I’ve always loved science. Partially it is because of the excellent science training I had. [that is a must read link, go read it and come back, I’ll wait here… I mean it.]
That same 9th grade science teacher (you did read the link right?) used to say that the measure of a true scientist was not what they knew but how much they admitted they didn’t know. That is why I take great pleasure is smacking around the global warming kooks and G O O F B A L L “evolution” zealots. (or “oozers” which is more accurate)
Now there is a certain irony in these two topics. There are a whole bunch of people who think the “ooze theory” is gospel but global warming is bunk. Then there is another group who swears global warming is true but thinks the “ooze” theory is bunk.
Me… I think they’re all a bunch of idiots.
Mankind has a long and storied history of being absolutely certain that we know something only to learn we are clueless. It is the ego of man. Every generation thinks their’s is the one with all the answers. As I scientist, I savor every new discovery… But the historian in me keeps me from getting too excited. The only certainty in science is that man will be humbled.
Which brings me to today’s story in New Scientist… 13 things that do not make sense A list of 13 things we think we understand but our observations just don’t fit our theories. It seems a few scientists are learning humility…
1 The placebo effect
DON’T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it’s not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don’t know. …
3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays
FOR more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles – mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei – that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don’t know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that’s not the real mystery. …Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo’s Akeno Giant Air Shower Array – 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres – has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?
One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong. His special theory of relativity says that space is the same in all directions, but what if particles found it easier to move in certain directions? Then the cosmic rays could retain more of their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit.
4 Belfast homeopathy results
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions – so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule – worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out. [Look, a scientist -ed] …
You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. “We are,” Ennis says in her paper, “unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.” If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry. [yikes -ed]
This list goes on and it it worth reading the whole thing, but you get the idea. Some people think they know everything there is to know about one topic or another. The truth is we aren’t 100% sure we have the basics down yet. No matter how loud my critics pound their chests and no matter how much we think we know… We don’t know jack. ]]>< 
*plonk*
Jebus. You know better than every well-trained scientist on the planet because you had a science class in 9th grade? You’ve got the understanding of a 14 year old in matters scientific?
Wow.
I know who the idiot is here, that’s for sure.
Well done, Paul.
Cindy
Cindy – your sarcasm is far too subtle. You need to work on that.
Paul – Mr. Nerd has it about right. You’ve had your ass kicked up and down the blogosphere (crikey, my wee little blog has seen a 60% increase in traffic just because of the idiocy you spout). But, hey, it’s ok, I know you don’t realize this or accept it.
Woah! It’s like my very own little theory of blog evolution or something!
Reject it! Quickly!
It’s been fun. You’re still a scientific ignoramus, but I’m sure you’re probably a nice guy in general.
That and two bucks fifty will get you a good beer at happy hour.
Cheers, pumpkin.
Paul: no, I didn’t know that about the life of Copernicus. I’ve always heard contemporary sympathies from the scientific community about Copernicus and the social obstacles that existed to accepting his theory(ies).
Perhaps what’s been accomplished is that the suffering associated with accepting the theory(ies) by Copernicus has been projected backward in time to include the non suffering author — which might indicate yet another area among “science” of a form of theology about the concepts: Copernicus the non suffering in lifetime later regarded as the suffering martyr for his ideas. Seems silly now that I think about it but perhaps there’s a point there to prove your other assumptions, and that is the philosophical regard by many among practitioners of science (a huge tentpole term, no less) while denigrating the scientifically unwashed as being too theologically curious.
Argh…Galileo, Copernicus…it’s not so important just what discoverer experienced social difficulties where their theory(ies) were concerned, but that their peers were so opposed to change (and to therefore accept new and alternative concepts to replace other “beliefs” about what certain definitions and terms were).
That’s the point I was making earlier, not so much specifically about any one scientist, although writing under time constraints these last weeks here.
I’m now concluding that this just serves to prove even moreso just how much of what is “believed to be” “fact” by many among the sciences and then protected with intensity as “believers” in that/a body of information are later proven to be both repressing toward more accurate information (new discoveries) but that it points out just how much “science” is a belief system while so many who associate with it also denigrate those who display theological curiosity and ideas.
So, Copernicus or Galileo or whomever, it was a different sort of statement I was making, not so much about a man and his history. Or, in my case, a woman and her history.
