Spring has begun!

March 20, 2018 • 11:15 am

At the exact second when this post goes up, it will be Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s still near freezing in Chicago, but the crocuses are poking up above the soil, and there is no snow on the horizon (sorry, eastern U.S.).

Soon it will be duckling season!

 

Gal Gadot demonized for her memoriam for Stephen Hawking

March 20, 2018 • 10:30 am

The outrage mob, always sniffing for ideological impurities, has struck again. When Stephen Hawking died on March 14, actor Gal Gadot—you know, the Wonder Woman phenom who is also an Israeli—issued this tweet:

Now most of you are on the Left, but look at that tweet and see what you could find objectionable if you’re a Pecksniff. You’ll spot it instantly, I bet. Yep, it was the idea that after death Hawking will be “free of any physical constraints.” Now I don’t know if that means he’ll have an afterlife where he’s not in a wheelchair (implying Gadot is religious, though most liberal Jews don’t believe in an afterlife), or that he’s simply gone and therefore not thereby constrained.

But if you’re a Pecksniff, you can also be huffy and say, “Well, this is ableism, pure and simple. It implies that Hawking was ‘constrained’ mentally as well as physically, and that he could have accomplished more had he not been afflicted with ALS (or polio).” That is arguable, because perhaps being confined to his chair enabled his mind to roam more freely. But that’s not what Gadot meant, I bet, for she pays tribute to his “brilliance and wisdom”. She was, I suspect, just paying tribute to him, and saying that he’s free from “constraints”—exactly as many people say, when someone dies, that they’re finally “at peace”, or “beyond suffering”. And that tweet, of course, got 53,469 likes when I put it up.

Yet the termites are ever dining, and so there’s a piece on Mashable called “People aren’t thrilled with Gal Gadot’s tribute to Stephen Hawking“, which presents exactly seven tweets accusing Gadot of ableism, and one supporting her. Apparently seven people is some kind of consensus.

Here are some Pecksniffs:

Yes, the last tweet is accurate: people should chill out about this, and there’s no doubt that, these days, many people are simply “looking to be offended.” I suppose there are psychological reasons for that, but this is above my pay grade.

But what was Hawking’s view? Would he have preferred to have had his ALS (with its putative benefits for his science), or to have never gotten it?

This video, which I found on YouTube, supports the latter, for it shows Hawking supporting the “ALS Ice Bucket Challenge“, in which someone challenges another to dump a bucket of ice water on their head. If they don’t do it within a stipulated amount of time, the one who forfeits donates to The ALS Association or other groups fighting motor neuron disease.  It’s estimated that the challenge not only brought awareness of this dreaded ailment, but raised over $100 million dollars for research and treatment.

And here’s Stephen Hawking participating in that challenge, urging his kids to drench themselves. They do. And Hawking adds, with his computer voice, “I urge everyone to donate to the MNDA to eliminate this terrible disease.” Yes, it’s terrible, and one has to conclude that Hawking would prefer not to have been afflicted.

That, of course, doesn’t mean that one should treat the disabled as lesser humans, or make fun of them (as Trump did during his campaign); it just means that we should keep working, raising money, and using the best science we can to get rid of those ailments that people don’t want. I suspect that most people with disabilities would just as soon not have them, though some deaf people say they wouldn’t want to hear even if that were possible.

And people should lay off Gal Gadot.

By the way, yesterday I mentioned a piece in the Torygraph intimating that Hawking’s final science paper might have shown a way for us to test the idea of the multiverse, heretofore seen as hard or impossible to test. A new article in Gizmodo by George Dvorsky, however, says that the Torygraph’s interpretation is overblown, and urges considerable caution:

The scientists say it may eventually be possible to see signs of the multiverse in the background radiation of the universe, but that has yet to be proven. If someone down the line can expand on this work, and show us what we should be looking for, then it can be said that Hawking and Loeb were truly onto something. But for now, that’s a big if.

. . . Frank Wilczek, a theoretical physicist at MIT and Nobel laureate, was less charitable about the new work.

“It’s heavy on speculative assumptions, and I don’t see any concrete predictions,” Wilczek told Gizmodo. “Very hard to understand, though, at least for me, and I may be missing something.”

The 2018 UN World Happiness Report: most atheistic (and socially well off) countries are the happiest, while religious countries are poor and unhappy

March 20, 2018 • 8:45 am

The 2018 edition of the World Happiness Report is out, and it shows pretty much what other recent reports have shown: Western European countries are the world’s happiest, the poor countries of Africa and the Middle East are the world’s unhappiest, and Finland has moved into the #1 spot. A new aspect of the report deals with immigration, and finds that immigrants quickly tend to approach the happiness of the countries to which they moved. This is expected because, after all, immigrants usually move to where they expect to find a better life.

