaps because Engelbeen also refutes the argument Plimer is trying to make.

This is not the first time Plimer has copied without quoting or citing sources--multiple instances in his book Telling Lies for God have previously been identified by Jeffrey Shallit and me.

(Previously on Plimer at this blog.)

Maricopa County Notices of Trustee's Sales for October 2009

2009-10-30T17:22:00.004-07:00

I haven't posted one of these things in a while, so I figured it was about time.

The big peak was in March, with a total of 10,725 that month. October's total was 6,618.

Robert Balling on climate change

2009-10-30T15:01:00.005-07:00

This afternoon I went to hear ASU Prof. Robert Balling, former head of ASU's Office of Climatology and current head of the Geographic Information Systems program, talk about climate change in a talk that was advertised as "Global Warming Became Climate Change: And the Story Continues," though I didn't notice if he had a title slide for his presentation.

He began his talk by saying that in 1957, measurements of CO2 began to be made at Mauna Loa (by Charles David Keeling), which established that CO2 is increasing in our atmosphere, largely because of human activity--from fossil fuel emissions. It's approaching 390 parts per million (ppm). Last weekend, the "A" on A Mountain near the university was painted green by a bunch of people wearing shirts that say "350" on them, because they want atmospheric CO2 to be stabilized at 350 ppm, which was the level in 1990, which is the benchmark year for the Kyoto Protocol.

But this isn't remotely feasible, he said, citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Even the most optimistic scenario in the IPCC Report has atmospheric carbon continuing to rise until 2100, hitting about 600 ppm. If we reduced emissions to 0, the best case would end up with stabilization at around 450 ppm. Our lifetime will see increasing CO2 levels, no matter what we do. (In other words, the Kyoto benchmark sets a standard for emissions levels to return to, not for a level of atmospheric carbon to return to.)

If you look at the earth's history on a longer scale, atmospheric carbon has been much higher in the past--it was at about 2500 ppm during the dinosaurs. During the last 600,000 years, however, it has been much lower, and fell below 200 ppm in the last glacial period. This, Balling said, shows what he would identify as a dangerous level of CO2--falling below 160 ppm, which causes plants to die.

There are other greenhouse gases besides CO2 that have an effect, such as methane and NO2, that humans are producing, he said.

At this point, he said the greenhouse effect is real--CO2 doubling causes warming--and this has been known for 120 years and "nobody is denying that."

There are climate models, which he said he has great respect for--it's basic physics plus fantastic computing and applied math. Climate modelers, he said, are their own worst critics. Problems for climate models include clouds, water vapor, rain, and the ocean, but lots of things are modeled correctly and the results are generally pretty good. Clouds, he said, are the biggest area of debate. The IPCC models say that clouds amplify warming, but satellite-based measurements suggest that clouds dampen (but don't eliminate) warming. Thus, he concluded, IPCC may be predicting more warming than will actually occur.

He next discussed empirical support for warming, and pointed out that the official plot of global temperatures has no error bars, and the numbers reported come from sensors that don't cover the entire world. How you come up with a global average can be done in different ways, and the different methods produce different results. You can take grid cells, average by latitudinal bands, get two hemispheric averages, and average them together. You can just average all of the data we have. He said that Roger Pielke Sr. questions the use of average temperatures and suggests looking at afternoon high temperatures. Looking at the older end of the chart, he asked, "where were the sensors in 1900? Why no error bars?"

He asked, "Is the earth warming," and said "right now the earth is not warming. I expect it to keep going up, but over the last decade there's been essentially none." He pointed to a recent article in Science magazine, "What happened to global warming?" Many are writing about this, he said, and there could be "1001 different things including sun and oceanic processes." (I don't believe this is correct unless you measure from 1998, which was an El Nino year. Most of the top 10 warmest years in history are post-1998.)

"Scientists are questioning the data," he said, showing photos from Anthony Watts' blog of poorly situated weather stations. "The albedo of the shelter in my backyard has changed as it has decayed," and caused it to report warmer temperatures. He said that people are having a field day taking photos of poor official sites. (What Balling didn't say is that what's important in the data is not absolute temperature but the temperature trends, and the good sites and bad sites both show the same trends.)

He pointed out that there are corrections to the temperature based on time of measurement, urban heat islands, instruments used, etc. If you look at the raw data for the U.S. from 1979-2000, you see 0.25 degrees Celsius of warming. Sonde data shows 0.24 degrees, MSU's measurements show 0.28, IPCC shows 0.28, and FILNET shows 0.33. He suggested that these corrections on the official data may be inflating the temperature (again, see my previous comment on trends vs. absolute temperature). Sky Harbor Airport produces the official temperature results for Phoenix, maximizing urban heat island effect. Many of the city records are from the worst sites, and he suggests looking at rural temperatures might give a different result.

Another factor is stratospheric turbidity from volcanic eruptions, and he showed a plot of orbital temperatures from satellites vs. stratospheric turbidity. He said that volcanism accounts for about 30% of the trend variability.

The big player in the game, he said, is the sun. Solar irradiance measures showed a significant decline in solar output in 1980, but earth temperature continued upward--he said he mentioned this because he thought it would be used as an objection. In response, he said that "the sun doesn't increase or decrease output over the entire spectrum and there are interactions with stratospheric clouds." He said that there are astrophysicists who argue that this is the major cause of global warming. In the Q&A, he said that there's one group that thinks cosmic ray flux is the major factor in global temperature because it stimulates cloud formation, while another group says that cosmic ray flux is little more than a trivial effect. He also said that this debate takes place in journals that "I find very difficult to read."

