Month: July 2015

On the Origin of Twats @AdamRutherford #bbcinsidescience

In the words of Adam Rutherford, Linnaeus was a twat.

Well I’ve got news for Adam; Rutherford is a twat. The standard of BBC science journalism and broadcasting has come to this. Adam previewed and then followed-up after his broadcast of BBC R4 Inside Science with smart-arse quips about no such thing as a species and “Chimps are monkeys, so suck on that.” And a few people picked up on the new “factoid”. Mercifully few so far. 

This is just so much politically motivated bollocks. Science is everything so we can say what we like and you can’t touch us. We don’t really care about the consequences, evolution will take care of things, we’re all dead, ultimately extinct, in the long run. Oh, how we laughed, not.

It’s not news that biological species are not what they appear. Scientifically speaking it’s about choosing your definition(s) and there are plenty to choose from. And, more and more genetic indicators give us more possible definitions, not fewer. And that blurring is compounded by the fact that the genes we are using as indicators are less and less objectively defined the closer we look too. More information equals less definition. Get used to it.

Moreover, choosing definitions is a political act. Always driven by your purpose, and how useful a given definition is to your purpose. This is Modelling 101. Taxonomy 101. Science is no different. Science’s models of life are just that. Models, not real life.

Biological species? Whether you look at inherited aspects at the DNA patterning or expressed physical properties and appearances level, most useful working definitions of species involve gene transfer processes – schoolboy tittering, you know – “shagging”. Jeez, gimme a break BBC.

Reproduction. If two individuals are able to successfully reproduce fertile offspring they must be the same species is how the common definition goes. But there are statistics and time and geographical population movements involved in that success. How many pairs of individuals in the population(s) and how far diverged from common ancestry are those individuals and the population averages, in both time and space. It’s easy to say “if they are able to reproduce”, but much harder to model that success meaningfully, and there are many variations in how that is done too (eg so-called circle species). ie not only are there other bases of definition besides reproductive capability, but even that definition has many variations in how it might be interpreted.

Common shared genes, or genetic content, is all the rage of course – but how much is just a number, the significance of which is chosen with statistical relevance to other numbers. And a common shared-ancestor gives a basis on which to make relative comparisons on shared genetics.

You could say (Taxonomy 101): “we are all members of the class (clade) we share in having a common hierarchical parent” – a common heritage. Using that heritage as the basis for membership of the class (set). In fact every two living things shares a common ancestry with at least one other earlier living thing. It’s as meaningful to say Humans are the same species as Neanderthal as it is meaningless to say Chimps are Monkeys. Oh, you’re 5% Neanderthal, well I’m only 2%. That may tell us something about our different lineages since the ancestor we share with Neanderthals, and thence about evolutionary genetic similarities and differences – ie useful science for explaining and understanding the processes involved.

In the programme, when Adam actually says “Chimps are monkeys” he does briefly qualify it with “kinda, but not really”. This is choosing the species definition in terms of sharing a common parent. And as the expert  @PaoloViscardi points out picking the (remote) common parent as your definition isn’t right, you should always talk just one-level down as the class, or in general taxonomy a more significant “Ur-Class” or “archetype” class. It’s just not useful, outside philosophical ontology, to say everything is a thing – even though it is trivially true in real life too.

All this is lost in the takeaway one-liners. Ultimately every two living individuals – however diverse their current species – share a common parent, a representative of a third extinct species, and one that’s pretty hard to pinpoint in most cases. A useless means of classifying individuals now.

Of course, these problems with the apparent meaningless of species are as nothing compared to narrower human concepts like race, and one reason why we ultimately learn that even with ethnic classifications, it’s about self-identity with groups that matter to us as individuals, not about immediate objective definitions of groups with well-defined boundaries. That’s a fools errand.

We are all monkeys? Yeah, and in the long run we’re all dead.

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[Post Note:

Sadly, turning Adam’s “mocking twat” accusation back on himself elicited only the denial and blocking response. Public scientist, in public broadcasting, publishing his opinions and conversations on public social media, in order to promote his media output, can dish it out but not take it apparently.

A couple of ironic tweeted responses to Adam’s reaction. “Capitalist conspiracy theory” particularly hilarious and wide of the mark. Do I not like conspiracy theories. No just the root issue here – the careless “arrogance” of scientific received wisdom.]  

Physical Science – A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing? @jonmbutterworth

Jon Butterworth in the Grauniad yesterday asks “Has physics cried wolf too often, or do false alarms help build understanding?“.

If you want a working understanding of the universe, which gives you the best chance of health for you and your loved ones, a stable environment to live in and cool gadgets to play with, science is absolutely the best we can do. But that doesn’t mean it is infallible. Particle physicist Brian Cox, much more of a logical positivist than a postmodern relativist, went so far as to say¹

“Science is never right.”

and he’s correct, in the sense that it is always provisional, and is never, or at least never should be, dogmatic.

