Science – Page 31 – a sibilant intake of breath

Education as a technology

“Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child’s nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don’t go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much more difficult than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because these bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.”

Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. p. 222 (paperback)

Walking around the other day, observing the slow emergence of spring, it occurred to me that there is another whole set of reasons to provide children with early and accurate sexual education, aside from their important right to understand their own bodies.

Briefly, it is impossible to understand nature, history, or biology well without knowing about sex. Why do plants have flowers? Why do birds and insects fly between them? Why do animals form pairs? Why do some species of bird have males that look very different from females (displaying sexual dimorphism)? Why is there such a variety of life forms on Earth? Conversely, why are there so many similarities between life forms on Earth? What defines the human species?

None of these questions can be answered in a satisfactory answer without reference to sex. Plants have flowers because sexual selection helps produce diversity, which improves survival odds. Plants bribe more mobile creatures into carrying around their sex cells (pollen), paying the bribe in the form of nectar. Animals often form pairs to ease the burden of parenting. Sexual dimorphism is reflective of differing investment costs in reproduction between sexes, as well as the way in which sexual selection can drive evolutionary development. Sexual reproduction has contributed to biological diversity, and yet the fact that many organisms need to perform the same basic tasks explains some of their similarity. Humans are the set of organisms that can mate and produce fertile offspring with one another.

Any understanding of nature that excludes sex is sure to be terribly impoverished. As such, it seems foolish to delay telling children about it until they themselves are starting to reach sexual maturity. It seems much better for it to be a fact of life they have learned accurate things about all along.

Pinker on intelligence

Here is an interesting passage from Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate:

In any case, there is now ample evidence that intelligence is a stable property of an individual, that it can be linked to features in the brain (including overall size, amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes, speed of neural conduction, and metabolism of cerebral glucose), that it is partly heritable among individuals, and that it predicts some of the variation in life outcomes such as income and social status. (p.150 paperback)

Conceptually, we can separate the question “Is there a physical/biological/genetic basis to intelligence” from the question “What moral implications does that have for society?” Still, it seems clear to me that there are moral implications that arise from the diversity in human intelligence. They are, however, connected to tricky moral problems, like what it means to ‘deserve’ one’s level of success or failure.

Dinosaur demise historiography

At the Ottawa Museum of Nature the other day, I saw their video presentation on the demise of dinosaurs. It was interesting to compare it with videos I saw as a child on the same topic. The ones I remember were claymation productions, put out by the National Film Board of Canada. This one was computer animated, and used multimedia effects like fans to simulate the shockwave from the Yucatan asteroid collision.

More than in videos I can recall, this one stressed that both birds and mammals already existed when the extinction of dinosaurs took place. It also included a couple of references to the paleoclimate, describing some of the ways in which the Cretaceous Earth differed from the modern form. The film was also forthright in describing some enduring scientific uncertainties, such as how long it took after the impact for the dinosaurs to actually die.

The Museum of Nature is a pretty great place, even though they removed the live frog exhibit which was my favourite part. They have a rather excellent gift shop that sells – among other things – hand puppets shaped like crabs and very affordable large actual fossils.

Helpless in zero G

It occurred to me the other day that people would be incredibly helpless in a large, zero-gravity environment. If you managed to become stationary, out of reach from any walls or objects, you would effectively be stranded, screaming for someone to come collect you.

Unless you have some kind of rocket motor with you, you are dependent on being able to push off of things to control your movement. Also, zero gravity could involve other unpleasant elements. For instance, if you push off from one surface too aggressively, all you can do it wait until you crunch into the far wall. There would be no particularly effective way to reduce your rate of movement, though you could try splaying yourself out like a sky-diver trying to descend slowly.

This somewhat alters my sense of how much fun a huge recreational space station would be.

Warning labels for booze

According to a study in the British Medical Journal, alcohol could be responsible for 10% of cancer in men and 3% in women. The scientists performing the study examined data from eight European countries. Reporting on the study, the CBC raised the question of whether there should be warning labels on alcoholic beverages.

I think there should be. They should warn about the risk of addiction, about damage to unborn children, and about other well-documented risks. These days, there are warning labels on everything from plastic bags (choking hazard!) to coffee cups (this beverage is extremely hot!). When governments put warning labels on some things with long-term health consequences, it implies that anything without such a label is considered safe by the government, or at least substantially safer than the things that do bear warnings. Given that alcohol is one of the most lethal drugs consumed by human beings, along with tobacco, it just makes sense that there be warning labels there too.

