Why Do We Regulate Pain Killers But Not Antibiotics?

Two points: I just finished watching the PBS|Frontline documentary Chasing The Nightmare Bacteria; I also just read about a massive study showing that access to pain killers is poor. You can watch the documentary below.

The takeaway from the documentary is that we are charging headlong into a massive, global, health crisis the likes of which the post-war era has not seen. We are overusing antibiotics in our food supply, and even with that not taken into account, fifty-percent of antibiotics are unnecessary. We should be regulating antibiotics like crazy, and yet we aren't.

What are we regulating? Pain killers. The study to which I linked above says that the regulations applied to pain killers had good intentions, but now they are causing harm.

No. They never had good intentions, and the intentions that we actually had all but guaranteed the negative outcomes that we now face.

We regulated pain killing drugs because they are "fun" drugs. Any and all fun drugs are bad, because fun is bad. Semi-legal fun drugs are even worse, because we cannot call those who use them necessarily scum. We regulate it because doctors judge their patients and disregard their pain.

My father has diabetic neuropathy in his legs, a type of pain that is known to be resistant to opioid analgesics. He is also opioid-resistent, making the problem worse.. (I am also opioid-resistant, but I'm not in pain, so it doesn't much matter to me.) This means that very few pain killers work for him. He actually had a doctor tell him "this dose works for me, so it will work for you."

Along with that stunning, stunning, display of arrogance, my dad has had to face judgmental stares, questions, and disapproving tisks from nurses and doctors. It took months of pain before a doctor finally listened to him. Months of pain.

I have felt it, especially now that I have to present an ID to get simple pseudoephedrine: guilt. I have been trained by society to feel bad about using particular drugs. This mindset extends into the medical world, but the coin is flipped. Whereas I feel guilty about using the drugs, the person in a position of power, the doctor, feels judgmental about my using and asking for the drugs.

If I am in pain, then I must suffer nobly, otherwise I am a bad person. No fun drugs for me! Because having fun is bad.As I mentioned, semi-legal fun drugs are the worst for a judgmental society, because we cannot automatically label those who use them as deviant. As such, we must put those who do use them through a rubicon of pain, judgment, scorn, and red tape to ensure they feel correctly bad about using them. You may not be scum, but you are almost scum.

We regulate pain killers for the same reason we regulate marijuana, cocaine, and heroin — for the same reason we imprison huge numbers of people every year for victimless crimes. We do it out of sheer, unmitigated stupidity driven by a history of conservative, Christian judgment and racism. And as I said, the problems we now face of unaddressed pain in patients: almost inevitable.

When we base decisions on blind dogma, the outcomes are always going to be bad. Dogma is almost never right, because if it were right, then it wouldn't be dogma. It would simply be knowledge.

If I smoke marijuana (which I do not do, never have done, and never will do) I hurt no one. I barely hurt myself. But if I take an antibiotic, I could theoretically create the germ that kills us all.

So tell me again, why is marijuana the one that gets me thrown into jail?

Psychology Is Science

I remember taking the various statistical classes when working through my psych degree, and one of the few points that was echoed from professor to professor was the need to be almost anally exacting with research, measurements, and data. They all explained that this was because there was something of a negative perspective of psychology as something less than true science.

I assumed that this was something of the paranoid ramblings of professors who cut their teeth in the psych world of the 1970's, back when psychology was finally shaking off the last bits of spiritual, metaphysical junk  left behind by Freud and Jung. It was very much a problem. In my collection, I have some psychology books from the 1920's, and the work of Freud and Jung was taken as true! People actually believed this stuff!

It was comical to me, comical to every single one of my classmates, and comical to my professors. I appreciated that this baggage was once there, but could see plainly that it no longer was. Psychology was a science trying desperate to prove something everyone already believed.

In retrospect, perhaps I was naive. I only ever went to psychological conferences. I only ever worked with other psychologists and psychiatrists. And whenever I was involved with those from other fields, it was neurologists, with whom there was so much cross-pollination with psychology that it almost gelled into a single field.

As I have since learned, there is still a great deal of prejudice against psychology, being as it is a "soft" science. The major point against it is that "soft" sciences do not produce predictions.