There are other confounding variables like El Nino and La Nina, but he said there has "definitely been warming over the last three decades with a discernable human contribution."

He put up a graph of the Vostok Reconstruction of temperature based on ice core data, on a chart labeled from -10 to +4 degree temperature changes in Celsius, which were mostly in the negative direction, and said we've seen periodic rapid changes up and down without any human contribution.

He talked about the IPCC "hockey stick" graph from 2001, which led to a huge debate about the possibility of bad statistical methods that guaranteed the hockey stick shape. He observed that 1000 years ago it was as warm or warmer than today, the Medieval Warming Period, which was missing from the "hockeystick" graph. There was also a "Little Ice Age," also missing from the graph. He said the IPCC has backed away from the hockey stick and its most recent report includes clear Medieval Warming Period and Little Ice Age periods in its graphs.

He showed a photo of a microwave sounding unit for temperature measurement, and the polar satellite record from 1978 to present, which showed a big peak in 1998 from El Nino. He said he wrote his book saying that there was no warming in 1992, when it was true. After 1998, the temperature came back down quickly, and, he said, the satellite record, like the Science article, hasn't seen warming. He then corrected himself to say, "well, some warming, but not consistent with the IPCC models."

He said there has been high latitude warming, and the difference between winter and summer warming has supported the numeric models. "But a problem has evolved, which is the most powerful argument of the skeptics." The models predict that there should be warming at the surface, which increases at higher altitude as you go up into the atmosphere. "There should be very strong warming in the middle of the atmosphere, but it's not in the data." This is the main anti-global warming argument of Joanne Nova's "The Skeptics Handbook" that has been distributed to churches throughout the U.S. by the Heartland Institute (an organization supported by the oil industry that has sometimes gotten into trouble due to its carelessness).

At this point, Balling started asking various questions and answering them by quoting from the IPCC reports:

More hurricanes? The IPCC doesn't say this. He cited the 1990, 1996, 2001 (executive summary, p. 5), and 2007 (p. 6) reports, all of which say that there's no indication or no clear trend of increase or decrease of frequency or intensity of hurricanes or tropical cyclones as a result of warming.

The southwestern United States may become drier? Here, he answered affirmatively, pointing out that an ASU professor has an article that just came out in Science on this topic. Atmospheric circulation is decreasing, and soil moisture measures show the southwest is becoming drier. On this, he said, there's "evidence everywhere," and the Colorado River basin in particular is being hit hard. And this is consistent with IPCC predictions. He cited Roy Spencer to say that "extraordinary prediction require extraordinary evidence." (This actually comes from Carl Sagan, who said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" in Cosmos.)

Frequency of tornadoes? It's down, not up, and IPCC 2007 p. 308 says there is no evidence to draw general conclusions.

Ice caps are melting? Balling said Arctic yes, Antarctic, no. He cited the IPCC 2007 p. 6 regarding Antarctic sea ice extent indicating a lack of warming, and p. 13 that it's too cold for widespread surface melting. He contrasted this with a slide of a homeless penguin used to argue for action on global warming. The Arctic ice cap "has its problems," he said, and its extent has declined though has "rebounded a bit" recently. (In the Q&A, he said that half of the loss in the last six years has been recovered.) He said that experts in sea ice extent identify relative temperature, ocean currents, and wind as more important than temperature--"it's not a thermometer of the planet." In the past, northern sea ice has dropped as southern sea ice has increased, with the overall global extent of sea ice relatively unchanged. In the Q&A, he made it clear that he wasn't saying that temperature wasn't a factor, but that global temperature is definitely not a factor and temperature is less important than the other factors he identified.

Sea levels changing? He said there's no doubt about this, but the important question is whether the rise is accelerating. He cited Church et al. J. Climate 2004, p. 2624 for a claim of "no detectible secular increase" in rate of sea level rise, but noted that another article this week says that there is. IPCC 2007, p. 5 says that it is unclear if increasing is a longer-term trend. The average has been 1.8 mm/year, but with variable rates of change. IPCC 2007, p. 9 says that 125,000 years ago sea levels were likely 4-6m higher than in the 20th century, due to retreat of polar ice.

He said that ice melting on Kilimanjaro has been a "poster child" for global warming, but that this sharp decline "started its retreat over 100 years ago," at the end of the Little Ice Age (1600-1850), and is related to deforestation and ocean patterns in the Indian Ocean rather than global warming. It's not in an area where significant warming is expected by climate models, and local temperatures don't show it.

He then talked about a few factors that cause temperature forcing in a negative direction (i.e., cooling)--SO2, which makes clouds last longer, increased dust, and ozone thinning. He said that his entry into the IPCC was his work at the U.S./Mexico border where he found that overgrazed land on the Mexican side caused warming, and it was much cooler on the U.S. side of the border. The dust, however, had a global cooling effect.

The 2001 IPCC report lists global radiative forcings in the negative direction: stratospheric ozone, sulfate, biomass burning, and mineral aerosols. In the positive direction include CO2 and solar irradiance. The 2007 report adds many more, including contrails from aircraft. A chart from the report lists the level of scientific understanding for each factor, and he observed that it's "low" for solar irradiance.

He cited a quote from James Hansen (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. p. 12,753, 1998) saying that we can't predict the long term, and said he agrees.

He observed that the Pew Foundation poll for Sep. 30-Oct. 4 asked Americans if they think there is evidence of global warming being caused by humans and only 36% said yes--he said he's one of those 36%.

