Skepticblog

Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice

—Historian Will Durant

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For days now, the southeastern United States has been pounded by record tornado outbreaks. Just over a month ago, Japan experienced the third largest earthquake ever recorded by seismographs, followed by a devastating series of tsunamis that may have killed tens of thousands. Add this to the major recent earthquakes in Chile, New Zealand, and Haiti, or Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or the Boxing Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, and the public is more aware than ever of the hazards of living on Planet Earth.

But before we overreact or act irrationally in fear of earthquakes or other natural disasters, we must step back a bit and put them in perspective. as I have done in my new book Catastrophes! Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Tornadoes, and other Earth-Shattering Disasters. Which ones cause the most damage? Which ones are the most dangerous to us in the short term? Which ones are dangerous in the long term? What things are most likely to kill you? What kinds of things are capable not only of hurting us as individuals, but destroying human civilization? (continue reading…)

Renmark North School, Grade 2, 1956. South Australia. Photo provided by Bonnie Poulter

[This week, I'd like to share a story excerpted from my recent LogiCON keynote. The speech is a bit on the personal side, as I'm sure you'll be able to tell. Much of it has to do with my own childhood. —Daniel]

My father has always been a wonderful storyteller.

When my brothers and I were little, my Dad would tuck us into our beds, “bristle” our cheeks with his stubble, and tell us stories or poems. We loved Australian bush poetry (we must have heard “Mulga Bill’s Bicycle” and “The Man From Ironbark” a thousand times), but our favorites were tales of his own childhood, growing up poor on the edge of the desert in South Australia. His Tom Sawyer-like childhood sounded magical to us: racing horses bareback over red sand, plucking oranges from the trees of his family’s tiny fruit farm, catching yabbies in the hidden backwaters of the River Murray.

Many of these stories had a subversive edge to them, I realize now. Many were direct lessons in skepticism.

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There is another major measles outbreak in Europe. The WHO reports:

The World Health Organization said Thursday that France had 4,937 reported cases of measles between January and March – compared with 5,090 cases during all of 2010. In all, more than 6,500 cases have been reported in 33 European nations.

That is four times the rate of 2010. I know – these reports are almost getting boring. The shock has worn off – we have come to accept that previously conquered diseases (at least reduced to minimal cases without outbreaks) have come back. The cause seems clear – outbreaks occur where herd immunity has been lost due to vaccine non-compliance. Fewer people are getting vaccinated, and not much fewer. But the numbers are falling below herd immunity levels in pockets. When vaccination rates fall below a certain level, then infectious organisms are able to spread and cause an outbreak.

The anti-vaccine movement has successfully spread unwarranted fear of vaccines, resulting in the compromise of herd immunity. There is a toll of morbidity and mortality associated with this movement.

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Dick Smith

While in Australia for The Amazing Meeting last year, I got to (very briefly) meet fellow speaker Dick Smith, a co-founder of the Australian Skeptics, serial entrepreneur, all-around snazzy gentleman, and former Chairman of Australia’s Civil Aviation Authority and its Civil Aviation Safety Authority. I became intrigued with a policy he advocated strongly during his years at the CAA and CASA and still continues to lobby for today. It’s called affordable safety. To get the complete idea, Dick offers a free book on the subject here, Unsafe Skies.

In a nutshell, affordable safety is, as its name suggests, the idea of making things as safe as we can reasonably afford to, allocating dollars where they are needed most. The status quo, Dick argues, is to continue overspending on outdated systems, hoping in vain that it will lead to that extra percentage point of safety, and creating a burdensome bureaucracy to support the Quixotic efforts. (continue reading…)

The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.

—Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, on “Real Time With Bill Maher”, Feb. 4, 2011

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

—Philip K. Dick, author

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

—Carl Sagan

In recent years, both philosophers and science deniers (such as creationists) have repeatedly attacked the objectivity of science and scientists. Creationists claim that scientists are big frauds, deceived by a mass delusion about evolution. They argue that the stratigraphic sequence of fossils in the rock record is faked by evolutionists who shuffle the fossils and the strata in the order they need to prove evolution, then allegedly point to the same sequence as proof of evolution. (Never mind the fact that the objective, empirical sequence of fossils through geologic time was worked out by devoutly religious naturalists like William Smith and Georges Cuvier before 1800, at least 50 years before evolution was published by Charles Darwin). The Creation “Museum” in Kentucky is built upon the basic premise that “evolution scientists” and “creation scientists” start with the same data, but view them with different assumptions about the world–the fossils cannot speak for themselves, nor can the evidence falsify one position or the other.

On the other hand, philosophers and cultural critics have attacked science as well. Some philosophers have argued that outside reality is an illusion, and we can only know what we personally experience. If we do not perceive it, reality does not exist. More recently, the fad for deconstructionism in the non-scientific realms of academia argues that all our ideas are so culturally based and biased by our human prejudices that we cannot decide what is “real” or “objective.” This argumentation has gone in circles within philosophy for centuries. Philosophers of science, in particular, are fond of telling scientists what they should do, often without finding out what scientists actually do. (continue reading…)

A Review of Transcendent Man: A Film About the Life and Ideas of Ray Kurzweil. Produced by Barry Ptolemy, Music by Philip Glass, inspired by the book The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. Digital release March 1, DVD release May 25.

Beware the prophet who proclaims the end of the world, the apocalypse, doomsday, judgment day, the second coming, the resurrection, or the Biggest Thing to Happen to Humanity ever will happen in the prophet’s own lifetime. It is our natural inclination to assume that we are special and that our generation will witness the new dawn, but the Copernican Principle tells us that we are not special. Thus, the chances that even a science-based prophecy such as that proffered by the futurist, inventor, and scientistic visionary extraordinaire Ray Kurzweil—that by 2029 we will have the science and technology to live forever—is unlikely to be fulfilled.

Transcendent Man is Barry Ptolemy’s beautifully crafted and artfully edited documentary film about Kurzweil and his quest to save humanity. If you enjoy contemplating the Big Questions in Life from a scientific perspective, you will love this film. Accompanied by the eerily haunting music of Philip Glass who, appropriately enough, also scored Errol Morris’ film The Fog of War—about another bigger-than-life character who thought he could mold the world through data-driven decisions, Robert McNamara—Transcendent Man pulls viewers in through Kurzweil’s visage of a future in which we merge with our machines and vastly extend our longevity and intelligence to the point where even death will be defeated. This point is what Kurzweil calls the “singularity” (inspired by the physics term denoting the infinitely dense point at the center of a black hole), and he arrives at the 2029 date by extrapolating curves based on what he calls the “law of accelerating returns.” This is “Moore’s Law” (the doubling of computing power every year) on steroids, applied to every conceivable area of science, technology and economics. (continue reading…)

By now most readers have likely seen the famous basketball-passing video. But if you have not, check it out here before reading further. It’s a fun test, but will be spoiled by the discussion here.

The phenomenon demonstrated by the video is called inattentional blindness (I have also seen attentional blindness and inattention blindness). It reflects the fact that we have a finite capacity to process information. We cannot attend to all the sensory information coming from our environment at the same time, let alone do that and attend to other cognitive tasks as well, like solving a math problem. So, moment to moment, we apply our finite capacity selectively to one or a few tasks. The more tasks we try to do simultaneously (multitasking) the fewer cognitive resources can be applied to each task, and performance suffers.

Most people cannot effectively multitask, even if they think they can. Only about 2.5% of people can genuinely multitask – perform two demanding cognitive tasks simultaneously without both suffering. For most people, multitasking comes at a price. We can divide our attention, but not without a decrease in performance. Many states now have laws reflecting this research – prohibiting talking on cell phones while driving.

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I’m writing this on the evening of Monday, April 11, 2011. As Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis is an ongoing event, things will change by then; and if it’s necessary to update this post by the time it goes live on Thursday, I shall so notate.