I think it’s absurd that Canada is considering putting warning labels on beer to alert people of the presence of wheat, but not considering putting on labels advising that if you drink enough of the stuff, it could kill you in a matter of hours.

P.S. Non-alcoholic beer can be a good option for those who enjoy beer, but want to avoid alcohol for whatever reason.

Appreciating Pinker

Now that I am forty pages in, I can enthusiastically endorse Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. It engages with complex and important ideas in a highly accessible way, without the tediousness that sometimes accompanies technical writing. In terms of his brilliance in covering challenging topics comprehensibly, Pinker reminds me of Richard Dawkins and Simon Singh.

It’s one of those books where you want to underline and quote nearly every sentence.

Understanding complex dynamic systems

Complex dynamic systems are the most difficult things in the universe to understand because they are bundles of relationships that interact in complex ways. It’s easiest to explain what they are through an example. Think of the Earth’s climate. It has discrete elements like incoming sunlight and the physical properties of water. The elements interact in complex ways that vary with time. Water forms clouds and icesheets which affect the reflection of light. The amount of ice on Earth has an effect on the totality of life on Earth, which then interacts in complex ways with other elements of the climate system: the erosion of rock, the composition of the atmosphere, etc, etc, etc.

Understanding a complex dynamic system at all is challenging. For instance, there is the task of understanding all the interactions that are ongoing when something is in a steady state. The level of complexity jumps when you consider the totality of steady and unsteady states, and all the ways by which they can turn into one another.

It seems arguable that the main task of thinking entities in the universe is to better understand complex dynamic systems. That understanding is always partial – akin to the French concept of connaitre rather than the concept of savoir. You can write down the totality of a person’s phone number on a piece of paper, but you can only express a partial view of what ‘Paris’ or ‘German’ or ‘physics’ is. In addition, it seems that complex dynamic systems are nested and that if we want to be able to behave intelligently in the world, we need to have some kind of understanding of all of them:

The rules of the universe: gravitation, electromagnetism, the nature of matter, etc
The physical Earth: the composition of the planet, and the way physical elements interact
The totality of life on Earth: genetics, behaviour, the history of life, etc
The human body: cells, organs, genes, the endocrine system, the physical brain, etc
The human mind: cognition, politics, economics, creativity, etc

At some point in history, it may be necessary and useful to consider the physical and/or mental characteristics of life from places other than the Earth.

The better a particular being understands each of these complex dynamic systems, the more capable they are of acting effectively in the world (a concept that presumes the existence of intentions, which ties back to each of the dynamic systems under consideration). Understanding them all better is thus a strategy capable of advancing the achievement of any conceivable goal, with the possible exception of intentional laziness or the avoidance of mentally taxing work.

Science endorses bling

I knew designer labels had a psychological effect on people who see them, but I am surprised by the size of the effects discovered by researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. They found that people in designer labelled clothes were rated as significantly higher status and wealthier than those in the same clothes sans labels. They found that 52% of people would take a survey from a person in a Tommy Hilfiger garment, compared with 13% for the same garment without the logo. They also found people more willing to give a job to someone bearing a designer logo, with a recommended salary 9% higher.

The strategies suggested by this data are pretty obvious: even if it seems a bit tasteless, it may be wise to emblazon yourself with labels, especially when dealing with strangers.

‘To-do’ task longevity

It might be interesting to do a statistical examination of to-do lists, specifically of the length of time for which items remain on them. It might seem logical that the longer something has been on a to-do list, the sooner it is likely to get done. I doubt this is usually the case, however. Easy items tend to get added and removed quickly. “Buy soy milk” is an instruction that is likely to be followed in a matter of hours or days. Other items are likely to sit on to-do lists for months or years: “Research doctoral programs”, for instance, or “Photo project with L-series macro lens”.

One natural response to all of this is to have lists that are tailored to different timescales. Few people will retain their grocery lists for longer than it takes to acquire the desired items. By contrast, keeping a list of major long-term projects is probably a good idea, from a life planning perspective. It can be a way to check whether one’s time is primarily being occupied by personal priorities, or whether distractions are consuming most of it.

Category: Science