Self-correction, paradigm shifts, and Rapa Nui

It's not even 7 AM and I already broke the cardinal rule of the internet, which is, "Don't feed the trolls."

Posting as I do about controversial issues like climate change, evolution, and religion, it's only to be expected that I get pretty heated commentary sometimes.  While I'm always ready and willing to consider a well-reasoned argument against my viewpoints, I'm usually smart enough to let the "You only say that because you're a (choose one): radical leftist, godless heathen, anti-American, tree-hugger, cynic, whiny liberal, complete idiot" comments roll off me.

Usually.

The one that got me today was the person who responded to a story I retweeted about a recent discovery in evolutionary biology with the time-honored snarl, "Your sciencism is more of a faith than my religion is.  I don't get why you trust something that could be completely disproven tomorrow.  I'll stick with eternal truths."

I spent a long time (well, to quote Lieutenant Commander Data, "0.68 seconds... to an android, that is nearly an eternity") trying to talk myself out of responding.  That effort being unsuccessful, I wrote, "... and I don't get why you trust something that is completely incapable of self-correcting, and therefore wouldn't recognize if something was wrong, much less fix it."

This resulted in another time-honored snarl, namely, "fuck you, asshole," which I am always surprised to hear from someone whose holy book says lots of stuff about "turn the other cheek" and "love thy enemies" and "pray for those who persecute you" but very little about "say 'fuck you' to any assholes who challenge you."

Anyhow, I do find it puzzling that self-correction is considered some kind of fault.  Upon some consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the problem is based in a misunderstanding of what kind of self-correction science does.  The usual sort is on the level of details -- a rearrangement of an evolutionary tree for a particular group of animals (that was the link that started the whole argument), a revision of our model for stellar evolution, an adjustment to estimates for the rate of global temperature increase.  As I've pointed out more than once here at Skeptophilia, truly paradigm-changing reversals in science -- something like the discovery of plate tectonics in the 1960s -- stand out primarily because of how uncommon they are.

So "this all might be proven wrong tomorrow" should be followed up with, "yeah, but it almost certainly won't."

As an example of how self-correction in science actually works, consider the paper that appeared last week in The Journal of Archaeological Science questioning a long-held narrative of the history of Rapa Nui, more commonly known by its European-given name of Easter Island.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons TravelingOtter, Moai at Rano Raraku - Easter Island (5956405378), CC BY 2.0]

The previous model, made famous in Jared Diamond's book Collapse, was that the inhabitants of Rapa Nui did themselves in by felling all the trees (in part to make rollers and skids for moving the massive blocks of stone that became the iconic moai, the stone heads that dot the island's terrain) and ignoring the signs of oncoming ecological catastrophe.  The story is held as a cautionary tale about our own overutilization of natural resources and blindness to the danger signals from the Earth's environmental state, and the whole thing had such resonance with the eco-minded that it wasn't questioned.

Well, a team researchers, led by Robert DiNapoli of the University of Oregon, have said, "Not so fast."

In "A Model-Based Approach to the Tempo of 'Collapse': The Case of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)," the anthropologists and archaeologists studying Rapa Nui found that it may not be so clear-cut.  The pre-European-contact ecological collapse was much more gradual than previously believed, and it looks like the building of moai went on long after Diamond and others had estimated.  The authors write:

Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) presents a quintessential case where the tempo of investment in monumentality is central to debates regarding societal collapse, with the common narrative positing that statue platform (ahu) construction ceased sometime around AD 1600 following an ecological, cultural, and demographic catastrophe.  This narrative remains especially popular in fields outside archaeology that treat collapse as historical fact and use Rapa Nui as a model for collapse more generally.  Resolving the tempo of “collapse” events, however, is often fraught with ambiguity given a lack of formal modeling, uncritical use of radiocarbon estimates, and inattention to information embedded in stratigraphic features.  Here, we use a Bayesian model-based approach to examine the tempo of events associated with arguments about collapse on Rapa Nui.  We integrate radiocarbon dates, relative architectural stratigraphy, and ethnohistoric accounts to quantify the onset, rate, and end of monument construction as a means of testing the collapse hypothesis.  We demonstrate that ahu construction began soon after colonization and increased rapidly, sometime between the early-14th and mid-15th centuries AD, with a steady rate of construction events that continued beyond European contact in 1722.  Our results demonstrate a lack of evidence for a pre-contact ‘collapse’ and instead offer strong support for a new emerging model of resilient communities that continued their long-term traditions despite the impacts of European arrival.