The report is carried out and prepared by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and “happiness” is simply inhabitants’ self-report of their state of mental well-being. The study found, as always, that happiness is strongly correlated with variables like income, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom, trust and generosity. (Note: religiosity isn’t mentioned, at least not that I can find.)

Click on the screenshot to access the full report (you have to download individual chapters and the appendices):

And, here are the rankings, from happiest to unhappiest countries, with the statistical analysis of what factors contributed to the overall happiness, which is measured on a scale from zero to eight (data from this part of the report).

Most of the top 20 countries are from Western Europe or are Anglophone, while, with the exception of Ukraine, all the 20 bottom countries are from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. This is similar to the results of last year’s report.

Here’s a map of happiness measured in 2017. Greenest countries are the happiest (scores above 5.0; darker green indicates real happiness), while red and blackish-brown countries are the unhappy ones (scores below 5.0).  You can see that misery correlates with social well-being, including poverty. But it also correlates (negatively) with religiosity.

As I said, the self-perceived happiness of people is highly correlated with their income, health, freedom, and social support, which explains the patterns above. But I’m absolutely sure, based on partial surveys I’ve reported before, that happiness is also, across all countries, strongly and negatively correlated with their religiosity. That is, the most religious countries (which happen to be those in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa) are the unhappiest, while the most atheistic countries—those in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, as well as Australia and Canada—are the happiest. (The U.S., which is the most religious First World nation, ranks as #18.)

It would be lovely if some reader with extra time correlated religiosity with happiness. I’ll bet $50 the correlation is negative and statistically significant. Reader Gluon Spring did a correlation two years ago with some of the data, and here’s the result, with the 95% confidence interval around the regression line:

No wonder people ignore religiosity when they’re analyzing happiness! Who but a petulant atheist would even make a plot like this?

Of course correlations are not causation, and the negative correlation that I expect between religiosity and happiness does not mean that atheism makes people happier, or religion unhappier. What it means—and this is supported by several sociological studies (see here for one)—is likely that people either turn to religion or maintain their religion when their social situation is so dire that they’re unhappy.  When conditions are good, and there’s lots of social support, including help for sick people, old people, free medical care, and so on, then there’s no need to be religious, no need to supplicate a god for what your society can’t provide. When you’re well off, your country gradually loses religion, the thesis of Norris and Inglehart in the preceding link.

In short, what makes people happy is not religion, but material well being and the assurance of material aid. That’s supported by the study’s finding that immigrants, including Muslims from the Middle East, quickly gain the happiness of their new country, while (I suspect), still keeping their religion, though perhaps in an attenuated form.

Religion is simply what you do when you don’t have well being.

I always quote Marx on this point. I’m not a Marxist, but here’s one place he was right:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

—Karl Marx (1843)

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 20, 2018 • 7:30 am

Reader Joe Dickinson sent some bird photos (and one reptile snap); his captions are indented.

Here are the best of my non-goose  photos from the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge.   (Autocorrect tried to make that “sacrament”, not appropriate for this site.) This is, I believe, my first ever photo of an American bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus).

This great egret (Ardea alba) stared intently into this shrub without moving for several minutes.  I suspect he heard something rustling around in there.  Approaching traffic forced us to move on before he did anything.

 I did not know what these were when I snapped the picture, but consultation with my Sibley Guide convinces me that they are white-faced ibis (Plegadis chihi).  (Try to type that without autocorrect insisting on “chili”.)  I’m surprised to see them flying in a flock of over twenty (some stragglers cropped out of the finished photo) because we saw them wading mostly solo and never more than two or three together.

I did not get a good shot of a wading ibis on this trip, so here is one from a couple of years ago.

Speaking of flocks, I initially took these to be starlings since I am used to seeing them in large flocks, but actually they are red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus).

Here is a blackbird close up.  It seemed a bit early to me (late January), but some males seemed to be at least tentatively making territorial displays.

This bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) kindly stayed put while I maneuvered my car to get a clear shot.  (Refuge rules require visitors to remain in their vehicles at all times.)

The most common raptors on the refuge were the northern harrier and the red-tailed hawk, both most easily identified in flight, at least for me, so I struggled with identifying this perched bird before settling on juvenile redtailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis).  I would be happy to be corrected by one of your many more competent readers.

