Critical Science

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=free-will-vs-programmed-brain

If our actions are determined by prior events, then do we have a choice about anything—or any responsibility for what we do?

Many scientists and philosophers are convinced that free will doesn’t exist at all. According to these skeptics, everything that happens is determined by what happened before—our actions are inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action—and this fact makes it impossible for anyone to do anything that is truly free. This kind of anti-free will stance stretches back to 18th century philosophy, but the idea has recently been getting much more exposure through popular science books and magazine articles. Should we worry? If people come to believe that they don’t have free will, what will the consequences be for moral responsibility? Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/14/AR2008071402145.html

Wal-Mart and Toys R Us announced this spring that they will stop selling plastic baby bottles, food containers and other products that contain a chemical that can leach into foods and beverages. Even low doses of the chemical (bisphenol A, or BPA) are linked to prostate and mammary-gland changes in laboratory animals that were exposed as fetuses and infants. The big retailers are responding to the fears of parents, and Congress is considering measures to ban the chemical.

But is there enough evidence of harmful health effects on humans? One of the eyebrow-raising statistics about the BPA studies is the stark divergence in results, depending on who funded them. More than 90 percent of the 100-plus government-funded studies performed by independent scientists found health effects from low doses of BPA, while none of the fewer than two dozen chemical-industry-funded studies did.

This striking difference in studies isn’t unique to BPA. When a scientist is hired by a firm with a financial interest in the outcome, the likelihood that the result of that study will be favorable to that firm is dramatically increased. This close correlation between the results desired by a study’s funders and those reported by the researchers is known in the scientific literature as the “funding effect.” Read the rest of this entry »

http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/06/mri_what_is_it_good_for.php

We are being constantly bombarded with news stories containing pretty pictures of the brain, with headings such as “Brain’s adventure centre located“. Journalists now seem to refer routinely to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as “mind reading”, and exaggerated claims about its powers abound, as do misleading, irresponsible and downright ridiculous stories about the technology.

Take, for example, this article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Atlantic:

The preliminary findings began to arrive a few days later, in a series of e-mails…”Carter: big amygdala response on both sides! Jeff, do you fear this guy?” Fear might not be the most accurate term, but I worry about him a great deal. I’d recently given his book on Israel a negative review in The Washington Post. Score one for the fMRI.

Yes, the amygdala is involved in encoding fearful memories, but it is also involved in many other emotional responses, any of which could cause an increase in activity there. Yet for Goldberg, a colourful blob on the amygdala must mean he must be scared, or at least apprehensive of, Carter, when in fact this is not necessarily the case.

fMRI is not mind reading, and never will be. The closest that researchers have got to reading minds is the accurate prediction of which of several visual stimuli is being viewed by a subject. This can be done by focusing on the activity in two discrete regions of the brain. For example, activity in the fusiform face area is known to increase when a face is being viewed, while increased activity in the parahippocampal gyrus is associated with the viewing of images of places, so this kind of prediction can be made by monitoring the relative activity in those areas. Read the rest of this entry »

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/08/promoting_a_scientific_mind.php

I find it astounding in this day and age, with the many grand scientific discoveries and advances we’ve seen and in our increasingly technologically dependent world, that a large proportion of our population (at least in Canada and the US, with which I have more personal experience) seems uninterested in understanding and learning about science. We have a wealth of information available at our fingertips and an educational system with the potential to accommodate any type of scientific mind, but yet we science-minded individuals are not in the majority. We are a culture that largely breeds an aversion to science. Now I know that I’m generalizing here, and that some individuals living in North America aren’t able to access these opportunities so easily, but that of course is part of the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2008/07/what_philosophy_of_science_and.php

Lately there has been a rediscovery on the blogia of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures – which initially was the divide between those who understood the Second Law of Thermodynamics and those who don’t, but is now, it appears, between those who know math and those who don’t, and the respective attitudes. In Chad’s initial post, the discussion turned to the Sokal hoax and what it is supposed to prove. So what I want to do here is a little “compare and contrast” between what is usually thought to be the main themes of postmodern philosophy (not being an expert, I may be… no I certainly am misrepresenting it, for it is a fluid and hydra-headed school of thought, like any such school, I suppose) and those of the philosophy of science. There are some interesting overlaps of concern, but exclusions of approach. It’s no accident that three of those who influence modern philosophy of science – Wittgenstein, Quine and Kuhn – are also thought of as contributors to postmodern philosophy in various ways that may or may not be fair. Think of this as a start to a rapprochement. Read the rest of this entry »

Came across a couple of interesting lectures (via RichardDawkins.net) on the science of religion, and potentially more interestingly, the religion of science – stick them on your portable audio device and give the philosophical part of your brain a workout!

“The twenty-second Harvard University series of Tanner Lectures on Human Values 2003

Seminar with Richard Dawkins (Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford University), Steven Pinker (Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University) and Keith DeRose (Professor of Philosophy, Yale University).”

Richard Dawkins – The Science of Religion – Part 1 (1:02:05, 28.5 MB)

Richard Dawkins – The Science of Religion – Part 2 (35:35, 16.3 MB)

Richard Dawkins – The Religion of Science – Part 1 (54:07, 24.8 MB)

Richard Dawkins – The Religion of Science – Part 2 (35:36, 16.3 MB)

Seminar with Dawkins, Pinker, DeRose – Part 1 (1:00:01, 27.5 MB)

Seminar with Dawkins, Pinker, DeRose – Part 2 (57:30, 26.4 MB)

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on religion
• Scientific proof of the good that religions provide
• Revisiting race and religion
• Quantifying religion news

• Related Blogs on science
• Wall St. Journal: The man trying to vindicate California’s novel …
• Five Mad Scientists Who Went Too Far in the Name of Science
• Science Blogging Conference – London
• Miami Herald, NYTimes, etc: Warming climate means more rain

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

Read the rest of this entry »

State crime lab analyst Kathryn Troyer was running tests on Arizona’s DNA database when she stumbled across two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles.

The men matched at nine of the 13 locations on chromosomes, or loci, commonly used to distinguish people.

The FBI estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. But the mug shots of the two felons suggested that they were not related: One was black, the other white.

In the years after her 2001 discovery, Troyer found dozens of similar matches — each seeming to defy impossible odds.

Read the rest of this entry »