All of which points out that -- like yesterday's post about the Greenland Vikings' demise -- complex events seldom result from single causes.  Note that the researchers are not saying that the inhabitants of Rapa Nui's felling of the native trees was inconsequential, nor that the contact with Europeans was without negative repercussions for the natives, just as the paper cited yesterday didn't overturn completely the prior understanding that the Greenland Vikings had been done in by the onset of the Little Ice Age.  What it demonstrates is that we home in on the truth in science by questioning prior models and looking at the actual evidence, not by simply continuing to hang on to the previous explanation because it fits our version of how we think the world works.

So the self-correction about the history of Rapa Nui isn't a paradigm shift, unless you count the fact that its use as a caution about our own perilous ecological situation won't be quite so neat and tidy any more.  And what it definitely doesn't do is to call into question the methods of science themselves.  The proponents of "it could all be proven wrong tomorrow" seem to feel that all scientists are doing is making wild guesses, then finding out the guesses are wrong and replacing them with other wild guesses.  The reality is closer to an electrician trying to figure out what's wrong with the wiring in your house, first testing one thing and then another, gradually ruling out hypotheses about what the problem might be and homing in on where the fault lies so it can be repaired.  (And ultimately, ending up with functional circuitry that works every time you use it.)

But the truth is, I probably shouldn't have engaged with the person who posted the original comment.  There seems little to be gained by online snark-fests other than raising the blood pressure on both sides.  So I'm recommitting myself to not feeding the trolls, and hoping that my resolution will last longer than 0.68 seconds this time.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is a dark one, but absolutely gripping: the brilliant novelist Haruki Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

Most of you probably know about the sarin attack in the subways of Tokyo in 1995, perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult under the leadership of Shoko Asahara.  Asahara, acting through five Aum members, set off nerve gas containers during rush hour, killing fifty people outright and injuring over a thousand others.  All six of them were hanged in 2018 for the crimes, along with a seventh who acted as a getaway driver.

Murakami does an amazing job in recounting the events leading up to the attack, and getting into the psyches of the perpetrators.  Amazingly, most of them were from completely ordinary backgrounds and had no criminal records at all, nor any other signs of the horrors they had planned.  Murakami interviewed commuters who were injured by the poison and also a number of first responders, and draws a grim but fascinating picture of one of the darkest days in Japanese history.

You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Rushing toward a paradigm shift

I have a sneaking suspicion that the physicists are on the threshold of a paradigm-breaking discovery.

The weird data have been building up for some time now, observations and measurements that are at odds with our current models of how the universe works.  I say "models (plural)" because one of the most persistent roadblocks in physics is the seeming incompatibility of quantum mechanics and general relativity -- in other words, coming up with a Grand Unified Theory that pulls a consistent explanation of gravity into our conceptual framework for the other three fundamental forces (electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces).  All attempts to come up with an amalgam have either "led to infinities" (had places in the relevant equations that generate infinite answers, usually an indicator that something is seriously wrong with your model) or have become so impossibly convoluted that even the experts can't agree on the details (such as string theory with its eleven spatial dimensions, something that's always reminded me of Ptolemy's flailing about to save the geocentric model by adding more loops and twists and epicycles so the data would fit).

And still the anomalous data keep rolling in.  Three weeks ago I wrote about a troubling discrepancy that's been discovered in the value of the Hubble Constant, which describes the rate of expansion of the universe -- there are two ways to measure it, which presumably should give the same answer, but don't.

Then last week, physicists at a lab in Hungary announced that they'd found new evidence of "X17," a mysterious particle that could be a carrier for a fifth fundamental force.  The argument is a bit like the observation that led to the discovery of the neutrino back in 1959 -- during beta radioactive decay, the particles emitted seemed to break the laws of conservation of energy and momentum, until that time strictly enforced in all jurisdictions.  Wolfgang Pauli said, basically, "Well, that can't be right," and postulated that an undetected particle was carrying off the "lost" momentum and energy.  It took twenty-eight years to prove, but he was right.

Here, it's the behavior another radioactive substance, beryllium-8, which emits light at the "wrong" angle to account for all of the energy involved (again, breaking the law of conservation of energy).  Conservation could be re-established if there was an undetected particle being emitted with a mass of 17 MeV (about 33 times the rest mass of an electron).  Even considering the neutrino, this seemed a little bit ad hoc -- "we need a particle, so we'll invent one to make our data fit" -- until measurements from an excited helium nucleus generated anomalous results that could be explained by a fifth force carried by a particle with exactly the same mass.

Hmm.  Curiouser and curiouser.