The main line of the piece is the balance between over and under claiming the significance – or more often potential significance – of reported science. It is one of my recurring complaints – and the reason I’m a fan of Jon – that too many reports are over-hyped (#), for attention-and-budget-claiming reasons, particularly at the speculative boundaries of “known” science.

Cox on the other hand is reprehensible. This constant lip-service to contingency, whilst using this stuff that’s never right to take the piss out of anyone who disagrees. Cynically dishonest egotism of the logical positivist.

“I suppose the most important defect was that nearly all of it was false.”
A J Ayer erstwhile doyen of Logical Positivism.

Anyway, back to Jon and science being the best we can do?

  • Best working understanding of the [physical] universe? – check.
  • Best chance for our health? – check sorta – but medicine is not science (*).
  • Best for a stable environment? – not even close.
  • Best chance for cool gadgets [and even useful technologies]? – check.

2.5 out of 4 for science. Better science than not, but it’s not the best answer to everything.

And back to the issue of hype in science reporting. Clearly news, even of possibilities, is tremendously exciting at the cosmic and quantum boundaries of known science, but of course at these boundaries closest to the unknown, the science is at its most speculative and least accepted by scientific authority beyond the particular specialism.

Saying “science is never right” disingenuously blurs an important distinction. Sure all science is ultimately contingent, even the greatest and longest established knowledge, but there is a difference between science accepted non-contentiously as “knowledge” by scientific authority, and knowledge accepted as valid theory and significant evidence by specialists, but still considered as speculative by wider scientific authority.

Some things “deserve” to be believed, for now, by the non-specialist, as knowledge about the natural world. Others deserve to be recognised as valid theory, scientific work-in-progress, but not as knowledge. The speculative stuff helps build understanding amongst the specialists, but does not contribute directly to wider knowledge. Knowledge is never dogmatic; honest scepticism is the antithesis of dogma. Meanwhile, knowledge is useful stuff we can believe. It is cynical rather than sceptical to treat all science as falling into the same category of contingent knowledge.

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Note (*) Using science here as both the biology & chemistry-based knowledge, logic and technologies, and the mathematical and statistical analysis of objective evidence of medical conditions and outcomes, it is these “sciences” that make medicine distinctive, but do not wholly define it. Medicine would be sadly limited without love and the art of caring, not to mention the politics and economics of its organisation and provision. [Note this is quite different for the wider technology and gadget exploitation in society. If the politics is maintained to be free-market, organisation and provision can be driven entirely by objective logic, maths and stats. Customers buy it in numbers, or they don’t. Neither medicine, nor science for that matter, are free-markets, or even wholly objectively scientific.]

[Post Note : (#) Listening to Dorothy Bishop with Jim Al Khalili on BBC R4 The Life Scientific. Scientists (and journalists) need to be sensitive to different sorts of science and scientific knowledge. Hear Hear.]

Bonya Ahmed an Inspiration to Us All #BHAVoltaire @BHAhumanists

I was going to say “to all humanists” but you’d have to be something other than human not to be moved by Bonya Ahmed, the person and her story, speaking to a live public audience for the first time last night at the British Humanist Association 2015 Voltaire lecture in London.

“Wife of” murdered atheist blogger Avijit Roy is how most of us will have first come across Bonya, but she is very much all of atheist, secularist, rationalist, humanist thinker, writer and activist in her own person. A full transcription of her talk last night is already available on the English-language version of the Mukto-Mona rational free-thought blogging platform they set up with other Bangaldeshi bloggers. Giving free-thought a voice in the Bangla language was fundamental to their project. But the words of her talk were only the half of it

At pains not to be drawn into simplistic responses to complex questions, she emphasised the historical perspective of all human situations. And whilst thoughtfully researching the philosophical and historical underpinnings, she also emphasised that this had limited value without political action. It takes all of us to do all of this – we each must do our part of the whole. We can’t fight machetes with pens alone. In that striving for careful thought and balanced effective action, I personally couldn’t help but see a fellow-traveller. A fellow-traveller, in my case, in the comfort of a western secular democracy as chair Jim Al-Khalili pointed out. It was all I could do not to participate whilst she was talking.

Whatever the careful content of her messages, the passionate yet slight, unassuming individual shone through. Shining through, you kept having to remind yourself, not just the horrific death of her husband and father of their daughter, an attack in which she too was savagely maimed, not to mention already under treatment for existing cancer, debilitating personal experience few of us could even imagine. Only 4 months after that event the emotion was visible, yet contained, and the humour and humanity only ever one shyly unassuming smile away.

No wonder so many Tweets used awe-struck language. Courageous and inspiring to all of us it seemed. And a spontaneous emotional standing ovation that died only when Jim persuaded her to step down and leave the stage. The effect summed-up in Phil Walder’s tweet:

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[Post Note : Video of full event and talk online at BHA You Tube page.]

[Post Note : and some progress thanks to BHA and FCO.]