No, Kurt, the Hippies Didn't Plant the Seeds of Trump's Election

One of the standard plays of those who refuse to accept observations of the paranormal involves assuming a sanctimonious “holier-than-thou” attitude in regard to rationality. The skeptic will imply that he and his ideological allies are rational thinkers, and that those who believe otherwise are irrational. A lame example of this strategy is to be found in a long essay recently published in The Atlantic. The essay by Kurt Andersen is called “How America Lost Its Mind.” The approach Andersen takes is to go throughout the past 60 years of American history, and belittle a huge variety of observations, theories or thought tendencies that he dislikes. He tries to trash all such things by claiming that they were irrational, part of a process of America losing its mind. The resulting critique, involving a great deal of unfairness and poor logic, is a kind of toxic soup that is served up in a cup marked “100% rational.”

Andersen disparages the counterculture of the 1960's, trying to portray it as some outburst of irrationality and reality-denial. This is quite unhistorical. The hippie-movement or counterculture of the 1960's largely arose as a reaction to the sins of 1960's America, which included racial discrimination, conformist consumerism, and the waging of a senseless war abroad in Vietnam in which more than 300,000 died or were maimed by bombs dropped by American bombers and toxic Agent Orange sprayed by American personnel. Reacting against such things was more like rationality and paying attention to reality than the opposite.

Two of the visuals of Andersen's article show peace signs and an “End the War” sign among various other portrayals supposed to show irrational Americans. Andersen says, “As the Vietnam War escalated and careened, antirationalism flowered,” and then in the next sentence he discusses a Vietnam war protest described by Mailer. The net result is we are left with the insinuation that opposing one of America's most senseless wars was an act of irrationality. But it was actually the opposite of that. 

 1960's: a rational response to an irrational war

Andersen then attempts to make a list of various things that he thinks are examples of America “losing its mind” and becoming “untethered from reality.” Among the things he lists are Raymond Moody's book describing near-death experiences, and Charles Tart's research on out-of-body experiences. But what are these things doing in such a list? Both near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are occasional parts of human experience, whatever their cause. Documenting such experiences is an example of paying attention to reality, not becoming untethered from it. Andersen gives us a bogus claim that Charles Tart “proceeded to devote his academic career to proving that attempts at objectivity are a sham and magic is real.” To the contrary, Tart is a very serious scientific researcher who has written many level-headed books dealing with parapsychology research. I've read several of his books, and they never presented any belief about magic. You can see Tart's recent blog postings here, and you will find no sign of Andersen's cheap-shot depiction being correct.

Andersen then goes on to include UFO observers in his mudslinging, by saying, “I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports in the ’70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed.” But there's no “magical thinking” in a typical UFO sighting – a person simply reports some strange thing he saw. Absurdly, Andersen tries to suggest that maybe we should have denied Jimmy Carter the presidency because he saw a UFO. He states, “Until we’d passed through the ’60s and half of the ’70s, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have given the presidency to some dude, especially a born-again Christian, who said he’d recently seen a huge, color-shifting, luminescent UFO hovering near him.” Carter's sighting (which actually occurred 7 years before he became president) was witnessed by other people. There's nothing irrational about reporting what you and other witnesses have seen, nor is it irrational to report what you alone have seen. Andersen's type of “shaming the witnesses” talk is deplorable, the type of talk engaged by those who wish to be shielded from some aspect of reality they find disturbing.

Andersen scorns those who have suspicions about evolution dogmas, but also scorns those who believe in UFO's or ancient astronauts. What sense does that make? If Darwinian assumptions are correct, we might expect that there should be life on many of the billions of planets in our galaxy. In that case we might well expect to have had extraterrestrial visitors who visited in the past or are visiting now. We may note the very arbitrary selectiveness of what Andersen deems to be irrational. Why is the ancient astronauts thesis advanced by von Daniken irrational, when the same idea was suggested in print earlier by distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan, a hero of people who call themselves rationalists?

After engaging in many an unfair characterization, Andersen then goes on to try to link these supposed examples of irrationality with the baffling election of Donald Trump, using a kind of logic insinuating that the election of 2016 was the result of seeds planted in the 1960's and 1970's. His reasoning is not convincing. When judging claims that event X helped to cause event Y, we should always look at the time between the two events. The longer the time between the events, the less likely the two are to be causally related. In this case there is some 50 years between the hippies of the 1960's and the election of 2016. Any attempt to suggest the first “planted the seeds” of the second is not believable. The “money isn't very important” hippies of the 1960's criticized the “creature comfort goals” of the moneyed establishment (to quote a phrase from a 1960's song), and would not likely have approved of Trump's election.  

