Glenn Beck's Monkey Show: Not Even Wrong

“Even my fellow biologists are unacquainted with the
many lines of evidence for evolution, and most of
my university students,who supposedly learned evolution
in high school, come to my courses knowing almost nothing
of this central organizing theory of biology.”
--Jerry A. Coyne; Why Evolution is True. 2009.

In my last blog entry, I gave an overview of the problems I heard in Glenn Beck's latest attack on the theory of evolution by natural selection. To recap briefly, those problems are errors in knowledge, distractability from the main point and reason for the discussion, and philosophical errors at the level of premises, reasoning and argumentation. The blog entry can be found here.

In this blog entry, I will discuss Glenn Beck's misapprehension of the modern theory of evolution because it is not even wrong. By this I mean that Beck's argument on his show, that evolution cannot be true because he has never seen a half-monkey, half human, is so off the mark that it is not even an argument. It is a straw-man, and does not rise to the level of an argument that can even be discussed. The phrase implies that even an argument that is wrong, would be better than this one.

What I am not going to do is try to convince anyone that the theory of evolution is true. I accept the evidence for evolution, which is so varied, so strong and so convincing that its reality is not even a casual discussion among biologists. However, there is so much evidence, on so many levels and coming from so many fields in the natural and physical sciences that it would take more than one book to recount it all. The interested reader can begin with Jerry Coyne's book, cited above, and continue with many well-written and documented books in the popular scientific literature. There is also another reason, and that is that is useless to argue either major or minor points of the theory, citing evidence, when the real problem is on a different level. That is, most people who refuse to accept the evidence for evolution by natural selection do so not because of this or that point has not been adequately addressed, but because he or she has a religious view of the world that includes biblical literalism, which is incompatible with most of modern science. Argumentation without a general agreement on world view is futile. And I believe that the problem is a political one and not scientific at all, and as a libertarian I do not believe that it is my place to use the force of law to change another's beliefs. I have written my opinion about the issue of evolution and science education here .

Glenn Beck's problem is not that he does not accept the evidence for the theory of evolution by natural selection. Although it is clear that he does not. His problem lies in that he attacked the theory citing a half-baked non-observation as evidence against it, and that indicated to anyone who knows the theory well that he does not know it or understand it in even the most rudimentary sense. This is not uncommon – as Coyne indicates in his book (quoted above). The purpose of this blog entry is not to change anyone's mind about evolution, but to discuss this common error that becomes the logical fallacy commonly called “the straw man argument” with amazing frequency.

The sum total of Glenn Beck's argument against evolution was that it was not likely to be true because , he said, “I haven't seen a half-person, half-monkey, yet.” When this statement came out of Beck's mouth, I shouted “Thank you, Bishop Wilberforce!” at the radio, because this was so reminiscent of the early arguments against evolution. From that time until this, the caricature of a blend of two species is, well, specious. It is a straw man put up in order to mock the opposition and to implant in the minds of listeners (or at least those who are ignorant of the actual theory of evolution) an idea that has never been a part of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Either Glenn was not paying attention during his high school biology class--a distinct possibility--or he is intentionally making a mockery of the theory in order to woo the most ignorant of his listeners. This second motive is also a possibility, however, it was not well-thought out, for in so doing he probably caused the majority of his listeners (including a NY News Tea Party reporter here) to do a double-take.

For those who have forgotten, or those who have never learned it, here is the theory of evolution by natural selection in a nutshell: The variation that we see among living organisms today arose gradually over time, brought about by a process called natural selection. There are five ideas that are necessary to any explanation of Darwin's theory and they are: evolution, speciation, the common ancestry of all life, natural selection, and gradualism. Evolution means change over time, and according to evolutionary theory, those changes in the genetic code of existing populations that create traits that give certain individuals a reproductive advantage – that is, traits that make it more likely for that individual to survive to reproduce – will become more common in the population over time. This change in the gene-frequencies of a population indicate that it is evolving.

Most of the time these changes in gene-frequencies occur naturally over time because successful reproducers pass those advantageous traits to their offspring, whereas those individuals who do not successful reproduce have no effect on the future genetic makeup of the population. This is natural selection*. Speciation usually occurs because enough variation occurs between two populations of the same species that they can no longer reproduce with one another. This is usually due to two populations being isolated from one another for some reason. Although speciation is arguably the most spectacular of the phenomena that the theory of evolution by natural selection explains, it is not the only one, or even the most common. But speciation is an effect of natural selection that has occurred many times over the history of life of earth, and that does mean that all species share a common ancestry; that is a link with every other species that is either a close relationship or a distant one, depending on how far back in the history of two species the divergence occurred.

*Although natural selection is by far the most common mechanism for evolutionary change in a population, it is not the only one: others such as gene-flow among populations, and the loss of genetic variation due to population bottlenecks and founder effect do have some influence.

For the purposes of our discussion about Glenn Beck's straw-man, the most important word in the paragraphs above is population. Populations evolve, individuals do not. That is because an individual's phenotype is fixed by the particular genotype he or she inherited. Some changes in gene expression do change over the lifetime, but an individual does not suddenly acquire half a genome from somewhere else. Therefore, one would not expect to ever see an individual that displays half the phenotype of one extant species and half the phenotype of another. Rather, if a biologist predicts that two species are closely related, she then expects to find many common traits between, and some important differences. Those common traits point to an ancestor species that is common to both of the related species. That ancestor species may or may not still be flourishing on earth. Extinction is also an important phenomenon that is predicted by the theory of evolution by natural selection.

