Faster than a speeding ..... neutrino? What d'ya know?

Comfort Facts--the scientific analog of comfort food, are principles we think we really, truly know are at the heart of how the universe runs.  Even scientists (Professors, no less!) may not know everything, or as much as they (we?) want you to think we know.  But if we at least know some of the deepest fundamentals, if Nature is orderly then sooner or later we can build on the bedrock facts to get an ever-closer understanding of How Things Work.  But what if even the bedrock is shaky?  What can a scientist, much less an ordinary poor mortal, think?

Among the more secure Comfort Facts is that nothing travels faster than the speed of light.  The ultimate e=mc^2, where c is the speed of light.  But what if it's Eeecc! not true?  Where is the ground we stand on?  The issues are technical, largely beyond anything we know specifically, and there are various contexts in which one can read that c is not the Ultimate Limit.  To suggest that this Law of Laws can be broken borders on, well, heresy.  But a recent report claims that tiny particles called neutrinos in fact, do break the Law of Laws.

Can neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light or can't they?  Last month's report of just this observation has riled up the physics community, with most physicists saying it can't be true (it is, after all, against the rules!).  No one yet is sure how the researchers erred, or even that they did, but the general idea seems to be that Einstein's law has been tested so many times it can't be false now.  As reported last week in the NYT,

The neutrino news came from a group of physicists based at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy and doing business under the apt acronym Opera. The neutrinos, they reported on Sept. 23 in a paper and at a special symposium at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, had beaten a metaphorical light beam from CERN to Gran Sasso, a distance of 457 miles, by 60 nanoseconds.

The initial response of physicists assembled at CERN and around the world was that there was probably a mistake somewhere in the experiment. Einstein’s theory is the basis of all modern physics, and has been tested a zillion times.

Technically, relativity does allow some particles, known as tachyons, to go faster than light — in fact it forbids them to slow down to light speed. The hitch is that they would have imaginary masses, whatever that means. And there is also the possibility, in some versions of string theory, of particles’ taking a shortcut through another dimension. But allowing anything to travel faster than light would open up the possibility of all kinds of problems with cause and effect and even time travel.

We aren't physicists and certainly can't comment on what might have gone wrong with the experiment, or indeed whether something necessarily did go wrong.  It would be pretty exciting, we have to say, if it were true, if something totally paradigm-toppling were to happen in our lifetimes.  But, be that as it may, this whole brouhaha touches on questions that philosophers of science have been grappling with for decades, if not centuries, and that we can comment on. 

Black swan, Wikimedia Commons

Now a fact can be replicable, such as estimates of c, without being universally true.  A new observation can always come along, such as the neutrino experiment that is different from or more sensitive than, or tests a previously untested condition than has been tested before.  The argument by induction, that repeated observation increases one's belief in something, can obviously be false.  The classic philosophy of science classroom example of the problem is the assertion "All swans are white," based on many observations.  But next along the river, one may see a black swan.

One might argue that this simply overturns an approximate, but faulty hypothesis about the true nature of swans.  But one may counter to defend orthodoxy, that the definition of 'swan', or perhaps some conditions of swandom, were not proper, and the idea is still true under a revised definition.  Others would say this is the critical kind of falsiification result that helps us tinker with our scientific hypotheses til we get to the right one.

In that view, a theory in any science is always, and only, a best-guess-at-the-time about Nature.  We'll never get to the absolute truth or even if we did, how would we know we can't come upon something better later?

The 1600s and 1700s ushered in the modern age of science, framed largely in terms of the idea that there are true, unexceptioned, universal Laws of Nature, and that science's job is to find out what those laws are.  Gravitation, relativity, properties of electricity and chemistry and so on, are examples from the physical sciences.  Darwin thought natural selection was such a law--indeed he repeatedly referred to patterns he observed or theorized, as 'laws'; so did his contemporaries in life and even social sciences.

But the history of all sciences is one of revision, so a reason, or an excuse, for accepting imperfect descriptions of Nature is often that we'll never know Truth and should accept that, and that our models today are something we should accept.  It is often now said, in such a context, that nobody believes in Laws of Nature any more.  But is that true?

