Joan of Arc and Science

I recently visited the equestrian statue of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) in Strasbourg, France. I have posted a video about what I learned.

Joan of Arc was a peasant girl, aged about 17, when she claimed that the Archangel Michael and Saints Margaret and Catherine had told her that she needed to lead the French troops to victory over England, which at that time (1429) occupied a large portion of what is today France. This was during the Hundred Years’ War, and France was not doing too well. The French troops were under siege in Orléans.

Jeanne must have had a mesmerizing personality, because she convinced the future French King Charles VII that the voices in her head had told her France would prevail and Charles would be king. She was put in charge of the portions of the French army that eventually drove the English away from that siege and some others as well. She was a military heroine—a 17 year old peasant girl. The story did not end so well for her. She started losing battles, and when she was 19 she was put on trial and convicted of heresy. She was burned at the stake in 1431. One of the charges was that, in leading battles, she had worn men’s clothing. Later, a new trial found her not guilty and today she is esteemed as one of the patron saints of France. Everyone has heard about her.

Every artistic depiction of her shows her to be very beautiful. The usual standards of physical beauty, however, is not at all necessary. She would have appeared beautiful to those who believed her divine claims, no matter what she actually looked like.

What this means for us, as we examine the role of religion in human history, is that even the craziest of claims are credible if the person making them is persistent and absolutely convinced of them. She heard the little voices in her head and had not the slightest doubt of their authenticity. Many historians today believe that Jeanne was schizophrenic (the little voices were in her brain) or had Menière’s disease (the little voices were in her inner ear). We do not know. More to the point, she did not know.

Religious claims can be made and believed on no further basis than the assertion of those who make them. No other evidence is needed. Many people claim that there is, in fact, evidence other than assertions that support many religious beliefs, such as Jesus’ resurrection. But such evidence is not necessary to true believers.

Scientific thinking, however, requires that the person making a claim provide evidence that is verifiable to people other than the one making the claim. You can read more about it in my book Scientifically Thinking. This is an important reason that we should depend on science, rather than religious assertion, to guide us in making decisions of worldwide importance—which nearly all of our decisions are these days.

Scientific Fads

Science is a relentless pursuit of truth via evidence, right? Well, more so than most other ways of thinking, but scientists are still human. As explained in my book Scientifically Thinking: How to Liberate Your Mind, Solve the World’s Problems, and Embrace the Beauty of Science (what a pompous title), scientific research is specifically designed to keep human scientists from falling into the common frailties of human thought (I have a chapter about each of them).

One example is that scientists are attracted to fads just like anyone else. Here are some examples:

Before Darwin, evolutionary theories were pretty speculative and justly earned the dislike of scientists. Darwin presented not just evidence for evolution but a mechanism for how it could work. All at once, evolution became a scientific theory. (Some problems, such as the objection raised by Fleeming Jenkin, come out of the woodwork with sometimes wild speculations. Herbert Spencer’s version of evolution was quite different from Darwin’s, and has essentially no supporters today, but it was Darwin who made Spencerism briefly viable. Darwinism also opened the door for the application of evolutionary ideas in the interpretation of human history and the evolution of languages (for example, by John Fiske in his 1883 Excursions of an Evolutionist), and theological applications such as those by Henry Ward Beecher.

Once Koch and Pasteur had proven that the diseases that they studied were caused by microbes, then most medical research (about 1880-1910) focused on microbes. This was before the modern understanding of genetics. At least the focus on microbes was a welcome relief from the older concepts of demons, humours, and vapours. And we continue to be surprised by microbial influences on what we thought were simply metabolic diseases. Some researchers think that plaque buildup in arteries, leading to heart disease, may be a response to bacterial infection, and that antibiotics might be used to treat some cases of heart disease.

For a while, it was a fad for scientists to find microbial causes of every disease. The truth, it turns out, is more complicated.

Another example. When the Alvarezes and colleagues proposed that an asteroid caused the Cretaceous Extinction, the proposal was met with skepticism or worse. But as evidence accumulated, a consilience of independent lines of evidence, everyone was convinced that they were right. It wasn’t long before scientists proposed asteroid causes of other Earth events. Colleagues of Luann Becker proposed that the Permian Extinction was also caused by the asteroid that formed the Bedout Crater. The Alvarez group was able to find the Chicxulub Crater in Yucatan, from 65 million years ago; finding the Bedout Crater from 250 million years ago was not as easy, and this might be the reason the Bedout hypothesis is so weak. 

But then other scientists proposed an asteroid cause of the mass extinction of North American mammals at the onset of the Younger Dryas cooling period. Although not all of the evidence presented by Firestone and colleagues has been discounted, it has not proven convincing enough to change most scientists’ minds, especially since this asteroid would have hit less than 13,000 years ago. Scientists (that is, not including me; I am no expert in this field) still prefer to say that the Pleistocene Extinction was caused by an interaction of global warming after the most recent ice age and overhunting—though neither of these factors could alone explain the extinction. Asteroids were a fad.

As with science, so also with technology. Most agricultural researchers, working in labs well-funded by the government and private industry, have jumped on the bandwagon of GM and claim that world hunger can be solved by genetic modification of crops. There are even more scientists, and they are more certain, since the development of CRISPR enzymes. I am not one of the GM technophobes (though I respect those such as Gary Paul Nabhan who do fear it), but our world food problem is way too complex for genetic modification to solve it and, by concentrating the power of agribusiness, will probably make the problem worse, as I explained in previous essays. Genetic modification, and its detractors, are both fads.

I can only hope that the scientific method will help scientists to avoid the pitfalls of human thinking right when everyone else needs our guidance.

Is Science a Religion?

No. But it does have some religious elements to it. I might have written about  my book but I didn’t think of it by press time.

I will use as my example of religion not the hot-headed American conservative celebration of racism and environmental destruction—nothing could be further from science than this. Nor will I use Islamic fundamentalism. Instead, I will use Catholic Christianity.

In many religions, including Catholicism, there is a deep and unquestioning reverence for ritual. Science, too, has its rituals, to which we scientists give our unwavering adoration. In each of these cases, there are essential justifications. I do not mean these practices are bad, but just that we scientists feel a deep reverence for them, like a priest conducting a liturgy. Examples of scientific rituals include:

Holy language. When we write scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, we try to be as emotionally bland as possible. We are passionate about the avoidance of passion. We dare not betray any feelings about the importance of wild species or intact ecosystems. Certainly no humor! I remember finding an article, decades ago, about shallow freshwater ecosystems. The author and editor allowed one joke to get published: a certain principle was littorally true. You didn’t get the joke? Then you aren’t part of our inner circle of priests. Also, in the 1980s, a fellow graduate student, who studied plant physiology, permitted herself just once to say that chlorophyll—in particular, chlorophyll a—was such a beautiful color. But you can bet your bottom thylakoid that she never wrote this in her thesis. We offer these papers on the holy altar of “objective” science, undefiled by humor and enthusiasm. Also, only a botanist would get bent out of shape if someone calls a dandelion a flower.

Holy objectivism. Scientists will almost never, even in our unguarded moment, express any idea for which we do not personally have corroboratory data. We are passionate in our avoidance of personal bias. Meanwhile, anti-scientific zealots proclaim their statements with absolute certainty. For example, an epidemiologist can say that a certain covid vaccine has 99 percent efficacy, thus it “appears that” the vaccine prevents covid. The lay reader thinks that we scientists are not quite sure. In contrast, anti-vaxxers loudly dismiss all evidence and proclaim that the vaccines are dangerous. One even went so far as to call Anthony Fauci a mass murderer. You have to read into the article a few lines to find the reference. Anti-scientific zealots are certain; scientists are hesitant; guess whose views prevail in conservative circles. Scientists use the term “hypothetical” to mean that a hypothesis is being tested; but anti-scientists, who never bother to question their own beliefs, think it means not just guesswork but evil guesswork.

Holy significance. Scientists insist that data should only be believed if the odds are 20 to 1 against the results being random. This is the origin of the 5 percent (p = 0.05) significance level. To have an accepted significance level is essential. A 50 percent significance level would mean that the results are as random as the flipping of a coin (50 percent heads, 50 percent tails). As discussed in Richard Harris’s book Rigor Mortis, it may be important for medical studies to demand even more significance, such as a 1 in 100 or 500 chance, because we have to be really, really sure before we put human lives at risk. But why 5 percent? Why not 4, or 6, percent? But 5 percent it is. This is a religion among scientists. Fortunately, in my one remaining scientific study before retirement, my significance levels are all p < 0.001, that is, there is less than 1 chance in 10,000 that they are due to chance. But in some analyses, if I end up with p = 0.06, I feel that I have utterly failed.

Holy place. Scientists do, in fact, have passionate personal opinions. It’s just that we do not express them in the holy scientific scriptures (peer-reviewed journals). We can express them in popular science books, which is why I prefer this venue of publication. In popular books, we can say (with our scientific authority) that humans are causing dangerous levels of global warming. But any scientist who makes such statements has to be very careful to not risk the disapproval of the bishops of the scientific Vatican. This is why there are very few scientists who write popular books; general readers get tired of phrases that depict scientific uncertainty. This is why most popular science writers, such as Carl Zimmer and David Quammen, began as English majors. Their science is very, very good; and being outside of academia, they are permitted to express their emotions. Many scientists would be proud to be called “a scientist’s scientist,” but not me! I want to be known as someone who makes science interesting and exciting. As you might know from my YouTube channel, I transgress fully into the realm of being a science clown. My editor even allowed me to slip a few jokes into Scientifically Thinking.

Liturgical Latin. Scientists love, love, love to use Latin and Greek phrases. And something that means the same thing in Latin as in Greek can have different meanings. If a shot (or, in jolly old England, a jab) goes under the skin (as perhaps all of them do), they are hypodermic (Greek); but an infection under the skin is subcutaneous (Latin). We give Latin, or Greek, or Latinized, names to every species of organism. If you don’t know the Latin names of the animals and plants, how can you be considered knowledgeable about forests or prairies or deserts? It is essential to have standardized names for species. For instance, non-scientists might just call all prairie grasses “grasses,” but each species is a little different and deserves its own name. But why Latin? The language of vicious world conquerors, then later of scholarly snobbery. There are reasons. One is that Latin is international; nobody speaks it today, even many Catholic priests. But I can tell you that it makes me feel really, really good to say Liquidambar styraciflua.

Later today I will probably start writing on my last scientific paper. I will try very hard to not get enthusiastic about it, despite all those p < 0.001 values that show that budburst times of Oklahoma deciduous trees, are responding, and responding clearly, to global warming.

Science as THE way of knowing

It is common among scientists, as among others, to refer to the scientific method as a way of knowing, but there are other ways as well. I wish to briefly explain that science is not just a way of knowing, but the way.

I am not referring, of course, to the subject matter of science. I refer to the scientific method, about which I wrote my most recent book, Scientifically Thinking.

