Category: Modern Science

This Is Why You Shouldn’t Pay Attention to Most Surveys

A possible warning label for food?
A possible warning label for food?
As a nation, we seem to be addicted to surveys. We want to know what other people think about politics, education, celebrities, music, television shows, movies, science, etc. I have never understood that. While I might find a survey interesting from time to time, I honestly don’t worry much about what most people think. Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t bother me when people complain about my “contrarian” views, as one professor recently described them. While I strongly value the opinions of many people I know, I really couldn’t care less about what the majority of people (including the majority of scientists) think.

Well, I recently came across a survey that might help me understand why the opinion of the majority means little to me. It was done by the Oklahoma State University Department of Agricultural Economics. This particular survey is performed online monthly and tries to track “consumer preferences and sentiments on the safety, quality, and price of food at home and away from home with particular focus on meat demand.” Even though most of the questions on the survey are consistent from month-to-month, ad hoc questions can be added.

For the June 2016 survey, three new ad hoc questions were added. One of them asked the respondents whether they support or oppose a mandatory label on all foods containing DNA. It turns out that 80% of the respondents supported the idea! By contrast, 82% supported mandatory labels on foods produced with genetic engineering, and only 69% supported mandatory calorie labels on restaurant foods.

Now, of course, I suspect that most of my readers are educated enough to understand how silly it is to want mandatory labels on foods that contain DNA. However, just in case it escapes some people: Most of the food we eat contains DNA! When you eat a vegetable, for example, you are eating plant tissues that are made up of plant cells. Each and every cell holds the plant’s DNA in its nucleus. When you eat meat, you are eating an animal’s muscles, which are composed of muscle cells. Once again, muscle cells contain the animal’s DNA. It is very difficult to eat without ingesting the DNA of the organism you are eating!

Think about that for a moment. In this survey, 82% of people think there should be a warning label on foods that were produced with genetic engineering. However, the majority of those people also think there should be a warning about something that is in nearly every food we eat! Why in the world should we take advice about genetically-modified food from people who clearly don’t know much about the very molecule that is modified to make those foods? Also, since there were fewer people who supported mandatory calorie labels on restaurant foods, at least some of the people who are worried about DNA being in food don’t seem to be worried about how restaurant food can contribute to a real health issue: obesity!

This survey tells me two things: First, science education in the U.S. is abysmal. Of course, there are lots of other things that have already demonstrated that! Second, we shouldn’t listen to surveys when it comes to making decisions.

Bill Nye Continues To Talk About Things of Which He is Ignorant

Bill Nye, who knows hardly anything about philosophy
Bill Nye, who knows hardly anything about philosophy
Bill Nye is a popular “scilebrity.” Unfortunately, he does an enormous disservice to science, frequently speaking on topics about which he knows very little. He narrated a faked experiment on global warming because he doesn’t understand the physical mechanisms governing how infrared light interacts with matter. If he did, he would have realized that the experiment he narrated couldn’t possibly have worked. He excludes ideas simply because he doesn’t care for them and encourages others to do the same. He wrote a book about evolution that is riddled with errors, and he tried to defend abortion using an argument that is demonstrably false.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to learn from his mistakes. Instead of educating himself on an issue before discussing it, he continues to pontificate on things about which he knows nearly nothing. His latest silliness is on the subject of philosophy. While Olivia Goldhill has written an excellent discussion of why that video is so ludicrous, I want to add just a couple of thoughts.

A while back, I wrote about Dr. Kevin R. Grazier, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a science consultant for film and television. I briefly mentioned that he confirmed some of my thoughts regarding Bill Nye and Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, but Nye’s inane video leads me to expand on that point. In addition to discussing errors that Nye and Tyson have made regarding the science found in film and television, Grazier said that in his view, both Nye and Tyson aren’t really interested in educating the public about science. If they were, they would be more accurate in their pronouncements. Instead, they are just trying to convince the public that they are really smart guys.

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The Inquisition Strikes Again

Karl Aspelin's painting of Martin Luther burning the papal bull that excommunicated him from the Roman Catholic Church.
Karl Aspelin’s painting of Martin Luther burning the papal bull that excommunicated him from the Roman Catholic Church.

There are times when modern scientists act like members of the Inquisition. Such situations can result in people getting removed from their positions in the scientific community, courses being shut down, scientists being fired, or papers being retracted. (see here, here, here, here, and here). Unfortunately, it has happened again, resulting in another scientific paper being retracted.

