The unanswerable

Humans are boundlessly curious, and that's a good thing.  Our drive to understand, to cure our ignorance about the world around us, is the engine that powers science.  In my 32-year career as a science teacher, one of the things I strove the hardest to accomplish was to urge my students never to be content to shrug their shoulders and stop trying to understand.

Like most things, though, this curiosity has a downside, and that is when it turns into a desperation to have an answer, any answer, whether it's supported by the evidence or not.  Saying "I don't know, and may never know" is sometimes so profoundly uncomfortable that we settle into whatever explanation sounds superficially appealing -- and forthwith stop thinking about it.

Taking a scientific, skeptical view of things requires not only that you have the drive to understand, but that you can tolerate -- and know the scope of -- the limits of your own knowledge.  As theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler put it, "We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance.  As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."

What got me thinking about this is a story I ran into on the site Coast to Coast, which specializes in oddball speculation about unexplained phenomena.  The headline was "Mysterious Stone Carving Stumps Archaeologists in England," just the latest in umpteen popular media stories about some new discovery that "has scientists baffled."

To read this stuff, you come away with the impression that scientists do nothing all day but sit around scratching their heads in puzzlement.

In any case, the contents of the story are interesting enough.  A curious stone carving was discovered by some archaeologists investigating a Late Bronze Age site on Nesscliffe Hill, near Shrewsbury.  Without further ado, here's the carving:

Paul Reilly, one of the archaeologists studying the site, said that the carving is "indicative of two different types of technology, grinding and carving...  It appears to depict some kind of figure with the indentation being its head and the various scratches representing two long horns and two small horns, a central body line and two arms, one held up and the other down, the upward one showing a possible hand holding a pipe or a weapon...  Placing it in historical context, however, is another challenge altogether...  The carving has similarities with Late Bronze Age carvings of figures in horned helmets.  The region was once the domain of a Roman tribe known as the Cornovii, a name that has been suggested to reference to the ‘horned ones’.  The figure also could represent a horned deity cult in the Roman army as depicted at several military sites across Britain."

Note how many times Reilly uses words like "appears" and "could be" and "possible" and "suggested."  The fact is -- as he admits up front -- he doesn't know who carved the figure and why.  Dating such finds is a challenge at best, and this one is especially problematic; it was found in loose soil that had been used to backfill a trench from an earlier dig, so it was not in what archaeologists call "a secure context" (i.e., pretty much where it had been placed when its maker set it down millennia ago).

None of this is all that unusual; this kind of thing happens all the time in archaeology, and is in fact way more common than finding an artifact and being able to ascertain exactly when it had been created, by whom, and why.  But what got me thinking about our need to find an answer, any answer, was how Tim Binnall -- who wrote the article about the discovery -- wound up his piece by asking if any of his readers could "solve the mystery of the stone carving," and asked them to submit their answers to him at Coast to Coast.

Now, I know part of this is just an attempt to engage his readers, and there's nothing wrong with that.  I always love it when readers post comments and questions here at Skeptophilia (well, almost always -- I could do without the hate mail).  But immediately I read that, my reaction was, "Why on earth would some random layperson's opinion on the carving have any relevance whatsoever?"  He is, in essence, asking people to form opinions about an artifact for which even the experts have nothing more than speculation.

This is where we cross over into the territory of preferring any answer at all over admitting that we simply don't know, and may never know.

I'm deliberately leaving this in the realm of an obscure archaeological find, because (notwithstanding Binnall's request) few of us are going to get passionately emotional about a carved piece of rock from Bronze Age England.  But I'm sure you can come up with lots of other, more highly charged, examples of this -- questions for which our desire to have answers overrides the fact that we simply don't have enough evidence to conclude anything.  And some of these answers to unanswerable questions are believed with enough fervor that people will die for them -- and there are those who will unhesitatingly kill you if your answer is different from theirs, or worse, if you state outright that you don't know, and in reality, neither do they.

These are not easy issues.  As I said earlier, a lot of it comes from a source that is, at its heart, a positive thing; the drive to know.  But honesty is as important as curiosity, and that includes an honest assessment of what we understand and what we do not.  I'll conclude with a quote from another brilliant physicist, Richard Feynman: "I would far rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."