I find this criticism absurd. Of course psychology produces predictions. Those predictions may be probabilistic, but they are predictions nonetheless. The limitation that we have is that our ability to measure humans is limited by our interaction with the machine that is a human: behavior. It is an imperfect measurement, but no less imperfect than measurements in the work of very early scientists. And as research continues, our ability to read behavior will get increasingly better — our ability to understand the workings of the machine will advance.

Stop bullying the 'soft' sciences (Via L.A. Times)

Evolution and Self Worth

I don't understand the problems that people have with evolution and its supposed destruction of self worth. As though finding out that our distant ancestors looked like monkeys is counter to our grand sense of self.

I find this absurd. It's as though I believe myself to be scum after finding out that my great-great-grandfather was a serial killer. It has NO effect on me. It does not change me. I am still the "me" that is defined by my actions and words. My past does not define me in the slightest.

This sort of personal or moral essentialism drives me up a wall. People who identify as Irish, or black are insane. You are not Irish. You are you. You are whatever you decide of yourself. To subscribe to some socio-historical narrative and then define yourself as that is barking mad!

It forces you to accept that the behaviors of your ancestors are somehow the right behaviors. That you have a responsibility to continue some tradition, regardless of how stupid that tradition may be.

History is an illusion. All that exists is the present. We are defined by our present and our memories, and at any moment we can choose to change. The fact that my Great⁵⁰⁰⁰ Grandmother was chimp-like (remember, she wasn't a chimp. Chimps didn't exist yet.) means nothing to me.

If anything, it forces me to marvel at the mechanisms in nature that are able to produce me --a GPS-using, latte-making, music-listening, blog-writing marvel-- from the bug-chewing, lice-infested, poop-throwing raw materials of that long-dead ancestor. That's fucking amazing!

I feel downright special knowing that I am the intellectual zenith of evolution on this planet. I am not separate from it. I sprang from it. If you want a spiritual sense of one-ness with the universe, there it is! I am not somehow fundamentally separate. I have no transcendent soul. I am not special in comparison to other animals because some nebulously defined creator made me.

I am a gear in an astounding machine. I am made from the same stuff as my dog or my girlfriend. They and I are one. And just as I can choose to change, my body, and the genetics that comprise me are continuing to change over vast time scales. That doesn't diminish me. My Great⁵⁰⁰⁰ Grandmother was a chimp-like thing, but I am not. And that's all that matters.

Living Forever

On that same episode of Nova Science Now that I mentioned in the previous post, Neil DeGrasse Tyson says that, if we ever develop an ability to live forever, our only option to deal with the population problem that would follow is interplanetary travel. I disagree. And I think it's patently obvious that that position is false.

Our only option, and I want to be perfectly clear in this, our ONLY option is social restrictions on breeding. I'm talking dystopian-level stuff. We either do what China did and make is so absurdly expensive to have children that the vast majority of people can't, or we make it illegal to have children and force abortions on people.

Population growth would be logarithmic. Even if we develop interplanetary travel, we would fill up those planets in very short time. With a population of 60 billion, we'd be generating a billion people every couple of years. There is no where that we could put that. We couldn't build space ships quickly enough.

Our only other option is stopping sex. If you want to live forever, you forfeit the right to want or have sex. Because if the desire is there, there is nothing we could do to stop it. Adultery is punishable by death in some areas of the world, and people still mess around.

This is undeniable. Immortality would force the greatest cultural upheaval in the history of our species. It would require a complete rewriting of our concept of human rights, because for the first time, doing something that is natural and, in itself, not harmful, would be incalculably destructive.

Science For... Whom?

Michio Kaku, that omnipresent, physics-spouting android of a television personality, has a show on The Science Channel called Sci-Fi Science. Each 30-minute episode discusses some sci-fi concept, like warp drives or something, and goes over the basic physics behind that concept and what we can do today.



(Really? You GUESS that carbon dioxide is denser and heavier than air? You aren't sure about that?)