We think not.  We think that whether people state it or not, most people in and out of science essentially if tacitly believe that there is one Truth and only one.  Whether we call it a 'law' or by some other name, it must be that way.  If Nature is not law-like in that way, or if in some part of the universe things are fundamentally different from what they are here, we would have no way to understand the essence of the universe--not even in principle!  But at the same time, if there is no Truth, how can we evaluate scientific evidence, make predictions, and the like?  Saying there are no material universals verges on mysticism, the ultimate NotSo for science.

If there is ultimate truth, we may never find it, being but fallible mortals evolved to detect what our ancestors needed to detect about Nature.  But the idea that there is such a Truth is at least an anchor for our worldview and certainly of our work in science.  We essentially believe that our approximations are approximations of something real--indeed that is what the word 'approximation' means.

Depending on one's view of what we know, or what there is to know, the speedy neutrino may turn out to fly past everything we thought we knew. But if it turns out that the measurements were faulty, and the little guy's just poking along at below-c speed, we cannot assume we had it right after all.  There will always come along another claimant to audition for the role of the black swan.

-Ken and Anne

The integrity of science; the integrity of its critics

Here's a video from the Daily Show that, not surprisingly, builds satire around a grain of truth.  But in this case, it's not clear if the Daily Show realized where the grains all lay.

The Daily Show
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The video wholly appropriately lampoons the Republican candidates---even for President, if you can believe the awful prospect!--for their extreme and wholly culpable ignorance.  One can ask if these people are even intelligent enough to spell 'Republican'.  Of course, the other party has its various demogogues and benighted figures as well, but they're not as flagrant at this particular time.

So let's ask some relevant questions.

• Do scientists go after money for their research?  Absolutely
• Do they try to manage things so the money flow increases, never stops?  Absolutely
• Do they massage their data in ways that favor their theory, or prospects for future funding?  Routinely
• Do they present their work in a way that maximizes the attention they get? Certainly
• Are scientists greedy and money-seeking?  Often
• Are they aware that they are dissembling the media and public?  The smart ones definitely are
• Are they doing their jobs for the public good?  Some certainly do
• Do scientists make mistakes?  Often (always?)
• Are scientists wrong about their claims?  Almost always to some extent (we're human, after all)
• Does 'peer review' effectively prevent mistakes or screen out bad theories?  Not very well
• Does peer review put straight-jackets on what is 'acceptable'?  Routinely
• Do scientists outright cheat?  Very rarely

Now, it would seem the height of hypocrisy for Republicans to play the J'Accuse role against the venality and greed of science when they are rarely deviating advocates of the rawest forms of wealth-accumulation and inequality, defenders of every corporate interest by systematically reducing oversight, allowing advertising claims, manipulating the media, and passing  laws favorable to private greed, and using every diversionary tactic to get voters to go along with it.  We could ask the above same kinds of questions of these politicians and those they represent.  Accurate answers would show them to be certainly no better than those they accuse.

So if the categorical slurs they make against science have some cogency, the attackers' bottom lines are ridiculously off-target and hypocritical.  Intelligent Republicans ought to repudiate these abuses, made in their name.  You don't have to be an atheist or even to accept ('believe in'?) evolution to see the repugnance of what they'll say in order to get elected (if you assume that at least some of them privately know better than what they say).

But no matter their political persuasion, everyone should recognize that each political party has had its overstated dogmas, and its times of rampant demagoguery--or maybe one could say there's some of it in every party all the time.  And science is no longer an arcane basement-lab kind of endeavor.  Even in the past it had its promoters, exaggerators, and, yes, charlatans.  We're in the middle class, we need to earn our living, there are lots of us, and we are simply a part of the same greedy, self-promoting (but occasionally kind, humble, and sharing) society that businesses, universities, and media of all sorts work in.  Science perhaps needs to be watched over,  constrained, or made accountable to societal concerns and for what it yields from its funding--just like industry does.