Paul,
Not only did I not miss your point, I could have made it rather better than you did, using examples that any good historian of science would know but most nonscientists don’t. Your error wasn’t in saying “scientists don’t always know as much as they think they do.” That’s more true than even you realize. Your problem was in your selection of examples. Had you picked examples like the Channeled Scablands debate, you wouldn’t have gotten the reaction you did. The mid-20th-century orthodoxy of dinosaurs as stupid slow swampdwelling failures, or the collapse of classical physics, or the Piltdown Man fiasco, or the furor about plate tectonics, or the squabbling over asteroid-impact craters, or orthodoxy’s reaction to herbal medicines — any of those does a more than adequate job of showing dogmatic “science” at its worst. But evolutionary theory in general — no, that’s a bad example of what you were trying to say, and you rightly got your head handed to you for using it.
I step out for a few hours to watch a little tee vee, and look what happens. I’ve missed so much.
Tman said, “I have seen experiments that reproduce the conditions of early life.”
No, you haven’t. You’re referring to the Miller-Urey experiment in which a mixture of water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen were exposed to electrical arcing and amino acids formed.
Amino acids are relatively simple molecules, consisting of only a handful of atoms. It’s not at all implausible to think that the raw materials in the presence of the right catalysis should form amino acids.
But it’s a very long way from the formation of simple amino acids to the creation of even the most primitive prokaryotes. The fallacy of the Miller-Urey experiment is, “Look, we made alanine. Q.E.D.” Well, the Q was not D’d at all, not by that experiment or any other since.
Besides, the Miller-Urey experiment completely ignored the oxygen problem. That is, when oxygen was introduced into the mix to form an oxygenating atmosphere rather than a reducing atmosphere, no amino acids formed. In fact, the necessary composition of liquids and gases in the Miller-Urey experiment was very finicky; a very slight change either way caused the experiment to fail. Does the mix that was successful accurately represent the composition of the earth’s surface and atmosphere in primordial times? Nobody knows.
Also ignored was the polymerization problem: How can simple organic molecules like amino acids come together to form larger molecules like RNA and proteins without some source of chemical energy? Nobody knows. (Wachtershauser advanced a theory based on the oxygenation-reduction of iron sulfides, but experiments suggest that while such an environment might create complex molecules, it also appears to be seriously hostile to those molecules, destroying them almost immediately through hydrolysis.)
Long story short: Nobody has the foggiest idea how a totally inorganic environment could give rise to complex organic molecules. If we were to crack that nut, we’d still have no idea how to go from complex organic molecules to prokaryotes.
The origin of life is one of the last remaining complete mysteries that science has yet to even begin to crack.
Frankly, panspermia fits the facts better than any other hypothesis we have right now, although at best that idea just pushes the origin problem back up a level. Rather than asking why life emerged spontaneously here, we have to ask why it emerged spontaneously elsewhere. Another way of phrasing that question is to ask, “Is there any set of conditions in which cellular life can arise spontaneously out of inorganic life?” So far, the answer has remained a resounding “no.”
We know that organisms evolve over time. We have observed this, and we have a good theory that explains how it happens. What we lack, though — as Paul continues to point out, and as some readers continue to misunderstand — are theories that can explain (1) the origin of life, and (2) the mechanism which led to the present diversity of life. Saying “organisms change over time” doesn’t answer either of those still entirely open questions.
That part up yonder where I said “inorganic life?” Obviously I mean “inorganic conditions.” Me sleepy. Me no post when sleepy any more, not nohow.
Tman said:
I like how you avoided the question though. You did the same thing to commisar, so I figured I would call you out again.
WOW… Why do all you guys have so much trouble reading?
I answered him like 15 times. (Since you apparently read the thread,) you know that Darby and Michael were smart enough to figure it out to the point they mocked The Commissar multiple times for like getting the answer.
Now if you read the whole thread –and I’ll excuse you if you skipped around– I gave your answer to this question to Steve (go read it) and then later directly to The Commissar.
Then Tman just embarrassed himself by asking:
What are you afraid of Paul? Why won’t you give us your answer to what is essentially a simple question?
If it’s not evolution, what is it?
Afraid? Don’t flatter yourself. The reason I did not answer you directly is because I tire of the intellectually lazy asking for candy when they are too lazy to actually read and think for themselves… well in fairness with you it might be an inability and not laziness. (plus answered it twice last night!)