My issue with the show is that I don't know who it's for. If you're catering to the uninformed-laymen market, why have it on a channel that's aimed squarely at the super-laymen demographic. It would be like Scientific American explaining chemistry with wacky comics and slapstick. There's nothing wrong with being an uninformed-laymen. You're still interested in this stuff, you might just not have enough time to read up on this and do all of the other things that you enjoy. But Discovery Networks already has a channel for this demographic, it's called the Discovery Channel! What? Are they too busy just blowing shit up in the name of "science" in an attempt to attract a demographic one step below what they should be doing? What the fuck!

Is that their strategy? Create a channel, aim it at a market, then, tailor all of the shows to entice a lower market? The Learning Channel used to be simple but educational, now it's aimed at assholes. Discovery is now the simple but educational, and Science Channel is now the somewhat dry and educational channel (with a few silly things thrown in). What the fuck is the new Science Channel, that actually covers science, going to be called?! The UNIFIED FIELD THEORY CHANNEL?!?!

It's also odd that they'd attach a luminary of advanced (and some would say fringe) concepts like string theory to a show that seems aimed at middle-schoolers.

New Life

I was dismayed when the third biggest discovery we could have made regarding life was made, and it garnered nary a mention in the major news outlets. There are only two bigger discoveries we could make, three if you include a subset of one of the others: non-carbon life and life on another planet. Sentient life would be the biggest, but I include that in life in general.

This is HUGE. Fucking HUGE, and major news organizations all but ignored this. We should have had Bill Nye doing a special on it, discussions with experts, CGI animations, the whole nine yards. Instead, The Situation takes a shit and 7,000 people Twitter about it.

Thankfully, Gizmodo was one of the first publications to break the news, and their post has over one million views and two thousand comments. Thank God for the geeks. Someone cares.

Nasa Finds New Life (Gizmodo)

Science Be Praised!

If you're already running Folding@Home and SETI@Home, I have another way for you to participate in the global, scientific progress. You can help spot super novae!

Apparently, super novae are problematic things to catch, because even though they happen frequently enough, they only last a short time. And every night there are thousands of photographs that people must sift through by hand and analyze personally to tell whether what they're seeing is a true super novae.

C'mon. All the cool kids are doing it.

Help Scientists Hunt for Exploding Stars (Wired.com)

Science Can Answer Moral Questions

Scientific American has lent a perspective on Sam Harris' new book The Moral Landscape, where he argues that science is the best choice for answeing moral questions. Both surprisingly and sadly, the criticism is terrible.

The one point that the article touches on by proxy, via a link to an article in the New York Times, that is valid is Harris' actual moral statement: morals are a function of human suffering. This sounds like utilitarianism, which as you would expect, has some problems with it. But what's important is that this perspective is empirical and thus scientific. We can analyze and determine the best ways to get the best outcomes for the most people. It allows of a discussion, a dialectic, on the subject. Religious morals are not based on anything empirical! They're based on books, scriptures, and are, arguably, total nonsense.

He brings up the issue of scientists who did lots of damage in the past, but that misses the point entirely. Scientists did what they did while "rogue." It's like saying that scientists who falsify data negate all of science.

"Some will complain that it is unfair to hold science accountable for the misdeeds of a minority. It is not only fair, it is essential, especially when scientists as prominent as Harris are talking about creating a universal, scientifically validated morality. Moreover, Harris blames Islam and Catholicism for the actions of suicide bombers and pedophilic priests, so why should science be exempt from this same treatment?"

There is so much wrong with this I barely know where to begin. You can not hold a process accountable for what people do with it. You don't blame physics for the atomic bomb. Religion is a pre/proscriptive belief system, science is a process for achieving things. If we can all agree that morals are the rules defining right and wrong, and that wrong is wrong because it causes suffering, science applies! With morals as a function of suffering and happiness at the core, science is all we need.

Moreover, religion can be blamed where science cannot because science is a process to try and determine truth, religion is a system of posited statements. Moreover, we don't do things in the name of science, but truth and all of the good concepts that result from science. People do perform actions in the name of their religions. Finally, we don't blame religion, per se, for the pedophillic priests, we blame the system that claims to be moral and righteous that then hides them. What we do is mock the idea that the religion can have any weight or truth to it when the supposed arbiters of God are some of the biggest assholes on Earth.

Be wary of the righteous rationalist: We should reject Sam Harris's claim that science can be a moral guidepost (Scientific American)

Faith in Schools

This is a documentary by Richard Dawkins. It's primarily concerned with British schools, but the arguments apply equally well to our own system.