If that's not enough, just this week a paper appeared in Nature Astronomy about that elusive and mysterious substance "dark matter" that, despite defying every effort to detect it, outweighs the ordinary matter you and I are made of by a factor of five.  Its gravitational signature is everywhere, and appears to be most of what's responsible for holding galaxies together -- without it, the Milky Way and other rotating galaxies would fly apart.

But what is it?  No one knows.  There are guesses, but once again, those guesses have come up empty-handed with respect to any kind of experimental verification.  (And that's not even considering the even-weirder dark energy, which outweighs dark matter by a factor of two, and is thus the most common stuff in the universe, comprising 68% of what's out there -- even though we have not the slightest clue what it might be.)

The paper, by a team led by astrophysicist Qi Guo of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is called, "Further Evidence for a Population of Dark-Matter-Deficient Dwarf Galaxies," and describes no less than nineteen different galaxies that have significantly less dark matter than conventional explanations (such as they are) would need to explain (1) how they formed, and (2) what's holding them together.  Lead author Guo, for her part, is baffled, and although the data seem solid, she admits to being at a bit of a loss.  "We are not sure why and how these galaxies form," she said, in a press release in Science News.

Elliptical galaxy Abell S740 [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA]

So the anomalous observations keep piling up, and thus far, no one has been able to explain them, much less reconcile them with all the others.  I'm reminded of what Thomas Kuhn wrote, in his seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: "Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense... that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way."

It must be both nerve-wracking and exhilarating to be a physicist right now.  Nerve-wracking because suddenly finding out that your previous model, the one you were taught to understand and cherish during your training, is inadequate -- well, the response is frequently to do what Irish science historian, writer, and filmmaker James Burke calls "scrambling about to stop the rug from being pulled out from under years of happy status-quo."  On the one hand, you can understand that, apart from any emotional attachment one might have to an accepted model; it is an accepted model because it worked perfectly well for a while, accounting for all the evidence we had.  And there are countless examples when a model was challenged by what appeared to be contradictory data, and it turned out the data were mismeasurements, misinterpretations, or outright fabrications.

Which is why Pauli was so sure that the neutrino existed -- the law of conservation of energy, he reasoned, was so well-supported that it just couldn't be wrong.

But now -- well, as I said, that data keep piling up.  Whatever's going on here, they aren't all mismeasurements.  It remains to be seen what revision of our understanding will sweep away all the oddities and internal contradictions and make sense of what the physicists are seeing, but I have no doubt we'll find it at some point.

And there's the exhilarating part of it.  What a time to be in research physics -- when the race is on to pull together and explain an increasingly huge body of anomalous stuff, and revise our understanding of the universe in a fundamental way.  It's the kind of climate in which Nobel Prizes are won.

Being an observer is exciting enough; I can't imagine what it might be like to be inside it all.

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Long-time readers of Skeptophilia have probably read enough of my rants about creationism and the other flavors of evolution-denial that they're sick unto death of the subject, but if you're up for one more excursion into this, I have a book that is a must-read.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself both as an outspoken atheist and as a champion for the evolutionary model, and it is in this latter capacity that he wrote the brilliant The Greatest Show on Earth.  Here, he presents the evidence for evolution in lucid prose easily accessible to the layperson, and one by one demolishes the "arguments" (if you can dignify them by that name) that you find in places like the infamous Answers in Genesis.

If you're someone who wants more ammunition for your own defense of the topic, or you want to find out why the scientists believe all that stuff about natural selection, or you're a creationist yourself and (to your credit) want to find out what the other side is saying, this book is about the best introduction to the logic of the evolutionary model I've ever read.  My focus in biology was evolution and population genetics, so you'd think all this stuff would be old hat to me, but I found something new to savor on virtually every page.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Don't throw out your textbooks

It'll come as no surprise to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I get really frustrated with how scientific research is portrayed in popular media.

It's not just the way it's explained -- it's the all-too-common impression media give that every new scientific discovery undoes everything that came before it.  How many times have you seen headlines that say, "Scientists Are Back to the Drawing Board Because...", as if the scientists were all sitting around sipping glasses of wine, thinking they had the entire universe figured out, when along comes some pesky upstart making a discovery that causes it all to come crashing down?

Yes, there are times that a discovery overturns a huge chunk of what we thought we knew, but the reason those stand out is because they're so infrequent.  (This is the subject of Thomas Kuhn's seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which should be required reading for anyone interested in the scientific process.)  Most of the alterations caused by new discoveries are small course changes, not capsizing the entire boat.  Not that they're unimportant -- refining the model is what science is all about.  But refinement doesn't require destroying the superstructure, any more than remodeling your kitchen requires that you tear down your entire house.