Today I received at least a dozen emails, Facebook messages, and tweets telling me that the INES (International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale) severity level, which had been a 5 (same as Three Mile Island) for some weeks, had been raised to a 7 (same as Chernobyl). I was a bit surprised, because I’m following a number of sources pretty closely, and it seems impossible that this would have escaped my notice. So I searched around a bit and followed all the popular reports back to their source. Here’s what happened.

Slowly but surely, they’ve been getting the crisis sorted. It’s going to be a long, slow process, which is not terribly newsworthy from a headlines standpoint. However, earlier today, a Japanese media report stated that some within Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission were calling for it to be raised from a 5 to a 7, but it wasn’t actually done (yet). Happy to have some sensational news to report, since nothing interesting had happened at the plant for a week or so, worldwide media picked it up. Even the front page headline at CNN.com shouted that JAPAN’S NUCLEAR CRISIS MAY REACH THE HIGHEST THREAT LEVEL IN HISTORY!!!

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Biologist and paleontologists are all familiar with the name of Lynn Margulis. Now 73, she made her reputation in the 1960s for her “endosymbiosis” hypothesis: the idea that complex eukaryotic cells with all their organelles were assembled from prokaryotes which came to live symbiotically within the walls of other prokaryotic cells. Her hypothesis was first proposed by Merezhovsky in 1905 and Wallin in 1920, but Margulis used the great advances in microscopy and microbiology in the 1960s to show that the idea was highly plausible. At first, her papers were rejected by at least 15 journals before they were finally published. But as time passed, the evidence for much of her “outrageous idea” continued to accumulate. It does indeed appear that the chloroplasts of the eukaryotic cell are derived from symbiotic cyanobacteria (as it is common that many animals, from large benthic foraminifera to hermatypic corals to giant clams, use algae in their own tissues symbiotically), and that mitochondria were once purple non-sulfur bacteria. The best evidence comes from the fact that organelles have their own DNA independent of the cell’s nuclear DNA (we hear about research on mitochondrial DNA all the time); that organelles can divide independently of their host cell and have their own ribosomes; that organelles can be killed by antibiotics, just like their prokaryote ancestors, while the host cell is not killed. In addition, there are now numerous examples of eukaryotes which still use endosymbiotic prokaryotes to perform various functions, and have not completely absorbed and transformed them into organelles of the host cell. Over the years, Margulis has promoted additional ideas about the importance of symbiosis in biology, and has become a major advocate of the “Gaia” hypothesis and how all of life is dependent on the rest of life in an intricate, delicate web.

Margulis’ sheer determination in getting her ideas heard, and finding scientific evidence to support them, was remarkable, especially in a age where the idea was highly unorthodox. But she was never an orthodox scientist to begin with. Admitted to the University of Chicago when she was 14, she married Carl Sagan when she was 19, and her son Dorion Sagan is a frequent coauthor with her on her books. Her other child with the great astronomer, Jeremy Sagan, is a software developer and the founder of Sagan Technology. As the years go by and more and more people recognize her pioneering work, she has received all sorts of honors: membership of the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, the 1999 National Medal of Science, the 2008 Darwin-Wallace Medal, the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement, and her papers are archived at the Library of Congress. (continue reading…)

Daniel Loxton Keynote Address at LogiCON 2011. Photo by Mark Iocchelli

Last weekend I was honored to deliver the keynote address at LogiCON, a skeptical event held at Edmonton’s Telus World of Science. It’s an amazing facility, and it was an inspiring event.

LogiCON

Organized by the Greater Edmonton Skeptics Society, LogiCON 2011 was a curated sequel to (and departure from) a successful 2010 event built on the open SkeptiCamp model.

Billed as “Critical Thinking for Everyone,” LogiCON was explicitly conceived and promoted as a science outreach event rather than as a rally for self-identified skeptics. Though it incidentally did bring together Edmonton’s skeptical community, it was designed first and foremost to introduce the public to science-based approaches to evidence in general — and to many paranormal claims in particular. (continue reading…)