Category: Science

New discoveries, the scientific method, and all matters relating to the scientific study of the physical world

Late spring flowers

Flowers are coming up gloriously across Toronto. I have been enjoying the rich red and alien shape of Canada Columbine and, in the last few days, seeing the pink of Common Milkweed flowering, with flowers emerging in clusters. Black Cohosh cultivated on campus is already producing flower wands, just still green instead of white, and it is spreading in rhizomal clusters around where flower wands appeared last year.

I am checking iNaturalist daily for when the Butterfly Milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) bloom begins, at which point I will be leading a city-wide search to improve the data on where this plant is present.

A starting point in grass identification

Grasses create a special challenge when it comes to identifying native plants, and even experienced experts have told me they have trouble with it.

I recently got a useful start from Natasha Gonsalves’ presentation for the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA): “Getting to Know Grasses“.

I’m still an absolute beginner, but at least know I know a bit of the relevant anatomical vocabulary and have a sense of the difference between grass and grass-like plants like sedges and rushes.

Phages for treating pathogenic bacteria

I have been deeply worried about antibiotic resistance for ages. Last night, Paul Turner’s Martin Lecture on leveraging evolutionary trade-offs for phage therapy was very encouraging.

Professor Turner, who is Rachel Carson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale, provided a fascinating account of how bacteriophages (viruses that attack bacteria) can be used in synergy with antibiotic drugs to avoid the development of drug resistance.

His Martin Lecture doesn’t have a public recording, but he suggested his TEDx talk for people interested in the subject. Though he was not featured in it, he also recommended the documentary “The Good Virus”.

Open Process Manifesto

This document codifies and expresses some of my thinking on cooperation on complex problems, for the sake of the benefit of humanity and nature: Open Process Manifesto

It is based on the recognition of our universal fallibility, need to be comprehended, and to be able to share out tasks between people across space and time. To achieve those purposes, we need to be open about our reasoning and evidence, because that’s the way to treat others as intelligent partners who may be able to support the same cause through methods totally unknown and unavailable to you, across the world or centuries in the future.

America is demolishing its brain

From NASA to the National Science Foundation to the Centres for Disease Control to the educational system, the United States under the Trump administration is deconstructing its own ability to think and to comprehend the complex global situation. A whole fleet of spacecraft — each unique in human history — risks being scrapped because the country is ruled by an anti-science ideology. They are coming with particular venom for spacecraft intended to help us understand the Earth’s climate and how we are disrupting it. Across every domain of human life which science and medicine have improved, we are in the process of being pulled backwards by those who reject learning from the truth the universe reveals to us, in preference to ‘truths’ from religious texts which were assembled with little factual understanding in order to reassert and justify the prejudices of their creators.

The anti-science agenda will have a baleful influence on the young and America’s position in the world. In any country, you are liable to see nerds embracing the NASA logo and pictures of iconic spacecraft — a form of cultural cachet which serves America well in being perceived as a global leader. Now, when an American rover has intriguing signs of possible fossil life on Mars, there is little prospect that the follow-on sample return mission will be funded. Perhaps the near-term prospect of a Chinese human presence on the moon will bend the curve of political thought back toward funding space, though perhaps things will have further decayed by then.

The young are being doled out a double-dose of pain. As Christian nationalism and far-right ideology erode the value of the educational system (transitioning toward a Chinese-style system of memorizing the government’s official lies and doctrine rather than seeking truth through skeptical inquiry), young people become less able to cope in a future where a high degree of technical and scientific knowledge is necessary to comprehend and thrive in the world. Meanwhile, ideologues are ravaging the medical system and, of course, there is a tremendous intergenerational conflict brewing between the still-young and the soon-to-be-retired (if retirement continues to be a thing for any significant fraction of the population). Whereas we recently hoped for ever-improving health outcomes for everyone as technology advances, now there is a spectre of near-eradicated diseases re-emerging, in alliance with the antibiotic-resistant bacteria which we have so foolishly cultivated.

What’s happening is madness — another of the spasmodic reactionary responses to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution which have been echoing for centuries. Unfortunately, it is taking place against the backdrop in which humanity is collectively choosing between learning to function as a planetary species and experiencing the catastrophe of civilizational collapse. Nuclear weapons have never posed a greater danger, and it exists alongside new risks from AI and biotechnology, and in a setting where the climate change which we have already locked in will continue to strain every societal system.

Perhaps I have watched too much Aaron Sorkin, but when I was watching the live coverage of the January 6th U.S. Capital take-over, I expected that once security forces had restored order politicians from both sides would condemn the political violence and wake up to the dangerousness of the far-right populist movement. When they instead jumped right back to partisan mudslinging, I concluded that the forces pulling the United States apart are stronger than those holding it together. There is a kind of implicit assumption about the science and tech world, that it will continue independently and separately regardless of the silliness that politicians are getting up to. This misses several things, including how America’s scientific strength is very much a government-created and government-funded phenomenon, going back to the second world war and beyond. It also misses the pan-societal ambition of the anti-science forces; they don’t want a science-free nook to sit in and read the bible, but rather to impose a theocratic society on everyone. That is the prospect now facing us, and the evidence so far is that the forces in favour of truth, intelligence, and tolerance are not triumphing.