Reflections on science and human nature

All right, the news comes so thick and fast that no postings of mine can keep up, except to share with you a deep hope that our professional protector castes - who defeated Hitler and stymied Stalin, Mao and bin Laden and created an unbeatable alliance of free peoples - are on the ball. (Ironically, this is the first year in ten that I haven't consulted with one or another of those agencies, offering warnings that all-too often came true.) 

And so, for sanity's sake... in order to recall that 'sanity' is even a thing... let's step back and take a bigger perspective.

== The Pursuit of Truth ==

For example, a selfish argument for making the world a better place: this video on Egoistic Altruism about the key concept of our times - the Positive Sum Game - is very persuasive.  

Consider also the insights of Roger Bacon's pursuit of truth....“This year marks what is believed by many to be the 800th birthday of an especially courageous truth seeker, the English polymath Roger Bacon (1214 - 1292). Though other scientists came before him, his breadth of study has led many to call him “the first scientist.” Were he alive today, Bacon would likely be pursuing the truth about such matters as the coronavirus and its effects on society, as well as the need for personal and political virtues to overcome it.”

“Bacon believed that the improvement of human life, both personally and socially, depends on the eradication of error. To correct what ails society, it is necessary to restore respect for learning, real-world experience and the pursuit of truth. So long as people go forth with a false map of reality, they will lose their way and never reach their true destination." 

Roger Bacon argued that there are four causes of error: 
1) weak and unworthy authority, 
2) longstanding customs, 
3) the opinions of ignorant crowds, and 
4) the hiding of ignorance through displays of apparent knowledge…. What people often lack, Bacon believed, are not correct answers but the best questions.”

Further “…he called for experimentation, but not only in the sense of a scientific laboratory. He believed that people should put their ideas on trial, seeing how well they fare when tested in the real world of experience. What doesn’t hold up should be rejected.” And this essay’s author adds: “The last thing any good political leader needs is to be surrounded by yes men.”

To which let me add my own guideposts, in the form of a Questionnaire on Ideology which some of you have taken, carefully designed to get you to interrogate - at least briefly - some of your own 'fundamentals.' A whole lot more challenging that Donald Trump's dementia test.

Take it, if you dare!

== Experimental evidence against cynicism about human nature ==

Since 1951, one novel has typified the cynically pessimistic view that human beings are inherently nasty and selfish and brutal. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was certainly a masterpiece, presenting us with Jungian archetypes like the hero, the hunter, the mystic and the civilized man – and it ripped away the naïve notion that civilization is anything more than a veneer, whose restraints, if ever loosened, meant immediate return to chaos.

Or else something worse than chaos – a return to the form of ‘government’ that dominated maybe 99% of the last 6000 years. 

Certainly these are topics I’ve chewed upon, in works from The Postman and Earth to The Transparent Society. And yes, while deeply impressed by Golding’s novel, it was a very Hobbesian view of us. I hoped and prayed and gathered evidence that he was wrong.

And it seems the experiment was run, pretty much perfectly, when, almost exactly cribbing from Lord of the Flies, in 1966 half a dozen Tongan school boys had to survive as castaways on a rocky islet for 15 months… and they exhibited absolutely none of the nasty traits that Golding implied were inevitable. Cooperating to an almost obsessive degree, caring for each other, resolving disputes and setting broken bones, they innovated and retained their compassion up to the moment of rescue, and later served together on a fishing boat.

This is important, because cynicism is the poison being spread not just by the entire Putin-Murdoch right but also some elements on the left, catering to the ingrate laziness of those who dislike what’s demanded by the contingently optimistic among us. 

Hard work and maybe a little heroism, to help save a planet and civilization that’s been very good to them.

== The Science of Deception ==

Inside corporations' war on science: we've seen an excess of bogus science paid for by companies seeking a pre-biased outcome are familiar from tobacco and Big Oil industries  - to sugar, chemical and pharmaceutical companies. There are ‘studies' denying health harms from smog… even while - in my childhood - it was physical agony to breathe. Similarly, for months, the Fox network promoted the idea that the coronavirus was a hoax.

See the recently published book - The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception. David Michaels dissects the methods many corporations use to sow doubt, uncertainty and confusion in the public sphere. Michals comments, "It's mostly because the laws are written in a way that parallels the criminal justice system. So the assumption is that exposures, pollutants, chemicals are innocent until proven guilty." 

And finally... Caltech’s “The Lonely Idea” podcast demonstrates how top scientists nurture curiosity that’s impudent and challenging – diametrically opposite to the “herd mentality” accusation hurled by those who would never recognize a fresh idea, themselves. And here's another good one.

