R.I.P. Neil Armstrong, 1930-2012

"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." - Neil Armstrong

Rest in Peace.

Symphony of Science Supergroup

So great to see someone infuse so much joy into their love of science.

"The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. ... We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." - Carl Sagan

CNN Vs. Science

In a bizarre and disheartening move today, CNN announced they are lopping off their entire science department, including technology and environment staff and their chief technology and environment correspondent, Miles O'Brien. In an age where there's so much misinformation and ignorance around important scientific subjects, I can think of other areas , which could've been cut (or at least reduced in their scope) and brought greater integrity to CNN as a news-gathering enterprise, rather than just another channel for entertainment. Call me an idealist, but news should be more about what we need to know and less about that which we simply want to know.

(Via CJR )

Skinner Covers Dawkins

Just listening to the new single by Mike Skinner AKA The Streets and had to wonder if he were paraphrasing Richard Dawkins. You decide:

For billions of years, since the outset of time
Every single one of your ancestors survived
Every single person on your mum and dad's side
Successfully looked after and passed onto you life
What are the chances of that like?

- The Streets, "On the Edge of a Cliff"

Compare with:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. ...

[T]he instant at which a particular spermatozoon penetrated a particular egg was, in your private hindsight, a moment of dizzying singularity. It was then that the odds against your becoming a person dropped from astronomical to single figures.

The lottery starts before we are conceived. Your parents had to meet, and the conception of each was as improbable as your own. And so on back, through your four grandparents and eight great grandparents, back to where it doesn't bear thinking about. Desmond Morris opens his autobiography, Animal Days (1979), in characteristically arresting vein:

Napoleon started it all. If it weren't for him, I might not be sitting here now writing these words ... for it was one of his cannonballs, fired in the Peninsular War, that shot off the arm of my great-great-grandfather, James Morris, and altered the whole course of my family history.

Morris tells how his ancestor's enforced change of career had various knock-on effects culminating in his own interest in natural history. But he really needn't have bothered. There's no 'might' about it. Of course he owes his very existence to Napoleon. So do I and so do you. Napoleon didn't have to shoot off James Morris's arm in order to seal young Desmond's fate, and yours and mine, too. Not just Napoleon but the humblest medieval peasant had only to sneeze in order to affect something which changed something else which, after a long chain reaction, led to the consequence that one of your would-be ancestors failed to be your ancestor and became somebody else's instead. I'm not talking about 'chaos theory', or the equally trendy 'complexity theory', but just about the ordinary statistics of causation. The thread of historical events by which our existence hangs is wincingly tenuous.

- Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow

Turns out I'm not the first to notice the Skinner/Dawkins connection.

The Future Impact of Neuroscience Upon Jurisprudence

I'm reading The Best Technology Writing of 2008 (kindly provided to me for review by The University of Michigan Press) and finishing up Jeffrey Rosen's excellent March, 2007 article, "The Brain on the Stand," which details how advances in neuroscience may affect the U.S. legal system in the near future. To wit, if we discover that some people are predisposed neurologically to anger, how can we hold them responsible for their actions in the same way we do now? He interviews Stephen Morse, professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, who asserts a more skeptical tone, suggesting that just because a neurological condition can be established in an individual, we may not automatically absolve them of responsibility. But Morse also concedes that some conclusions might have an inevitable impact upon our legal system:

“Suppose neuroscience could reveal that reason actually plays no role in determining human behavior,” he suggests tantalizingly. “Suppose I could show you that your intentions and your reasons for your actions are post hoc rationalizations that somehow your brain generates to explain to you what your brain has already done” without your conscious participation. If neuroscience could reveal us to be automatons in this respect, Morse is prepared to agree with Greene and Cohen that criminal law would have to abandon its current ideas about responsibility and seek other ways of protecting society.

Rosen has apparently stated his fear more explicitly elsewhere that these conclusions could lead to a society, which embraces the pre-emptive incarceration of those likely to commit crimes (well, we're already doing this in principle at the international level, right?), instead of punishing people for committing actual crimes.

That wasn't my first thought, though. My first thought was that, should this sort of empirical data amass to significant proportions, it might likely make society feel much more comfortable with genetic engineering. If you know you can isolate the neurological problem, wouldn't the next step be to prevent it genetically? After all, you might argue, it'd be like preventing cancer - only if you're preventing the creation of, say, a serial killer, so you might be saving several lives.

So, do we end up with a future of Philip K. Dick's Minority Report? Or Gattaca? Seems like one of the two is inevitable. We just have to agree to which we feel more comfortable embracing. Was Gattaca just a worse-case scenario? Is there a best-case scenario for genetic engineering we'll have to consider as a species?