Dawkins' first argument is undeniable. If the government is spending taxpayer money, faith should not be a component in the schooling. If schools want to maintain religious aspects to their school, and thus discriminate based on religion, government funding must drop to zero.

Dawkin's second argument is not nearly as definite, though. He argues that faith schools in general are bad for children. While I agree, allowing the argument of "doing it for the children" opens the door to all of the abject stupidity we see with grandstanding politicians day-in and day-out. If you can't figure out how to argue your position rationally, pull out the "children" card. I think that it's dangerous to allow the "for the kids" argument at all.

From a more libertarian perspective, I also think that it's the right of the parents to raise their children however they see fit, even if that leads irrevocably to the child's death. Again, doing otherwise introduces to the concept of "for the children." While I think that the argument is valid, and we can, in fact, come up with objective variables by which to measure the "good" for the child, the subject is far too easily hijacked by grandstanding politicrits looking for easy hay. We need to avoid areas of discourse that are easily perverted.

So, in a sense, I'm not actually against Dawkins in the meat of his argument. He says that we can determine if something is good or bad, children are their own people and not property of their parents, and as such the government must enforce a standard on parents. I just think that it's a terrible idea in practice.

Part 2 is my favorite part. An Islamic faith school allows them to film the lessons, apparently the only school that did, and the students and teachers are then interviewed. It's almost uncomfortable to watch the students and teachers squirm in their seats as they try to explain the disconnect between the government science curriculum and their faith vis-à-vis evolution. Everyone in the room reiterated that everyone gets to make their own choice. It's convenient how everyone made the same choice. I find it interesting because of the societal difference between Britain and the US. In Britain, the school seems almost aware of how stupid what they're doing is, while US schools will proudly declare that evolution is wrong and the scientists who advocate for it are all imbeciles.

Debate With Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins debates evolution, the existence of God, and the nature of the human soul with Wendy Wright. She's remarkably poor in a debate. Whether I agree with her statements or not, she is terrible at this. Holy crap, Christopher Hitchens would have simply eaten her face.

For example, she keeps saying "show me the evidence," which Dawkins does, and she then appears to ignore him. I don't think she's ignoring him, I think that she's failing to articulate what she means. She requests evidence for the transition from species to species, he then tells her about transitional fossils. She rejects that as not evidence. What she means is that the fossils only show that a creature that looks like that once existed, not that it then evolved into any of the other fossils. She accepts the discreet fossils, but rejects the theorized path from example to example. If we can't show her a monkey turning into a man, she doesn't buy it.

Also of interest, she doesn't openly describe herself as a young-Earther (someone who believes the Earth was created less than 10,000 years ago). I can only assume this is because she knows that the argument is unbelievably stupid. To reject the age of the Earth is to reject ALL science. You reject cosmology, physics, biology, geology, oceanography, everything, to explain your view. That is not a view that would hold up well with one of the planet's premier scientists.

I also think that her belief that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old outright rejects the validity of the fossils. Even if she wasn't specifically rejecting the transition itself, she simply rejects that the fossils represent anything at all.

And I want to go where Dawkins didn't want to for, I'm assuming, the sake of keeping the argument from getting mired down in too much morality. she asks in part four whether a person who is mentally retarded has a soul or not. Dawkins says that "soul" is a meaningless word and that, for example, a person in a vegetative state does not have the properties of a person with consciousness, and thus doesn't have a "soul."

She then says that she believes that the person is still a person and has a soul and as such must be cared for. Ignoring Western religion's great history in not caring for people, I see no problem with the materialist perspective (she keeps trying to use the word materialism, and I know what she's doing. She's trying to tie the scientific perspective back to the USSR). No. NO ONE has souls. Souls are a meaningless word. Even Wittgenstein, a devout man, would agree with that. When you say "soul," you might as well have said quijibo.

This does not negate a kind and loving existence. A wise society recognizes that its greatest contributions might come from its weakest members. Profoundly retarded people produce great art and music, can remember amazing things and perform mathematics that beggar the imagination. Even a person in a vegetative state can be recognized as someone who can spring from that state at any moment and be a full person again. There are very, very good reasons for caring for everyone and keeping this world a happy place without simply retreating to God. Because, as I argue frequently, that still doesn't explain it. Why should I help people? Because God says so? Why should I listen to God? Why should I care? Because I'll go to hell if I don't? And thus, we reduce it to self-serving nihilism.

