No Award for Darwin!

So I decide to read Charlie D's On the Origin of Species, just in case some wiseacre asks, "... but, have you actually read what Darwin wrote?"

I am convinced that VERY FEW people have ever read what Darwin wrote. If they tried, they would fall asleep in the first chapter, like I did. At least I'm past his discourse on pigeons, may they sit on his statue.

Long day was it.

Whew. Shovelled and shovelled today. Muscles are sore, snow is mounded high. We have about 18" on the ground, but very little in the driveway.

Scanned about 80 slides tonight. All were taken in 1970. Talk about time travel -- quite a few memories from when I was just a lad of 22&1/2. People and places that have vanished into history. Maybe soon I will have everything together to make a presentation about that year.

A Great Leap Forward?

Well, I done did it. I switched to the NEW blogger. In doing so I read all of their privacy stuff. I wonder how many people do that. Interesting:

--Google has the right to suppy your personal information to any government that asks, without telling you.

--The only legal venue is in Santa Clara County, CA.

I really would be more comfortable if we had a national law that said information about US persons could only be sent to a foreign government after (1) permission was received from the US Department of Justice, and (2) the person was notified that the information was being sent. Since I doubt that this will occur, the best policy is to not place any personal information that you wish to keep private in the hands of Google.

Now on to other things. The slide scanning project is still going forward. I'm trying to scan several boxes of slides each evening. There are thousands of those things! Lots of pictures of roads and flowers and museum exhibits (can you spell GEEK if the activity precedes the creation of the word?). But there are also lots of pictures of my cute little kids, and places they visited... and places I visited long before they were little kids. Once it's done, we will have to sit down and make a slide presentation with narrative and burn it using iDVD.

The 8mm movie project is a bit of a problem. I can't seem to locate a super-8 projector (without buying one on eBay for an obscene price) to run those films and record them digitally. Scanning is out of the question at this point; they run approximately 6 frames to the inch on 50 foot segments. I have about a dozen of those, plus several 400 foot reels. They do need to be preserved digitally, though, if they are to be kept at all. The color on some of the slides is fading a bit (30-40 years will do that for a chemical emulsion), and any 8mm clips will probably need some color correction, just as I'm doing with the 35mm stuff.

Time to go shovel snow again. It's well over a foot deep in the drive, and I shovelled 3-4 inches out of there twice yesterday. Reminds me of the good old days...

The Valley of the Shadow of Doubt

What Science is .. and isn't. Part 2.
(C) 2007 -- all rights to revise reserved.

Out of the mists of Hollywood strides that champion of justice, the TV Prosecuting Attorney. As the suspense builds, the final hand is played : scientific evidence is presented that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the accused is indeed guilty, because his fingerprints were found on the murder weapon.

The theory behind the use of fingerprints as evidence claims that fingerprints are unique; that no two people in the world have the same fingerprints. Has this ever been proven? No. While it is true that no two sets of fingerprints have ever been found to match identically, it is also true that not all the people in the world who have ever lived have been fingerprinted. It is therefore possible that somewhere in the world, at some time, two people have had identical prints. Since we do not actually know how many people there are and have been in existence, the probability of such identical prints can only be assumed to be zero. Thus it becomes a matter of faith that if the fingerprints on the murder weapon match the fingers of Suspect A, only Suspect A could have left them.

Even more reliable as evidence, supposedly, is DNA sampling. The theory states that no two people have identical DNA. Unfortunately, this cannot be proven, either. It may become possible, as the human genome is completely mapped, that the total number of human genes can be determined, and with that number present, an accurate probability of the uniqueness of each individual calculated. Nevertheless, until every set of human chromosomes, from every person who ever lived, is catalogued, it will not be possible to state with 100% certainty that no duplicate people exist of have existed in human history. Persons convicted on the basis of DNA sampling are convicted on the mere assumption that their DNA is unique to them.

While criminal courts tend to be somewhat conservative in regard to conviction on circumstantial evidence, civil courts are a different type of zoo. A criminal court jury is required to convict when all reasonable doubt of innocence has been dispelled; whereas civil court juries make their findings based on a preponderance of evidence. This preponderance of evidence often takes the form of high correlation; that is, if A is true at the same time B is true, A must have caused B. In its simplest form, this is easily seen to be ridiculous, but somehow, when faced with statistics, juries tend to react irrationally.

Thus it is, while there is a high correlation between smoking cigarettes and contracting lung cancer, it is also possible to contract lung cancer without smoking cigarettes, and it is also possible to smoke cigarettes for a long lifetime and never contract lung cancer. It is therefore impossible to prove that cigarette smoke (or even second-hand cigarette smoke) causes lung cancer, but that is scant comfort to cigarette manufacturers who have to pay out damage settlements awarded by scientifically impaired juries.

The same kind of "correlation is causation" thinking has cost many American businesses dearly. The Dow Corning breast implant case, the black lung, asbestos, and black mold cases, the scare over the use of the pesticide Alar, and even the now-reversed ban on the use of DDT, all involved fixing of blame based on correlations and the assumptions of causation.

A person may look at the statistics and decide that his probability of dying or getting a disease or suffering injury may increase with certain activities or the use of certain products. Based on that probability, he or she may decide that a lifestyle change is in order. That is a matter of personal responsibility. However, to punish a person or corporation (which is a non-human person) on the basis of the correlation of events is totally unjust. The Bible makes it clear that conviction must reside in the testimony of two or more witnesses, and if their testimony is merely an assumption that something has happened, it cannot be allowed.