Not a great photograph, but I need to share what for me was a remarkable concentration of black-crowned night-herons (Nycticorax nycticorax).  I count over forty in this frame, and this is about one fourth of the contiguous strip of trees and shrubs that they occupied.  They are sufficiently reliable that the printed map of the refuge actually shows where to find them.

One non-avian species:  I’m pretty sure they are northwestern pond turtles (Actinemys marmorata).

There were plenty of ducks, mostly duplicating the species featured in a previous submission from the Merced NWR, but I think these ring-necked ducks (Aythya collaris) are different.

I did send northern pintails (Anas acuta) previously, but I think this is a particularly handsome male.

The end.

 

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

March 20, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s March 20, 2018, a Tuesday and the day when Spring begins this year: the vernal equinox. (Spring officially begins at 12:15 EDT in the U.S., and I will announce it on this site.) Here’s a celebratory tweet about Spring in Chicago (found by Matthew):

The photo is by Anthony Artense at NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, is called “Chicagohenge: Equinox in an Aligned City”, and the explanation is this:

Sometimes, in a way, Chicago is like a modern Stonehenge. The way is east to west, and the time is today. Today, and every equinox, the Sun will set exactly to the west, everywhere on Earth. Therefore, today in Chicago, the Sun will set directly down the long equatorially-aligned grid of streets and buildings, an event dubbed #chicagohenge. Featured here is a Chicago Henge picture taken during the last equinox in mid-September of 2017 looking along part of Upper Wacker Drive. Many cities, though, have streets or other features that are well-aligned to Earth’s spin axis. Therefore, quite possibly, your favorite street may also run east – west. Tonight at sunset, with a quick glance, you can actually find out.

For some reason Winter has seemed interminable, though that shouldn’t be the case for someone of my age. (My theory, which is mine and which can be tested, is that time appears to go by more quickly as you age, for you see a span of time in relationship to how much time you’ve spent on Earth. My test: ask people of various ages to tell you when they think five minutes have passed, and ensure that they can’t count or look at a watch. Prediction: older people will judge that less time has passed.) It’s also National Ravioli Day as well as “The Great American Meatout,” celebrating the abnegation of carnivory. Finally, it’s a lovely holiday—World Sparrow Day—celebrating the beautiful but neglected House Sparrow (Passer domesticus).

On March 20, 1616, Sir Walter Raleigh was released from the Tower of London, having been imprisoned there for 13 years. On this day in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published. On March 20, 1915, Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity; 51 years later, Tunisia gained independence from France. On this day in 1985, Libby Riddles became the first woman to win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, a grueling competition involving 1,135-miles of mushing and three weeks in the snow. Here’s Riddles’s victory and her induction into the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame:

You may remember the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway by the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which killed 12 people, severely injured 50 and created temporary vision problems for nearly 1,000 others. That attack took place on March 20, 1995. 13 members of the cult are on death row, which is a long time  in Japan (you’re only informed you’re to be killed on the morning of execution). Finally, 15 years ago on this day, the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Poland invaded Iraq, an unwise decision that’s cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars.

Notables born on this day include the painter George Caleb Bingham (1811), Henrik Ibsen (1828), B. F. Skinner (1904), Ozzie Nelson (1906), Carl Reiner (1922; still alive at 96!), John Ehrlichman (1925), Fred “Mr.” Rogers (1928), the historian John Boswell, who lived across the hall from me during sophomore year at William & Mary, Bobby Orr (1948), Spike Lee (1957), and Holly Hunter (1958; where did she go?).

Here’s Bingham’s most famous painting, “Fur traders descending the Missouri” (1845). It’s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Now, is that a fox or a cat in the prow? Why is it there?

Those who expired on March 20 include Henry IV of England (1413), Isaac Newton (1726), George Curzon (1925), Chet Huntley (1974), V. S. Pritchett (1997), and David Rockefeller (last year).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, there’s a long dialogue between Hili and Andrzej. I was a bit confused by it, and Malgorzata explained: “Hili is prepared to have something tasty which will better prepare her to meet whatever the future has in store for her.”

Hili: You can’t predict the future.
A: That’s right.
Hili: But you can prepare yourself for it.
A: What do you mean?
Hili: I’m already prepared. Is there anything tasty in the fridge?
In Polish:
Hili: Przyszłości nie można przewidzieć.
Ja: To prawda.
Hili: Ale można się do niej przygotować.
Ja: To znaczy?
Hili: Już jestem gotowa. Co jest smacznego w lodówce?