He concluded by observing that if you look at the difference between doing nothing at all, or stabilizing at 1990 levels in 1990, that only produces changes of a few hundredths of a degree of temperature in 2050--so no matter what we do, "we won't live long enough to see any difference."

In the Q&A session, Prof. Billie Turner said that "our academy is about to issue a statement that we are 97% sure that we will not be at a 1-degree Celsius increase but a 2-degree Celsius increase by 2050" (or about double what Balling's final slide showed). He objected that Balling's talk began with the "lunatic green fringe" and contrasted it with the IPCC, which he said would be like him beginning a talk with Dick Cheney's views before giving his own. He said this may be an effective format, but it "gives a slant on the problem that isn't real in the expert community." Turner also pointed out that on the subject of mitigation, if you are going to make a calculation in economic terms you have to use a discount rate. The Stern Review used a high discount rate, and concluded that it is worth spending a lot of money now on mitigation; William Nordhaus and Partha Dasgupta, on the other hand, used a low discount rate and concluded that it's not worth spending money on now.

Balling said that he gets email from "lefties" that ask him to "please keep criticizing" because "this [global warming] is just an excuse to keep the developing world from catching up." In conversation with a small group afterward, Balling made it clear that he thinks people shouldn't be listening to Limbaugh and Hannity on climate change, and in answer to my question about what sources the educated layman should read and rely upon, he answered unequivocally "the IPCC," at least the scientific portions authored by scientists. He had some criticisms for the way that the technical summaries are negotiated by politicians, however, and said that S. Fred Singer has made hay out of comparing the summaries to the actual science sections and pointing out contradictions. He also said that Richard Lindzen at MIT, who he said may be the best climate scientist around, thinks the whole IPCC process is flawed, and that John Christy, lead author of the 2001 IPCC report, thinks the IPCC process should allow an "alternative views" statement by qualified scientists who disagree.

In a very brief discussion afterward with the climate modeling grad student in my climate change class, he said that the biggest weakness of the talk was that Balling didn't talk about ocean temperatures, being measured by the Argo project of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These measures had shown some recent cooling (but a long-term warming trend), but after discovering an error, Joshua Willis found that warming has continued.

Balling supports the science, but he still leans to minimizing the negative effects, and uses some apparently bad arguments to do so. His position clearly advocates a "wait and see" approach, and argues that we needn't be in a hurry to mitigate since nothing we do will have any effect in our lifetimes--but it could have an enormous effect on what is required for mitigation and adaptation for future generations.

State Press defends Ravi Zacharias

2009-10-29T20:33:00.005-07:00

ASU's State Press columnist Catherine Smith authored an op-ed piece promoting last night's appearance of Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias. This was at least her second such op-ed; a prior one was published on September 17.

My letter to the editor, below, didn't get published, but another critic's letter did get published.

Here's mine:

Catherine Smith quotes Ravi Zacharias as stating that "irreligion and atheism have killed infinitely more than all religious wars of any kind cumulatively put together." This statement not only demonstrates Zacharias' innumeracy, it shows that he continues to make the mistake of attributing killing in the name of political ideologies like Stalinism and communism to atheism. I agree that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot killed more than religious wars, but it wasn't their atheism that caused that killing. Those killed by religious wars, the Inquisition, and witch trials, however, were killed in the name of religion. Out of fairness, there were no doubt political issues involved in many wars over religion as well, but if you take claims of religiously motivated killing at face value, the death tolls for those killed in the name of religion far exceed the death tolls for those killed in the name of irreligion.

Zacharias has a history of attacking atheism with misrepresentations in his books, as documented in Jeff Lowder's "An Emotional Tirade Against Atheism" and Doug Krueger's "That Colossal Wreck," both of which may be found on the Internet as part of the Secular Web (http://www.infidels.org/).

I first heard of Zacharias back around 1991, when I sat behind someone on an airplane flight who was reading his book (reviewed by Krueger, linked above), A Shattered Visage. The parts I read were truly awful, about the quality of M. Scott Huse arguments against evolution (a step below Kent Hovind and Ken Ham). I didn't bother to attend, but would be interested in hearing any reports of how it went.

Teaching the Bible in public schools

2009-10-28T08:54:00.005-07:00

The following is a letter to the editor of Arizona State University's State Press that the paper didn't print. It was written in response to an editorial by Will Munsil, son of Len Munsil, who was editor of the State Press when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s. Len Munsil is an extremely conservative Republican, failed Republican candidate for Governor in 2006, and founder of the Center for Arizona Policy, Arizona's version of the American Family Affiliation. His daughter, Leigh Munsil, is the State Press's current editor-in-chief. When Munsil Sr. edited the school paper, he sometimes refused to print my letters to the editor for shaky reasons.

The letter below was written in response to Will Munsil's "Putting the Bible back in public schools," which was published on October 14.

I disagree with Will Munsil's assertion that the Bible is the foundation of American political thought. On the contrary, the American form of government was rooted in the work of enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. The U.S. Constitution's form of government has more resemblance to Caribbean pirate codes than to the Ten Commandments.

That said, however, I agree with Munsil that knowledge of the Bible is worthwhile and should be taught in public schools for the purpose of cultural literacy, so long as it is done without endorsing Christianity or Judaism. The Bible Literacy Project's curriculum might be one way to do it. One way not to do it is to use the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools' curriculum--it takes a sectarian perspective, is full of errors, and has failed legal challenges in Texas and Florida for being unconstitutional.