The paper, Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living, discussed the results of an experiment that tried to figure out the functional link between the architecture of the hand and its coordination. In the experiment, 30 individuals (15 men and 15 women) with apparently healthy hands were given a glove to wear while performing several mundane tasks. The glove measured the angles of the joints in the hand throughout the time each task was being performed. This allowed the researchers to then determine the degree to which the movements of the hand joints were coordinated.

The researchers found that while some joints (particularly those of the thumb) did move independently of the others, there was an enormous amount of coordination between the joints. The authors note:

This suggests that there is no need for the human hand to control each joint independently. If there was not such biomechanical architecture, such as the separated connection of each articular from a single muscle, it would significantly increase the computational burden of the [central nervous system] to make up for the loss of the biomechanical architecture.

In other words, the joints of the hand are coordinated so that the brain doesn’t have to concentrate on controlling each joint independently when the hand is grasping objects.

Why was this scientific paper retracted? Was there a serious methodological error in the experiment? Was the data analysis incorrect? Did the authors commit some sort of fraud? No. It was retracted because the authors dared to do something that scientists have done throughout the vast majority of human history: They dared to mention the Creator in their scientific work!

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Review of Evolution: Still A Theory in Crisis

Dr. Michael Denton's latest book
Dr. Michael Denton’s latest book
Back in January, I read that Dr. Michael Denton was about to release a new book on evolution. I ordered it right away and started reading it as soon as I could, because I thought that his previous book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, was amazing. For a long time, I considered it the best discussion of evolution that was available to the general public. However, like all books on scientific issues, much of the information became outdated over the years, so I was really excited that he was releasing a new book on the same subject.

Dr. Denton earned an M.D. from Bristol University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from King’s College London. After earning his Ph.D., he was appointed to the faculty at La Trobe University in Australia. He then did pathology work in England, Canada, and Australia. Eventually, he ended up on the faculty at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Currently, he is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, which tells you he is a member of the “intelligent design” community. His dual training in medicine and biochemistry, as well as his experience working in several different countries, gives him an interesting perspective on science in general and evolution in particular.

Like his previous book, this one is encyclopedic. It covers a wide range of topics, but unlike his previous book, it is focused on the difference between structuralism and functionalism. The way he constructs the two positions, all Darwinists fall into the functionalism camp. They believe that structures develop in nature because they are functional. After all, natural selection is constantly weeding out poor adaptations and preserving useful ones. As a result, whether or not it is functional determines whether or not it exists in the biological world. Denton, however, argues for structuralism, a view that was quite in vogue in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this view, there are certain structures that are inherent in the world, and life makes use of those predefined structures. As Denton writes:

It is hard to imagine two scientific frameworks as diametrically opposed as structuralism and functionalism. Where functionalism suggests that function is prior and determines structure, structuralism suggests that structure is prior and constrains function. (Kindle e-reader, Chapter 1: Introduction)

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Honeybees Are Recovering in the U.S.

This graph shows the number of honeybee colonies in the U.S. each year. (click for source)
This graph shows the number of honeybee colonies in the U.S. each year. (click for source)
Have you seen the headlines? “Beekeepers Feel the Sting of Climate Change,” “Climate change crushes bee populations,” and “Bees Are Losing Their Habitat Because of Climate Change.” Yes, the world is running out of bees and “climate change” aka “global warming” is to blame. Of course, the science behind the entire concept of human-induced, catastrophic climate change is shaky at best, so it is hard to understand how anyone can take such headlines seriously. Nevertheless, there are those who think that bees are on their way to extinction, and human-induced climate change is to blame. Of course, like most of the statements made by global warming alarmists, the facts tell us something completely different.

An excellent article published in the journal Science, for example, tells us that the main reason honeybee colonies have struggled recently is because of the spread of a virus called the deformed wing virus. It is carried by a mite called Varroa destructor, which has been infesting Asian honeybee colonies since at least the 1960s. When European honeybees were introduced to Asia, the mite was able to jump to the European species, and as a result, it began spreading around the world.1

Why should we care about bees dying off? Because they are very important pollinators. In order for a flowering plant to produce fruit, pollen from one flower must travel to another flower and fertilize the egg cells found there. While wind can carry pollen, insects are much more efficient at the job. Bees are especially important when it comes to pollination. They are the main pollinators of 130 crop species in the United States and 400 crop species worldwide.2 Bees are so important that a French periodical for beekeepers reported:3

Professor Einstein, the learned scientist, once calculated that if all bees disappeared off the earth, four years later all humans would also have disappeared.