From Matthew: a captive killer whale uses bait to hunt birds. Aren’t they feeding it enough?

Matthew notes: “This is not a painting.”:

Cryptic felinity:

https://twitter.com/catcontent/status/975406986656452608

Be sure to enlarge the photos on this one:

From Grania, who says this is an interesting argument (I haven’t yet read it):

Check out the titles of these great bird paintings:

I missed this holiday two days ago, but St. Gertrude is indeed the patron saint of cats (see pictures here):

 

 

Did Hawking have polio rather than ALS?

March 19, 2018 • 2:15 pm

As we all know, Stephen Hawking is a medical anomaly, for he lived for over half a century with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)—a disease that usually kills you within just a few years of diagnosis. As far as I know, he had the disease for longer than any human in history.

But did he really have ALS?

The Torygraph has a new article, based on a physician’s letter sent to to the Financial Times that after some effort, I finally found unpaywalled. Here it is (I think the first sentence is an unintended double entendre):

Well, this dude is a physician, and what do I know? But my impression of polio was that it does most of its damage at the outset, and doesn’t get progressively worse over decades, as Hawking’s illness seems to have done. Not that his polio—if that’s what he had—could have been ameliorated, but didn’t doctors think of that? And there must surely be a test to see if you have a virus versus ALS.

Perhaps Hawking was simply an outlier: a very rare case of hyper-longevity that has been seen in other fatal diseases. (Steve Gould’s cure of mesothelioma is similar.)

Well, it’s not of great import what disease killed Hawking; what I found more interesting was this article, also in the Torygraph (click on screenshot to see it).

An excerpt:

A final theory explaining how mankind might detect parallel universes was completed by Stephen Hawking shortly before he died, it has emerged.

Colleagues have revealed the renowned theoretical physicist’s final academic work was to set out the groundbreaking mathematics needed for a spacecraft to find traces of multiple big bangs.

Currently being reviewed by a leading scientific journal, the paper, named A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation, may turn out to be Hawking’s most important scientific legacy.

Fellow researchers have said that if the evidence which the new theory promises had been discovered before Hawking died last week, it may have secured the Nobel Prize which had eluded him for so long.

The problem with the idea of a multiverse, an idea that fascinates me, is that it seemed largely untestable. Hawking’s paper implies that this might not be the case:

Carlos Frenk, professor of cosmology at Durham University, told The Sunday Times: The intriguing idea in Hawking’s paper is that [the multiverse] left its imprint on the background radiation permeating our universe and we could measure it with a detector on a spaceship.

“These ideas offer the breathtaking prospect of finding evidence for the existence of other universe.”

We shall see. This is above my pay grade, so watch our Official Website Physicist™ Sean Carroll’s website for updates. His latest post is a nice summary of Hawking’s scientific contributions.

 

h/t: Hempenstein

A muddled thinker claims that evolution can’t explain organisms or their “strivings”

March 19, 2018 • 1:00 pm

Alternet notes that Jeremy Sherman “is a decision theorist studying how life deals with dilemmas from the origins of life to everyday and political life.” In the article below (click on the screenshot), he also shows himself to be deeply muddled about evolution. The headline is tantalizing, but the “biological mystery” that science can’t explain turns out to be trivial: something that’s eminently explainable from what we already know about life and evolution. 

So what is the Big Biological Mystery? It’s that organisms appear to be striving—trying to do things. This striving takes the form of things like organisms “trying” (I use the word as he does) to stay alive, trying to reproduce, trying to regenerate damaged bodies, trying to protect themselves from the multifarious harms that threaten every creature.

Sherman gives this appearance of striving and “purposefulness” a fancy name: “functional fitted effort“, which he further explains this way:

Effort is purposeful work, an organism trying to achieve what is functional – of value to it, fitted or representative of its circumstances. Effort value and representation only make sense with respect to organisms. Organisms try to benefit themselves given their environment. Inanimate things don’t.

In the physical sciences, there’s simply no room for explanation from functionally fitted behavior. Any physical scientist who claimed that subatomic, atomic, molecular, geological or galactic phenomena as trying to benefit itself given its circumstances would be drummed out of the physical sciences. A physicist knows better than to say the moon tries to lift the tides for the moon or the tide’s benefit.

In contrast, in the life and social sciences, one can’t do without explanations that assume functional fitted behavior. That’s what’s meant by an adaptation, a trait that enables an organism to engage in effort that functions for itself, fitted to its environment.

