New Scientist
by Paul Hazelden
Introduction
I am a regular reader of the magazine, New Scientist,
and it regularly contains articles and other items of interest.
My intention here is simply to provide an index to some of these
so I know where to find them again.
A matter of faith
7 August 2010, 40.
Review by Manjit Kumar of Why Beliefs Matter: Reflections
on the nature of science by E Brian Davies (OUP).
Bohr and Einstein did not agree on whether science gives us
access to an objective reality. This is as good a starting point
as any to examine the role of belief in the practice of science:
not just religious belief, but philosophical beliefs and
worldviews. What we believe affects how we act and how we
perceive the world - whether or not we recognise that this is
taking place. As Davies points out: you cannot avoid having a
worldview.
From the review, this sounds like a thoughtful and helpful
examination of a subject which is often neglected. And he quotes
C S Lewis to support his argument!
Beware the lone wolf
3 September 2011, 28-29.
Examining similarities between Anders Breivik, Timothy McVeigh,
Theodore Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph: they were all highly
intelligent but shared a profound inability to forge meaningful
relationships. Several were refused membership of the radical
groups whose ideology they shared.
Most members of these groups committed no crimes, so it is
suggested that membership itself satisfies the need for most
people; the killers "resorted to carnage on a wide scale to grab
the attention they craved."
Cosmology's not broken
7 August 2010, 22-23.
Whether or not you are interested in Cosmology, this article
makes a very valid plea for probability to be handled correctly
within mainstream science.
The basic point is that unlikely events occur frequently, so we
should not argue that the probability of this event, given
what we know, is low, so what we know is probably wrong; instead
we should consider the probability of what we think we know being
wrong, given that this event has occurred. This latter
calculation will involve many more factors than just the
probability of the event, so it gives a much more useful result.
Deadly rationality
28 November 2009, 53.
Review by Michael Bond of Radical, Religious and Violent
by Eli Berman (MIT Press).
Looking at religious terrorism. "While other authors have
focussed on the obvious but peripheral issue of how religion
inspires individual attackers - it is rarely the primary
motivation, as many studies have shown - Berman tackes the
pertinent question of what makes radical religious organisations
so much more deadly than other groups... one key measure of the
potential effectiveness or lethality of a group... is the extent
to which it provides social services within its community."
"Those whose jobs it is to protect citizens from such attacks
should note his conclusion: that the groups behind them are
rational operators whose tactics are best countered socially,
economically and politically, not with violence."
Down in Flames
4 November 2006, 42-45.
This contains the worrying news that many fires have been
wrongly identified as being caused by arson, as many
features the experts associated with arson turn out to
be produced in accidental fires as well.
It also contains the fascinating detail that you can't
set fire to a pool of petrol by dropping a lit cigarette into
it, despite what you may have seen in numerous films.
Easy rider
28 May 2011, 44-47.
A classic New Scientist article: we still don't
understand how bicycles work - why they are so stable. But we are
getting closer to an understanding. We also don't entirely
understand how people manage to control bicycles, which ties in
with another important theoretical question: how complicated a
system can humans deal with?
End of spacetime
7 August 2010, 28-31.
For over a hundred years, we have lived with the idea that we
live in a universe that has at least four dimensions: three of
space and one of time. Relativity shows how space and time are
connected, and constitute the single entity of spacetime. This may
be about to change.
Petr Horava at the University of California in Berkley is
proposing a new interpretation. This could lead to a 'theory of
everything' but at the cost of undoing spacetime.
We have known for a long time that Relativity and Quantum
Physics are incompatible. Horava suggests two changes to
Relativity: first, remove the Lorentz symmetry; and secondly, give
time a preferred direction.
Lorentx symmetry has been tested to an astonishing degree of
accuracy in many ways, so this is a brave move. But Horava
suggests that the symmetry holds at 'normal' distances but
disappears when you are working at very small distances, in much
the same way as Newton's equations hold at normal speeds but
disappear when you go very fast. With this modification, gravity
can work at very small distances without contrdicting Quantum
Mechanics.
Another benefit from this approach is that it can explain our
observations of galaxies without needing to introduce 'dark
matter' - a very attractive possibility.
Inevitably, more work is required. But it looks like an
interesting possibility.
Evolving gods
28 November 2009, 53.
Review by Amanda Gefter of The Faith Instinct by Nicholas
Wade (Penguin).
"Wade argues that in early human societies religion was the best
solution to lawlessness within a group and warfare from without,
motivating individuals to put society's needs before their own.