 

I have had positive and exciting responses to this book. One email that I received is typical:

“[I am] an astronomy PhD student in UC Riverside. I read your fantastic book (Scientifically Thinking) and all the way during reading the book I was like: This book is really great! I think this book can be and is a life-changer and savior for many of us, regardless of the field of study and career.

I feel I am a better person after reading this book. That's why I recommend it to everyone I know and even don't know: last time I recommended it to a stranger in a playground who was trying to raise his little son a better person that himself!”

However, one reviewer (who was otherwise rapturous about how much he loved the book) accused me of being a scientific imperialist. How dare I say science is the only way of knowing? He said this was dangerous.

I plead guilty.

Science, as a profession, confines itself to repeatable and measurable data. The scientific method, however, can be applied to other kinds of observations that are not physical. What the scientific method allows you to do is to, as much as possible:

• Avoid bias. Science allows you to recognize your own biases and at least try to compensate for them.
• Have appropriate construct validity. Science allows you to, as much as possible, use a source of information that really tells you what you want to know.

These are characteristics that all kinds of thinking, including philosophical and religious, need to have. (Note that many fields of study outside of science—such as history—do in fact use data that are physical. Music is grounded in the physics of sound and in the psychology of the human mind. Psychology, in turn, is based on physiology and evolution. Literature is also based on psychology and evolution. As I use the term, science may include all of these fields of experience.)

If a religious person makes a claim, there must be something other than his own craziness that can support it. At least, find it in the Bible before blurting it out. While finding a Bible proof-text does not count as scientific thinking, it is better than the kind of craziness that we see around us today. Christian fundamentalists wave their Bibles in the air without reading them.

While I consider science to be the way of knowing, it is clearly not the only way of experiencing. I have had numerous and powerful religious experiences, both when I was a fundamentalist Christian, and now when my views are less defined. When I listen to music, I do not think about music theory; I am swept away by a rapture that is not unlike religious experiences that I have had. Earlier, I reviewed The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell. He studied his little patch of forest floor scientifically, but his experience was strongly influenced by Buddhism (he kept referring to the spot of land as a mandala).

And while I now question the historical reliability of the “stories of Jesus,” I am irresistibly drawn to them; I continue to write about them in my fiction and use Bible quotes even in my science classes. To me, Jesus is real, even though it may all be inside my head. I love this guy. I just don’t claim this to be knowledge; it is experience.

As I close, I must mention a source of bias in my views. I have, on several occasions, been duped by religious cult leaders. One was Garner Ted Armstrong. I was also swept into a Church of Christ cult for many years. My faith was more powerful than any experience I have had before or since. It was strong enough that I ignored contrary evidence, such as the verified news that Garner Ted was having illicit affairs with undergrad women at his college. With a history of such vulnerability to cult-thinking, how can I trust anything that is generated solely within my brain? I’m just speaking for myself, but I’ll bet you have similar vulnerabilities. I need to test my beliefs against evidence.

The distinction between knowledge and experience is particularly crucial today, when millions (not many millions, I hope) of people believe that everything Donald Trump says is as infallible as if God Himself had said them, and that there is a totally secret conspiracy that stole the election from Him. Few of them will go as far as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who claimed that mass shootings were all fake, and that the California wildfires were started by a satellitefinanced by Jewish money, but many of them use their religious delusion to claim that the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax and that we should neither wear masks nor get vaccinated. At this point, treating religious experience as if it is knowledge has become a public threat.

That is, I get upset when I see people using religion as a basis for believing and doing terrible things, which is something that I almost did as well. I am reacting in horror to what I might have been, as well as to what they are. That is my bias but, I think, a reasonable one.

Scientific thinking, not necessarily science, is THE way of knowing.

 

Cause and Effect: The Last Refuge of Denialists, part two.

One of the most important ways in which denialists use a deliberate misunderstanding of multiple causation (see previous essay) is to ridicule global warming. In this essay, I will look at just one example of an effect of global warming that is dominating the news now (September/October 2020): the wildfires in the west, particularly in California.

Scientists are certain that global warming, primarily of human cause, is already increasing the number and severity of wildfires. Of course, global warming is not the only cause. Another factor that makes wildfires in California so big and deadly is the accumulation of dead wood in the forests. I have seen first-hand that buildup of dead wood is also a problem in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where I taught field botany for eleven years. Once a fire gets started, there is an incredible amount of fuel for it to burn. (Then, of course, yet another cause is whatever ignited the fire. It is usually lightning strikes, though in one case it was sparks from fireworks at a gender reveal party.

This is hierarchical causation: a spark starts a fire, which burns a massive accumulation of dead wood. This is multiple causation: once the fire starts, it is more likely to spread if global warming has made hot, dry conditions worse than they would otherwise have been.

But some people who deny global warming like to ignore multiple causation. They blame the dead wood, then ridicule one of the other causes, global warming.

According to an article, California has been allowing dead wood to accumulate in its forests for decades.

Why has the dead wood accumulated? Because there is no easy way for humans to get rid of the dead wood. Nature’s way of clearing away dead wood is, in fact, fire. Fire is a part of all natural ecosystems, particularly coniferous forests in California. Almost without exception, scientists claim that we need to have natural fires to reduce the accumulation of dead plant matter. In Oklahoma, where I work, fire is the best way to control the spread of red cedar.

The ash from the fire releases nutrients back into the soil, actually promoting the forest to grow back more vigorously (see my YouTube video). Some species of trees actually require fire in order to germinate, as shown in another of my videos.