Also under neurology: Robert Burton's recent Salon article, "Born that Gay," asks "Do recent neurological studies prove once and for all that homosexuality is biological?" Short answer: Yes.

Skepticism

If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we are up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.

- Carl Sagan

You can download Sagan's classic book The Demon Haunted World here in PDF form.

The Encyclopedia of Life

Congrats to the Encyclopedia of Life on launching with over a million species pages. My agency of employment, Avenue A | Razorfish provided EOL's original design.

The Reinforcement of Belief

This extraordinary Fox News clip (well, it's hardly extraordinary in the sense that it's typical) demonstrates how the news organization is not interested in the pursuit of knowledge, but in the reinforcement of belief. The priest interviewed unreels so many unchallenged fallacies, it's mind-bending, and when he speaks of the "the intricacy of a human eye" (revealing his tremendous ignorance of evolution, since Darwin himself expected and countered this very argument in The Origin of the Species in 1859) the hosts nod appreciatively, one of them adding "that whole miracle of pregnancy," ironically unaware of the reams of evidence for evolution that pregnancy offers.

It's important to note, too, that the priest dismisses Dawkins and others as straying from their respective fields, then continues by offering his limited understanding of human biology and evolution as evidence for a Creator. It he truly sought knowledge, he could have found countless books, essays, and scientific documentaries detailing the evolution of the eye. To employ this argument reveals one of two things: either (1) a simple ignorance of the subject or (2) intellectual dishonesty. Of course, the latter is a distinct possibility, since many well-known pushers of Creationism have been confronted with the evidence which counters this argument (the eye's intricacy) repeatedly, yet many of them continue to employ the argument, safely assuming that the flock hasn't been exposed to its thorough rebuttal.

With this modus operandi in mind - employed by propagandists of every stripe, whether religious or political - and with this sort of ignorance on the loose, is it any wonder that 40% of Americans still think there was a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11?

Related: Watch this excellent video on the evolution of the eye on YouTube.

Additionally, today, The New York Times posted an excellent series of articles about evolution and especially the relatively new field of evo-devo.

A Is for Aardvark

Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.

- Jules Verne

For my money, the Encyclopedia of Life would have to be the single most exciting project Avenue A | Razorfish has been associated with since I began working there. AARF has produced a video and preliminary IA and design for the Wiki-like site, which intends to catalog the earth's 1.8 million named species.

The Boston Globe has a great writeup, which quotes the eminent biologist, E. O. Wilson, one of the program's founders:

Our ignorance is dangerous. Life forms with which we've shared the planet are going extinct at an alarming rate -- usually before we even determine what they are and what role they play in the ecosystem. Our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is even discovered.

The Washington Post also has an article, which reminds us that perhaps as little as 10% of the world's species have been cataloged.

Feed Your Mind

Lately, I've discovered a few sites, which feature lectures by some of the world's biggest brains, so many that I could probably fill my 30 GB iPod several times over.

Here's a few great resources, including links to some lectures I've enjoyed.

Listening to Words - fantastic clearinghouse for all kinds of different lectures, gathered from various sources across the internet, including MIT, Princeton, the Museum of Natural History, and the BBC. Plus you can browse by lectures, people, locations, tags, and popular.

• Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything [mp3]
  

The Long Now - Brian Eno coined the term "The Long Now" and he's one of the founders of this group, which understands the need for long-term thinking when considering human progress. Check out the seminar section of the site for mp3 lectures by Jared Diamond, Stewart Brand, Jill Tarter and loads more. Many Long Now videos are provided, too, via Google video.

• Jared Diamond - How Societies Fail-And Sometimes Succeed [mp3]
  
• Jill Tarter - The Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence: Necessarily a Long-term Strategy [mp3]

TED - view videos of lectures online through a slick AJAX interface or download them free for your iPod. Includes Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Jane Goodall, James Nachtwey, Bill Clinton and E. O. Wilson among many, many others.

• Richard Dawkins - The universe is queerer than we can suppose [mp3 | mp4 video]
  
• James Nachtwey - The recent TED winner discusses his photography [mp3 | mp4 video]

Even YouTube has some great stuff among all those vanity projects if you look for it.

You can practically attend the world's best university online for free.

Pale Blue Dot

Via Pharyngula: Kudos to Ice-Core Scientist for somehow managing to combine skepticism, thoughtful criticism, a Carl Sagan tribute, and great music and video into one singularly affecting package. The song's so well crafted, I assumed it was a classic tune I'd somehow (as a music addict) just never heard before. Rather, Ice-Core Scientist is apparently responsible for editing the video, writing and performing the song, everything.

You can buy an mp3 of a longer version of the song over at Indie 911.

Choose Life

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

- Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow