Another favorable review of my book

The American Journal of Physics has just posted a very favorable review of my book The Great Paradox Of Science. This is important because that journal reaches a significant portion of my target audience, those scientists who have broader interests outside their sub-speciality. You can read the full review here but below is an extract.

The book … is a deep and thoughtful attack on the fundamental issue of how science works. I use the word “attack” deliberately, for the central theme of his book is a devaluation of the concept of truth. As he puts it in his closing words (emphasis in the original),

Truth and correspondence with reality are unnecessary as explanatory concepts in science and …. we can regard them as irrelevant and can comfortably dispense with them as no longer serving any useful purpose.

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My Scientific American article on Kelvin and Darwin

In lieu of a post, I will refer you to an article of mine that was just published in Scientific American magazine titled When Lord Kelvin Nearly Killed Darwin’s Theory. It deals with an an interesting historical period in the second half of the 19th century that pitted two scientific giants against each other in which the age of the Earth was the key factor in determining the final outcome.

Enjoy! And let me know in the comments what you think.

Sliced bread was not that great for three months

Slicing bread yourself is not only tedious, it also results in uneven slices. The bread slicing machine, first marketed in 1928, was an incredibly useful invention and took the country by storm so that in just five years, about 80% of bread was sold pre-sliced. The phrase “the greatest thing since sliced bread” has become a cliche, so much so that one wonders whether a similar saying existed before it and, if so, what the equivalent product of comparison was.

But during World War II, the overzealous person in charge of war time food supplies actually banned sliced bread for reasons that had dubious merit.

In 1943, Claude R. Wickard, the head of the War Foods Administration as well as the Secretary of Agriculture, got the bright idea to ban pre-sliced bread in America, which he did on January 18, 1943.  The specific reasons behind this aren’t entirely clear, though it was about conservation of resources, particularly generally thought to have been about conserving wax paper, wheat, and steel.

None of these reasons held up. The US had a two-year stockpile of wheat, there was no shortage of wax paper, and it was not clear that much steel would be saved. The outcry against the ban was so great that he reversed his policy after just three months.

How could big investors have been this gullible?

I have been fascinated by the case of the company Theranos, whose founder Elizabeth Homes is going on trial for fraud.

The trial, delayed earlier this year by Holmes’s pregnancy, is scheduled to begin on Tuesday and last several months.

Jurors will hear allegations that Holmes raised more than $700m from investors on claims Theranos invented a revolutionary machine that could conduct hundreds of laboratory tests from a single finger-prick of blood, but was actually using other companies’ technology for the tests. The company folded in 2018.
…

Holmes dropped out of Stanford University at 19 and became a star in a startup space dominated by men. She founded Theranos in 2003, with the goal of revolutionizing blood testing. The company’s rise and fall became a cautionary tale about the Silicon Valley hype machine.

Theranos received glowing media coverage and raised more than $700m from investors on
claims it had invented a machine that could conduct hundreds of laboratory tests from a single prick.

The tests were rolled out in Walgreens stores and Theranos reached a $9bn valuation before it became clear that many of the claims about the supposedly revolutionary blood test were bogus.

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Sacklers look likely to get the bankruptcy ruling they sought

Just as I feared, a bankruptcy judge has approved the deal that the odious Sackler family sought that would enable them to preserve and even increase the ill-gotten fortunes that they amassed from aggressively pushing their addictive pain-killers on the public, resulting in massive addiction levels and deaths from overdoses.

A US federal bankruptcy judge on Wednesday conditionally approved a sweeping, potentially $10bn plan submitted by the OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma to settle a mountain of lawsuits over its role in the opioid crisis that has killed a half-million Americans over the past two decades.

Under the settlement reached with creditors including individual victims and thousands of state and local governments, the Sackler family will give up ownership of the company and contribute $4.5bn but will be freed from any future lawsuits over opioids.
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Let’s take a moment to savor a global victory

The news can be depressing so I thought we could use a bit of good cheer. The United Nations announced that the world has finally eliminated the use of leaded gasoline. Algeria was the last country to do so in July.

When in 1921 engineers at General Motors discovered that adding lead to gasoline improved engine performance, it was already known that lead was toxic but they went ahead with it anyway, arguing that small amounts were not harmful. That was wrong. It became increasingly realized that the copious amounts of lead that were being released into the atmosphere was finding its way into people, leading to all manner of problems, including lower IQ and a propensity for violence. (I wrote about this back in 2014.)
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The divide between prevention and treatment of covid-19

In an earlier post, I wrote about the FDA trying to stamp out the practice of some people using the livestock deworming drug ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment. We have even reached a stage where people are going to court to force hospitals to provide it to patients.

When there is a matter of urgency like covid-19, a lot of exploratory research is done on treatments, using small samples or on animals or in petri dishes. In the age of the internet, the results of such studies can become widely known and people can seize on any positive information and think that the treatment should be freely used, even if there is the potential for danger. In the case of ivermectin, it has not yet been shown to be an effective treatment against the virus and can be dangerous in large doses. Preliminary results showed no appreciable efficacy.
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The age of the faux expert

Where I live there is a small regional airport and from my window I can see planes coming in to land or after taking off. On the Nextdoor neighborhood community discussion board there was a post by someone claiming that the airport does not follow standard aviation rules for which direction to take off and land depending on the wind direction, giving as the source for their complaint the responses they got when they did a search on Google on “what direction do planes fly with NW wind”.

Really? This person thinks that the people working in air traffic control and the pilots have no idea what they are doing and that this person knows better than people who do this for a living and who are well aware that lives depend on them getting it right? In response to the complaint, one commenter posted “Monterey Airport is HIRING!!! They are looking for employees just like you. Currently nobody knows what they are doing 😂😂😂 instead of criticizing maybe you should go help out.”

This illustrates the problem that we have, that people think a quick Google search makes them an ‘expert’ on pretty much anything. We see this most clearly with medical treatment, especially with covid-19. It is one thing to go on the internet and seek out information so that you can be better informed and have more meaningful discussions with your health care professionals by asking more pertinent questions and being better able to appreciate their answers. It is something else entirely to think that your judgment is now superior to that of those who do what they do for a living, day in and day out.

Evolution has won the war over creationism

We seem to be awash in various culture wars that seem to never end. So it is good to consider one that was major war less than two decades ago that seems to have ended quietly. A new survey suggests that the war between evolution and various forms of creationism has resulted in science winning a resounding victory. A paper based on survey results gives the reasons for this shift. Its abstract says:

The public acceptance of evolution in the United States is a long-standing problem. Using data from a series of national surveys collected over the last 35 years, we find that the level of public acceptance of evolution has increased in the last decade after at least two decades in which the public was nearly evenly divided on the issue. A structural equation model indicates that increasing enrollment in baccalaureate-level programs, exposure to college-level science courses, a declining level of religious fundamentalism, and a rising level of civic scientific literacy are responsible for the increased level of public acceptance.

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