Here’s a useful web site for those people who claim that evolution is “only a theory,” an argument that’s so ignorant that it’s not even wrong.
Category Archives: Science And Society
The Economy Is Not A Machine (Part Two)
I had a post on this subject the other day, but Brian Micklethwait (boy, is that an English name or what?) is more pithy:
In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian.
Just so.
Bad News At The FDA
Via Virginia Postrel — Sidney Wolfe has been put on the committee overseeing drug safety. This is a calamity. Many unseen murders, and needless suffering, will ensue. As she notes:
He’s got the “consumer” slot. Well, I’m a big-time pharmaceutical consumer, and this man does not speak for me.
Fortunately, I’m not (yet) much of a pharmaceutical consumer, but he doesn’t speak for me, either.
Questions For John Holdren
From Jeff Jacoby:
4. You argued that “a massive campaign must be launched . . . to de-develop the United States” in order to conserve energy; you also recommended the “de-development” of modern industrialized nations in order to facilitate growth in underdeveloped countries. Yet elsewhere you observed: “Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” Which is it?
5. In Scientific American, you recently wrote: “The ongoing disruption of the Earth’s climate by man-made greenhouse gases is already well beyond dangerous and is careening toward completely unmanageable.” Given your record with forecasting calamity, shouldn’t policymakers view your alarm with a degree of skepticism?
6. In 2006, according to the London Times, you suggested that global sea levels could rise 13 feet by the end of this century. But the latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that sea levels are likely to have risen only 13 inches by 2100. Can you explain the discrepancy?
This seems like a terrible pick to me, and now we’re going to see a “war on science” from the Democrats.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s one more, suggested in comments: Have you read Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto? If so, with which parts did you agree, and with which did you disagree? (A lot of people had fun after its publication, putting parts of it up alongside excerpts of Al Gore’s book, and defying people to guess which were which.)
The Economy Is Not A Machine
I don’t understand why people don’t understand this. An ecosystem is a much more accurate (and more useful) analogy. And I’ve always found this amusing/frustrating:
Keynesians on the left are eager to dismiss Intelligent Design (ID) as the creationist afterthought to evolution, but just as eager to embrace its analog in economics. Disciples of Adam Smith know better. Darwin, after all, read Smith. As the late naturalist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “the theory of natural selection is a creative transfer to biology of Adam Smith’s basic argument for a rational economy: the balance and order of nature does not arise from a higher, external (divine) control, or from the existence of laws operating directly upon the whole, but from struggle among individuals for their own benefits.”
It’s particularly ironic (and there must have been some cognitive dissonance) that Gould wrote this, because my understanding was that he was a life-long Marxist. And of course, the opposite applies as well — many free marketeers refuse to believe in biological evolution. They understand that there is a natural emergent order in the marketplace, but can’t believe that life could evolve unguided from above.
I’m one of those weirdos who believes in both free markets, and free nature.
[Update late morning]
Arnold Kling has some thoughts on the myth of the “economic multiplier”:
It is amazing what happens when you assume that you live in a linear world. You say that the multiplier for government spending is 1.57.
Really? Over what range? Think of it this way: at which level of additional government spending would the path of U.S. real GDP be the highest?
(a) $100 billion in spending above the baseline
(b) $1 trillion in spending above the baseline
(c) $100 trillion in spending above the baselineIf you use a constant multiplier of 1.57, the right answer is (c). Yet we know that this is not the right answer. At $100 trillion in additional government spending, the United States would be operating like Zimbabwe, with similar results.
This is similar to the (dumb) argument often made by space advocates that space spending has a high (or higher) “multiplier” effect than other kinds of spending (the study most cited on this is the one done by Chase Econometrics back in the 70s).
Yes, obviously, if you pay engineers to do things, they’ll go out and spend the money on goods and services, and create more jobs for other people. And yes, if you develop technology, some of it is bound to have an economic benefit and improve productivity, or create new products, and grow the economy.
But when one makes these kinds of arguments, it’s all too easy to ignore what you’re spending the primary money on. It really does matter what product the engineers are building with government money. When it comes to space, does anyone think that it makes no difference whether we had continued to employ people building and flying Saturns, or had developed the Shuttle? Or that if we’d developed a better version of the Shuttle (perhaps by starting with smaller prototypes, and continually improving the concept over the past thirty-five years) that it would have made no difference in our prospects for being spacefaring? That it makes no difference whether we spend thirty-billion dollars developing Ares, or instead something that actually reduces the cost of access to space?
To listen to the “multiplier” argument, it doesn’t matter at all. Having the engineers design a machine to bore a hole to the earth’s center has the same economic value as to build a space elevator.
When we are talking about government spending, it isn’t sufficient to talk about how much we’re spending, and whether or not it will “stimulate the economy.” We have to talk about what we’re spending it on, and unfortunately, much of what the Democrats want to spend it on will (relative to letting people decide what to do with their own money) not create wealth, or grow the economy, but rather destroy it. It’s what governments do.
Bad Design
Sorry, but I see no other sensible explanation for the screwed-up bodies that we have than that we evolved from other forms. It’s hard to believe that God is built like this, and he supposedly made us in his own image.
Quackery
Derek Lowe takes on (loon) Deepak Chopra et al.
As a commenter notes, one of the (many) frightening things about nationalizing health care is that these people will probably have a lot of influence over it. All part of the Democrat war on science.
Thoughts On Extinction
…and scientific paradigm shifts, from A Jacksonian.
[Via Joe Katzman]
The Origin Of Life
An interesting new theory, for those well versed in organic chemistry.
[Update in the afternoon]
This seems related:
Not content with achieving one hallmark of life in the lab, Joyce and Lincoln sought to evolve their molecule by natural selection. They did this by mutating sequences of the RNA building blocks, so that 288 possible ribozymes could be built by mixing and matching different pairs of shorter RNAs.
What came out bore an eerie resemblance to Darwin’s theory of natural selection: a few sequences proved winners, most losers. The victors emerged because they could replicate fastest while surrounded by competition, Joyce says.
“I wouldn’t call these molecules alive,” he cautions. For one, the molecules can evolve only to replicate better. Reproduction may be the strongest – perhaps only – biological urge, yet even simple organisms go about this by more complex means than breakneck division. Bacteria and humans have both evolved the ability to digest lactose, or milk sugar, to ensure their survival, for instance.
Joyce says his team has endowed its molecule with another function, although he will not say what that might be before his findings are published.
More fundamentally, to mimic biology, a molecule must gain new functions on the fly, without laboratory tinkering. Joyce says he has no idea how to clear this hurdle with his team’s RNA molecule. “It doesn’t have open-ended capacity for Darwinian evolution.”
Not yet.
Daisyworld
…meet rainmaking bacteria:
Barbara Nozière of Stockholm University, Sweden, and colleagues suggest that surfactants secreted by many species of bacteria could also influence the weather. While these are normally used to transport nutrients through membranes, the team have shown that they also break down the surface tension of water better than any other substance in nature. This led them to suspect that if the detergent was found in clouds it would stimulate the formation of water droplets.
This is the kind of thing that makes me skeptical about bureaucratic solutions to planetary engineering, natural or otherwise.