The fact that Trump did not actually win the popular vote, and lost by nearly 3 million votes, is a fact inconsistent with Andersen's thesis suggesting Trump's election is a sign that America has lost its mind.  You could just as easily argue the popular vote totals were a sign of America's good judgment. 

A close examination of the dogmas held by "holier-than-thou" rationalists will show that these supposed rationalists are often people throwing rocks from inside glass houses, because such thinkers are often guilty of believing things every bit as irrational – or even more irrational – than many of the beliefs they call irrational. Such an examination will be found in past and future posts on this blog.

A Dubious Claim to Have a Map of a Never-Observed

As I described in this post, there is a pattern I observe repeatedly in science reporting:

1. A scientific paper will be released making modest claims that may not be particularly interesting.
2. That paper will be hyped and exaggerated by a press release published by some institution related to the scientific paper, perhaps a particular university or scientific group.
3. Further hype and exaggeration will be done by the popular press, which is always eager to sensationalize the scientific, because of the Internet profit that results from an increased number of users clicking on a click-bait link.

By the time the average person reads the story prompted by the scientific paper, they will be given some idea that may not at all be justified by the original paper.

I saw such a thing going on in a recent announcement of a new map called a “dark matter map.” When I saw the story announcing this on bbc.com, I was quite surprised. The bbc.com story announced, “Researchers have released the most accurate map ever produced of the dark matter in our Universe.” But how can someone have a map of dark matter locations when dark matter has never been observed? All attempts thus far to make direct observations of dark matter have failed. Dark matter doesn't even have a place in the Standard Model of Physics, and no evidence for it has turned up at the Large Hadron Collider. 

I began examining the sources of these claims. The BBC story took me to the the web site of something called the Dark Energy Survey. On that site was a press release issued by Fermilab, a major scientific organization. The press release was entitled, “Dark Energy Survey reveals most accurate measurement of dark matter structure in the universe.” That is pretty much the same as claiming to have a map of dark matter in the universe. The Fermilab press release claimed that scientists had “precisely measured the shapes of 26 million galaxies to directly map the patterns of dark matter over billions of light-years, using a technique called gravitational lensing.” It then gave a link back to the Dark Energy Survey page and some papers released on that page.

This sounded very fishy to me, because observations of gravitational lensing are not equivalent to observations of dark matter. Gravitational lensing is a strange effect produced on light rays bent by the gravity of high concentrations of matter. Such matter can be any type of matter: either normal matter or possibly some type of dark matter. As Scientific American puts it when describing gravitational lensing:

According to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, mass warps space, so a large amount of matter in the foreground of a galaxy can bend its light in a way that makes it look slightly squashed. This is true whether the foreground mass is made of invisible dark matter or ordinary matter.
 
So if you are claiming to have a map of dark matter made by observing gravitational lensing, you are doing something rather like announcing that you have a map of UFO landing sites made by observing small burnt patches in the forest. Such patches might be produced by hot UFO's that are landing, but they also might be produced by ordinary lightning flashes.

What I also thought was fishy was that the Fermilab press release gave us a visual which it tells us is a map of dark matter. But the map legend on that visual does not refer to dark matter, but is instead labeled “Density of matter.”  The map is below:

To further investigate whether both the BBC and Fermilab are guilty of exaggeration or hype or dubious interpretations, I tracked down the scientific paper that is the source of these claims. The paper is here. It is entitled “Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Curved-sky Weak Lensing Mass Map.” This paper has the same visual that appears in the Fermilab story and the BBC story, so it seems to be the source of their stories.

I read the abstract of the paper. There was no mention made of dark matter. I tried searching for “dark matter” in the text. The only two mentions of dark matter were incidental mentions not claiming to have observed or mapped dark matter. The first mention was this:

Briefly, three flat LCDM dark-matter-only N-body simulations were used, with 10503, 26003 and 40003 Mpc3h−3 boxes and 14003, 20483 and 20483 particles, respectively.

Simulations? That's “make believe” stuff, not an observation of dark matter or a mapping of dark matter.

The second and last mention of dark matter in the scientific paper was the following turgid prose:

Galaxies are assigned to dark matter particles and given rband absolute magnitudes based on the distribution p(d|Mr) measured from a high resolution simulation populated with galaxies using subhalo abundance matching (SHAM) (Conroy, Wechsler

& Kravtsov 2006; Reddick et al. 2013), where d is a large scale density proxy.

This is not a statement making any claim about dark matter. The scientific paper makes no claim at all to have mapped or observed dark matter. It only claims to have observed gravitational lensing and made a map of “mass distribution,” which could be any type of matter, either regular matter or dark matter. The paper did have several visuals like the visual in the Fermilab press release (which calls the visual a map of dark matter). But in the scientific paper none of those visuals was described as a map of dark matter.

