A voice crying in the wilderness

I said I would post something about scientific debate vs political debate. These are some very ill-formed ideas which fit into a wider complex of ideas which I’ve been thinking about for a long time, well, more or less since I did my PhD. Maybe if I pull them all together they’ll make a book, who knows?
I’ve been inspired by recent debates round here (among other things) to think about the differences, and similarities, between these two modes of discourse – sorry, a bit of sociologese there, make that ‘ways of discussing the world’ – and how they overlap. Maybe there’s a spectrum, with at one end the classic scientific method, and at the other, oh, I don’t know, voting on the latest Big Brother, maybe. No, scrub that, I’m getting distracted.
Recent work that I’ve done – going back a couple of years now, because basically I haven’t done ANYTHING intellectual since last summer – has focused on analysing contributions to the public debate on GM, looking at what people base their ideas on, where they come from, and what are recognised as legitimate truth claims. In this work, I have used concepts developed by Geoffrey Vickers, a particular guru of mine. He talks about statements of fact and statements of value, and the differences between the two. Statements of fact are independently verifiable – so, ‘this box is red’ is a statement of fact (if we leave aside philosophical discussions about the definitions of ‘this’, ‘box’, ‘is’ and ‘red’), while ‘This box is beautiful’ is a statement of value. Statements of value are inherently subjective – they require an observer – although they can acquire a form of ‘objectivity’ if enough people agree with them – thus the statement ‘The Mona Lisa is beautiful’ is widely considered an objective statement, although it is not equivalent in its objectivity to a statement like: ‘the Mona Lisa is a painting in oils on canvas’.
Oh, sorry, now I’ve really got down into the nit-picking, and I can feel myself being drawn into discussions about objectivity and subjectivity and facts and values… and something someone said a few months back about beliefs and opinions… I love this stuff, I know, I’m a sick, sick woman…
But to get back to my original debate – because to be honest it’s time to get back to work and stop scribbling in cafes [Ed’s note: this was written on Wednesday, it’s just that I’m only typing it up now, on Saturday morning] – the distinction I wanted to make is that scientific debates ultimately rest on judgements of fact, not value. It is possible to settle a scientific debate by an appeal to the evidence – indeed, this is the only legitimate way of doing so. This is not to say that this is easy, far from it, for all sorts of reasons, which I will expand on if I ever get round to writing that book (or even any more papers). But the point I was trying to make is that political debates – at the opposite end of the spectrum – are entirely based on judgements of value. It is not philosophically possible to say that one argument is ‘better’ than another purely on the basis of its content. I can argue with you forever over whether Warhol’s Marilyn is more beautiful than the Mona Lisa, but we cannot settle this by an appeal to judgements of fact, only perhaps by canvassing the opinions of others and seeing where the balance of preference lies - a democratic approach, if you like. Damn, I seem to have wandered away into aesthetic rather than political debates, that gives me another category.
Political debates can, of course, be settled by an appeal to ethics, but this is also inherently subjective.
What I wanted to say was this (and I really DO have to get back to work now) is that with factual/scientific debates, it is possible to reach some kind of resolution in terms of an appeal to an external standard. Different arguments can be shown to have a stronger basis than others. They are not all of equal value, different opinions which should all be accorded equal respect. Thus, it is wrong to say that Creationism is equal in value to evolution because they are alternative ‘theories’. There exists an external standard against which they can both be compared – and one, evolution, has a huge body of objective evidence to support it, while belief in creationism rests only on faith.
And now I have spent long enough in this café and sadly I really have to get home and get some work done.

I just got an email with the message line: ‘If you can read this, email marketing works’.
Well, I COULD have read it. But I didn’t bother.
I couldn’t even tell you what it was ad-ver-tising.
So, it didn’t work THAT well.
PS But interestingly enough, when I just tried to post this, BCUK refused to accept it because of the word adv...