In part 5, she mentions being arrested. She's either lying outright or smoothing over the facts. I found two references to her being arrested, one was quite violent, only that it was her being the violent one. The second arrest appears to be the one that she references; here it sounds like she was just being an asshole.

Also in part 5, she says that it's demeaning to say that they haven't read books. Michael Behe is a superstar in the ID community. With that in mind, watch this clip from the PBS documentary about the Dover, Pennsylvania school board controversy.




She's right, it is demeaning to say that they haven't read the books. But she deserves to be demeaned. I started off angry at her, but finished the videos just being baffled. She simply pretends that Dawkins hasn't said anything on a number of occasions in the debate, leaving him puzzled how to respond.

The whole encounter reminds me of the frequent counterpoints to Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris. Each book comes out, opponenets bring up arguments like how Nazi Germany and the USSR were atheistic, those arguments are soundly rebutted, and then, later, they pretend like the arguments weren't rebutted at all and simply bring them out again. The worst one is the argument that Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins are attacking a straw man. Dawkins specifically addresses this argument early in his book, and then readdresses it in the updated forward to the paperback. Yet, this is one of the first arguments trotted out in any confrontation.

As watching this, keep thinking that she represents 500,000 people.

Argument

I live for enemy audiences. I would prefer to speak to a well-sorted advocate for religious thought that with someone who already generally agrees with me.

First off, the enemy encounter is less-frightening. With someone who already agrees with me, they might see me as intellectual competition, or I may fail to impress them. Someone who has thought about all the same stuff as me might determine me to be a total idiot. I'd rather have someone who's gone on an entirely different track.

I also want the competing viewpoint because it's the best way to engage in the classic dialectic. An argumentative exchange of points and counterpoints, where at the end, both parties leave with a greater grasp of the subject. No synthesis needs to be achieved. Both parties either leave shaken or ever more resolute in their original belief, but both outcomes are an advancement from where they started.

It's from that standpoint that arguments should not be about winning, but about achieving something separate from the encounter. In this way, arguments are never seen as something worthy of raised voices. Obviously, if we're talking about arguments that could lead to action, such as going to war, raised voices might be necessary, but in this ideal, academic setting, raised voices just make you look like an ass.

I've always felt that this goes back to Socrates. Where Soh-crates generally seemed more interested in showing the errors in others' thoughts, in his encounter with Protagoras, he discusses not a desire to prove Protagoras wrong, but to bumble towards truth. And whoever is proven correct is of no importance, just so long as someone is proven correct.

It's for this reason that I love science. It has been a massive, ongoing dialectic, with new sides and new evidence arising daily. The dialectic is our only path to something resembling "truth," whatever that may be, and science is the biggest one in history. That makes our country's ever-surprising fear and distaste for it all the more depressing. I can only hope all those that speak against science, be it climate loonies or people who support Intelligent Design, will all soon be dead from either old age or acute stupidity.

12 Questions

Twelve questions. That's all. Twelve questions of basic scientific knowledge, and only 10% of those taking the quiz got them. That's fucking depressing.

Poll: Science, Though Beneficial, Losing Importance (Sciam.com)
The Science Knowledge Quiz (Pew Research)

Global Warming vs. An Old Man

There's an excellent article/biography of Dyson Freeman, a scientist of whom I knew very little up till now. A super-genius and all that good stuff, and, importantly, a global warming skeptic.

I won't go into detail about what he has to say, I'll only go so far as to say that his points are very well made. I still disagree with him, but I actually have an out because the bulk of my views don't come into conflict with his, namely:

• I don't care about the Chinese. They can do whatever they want. I want change in my country and my country alone. Other countries are free to do anything at all.


• Whether we're causing global warming or not is irrelevant. We are a rich nation and can afford environmental advances that are good for reasons beyond their being green. As I've said before, the goal is not to be green, but to be efficient.