Rather than claiming to be making a map of dark matter, the paper claims to be creating a map of the “mass distribution of the universe,” a more general term referring to any type of matter, either regular or dark matter. The paper states in its first sentence: “One way to map the mass distribution of the Universe is by using the technique of weak gravitational lensing.” Then in its conclusion the paper states the following:

Weak lensing allows us to probe the total mass distribution in the Universe. One of the most intuitive ways to visualize and comprehend this information is through weak lensing convergence maps,or mass maps....In this paper, we construct weak lensing mass maps for the first year of Dark Energy Survey data (DES Y1) using two independent shear catalogs. METACALIBRATION and IM3SHAPE, in the redshift range 0.2 < z < 1.3 and in the region overlapping with the South Pole Telescope footprint.

This is exactly how a paper would speak if it were presenting a map of the mass distribution of the universe (its total matter that is either regular matter or dark matter), not specifically a map of dark matter.

What we have going on here by bbc.com and Fermilab seems to be shameless hype and exaggeration, which includes the inaccurate claim that a map has been made of dark matter. The bbc.com and Fermilab press coverage refers us to the Dark Energy Survey. But when the relevant scientific paper is tracked down from the site of the Dark Energy Survey, we find that the paper did not actually make any substantive claim at all about dark matter, referring to it only in two passing references. The paper does not claim to have presented a map of dark matter, but merely claims to have made maps of mass distribution (a term that means the total amount of any type of matter, whether dark or regular). A Scientific American article describes the research correctly, saying it is a finding about "the distribution of matter," and making no claim that it involves  any type of map of dark matter. 

Described by those who believe in it as something "invisible," dark matter has never been observed, and you cannot make a map of something that has never been observed. The map these stories referred to is a map of mass distribution, not specifically dark matter. But, of course, if you describe such a map as a map of dark matter, that will result in more web traffic, because it sounds like something new and exciting (scientists have been making mass distribution maps for decades).

A lesson we may draw from this episode is perhaps that exaggeration and misinterpretation of scientific papers is not something done only by more sensationalistic sites like  DailyGalaxy.com; it is also something that can be done by the most mainstream and respected science-reporting sites such as the BBC site and the Fermilab site.

Why Are Our Genomes Smaller Than a Lily's, and Our Brains Smaller Than a Caveman's?

Some biologists keep perpetuating simplistic ideas about DNA and the brain, but sometimes the facts biologists discover seem to conflict with such ideas. One idea often advanced is that our DNA is some kind of blueprint for the body. Nature never told us such a thing, but it has been a convenient assumption for many. However, when we look at the size of the genomes in DNA, we find that some organisms much simpler than humans have genomes much bigger than we do.

If you do a Google image search for “genome size by base pairs,” you will see a variety of graphs like the one below. If we judge genome size by the number of nucleotide base pairs, we find that certain type of amphibians such as newts have a much larger genome than human beings. According to the graph below, from one of the fine science textbooks of Garland Science, the humble lily plant has a genome more than 10 times bigger than a human's, as does an amoeba.

According to this link, a particular flowering plant has a genome 50 times bigger than the human genome. 

The paradox that genome size does not correspond to the complexity of a species is known as the C-value paradox. A related paradox (that the number of genes in an organism does not correspond to the organism's complexity) is called the G-value paradox.  A rice plant has more genes than a human. 

Another paradox involves the size of the human brain. If asked to guess about the matter, most people would guess that the brain of a modern human is bigger than the brain of a person living in the Stone Age. But it seems that the opposite is true. A science article in the mainstream Discover magazine tells us this: “Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball.”

The same article states the following:

Only a tight-knit circle of paleontologists seem to be in on the secret, and even they seem a bit muddled about the matter. Their theories as to why the human brain is shrinking are all over the map.

One cognitive scientist quoted in the Discovery article suggests that this means humans are actually getting more stupid as time goes on. But such an idea is contradicted by evidence regarding the Flynn effect. Based on scores on standardized IQ tests, human intelligence seems to be increasing by about 1 percent per decade.

What can we infer from the fact that our genome's are much smaller than a lily's and that our brains are much smaller than a caveman's? One inference is that some modern biology dogmas are unfounded. One such dogma is the claim that DNA is some kind of blueprint for an organism. There has never been a sound basis for this idea, which has been advanced without proof by countless writers. DNA is properly thought of as a list of the chemical ingredients used by an organism.