I suspect this letter wasn't excluded by reason of content, but because they had already printed a couple of letters critical of Will Munsil's op-ed by the time I submitted this on October 16. Perhaps I should have mentioned that I'm an atheist, which makes the extent of my agreement with Munsil more interesting. Of course, my view is contrary to Munsil's in that I think Bible literacy is likely to decrease, rather than increase, religious belief. But it wouldn't surprise me if the NCBCPS curriculum is the one that Will Munsil had in mind.

I should point out that I think it should probably be taught as part of a world religions class that covers more than just Christianity--kids should not only get information about the Bible that they won't get in Sunday School, they should be informed about other religions, as well as the fact that history has been full of doubters of religion, as documented in Jennifer Michael Hecht's excellent Doubt: A History.

You can find out more about the NCBCPS curriculum that failed legal challenge in Texas here.

Munsil cited Stephen Prothero, whose op-ed piece, "We live in a land of biblical idiots," I wrote about at the Secular Web in early 2007.

Hitler orders DMCA notices for "Downfall" parody videos

2009-10-26T19:54:00.003-07:00

Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has produced his own "Downfall" parody video, making fun of the fact that Constantin Films has issued DMCA notices to remove all of the "Downfall" parody videos from YouTube:

Paul Haggis leaves Scientology

2009-10-26T18:12:00.003-07:00

Paul Haggis, director of the film "Crash" (not to be confused with the David Cronenberg film of the same name), has left Scientology with an open letter published on ex-Scientologist Mark "Marty" Rathbun's blog (which has also supplied links to Scientology's reply).

One of Haggis' main complaints is the Church's homophobia. Was Haggis really in Scientology for three and a half decades without realizing that homosexuality is 1.1 on the "tone scale"? Good for him for leaving, but he must have had blinders on regarding everything he complains about.

Richard Carrier to speak in Phoenix

2009-10-26T09:44:00.002-07:00

Richard Carrier will be speaking to the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix on Sunday, November 8 at around 10 a.m.--it will likely be packed, so showing up for breakfast or just to get a seat at 9 a.m. is advised. Richard will be speaking about Christianity and science, ancient and modern, and you can get a bit more information about his talk at his blog.

Personalized medicine research forum

2009-10-24T13:54:00.002-07:00

Yesterday afternoon I attended a Personalized Medicine research forum at ASU's Biodesign Institute, sponsored by ASU's Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Affairs (OVPREA) and hosted by Dr. Joshua LaBaer of ASU's Virginia G. Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics.

The forum's speakers covered both the promise and problems and issues raised by the developing field of personalized medicine, which involves the use of molecular and genetic information in medical diagnosis and treatment. A few highlights:

Introduction (Dr. LaBaer)
Dr. LaBaer pointed out that these new diagnostics cost a great deal of money to develop, but they have the potential for cost savings, for instance, if they can be used to identify forms of disease that will not benefit from very expensive treatments. He gave the example of Genomic Health, which has developed a test for early stage breast cancer to determine if women will or won't benefit from adjuvant therapy (chemotherapy to prevent recurrence). A test that costs even a few thousand dollars to perform is something insurers will be willing to pay for if it has the potential of saving tens of thousands of dollars of expense on chemotherapy that will not provide any benefits. On the other hand, the mere promise of early detection of susceptibility for disease has the potential for overtreatment and an increase in healthcare expenses. This problem was discussed by a number of speakers, with particular bad potential consequences in the legal realm.

Personalized Diagnostics (Dr. LaBaer)
Dr. LaBaer talked briefly about his own lab's work in biomarker discovery and cell-based studies. In biomarker discovery, his lab is working in functional proteomics, using cloned copies of genes to produce proteins and building tests that allow examination of thousands of proteins at a time. His lab, formerly at Harvard and now at ASU, has 10,000 copies of human genes and 50,000 copies of genes from other animals, which are made available to other researchers. (There's more information at the DNASU website.)

The goal of biomarker discovery is to greatly improve the ability to find markers of human health using the human immune system, by identifying antigens that are markers for disease. The immune system generates antibodies not just in response to infectious disease, but against other proteins when we have cancer. Tumor antigens get into the bloodstream, though they may only appear in 10-15% of those who have the disease. Rather than testing one protein at a time, as is done with ELISA assays, LaBaer's lab is building protein microarrays with thousands of proteins, tested at once with blood serum. Unlike old array technology that purifies proteins and puts them into spots on arrays, where the proteins may degrade and lose function, their method involves printing the DNA that encodes the gene on the arrays, then capturing proteins in situ on the array at the time the experimental test is performed.

LaBaer's lab's cell-based work involves tryng to identify how proteins behave in cells when they are altered, in order to find out which pathways contribute to consequences such as drug resistance in women with breast cancer, as occurs with Tamoxifen. If you can find the genes that make cancer cells resistant, you can then knock them out and cause those cells to die. They tested 500 human kinases (5/7 of the total) and found 30 enzymes that consistently make the cancer cells resistant. Women with a high level of those enzymes who take Tamoxifen have quicker relapses of cancer.

Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative (George Poste)
George Poste, former director of ASU's Biodesign Institute and former Chief Scientist and Technology Officer at SmithKline Beecham, talked about the need to replace thinking about costs in the healthcare debate with thinking about value. The value proposition of personalized medicine is early detection, rational therapeutics where treatment is made based on the right subtype of disease being treated, and integrative care management where there's better monitoring of the efficacy of treatments. He said that the first benefits will come from targeted therapy and this will then overlap with individualized therapy, as we learn how our genome affects such things as drug interactions. He was critical of companies like 23andme, which he called "celebrity spit" companies, which do little more than give people a needless sense of anxiety about predispositions to disease that they currently can do nothing about except eat right and exercise.