'As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.' Albert Einstein

My pet bugbear is the highly processed ‘civilised western’ diet which has taken hold in the US and UK, particularly over the last 50 years or so. Our bodies have over millennia evolved to consume certain types of foods. The evolutionary aspects of this can be seen to some extent in different reactions to certain foods within different cultures. For example, Western Europeans (and by extension North Americans of Western European extraction) have, over many generations, eaten and drunk dairy products. This is not the case in the Far East, with the observable result that the proportion of Asians who suffer from lactose intolerance is far higher than in Europe. The reason for this is obvious – the lactose-intolerant portion of the gene pool in our society is more likely to have died in childhood in previous generations, and not left any genetic offspring to come down to the present. Hence, lactose tolerance has been selected for in those populations which have a history of dairy consumption.
Now we turn to the issue of the western diet more generally – particularly aspects such as the widespread availability and relative cheapness (compared with previous generations) of meat and saturated fats, refined sugars, refined carbohydrates, etc etc, which characterise a ‘modern’ diet – not to mention ‘artificial’ and highly processed additives. Many of these foods, when introduced to ‘indigenous’ populations, prove highly toxic.
But the point I want to make is, that they are not exactly healthy for indigenous Western Europeans/North Americans either. What are the greatest killers in these countries? Diseases of affluence, such as heart disease and cancers, which can be directly linked to this kind of diet. (Of course, this effect is partly due to the reduction in deaths from infectious diseases etc, because, after all, everyone has to die of something).
Within the population, there are naturally variations in predisposition to these diseases, and also there are other lifestyle factors which also can have an impact. But can we say there has been, or will be, any evolutionary adaptation towards this kind of diet? Well, for a start, it hasn’t really been round for long enough for truly evolutionary effects to appear – a couple of generations, at most. The second point is that the impact of this kind of diet on morbidity tends to come in middle age or later life, after the subjects have already passed on their genetic material to the next generation.
But what is happening now – and this is what I find really interesting - is the rise in diet-linked diseases at a younger age, particularly type 2 diabetes among children and young adults – before they have had a chance to breed.
So, my suspicion is that this is an area where evolution can be seen in action – in that those with a genetic adaptation to toleration of this kind of diet have a genetic advantage – quite a depressing thought, really.

According to Darwin, there are two pre-conditions for evolution by natural selection to work. One is that parents have more offspring than are needed to replace themselves, and that there is genetic variation between the young – which occurs through sexual mixing. The second is that those genetic variations affect individuals’ ability to cope with the conditions in their environment, most specifically, to find food and to breed. If an individual’s genetic suitability is so poor that it dies before it is able to reproduce, its particular genetic configuration is removed from the gene pool, it leaves behind no offspring with that configuration. This is the meaning of ‘survival of the fittest’, - simply that those genetic traits which pass to the next generation tend to be those which have the closest ‘fit’ to the conditions of the environment – not necessarily the strongest, or the biggest, maybe the smallest, or the best camouflaged – and, although ‘the struggle for survival’ is often conceptualised as a competition between individuals, it is more accurately dependent on the way in which the individual reacts with its environment.
Among people with a partial understanding , there is often an assumption that evolution is teleological and progressive, ie) that it leads towards a specific goal which is in some way an ‘improvement’ on what went before. But this is to superimpose an artificial evaluation onto an objective situation. And anyway, the adaptation is to a specific set of environmental conditions. If that environment changes, for whatever reason, whether initiated by the organism or due to external circumstances, the species (and note that here we are talking about species, not individuals) no longer necessarily has the combination of genetic traits which will allow it to be successful with respect to the changed environmental factors.
OK, so there is a widespread assumption that humanity is the ‘pinnacle of creation’, possibly inherited from the judeo-Christian tradition, possibly just a natural species-centrism – just as each of us as individuals consider ourselves to be the centre of our own universe. But homo sapiens as a species has been around a very short span of evolutionary time, and ‘civilisation’ for practically no time at all.
So, why should we assume that evolution has in some way come to a halt? It seems that way because we only see an infinitesimally short time scale. It would be like, say, a mayfly which hatches in the morning and dies before sunset believing (assuming it had the mental capacity to do such a thing) that daylight is the eternal state of the world – or the people in Asimov’s short story ‘Nightfall’.
But I digress. So, if we think about the mechanisms of evolution, how are they likely to impact on humanity in the future? I have some thoughts about that – but you’ll have to wait until the future (probably tomorrow) to find out what they are.