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Gravitational Waves Detected!

This is an artist's conception of two merging black holes and the gravity waves they generate.
This is an artist’s conception of two merging black holes and the gravity waves they generate.

Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity makes some outlandish claims. For example, it says that the rate at which time passes depends on the strength of the gravitational field to which you are being exposed. It also says that gravity isn’t really a force. Instead, it is a consequence of how massive bodies warp spacetime, a four-dimensional mesh in which the three dimensions of space are merged with time. When I first read about this wild theory, the scientist in me was very skeptical. However, its predictions have been verified time and time again, so the scientist in me is forced to accept it as a reasonable description of the natural world.

For example, the global positioning system (GPS) must take relativity into account in order to work properly. Because they are farther from the center of the earth, the satellites that make up the GPS experience a lower force of gravity than we do on the surface of the earth. As a result, time passes more quickly for them than it does for us. If this were not taken into account, the GPS couldn’t accurately determine your absolute position on the surface of the earth.1 (There are many other factors that must be taken into account, including the effect of relative motion on time, but that is a part of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and is not related to this post.)

Of course, there are many other confirmations of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Mercury’s closest approach to the sun is best explained by general relativity. General relativity gives the only correct description of how a massive object bends the path of light. An experiment first done in 1959 showed that gravity causes a shift in the wavelength of light, which was predicted by general relativity. More recently, satellites confirmed a process called frame dragging, which is also a prediction of general relativity.

Just a few days ago, Physical Review Letters published a paper that provides yet another confirmation of general relativity, but this one is more important than many of the others.

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Jupiter May Not Shield Earth from Comets

An image of Jupiter as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
An image of Jupiter as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Years ago, I was editing an elementary-level science text, and I ran across a statement that didn’t make a much sense to me. The author said that Jupiter acted as a “shield,” protecting earth from comets that could hit it. I am not an expert in orbital mechanics, but I couldn’t understand how that would work. It’s true that Jupiter is quite massive; therefore, its gravity would tend to attract comets towards it. However, it seemed to me that its gravity could just as easily attract comets toward the inner solar system (where the earth is) as deflect them away from it. Thus, I didn’t see how Jupiter could do what the author suggested.

So I did a little research, and I found a paper from 1995 that seemed to support the author’s contention. The focus of the paper was the hypothetical formation of gas giant planets like Jupiter, but one thing it noted was:1

…terrestrial planet systems physically similar to ours may be abundant but hazardous unless protected by gas giant planets.

This seemed to support the idea that Jupiter “protects” earth from comets, so I didn’t suggest any changes to the author’s statement. However, I still avoided making such a statement in my own textbooks (as least I think I did), because the physics of the claim still did not make any sense to me.

Well, yesterday I attended two lectures by Dr. Kevin R. Grazier at Anderson University, where I am an adjunct member of the faculty. Dr. Grazier is a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but that’s not why I wanted to listen to his lectures. He is also a science consultant for television shows and movies, and I wanted to learn more about how that works. I have served as an unofficial science consultant for one yet-to-be-produced screenplay, but I was really interested to learn how the process works in productions that are actually being made.

The more he talked about his experiences, the more interested I became, because I learned that he has consulted for some of my favorite television shows. He was the science consultant for Eureka, Defiance, Falling Skies, and the reboot of Battlestar Galatica. Aside from the first series (which I never really got into), those are some of my favorite television shows! In fact, had Battlestar Galatica ended more reasonably, I would probably call it the best science fiction series that has ever been on television. Because of its awful ending, however, I rank it just under Babylon 5, which every science-fiction fan should watch in its entirety. He also was the science consultant for Gravity (one of the more scientifically-accurate space movies) and will soon start working on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.

While his experiences with films and television shows were fascinating, and while he did confirm my thoughts regarding “scilebrities” Bill Nye and Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, it was something he said about his scientific research that inspired this post.

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Is There An Undiscovered Planet in Our Solar System?