Poste also had criticisms for physicians, pointing out that it takes 15-20 years for new innovations to become routinely adopted, and many physicians don't use treatment algorithms at all. Oncologists, he said, make money from distributing treatments empirically (that is, figuring out whether it's effective by using the treatment on the entire population with the disease) rather than screening first, even where tests exist to determine who the treatment is likely to work on. He said that $604 million/year in health care costs could be saved by the use of a single colon cancer screening test, and not proceeding with treatment where it isn't going to work. Today, where 12-40% of people are aided by treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars, 60-88% of that spending is being wasted. With the aging population, he said that Humana will in the next several years see all profits disappear, spent on expensive treatments of people who don't respond to them.

Pharmaceutical companies are beginning to do diagnostic test development alongside drug development now, and insurers will push for these tests to be done. Poste suggested that we will see the emergence of "no cure, no pay" systems, and noted that Johnson & Johnson has a drug that has been introduced for use in the UK under the condition that the company will reimburse the national health care system for every case in which it is used but doesn't work. Merck's Januvia drug for type II diabetes similarly offers some kind of discount based on performance.

Poste pointed out another area for potential cost savings, related to drug safety. With some 3.1 billion prescriptions made per year, there are 1.5-3 million people hospitalized from drug interactions, 100,000 deaths, and $30 billion in healthcare costs, though he noted this latter figure includes caregiver error and patient noncompliance.

He bemoaned the "delusion of zero risk propagated by lawyers, legislatures, and the media," and pointed out that the FDA is in a no-win situation. (This is a topic that's been recently covered in two of my classes, my core program seminar and my law, science, and technology class with Prof. Gary Marchant. If the FDA allows unsafe drugs to be sold, then it comes under fire for not requiring sufficient evidence of safety. If, on the other hand, it delays the sale of effective drugs, it comes under fire for causing preventable deaths. The latter occurred during the 1980s with AIDS activists protesting against being denied treatments, described in books such as Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On and Steven Epstein's Impure Science. This led to PDUFA, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act of 1992, under which drug companies started funding FDA drug reviewer positions through application fees to help speed approval. That has been blamed for cases of the former, with the weight-loss drugs Pondimin and Redux being approved despite evidence that they caused heart problems. That story is told in the PBS Frontline episode "Dangerous Prescription" from November 2003.)

Poste pointed out that there have been 450,000 papers published which have claimed to find disease biomarkers, of which the FDA has approved only five. But he didn't blame the FDA for delay in this case, because this consists of a mass of bad studies which he characterized as "wasteful small studies" with insufficient statistical power. In the Q&A session, he argued that NIH needs to start dictating clear and strong standards for disease research, and that it has abrogated its role in doing good science. He said that "not a single national cancer study with sufficient statistical power" has been done in the last 20 years; instead research is fragmented across academic silos. He called for "go[ing] beyond R01 grant mentality" and building the large, expensive studies with 2,500 cases and 2,500 controls that need to be done.

He also raised challenges about the "very complex statistical analysis required" in order to do "multiplex tests" of the sort Dr. LaBaer is trying to develop. And he pointed out the challenge that personalized medicine presents for clinicians, in that "only about six medical schools have embraced molecular medicine and engineering-based medicine." Those that don't use these new techniques as they become available, he said, "will open themselves up to malpractice suits."

Science and Policy (David Guston)
David Guston, co-director of ASU's Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO) and director of ASU's Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) spoke about "cognate challenges in social science" and how CNS has been trying to develop a notion of "anticipatory governance of emerging technology" and devising ways to build such a capacity into university research labs as well as broader society, to allow making policy decisions in advance of the emergence of the technology in society at large. He described three capacities of anticipatory governance--foresight, public engagement, and integration, and described how these have been used at ASU.

Foresight: Rather than looking at future consequences as a linear extrapolation, CNS has used scenario development and a process of structured discussions based on those scenarios with scientists, potential users, and other potential stakeholders, about social and technical events that may be subsequent consequences of the scenarios. This method has been tested with Stephen Johnston's "Doc-in-a-Box" project at ASU's Center for Innovations in Medicine, which Guston said led to some changes in the conceptualization of the technology.

Public Engagement: The "scope and inclusion of public values is important for success," Guston said, and gave as an example the "national citizens technology forum" that CNS conducted in six locations to look at speculative scenarios about nanotechnology used for human enhancement. These were essentially very large focus groups whose participants engaged in "informed deliberation" over the course of a weekend, after having read a 61-page background document and spending the prior month engaging in Internet-based interaction.

Integration: Guston described the "embedding of social scientists in science and engineering labs," to develop productive relationships that help lab scientists identify broader implications of their work while it's still in the lab rather than after it's introduced to the general public.

Guston suggested that there might be other ways of implementing "anticipatory governance" in the form of legislative requirements or standards and priorities set by program officers at funding organizations, but that the lab setting is "the best point of leverage at a university" and can set an example for others to follow.

Clinical Perspective (Larry Miller)
Larry Miller, Research Director at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, spoke about the healthcare provider's approach to personalized medicine. He said that Mayo is committed to individualized care, and that now that we are beginning to understand the power of human variation, these new developments have "to be transformational for providers or they won't survive." He suggested that the future of medicine will move from reactive and probabilistic to more deterministic selection of treatments based on diagnoses. He emphasized the need for education for doctors, and pointed out that "standards of care will become outmoded," which is "disruptive to law and [insurance] coverage." He said that Mayo sees a big challenge of complexity, where what was one disease (breast cancer) is now at least ten different subdiseases. Doctors need to make their treatment decisions on the detail, to predict how the disease will behave, and choose the best drugs possible based on safety, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness.