The problem is that there is no safe way to start control burns, that is, small fires that burn away the wood in wild forests but not on private land holdings. It is so easy for a control burn to get out of control. If California conservation officials started a control burn, which would clear away wood and reduce the risk of future fires, and if a puff of wind sent the fire onto private land, where it destroyed a house, the state might be on the hook for millions of dollars of liability. The article linked above said that, in order to bring California forests back into a stable fire balance, it would be necessary to set fires to wild forests the equivalent of the area of Maine. There is simply no way to do this safely. Having participated in control prairie burns in the Midwest, I can tell you they are risky undertakings. We have a university class in which an expert fire manager was teaching techniques of control burns; the fire got out of control and burned a fence, for which either he or the university (or insurance) had to pay. This was a scientific expert, in a grassland. Imagine what would happen with a fire crew in a dry forest full of dead wood.

It appears to me that California has allowed wood to accumulate in its forests because of the fear of lawsuits. Anyone who lives in a fire zone, let me know: would you be happy if a control burn, which would make life better for future generations, destroyed your home?

The article took an extreme position, however. The author accused the fire control agency CalFire of letting wood build up in order to create new wildfires. Why? Because the money and the glamor comes from fighting wildfires, not from doing control burns. The firefighters get lots of hazard pay, and, friends have told me, it is nearly a carnival atmosphere. The author of the article compares it to “the Halliburton model.” This is a conspiracy theory that says Dick Cheney, who headed up Halliburton corporation, fanned the flames of the Iraq War when he was vice president of the US, in order to get billions of dollars of contracts from the federal government. I am willing to believe almost any conspiracy theory about Dick Cheney, but even I am a little skeptical about this one. Cheney starting a war to get contracts for Halliburton? I haven’t seen quite enough evidence for this.

We’re stuck between a rock (Iraq?) and a hard place. We need to burn that dead wood, but we need to avoid destroying human habitations. This is a problem created by human civilization. The Natives who lived in the forest before Smokey the Bear got there had temporary dwellings, and could usually just get up and move if they saw a fire coming. If you have a big house back in the woods (or, worse, in the chaparral), you can’t do that. You may save your life, but nothing else.

The article also says that California should adopt the model that is successful in the Southeast: namely, control burns. The author seems unaware that control burns are easier in the Southeast because it rains more, and fires are less likely to get out of control.

The denialist problem is this: Denialists say that dead wood causes wildfires and global warming (which doesn’t exist, and they ridicule it) does not. The simple fact is that both of them are causes, just waiting for that spark. Denialists should stop twisting the truth by focusing on some causes and ignoring others.

Cause and Effect: The Last Refuge of Denialists, Part One

 

In my book Scientifically Thinking (Chapter 9), I explain the different kinds of cause and effect. Almost everything that happens has more than one cause.

Consider the example of hierarchical causation. An example of this is AIDS. If an AIDS victim dies of pneumocystis pneumonia, then you could say he was killed by the Pneumocystis carinii germ. But the reason the germ got a chance to spread was the depletion of the immune system, caused by HIV. The hierarchy of causation is, therefore, HIV—immune depletion—Pneumocystis. You cannot say “HIV does not cause pneumocystis pneumonia; Pneumocystis does.” The simple fact is that they both do, in a hierarchical fashion.

A very real example of people using hierarchical causation to mislead public opinion regards gun laws. I have heard “gun rights” people say that “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” The simple fact is that people use guns to kill people. It is hierarchical causation. Nobody believes that guns jump up and start shooting all by themselves. It is just a deliberate argument by the gun lobby to heap ridicule upon even mild versions of gun control.

Washington Post photo

This can lead to a dangerous situation. Many people have lots of guns and are ready to use them at the slightest provocation. And the social pressures against them are dwindling. Some white separatist groups openly display their weapons, clearly wanting us to know that they are ready to use them if something happens that they do not like. During the September 29 presidential debate, Donald Trump said that white supremacist groups should “stand by.” He clearly wants them to be ready to use their guns at some unspecified time in the future.

Another kind of causation that is misused by conservative denialists is multiple causation. This is one that has been deliberately propagated by Donald Trump. Covid-19 is caused by the coronavirus. The United States has now had more than 200,000 coronavirus deaths. But Donald Trump did not believe this. He believed that anyone who died of coronavirus but had previous underlying conditions should not be counted as coronavirus deaths. If you die of coronavirus, but you are old, then you died of being old, not from the coronavirus. Or if you have diabetes, and die of coronavirus, then you died of diabetes, not of coronavirus. Read about it here [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-it-affects-virutally-nobody-trump-coronavirus-rally/]. I have not heard whether, since his diagnosis and return from the hospital, he has changed his mind about this.

The simple fact is that coronavirus deaths, in fact all deaths, have multiple causation. If a diabetic dies of coronavirus, the diabetes had weakened his or her health, and the coronavirus finished him or her off. Both the virus and the diabetes caused it. By Trump’s line of reasoning, if I (a pre-diabetic over 60 years old) die of coronavirus, it is not a coronavirus death. The simple fact is that I am getting along fine right now and am not on the brink of death; if I become ill with coronavirus, this is the spark that starts the fire. It would still be a coronavirus death.

Science denialists like to claim that, in cases of multiple causation, they can choose one of the causes and ridicule the others. This is especially true of global warming denialism, the subject of the next essay.

New Darwin Video: I Have a Stethoscope and You Don't!

Click here for a new Darwin video in which I explain how some doctors and scientists, whether legitimate or not, use images rather than facts to enhance their credibility. It relates to chapter 14 of my book Scientifically Thinking: How to Liberate Your Mind, Solve the World's Problems, and Embrace the Beauty of Science.