Science is a human and therefore fallible endeavor.  Things could be improved, and faults need to be resisted.   But it would take societal will to do that in serious ways, and that would require more humility by us, more patience by the public, better ethics by the media (including the advertising and PR megaliths), and better schools across the board.  Alternatively, some (especially scientists) argue, that despite our clay feet, in the end we achieve enough good to overcome our evils, that might be hard to purge in any case.

Despite our manifestly clay feet, science does systematically uncover and characterize individual facts about our world.  And even if it rarely if ever does so perfectly, it also discovers major, over-arching, systematic truths about the world, too.

• Evolution happened, whether or not we understand all its causal details
• Climate is changing, whether or not we understand all of the causal reasons
• GM crops work in some ways, if not in all ways
• Vaccines work, even if not 100% of the time
• Tobacco kills
• Planes fly, cars pollute less than they used to, and computers of all sorts do amazing things
• And without science you'd not have a giant TV to watch the Republican know-nothing show

Unfortunately, all too often, demagoguery and ignorance work at least as well as truth.... If some accountability needs to be forthcoming, politicians should look inside themselves first.

Carnival of Evolution #41

The 41st Carnival of Evolution is here.  Each month, a fascinating hodge-podge of evolution-themed posts from blogs both big and small is collected in a single place and heralded far and wide.  Or as far and wide as interested bloggers can herald it.  Evolution is a broad topic with broad areas of agreement, some controversy (within the science itself), and regular surprises.  So, if you're interested in evolutionary issues, post, tweet, text, or even speak the 41st CoE! 

Here, in no particular order, are this month's contributions.

M.L. Henneman over at Bioblog by Biotunes nicely parses the debate over invasive species that recently heated up in Nature -- should non-natives be controlled or not, is hating them another form of xenophobia? 

Jeremy Fox, at Oikos Blog, explores the issue of trade-offs.  Organisms can't be good at everything, and ecologists generally expect to find that organisms do some things very well and some things not so well.  He asks whether such trade-offs should in fact be expected in theory.

Over at Lab Rat, on the Scientific American blog site, S.E. Gould writes about the evolution of bacterial energy centres, in particular, the acidocalcisome.

Carl Zimmer, at The Loom, posts some interesting videos that get at the origins of flight. Was wing-flapping useful in its own right before birds could fly?  And, PZ Myers at Pharyngula takes on the question of how to reconcile the idea that eyes evolved more than once with the idea that eyes share a common origin.

Three-spined stickleback
Piet Spaans, Wikimedia Commons.

Kevin Zelnio, dueño of EvoEcoLabs also at Scientific American Blogs, went hunting for good stuff on stickleback fish -- via Google of course.  His results were frustratingly thin, prompting him to propose that evolutionary biology needs better PR.

Is it brutal behavior, or just survival?  Kelsey, at the Mauka to Makai blog, describes how adult cuckoo and African greater honeyguide females ensure the survival of their offspring, to the detriment of the young of the unknowing host -- complete with video documentation of death and destruction. 

Guest blogger Kevin MacCarthy at Scientopia muses about the definition of life.  Is it the ability to reproduce?  In which case a male and a female together are alive, but one rabbit alone is not?

Over at BioLogos, guest blogger Steve Matheson writes about limbs and common ancestry.  And, at Philly.com Faye Flam reports about an investigation of where the nurseryfish fits into the tree of life.

What caused the Black Death?  That question has now been answered, and on her blog, Genome Engineering, Suzanne Elvidge gives a nod to the Nature paper that reports that the culprit was indeed Yersinia pestis.

How does variation get shaped toward an adaptive end, when evolution is not goal-directed, Bradly Alicea asks over at Synthetic Daisies.  The post is a thoughtful discussion of the question, tying complexity theory with evolutionary theory.  Bradly also rediscovers a classic paper by Barbara McClintock in which she discussed different kinds of genomic 'shocks'.

CJ Jenkins discovers evolutionary medicine, over at Nothing In Biology Makes Sense.  Devin Drown on the same site writes about the conflict, due to limited resources, that results when two different parasites infect the same host, and how it is resolved.  (Thanks to Jeremy Yoder for these submissions.)

