Science

Pharyngula summarizes and augments a list of characteristics from the Give Up Blog common to those who deny the existence of various things, whether that be the Holocaust, global warming, HIV causing AIDS, the actions of Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001, or other well-established phenomena. Key features: 1. Conspiracy 2. Selectivity 3. The fake expert 4. Impossible expectations 5. The metaphor 6. The quote mine 7. Appeal to consequences I recommend reading both the Give Up Blog’s original list and descriptions and Pharyngula’s extended list. ...

In a short Eugenie Scott co-authored study published in Science, the United States had the 33rd lowest acceptance of evolution out of 34 countries polled; only Turkey had lower acceptance. No doubt Harun Yahya had something to do with that. The measurement was whether one thought the following statement was true or false: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” Answers were multiple choice: true, false, not sure or does not know. The full ranking: (Via stranger fruit, where commenters have noted a possible correlation with rankings of levels of happiness. It doesn’t look like much of a correlation–the happiness rankings were 1. Denmark, 2. Switzerland, 3. Austria, 4. Iceland, 5. Bahamas, 23. United States, 35. Germany, 41. Britain, 62. France, 82. China, 90. Japan, 125. India. There’s a slightly better correlation with rankings of percentage of atheists: 1. Sweden, 3. Denmark, 4. Norway, 6. Czech Republic, 7. Finland, 8. France, 10. Estonia, 11. Germany, 13. Hungary, 14. Netherlands, 15. Britain, 16. Belgium, 17. Bulgaria, 18. Slovenia, 21. Latvia, 22. Slovakia, 23. Switzerland, 24. Austria, 27. Spain, 28. Iceland, 32. Greece, 34. Italy, 37. Lithuania, 42. Portugal, 43. United States. Turkey and Cyprus didn’t make the top 50 for percentage of atheists.) UPDATE (February 20, 2009): It is interesting that western democracies without a strong history of church and state are those where religion is weakest and acceptance of evolution is highest. Turkey, the only OECD country with lower acceptance of evolution than the United States, is a Muslim democracy with a strongly enforced separation of church and state. Iceland and Denmark, the top two, are Lutheran, and Sweden, at #3, was officially Lutheran until it began introducing the separation of church and state in 1995. France and Japan, at #4 and #5, are perhaps counter-examples, both rounding out the bottom of the top five and having fairly strong separation of church and state, though Japan’s was first imposed by the U.S. occupation after WWII. The UK, at #6, is Anglican; Norway, at #7, is Lutheran but expected to remove the official religion clause from its Constitution by 2012; Belgium, at #8, is officially Catholic and also funds other religions; Spain, at #9, is officially Catholic; Germany, at #10, guarantees freedom of religion but the state funds both Catholic and Protestant churches via “church tax”; Italy, at #11, is Catholic; the Netherlands, at #12, has constitutional freedom of religion but funds religions.