Scientific Pseudo-Understanding

As I explained at great (and, I think, interesting) length in my new book Scientifically Thinking, the scientific way of thinking reveals the deep significance and structure of the world around us.

But sometimes us scientists are guilty of pseudo-understanding. I am about to encounter one example in a couple of hours. I am giving the final exam (which includes a lab practical) for my Systematic Botany course. I expect students to know about 150 different kinds of plants, though in reality I emphasize just the most common ones (still about 70). (If you don’t like plant biodiversity, don’t move to Oklahoma. We have more plant species per square kilometer than any other state.) They can pass the exam with a C if they only know the common names, but to get an A they have to know many Latin names as well.

For me, and I bet for many students, if we can say, “that plant is a mustang grape,” we feel as if we know everything there is to know about it. If we can say, “that plant is a Vitis mustangensis,” we really understand everything about it. But of course just giving something a name does not mean we know very much about it. The Latin nomenclature allows us to recognize the relatives and the evolutionary ancestry of the plant, but that is about all there is to it.

The people who really understand each of the plants are those who can recognize it in the wild (hence the lab practical), and who know how it grows and its place in the community of species. The mustang grape, like other grapes, is a vine that takes advantage of the strong stems of bushes and trees in order to get its leaves up in the sun without having to make its own strong stems. Unlike the other common grape species in Oklahoma, the muscadine grape (Vitis rotundifolia), the mustang grape has thick woolly hairs on the underside of the leaf, which might mean that it grows in sunny locations, being able to reflect some of the light and therefore the heat. The two grape species probably bloom at different times, thus preventing cross-breeding that would be beneficial to neither species. Now that’s understanding. Just reciting the name is not.

Sometimes I catch myself reciting the name and then not looking further at the plant. This usually happens when I am on a walk with my wife. She cannot always remember what the plants are, but she probably looks at them more than I do.

Well, time to go give my final practical. I have to be ready for either indoors or outdoors during Oklahoma’s spring-long potential stormy weather. One of the species is poison ivy, and of course I will not tell them which one it is.

May the Spirit of Science Be With You!

If you can, find some time to sit back with a copy of my latest book Scientifically Thinking and read it while sipping your favorite drink. Preferably a book you have bought rather than borrowed from the library, though enough libraries have purchased it that you can probably look at it first before buying it.

I have received several emails from people who have thoroughly enjoyed this book, which presents science as a thoroughly human activity but one that is constrained by logic that does not come easily to the human mind. One of them interviewed me on his radio show even though he had only read the introduction. (He asked me to tell him more about the Acknowledgements page.)

The most interesting response I have so far received was an email from Gary Spedding, a distillation quality consultant, a member of judging panels for distillation quality, and a contributor to the magazine Artisinal Spirit. (I like to think the title refers both to alcoholic and to creative spirit.) Trained in biochemistry, Gary runs the BDAS (Brewing and Distilling Analysis Services) website. Although British, this Gary is not the same Gary Spedding as the notorious British (brutish?) Holocaust denier by the same name. Gary shared with me an article that is to be published in an upcoming issue of Artisinal Spirit. It is safe to say that I have little experience with this field of study. And I think that Gary probably already knew most of the things that he wrote about my book in his article before reading my book, but my book gave him a framework to organize his thoughts and to show that his work is not entirely different from the work of those of us who call ourselves professional scientists.

Below I will mention some of the topics in Gary’s article, to show you some of the scientific considerations involved in the practice of good beverage distillation. Distillers already know these things, as evidenced by Gary’s articles and references therein, but many need some clarification.

The concept of terroir. I did not know that distillers worked with this concept, though the French wine industry is largely based upon it. Terroir comes from the word for earth, and it means that wine made from grapes raised in one location, say Bordeaux, is very different from an otherwise identically-produced wine made from grapes grown in Alsace. Theoretically, this could apply to almost any agricultural product—I suppose sauerkraut (choucroute) raised in Alsace would taste different from choucroute raised in Bordeaux, that is, if they raise any in Bordeaux. Since it is hotter and drier in Bordeaux, I’ll bet the Bordeaux choucroute would be more bitter. But I had supposed that any terroir-associated differences in the grains used to make whisky or gin would have been lost during distillation. Perhaps I was wrong about this. Gary pointed out how easy it is for an individual, or even a tasting panel, to be biased in its detection of terroir quality (please, Word software, quit changing this to terror).

Tasting panel bias. Humans are all biased, and a panel of expert tasters is no exception. Individual tasters can be influenced by other factors such as color. As Gary pointed out, tasters might think that a darker whiskey tastes better. Also, the taster should do his or her test at a time of day and under circumstances in which bias would be minimized, for example, at least an hour after using toothpaste, but during a time of peak sensitivity, e.g., mid-day. Also, in a panel of judges, some individuals can influence others. If one of them says “Ah!” this must surely influence the others. Are all the tasters blindfolded in individual cubicles? And just how objective are the panelists? Do they enjoy tasting the samples so much that they become the equivalent of the field zoologist’s “trap-happy animals”? (See page 143 of my book.) I wrote that all humans are biased, even scientists, but scientists try to compensate for it. Gary improved on what I said by entitling one of his sections “If you’re biased and you know it clap your hands...” Maybe what you want in a tasting panel is not uniformity of expertise but diversity of tastes, in which case—you might not want to go there—pulling volunteers off the street might be more reliable than what the experts say.