And Jeremy Yoder, on his own blog, Denim and Tweed, ponders the possible reasons for the evolution of sexual reproduction.   Why share the benefits when reproducing by yourself would double your genetic contribution to the next generation?

At TheViableBlog, Kerstin Hoppenhaus tells us what's in a name.  The mite responsible for much honeybee death and destruction wasn't always called Varroa destructor, but when the name fits...

A new phylogeny of mammals was just published in Science.  Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution Is True posts the tree and his take on the highlights.

Razib Khan over at Gene Expression says he's now willing to entertain the idea that there may not be a single gene that made us human. 

Spanish moss is an example of commensalism, the interaction of organisms in which one benefits and the other is unaffected, at The Phytophactor. And, over at Evolving Thoughts, John Wilkins evolves some thoughts on how organisms are classified and why. 

Gemma Atkinson over at Protein Evolution and Other Musings muses about the relationship between hummingbirds and ornithophilous flowers, and the co-evolution of ligands and receptors.  She does a nice job morphing hummingbirds into ligands and flowers into receptors. 

And speaking of musing, Ken Weiss, here on the Mermaid's Tale, muses about the concept of uniformitarianism, the idea that while events may be unique, the processes are the same.  The idea, which Darwin adopted from geologist Charles Lyell, is central to evolutionary theory, but Ken notes that Marcus Aurelius in 170 AD had much the same thought.

And, Ken offers a different interpretation for the evolution of the hand.  For tool use?  Nah.  He argues that the new fossil finds, of two individuals now called Australopithecus sediba, might better be called Australopithecus erotimanus.  Hard to argue with his reasoning. He nicely sums up the sticky issues involved in interpreting these kinds of data here, praising Darwin for his usual circumspection and cautious interpretation.

Next month's Carnival, at The Ocelloid.   Submit your entries here.

Fire breather lending a carnival atmosphere
to the Jaipur Maharaja Brass Band in
Chassepierre, Belgium. Wikimedia Commons

"Let them eat cake!" (wild applause) Why? Part II

We continue our musing on the nature of the 'science' in what is so proudly self-proclaimed as 'social science'?   The issues are subtle, and it is curious that we as a society--our professors, pundits, op-ed writers, pop-sci writers, and their ilk, and the advisors and advisees in social policy and politics--seem so sure there is such a thing.  And, indeed, we don't have to pound on the thoroughly desrving-it economists whose predictions after eons of funded research can't do much better than coin-flipping, to make our point.

We described in Part I of this mini-series the tradition of views of social theorists of various stripes as 'social Darwinists' and 'social Lamarckians', for those who felt that inequity was a built-in law of Nature that should be nurtured by social policy, or who felt that human achievement could lead to equity, and that that principle of Nature should be nurtured by social policy.

All these thinkers would have said that they were doing science--that is, were describing fundamental truths of the material world.  But how did they know what they thought they knew?  Did they 'prove' their assertions?

Social Darwinists assert that inequity is not only inevitable and unavoidable, but is the mechanism by which societies compete to succeed (in wealth or power or whatever), and is therefore good. This doesn't mean that social Darwinists are personally cruel people, but that they are sanguine about inequity as being good for society and unavoidable even if some people suffer.  But how can one prove that social inequity is inevitable and what kind of 'law' is it that would assert so?    What counts as 'inequity'?  How can one know?  The fact that inequity exists in successfully competing societies (and in downtrodden ones as well) does not imply inevitability, and 'good' is totally a judgment--and of course by definition not good for all.

Is it that if there are random effects on resources, even if each person has the same probability of getting resources, by chance some just won't, and that in the next year or generation they'll be drawing from a position of relative strength or weakness, which will probabilistically make the differences greater?  If so, what kind of 'law' is that--based on probability alone, not on anything to do with resources themselves?