It's a compelling idea, but it requires natural selection to act
on groups as well as individuals - an idea that remains
controversial."
"Wade sees a future in which religion serves only its societal
functions, stripped of obsolete beliefs in the supernatural. It's
hard to reconcile with today, when those who cling to superstition
and those who turn to reason seem more polarised than ever."
And it is hard to see how religion can have any function if it
is stripped of belief in the supernatural. If you believe there is
no God, how do you practice a religion which requires that belief,
and how does such a faith motivate you to sacrificial love of your
fellow creatures?
This is the key issue Sartre and his fellows struggled with.
The best solution they found? "Life is meaningless, but we must
live as though it has meaning." But where does this 'must' come
from, if morality is only something we invent to make ourselves
feel better? You just have to pretend hard enough, and maybe you
can convince yourself it is true, even though you know it's not...
Fearlessness may be linked to crime
21 November 2009, 18.
Even at the tender age of 3, children who later go on to be
convicted of a crime are less likely to learn to link fear with a
certain noise than those who don't. This may mean that an
insensitivity to fear could be a driving force behind criminal
behaviour.
Adrian Raine of the University of Pennsylvania looked at the
data from a study of 1800 3 year olds in the 1970s. They found that
137 of them now had criminal records, and these people had showed
significantly less fear than those who did not go on to become
criminals, compared to subjects of a similar race, gender, and so
on.
The Happiness Agenda
16 April 2011, 46-52.
The 'special investigation' looks at several aspects of
happiness. It repeats a number of observations published elsewhere
- for example, Daniel Gilbert notes that we are generally happier
with irreversable choices than reversible ones; which is why he
decided to marry his girlfriend.
Useful observation that happiness and satisfaction are
different: in the USA, increasing income above $75,000 a year does
not increase happiness, but it does increase satisfaction.
Action for Happiness is a secular movement. It will be
interesting to see how it fares: traditionally, religion has been
consistently important in detering happiness.
The authors of The Spirit Level give an update on their
work over the past two years. It seems that even the American
public, even the rich part of the American public, might be
interested in living in a fairer and happier world.
Happiness can become an unhealthy obsession. As pointed out in
'Obliquity', it doesn't work to have your own happiness as your
goal in life.
Finally, there is a fair review of 'Flourish'. Important
material.
It doesn't add up
14 August 2010, 34-38.
Around 1920, David Hilbert suggested that the rules of
arithmetic should be complete, consistent and computable. Very
reasonable, you would have thought. But in the 1930s,
Gödel established that they can't be both complete and
consistent; and Turing established that they can't be computable.
This is disturbing stuff, but most people manage to ignore it.
After all Gödel's proof uses logical abstractions, which
don't really touch on the real world.
But now, Harvey Friedman from Ohio State University is
publishing a book (Boolean Relation Theory and
Incompleteness) which extends the problem much further: now
we know that there are unprovable statements about concrete
structures. It touches the real world. The hole in mathematics is
much bigger than we thought.
The issue seems to hang on the way in which infinity is
handled: it is an essential part of the mathematician's toolbag,
but this may not be enough. We may be faced with two contradictory
options for how we do maths, and both options seem to be
completely unpalatable.
The man who would banish evil
9 April 2011, 32-33.
Simon Baron-Cohen has just published a book,
'Zero Degrees of Empathy' (US edition: 'The Science of Evil').
Simon Baron-Cohen is best known for his research into autism.
His main goal "is to understand human cruelty, replacing the term
'evil' with the more scientific one of 'lack of empathy'."
He sees empathy as composed fo two parts: the congnitive
understanding of what goes on in someone else's mind, and the
affective part - the emotional reaction to what you perceive is
going on.
He sees evil as being presented as a reason for behaviour,
possibly as an excuse: people say things like, "he did this
because he is evil." I suspect that this is generally a verbal
shorthand.
The point of this, of course, is to get around the problem
identified by Hume: you can't reason from 'is' to 'ought'. You
cannot move from a statement of scientific fact to a statement of
moral principle - so ethics need to come from somewhere else.
If an ethical term ('evil') can be replaced by a scientific term
('lack of empathy') then we can argue from science to ethics, and
there is the possibility of setting up a scientifically based
moral system.
He doesn't manage it. People may do good because they feel for
others, or because they have calculated what is in their own best
interest. This does not stop the action from being good.
30 April 2011, 24.
A letter from Robin Jamieson expresses a different viewpoint,
including the idea that "one could surmise that the most extreme
acts of cruelty require a high degree of empathy."