Sample size. A distiller cannot draw a conclusion from one vat, even if s/he has a control vat (whatever that might be) to which to compare it. How many vats? As many as possible? It really depends on your market. If you think “scientifically tested with thousands of independent samples” will sell more product, then do it, if it doesn’t cost more than your likely profits. A scientific rule-of-thumb for statistical significance is to use 30 specimens in each treatment. Is it worth it? Even the statistical tests must be done by expensive computer programs. Don’t use the same vat over and over; that’s pseudo-replication.

Humans as measuring devices. Human senses are not reliable measuring devices. As Gary points out, the sense of smell (which responds to thousands of scents, unlike taste, which responds to only six) varies greatly from one individual to another. One individual might be unable to taste, say, ethyl acetate, while another finds it pleasant, and another dislikes it. Human senses are also influenced by the sequence effect: tasters will pay closer attention to the first sample than to the twelfth, especially if they swallow. (I don’t know whether they do. I have heard that there is such a thing as a spit bucket, so I suppose they don’t.) Even something like how long a bottle has been opened (since opening a bottle introduces oxygen and thus oxidation) can influence taste. Drinks consist of thousands of chemicals, as will anything of biological origin, and a taster cannot pay attention to all of them. But is this really an important consideration? It is, after all, humans who will be drinking it. A subjective (scientifically unreliable) opinion might be exactly what you want from the panel of tasters.

You can use the scientific method just about anywhere. Or, you might intelligently decide to not use it. You just should not overlook it. I will end this entry where Gary ended his article, “May the spirit of science be with you!”

Fiction as Science: The Example of On the Beach

Fiction can be science. This is a point that I made in my recently-released book Scientifically Thinking: Sometimes fiction has a structure similar to scientific research. The novelist sets up an experiment and runs it to test a hypothesis, just like a scientist would, only the experiment takes place in a fictional mind-space rather than in the lab or field.

In 1957, the world was on the cusp of nuclear annihilation, and nobody knew what might happen next, and what the consequences of nuclear war might be. Everyone knew there would be a lot of radiation, but nobody knew how much or what the physiological effects on humans or any other species might be.

Into this milieu of peril came Nevil Shute’s famous novel On the Beach, in which the entire Northern Hemisphere had been destroyed by nuclear war. The Southern Hemisphere, including Australia where the novel is set, did not participate. And yet the radiation crept inexorably down from the north. On the southern shore of Australia, even as the radiation destroyed northern Australia, life continued almost as before. The electric trains still ran, since Australia had its own low-quality coal for power plants, but there was no gasoline, so people rigged up their cars to be drawn by horses. The novel was set in 1964, which was the future, but near enough so that the readers could not feel distant from it.

This novel was made into a famous 1959 movie starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins. Only a really important movie could have gotten this line-up.

It is an amazing movie, except that almost the only soundtrack was Waltzing Matilda over and over and over. But even here the movie was well done. Drunken fishermen were singing the song out of tune, but right at a dramatic moment when Dwight and Moira had to confront their doomed love for one another, the orchestra played the tune in perfect and disturbing harmony.

Into this Australian scenario comes an American submarine that just happened to be in the south when the war struck. Toward the end, Commander Dwight Towers realized that he and his crew were the only Americans still alive in the world. He was the only American with any authority. When he realizes this (page 164 of Signet edition), “He said wearily, ‘I guess the United States is me, right now. I’m thinking of running for President.’”

Nevil Shute set up the fictional experiment, and controlled the variables that he knew would make the results of the experiment too difficult to interpret.

• Shute made the dying silent and without destruction. If the novel was filled with explosions and carnage, it would just be confusing. But Shute had the radiation approaching invisibly. The atmospheric circulation of the Northern Hemisphere is almost entirely separate from the Southern, but not quite. The air is almost still right where the sun is straight overhead, but this latitude of stillness moves north and south with the seasons, causing the atmosphere of the North to mix with that of the South in a gradual and totally consistent manner. Every Northern Hemisphere city that the submarine crew saw through their periscope during a reconnaissance mission was nearly intact except for the total absence of people.
• Shute made it easy for people to choose a painless end to their lives. The Australians also chose to end their lives, once they knew death was inevitable, by taking poison pills, for which they lined up at health dispensaries. For the sake of simplifying the experiment, Shute made up a poison that makes you painlessly fall asleep forever. I am not aware that any such poison exists.

Therefore the novel can focus clearly on the central questions, rather than being distracted by mayhem.

One question this novel addresses is this: what would people do if life seemed utterly normal, except that they knew that death was coming, and they knew almost exactly when it would arrive and how it would happen?

• One hypothesis is that people would go wild and plunder one another and establish warring states. Maybe this is, in fact, what Americans would do, with our tradition of taking whatever we want for ourselves and our worship of guns. One might imagine that a lot of men would go wild and take as many women as they could get, and plunder the houses of anyone with no, or fewer, guns.
• But another hypothesis is that people would continue on with their daily lives as long as possible. This is what the Australians did and what countries with a greater sense of social identity would do. I imagine that this is what would happen in, say, Finland. The people continued their jobs, their families, their marriages just as before. This is also what Americans did during the Cold War: they continued their daily lives.

Why would a society of people continue with their normal lives even as death approaches? Here are two possible reasons.

• A normal life was their only sense of comfort and happiness.
• A normal life allowed them to fantasize that it wasn’t really happening. In this novel, the American submarine commander Towers has a romance with a young Australian woman (Moira Davidson), but he is chaste with her since he considers himself still married to his wife in Connecticut, even though she must be dead. Towers even bought presents to take home to his wife and children, whom he knew yet denied were dead. The wife of the Australian naval officer put in a garden for the next year that she pretended to believe would still come. This might be the most chilling aspect of the novel: to see people living in their fantasy worlds.

