Chris Lintot has the forty-second edition.
A New Take On An Old Subject
Jason Bellows muses on life without the moon. Asimov had a much longer essay on this topic, decades ago, in which he speculated not only about its impact on the development of life, but on the development of intelligence, science and civilization.
An Evolutionary Golden Oldie
In light of the decision of my current home state, Florida, to teach evolution as “only a theory” (as though there’s something wrong with that), I thought that I’d repost a post from early on in the blog. You can no longer comment on it there, but you can here, if anyone is inclined. Here is the repost:
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The Jury Is In
In a post last week, amidst a lot of discussion of evolution, Orrin Judd made the mistaken claim that evolution is not a falsifiable theory (in the Popperian sense), and that (even more bizarrely and egregiously) defenders of it thought that this strengthened it.
On a related note, he also added to his list of questions about evolution a twelfth one: What would it take to persuade me that evolution was not the best theory to explain life? What evidence, to me, would disprove it? I told him that it was a good question, and that I’d ponder it.
Well, I did ponder it, and here is my response.
First of all, the theory is certainly falsifiable (again, in the theoretical Popperian formulation). If I were coming to the problem fresh, with no data, and someone proposed the theory of evolution to me, I would ask things like:
Does all life seem to be related at some level?
Is there a mechanism by which small changes can occur in reproduction?
Does this mechanism allow beneficial changes?
Can these changes in turn be passed on to the offspring?
Is there sufficient time for such changes to result in the variety of phenotypes that we see today?
There are other questions that could be asked as well, but a “No” answer to any of the above would constitute a falsification of the theory. Thus the theory is indeed falsifiable, as any useful scientific theory must be.
The problem is not that the theory isn’t falsifiable, but that people opposed to evolution imagine that the answer to some or all of the above questions is “No,” and that the theory is indeed false.
But to answer Orrin’s question, at this point, knowing the overwhelming nature of the existing evidentiary record, no, I can’t imagine any new evidence that would change my mind at this point. Any anomalies are viewed as that, and an explanation for them is to be looked for within the prevailing theory.
And lest you think me close minded, consider an analogy. An ex-football player’s wife is brutally murdered, with a friend. All of the evidence points to his guilt, including the DNA evidence. There is little/no evidence that points to anyone else’s guilt. Had I been on the jury that decided that case, it would have at least hung. I might have even persuaded a different verdict, but that’s unlikely, because I’m sure that the jury had members who were a) predisposed to acquit regardless of the evidence and/or b) incapable of critical thinking and logic, as evidenced by post-trial interviews with them.
But for me to believe that ex-football player innocent, I would have to accept the following (which was in fact the defense strategy):
“I know that some of the evidence looks bad for my client, but he was framed. And I can show that some of the evidence is faulty, therefore you should throw all of it out as suspect. I don’t have an alternate theory as to who did the murders, but that’s not my job–I’m just showing that there’s insufficient evidence to prove that my client did it. Someone else did it–no one knows who–it doesn’t matter. And that someone else, or some other someone else, also planted evidence to make it look like my client did it. It might be the most logical conclusion to believe that my client did it, but that would be wrong–the real conclusion is that it is a plot to confuse, and it just looks like he did it. Therefore you shouldn’t believe the evidence.”
Is this a compelling argument? It was to some of the jury members. And it apparently is to people who don’t want to believe that life could evolve as a random, undirected process.
The only way that I could believe that OJ Simpson is innocent at this point would be for someone else to come forward, admit to the crime, and explain how he planted all of the abundant evidence that indicated Orenthal’s guilt.
The equivalent for evolution, I guess, would be for God (or whoever) to reveal himself to me in some clear, unambiguous, and convincing fashion, and to tell me that he planted the evidence. At which point, of course, science goes right out the window.
But absent that, the evidence compels me to believe that OJ Simpson murdered his wife (as it did a later jury in the civil suit), and the evidence compels me to believe that evolution is as valid a theory as is universal gravitation.
How It Went Down
Gizmodo has a video and the story on the satellite hit.
Oh, and so much for the naysayers who said it wouldn’t work. Wishful thinking, one suspects.
They’ve been poo-pooing this since the eighties, going back to Tsipis and Garwin in SciAm. A good example of Clarke’s First Law, about elderly and distinguished scientists.
Tugs And Ferries
Jon Goff has some useful thoughts on in-space transportation elements. Dave Salt has a salty comment:
If you go back a couple of decades (circa 1985) you’ll find NASA was developing your “tug” and calling it the Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle (OMV), while what you term a “ferry” was being developed as the Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV) – astronautics.com has some nice pages describing each.
They were (and still are) logical elements in any reusable LEO infrastructure that uses space stations/platforms/depots as transportation nodes to enable sustainable deep-space missions… which is probably why they don’t feature in ESAS 🙂
Better Print Some More Money
Zimbabwe’s inflation rate is 100,000%:
In Africa’s fastest shrinking economy, per capita gross domestic product in Zimbabwe fell from about $200 in 1996 to about $9 a head last year.