Social Darwinism has caused, or has been used to justify, enormous horrors visited on large numbers of people.  But what about its supposed opposite, social Lamarckians (a term, but by no means an idea, that we may have invented)?  One might believe that learning and improved social environments, based on sharing and fairness, can lead to an equitable society without competitive winners and losers.   People have comparable potential (unless manifestly handicapped by disease) that just needs a chance to flourish.  Communist societies believed (or, at least, claimed to believe) in this idea--in society's evolution and even in agricultural evolution (called Lysenkoism, a topic too big to go into here).  But how could one ever prove that true social equality (let's not worry about how it's defined) is possible, much less inevitably achievable, even if a semblance of it exists here and there?

There is in either view precious little theory that is of the usual kind one finds in science.  Even defining 'equality' is probably a hopeless task.  Is being a basketball player equal to being an accountant or trucker? Even Darwin's own theory on which social Darwinism rests, basically argues that if some have an advantage in an environment they'll do better, which in a way verges on tautology and in any case is not inevitable--despite his and others' implications to the contrary.

Biology has subsequently developed respectable theory of life, based on biochemistry and genetics, but while that theory may account for different disease susceptibility or hair color, it is only stretched, and thinly so, to culture and social inequality by assumptive extrapolation of genetics.  The fact that someone may feed on the ideology of competition, in the sense of organismal evolution, does not in any way prove that the same applies to society.  Even if competition does clearly seem to exist.  Likewise, the fact that one can imagine societal equality does not in any way prove that there is a physical basis for such a view.  And sharing clearly also exists.  In some societies, sharing is relatively more important, or reported by the members of the society,  than in others.

Genes must affect individual proclivities (whatever that means), but obviously the cultural attributes of a group, which can change much more rapidly than its genetic makeup, are several levels of removal from individual genes.

So ideas about the evolution, or genetic-behavioral nature, of society and culture are far less supported by real evidence than the purveyors of such ideas typically acknowledge.  Still, if we're material beings, and not guided by truly spiritual 'forces', there must be some relationships, no?

Speaking of  the latter, of course materialist views of the world are very threatening to the idea that free will exists, and this is even more of a problem for people holding strongly religious views, one of many reasons some religious people strongly oppose Darwinian evolution.  Another question that raises is how a purely spiritual something-or-other (like soul or God's will) can make a difference in the material world without itself being material--and hence subject to scientific analysis.

But what is 'free' will, and is whether it exists even a legitimate or determinable empirical question?  One view is that we only think we're making choices, an illusion, when really it's all our neurons doing that so that, when we finally know enough about each neuron etc., we will be able to predict one's every move, emotion, or decision.

On the other  hand, there may be so many layers of material causation, each involving at least some probabilistic elements that, even in principle, we could not predict individual decisions from knowledge of neurons per se.

In the latter case, culture is yet many levels of interaction and causation further removed from individuals' neurons, and moreso from their genes.  If so, and this seems likely true, then culture can be an entirely material phenomenon that cannot be understood by genetic or neuroscience reductionism.  This is not something those convinced of a deterministic evolutionary world like to acknowledge, and not something that yields much confidence in how to develop a sound theory of culture and its evolution.

Biology hasn't solved this causal problem because we know the truth is mixed and even that it is difficult to tell what is 'genetic' in this context.  Being a social parasite like a criminal or 'welfare queen' might be consistent with many genetic determinants but how does one decide if that is a defective trait?  Indeed, being a legal social parasite, like an hedge-fund manager (pick your own particular favorite)  might reflect the same genotypes.  These issues are not clear-cut at all.

Nowadays we couch things in terms of 'science', we accept very poorly supported pop-sci and Just-so stories by psychologists, op-ed writers, and that ilk, but how different are these claims from those of scripture, shamans, or other smooth talkers and demogogues?

Where, if anywhere, is there any science in this?  If this is the material world, why can't science answer the questions?  If after billions of research dollars spent, society is every bit as screwed up in these kinds of ways as in  the past, why do we still even have departments of sociology, psychology, economics (or anthropology)?

These are serious questions in an age of widespread molecular deterministic beliefs, because these beliefs haven't led to a seriously useful theory of the 'laws' of culture and society, yet from a materialistic point of view something of that sort must exist, if only we knew how to find it.