Science - or "scientism"?

I’ll finish with one of my roundups of some amazing news from the frontiers of science! But first, a little philosophizing about just what kind of an era we are living in.

== Anti-“scientism”? ==

I’ve been accused of scientism -- belief that scientific knowledge somehow yields insight into the supposedly separate category of moral knowledge. A typical hate-reflex against science is to label it in terms that adversaries know will be deemed insulting by scientists: i.e. dismissing it as just another religion. This happens at both ends of the political spectrum.

1. Those who operate in more traditional mental modes tend to see things in zero-sum terms and assume that truth is found in incantations. Hence on the 'right' you are damned if you question received dogma. On the 'left' you have fewer anti-science cultists, but they are intense.

2. Science is terrifying to such folks, because it invokes objective reality as an arbitrator of disputes. A 'god' of sorts who actually answers 'prayers' for intercession and ruling on true incantations. This is offensive to those who fear their spells may be rendered useless or become objects of derision. Or forgotten. 

Postmodernists respond by doubling down that text is everything and efforts to apply experimental evidence are simply male-western-white bullying. Rightists are remarkably similar, but less creative. 

3. Since they operate in cabals of incantation, they assume it's what scientists do. In fact, "science" is not the essential thing that has changed. The new thing that's entered the world is competitive reciprocal accountability, of which science is just the most powerful application. Others include adversarial justice courts and free-fair elections. And all of these 'liberal' inventions are now under open attack.

(BTW I have a monograph on modern theology. And while many dogmatists are fanatical, I have found other religious folk to be far more willing to engage in fair disputation than hostile campus postmodernists.)

But the advantages of science go beyond competitive effects of reciprocal accountability. Both the underlying assumptions of science and the cornucopia outcomes are positive sum, a concept that a great many humans - even educated ones - cannot grasp, even in theory. 

4. I have found that two counter-memes can be effective. To those who criticize science, or the west, or America, or etc., but who appear to be folks of good will (especially youths) hold up a mirror. 

"Look at yourself! Your reflex to criticize and to be unsatisfied with a situation that has benefited you above all other generations: where did that critical reflex come from? Did you invent Suspicion of Authority? Or did you suckle it from almost every Hollywood film and from countless songs?  

"Is it possible that you learned it from a civilization whose very success has depended upon new systems of internal criticism that now pervade almost every university or TV show?  An error-correction system, based on relentless error-discovery through criticism, of which you are now a part?"

We're not asking you, on realizing this, to give up your passion for change, for expansion of horizons of inclusion, or to stop complaining about hoary old assumptions or injustice! Error-targeting by brash critics is our only chance to cross the minefield ahead! Still, you'll be a stronger warrior for justice if you calmly see the synergies and who might be unexpected allies.

Science has been instrumental in disproving so many prejudices earlier generations took for granted, such as the physical incapability of women - (Have you watched the womens' soccer World Cup?). Or the notion that other races cannot achieve intellectual excellence, or that tobacco is safe, or that it's harmless for rivers to catch fire. Those opposing injustice and wanting a healthy Earth have been empowered by science.

5. To those who are committed anti-modernists of either today's far-left or entire (mad) right, I find one weapon that's partly effective. Wagers. Blunt dares to put money on their assertions. No, you won't get rich: 99% of the time they refuse, they weasel and flee (a reward in its own right). But on occasion (especially when you use the words "ocean acidification") the threat of a bet causes someone with a sliver of residual honesty to back down and admit they had been too grand in their declarations. It's a step.

== Amazing items from the discovery horizon ==

The beginning of uplift? Frankly, I expected this particular insertion experiment back in the 1990s. The effect of one alteration on monkey brains is apparently substantial, though still only a baby step.

Have you been following news that 'Impossible' meatless meat will make a Whopper and 'Beyond' meatless meat is skyrocketing in stock value? Now add the fact that cultured chicken is getting closer. All of this makes it feel more like a sci fi world than most space stuff! And these developments might (we can hope) be as big a game changer as the white light LED bulb or plummeting solar cell prices. Now — Seafood Without The Sea: Will Lab-Grown Fish Hook Consumers?

For it to be a world changer, meat substitution must come in 3-5 years, not 25. What's also needed? Algae industry at huge scale. Could provide zero-net carbon fuels plus basic feed stock for all those meat substitutes. And in a pinch, we could eat algae. Or feed it to crickets. Ideally the algae farms would take up the entire south face of urban towers, letting cities feed themselves.

