Category Archives: Science

Science

Dolphins are smart

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I’m not sure why Marginal Revolution only just now linked to a Guardian article from 2003, but it’s still a seriously good read. The dolphin in the article was trained to help keep her pool clean by bringing any waste paper that falls into her pool to the keepers for a reward. Over time, one of the dolphins learned to trick the humans. Instead of immediately giving a big piece of litter to her keepers, she would hide it and only tear off small pieces to give to a keeper each time one passed, thereby earning more fish as a reward.

What’s even more impressive is that since she has also been trained to bring gulls (I’m not sure if they’re dead or alive at this point) that fly into her pool to the humans in return for a reward, she learned to keep some of the fish that she’d been given. Once the humans went away, she used the extra fish as bait to lure gulls to fly into her pool to catch them so that the humans would give her more fish for the gull. The rest of the article is filled with similarly fascinating anecdotes.

Science-fiction of course has long been full of stories about dolphins being intelligent, the entire plot of the fourth Star Trek film being the most obvious example. But this article lead me to thinking back to opinions of people like Australian SF author Greg Egan, who believes that our current treatment of some animals amount to human rights violations that will one day be recognized as a historically shameful era of our species.

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (October ’09)

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A bit early this month but I need to make space for more updates next week. The most unusual thing about this installment is that none of the three articles this month are from The Economist! Two of the three articles are about biology while the last one is very speculative, very theoretical physics.

The first of these articles discusses a controversial book about a topic that I’m sure everyone has thought of at one point or another: were our ancestors really faster, stronger and tougher than the humans living today now are? According to the author of Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male, Peter McAllister, the answer is yes. An anthropologist, he bases his conclusions on a wide range of evidence. For example, he examined fossilized footprints of Australian aboriginals who lived 20,000 years ago to estimate their running speed.

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Politics, Science

Anti-vaccination nutjobs

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As a skeptic, I’ve never been a fan of alternative medicine or even herbal remedies. I prefer that any medical treatments that I take be experimentally controlled, peer reviewed and statistically compared for efficacy against competing treatments. It feels however that I’m in the minority on this and even people who have a reasonably sound education in the sciences often just state that alternative medicine, while not necessarily being more effective than a placebo, is at least harmless and could provide some psychological reassurance to patients.

Frankly, I feel that this is conceding too much. Even if alternative medical treatments are physiologically harmless, admitting them into the mainstream dangerously blurs the line between truth and falseness. It means conceding authority to snake oil salesmen who claim to not only know better than trained doctors but that doctors aren’t to be trusted because they are in collusion with drug companies who poison patients. More importantly in the long run, it feeds the general perception that scientific truth is not objective and that you don’t actually need any academic qualifications in order to be a respected authority on scientific matters.

Currently the best example of how much damage the anti-intellectual crowd can do is the ridiculous argument against vaccinations. This profile of Paul Offit, a prominent scientist in the development and study of vaccines, in Wired should be required reading for anyone who isn’t convinced that the rise of alternative medicine is actively harmful. It is truly frightening how quickly the fad of parents refusing to have their children vaccinated has grown and how much damage it is already doing. Furthermore, it’s one thing if the parents are harming their own children by not getting them vaccinated, but it’s another thing when you consider that they’re endangering everyone else around them because a good vaccination program depends on everyone being vaccinated to work.

As the article explains, the fears about the risks posed by vaccines are completely groundless and even now diseases that were previously thought to have been vanquished are making a comeback because vaccination rates are dropping. The saddest part is that all this has happened before. In England and Wales in the late 19th century, an anti-smallpox vaccine movement got started causing the disease to flare up even though the vaccine had been invented in 1793. I guess this is what you get when people look to celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carey and Oprah Winfrey for scientific advice instead of actual scientists.

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (September ’09)

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A little late this month because I made more posts last week than I’d originally planned for but here are three articles for September, all of them related in some way with human nature and with two of them related to video gaming. Two of the articles are from The Economist. I suppose I should try to find the time to read more widely.