• Our course of action is dictated apart from the reality of global warming. Whether it's true or not is irrelevant and we must invest heavily into high-efficiency, green technology.
  

I also fully disagree with a few of his points.

• I disagree that there is no such thing as an ideal ecological system. The concept of ideal requires that certain parameters are set. I think that we can, in fact, set those parameters. Yes, in the grand scheme of things, whatever we do doesn't matter since the planet will just change and evolve. Yes, evolution is happening as we speak. Yes, life goes on. Too bad we live and exist on small scales and I would very much like to keep the world as is, if at all possible. I think it's very nice, now.


• Solar energy will be a viable form of energy in much shorter order than 50 years, and shifting focus away from that to coal is, I think, a terrible error.

Also, he considers himself a skeptic and that's cool. I love skeptics. But some of the best skeptics on Earth all support that theory that human action is having a significant impact on global warming. These are not easily-convinced people. James Randi, Michael Shermer, and the whole of the crew who produce Skeptic Magazine, all of them support the theory. I find this sort of weight hard to argue.

S.O.S.

Adam Savage, the more energetic, ADD-addled member of the Mythbusters pair (I don't count their trio of doofuses as real Mythbusters) recently penned a short article for Popular Mechanics about how to save science education.

It's a quick read, so go do that, I'll pee, and when we come back we can talk about it.

Ok. While I support his drive to make science better in American schools, I think he's picking out a bad apple from a bad bushel and focusing on it. Yes, science is taking quite a hit in America, but that's because education on the whole is taking a hit.

He laments that "one of the first things to go when educational budgets get slashed is science supplies." But I think that's a bit like complaining how firefighters don't rescue the pets first when the house is on fire. The real problem is that the house is on fire. I like that he bluntly states "By all means throw money at the problem!" He's totally right. While many aspects of our school system are inefficient, the need for more money is without doubt. Politicians speak a god game about children being our most valuable asset, and education is critical. But when the time comes to actually do something about it, they push through a laughable reform like "No Child Left Behind" and then cut funding across the board because they all know that petroleum is actually more important than our kids.

I also can't complain about my own experiences in science classes. True, my teachers pretty much single-handedly funded the experiments, but experiment we did. It was interesting that surface tension experiments were some of the very first I ever did in High School. Hell, we even built robots out of TI-86 calculators and motors the teacher had ripped out of dead VCR's.

His last point is important, namely, celebrate mistakes. Our schools, and NCLB only exacerbates this problem, are obsessed with the avoidance of mistakes. When education is based entirely on standardized tests, which Adam laments earlier in the article, mistakes are anathema. Because if you make a mistake, you get the answer wrong, you fail, and your school gets its budget cut.

Obviously, though, this only scratches the surface of our country's educational problems. We have so many I am of the mind that it is dead, and is merely decaying. As Adam points out, "by 2010, Asia will have 90 percent of the world’s Ph.D. scientists and engineers." Our schools are dying. Crumbling under the weight of inadequate funding, an antiquated psychosocial design, and a populous that, really, doesn't care. You may say you care, but when was the last time you voted for someone who said they were going to raise taxes.

As always, America will respond when things get really bad, and they're not really bad, yet.

Science x Religion = Scigion?

In a recent issue of the New York Times, the John Templeton Foundation. They're a scientific finance group that used to sponsor Nova. They've instead gotten into running large, two-page ads in the Times about "The Big Questions." Such as: who is Britney dating, and, where can I get g00d che@p \/|@gra from C@n@d@?

The most recent one was; Does science make belief in God obsolete? They solicited answers from a wide variety of people, I give them credit, including one of my heroes, Michael Shermer. They also got Christopher Hitchens, who is always entertaining. I do wish they had gotten more people with hard-core philosophical backgrounds. They got a few with theological training, and ONE person, Mary Midgley, with focus on ethics. But this has nothing to do with ethics. Where are the epistemologists and metaphysicists? They had boat-loads of physicists and biologists, a few priests, and one very devout guy, but no philosophers.

I think the question was also formulated poorly, since almost everyone re-stated the question before answering it. Surprisingly, most of them re-stated it similarly. I, too, restate it. I find the question multi-faceted. The first question is “can someone believe in science and God simultaneously,” and “can someone be a scientist and believe in God.”