It's why I get frustrated with students who say (usually about evolution) "it's just a theory."  "Theory" is a word that is consistently misused by many laypeople, who take it to mean "a wild guess that could just as easily be disproven as proven," when actually what it means is "a complex explanatory model well supported by all of the available evidence."  Yes, it's possible that the theory of evolution could be disproven, but in the same sense that it's possible you could throw a deck of cards into the air and have them land in a stack by number and suit.  It could happen -- but I wouldn't bet on it.

I saw a frustrating example of this phenomenon yesterday in the usually excellent site Science News, apropos of a discovery in South Africa of a rock that may force a revision of our timetable for the tectonic history of the Earth.  Pretty cool, even if the revision isn't that large, in the grand scheme of things -- pushing back the start of tectonic activity from 2.7 to 3.3 billion years ago.  The most interesting thing is that this means tectonic movement started right around the same time as life did, leading to speculation that there may be some kind of causation there.  (Recall that tectonics isn't just responsible for earthquakes and volcanoes, but for recycling large chunks of the Earth's crust.  It may be that this movement of minerals and seawater kicked off the chemical reactions that led to the first living things -- although this is still highly speculative.)

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So the article is cool, but the headline made me cringe: "Drop of Ancient Seawater Rewrites Earth's History."  Yeah, okay, maybe technically that's true, given that the timetable of geological activity has been altered by the discovery.  But don't take away from it that the sequence of eras and periods in every high school earth science text has been trashed, and that geologists are now completely at sea.  The headline is factually correct but gives the wrong gist, way too reminiscent of the "Discovery Makes Scientists Throw Out the Textbooks!" headlines you see in popular media.  It leads to the all-too-common impression of scientists as bumbling around in their labs making wild guesses, and writing paper after paper (and textbook after textbook) that each supersede the previous ones like the fall of a row of dominoes.

The truth is, perhaps, not nearly as sexy, but popular media (and especially science-for-laypeople media like Science News) should try to reflect it.  In this time when our leaders are actively trying to poison our belief in scientific research on climate change, pollution, and ecology, it is incumbent on media of all type to be as careful as they can about being accurate not only in denotation but in connotation.  As a group, scientists are extremely cautious about publishing until their conclusions are supported by a wealth of evidence, and the impression fostered by many elected officials -- that scientific research is biased, tentative, and inaccurate -- is simply false.

So I wish the people who write about research for popular consumption would take this to heart.  We can't afford any more blows to our confidence in the experts.  Without them, we'd be left with only the politicians to rely on -- and given the choice, I'm trusting the scientists.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is sheer brilliance -- Jenny Lawson's autobiographical Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It's an account of her struggles with depression and anxiety, and far from being a downer, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.  Lawson -- best known from her brilliant blog The Blogess -- has a brutally honest, rather frenetic style of writing, and her book is sometimes poignant and often hilarious.  She draws a clear picture of what it's like to live with crippling social anxiety, an illness that has landed Lawson (as a professional author) in some pretty awkward situations.  She looks at her own difficulties (and those of her long-suffering husband) through the lens of humor, and you'll come away with a better understanding of those of us who deal day-to-day with mental illness, and also with a bellyache from laughing.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Reality blindness

I read an article on CNN yesterday that really pissed me off, something that seems to be happening more and more lately.

The article, entitled "Denying Climate Change As the Seas Around Them Rise" (by Ed Lavandera and Jason Morris), describes the effects of climate change in my home state of Louisiana, which include the loss of entire communities to rising seas and coastline erosion.  An example is the village of Isle Jean Charles, mostly inhabited by members of the Biloxi-Chetimacha tribe, which basically has ceased to exist in the last ten years.

But there are people who will deny what is right in front of their faces, and they include one Leo Dotson of Cameron Parish.  Dotson, a fisherman and owner of a seafood company, "turned red in the face" when the reporters from CNN asked him about climate change.  Dotson said:

I work outside in the weather on a boat, and it's all pretty much been the same for me.  The climate is exactly the same as when I was a kid.  Summers hot, winters cold...  [Climate change] doesn't concern me...  What is science?  Science is an educated guess.  What if they guess wrong?  There's just as much chance for them to be wrong as there is for them to be right.  If [a scientist] was 500 years old, and he told me it's changed, I would probably believe him.  But in my lifetime, I didn't see any change.