The best thing on Netflix: Our Planet is more than just another “nature show.” The first episode, narrated by David Attenborough, shows things I never, ever saw before in 60 years of watching such shows! The HD is simply stunning. And yes, there is no better way to lure your delusional-denialist cousin back toward some kind of awareness and light.

An army of micro-robots to swarm your mouth - attack bacterial biofilms and clean your teeth? Where do they go to work next - when swallowed?

See an image of one of the1000 or so cubes of purified… but not isotope separated… uranium that the Nazi regime created in their chaotic and (fortunately) extremely dumb efforts to develop nuclear power during WWII. Their concept involved no isotopic refinement, was clueless about the possibility of carbon as a moderator, (leaving them with heavy water which the allies and brave partisans destroyed), and their initial reactor design was insane, having none (at all) of the brilliant control methods invented by the team of Enrico Fermi, in Chicago. Yet there are romantics out there who proclaim there was superior “Nazi Science.” 

There was almost zilch Nazi science! They retained a number of fairly solid engineers, like Von Braun, after chasing nearly all the seriously-alpha scientists away. That’s what romantic-dogmatic jerks do. Almost an identical reflex underlies today’s romantic-confederate-foxite war on science… along with every other fact centered profession.

And no, that's not "scientism." It is self-interest, to defend the human trend that refuted past travesties, gave us nearly all our knowledge and wealth, and is rapidly teaching us what we need in order to become decent planetary managers.

Science updates!

It's hard to evade politics, even in a weekend science update. for example when a top Republican factotum declares: “Science is a Democrat thing.” 

Um. They say it proudly! Yes, science, but also every single fact-based profession. Including medicine, law, teaching, journalism and those "deep state" enemies -- the Intel/FBI/military officer corps -- who know that fact and science and climate change are real.

== Long ago at least they had an excuse for ignorance... ==

As we re-examine our distant past...

We’re finding numerous past eras when the male population in a region was winnowed to a narrow gene pool or else replaced by newcomers. One massive swing happened about 12,000 years ago, about the same time that two technologies might have exacerbated male death rates: agricultural kingdoms and the availability of plentiful beer. (This is actually my own theory, based upon traveller reports from Polynesia and other places that told of kings ordering the instant death of offending louts. It would help explain human resistance to addiction, which though terribly imperfect is greater than in most species.)

Now comes evidence that a mass migration of males transformed the genetic make-up of people in Spain during the Bronze Age. “It remains unclear whether there was a violent invasion or whether a male-centric social structure played an important role.”  Interesting article!  And yet, in my “contrarian gadfly” role, I must point out that while dominance by top king-chief-patriarchs seems the most likely explanation, there IS another way that a Y chromosome winnowing could have occurred. 

Female dominance. There have been a few cases of matriarchy in which women councils exerted strong control over which males were allowed to breed. It is quite conceivable (get it?) for such councils to enforce hypergamy – preference to share those males who meet strict standards, rather than “settle” for average. 

A mild version of this practice was seen among the Cherokee and Iroquois, for example.  Yes, our sad litany of nasty and oppressive patriarchies was far more common. But it’s wrong simply to assume that Y chromosome winnowing happened because of inter-male strife. It might have been female selection, which is actually the great driver of evolution in many non-human species.

== More evidence from the past ==

And the Denisovan story gets even more complicated and strange: our Denisovan cousins may have mated with modern humans as recently as 15,000 years ago.

A fossil discovery in North Dakota is strongly believed to be a fish that was blasted and killed precisely the very day that the Cretaceous ended with the Chicxulub meteorite impact, 66 million years ago, the most incredible (and precise) paleontological discovery of the century, so far. If this story is even 5% true...wow. Just wow.

Meanwhile a new fossil trove in China - the Qingjiang biota - has yielded thousands of Cambrian period specimens, with dozens of new species, yet to be named.

Gabonionta are the earliest multicellular macroscopic organisms discovered so far, vastly older –by almost 4x ! – than previous evidence for complex life. Known only from their fossilized mucous trails in black shale from Gabon. Likely something like colonial amoebae or slime molds, they seem to have appeared almost right after Earth finally got appreciable oxygen in its atmosphere. Good science reporting.

My old Caltech housemate Joe Kirschvink has done it again, proving (with colleagues) that humans have a small but verified sensitivity to magnetic fields. 

== Tech updates ==

Via Peter Diamandis: Researchers at Boston University have mathematically designed a 3D acoustic metamaterial that can block up to 94 percent of noise flowing through it. Most dramatically, however, the 3D-printed structure reflects noise-producing vibrations without impeding the passage of light or airflow itself.