You almost got the point when you said: “I agree that WE DO NOT KNOW FOR SURE if the conditions…”
But close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades. So, since you tried twice to get the point and failed… and Darby is not around, I’ll spell it out for you.
The point is about the ego of man. That generation after generation, man thinks he has all the answers when history proves him a fool. As I’ve said repeatedly, “We don’t know Jack.”
NOW- Given that I’ve insulted people who claim to have all the answers when in reality nobody does, what the HELL would it look like if I claimed to suddenly know????
If I say nobody knows, DUH! I clearly don’t have a pet theory I think is right!!!
Now that I’ve explained it… How hard was that to figure out? (assuming you get it now)
There is no such thing as certainty, in knowledge or otherwise. This does not excuse someone from having to hold opinions and having to justify them.
For most people, myself included, evolution is a clear-cut issue. It’s a theory that best approximates that happens in the real world. If we ever get a better theory, it will probably extend this one, as quantum physics did to the Newtonian one.
If you want to be a fundie, fine, but don’t shit on the whole of knowledge just to get your narrow, agenda-ride opinions the ounce of respect they lack.
The problem with evolution and friends is that there’s little practical applications for these theories, so little chance to test them… or is there? Evolution applied to genetics has provided more results than millenia of monotheism.
Honestly, for someone who claims to “love” science, Paul sure has a strange way of showing it, particularly with respect to evolution.
Orac, so much of what gets shouted about evolution is not science. It’s pseudoscience at best. That’s kind of the point here.
Whew! that took some time to read…
Well Paul, I’m glad that you are at least not going to jump to some kerazy creationist conclusion.
you say “we don’t know jack”. How Cartesian.
welcome to freshman philosophy.
Have you considered that your senses may be being mislead by an evil demon? or that you may be living in the Matrix?
In a way, you’re quite right: just because things have hit the ground every time they have been dropped in the entirity of recorded history doesn’t mean that the next thing you drop will necessarily do the same thing. I can show you loads of precedent, a lot of good theoretical foundation for why it will probably hit the ground, but I can’t deductively prove it.
So there you go, we really don’t know jack.
so my question to you is this: if you don’t think that evidence and seemingly logical theory are a sound foundation for accepting something as true, then why don’t you go and throw yourself off a tall building? no really.
It seems absurd to me that you will not believe something like evolutionary theory that is not only beatifully logical and gloriously elegant (read ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ by Richard Dawkins), but also completely consistent with all of our observations (if you doubt this, I direct you to talkorigins); then why do you trust that feeling hungry means that you should eat, or that your car needs gasoline to work?
If you want to go through life not believing anything (except possibly ‘cogito ergo sum’; assuming you cogit), then fine, no-one can touch you (good luck surviving though…), but if you want to accept certain propositions as true, then you’ve gotta figure out a way of deciding – blind faith? fine, again, I can’t touch you. But if you want to decide based on reason and evidence, then evolution is the /only/ game in town.
“Orac, so much of what gets shouted about evolution is not science. It’s pseudoscience at best.“
Jeff, could you by any chance back this up with proof? Or are you just making things up as we go along?
You are the dumbest fucking moron I have run across on the internet in 8 years. I don’t evenb think you rise to “homo sap” let along “homo sapiens.”
If you had a brain, you’d be dangerous. As it is you’re just a gibbering far right fool to point at and laugh at.
I don’t know about lighting striking ooze and all that, though electro-chemical reactivity is easily proven and well established, but the Big Invisible Man in the Sky theory (read: myth) is a tough one to prove as well, especially considering that religion makes no sincere effort whatsoever to connect beliefs with reality.
But let’s suppose for a minute the creationists are right, that there is a Greater Power that made everything, what then? Did it abandon us or does it choose to limit its control or influence over us? Or, an even more scary proposition, what if it is in control of everything? Of the three scenarios; no involvement, limited involvement, or total contol, the second and last are most disturbing, because given the evidence of the sad state of human affaits, God is a sadistic psychopath who gets off on schadenfreude. If the first is the case, then He’s nothing more than a deadbeat parent, so screw Him, amen.
By the way, Paul, I dare you to reply without using juvenile insults, though given your previous posts, if you can’t insult me, you’ll just delete this post and ban me.
Oozer? With such obvious lack of interest in civility, why should I stick around? Perhaps you might consider reserving the nastiness for those who actually ask for it.