The minimal poor-man's “language” used by DNA is a language capable of stating only a list of amino acids. There seems to be no way that DNA can possibly be stating either a three-dimensional specification of the body plan of an organism, nor any type of set of instructions for constructing a three-dimensional object.

Let's imagine I have a minimal, poor-man's language that has only 7 words in the language. The words are “bread-slice,” “ham-slice,” “cheese-slice,” “tomato-slice,” “turkey-slice,” “lettuce,” and “baloney-slice.” With this language I can specify endless varieties of sandwiches. But I cannot at all specify a blueprint for a house or a three-dimensional organism. The “language” used by DNA is like such a poor-man's “sandwich language.” The only difference is that instead of having 7 such words, the DNA language has only nouns that are the names of 20 amino acids. 

Besides the fact that there is no way to state a complex 3D blueprint in DNA, there is the fact that even if such a thing were to exist in DNA, there would be no tiny component in the body capable of interpreting instructions so complicated.  Blueprints are only useful because there are human minds that can interpret them and bring the design plan to fruition. There is nothing like a 3D blueprint interpreter in a human cell capable of interpreting 3D assembly instructions if they existed in DNA.  

The claim that DNA is some kind of blueprint giving the complete layout of an organism is a piece of simplistic nonsense, unsupported by fact. The C-value paradox and the G-value paradox contradict such a claim. If DNA was a blueprint for organisms, we would expect humans to have a genome 10 times bigger than the genome of a lily, but instead we find the opposite.

It is easy to understand why the myth of DNA as a blueprint became popular. After DNA was discovered there was a choice between two beliefs:

Belief 1: We've found one little piece in the puzzle, but it can't be anything close to the full answer. Finding the full answer may take centuries.

Belief 2: This is the answer that explains it all! 

Belief 2 became popular because it was reassuring, and people love simple, triumphal stories, even when they don't make sense or are not consistent with the facts. 

Just as the C-value paradox argues against the "DNA as blueprint" dogma, the claim by anthropologists that 20,000 years human brains were significantly bigger conflicts with the idea that the human mind is merely the product of the brain -- unless you want to believe that cave men were smarter than Plato.  Another fact conflicting with such a claim is the fact that crows (with a tiny brain) have been repeatedly observed in experiments to have very high mental functioning. 

Below is a table listing some simplistic ideas in biology. Each of these simplistic ideas currently enjoys a popularity it does not deserve.

SIMPLISTIC IDEAS IN BIOLOGY
Simplistic Idea	Counter-Arguments	Contrasting Idea
DNA is a blueprint for an organism, storing its entire specification and body plan.	DNA is simply a list of chemicals called amino acids, and cannot state very complex algorithmic instructions (or a three-dimensional blueprint). There's no natural way in DNA to express complex hierarchical information or advanced conceptual information. How can DNA be a blueprint when the lily's DNA is 10 times larger than the human DNA? (The C-Value paradox.)	DNA is mainly just an ingredient list, not a blueprint. We do not understand where or how the body plans of organisms are stored. Understanding that may take centuries.
The human mind is something generated by the brain, just like bile is something generated by the liver; and memories are all stored in the brain.	There is no understanding of how neurons could generate consciousness. Since synapses are subject to rapid protein turnover and structural turnover, there seems to be no way brains could store memories for even a year, but memories last 50 years. Anomalous experiences such as near-death experiences suggest the mind can operate when the brain is shut down. There are quite a few cases of people with high mental function despite very heavy brain damage (e.g. Lorber's).	Consciousness, memory and the human mind are mysterious things we don't understand. They may involve or have as their source some cosmic reality that transcends the brain.
Biological innovations and the origin of species occur because of random mutations and natural selection.	The incredibly complex biochemistry in organisms is too complex and functional to have arisen from random mutations, which are almost always harmful. Natural selection and random mutations cannot explain the origin of very complex systems that would provide no “survival of the fittest” benefit until many parts had been assembled in the right way. The fossil record shows all existing animal phyla appearing suddenly in one big clump, the Cambrian Explosion, rather than the phyla appearing gradually over 500 million years. The human mind has many aspects that have no survival-of-the-fittest value, so they cannot be explained by natural selection.	We do not understand how biological innovations arise, and do not understand the origin of species. Some biological innovations may have occurred because of some purposeful interventions (possibly extraterrestrial) that occurred long ago. Or perhaps there is a natural explanation vastly more complex than natural selection. Understanding our origins may take centuries.
The 3D shapes of proteins (protein folding) are determined merely by the 2D sequences of amino acids in DNA.	There is no way to account for how 3D protein shapes could be determined by a mere 2D sequence of amino acids. Small changes in an amino acid sequence can cause huge changes in 3D protein structure, while nearly identical 3D protein structures can have almost no similarity in the amino acid sequence. Neither such thing should be true if a 3D protein shape is determined by the 2D sequence of amino acids.	Protein folding is a mysterious phenomenon science has failed to explain despite decades of research. Protein folding may be caused by some mysterious life force that also drives morphogenesis (the progression from a fertilized egg to a full human).