In the end, everyone dies doing what they loved best. One seaman, when the submarine came to his hometown, jumped ship and spent his last day fishing in his own boat. Another, who had a race car, was willing to die during a dangerous race, but he won the championship; then took his poison pills while sitting in his race-car (in the book; in the movie, he killed himself with carbon monoxide). The Australian officer dies in bed with his wife. Moira dies as she watches Dwight sink his submarine offshore. They all died, except Dwight and Moira, with smiles on their faces.

Another question that this novel addresses: What is your responsibility to alleviate the inevitable suffering for those who cannot understand it? The Australian officer tells his wife she may have to kill their baby rather than let it suffer if they die first. At first she angrily insists that this is murder, but eventually decides it is mercy.

Yet another question: Is it fair the Southern Hemisphere should suffer from the fallout of what the Northern Hemisphere has done? All the characters struggle with this constantly, though only once in a while blurting it out.

I hope we are never in a position to find out what we would do if the end of the world was coming inevitably, gradually, and at a time we knew several months in advance. I hope that the real experiment is never done. Is it possible that this novel, and the movie made from it, forced people to confront the reality of the nuclear threat and keep it from actually happening?

Plants Will Save the World! Or Not

An old acquaintance of mine (well, no older than I am) responded to a message that I had posted on Facebook, in which I said I had my students do a project in which they increased their health and reduced their carbon footprints. My friend wanted to know why anyone would want to reduce their carbon footprint. Plants need carbon dioxide, so if we put as much carbon into the air as possible, we are feeding the plants, right? He was puzzled that I, as a botanist, did not seem to understand this.

He even had a scientific source for his views. He referred to the work of Sylvan Wittwer, a horticulturalist whose research showed that plants grow better in higher carbon dioxide. From this, Wittwer concluded that rising carbon dioxide levels in the air was a good thing.

In the narrow sense, Wittwer was right. Back in graduate school, I worked on experiments with Fakhri Bazzaz (University of Illinois, later Harvard) that proved this very thing. They were greenhouse experiments. But later outdoor experiments, using Free Air Carbon Enrichment (FACE) reached similar conclusions. What happened is that, at first, plants grow more when they have more carbon, but then the growth enhancement slows down. Just one example of this is a 2006 article by Stephen Long and Donald Ort, from the University of Illinois where I got my Ph.D. Unfortunately, I cannot provide the full text, since it is available only to members of AAAS. But you can read the abstract. Here is a photo of one such experiment. It was led by my fellow graduate student from Illinois in the 1980s, Rick Lindroth.

The problem with saying that plants will grow more and cleanse the air of excess carbon is that plants need lots of things other than carbon dioxide in order to grow. They need light, which on this planet is usually abundant. But they also need soil with water and nutrients. A lot of places on Earth have droughts and soil erosion, and in those places the plants cannot make use of any extra carbon dioxide. Most of all, plants need to not be destroyed if they are to grow and absorb carbon dioxide. A lot of forest and grassland is being destroyed. Forests grow back, but we are destroying them faster than they can grow back. Apparently the plants grew quite well in Wittwer’s greenhouses, but in the great outdoors, they frequently do not.

The results are clear. Carbon dioxide levels have been increasing. When measurements began in the 1950s, carbon dioxide levels were less than 300 parts per million. Today, they exceed 400. These numbers sound small but carbon dioxide is very good at holding in the atmospheric heat. Carbon dioxide is the main reason that Venus is hotter than Mercury despite being further from the sun.

If plants are going to save the world, why are they not doing so now? They seem to be totally incapable of absorbing the surplus carbon dioxide we have already put in the air. If plants are going to save the world, when are they going to start?

Plants need carbon, and we need water. But you can’t make us healthier by drowning us in water. You can’t make plants grow more by gassing them with carbon, except sometimes in a greenhouse.

Another problem is bias. Wittwer helped to start two major think tanks. One of these is the Greening Earth Society, which is sponsored by the Western Fuels Association. The other was the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, which does not reveal its funding sources but IRS records showed that at least one source was ExxonMobil. The very purpose of these think tanks is to convince people, mainly politicians, that global warming is nothing to worry about and we should use as much oil as possible right now. They fund only research that is consistent with this view.

Having bias does not mean that you are a liar. We all have biases, as I explain in Chapter 13 of my new book, Scientifically Thinking. But there is certainly pressure for scientists whose work is funded by oil companies to reach conclusions those companies would like. You would have to be nearly superhuman in your fairmindedness if your funding sources did not influence your conclusions.

One would think that the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change would gleefully promote the conservation and replanting of forests and grasslands, in order to get them to grow back faster and absorb more carbon dioxide. I asked the lead scientist of that organization if his organization promoted conservation and reforestation. He answered that taking a stand one way or the other on reforestation was outside the mission of his organization. I took this to mean that his oil donors did not want him to say that we should save and replant forests, even if he personally believed it. Your funding sources not only influence your conclusions but limit what you can say. This man struck me as being honest, as honest as he was permitted to be.

My own research shows that buds of deciduous trees in Oklahoma have opened earlier in the spring by about one to three days per year over the last dozen years. This is associated with one component of global warming. Earlier budburst is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a sign of global warming. This graph shows the earlier budburst dates in four major species of deciduous trees. Lower numbers on the y axis mean earlier budburst.