Miller pointed out that this requires interdisciplinary work, and said that Mayo in Arizona has a huge advantage with its relationship with ASU, where so much of this work is going on. While Mayo has scientific expertise in a number of areas, these new technologies draw on expertise from beyond medicine, in particular informatics and computational resources needed to build an effective decision support system that will become essential for doctors to use in a clinical setting.

He talked about Mayo's program for individualized medicine, which involves not just incorporating new developments in diagnostics and therapeutics, but in regenerative medicine for repair, renewal, and regeneration of deficits.

Mayo has had electronic medical records for the last 15 years, on 6 million people, but these are kept in multiple incompatible systems and were not built with research in mind. They hope to improve their systems so that it can be used in an iterative process to learn more about the efficacy of therapies, and so therapies can be combined with "companion diagnostics for monitoring progression, recurrences, and response to therapy."

Like Poste, he raised objections to the companies that market gene sequencing directly to individuals, which just "scare people inappropriately," but identified learning about disease predispositions as an important part of these developing technologies. We need to develop methods of risk analysis that can help people correctly understand what these predispositions mean.

He sees the future as having three waves--the first wave will be the new diagnostics, the second wave improvements in clinical practice and therapy, and the third wave embedding the new technology into the healthcare system, with significant changes to policy and education.

Health Informatics (Diana Petitti)
Diana Petitti, former CDC epidemiologist and former director of research for Kaiser Permanente, where she built a 20-year longitudinal data repository for its 35 million members, spoke about the importance of health informatics. (She is now a professor in ASU's Department of Biomedical Informatics.) Dr. Petitti raised concerns about how in the United States we are "loathe to deny anyone anything" in terms of medical treatments, but in fact "we do deny lots of people lots of things." She worried that personalized medicine has the potential to lead to greater maldistributions of healthcare, with the "haves" getting more and better treatment and the "have nots" getting less and worse treatment, unless we plan carefully. She advocated evidence-based medicine and assessing value of treatments to be deployed to the general population.

Dr. Petitti brought up as an example the fact that oral contraceptives result in a 2x-10x increase in the likelihood of a venous thrombotic event, and that the Factor V Leiden gene is predictive of susceptibility to that consequence, but no screening is done for it. Why not? Because the test only predicts 5% of those who will have the event, it's a very expensive test, and we don't have good alternatives for oral contraceptives. These kinds of issues, she suggested, will recur with multiplex diagnostics.

She explicitly worried that "we have dramatically oversold preventive medicine" and doesn't think it's likely that savings from prevention will allow coverage for more extensive treatment. She advocated that everyone in the field see the film "Gattaca," and stated that ASU provides "unique opportunities to train people to think about these issues" using "quantitative reasoning and probabilistic thought." She concluded by saying that we need to "work towards rational delivery of healthcare that optimizes public health."

Law (Gary Marchant)
Prof. Gary Marchant of the Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law at ASU, who has a Ph.D. in genetics and is the executive director of ASU's Center for the Study of Law, Science, and Innovation (formerly Center for the Study of Law, Science, and Technology), spoke about legal issues. First he listed the many programs available at ASU in the area, beginning with the genetics and law program that has been here for 10 years and was the reason he first came to ASU. Others include a new personalized medicine and law program at the Center for Law, Science, and Innovation, a planned center on ethical and policy issues regarding personalized medicine in conjunction with the Biodesign Institute, CSPO, TGEN, Mayo, etc., and research clusters at the law school on breast cancer, warfarin, and personalized medicine. He also gave a plug for an upcoming conference March 8-9, 2010 at the Arizona Biltmore sponsored by AAAS and Mayo, which also has a great deal of corporate support.

Prof. Marchant indicated that liability is the biggest issue regarding personalized medicine, and he sees doctors as "sitting ducks," facing huge risks. If a doctor prescribes a treatment without doing a corresponding new diagnostic test, and that has complications, he can be sued. If he does the diagnostic test, it shows a very low likelihood of a disease recurrence, and advises against the treatment, and then the patient ends up being one of the rare people who has the recurrence, the doctor can be sued. The doctor is really in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. The insurers and pharmaceutical companies are at less risk, since they have already developed enormous resources for dealing with the lawsuits that are a regular part of their existence. In a short discussion after the forum, I asked Prof. Marchant if doctors would be liable if they performed a diagnostic test, found that it showed a low likelihood of recurrence or benefit for a treatment, and then recommended the treatment anyway, knowing the insurance company would refuse to pay for it--would that shift the liability to the insurance company? He thought it might, though it would be unethical for a doctor to recommend treatment that he didn't actually think was necessary, and there's still the potential for liability if the insurance company pays for the treatment and the treatment itself produces complications. It seems that this problem really needs a legislative or regulatory fix of some sort, so that doctors have some limitation of liability in cases where they have made a recommendation that everyone would agree was the right course of action but a low-probability negative consequence occurs anyway.

Prof. Marchant observed that the liability issues are particularly problematic in states like Arizona, where each side in the suit is limited to a single expert witness. He said there is "no clear guidance or defense for doctors," and the use of clinical guidelines in a defense has not been effective in court, in part because doctors don't use them.