Does the Earth Have an Optimal Distribution of Fossil Fuels?

When speaking about global warming, people sometimes talk about fossil fuel reserves as a kind of great threat to us that we must resist fully using, or else face ruinous consequences. Some say that we have what is called a carbon budget that we must stick to, to avoid a future temperature rise greater than 2 degrees Celsius. The carbon budget has been described as being no more than 1500 gigatons of carbon dioxide that can be expended before the year 2050. Presumably a higher budget would be allowed for the period up until 2075 and the period up until 2100. It is argued that we must use great restraint in limiting ourselves to this carbon budget, rather like some person who can take some morphine pills, but who must restrain himself from taking too many, lest he die from an overdose.

But there is actually a reason for believing the chance of a carbon dioxide “lethal overdose” is low, and perhaps nonexistent. The reason has to do with the extent and nature of fossil fuel reserves. For one thing, there are not unlimited amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas lying about. The oil reserves of the top 15 oil producers is only about 1540 billion barrels, which is about 50 years of current global oil use, and considerably smaller than that if we allow for future population growth and economic growth. Some are worried that we may soon hit the “Peak Oil” point that has long been predicted. Although it is claimed that coal reserves are sufficient to last for 153 years of global production, many think that we will hit “Peak Coal” within a few decades.

What is called a resource pyramid is one of the reasons why both coal and oil production may decline within a few decades. As shown below, the resource pyramid is the concept that the easiest coal and oil resources to extract are found in the smallest amounts. The resources that are found in the greatest amounts are those which are hardest to extract.

 A resource pyramid

 

Because coal and oil resources are arranged in a kind of resource pyramid, with most of the resources being very hard to extract, it is quite possible that there is almost no chance that mankind will “overdose” on carbon resources. By around the middle of the century, we may find it harder and harder to extract coal and oil resources, as we work our way deep down the resource pyramid of oil and the resource pyramid of coal. The very distribution of these resources may put a brake on runaway consumption, forcing humanity to reduce consumption and switch more to alternate energy sources such as solar and wind.

David Rutledge of Cal Tech has predicted that by 2069 the world will have produced 90% of the coal that it will ever produce. If something like that happens, the worst projections of the IPCC will not occur, and the world's temperature will probably never rise much higher than 2 degrees Centigrade above its current level.

These facts bring to mind a very interesting question that has rarely been considered: what would be the optimal distribution of fossil fuels that our planet might have had? And also: is it possible that the earth's actual distribution of fossil fuels is something close to an optimal distribution?

First, let us consider some distributions of fossil fuels that would not have been optimal. One distribution we can imagine is one in which our planet simply had no fossil fuels at all: no coal, no oil, and no natural gas. In such a case there would have been no modern civilization of the type we have enjoyed for the past 100 years or so. That obviously would not have been an optimal distribution of fossil fuels.

Another distribution of fossil fuels we can imagine is one in which oil and coal started to run out at a time such as about 1980. That also would not have been an optimal distribution of fossil fuels.

We can also imagine a distribution of fossil fuels in which coal and oil resources were two or three times higher than our planet has, with two or three times more easily accessible resources. In that case there might have been a much higher chance of catastrophic global warming caused by excessive use of fossil fuel resources.

Instead of any of these possibilities, what we may have on our planet is pretty much an optimal distribution of fossil fuels. The fossil fuels we have are enough to last us until the cost of alternate energy sources such as solar power and wind power falls down so low that such things (possibly assisted by nuclear fusion) can serve as replacements for fossil fuels. But existing as they are in a resource pyramid, the fossil fuels we have may be distributed in such a way so that the easily accessible resources start to gradually run out just at about the time that we will need for them to run out, so that we don't overheat the planet by burning too much carbon. At just about the best time for such a message, nature will in effect start telling us, “It's time to switch away from fossil fuels -- I'm going to slowly make it harder and harder for you to get them.” And nature will start delivering that message in a louder and louder voice over the span of several decades. We will get this message from nature pretty much at just the right time -- all because fossil fuels just happened to be distributed in a particular way that may turn out to be very lucky for us. 

If we have such a nearly optimal distribution of fossil fuels, we may wonder whether that is an improbable lucky coincidence, or something that was set up in advance for our benefit.