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Warning: DNA is everywhere!

In yesterday's post, I stated that I hated hoaxes worse than I hate outright scientific ignorance.  In response, a loyal reader sent me an article referencing a survey in which 80% of respondents said they favored mandatory labeling of foods that contain DNA.

[image courtesy of the National Institute of Health and the Wikimedia Commons]

I kept looking, in vain, for a sign that this was a joke.  Sadly, this is real.  It came from a study done last month by the Oklahoma State University Department of Agricultural Economics.  And what it shows, in my opinion, is that there are people out there who vote and make important decisions and (apparently) walk upright without dragging their knuckles on the ground, and yet who do not know that DNA is found in every living organism.

Or maybe, they don't know that most of what we eat is made of cells.  I dunno.  Whatever.  Because if you aren't currently on the Salt, Baking Soda, and Scotch Diet, you consume the DNA of plants and/or animals every time you eat.

Lettuce contains lettuce DNA.  Potatoes contain potato DNA.  Beef contains cow DNA.  "Slim Jims" contain -- well, they contain the DNA of whatever the hell Slim Jims are made from.  I don't want to know.  But get the picture?  If you put a label on foods with DNA, the label goes on everything.

Ilya Somin, of the Washington Post, even made a suggestion of what such a food-warning label might look like:

WARNING: This product contains deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The Surgeon General has determined that DNA is linked to a variety of diseases in both animals and humans. In some configurations, it is a risk factor for cancer and heart disease. Pregnant women are at very high risk of passing on DNA to their children.

Despite the scary sound of Somin's tongue-in-cheek proposed label, there's nothing dangerous about eating DNA.  Enzymes in our small intestines break down the DNA we consume into individual building blocks (nucleotides), and we then use those building blocks to produce our own DNA every time we make new cells.  Which is all the time.  Eating pig DNA will not, as one of my students asked me a few weeks ago, "make us oink."

But this highlights something rather terrifying, doesn't it?  Every other day we're told things like "30% of Americans Are Against GMOs" and "40% of Americans Disbelieve in Anthropogenic Climate Change" and "32% of Americans Believe the Earth is 6,000 Years Old."  (If you're curious, I made those percentages up, because I really don't want to know what the actual numbers are, I'm depressed enough already.)  What the Oklahoma State University study shows is:  none of that is relevant.  If 80% of Americans don't know what DNA is, why the fuck should I trust what they say on anything else even remotely scientific?

But it's the voting part that scares me, because as we've seen over and over again, dumb people vote for dumb people.  I'm not sure why this is, either, because you'd think that there'd be a sense that even if a lot of voters are dumb themselves, they'd want smart people running the country.  But maybe that'd make all the dumb people feel inferior.  Or maybe it's because the dumb people want to be reassured that they, too, could one day hold public office.

Either way, it's why we end up with public office being held by people like:

Mitt Romney:  "I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love." 

Louie Gohmert:  "We give the military money, it ought to be to kick rears, break things, and come home." 

Rick Perry:  "The reason that we fought the [American] Revolution in the 16th century — was to get away from that kind of onerous crown, if you will." 

Hank Johnson:  "Guam is an island that is, what, twelve miles from shore to shore?  And on its smallest level, uh, smallest, uh, uh, location, it's uh, seven miles, uh, between one shore and the other...  My fear is that (if US Marines are sent there) the whole island will become so populated that it will tip over and capsize." 

Diana DeGette: "These are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now, they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high-capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available." 

James Inhofe: "Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that ‘as long as the earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night,’ my point is, God’s still up there.  The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."

Henry Waxman:  "We're seeing the reality of a lot of the North Pole starting to evaporate, and we could get to a tipping point.  Because if it evaporates to a certain point - they have lanes now where ships can go that couldn't ever sail through before.  And if it gets to a point where it evaporates too much, there's a lot of tundra that's being held down by that ice cap."

The whole thing is profoundly distressing, and brings to mind the quote from Joseph de Maistre:  "Democracy is the form of government in which everyone has a voice, and therefore in which the people get exactly the government they deserve."

And as far as my claim yesterday that deliberate hoaxes are worse than outright ignorance, I respectfully withdraw my statement.  Ignorance is worse.  Especially when ignorance has crossed the line into outright stupidity.