Well, you know what, Mr. Dotson?  I'm kind of red in the face right now, myself.  Because your statements go way past ignorance.  Ignorance can be forgiven, and it can be cured.  What you've said falls into the category of what my dad -- also a fisherman, and also a native and life-long resident of Louisiana -- called "just plain stupid."

Science is not an educated guess, and there is not  "just as much chance for them to be wrong as there is for them to be right."  Climate scientists are not "guessing" on climate change.  Because of the controversy, the claim has been tested every which way from Sunday, and every scrap of evidence we have -- sea level rise, Arctic and Antarctic ice melt, earlier migration times for birds, earlier flowering times for plants, more extreme weather events including droughts, heat waves, and storms -- support the conclusion that the climate is shifting dramatically, and that we've only seen the beginning.

At this point, the more educated science deniers usually bring up the fact that there have been times that the scientific establishment has gotten it wrong, only to be proven so, sometimes years later.  Here are a few examples:

1. Darwin's theory of evolution, which overturned our understanding of how species change over time.
2. Mendel's experiments in genetics, later bolstered by the discovery of the role of DNA and chromosomes in heredity.  Prior to Mendel's time, our understanding of heredity was goofy at best (consider the idea, still prevalent in fairy tales, of "royal blood" and the capacity for ruling being inheritable, which you'd think that any number of monarchs who were stupid, incompetent, insane, or all three would have been sufficient to put to rest).
3. Alfred Wegener's postulation of "continental drift" in 1912, which was originally ridiculed so much that poor Wegener was forced to retreated in disarray.  The fact that he was right wasn't demonstrated for another forty years, through the work of such luminaries in geology as Harry Hess, Tuzo Wilson, Fred Vine, Drummond Matthews, and others.
4. The "germ theory of disease," proposed by Marcus von Plenciz in 1762, and which wasn't widely accepted until the work of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur in the 1870s.
5. Big Bang cosmology, discovered from the work of astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble.
6. Albert Einstein's discovery of relativity, and everything that came from it -- the speed of light as an ultimate universal speed limit, time dilation, and the theory of simultaneity.
7. The structure of the atom, a more-or-less correct model of which was first described by Niels Bohr, and later refined considerably by the development of quantum mechanics.

There.  Have I forgotten any major ones?  My point is that yes, prior to each of these, people (including scientists) believed some silly and/or wrong ideas about how the world works, and that there was considerable resistance in the scientific community to accepting what we now consider theory so solidly supported that it might as well be considered as fact.  But you know why these stand out?

Because they're so infrequent.  If you count the start of the scientific view of the world as being some time during the Enlightenment -- say, 1750 or so -- that's 267 years in which there have been only seven times there has been a major model of the universe overturned and replaced by a new paradigm.  Mostly what science has done is to amass evidence supporting the theories we have -- genetics supporting evolution, the elucidation of DNA's structure by Franklin, Crick, and Watson supporting Mendel, the discovery of the 3K cosmic microwave background radiation by Amo Penzias and Robert Wilson supporting the Big Bang.

So don't blather at me about how "science gets it wrong as often as it gets it right."  That's bullshit.  If you honestly believe that, you better give up modern medicine and diagnostics, airplanes, the internal combustion engine, microwaves, the electricity production system, and the industrial processes that create damn near every product we use.

But you know what?  I don't think Dotson and other climate change deniers actually do believe that.  I doubt seriously whether Dotson would go in to his doctor for an x-ray, and when he gets the results say, "Oh, well.  It's equally likely that I have a broken arm or not, so what the hell?  Might as well not get a cast."  He doesn't honestly think that when he pulls the cord to start his boat motor, it's equally likely to start, not start, or explode.

No, he doesn't believe in climate change because it would require him to do something he doesn't want to do.  Maybe move.  Maybe change his job.  Maybe vote for someone other than the clods who currently are in charge of damn near every branch of government.  So because the result is unpleasant, it's easier for him to say, "ain't happening," and turn red in the face.

But the universe is under no obligation to conform to our desires.  Hell, if it was, I'd have a magic wand and a hoverboard.  It's just that I'm smart enough and mature enough to accept what's happening even if I don't like it, and people like Dotson -- and Lamar Smith, and Dana Rohrabacher, and James "Snowball" Inhofe, and Scott Pruitt, and Donald Trump -- apparently are not.

The problem is, there's not much we can do to fix this other than wait till Leo Dotson's house floats away.  Once people like him have convinced themselves of something, there's no changing it.

I just have to hope that our government officials aren't quite so intransigent.  It'd be nice to see them wake up to reality before the damage done to our planet is irrevocable.