The answer to the first question is no, and the answer to the second is yes. “Belief,” as it were, in science requires an acceptance of causality, probability, and basing thought and actions on these two tenets. I do not cower in a closet for fear of being killed by a rogue baseball, since the probability of that is very low. Likewise, since God is outside of causality, probability, and inquiry, there is no reason to believe. So, yes, a dedicated belief in causality and probability and the analysis thereof negates if not the actual existence of God, but the belief.

Science can be done by anyone, though. It can be done passively and effectively. How long this will be true is anyone’s guess, since most of our scientific tinkering is still in its earliest stages. What of the days when we will manipulate the very fabric of space-time. I think we will find it much harder to simply work with what is in front of us and assume the existence of a divine entity in the wings, watching over us. But the point remains, anyone can do science by observing, recording, predicting, and controlling. On the face of it, it’s obvious that religious belief need not intrude on this activity at all. My belief in God does not affect my ability to make a better television or cancer drug.

I think the question is better stated as whether it is possible to live a religious life and a scientific life simultaneously, and that is a resounding no. One cannot accept the tenets of science as a system by which to live a life and the tenets of religion. Science requires inquiry, experiment, and prediction. Religion requires the abandonment of all three. Religion requires the baseless assumption of God, faith, and the assumption that He is outside our ken. Science rejects that.

Obviously, it could be argued that a religious foundation and a scientific foundation are fundamentally equal. We are unsure of God's existence, but we are also unsure of our own existence. All we know is that we think, therefore we are. So the world may be an illusion, and as such scientific inquiry is as much a figment of our imagination as religion is.

This is true, but this figment is involuntary and universal amongst people. Religion, however, is not. We have to think about religion, come up with it, and watch it evolve. Religion has changed, human perception has not. I am just sitting here, having my perceptions forced on me. I have no rational reason to doubt them to such a degree as believe The Matrix is real. If I must base the world on something, it may be the things I do not have to contemplate.

At least this question was better farmed than the Does the Universe Have a Purpose? question. Again, where are all the philosophers?

A Tribute

Daisy Daisy, give me your answer do
I'm half crazy all for the love of you
It won't be a stylish marriage
And I can't afford a carriage
But you'd look sweet
Upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two.

They Should Have Named It 'Jurassic Park: Spunky Black Girl Adventure'

Well, the National Academy of Sciences has released a booklet illustrating, over a relatively brief 88 pages, the concept of evolution and why creationists are doofy liars. They go a bit farther in extending the olive branch than I suspect I would have gone, by having men of the cloth explain why Evolution and religious faith are not opposed.

While I certainly commend their efforts, I wonder how much good it's going to do. Those that don't "believe" in evolution never will. They're twits who you could safely shoot because the thickness of their skull renders their head bulletproof. I'm sorry to devolve into name-calling here, but it's the best that can be done. Reason doesn't work. Hell, theology doesn't even work. They know what they know and no one will ever change their mind.

Fine. Be that way. I can't stop you. It's you're right. It's also my right to mock you, deride you, and look forward to the day when you slough off this mortal coil, stand in heaven beside your precious God, and leave the rest of us the fuck alone.

I assume they hope to get this book into the hands of those who are on the fence, as it were. Again, commendable goal. But who the hell is on the fence? It's like being on the fence about the Iraq War. If you don't have an opinion yet, I don't want you to have an opinion. An opinion in someone as apathetic as you could be dangerous. Now go home and watch Trading Spaces.

I guess the best place to send this booklet would be schools. Millions of them. Get one into the hands of every public school student in the country. And start young. Hit them in 6th grade. Hit them before they even know most of the words. By them time they hit college, they're either smart or stupid and there's likely not much that can be done to change that.

I think there, in schools, the book stands a decent chance of doing something. And it needs to be free. Schools can't afford another book. Otherwise, it will just end up being yet another geeky publication out there that no one aside from scientists read.

P.S. I know it's free to download. I meant free to get a fully bound and printed copy.

Evolution: Read All About It! (Via Science Magazine)

I Believe in Joe Pesci.

I just finished watching the PBS Nova episode chronicling the Dover PA. school board battle over evolution. While the result of the case is already well know (YAY!), the background that this show gave us was fantastic. It makes me feel good about humanity.