Q&A
A few additional points of interest from the Q&A sessions (some of which has already been combined into the above summaries):

Dr. LaBaer pointed out that most markers for diseases don't seem to have any role in the cause of the disease, such as CA25 and ovarian cancer. So his lab is looking not just for biomarkers, but for those that will affect clinical decisions. 4 out of 5 positive results in a mammography for breast cancer are actually cases where there is nothing wrong and the woman will not end up getting breast cancer, but some procedure ends up being undergone, with no value. So he wants to find a companion test that can tell which are the 4 that don't need further treatment.

George Poste pointed out that baby boomers are going to bankrupt the system as they reach the end of their lives, and about 70% of the $2.3 trillion in healthcare spending is spent in the last 2-3 years of life, with many treatments costing $60K-$100K per treatment cycle on drugs that add 2-3 weeks of life. The UK's National Institute of Clinical Excellence has been making what are, in effect, rationing decisions by turning down all of the new cancer drugs that have come along because they have such great cost and such minimal benefit. He asked, "how much money could you save with a 90% accurate test of who's going to die no matter what you do?"

Prof. Marchant said more about legal issues involving specimen repositories, including a case at ASU. The developer of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, William Catalona, had a specimen repository with 30,000 tissue samples at Washington University, that he wished to take with him to Northwestern University when he took a new position there. He began asking patients for permission to move the samples, and 6,000 gave permission. But Washington University sued him, claiming that the samples were property of the university. Patients pointed out that their consent agreement gave them the right to withdraw their samples from future research and they had only consented to research on prostate cancer, but federal judge Stephen Limbaugh ruled in favor of the university and that patients had no property rights in their tissue. This ruling has reduced incentives for patients to consent to give specimens for research.

A current lawsuit against ASU by the Havasupai Indian tribe involves blood samples that were given for a study of diabetes by researchers who are no longer at ASU. They wanted to take the samples with them, and samples had also been given to other researchers for use in studies of schizophrenia and the historical origins of the tribe, even though informed consent was apparently only given for the diabetes research. Although this case was originally dismissed, it was recently reinstated.

Other cases involve patent protection of genetic information. About 25% of the human genome is patented, including Myriad Genetics' patent on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes which are predictive of breast cancer and can only legally be tested for by Myriad. This case is likely to go to the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the issue of whether human genes can be patented. The courts so far have ruled that a gene in isolation outside of the human body is patentable, even though (in my opinion) this seems at odds with the requirement that patents be limited to inventions, not discoveries. There has already been a legislative limitation of patent protection for surgical procedures for the clinical context, so that doctors can't be sued for patent infringement for performing a surgery that saves someone's life; it's possible that a similar limitation will be applied on gene patents in a clinical context, if they don't get overturned completely by the courts.

These gene patents create a further problem for the multiplex tests, since they inevitably include many patented genes. Prof. Marchant observed that someone from Affymetrix spoke at an ASU seminar and stood up and said they were building their GeneChip DNA microarrays for testing for the presence of thousands of genes, and were ignoring gene patents. They were subsequently sued. Dr. LaBaer stated that his lab is doing the same thing with cloned genes--they're cloning everything and giving them away, without regard to patents.

The session was videotaped and will be made available to the public online. I will add a link to this posting when it becomes available.

If you've read this far, you may also be interested in my summary of Dr. Fintan Steele's talk at this year's The Amazing Meeting 7, titled "Personalized Medicine or Personalized Mysticism?", in my summary of the Science-Based Medicine conference that took place just prior to TAM7, and in my short summary of Dr. Martin Pera's talk on regenerative medicine and embryonic stem cells at the Atheist Alliance International convention that took place earlier this month.

Atheist Alliance International Convention summary in Arabic

2009-10-23T08:01:00.002-07:00

The Arab Atheists Network has begun posting an Arabic translation of my summary of the AAI convention here. Thanks to Alpharabius and the Arab Atheists Network for doing that, and for their promotion of atheism in the Arab world!

Skepticism, belief revision, and science

2009-10-21T22:57:00.005-07:00

In the comments of Massimo Pigliucci's blog post about the scope of skepticism (which I've already discussed here), Skepdude pointed to a couple of blog posts he had written on similar topics some time ago, about what atheists have in common and skepticism and atheism. He argues that skeptics must be atheists and cannot be agnostics or theists, a position I disagree with. In an attempt to get to the bottom of our disagreement after a few exchanges in comments on his blog, I wrote the following set of questions which I first answered myself, so we can see how his answers differ.

Do we have voluntary control over what we believe?

In general, no. The credence we place in various propositions--our belief or rejection of them--is largely out of our voluntary control and dependent upon our perceptual experiences, memories, other beliefs, and established habits and methods of belief formation and revision. We can indirectly cause our beliefs to change by engaging in actions which change our habits--seeking out contrary information, learning new methods like forms of mathematics and logic, scientific methods, reading books, listening to others, etc.

How does someone become a skeptic?

People aren't born as skeptics--they learn about skepticism and how it has been applied in various cases (only after learning a whole lot of other things that are necessary preconditions--like language and reasoning). If skepticism coheres with their other beliefs, established habits and methods of belief formation and revision, and/or they are persuaded by arguments in favor of it, either self-generated or from external sources, they accept it and, to some degree or another, apply it subsequently.

When someone becomes a skeptic, what happens to all of the other beliefs they already have?

They are initially retained, but may be revised and rejected as they are examined through the application of skeptical methods and other retained habits and methods of belief formation and revision. Levels of trust in some sources will likely be reduced, either within particular domains or in general, if they are discovered to be unreliable. It's probably not possible to start from a clean slate, as Descartes tried to do in his Meditations.

Is everything a skeptic believes something which is a conclusion reached by scientific methods?