Triumph of the Darwinian method

In our recent spoof posts about Australopithecus erotimanis, we tried to make the point of how challenging it is to infer why traits found today evolved or, even more problematic, to infer this from fossils.  This raises several fundamental issues, and they are ones that Charles Darwin addressed even before Origin of Species:  explaining the nature of function from observed traits, explaining the fitness effects (for natural selection) of traits past and present, and explaining relationships among species (taxonomy).

Darwin didn't have all the answers (and neither do we), but he did introduce a method into biology that he applied to all of these questions (and so do we).  A very fine book, now about 50 years old, by Michael Ghiselin, called The Triumph of the Darwinian Method, goes in great detail using Darwin's own work, to show how transformative and powerful this was, and how Darwin used it in all the many contexts of his writing and thinking. Of course, legions of books and articles have adopted and reflected this approach to the present day.

Darwin didn't proclaim a method and then use it, but adopted and adapted the 'hypothetico-deductive' scientific method that had been developed over the previous century or so, for sciences based on concepts of 'laws of nature', as a way of identifying those laws and testing data in connection with them.  It was a framework for evaluating the empirical world.

To do this, to a considerable extent Darwin tried to show that life followed 'laws'.  So he didn't invent the method, but he did show more definitively than his predecessors, how it could be applied to life as well as planets, ideal gases, and so on.  The key was the assumption that life was a law-like--he compared natural selection to gravity, for example--descent from a common origin.

Given those assumptions, he interpreted both species formation and variation, adaptive functions of traits in fossils and in comparative morphology, taxonomy, biogeography, ecology, and so on.  From barnacles to earthworms, orchids and facial expression, he applied the selective, divergence framework.

There were mistakes, and one could go on about them, because some were serious.  To us, the most serious is that he took too strongly the assumed 'laws', so that his explanations are sometimes too rigid and in some instances too teleological or even near-Lamarckian--directional evolution, for  example, by which a fossil or barnacle was explained as being on the way to some state.

When we (that is, anthropologists who know something) try to explain fossils, like the Australopithecines we have just had some fun being satirical with, we have to try to understand all the central issues--taxonomy, function, adaptation.  Given the many problems involved in reconstructions, the conplexity of genetic control, the elusiveness and non law-like aspects of natural selection (versus genetic drift, for example), the incompleteness of data, and much more, it is no surprise that conclusions have to be tentative and assertions circumspect.

One of the main axes that we grind on MT is that we feel that there are many pressures of diverse kinds that encourage us not to be sufficiently circumspect, and to claim far too much.  This gets attention, and grants and promotion, but it can mislead science, when people take distorted claims as true and try to build on them.

Still, while it's fun to have fun with fossil claims, and fun to lampoon the hypersphere of our media-driven science circus, the problems are real and respectably challenging.  Perhaps much more than the public--or even many  professionals--actually realize.

Darwin, by the way, was often far more circumspect than is the usual case today.  He wanted to be right, of course, and didn't always exercise or express enough caution.  But he did frequently acknowledged where he was speculating, and so on.

More on the True Story of the evolution of the human hand

The other day, we posted our clearly rigorous explanation of the new human ancestral fossil find, originally named Australopithecus sediba but properly renamed by us Australopithecus erotimanis.  We'll not go over old ground here (and some may have been  too squeamish with our explanation anyway to have it repeated here).  Suffice it to say that one Commenter seemed unconvinced.

The issue surrounds the delicate opposable thumb-endowed hand of A. erotimanis.  How did this evolve? Now we must admit that this Commenter (who hides behind the moniker 'occamseraser') can do circles around us in terms of actual knowledge of human paleontology.  He (or she) clearly knows the fossil record bone by bone, which we unhappily must confess that we don't.

To flesh out our view, we thought making it even more convincing, we wrote a Comment of our own, a short bit of fictionalized history, that might be called "The misadventures of P'Qeeb" (since Jean Auel makes millions doing that, a point made by Holly, we felt we ought to be allowed to relay our views in that way, too).  Our tale tried to bring to life some of the on-the-ground realities of our past evolution.  We offered a rather, we think, totally convincing scenario for the evolution of the dextrous hand.  But 'occam' suggested that perhaps  A. erotimanii may have evolved their thumbs for other functions than we suggested.