Quite a fun article on how the media operate.
from (of course, where else?) the media.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200805150018

‘Experts’ tend to get a bad press these days. Never a day goes by without someone pontificating about some topic about which we’re all sure we’re better informed than they are. It’s easy to get a cheap laugh out of pointing out the idiocies espoused by some so-called, possibly self-appointed or media-nominated ‘expert’.
But let’s think about this for a while - yes, I know that’s a challenge, why should we bother to think about anything when we can just have a laugh and go back to whatever it was we were doing before, which almost certainly didn’t involve thinking?
What are we saying here? That we shouldn’t believe, trust or give any attention to anyone who claims to know more than we do about a subject? Even if they have spent their whole careers studying it?
There are experts and experts, after all. The first question is – who claims this person is an ‘expert’? Are they putting themselves forward, or is it someone else citing them, possibly with the purpose of making fun of them, of causing a sensation, or just to create a ‘good story’? Second, what did they actually say, what are the grounds on which they’re making whatever statement it is that they’re making, what qualifications did they make? Particularly if we’re talking about scientists, there is a often such a high degree of uncertainty and unknowns in what they’re saying, no good scientist will come straight out and make an unqualified, unequivocal statement without explaining his or her reasons. The people who quote them, however, will very often miss out those qualifications.
It’s important to ask these questions, before we decide whether to either accept or reject any advice or information we are given. But unthinking scepticism is as bad as unthinking gullibility.

'... a state of happiness - of contentment or satisfaction - merely by itself is a negative state, a passive condition, which undermines things we value more: our striving and yearning, our improving and growing, our inventing and discovering. Of course, some of what goes under these adventurous names is apt to rebound on us, and often has in the past; but not as often as it has moved us forward as a species, bringing the intrinsic goods of knowledge and progress, despite the prices that have sometimes been paid for both.
It is true that happiness frequently, although not invariably, accompanies these endeavours, as smoke does fire; and when it does, it enhances them. But it is knowledge and progress which are primary, causing happiness as a side-effect; they are the goal, and the attendant happiness, when it comes, is a sign that they are being reached.'

AC Grayling, 'The Meaning of Things', p 72

After reading AC Grayling on fidelity yesterday evening (which I’ve blogged about on HorC), when I couldn't sleep last night I was reading a back issue of the New Statesman and came across an article by Jonathan Beckman. He was writing about citizenship, and the idea that it can be taught: ‘...unlike physics or history, citizenship is not a body of knowledge. It involves both a civic participation and an interior disposition: it is a combination of activity and feeling’.
I liked what he said about Aristotle:
‘Establishing… virtues is not simply a question of education. One does not become virtuous by knowing that stealing is wrong. Virtue is maintained by constantly doing virtuous acts. These are not done reluctantly, but are accompanied by appropriate feelings of harmony and satisfaction. Indeed, should you suffer a dark night of the soul, Aristotle would claim that you are not truly virtuous’.
As with fidelity, so with Aristotle’s virtues: it is not enough simply to know, or to do, what you should do, in order to be virtuous - it must also be what you truly want to do.

Trust is a reciprocal relationship. We believe things said by people we trust – but we trust people who say things we already agree with. So it becomes self-reinforcing. Given that, how can we manipulate trust? Should we be manipulating trust? What are the grounds, the basis on which we evaluate truth? We take things on board to the extent that they correspond with the way we think things are already. But if what is said does not correspond to our pre-existing beliefs or experience, we are more inclined to reject it.
That I guess is it in a nutshell, and put like that it all seems a bit self-evident – well, to me it does. But is that actually the way people see the world more generally? Ah, but who are these ‘people’?
The point, I think, is that no individual’s responses are predictable in that way. Or maybe they are to some extent. This is always the way, isn’t it, you can go by what the probabilities tell you is most likely to happen, but it doesn’t mean that that is what actually will happen.
In any particular case, circumstances lead to a particular resolution. Which does not disprove the rule for all other cases, just says that this is what happened in this case, because of this.
Yet if we look at the classical scientific method, one instance of disproof should lead to the rejection of the general rule. Except that, it doesn’t. Within normal science, we look for the reason which caused the rule to be broken in this instance, and are quite likely to assume that something went wrong in that particular instance, that the sample was contaminated, or there are some circumstances that we are not aware of, and that that extreme example should be rejected and omitted from the findings. That is how science works. Or a new explanation is found for that particular case. We still work on probabilities – most cases indicate this, so we can ignore the one which indicates that.
Where is all this leading me? I don’t know. To the profound, or the banal? Or maybe a bit of both.