Budburst did not occur earlier each year, but over the twelve year period, the odds of this result occurring by chance were (by statistical analysis) less than one in ten thousand.

I have received no funding for this research, not from science agencies, nor from environmental groups, nor from oil companies.

So, what is my bias? Of course I have one. But it is not what you might think. I am a botanist. I love love love plants, starting with the green chlorophyll that absorbs sunlight all the way up to the whole organism and the whole forest.

In the photo on the top, green chlorophyll glows red because it absorbs visible white light but emits red light by fluorescence. The photo on the bottom is a water oak leaf, which is a photosynthetic factory filled with veins that deliver water and take away precious sugar.

I would love to be able to tell everyone, plants will save the world! They will scrub the excess carbon out of the air. Unfortunately, I have to dejectedly accept the conclusion that they will not. This is the conclusion I reached in Chapter 3 of my earlier book, Green Planet. The subtitle of that book shows clearly that I really hoped that plants would rescue us from the greenhouse effect: How Plants Keep the Earth Alive.

It is with a heavy heart that I must report to you that the research conducted by a handful of oil-funded scientists is incorrect, and global warming is real, getting worse, and very dangerous.

The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski

I just finished reading a pre-publication copy of Timothy Sandefur’s upcoming The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski. If even I, a reader of many popular science books, have barely heard of Jacob Bronowski, you can bet that most people have forgotten him. But before there was Neil DeGrasse Tyson, before Stephen Jay Gould, before Carl Sagan, there was Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974) whose passion was to open up the minds of non-scientists to the power and beauty of science.

Bronowski’s work was based on a fundamental assertion of faith that I share, but which I sometimes question. It is that most people are smart enough to understand science, at least in its basic outlines, and smart enough to use the scientific mode of thought. This is the basis of my book, to be released in December, ScientificallyThinking. Bronowski’s gospel was to get scientists to speak clearly and simply to non-scientists and open their eyes to science. I believe that most people are smart enough to do this, but relatively few people really want to. Most people would rather sit in their backwater of ignorance and listen only to things that reinforce their lazy prejudices.

Bronowski (known to his friends as Bruno) was the perfect example of a Renaissance Man, that is, someone who is interested in everything. I first learned this term back about 1977 when a friend called me a Renaissance Man. I was a biology major who wrote novels, wrote orchestra music, and studied history and languages. Perhaps only a Renaissance Man (or woman) can make the connections necessary to bring people from all different modes of thought together. This was certainly Bronowski. An English child of eastern European immigrants, he started off as a poet. But he was also interested in mathematics, which led to statistics. (Statistics differs from pure mathematics because pure math deals with the certainties of deduction, while statistics tries to understand the messy reality of the world through induction. At least, that’s my summary of it.) His mathematical expertise got him involved in the effort for the Allies to win World War II, and later to make industrial production more efficient.

This mathematical work did not always lead Bronowski where he might have expected. Yes, he helped the Allies win World War II, but like many other scientists he was deeply disturbed by the effects of atomic bombs. He traveled in Japan after the bombs, and knew that the new power we had unleashed from the atom was completely disproportionate to any legitimate military goals even the best of countries might have. Also, his dedication to industrial efficiency led him on the ultimately quixotic quest to produce Bronowski Bricks from coal dust, sort of a fossil fuel version of charcoal briquets. The briquets reduced coal waste, to be sure, but they were very expensive to produce, and, according to Prince Philip, they looked like turds.

But Bruno’s wide knowledge, and being at the right place at the right time, threw him into the public spotlight in radio and television broadcasting. He produced, one after another, important science documentaries, culminating in his still-famous The Ascent of Man. He dabbled in lots of things at which he was not really skilled, such as writing a light opera libretto that was not very good (the music was by Peter Racine Fricker, who was on the music faculty when I entered the University of California at Santa Barbara). But he tried!

Science and art, said Bronowski, were both creative. Take, for example, Copernicus, who did some of the earliest work that proved the sun to be the center of the solar system, rather than Earth being the center of the universe. Copernicus had to imagine what the planets would do if he were at a central solar vantage point, but as an artist has to imagine what the final work would look like. Both scientists and artists test concepts: scientists, how well the concept explains the natural world, and poets, how well the poem expands our experience.

Another idea he had was that animals need intelligence in order to have free will. You have to be able to visualize possible futures before you can choose among them. Only humans can do this. I do not know if Bronowski actually solved the problem of free will, but he clarified it, at least for non-philosophers like me. He helped lay the foundation for the study of language acquisition. He said that only humans can make a sentence out of separate words, and then isolate one word and generalize about that one concept.

When he helped to start the Salk Institute, Bronowski moved to La Jolla, California. He would host scholars for discussions in his living room (where he also filed the final episode of Ascent). He was an inspiring partner for dialogue. While he knew everything about everything, he could make you feel brilliant even when he was saying you were wrong, according to more than one of his acquaintances.

Jacob Bronowski inspired us to think big, to see all human thought as a single fabric rather than as a collage of specialties. And he was an early inspiration for what we now call citizen science. They didn’t have the internet back then, but on his televised shows he encouraged viewers to send in postcards with their own scientific thoughts on them.

You can get a taste for the kind of spellbinding quality Bruno had by seeing this short YouTube clip from one of the Ascent episodes. Apparently when the BBC was filming this segment, they did not expect Bruno to walk out into the pond; this was extemporized.

I have a lot of different kinds of creative and intellectual output. I am not equally good at all of them, and am not world-class at any of them, as far as I can tell. But I can still do a lot of good with them. Bruno is my guiding light in this respect.