What a disaster Mugabe has been. It shows how easy it is to destroy a once-vibrant country (Rhodesia was the bread basket of southern Africa) with insane government policies. And the sad thing is that his fellow African autocrats refuse to denounce him. I’ll bet that if there was a free and fair election there today, the people would vote Ian Smith back in.
Jabba The Hut Really Lived
They’ve discovered fossils of a giant carnivorous pre-historic frog. I wouldn’t want to run into him on a dark lily pad.
Arbeit Macht Frei
You know, I think that someone wrote a book
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
They can have my cynicism and uninvolvedness when they pry it from my cold dead soul that needs healing.
[Update a few minutes later]
Further thoughts from Mr. Steyn:
I wouldn’t mind if it was a high-minded call to a self-reliant citizenry, but you get the feeling all it boils down to is a demand that we take our place and twirl our batons in the 300-million cheerleading squad for Barack! The Barack Obama Show starring Barack Obama. The “shed your cynicism” bit sounds like a scene from one of those dystopian movies where you get slid into the Cynishedder as a bitterly sardonic old crank in a pork-pie hat and after 30 seconds bathed in the rays of the Obamatron you emerge in a turquoise 1970s catsuit with a glassy-eyed stare.
Bingo
Apparently the shooting gallery was a success.
A defense official says a missile launched from a Navy ship in the Pacific hit the U.S. spy satellite it was targeting 130 miles above Earth’s surface. Full details are not yet available.
Presumably, we’ll find out just how successful it was in the coming days.
“Progressive” Space Discussion
This post by Matthew Yglesias would be a lot more interesting if he explained why it was “advantage, Obama.”
What is Yglesias’ position?
It kicked off a lively discussion in the comments section, in which he doesn’t participate (so we still don’t really know what he thinks), but in which sometime commenter here, Bill White, and Ferris Valyn, do. Ferris has further thoughts, and links.
It also roused a spirited defense of government manned spaceflight programs (at least I assume that’s what he’s defending) by Chris Bowers. I find Bowers’ argument a little (well, OK, a lot) incoherent:
…the space program is about as good an example of stretching and expanding our capabilities as a nation and as a species that one can name. Deciding to not test the limits of our engineering and intellectual potential, and to not explore our surroundings because we have more important things to do, strikes me as a profoundly dangerous path to follow. That is the path of stagnation, and even regression, as a people. Further, it is a terribly utilitarian approach to life, concluding that only bread matters, and that roses are worthless. Personally, I don’t want to live that way, and I don’t think many other people want to live that way, either. Everyone, no matter their financial situation, has aspects of their life that expand beyond mere bread and into roses: art, religion, family, travel, and scholarship are only a few examples of this. To think that we shouldn’t have government funded roses in our lives is to posit a far more dreary nation than the one in which I want to live.
Well, I think that a nation in which one must count on the government to provide either bread or roses a dreary one. Last time I checked, there was plenty of bread, of all varieties, on the shelves of the local grocery, and I suspect that if the government weren’t involved, it would be even cheaper. I also bought two dozen roses last Thursday at the same place–there was no shortage, and they didn’t seem to have a stamp that said they were manufactured by the government. If he means rose gardens, there are plenty of those, too, both government and private. And I sure don’t want the government involved in family or religion, so I guess I just don’t see what his point is.
I do agree with this, though:
Space exploration is not an issue with clear partisan divisions. Some conservatives view it as a wasteful government expenditure that is better handled through private enterprise, while some progressives view it through a utilitarian lens in that it does not provide much direct benefit to humanity.
Unfortunately, this is quite true. In fact, it’s one of the reasons that our space policy itself is so incoherent. The people who promote it don’t generally do so from any kind of ideological base. It’s either a bread-and-butter local issue to provide jobs, or it’s a romantic urge that crosses ideological boundaries. And that’s why the arguments (in both Bowers’ and Yglesias’ comments section) are never ending, and never resolved. Heinlein once wrote that man is not a rational animal; rather, he is a rationalizing animal. Most arguments for a government space program are actually rationalizations for something that the arguer wants to do for emotional reasons, which is why so many of them are so bad. I say this as a space enthusiast myself, but one who recognizes that it is fundamentally an emotional, even religious urge.
I’m not going to beat up on Obama over this (though I’m not going to vote for him, either). Here’s what he reportedly said:
…the next president needs to have “a practical sense of what investments deliver the most scientific and technological spinoffs — and not just assume that human space exploration, actually sending bodies into space, is always the best investment.”
Contrary to what some reading-challenged people write (see the February 16th, 2:22 PM comment), this doesn’t mean that he “hates manned spaceflight.” Those words, as far as they go, are entirely reasonable, and Hillary was pandering for votes in Houston. The rub lies in how one makes the determination of what is “the best investment.”
Unfortunately, in order to evaluate an investment, one must decide what is valuable. That’s where all these discussions founder, because everyone comes to them with their own assumptions about goals, values, costs, etc. But these assumptions are never explicitly stated, or agreed on, so people tend to talk past each other. Until we have a top-down discussion of space, starting with goals, and then working down to means of implementing them, people will continue to argue about what the government should be doing, and how much they should be spending on it.
This is why getting a private space program, a dynamist