We're not stupid (despite occasional appearances), and had thought of other explanations on our own, thank you very much.  A thumb could be of great advantage for hitch-hiking, but no hub-caps were found at the site, so that seemed like a rather weak hypothesis.  Perhaps the most obvious alternative to an origin by natural selection for a kind of sexual behavioral trait, is that the opposable thumb was evolved for picking one's nose.  But, convenient as that may doubtlessly be, how could that confer a fitness advantage--enabling the picker to out-reproduce those with less manicured (so to speak) nares?  Indeed, it could be argued that such behavior would actually have a negative fitness effect: who wants to do what needs to be done with someone too habituated to digital nostrillary grooming?  Would they not be put off instead?

No, we don't want to be picky in what we'll accept as an adequate evolutionary explanation. But then our correspondent 'occam' suggested that the A. erotimanii may have evolved to be able to thumb their noses at their crude Alley-Ooopish paranthropine contemporaries (see our story, in the Comments, to get at taste of what they were like, the brutes).

We wrote, calmly, to defend our own ideas, by noting that they may not have had noses to thumb!  Clearly 'occam' was wrong.  But then in a riposte he snidely just said "who nose?", a cheap pun if there ever was one, and not one we can take lying down!

So herewith is exhibit A:  the noseless Australopithecine, easily found on the web it is so obvious.  Now, if you look very hard you can see that, yes, they do have a nose---of sorts.  It might be pickable, but it certainly isn't thumb-able!  No, occam, we're sorry (not!), but your idea simply won't fly.

In case you need a reminder, here is exhibit B, a real nose (also courtesy of the web)!  This one's worth thumbing, if you see any disgusting brutes around.

Now, again, we can flesh out our argument against occam's idea in another way.  How on earth would there be an advantage for the erotimanii to have a thumb or dextrous hand so they could pick (so to speak) fights with paranthropines?  How could that have had any but negative effects on fitness.  A picking explanation might gross out the paranthropines, but thumbing noses (even if they had noses to thumb) would have provoked the paranthropines to dangerous assaults.

Think again (and, yes, seriously if that's possible) about what we're debating when it comes to Darwinian explanations:  we need to offer scenarios that are directly relevant to reproductive success. If picking one's nose, or hitchhiking, or even thumbing at wild hominids are true aspects of behavior, even if very satisfying, they are not obviously connected to reproductive success.

In thinking about this we had momentarily wondered if the dextrous hand were designed for holding broad leaves to use when blowing one's nose.  But it's not clear, given the nature of Australopithecine noses, that that would not be just an uncontrollable mess.  So we dropped such nose-related explanations.  And we suggest that occam do the same.

Compare that to our explanation, and unless one really wants some actual evidence that has sound epistemology about it, our original explanation, immediately tied to reproductive success, is the clear winner.  If one admits that there really isn't serious data on which to construct a story, well, we should acknowledge it openly.  And, indeed, keep in mind that no matter how squeamish (or puritanical) you may be, the real world of animals involves many squeamish things and there's no reason they cannot be important in Nature's cold and very un-squeamish, judgments.

The bottom line is that it is not at all easy to understand how things evolved way back when in the days before blog-posts.  Incredibly, that is true even when you have the bodies of the actual individuals who did the evolving!   Getting correct explanations, and knowing that you have them, are great challenges that even the best of science needs to take seriously.

"Let them eat cake!" (Wild applause) Why? Part I

In this short series, we are asking what kind of real rather than self-proclaimed 'science' can there be in social science, and why don't we already have it, if science is so powerful a way to understand the world?

"The poor are starving, Mum.  They have no bread!"

"Well, then, let them eat cake!"

Marie Antoinette (whose family did, in fact, have cake and bread, too) may never have said those harsh words in about 1775.  The cold quip reflecting a harsh attitude towards the needy had been uttered before, but the point sticks when applied to the royal insensitivity towards social inequity in France.