GauGAN, from NVIDIA, may be the “MS Paint for the AI age.” Using a generative adversarial network (GAN) trained on 1 million Flickr images, GauGAN can create photorealistic images from just a few lines drawn by a user. As an example, a user could click on “tree,” draw a line, and GauGAN will create an image of a tree trunk.

And “Google has successfully shrunk its speech algorithm storage demands down to 80MB, rendering its speech recognizer small enough to fit on your smartphone, and work offline.”

A world game-changer would be to wean billions off cattle or other inefficient and eco-damaging meats, either with vegetable substitutes like the (yummy) Beyond Burger or else real-meat by tissue culture. Latest: “Memphis Meats, for example, recently filed a patent describing a method to create real chicken and beef tissue using CRISPR.”

Goodyear unveiled its new concept Aero tire, designed to run on roads and double as a propulsion system for flying vehicles.  Yes, the tires become rotors capable of downward thrust and lift. Yipe. Amazing tech.

Optical interferometry has long promised to help us parse distant planets from their hugely brighter nearby stars. Now a group claims to have done it. But then, a few weeks later, we got that image of a real black hole(!) via a method very similar.

 == short takes ==

Methane is so good at trapping heat that one ton of the gas causes 32 times as much warming as one ton of CO2. And Methane is spiking. The possible sources are worrisome. The GOP blocked Obama efforts to fund more inspectors to prevent venting from oil fields. But Trump savagely cut them further and progress toward an international treaty have foundered. 

Even worse are signs that methane is bubbling forth from permafrost and undersea hydrate ices, threatening the “blurp” cascade that would truly make it all deadly, making Earth an almost literal hell. These people are outright enemies of your children.

Slime molds’ ability to reconfigure their volume while fleeing from spots of light has enabled scientists to use these biological computers to solve complex mathematical  conundrums like the Traveling Salesman Problem.

Our opportunity to save ourselves includes ideas like the “Circular Economy.” Watch the video. Then re-read Earth?

An article on Vox discusses the latest silly-wrongheaded attempt by zealots to shout “messages” into the cosmos without ever doing risk analysis or talking it over with the rest of humanity, or allowing their assumptions to be examined. The saddest part is their dislike of science fiction, since SF explores a wide horizon of possibilities, and their religious fanaticism allows for only one.

Wallace’s bee, the size of your thumb and thought extinct, rediscovered!

Evidence that the huge Deccan Traps volcanic eruptions started just before the Yucatan asteroid impact, and hence may have severely weakened the dinosaurs and other species… but then got even worse after the impact, possibly tightening the noose. “The researchers' dates are also consistent with a major shift in the properties of the erupted rock occurring at the same time as the impact. This supports the idea that the impact's seismic effects reached across the entire planet.”

Wired ran a story on Valentine’s Day about OpenAI, the nonprofit institute founded by Elon Musk and Y Combinator founder Sam Altman, which has apparently designed a system that can learn natural language patterns better than any previous attempt so far after feeding it eight million web pages to train it. What is newsworthy to me about this is what they did next: they stopped to consider the implications.  “It could be that someone who has malicious intent would be able to generate high-quality fake news,” an OAI vice president told Wired.

We are a glorious, scientific civilization. Pictures of black holes! SpaceX triple landings! New disease cures! Meat substitutes! And if the enemies of all this want to make this partisan, then let's go.

Science - Tech Updates - we're incredible

Let's get caught up on some of the reasons we should realize that we're already way-great...

== Travels & speeches on space and the future! ==

In October I participated in the annual symposium -- in Boston -- of NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program, as a member of NIAC's external (advisory) council. My role, to ask targeted questions of the fellows who are using seed grants to probe the envelope of the usefully plausible. Some earlier NIAC concepts are incorporated in wondrous missions like the exciting Japanese Hyubusa2 probe and its ingenious landers.

You can see near real-time photos of that spaceflight action. This video is truly wonderful. A spectacular mission that has already has successes. But if they pull off both landings and the sample return it will be fantastic! The Japanese are smart, they know where the riches are. And thank you for not catching the insane Moon Fever that has infected so many others here on Earth.

And now some other amazing news from the frontiers of science!

== Tune in! ==

Moving toward our future in space: The Power of Synergy: was an amazing symposium - the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop 2018 in October, in Oak Ridge. Speakers like Marc Millis and Arlan Andrews talked starships and Joel Sercel and Rob Zubrin argued asteroids and Mars. Several astronauts and Jason Derleth, head of NIAC revealed amazing things plus news about the quantum realm and the Starshot Program. 

SF author Catherine Asaro is an organizer and Allen Steele capped things off… oh, and I spoke a bit, by Skype, about human modification and conscious AI. Have a look.