This is an artist's depiction of what 'Planet Nine' might look like. (click for credit)
This is an artist’s depiction of what ‘Planet Nine’ might look like. (click for credit)

On August 24, 2006, the the International Astronomical Union (IAU) passed a resolution declaring that Pluto is not a planet. This caused a lot of consternation, since Pluto had been considered a planet for more than 70 years. What caused this “demotion?” Starting in about 1992, astronomers began discovering other bodies orbiting the sun in a similar fashion. Astronomers began to ask, “If Pluto is a planet, should we consider these other bodies to be planets as well?” The issue really came to a head in 2005, when the body now called Eris was discovered. Its orbit around the sun is similar to that of Pluto, and it was originally thought to be more massive. If Pluto is a planet, then, Eris has to be considered a planet as well.

So, a decision had to be made: Are there 10 planets (or more) in the solar system (including Eris and possibly some of these other Pluto-like bodies), or is Pluto not really a planet? In the end, the IAU decided that Pluto and similar bodies in the solar system aren’t really planets. They are dwarf planets, and that brought the number of true planets in our solar system down to eight. Recently, however, two astronomers have suggested that there are actually nine planets in the solar system, because there is a very large, undiscovered planet lurking quite far from the sun.

For many years there have been suggestions that a ninth planet has been out there, but generally speaking, the evidence for its existence has been rather slim. Recently, however, two well-respected astronomers published a paper in a well-respected journal that laid out some indirect evidence for the existence of Planet Nine. While I don’t consider the evidence to be very strong, it’s certainly worth discussing.

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Exciting News in the Energy World

This illustration shows the coil system (blue) and plasma (yellow) design in the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator fusion reactor. (click for credit)
This illustration shows the coil system (blue) and plasma (yellow) design in the
Wendelstein 7-X stellarator fusion reactor. (click for credit)

Nuclear power has always presented the possibility of cheap, nearly unlimited electricity. So far, however, the reality has not lived up to the expectations, because we are using the wrong nuclear process. We have mastered using nuclear fission, which is the process by which large nuclei (like certain isotopes of uranium and plutonium) are split into smaller nuclei. This produces a large amount of energy, but it also produces a large amount of radioactive waste. In addition, the reaction can get out of hand, as we have seen in Chernobyl and Fukushima.

However, some countries have utilized nuclear power well. France, for example, currently gets 75% of its electricity from nuclear power. But even France is transitioning away from it, as it is planning to produce only 50% of its electricity that way by the year 2025. With the high-profile disaster at Fukushima and the problem of radioactive waste, it is understandable why even France is trying to move away from nuclear power.

If we could only master the opposite process, nuclear fusion, we wouldn’t have such problems. In fusion reactions, small nuclei (like certain isotopes of hydrogen) are combined to make a larger nucleus. If the nuclei are small enough, this also produces energy. The nice thing about nuclear fusion is that the byproducts are not radioactive, and the reaction is easy to stop. Indeed, it is hard to keep the reaction going! In addition, hydrogen is more abundant than uranium and plutonium.

Why don’t we use nuclear fusion to produce electricity? Because it’s harder than it sounds. Nuclei are positively charged. When you push two positively-charged things together, they repel one another. The closer they get, the more strongly they repel. In order to get two nuclei to combine, they have to get really close together. It takes a lot of energy to make that happen, and so far, the energy we spend trying to force it to happen is more than the energy we get from the reaction.

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It’s Not That Simple!

This Black Angus cow is not happy about a study done by Carnegie Mellon University! (click for credit)
This Black Angus cow is not happy about a study done by Carnegie Mellon University!
(click for credit)

It always bothers me when people make overly simplistic statements about the issues we are currently facing. It bothers me even more when scientists do it. Nevertheless, I find examples of scientists making overly simplistic statements time and time again, especially when it comes to “global warming,” aka “climate change.” I have discussed at length the overly simplistic way in which some scientists approach climate (see here, here, here, here, and here, for example). Not surprisingly, those same scientists often approach the “solutions” to global warming just as simplistically.

Consider, for example, this story from The Guardian. The headline says it all:

Eating less meat essential to curb climate change, says report

The article’s main discussion point is a report issued by a thinktank known as Chatham House, but it discusses several sources in which scientists and policymakers insist that we must reduce our meat intake in order to curb global warming. Why? It seems simple enough. Keeping livestock requires energy, and the livestock themselves produce greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. It only makes sense that eating food coming from plants (which consume carbon dioxide and produce little methane) would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, right?

Well, a study done by Carnegie Mellon University concludes precisely the opposite!

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