The Goldwater Institute sent out an email today titled “Some Like It Hot” by Robert C. Balling, Jr., a global warming skeptic who is a climatology professor at Arizona State University (and a Goldwater Institute Senior Fellow). It’s short, so I’ll quote it in full: This summer treated us to the films “Too Hot Not To Handle” and Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” as well as news that the Supreme Court will decide whether carbon dioxide (CO2) should be considered a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Reinforcing the idea that CO2 is a pollutant, Gore and others often speak of “CO2 pollution.” Before you train yourself to add the “p” word to your vocabulary, consider that CO2 comes from the Earth itself and its levels have fluctuated greatly throughout history. At one point, atmospheric CO2 levels dropped drastically and came perilously close to suffocating the global ecosystem. If someone is concerned about dangerous levels of atmospheric CO2, too low is far more dangerous than too high. Experiments show that when CO2 levels increase, plants grow faster and bigger. In order to make CO2 more sinister, claims are made that ragweed and poison ivy will grow more vigorously in the future, and indeed they will. But so will every tree in the forest. There is no doubt that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that when elevated will act to warm the Earth. However, its levels have fluctuated enormously over the history of the Earth, and the ecosystems of the planet have adjusted to cope with these variations. The Supreme Court ruling will be interesting, but Mother Earth has clearly ruled that CO2 is not a pollutant. Dr. Robert C. Balling Jr. is a Goldwater Institute Senior Fellow and is a professor in the climatology program at Arizona State University, specializing in climate change and the greenhouse effect. A longer version of this article originally appeared on TCSDaily.com.The big problem with this piece is a very critical omission. The last paragraph admits that CO2 elevation causes global warming, but says that its levels have “fluctuated enormously” over the history of the earth. But it fails to tell us what the record of CO2 fluctuation shows and where we stand today in comparison to the existing past record, leaving the reader with the false impression that the current levels are within normal historical fluctuations. CO2 levels today are much higher than they have been in the last 400,000 years (which I believe has now been extended to 600,000 years), as documented by CO2 levels in Antarctic ice cores. To quote Steve Albers at NOAA: The reason I would be most concerned is not what has happened so far, but what can very possibly happen if we stay on the present course. Carbon dioxide (CO2) mainly from fossil fuel burning is being released into the atmosphere faster than natural processes can remove it, thus increasing atmospheric concentrations. The rate of rise in CO2 concentration has been increasing as well, from about 1.3 parts per million per year several decades ago to about 2.2 ppm/yr in 2005. The natural background is about 280ppm and current CO2 concentrations are about 380ppm. A linear extrapolation of the 2005 trend would yield a doubling of CO2 over natural values by around 2080. It is often suggested that short of that, values of just 450ppm would represent a threshold of unacceptable changes in the environment. These values are potentially just a few decades away. If we wait until things get obviously worse before we take action it could be too late for reasonably quick action to restore our familiar climate. One reason is because the ocean reservior of CO2 might be filling up and it would then take hundreds of years or more to reverse the CO2 back to its “natural” level to undo the warming effect. Another aspect of the carbon cycle is that even if the global emission rate is held constant, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would continue to rise for quite some time (e.g. one or more centuries) and reach levels several times what it is at present. Alternatively, to hold the CO2 concentration at current levels, the emission rate would have to be cut by roughly one-half (without considering the effect of the ocean reservoirs filling up). To hold the currently elevated temperature constant the emission rate would need about a two-thirds cut. Even if we magically turned off all emissions at once, it would probably take 100-300 years for CO2 levels to come down close to the natural background levels. The corresponding “half-life” would be something on the order of 50 years, subject to changes in the various CO2 sinks. ...

The Interacademy Panel on International Issues has issued a statement in support of the scientific evidence for evolution (PDF), urging the teaching of the facts and evidence. The statement is endorsed by 67 national academies of science and the executive board of the International Council for Science. The statement says that: We agree that the following evidence-based facts about the origins and evolution of the Earth and of life on this planet have been established by numerous observations and independently derived experimental results from a multitude of scientific disciplines. Even if there are still many open questions about the precise details of evolutionary change, scientific evidence has never contradicted these results: 1. In a universe that has evolved towards its present configuration for some 11 to 15 billion years, our Earth formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago. 2. Since its formation, the Earth - its geology and its environments - has changed under the effect of numerous physical and chemical forces and continues to do so. 3. Life appeared on Earth at least 2.5 billion years ago. The evolution, soon after, of photosynthetic organisms enabled, from at least 2 billion years ago, the slow transformation of the atmosphere to one containing substantial quantities of oxygen. In addition to the release of the oxygen we breathe, the process of photosynthesis is the ultimate source of fixed energy and food upon which human life on the planet depends. 4. Since its first appearance on Earth, life has taken many forms, all of which continue to evolve, in ways which paleontology and the modern biological and biochemical sciences are describing and independently confirming with increasing precision. Commonalities in the structure of the genetic code of all organisms living today, including humans, clearly indicate their common primordial origin.It goes on to give a statement about the nature of science. For those who would like to see some of the supporting evidence for each of these four statements, I highly recommend the TalkOrigins website. For the fourth statement in particular, I recommend Douglas Theobald’s article at the TalkOrigins site, “29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent." (Hat tip to Pharyngula)