== Environmental & science updates ==

A disturbing article about how some species of whale are suffering from living near human “civilization,” even after we stopped trying to kill them. It will take concerted effort to reduce the inadvertent types of harm that might lead to extinction, as surely as hunting almost did.

China wants to build a $50+ trillion power grid. For the entire world. And they want to have it in operation by 2050. Talk about ambitious.

Fascinating new magnetotelluric imagery reveals a plug of solid rock in Oregon that diverts magma in different directions.  This new imagery solves mystery of why Mount St. Helens is out of line with other volcanoes.

Calling the Prediction Registry! The Pentagon has put a contract to develop a dental implant letting wearers do tap-controls and sub-vocal speech input/output, as I depicted in EARTH (1989) and EXISTENCE (2012).

The latest IgNobel Awards. Turns out human flesh isn’t very nutritious, but you can to self-colonoscopies! And voodoo dolls have a useful function.

“Bio-feedback” is back under a new name: Neurofeedback. Using MRI and fMRI and EEG, researchers hope to revive a field that never panned out before, but we all know _ought to work! The signs have all been there, with lots of anecdotal support. I’d put money on it having a big future, especially if tied in with games, in just the right way. I have some ideas…

Stunning - and disturbing - new NASA satellite photo shows a planet on fire, with active wildfires raging from Africa to South America to California. It's just beginning. The world is changing. I'll get back to that.

Teller, the brilliant sleight-of-hand artist of Penn & Teller, contributed to a neuroscience paper about the mental phenomena that a magician uses in the art of misdirection. “The concept of covert misdirection is exemplified by the cognitive-neuroscience paradigms of change blindness and inattentional blindness. With change blindness, people fail to notice that something is different from the way it was before. This change can be expected or unexpected, but the key is that it requires the observer to compare the post-change state with the pre-change state.” 

Will tissue culture meat - predicted in science fiction in the early 50s -- truly flourish and replace the whole 20,000 year old practice of herding and slaughtering animals for food? Certainly, if the quality is high and price acceptable, some will choose it for the low Karmic load. But it will be a game changer if the conversion of grain to meat is far more efficient than feed lots. Reducing greenhouse gas and a myriad other Earth-harms would be huge, and hunger could vanish... though so would some jobs and herder livelihoods. Cities would approach food autonomy. 

And we'd eliminate one more reason why (maybe) aliens aren't talking to us.

My old Caltech classmate Stephen Gillett has a provocative new book that proposes we may soon enter a post-scarcity world, because almost any scarcity will be solved by one bold technology. “Nanotechnology and the Resource Fallacy” asserts we won’t even need the fantastic riches of asteroids, let alone face “peak-oil” or any material scarcity, if vats of pico-nano-micro-machines are able to separate and refine into basic elements almost anything we choose to recycle. Of course it works both ways. Utter and total recycling ability will eliminate all great obstacles to human settlement of space. Invest... but not everything you own.

== And yes, science is a victim of politics ==

In the 42 year history of the post of Presidential Science Adviser, some of the smartest humans have been appointed to help U.S. presidents grasp how scientific matters — confirmed facts and gray-unknowns — might bear upon policy decisions. Never was the position unoccupied anywhere near as long as Donald Trump has left it.

Elsewhere I commented in detail when it seemed that the job might go to David Gelernter, a Unabomber victim who has veered down far right paths… but who undoubtedly told Mr. Trump “I’ll still tell you if something is clearly untrue.” Poof, there went his chances. 

All this time, “the highest-ranking science official in the White House has been a 31-year-old poli-sci grad who is a deputy assistant at the eviscerated Office of Science and Technology Policy.” (Not even ‘in’ the White House; OSTP (what’s left of it) is next door, in the Executive Office Building.)

Now, in a shock — possibly a sop to the RASRs (residually adult-sane Republicans) who still teeter inside the GOP tent — meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier, an expert on extreme weather, has been nominated to the position. 

Extreme weather would seem to be a highly pertinent topic, nowadays, and Droegemeier’s former colleagues say his views on climate change align with those of most scientists. And… “There are other scientific policy concerns that would benefit from a fully staffed OSTP, like the ongoing opioid epidemic.” Here are ten topics for consideration by the future science advisor.

Something happened behind the scenes. May we all live to learn what it was. Because this is not in character for the Donald Trump who railed that “glaciers are advancing as never before!”  (Um they’re not and you should get big bar bets from your mad uncles about that.) In any event, there is no law that says the President has to ever meet with his Science Adviser.

(That would change, under my proposal: Enact the FACT ACT!)