March Book list

..Elimination’
may give you a clue but she also does a great line in off-beat footnotes. Did
you know that Eskimo hunters travelling alone on still, glassy waters are sometimes
stricken by ”kayak angst” – delusions that their boat is flooding
or that that the front end is either sinking or rising up out of the water?
’Nonsense on Stilts’ presumes that you have a brain that still functions
and is written with a subtle and mildly sardonic intelligence. The book ranges
widely, describing how we should make judgements about science by forensically
examining and analysing a number of common beliefs, intellectual positions and
fallacies. Some like the inanity of astrology are like shooting fish in a barrel,
others like egregious intellectual positions adopted by the post-modernist philosopher
of science Paul Feyerabend are more complex but are treated with a considered
scorn. As that particular section is headed “Rebel with a Feeble Cause:
The Ranting of Paul Feyerabend “ Pigliucci’s position may be obvious.

Climate change sceptics are seriously dealt with through a critical appraisal
of Bjørn Lomberg’s ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist”
which is used as an example of how science can be used to simplify a complex
topic and how ‘hundreds of pages of footnotes and thousands of notes do
not necessarily make good scholarship.’
Mary Roach in Packing for Mars sails with a wry wit though the difficulties
and history of human space exploration from the concerns that man would go insane
in the vast emptiness of the cosmos – an expectation similar to the belief that
rapid transit would exert harmful effects on the human body at greater than
fifteen miles and hour that lead to the first rain services constrained to that
speed.
She also quotes the ominous words of Eugene Brody at the 1959 Symposium of Space
Psychiatry: “Separation from the earth with all its unconscious symbolic
significance for man, …. might in theory at least be expected ….
to produce – even in a well-selected and trained pilot – something
akin to the panic of schizophrenia.”
Regrettably Freudian psychoanalysis doesn’t get the serve it deserves
in ‘Nonsense on Stilts’ apart from Pigliucci’s introductory
mention of it along with Marxist theory as pseudoscience as its total inclusiveness
means that there is no psychological observation that cannot be interpreted
as being caused by an unconscious obsession with sex.
But I would like to quote extensively from Pigliucci in an attempt to deal with
my complete incredulity that a majority of Americans, and probably a significant
number of Australians, believe in Creationism. That is God created the world
either in the seven days and seven nights as described in the Bible or through
directly guiding the biological world into what it is today. Some still believe
that the earth was created during the night before the 23rd October 4004 BC
as determined by Bishop Ussher. Ah the joys of credulousness.
Pigliucci writes a good general introduction to evolution in a chapter ‘Science
in the courtroom’ that deals with trial of the Dover School Board in Pennsylvania
as a result of its attempt to impose a Fundamentalist Christian approach to
evolution in the school. The School Board was dutifully routed by Judge John
E Jones an appointee of President George W Bush.
“The modern theory of evolution begins with Charles Darwin in his book
’Origin of the Species by means of Natural Selection’ (1859). The
book makes two essential points: all life on earth is related by common descent;
secondly, the major explanation of the diversity of life, and especially of
the obvious adaptation of living organisms to their environment, is a process
called natural selection”
“The evidence that Darwin amassed included an examination of the fossil
record; the comparative anatomy of organisms; the study of animal breeding and
the biogeography of both living and fossil forms. Obviously modern biology has
expanded the lines of evidence and added a wealth of information not available
to Darwin. So to be blunt the empirical evidence supporting Darwin’s fundamental
insight is as solid as any other theory. “
In a murder trial such convincing level of evidence would have a jury convicting
in a matter of minutes.
Pigliucci elucidates further….
“… it is crucial to understand two ideas that are often obfuscated
within the context of evolution-creation debate. First, common descent is a
pattern (and not a mechanism) which is explained by a variety of causes (mechanisms),
the major one being that living organisms passes genetic material from one generation
to another. Second, and most crucially, natural selection is not a random process.”
“…. One additional important concept follows…… evolution
is both a theory and a fact, contrary to simplistic creationist views. How can
this be? Evolution is a fact in the sense that it is beyond reasonable doubt
that living organisms have changed over time throughout the history of the earth.
It is a theory in that scientists have proposed a variety of mechanisms (including,
but not limited to, mutation and natural selection) to explain the fact of evolution.
Similarly, in modern physics, gravity is a fact (apples do fall on people’s
heads when they become detached from their tree) and a theory (according to
Einstein, gravity is a local deformation of space-time caused by physical objects
with mass).”
Evolution turns out to be the result of two components: mutations (at the DNA
level which are random) and natural selection (which is not random). It is the
joint outcome of these two processes that explains the diversity and the adaptation
of all life on earth. Those not adapted did not survive with the result that
more than 99% of the species that ever existed have by now gone extinct.
It also means that species can carry the remnant traces of evolutionary paths
within us such as junk genes and also carry some apparently non-adaptive behaviours
that don’t threaten survival.
Mary Roach on Space Sickness…
Astronauts like most people are subject in varying degree to motion sickness,
which is technically not a sickness but a normal response to an abnormal situation
where the information of the inner ear and the eyes are in conflict about up,
down and sideways. Most people and a wide range of livestock also suffer, even
fish get sea sick. The only people who are predictably immune are those with
non-functioning inner ears.
“In the case of motion sickness, vomiting is an impressive lot of bother
for no apparent reason. Vomiting makes sense as a bodily response to poisoned
or contaminated food – get it out of you ASAP – but as a result
to sensory conflict? Pointless says Dr Charles Oman (of MIT and NASA). He says
it’s just an unfortunate evolutionary accident that the emetic brain happened
to evolve right next to the part of the brain that oversees balance. The emetic
brain isn’t an actual brain at all – just a place in the fourth ventricle,
a few clusters of nuclei a fraction of a millimetre across that has happened
to evolve right next to the part of the brain that oversees balance. Motion
sickness is most likely a case of cross talk between the two.
Interestingly dogs are used to study human motion sickness because the two species
are about equally susceptible. Guinea pigs are not used because they, along
with rabbits, are thought to be among the only mammals immune to motions sickness.
“Just one of God’s jokes,” says Pat Cowings a researcher at
NASA Ames.
Actually, that’s evolution for you.