In short, what scientists can’t explain are organisms. Sherman, who says he’s an atheist, is not offering a creationist alternative, but simply says that here we have a big gap in our understanding of life. If rocks don’t strive to protect themselves against rolling downhill, or try to repair themselves when they’re cracked, or try to create other rocks, why do organisms? How could this be, given that organisms evolved from chemicals that don’t show the same “functional fitted effort”? (Actually, rocks do “try” to roll downhill, and they “try” to turn themselves into smaller rocks and then gravel and then sand. Is this a flaw in Sherman’s logic?)

The obvious answer to anyone who knows biology and evolution is this: organisms are the products of genes, which themselves originated way back when, perhaps in concert with rudimentary protein-building systems, as an arbitrary point in a continuum of chemical evolution. Granted, we don’t understand how life began. But once there were creatures possessing heredity material that could replicate (that’s tautological!), then it’s clear that those replicators who left more copies would come to dominate the population of replicators. One way replicators can do this, as Richard Dawkins pointed out in The Selfish Gene, is to build themselves a vehicle that protects the hereditary material from damage and facilitates its reproduction. Those vehicles are called bodies (I include here plants). Given bodies, the replicators will then make them behave in ways that further replication. So we get behaviors that keep you alive, repair your replicator, prey on other replicators, and, of course, have the drive to reproduce—the sine qua non of evolution.

This is how the adaptations evolve, in both body and behavior, that Sherman sees as unexplainable “striving” or “functional fitted effort”. It’s almost as if Sherman knew nothing of Dawkins’s explanations. In fact, Sherman does consider the genic explanation I’ve just given and rejects it (I’ve bolded the worst muddling):

What then explains the transition from phenomena that can’t be explained in terms of functional fitted effort to behavior that can’t be explained without reference to functional, fitted effort?

A tacit assumption in the sciences is that evolution explains it. It doesn’t.

This assumption takes three forms. The most popular is that evolution starts (here, 10 billion years into the history of the universe) once there are molecules that replicate – special molecules – probably RNA since its instrumental in life today. Once there are copying RNA molecules, there’s heredity and variation. According to this view, the differences in replicating molecules is the beginning of evolution and therefore the beginning of life.

This doesn’t explain functional fitted effort. There’s no effort. The molecules aren’t trying to copy. They’re passive, like any molecular products of catalysis. They copy when conditions cause them copy. Is there function or fittedness? Is anything useful or functional for the copying molecules fitted to their environment?

You could say that any molecule that copied better functioned better, but given their passivity (they’re not trying to copy) that’s just an observer’s perspective, no more about true function than it would be to say that of two balls rolled down a ramp the one that arrived at the ground first had more useful, functional features. Yes, from the observer’s perspective it did but that’s just an outsider’s impression. The ball isn’t trying to win any races. Nor is a copying molecule trying to copy, even if it happens to be the kind of molecule that, in us is functional as a repository of functional information that constrains our behavior. A repository. In us, RNA and DNA aren’t making effort to benefit themselves either. Genes are not selfish. There’s no self in those molecules that is trying to do anything for its own sake.

This is so dumb that I hardly find it worthwhile to reply. Molecules don’t have brains and they aren’t “trying” to do anything; copying was something that happened, and once it happened all else follows. It’s almost as if Sherman believes that molecules of DNA must come with little brains attached that make them consciously “try” to replicate in the sense that humans “try” to drive to work. His pan-psychist refutation becomes obvious when he says “there’s no self in those molecules that is trying to do anything for its own sake.” Yes, he’s right: there is no self. Selves, in their conscious form, involve epiphenomena that came much later, when big brains evolved. But evolution doesn’t NEED consciousness: all it needs are molecules that can replicate, with the property that the replication isn’t always perfect. (You can’t have evolution without mutations.)

Later on in this muddled piece, Sherman claims, correctly, that we don’t know how life began. But that doesn’t mean that plausible scenarios can’t be limned—or even tested. But once we have the replicators, and their ability to make proteins that build bodies (a linkage that we also don’t yet understand), the rest is history: evolutionary history.

Sherman is the worst kind of science popularizer—maybe worse than creationists—for he’s not lying, and he’s not pushing religion. Rather, he’s making big, non-religious claims about the lacunae of science, and yet those claims are simply wrong. Still, many laypeople who ingest his pabulum will think, “Yes, yes, evolution must be wrong, because it can’t explain organisms; and if it can’t do that, well, how can it be right?” All because Sherman can’t understand that the difference between rocks and organisms is that the latter have hereditary material that reproduces itself.

If you want the video version of Sherman’s confusion, you can see 20 minutes of it below.