Regardless, something about the show rubbed me the wrong way. It's something about the ID debate in general, and that is the use of the word "believe."

A local journalist, talking about her personal battles with her father, recounts a question he directerd at her; do you believe in evolution? She responded with yes, that she believed we came from monkeys, and all that good stuff.

I have problems with that because I do not believe in evolution, I believe in science. I damn well should believe in it. It's what lets me write this. It's what's lighting this room. Evolution follows from science and all the other interconnected theories that support it. To reject it is to reject science, and one cannot accept science without accepting evolution.

And yes, on a brutally philosophical level, science is a "faith." I'll spare you all the technicalities, but the boils down to having faith that my own perceptions are accurate. I have no evidence, nothing testable to say that what I see and hear are what I actually see and here. There are many arguments against this, but I'll give the faith-foundation proponents the benefit of the doubt.

Still, science's goal is to strip as much faith as it can from reality. It strives to reduce it as best it can. Religion bolts on more faith; worse still, a faith that contradicts other faith. At least my faith in my own perceptions isn't contradictory on its face.

So yes, I believe in evolution. Of course I do. Because I have faith that I am not insane and the world is, roughly, as I see it.

Well, What About an A-Bomb?

I know that in certain movies, you can not invade them with certain systems of logic if they function on other, distinct systems of logic. For example, a movie about magic (or majiiiqcck as new-agers say) can not have science brought into it or it all breaks down.

Unfortunately, movies about magic are frequently brought together with modern times. Harry Potter is a good example. Yeah, yeah. All the wizards at Hogwarts are very powerful, but, could they stop an A-bomb? Or, again, any one of the 93,476 modern-day vampire movies where vampires are loaded with bullets and knives and whatnot but keep coming. Well, what about an A-bomb? Like the Grand Poobah vampire in John Carpenter's Vampires, what would have happened if he got nailed with Fat Man.

I'm sorry, but this is actually a knock against movies, for me. If the movie is set in modern times it must be subject to the rules of modern times. Like the bus that picks up Harry Potter in the third book/movie. It frantically dodges people on the road as it drives around at warp 5, and it's explained that people don't see because they choose not to see. Well, yeah, but the bus is still physically there, in some way. So whether they can see it or not they could still walk into it. And what about the tracks that carry the train? Do people just not notice them?

My favorites are still vampires, werewolves, and other such ergot-inspired delusions. I guess ol' B-Dogg Stoker didn't imagine A-bombs. What's more, he didn't need to. But now, if you're writing a movie about magic, vampires, or perhaps magical vampires, I beg you to ask the question, "what about an A-bomb?"

In Regards...

In regards to my previous post where I ranted about those two goofballs who were writing about science's intolerance of religion, I found this on PZ Myers' Pharyngula blog.

It is something that brings me pleasure to no end. You can always spot real science by looking at papers written on the subject a number of years ago. In this case, a quarter century.

In real science, the works done decades ago are almost quaint in the simplicity of their knowledge. What they are writing about and what they discuss has changed drastically compared to now. Conclusions are different, directions of research have changed, and what people know and what they think they know are in a different dimension.

Pseudo-science, religion, and just general bullshit never changes. It's the exact same arguments laid out by the exact same people. Oh sure, the names change, and sometimes the gender, but it's the still same person. I knew the war in Iraq was bullshit the day I read quotes from politicians on some liberal-wonk website.

All the quotes were blatantly pro-war. They all discussed the impending doom faced by our country. They all sounded ex-ACT-ly like the stewards of our governmental branches that grace our televisions today.

They were all from different eras, ranging from the Spanish-American War, up to the Vietnam war. Not one had to do with the current war, and yet they you couldn't tell the difference. The arguments haven't changed. The people haven't changed. Nothing has changed.

This article is exactly the same. Same words, different author, just as wrong. Science must advance by its very nature. Words written twenty years ago can't possibly be the same as they are today. It is this inherent advancement that separates science from all other disciplines.

We sometimes walk and we sometimes run, but we can never sit still.

Related:
Of Scientists And Popes.

What works, what doesn't: the futility of appeasing creationists (Via Pharyngula)