I’ve returned from the Skeptics Society conference on “The Environmental Wars," and there wasn’t much warring between speakers, though there were some debates among audience members between sessions. The most controversial speaker was John Stossel, who was the only person to proclaim himself a global warming skeptic (and did so without having witnessed any of the day’s presentations, which made it abundantly clear that (a) there is global warming and (b) it is caused by human activity). Michael Crichton managed to avoid the global warming subject in his talk, though in the Q&A he agreed that (a) there is no debate that the globe is warming (contrary to the position in State of Fear that it’s an artifact of city “heat islands”), (b) there is no debate that CO2 has increased as a result of human activity, and (c) there’s no debate about the greenhouse effect. I’ll comment more later on at least some of the talks, but for now I’ll refer you to conference presenter Jonathan Adler’s live-blogged descriptions of the talks and Chris Mooney’s summary of his initial debate presentation. UPDATE June 7, 2006: Also check out desmogblog’s coverage of the conference. UPDATE (July 18, 2009): Looks like my only further comment was on Jonathan Adler’s talk on federal environmental regulation, though I did post this on the JREF Forums on June 30, 2008: I very much enjoyed the Skeptics Society “Environmental Wars” conference. I thought it was a good mix of long-term history on climate change (Prothero), current scientific evidence on climate change (Schneider), what to do about it from an economic perspective (Arnold), what doesn’t work from a regulatory perspective (Adler), what wild and crazy mitigation techniques might be available and what they’ll cost (Benford), and a little debate on politicization of science (Mooney vs. Bailey), and a couple of climate change skeptics who didn’t really address any of the science presented during the conference (Crichton and Stossel). It was also a chance to see one of Paul MacCready’s last public appearances before he died. Michael Crichton and John Stossel were no Mike Reiss (Simpsons writer who gave a hilarious talk in 2005), but I still thought they provided entertainment.

Einzige and I will both be at the Skeptics Society conference in Pasadena tomorrow and Saturday and would welcome greetings from any blog readers, assuming the intersection of our readership and the conference attendees is non-null. At least I’ll be able to say hello to Chris Mooney, whose blog I read regularly…

Today’s Washington Post reports (via Donna Woodka’s blog): New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves – and to be treated by the health care system – as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon. Among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control. ...

Here’s a nifty little device that sits on your tongue and electrically stimulates it via 144 microelectrodes. Your brain figures out how to “see” patterns on the surface of this device, and: In testing, blind people found doorways, noticed people walking in front of them and caught balls. A version of the device, expected to be commercially marketed soon, has restored balance to those whose vestibular systems in the inner ear were destroyed by antibiotics.

Carl Zimmer writes about how retroviruses have inserted themselves into the human genome: Scientists can identify viruses lurking in our genome (known as endogenous retroviruses) by their distinctive DNA. A fully-functioning retrovirus sequence contains three genes–one for copying DNA, one for a shell, and one for escaping and invading cells. These genes are flanked by a series of repeating DNA, which allow viruses to be inserted or snipped out of their host’s genome. The human genome carries full-fledged retroviruses, as well as viruses in various state of decay. Scientists have identified 98,000 of these viruses, along with about 150,000 fragments of defunct viruses. All told, they make up 8 percent of the human genome. In many cases, the virus genes have disappeared altogether, leaving behind flanking repeats, which have been duplicated to millions of copies that take up about 40 percent of the genome. As a point of comparison, our “own” genes–in other words, those that encode proteins that make up our bodies and allow our bodies live–make up only about one percent of the genome. Some of these endogenous retroviruses are only found in some people and not others. They must have invaded someone’s genome and then spread to his or her descendants, but have not yet spread throug our entire species. Others appear to be ubiquitous–meaning that they are ancient passengers that had already spread throughout an ancestral population.The viruses themselves can change over time, leading to different variants in different individuals that can be compared to reconstruct the lineage of the virus, and reconstruct the older versions of the virus (as was done with the 1918 influenza virus). Unfortunately for creationists, this also works across species–and human beings share retroviruses in their genome with chimpanzees, macaques, and other primates. Zimmer again: It turns out that most of the viruses we carry can also be found in these other species. Our retroviruses can be grouped into families. They carry the same families. Our retroviruses usually appear in the same position in the genome, no matter whose genome you look at. Many of theirs are in the same place. These are all the sorts of evidence you’d expect if retroviruses had been carried down from distant primate ancestors. A particular retrovirus is not identical from one host primate to the next, but you wouldn’t expect that. Once each host lineage branched off, the viruses could acquire mutations. But the different versions of these retroviruses are still similar enough that scientists can reconstruct the DNA of original virus that infected some long-gone primate.I recommend reading Zimmer’s entire article, “The Sixty-Million-Year Virus,” as well as Doug Theobald’s “29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: the Scientific Case for Common Descent” FAQ at the talkorigins.org website (the evidence of endogenous retroviruses is item #5 in Part 4 of the FAQ). Anybody who denies common ancestry of life on this planet does so only by disregarding the evidence.

Pharyngula has a nice, simple explanation of how Plan B emergency contraception works, and how it can’t remotely be construed as a form of abortion (unlike the use of RU-486, which is an abortifacient). The use of Plan B prevents ovulation–it doesn’t do anything to an already fertilized egg. It thereby prevents the need for abortions when it’s used effectively. Yet this timeline of events shows how the Republicans have been preventing it from being made available as an over-the-counter medicine.