Evil and empathy may be linked, but I don't see how the one
can be used to replace the other.
The Orchid Children
28 January 2012, 42-45.
Three-year-olds who spontaneously offer to share are rare, and
most of them have a rare variant (7R) of the DRD4 gene. This
variant is associated with antisocial behaviour - it is seen in
children who have problems because they are too naughty or
hyperactive.
In common with other 'problem' genes, it seems that children
who have good parenting benefit greatly, and those who have poor
parenting suffer greatly as a result. With other genes, the
children do not suffer as badly from poor parenting, but neither
do they gain as much from good parenting. These genes make them
more responsive, more variable, than the general population.
The article title comes from the analogy that some children are
orchids - they flower brilliantly in good environments, and very
badly in poor environments; other children are dandelions, who
flower in much the same way whatever the environment.
Religion and Punishment
27 November 2010, 12.
Ernest Fehr and his team in the University of Zurich have come
up with an evolutionary reason for the development of religion
which demands suffering of the believer. After all, it is easy to
understand why people would believe a religion which offers them
something good; but not so hard to see why they would embrace a
faith which requires suffering.
Fehr and his team have done some studies which link religious
thoughts with the willingness to suffer in order for a bad act to
be punished - in other words, with the willingness to suffer for
the greater good. This clearly benefits society, and hence can
benefit the members of that society. It is still not entirely
clear that this is an evolutionary benefit - the benefit to the
individual as a member of the society must outweigh the cost to
the individual, and we seem to be a long way from establishing
that. But still, it is an interesting insight, and yet another
piece of evidence that religious faith brings real, tangible and
measurable benefits to people.
Interestingly, the piece concludes that while religion my have
a survival value, "other motivations are possible too...
Appropriate secular ideas, such as socialism should, in principle,
be equally effective in priming group-orientated behaviour." I
wonder why they 'should' be equally effective? There is no
evidence put forward to support this suggestion. It appears to be
yet another example of the blind faith people put in secular ideas
- a religion can inspire sacrificial behaviour for perfectly
understandable reasons, but we have yet to see how a materialistic
and secular dogma can achieve the same.
The secret life of pronouns
3 September 2011, 42-45.
The words you use are of two types: content, which
provide meaning (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs); and
functions, which connect, shape and organise the function
words (pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, quantifiers
and so on).
We focus mostly on the content words, but all the common words
we use are function words. They communicate far more than we
usually realise, and reveal a great deal about us and our
relationships with other people.
The time machine in your head
24 October 2009, 32-37.
We all know the 'waggon wheel illusion' in which the wheels on
waggons in films appear to go the wrong way at certain speeds. But
the same effect occurs in real life, because our brains sample
visual images at around 13 frame per second. Continuity of
movement is a visual illusion.
Even more strangely, when overlapping shapes spin at around
that rate, people often see one pattern reverse independently of
the other - so we are not just taking visual snapshots of the
world, but processing information about discrete objects within
the world as distinct units of mental activity.
Our brains must handle simultaneous input from different senses
and interpret them correctly. One aspect of this is to create
building blocks of consciousness: if two events fall inside the
same block, they are perceived as simultaneous, and if they fall
into different blocks, they are preceived as sequential.
But our brains process different signals at different speeds,
and it is possible for the timing to get mismatched. The
suggestion is that schitzophrenia may arise from a mismatch in the
timekeeping and coordinating function of the brain, so that the
normal perception of cause preceding effect may be at times
reversed.
Experiments also show that our perceptions do not actually
speed up when we are under stress, but the memories we capture at
such times are 'denser' - we store more memory, so it appears with
hindsight that the event lasted longer.
Where has your willpower gone?
28 January 2012, 30-31.
Extensive research shows that willpower functions very much like
a muscle: there is one muscle which is used in all situations
where we need willpower; when we use it, the muscle gets tired in
the short term; and it gets stronger only through regular use.
Lots of practical applications flow from this, but to mention
just one: because there is just one muscle being exercised, if you
use willpower, say, to resist saying something rude or sarcastic
to someone who deserves to be told off, you will then have less
willpower (in the short term) to use on keeping to your diet.
You have to practice using willpower, to strengthen your
ability; and you need to control the circumstances in which you
need to exercise it, so that you don't use it all up on something
unimportant and then fail to exercise it when it really matters.
Like a muscle, willpower uses glucose, which is why it is
harder to exercise willpower
when your glucose level is low. This is one reason why dieting is
so difficult - you need the glucose to help you resist eating
glucose.