The first article from The Economist covers the development of muscles in human males as a way to attract mates. Naturally, muscles in human males are useful because men do most of the fighting and hunting, tasks in which physical strength is a great asset. However, William Lassek of the University of Pittsburgh and Steven Gaulin of the University of California, Santa Barbara believe that the evolution of prominent and visible muscles in men are also driven by sexual selection, just as the tail feathers of male peacocks are. Working on the assumption that sexually selected characteristics are expensive to maintain, the researchers found that men generally consume fifty percent more calories than women do, even after adjusting for different levels of physical activity.

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Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (August ’09)

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Three articles for August and surprisingly for this blog, not a single one of them has anything to do with human nature. Two are related to biology but are more interesting in the way that they serve as examples of how science can correct a past mistake, even a long held one, as well as how popular reporting can easily misinterpret a scientific finding. The remaining one is a piece on dark energy, found via The Sycologist.

The first article deals with what is commonly taught as the most useless of human organs: the lowly appendix. As this article which appeared on Yahoo! by way of Livescience.com explains, all of us have probably been taught at some point in our lives that the appendix not only serves no purpose, being a relic of our evolutionary past, but is in fact a potentially lethal liability if it becomes inflamed.

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News & Politics, Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (July ’09)

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Three articles this month and all of them are related in some way to the study of human nature. The first article touches on an explanation of why depression occurs from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. The second one demonstrates that humans really are that irrational when it comes to making economic decisions. The last one is on how caffeine might hold the key to curing Alzheimer’s disease.

The first article is from The Economist and covers a theory by Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan. Dr. Nesse thinks that depression can be thought of as being analogous to physical pain. Just as pain serves to dissuade us from doing things that cause us physical harm, so depression serves to dissuade us from doing things that cause us mental harm. By this, he means specifically the pursuit of unreachable goals. Since pursuing goals that are ultimately unreachable wastes precious time and energy, he theorizes that depression exists as a mechanism to inhibit doing so.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (July ’09) →

Science

H1N1 conspiracy theories

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Everyone put on your tin-foil hats. I’ve heard my share of healthcare-related conspiracy theories, but this one takes the cake. An Austrian journalist has filed charges against the World Health Organization (WHO) and key figures in the U.S. government for conspiracy to commit mass murder against virtually the entire population of the United States. She alleges that the current H1N1 pandemic is in fact a smoke and mirrors play. The virus, she claims, is a bio-engineered weapon that was deliberately released as a pretext to institute a mass vaccination programme in the United States. Rather than helping however, the forced vaccinations are designed to kill almost all of the population in the US, giving the surviving elite exclusive access to the vast natural resources of the country.

There’s really no need to go into the details of her story on how H1N1 was created, tested and deliberately released. The dumbest thing about the claim is the assertion that it is the natural resources of the country, rather than intellectual and creative powers of the U.S. population, from which the country’s wealth is derived. A cabal of Illuminati would be stupid indeed to kill off every else and be forced to subsist as hunter gatherers in the post-apocalyptic U.S. that would result.

There are whackos everywhere but what worries most at the moment are the anti-science, natural health nutjobs. I mean, the religious fundamentalists are pretty scary too, but they’re clearly on the fringe of society. But when you have someone like Oprah Winfrey making arguments on behalf of the anti-science crowd, they look more and more like the mainstream while the actual doctors and scientists are made out to look like bogeymen. Seriously, she’s telling millions of women that taking megadoses of hormones, and even injecting them directly into the vagina, is a valid anti-aging treatment and that thyroid problems are caused by women holding back what they have to say.

I’m not sure what can be done against this wave of anti-intellectualism and calling for more science education seems a bit trite, but this certainly reinforces my view that we shouldn’t allow science to be regarded as just another aspect of the truth, instead of being what it really is, the objective picture of reality as we currently know it.