It was noted in part one that many politicians are lawyers. Having been nurtured in the "correlation is causation" school of law, they bring their pseudo-scientific understandings to the realm of legislation. Thus we have bans on any substance or activity for which a proper scare can be ginned up in the voting public. It does not help that the media sensationalizes the most fantastic claims (follow the money, said Deepthroat) and provides free publicity for the most rabid of Snake-Oil Salesmen.

Where the situation becomes really pathetic is the teaching of quasi-scientific ideas in the science classroom. Evolution is an educational battleground, and the battle has been making a monkey out of just about everyone who gets involved. We will try to peel that banana next.

What Science is ... and isn't

What Science is .. and isn't.
(C) 2007 -- all rights to revise reserved.

If an armadillo is killed crossing the road near Dallas, Texas, how is the price of yams affected in Namibia? Silly question? Mayhap not. It would certainly be a good starting point for a thriller novel. What has that to do with Science, though?

Life is filled with uncertainties. Events occur on the other side of the world that affect people who may never have heard of the people or places involved. Man has always been fearful of uncertainty, and has devised many ways of dealing with his fears.

From earliest times, magic and consultation with spirits was considered the only way to foretell what was going to happen in the future. Superstitions arose regarding almost every aspect of life. B.F. Skinner brought the concept of superstition into the modern realm with animal experiments, and helped his students visualize what occurs in the making of a superstition. He did not admit to cognitive thinking, so he couched his explanation in behavioral terms. Essentially, according to Skinner, superstitious behavior results when random activity is positively rewarded.

To many people, there is no distinction made between superstition and religion. It is easy to see why; the religious beliefs of many people are indeed founded in the reinforcement of superstitious behavior. Unfortunately, the same can be said of the scientific beliefs of many people as well.

I have to say that I went through high school and obtained a bachelor's degree in education, with a major and minor in physical and biological science education, without having been exposed to the philosophy of science. Certainly I had been well drilled in the "scientific method", but a number of the things taught were erroneous, and others misleading. The major error involved the concept of "proof" in science.

As noted in the beginning of this post, life is filled with uncertainties, and the purpose of science is to reduce those uncertainties and improve the quality of our decision-making. It was not until I took a post-graduate course in educational statistics that I was finally clued in to what science can and cannot do (Thank you, Dr. Isidore Newman!). The dirty little secret is that science cannot provide proof of what is true; it can only provide proof of what is false.

Think of it this way. I reach into a bag of hundreds of marbles, a bag into which I cannot see, and withdraw a marble. I do this 100 times. Each time, I withdraw a white marble. Have I proven that the bag holds only white marbles? No, because on the 101st try, I just might come up with a red or black or green marble. Can I expect that on the 101st try I will grab a white marble? Yes, because my experience provides a probability of 100 out of 101 tries that the marble will be white. It does not guarantee, however, that the 101st marble will be white, and does not prove that the bag contains only white marbles.

Experimentation and experience (largely the same thing, with differences in the degree of controls) provide us with probabilities that something will or will not happen. For this reason, it is critical to understand that the correct use of the scientific method is not to test a hypothesis, but to test a null hypothesis. We can be certain of what we have observed, and develop a prediction of what will happen in the future, based on what we have experienced in the past. I can say of the marble bag, that the probability of drawing a white marble is 100%, based on my experience, but I CANNOT say that the bag holds only white marbles, until I have completely emptied it, in which case I need not make any predictions about future drawings. I have proof when there is no longer any reason to predict because I have exhausted all possibilities; I have removed all uncertainty.

In order to make sense of the world around us, we develop theories about how things work. The theory may be based on superstition, and most likely is. As a result of having created a theory, we then form a hypothesis to indicate what we expect the results of an action will be.

Suppose I generate a theory that states that all bags containing marbles contain only white marbles. I have based this theory on the fact that I have reached into a marble bag 100 times, and 100 times I have pulled out a white marble. Have I proven that marble bags contain only white marbles? My experiments have 100% results. If someone asks me to gamble all of my possessions now and in the future on whether or not the 101st marble will be white, am I willing to trust the 100% results of the past?

If, however, I generate the theory that all bags containing marbles contain only white marbles, and that I will NOT withdraw anything but a white marble, then I can test that null hypothesis by experimentation. I can accept the null hypothesis with a percentage of certainty. If, however, I ever come up with anything other than a white marble, I must reject my null hypothesis, and at that point may have to admit that I have DIS-proven my theory. Or, as more commonly happens, I would modify my theory to state that in most cases, the marbles in a bag will be white, or that the majority of the marbles in a bag of marbles will be white.

While this may seem to be an exercise in semantics, it is critical to real-life operations. It is an observable part of human nature that the normal reaction to a situation that has gone wrong is to find someone or something to blame for the failure. Thus it was that some 40 or 50 years ago (my, how time flies!) the meteorologists switched from saying that today's weather would be rainy to saying there was a 70% chance of rain. It caused some consternation, and there are still some folks who are very unhappy about that kind of forecast, but it took the blame away from the weatherman. If he said there was a 70% chance of rain, and you gambled on the 30% chance of dry and got wet, it was your own decision, not his. Enough for now, but we will have to look next at the pseudo-science of legal proof, which has totally corrupted the American system of justice, and is widely used by dishonest politicians (most of whom are lawyers!).

I guess it works again

That last post created on 1-23-07 would not publish, and it looks like whaterver the problem was, it is now fixed. I'll have to add some meaningful content now, I suppose.