No. Much of what we believe, we believe on the basis of testimony from other people who we trust, including our knowledge of our own names and date and place of birth, parts of our childhood history, the history of our communities and culture, and knowledge of places we haven't visited. We also have various beliefs that are not scientifically testable, such as that there is an external world that persists independently of our experience of it, that there are other minds having experiences, that certain experiences and outcomes are intrinsically or instrumentally valuable, that the future will continue to resemble the past in various predictable ways, etc. If you did believe that skeptics should only believe conclusions which are reached by scientific methods, that would be a belief that is not reached by scientific methods.

Massimo Pigliucci on the scope of skeptical inquiry

2009-10-21T12:07:00.006-07:00

Massimo Pigliucci, a biologist and philosopher at the City University of New York and regular writer for the Skeptical Inquirer, has offered up his thoughts about the relationship between skepticism, atheism, and politics. He wants to argue that skepticism and skeptical inquiry are identical with scientific skepticism, and mostly distinct from philosophy, religion, and politics. He restricts the domain of skeptical inquiry to "the critical examination of evidential claims of the para- or super-normal," and further restricts his notion of "evidential" to the empirical. (He subsequently refers to philosophical arguments and reasons as "non-evidence based approaches." I disagree, though this may be strictly a terminological dispute--I often use the word "evidence" to apply to reasons and arguments, not just empirical observations or reports of empirical observations, and I think this is common usage.)

He ends up drawing a Venn-style diagram which has an outer circle labeled with "critical thinking" and "rational analysis," within which is a series of three overlapping circles labeled "atheism," "skeptical inquiry," and "political philosophy." He argues that skeptical inquiry only overlaps with atheism where religions make empirical claims that are subject to scientific investigation, and likewise for political philosophy.

I offered a few critical comments at his blog, noting that it is odd that "atheism" is the only label on his diagram which is the name of a specific position rather than a method or discipline, and suggesting that it be labeled something like "views on religion." I also suggested that that circle extend beyond the scope of the "critical thinking" and "rational analysis" circle, though that's presupposing his diagram is descriptive rather than normative. [Note added 1:31 p.m.: If his diagram is understood as a diagram of what is appropriate subject matter for critical thinking, rational analysis, and skeptical inquiry with respect to atheism and political philosophy, then those two circles should arguably not extend outside the border of critcial thinking/rational analysis.] Similar considerations should apply to the "political philosophy" circle. People hold religious and political views for reasons other than those produced as a result of critical thinking and rational analysis.

I also took issue with his identifying "skeptical inquiry" with scientific skepticism. Skeptics have always used philosophical tools as well as scientific ones, but I would find his diagram more accurate if the middle circle was labeled "scientific skepticism" or even "scientific inquiry."

I also have some skepticism about this taxonomic enterprise in general, which is arguably both philosophical and political itself--Pigliucci is not using scientific methods to set up this framework, it's philosophy, and there are political and pragmatic reasons for wanting us to accept it--to issue in a ruling that certain domains are off-limits for skepticism, namely the examination of religious and political claims that are not subject to empirical investigation.

I think there are good pragmatic reasons for skeptical organizations to restrict themselves in such a way--the methods of skepticism can be used by anyone, regardless of their political or religious views, and organized skepticism has tried to appeal to a broad audience to focus critical attention on paranormal claims where scientific methodology can be brought to bear. But I'm skeptical of this as a general picture of the applicable domain of the methods of skepticism or skeptical inquiry. (I should note that I don't think that atheism implies skepticism--thus the reason for extending a circle with that name outside the boundaries of critical thinking and rational analysis--nor that skepticism implies atheism. Skepticism is about the methods used, not the conclusions reached. An atheist might think that any consistent application of skepticism will lead to atheism, but that presumes both that atheism is true and that consistent application of skepticism is a guarantee of truth, which it is not.)

I agree with commenter Maarten that the boundaries of these circles are fuzzy--just as the boundary between science and non-science doesn't admit to a bright-line demarcation. People can conceptualize the boundaries differently, even granting Pigliucci's conception of "empirically investigatable" as the domain of skeptical inquiry or scientific skepticism. The boundaries between scientific disciplines are themselves fuzzy and they use different methodologies, with huge differences between experimental and historical sciences, for example.

Finally, I agree with commenter Scott (Scott Hurst), who observes that religious believers do make very specific claims "about the nature of the universe, how it works, and its history (including our own)," and specifically noting belief in the power of prayer. These things are empirically testable and do make at least some common (one could say "vulgar") conceptions of God and religion refutable by science. The fact that a more sophisticated believer or theologian can construct a view that uses the same words yet withdraws from the realm of the empirical doesn't mean that the vulgar conception hasn't been refuted. This is perhaps more obvious with modern religions such as Mormonism and Scientology, where in the former case historical evidence and DNA evidence falsifies some key claims, and in the latter case where scientific evidence falsifies a great number of its claims. Hubbard's cosmology, for example, includes the idea that Xenu dropped thetans into a volcano on Hawaii 75 million years ago, but Hawaii didn't exist 75 million years ago. His book History of Man includes Piltdown Man in the human lineage, even though that fossil was discovered to be a hoax shortly after the book was published. And so forth.

It's fine for Pigliucci to define and use the terms the way he wants, but I don't think he's given strong reasons for the rest of us to accept the specifics of his formulation.

UPDATE (October 24, 2009): Russell Blackford has written "Pigliucci on science and the scope of skeptical inquiry" at the Sentient Developments blog, which comes to similar conclusions with a somewhat more comprehensive argument.