In the 1790s, and in a spirit of similar kindliness, Malthus concluded his book about population and the inevitability of suffering from resource shortage, by saying that this is God's way of spurring mankind to exertion, and hence salvation.  The 'Reverend' Malthus sneered at the hopelessness of utopian thinking--and its associated anti-aristrocratic policies--then dominating France.  Forget about bread, 'they' (not Malthus or his friends and family) can't eat cake because there won't be enough to go around.

This view was justified by Herbert Spencer directly, and indirectly in effect by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace (all of whom had bread) who adopted Malthus' view as a reflection of the 'law' of natural selection, of competitive death and mayhem, and this view was and has since often been, used to justify social inequity as an unavoidable (and hence acceptable) aspect of life.

Of course, that such sentiments are cruel, insensitive, and self-serving does not make them false.  There is symmetry in these things because at roughly the same time, Marxists held that inequities inevitably lead to conflicts that gradually would lead to a stable equitable society, materialist utopian of a somewhat different kind from the Eutopianism of the 18th century, that was perhaps less reliant, in principle, upon conflict.  Religion is "the opiate of the people," he proclaimed with equal insensitivity to the multitudes for whom religion provide the only hope and solace in their lives (when they hadn't any comfort food).  Likewise, the fact that this opposite view of egalitarianism is insensitive in that way, doesn't make it false, either.

What goes around comes around.  Fifty years ago, in 1961, right here in the good ol' USA, similarly elitist, arrogant justification of social inequity were voiced, by a Presidential candidate no less,  as reflected in this famous Herblock cartoon in the Washington Post (for readers of tender age, that's Barry Goldwater, 5-term US Senator, and Republican presidential candidate in 1964; the homeless family, as always, were too numerous to name).

The Reagan-Thatcher era, which came 20 years later, revitalized the justifications of inequality, using images such as [black] Cadillac-driving welfare queens, to emotionalize their reasons for eating cake while others hadn't bread.  Of course, there were and are abusers of social systems.  The difference is that the abusers of the welfare system's entitlements have somewhat different social power, not to mention impact, than the abusers of the legal entitlements to wealth.

Of course, this attitude is not a thing of the past.  At recent debates of current Presidential candidates, it has been said that the poor are poor because of their own failings, essentially because they don't try hard enough (wild applause).  They don't have medical care? Well, then, let them die in the street! (more wild applause).

Similar views-of-convenience apply to people who question the usefulness of international development aid.  Some of these people, often social scientists, believe in development, but just don't think current policies will achieve their goals.  But, one can wonder, when and where is that itself a cover for a cold view that we don't want our taxes to help people of the wrong religion/color/location who haven't pulled themselves up by their bootstraps so that they, too, can have 96" flat-screen televisions and 3 cars (the fact that they don't have boots, much less bootstraps, gets somewhat less mention).

Now our view on this kind of social egotism is clear.  But it is not really relevant to MT, a blog purportedly to be about science.  The scientific relevance is clear, but in subtle ways that blur the kinds of polarized political uses, often by demogogues, that serve the convenient ends of getting elected without necessarily having actual policies that would justify it (which all political parties are prone to).

But what kind of science is this--if it is science at all?  The authors, regardless of their views, were thinking of themselves as scientists.  That is, they saw what they believed to be the truth of the material world, none of them relying on received truth from scriptures. They felt, or acted as if they felt, in their own minds that they were saying things that were not only profoundly true, but which reflected the irrefutable, unavoidable laws of Nature.  But does the scientist's view of the world inform his or her interpretation of the science, or is her or his view of the world informed by the science?  There was arrogance of privilege on both sides, both sides were led by people who ate cake (even Marx, though he was rather impoverished, because he had a Sugar Daddy in Friedrich Engels).

If the harshest defenses of competitive determinism were 'social Darwinists' as early such views were characterized, the harshest defense of equity could be called 'social Lamarckians'.  In the next installment, we'll explain what we mean, as we search for meaning, relevance....and any actual 'science' in this arena of human thought.