With respect to human beings, monkeys do share common ancestry, which is indicated by enough common traits so that both monkeys and human beings are in the same taxonomic order: monkeys and humans are both primates. However, the most closely extant species to which humans are related are the great apes, all of whom are classified in the same taxonomic family – hominidae – which means “human-like”. The closest extant related species to humans is the chimpanzees. However, this does not mean that humans evolved from chimps. Nor does it mean that one should expect to find a half-chimp, half-person in the fossil record. Rather what we do find is that humans and chimps show a greater than 98% commonality in our genomes. We have enough traits in common to know that we had a common ancestor that walked the earth rather recently.

Another facet of Glenn Beck's mistake is that he equates some form of Lamarckism, the idea that evolution occurs by the passing of acquired traits to future generations through the genome, with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. If this occurred, then one could say that individuals evolve. This is a philosophical mistake that Glenn actually shares with the communists, who promoted the neo-Lamarckian ideology proposed by Lysenko. This fallacy is necessary to the modern collectivists, but the Darwinian theory of evolution is not. Darwinisms is in fact at odds with it. But that discussion is part of the next blog entry on this topic. Stay tuned!

Glenn Beck's Monkey Show: Overview

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again."
--Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism. Part ii. Line 15.

If a little learning is dangerous, then no knowlege at all can be positively deadly. Or at least, embarrassing.

Yesterday, Glenn Beck made a fool of himself on his radio program.


As with many bright people, he did so by assuming he understood something that he did not. He did what he tells his audience not to do by making a judgment about a scientific theory on the fly, and it was clear that he had no clue what the modern theory of evolution actually is and what it is not.


For the record, I listen to Beck several times a week, although I have been listening less and less this fall because it is getting harder and harder to actually hear Glenn make his point. This is because in the past year he has brought on a friend from Texas, Pat Gray, who generally distracts Glenn from his more serious points, causing a number of listeners, including me, to reach for the dial. Pat Gray appears to be far less thoughtful than Glenn, and is clearly not as well read. When the banter begins, it devolves quickly and the show becomes frustratingly difficult to follow, and downright silly. I don't have time for that, and clearly from discussions with other thoughtful patriots, neither do they.


That said, it is quite clear that Glenn Beck is not stupid, as many of the leftist blogs claim. The so-called discussions of this issue at places like the Huffington Post come across as equally ignorant and worse, devolve to ad hominen statements. There is a large difference between rational disagreement and the kind of mean-spirited, angry, profanity-driven drivel that the lefties regularly spew out against Beck. However, this does not excuse Glenn from the equally ignorant attack on the theory of evolution that he made during a clearly ADD hour on his show yesterday.


Most laymen do not understand the modern theory of evolution. It is not that it is not understandable or even all that complex, though wading through the plethora of evidence for it takes time and study. It is that it has either been taught badly or not taught at all. This is the fault of the generally poor science teaching that goes on in America's K-12 institutions, private and public. With very few exceptions K-12 science education has treated the discipline as a series of disconnected facts that must be committed to memory and regurgitated, rather than as a method for discovering how the physical universe works using observation through our senses and their extensions. It is also the fault of a political divide that has been handled badly by scientists, creating a hostility towards all science among those who are expected to pay for it all without having the faintest idea of what it actually is. (I will have more to say about this later).


Collectivists and progressives at the extremes of both political parties have seized on this divide, and have used it to their own political advantage. On the right, it has been used to promote a kind of populist know-nothingism that lets those pols manipulate the religious passion of their constituents for Christian dominionism and theocracy. On the left, it has been used to promote an agenda of thinly disguised eugenics in which a scientific theory has been hijacked to bolster a collectivist ideology and a socialist agenda. (I have already said a bit about this here). It is clear that neither left nor right has the intellectual high ground here, nor the moral decency to promote and appreciate thoughtful and intelligent ideation among their constituents. A pox on both their houses!


Glenn Beck's ignorant diatribe betrayed several problems. One is that his notion of the scientific theory of evolution betrays an ignorance not only of the theory itself, but of science in general, and how the work of science is done. It is clear that because he has heard twaddle from equally ignorant others, he believes he knows what it is without having actually studied it. He would not make such statements in regard to areas he actually knows something about. So he has made an error of knowlege compounded by a certain ignorant arrogance, in that he did not question his lack of education in the field of science. Clearly his motto to "question everything" was left behind as he thoughtlessly spewed forth, compounding his embarrassment of ignorance with every sentence.


Glenn also has a problem organizing his thoughts that was clearly evident here, and in other monologues. His reasoning starts out with a good series of propositions and then his thinking stops at a certain point, and he rarely gets to the logical conclusion of his thought. Often he makes connections that seem to be leading somewhere interesting, and then he veers off, unable to complete the line of reasoning. He stops short and leaves his listeners in confusion or yelling at radio, "finish it, man!" Part of the problem here is the aforementioned Pat Gray, who nit-picks unimportant diction rather than letting the reasoning come to the conclusion of thought before cleaning up the proposition. Another part of the problem is that ADD that I mentioned earlier. Glenn has made no secret of it, as indeed he can't. Glenn distracts himself, going down rabbit-holes, and on snipe-hunts of thought, chasing extraneous thoughts prior to making a conclusion. And being that distractable means that the conclusion is never made.


Finally, Glenn Beck has a philosophical problem, and this is the most important. Although he reasons well up to a point, he often cannot bring the conclusion home, because he cannot or will not take his ideas to the most logical conclusion. This is not limited to his attacks on science, but can also be heard in other topics he discusses. For example, if Beck really believes in the sovereignty of the individual, which is clearly stated in the 9 Principles of his 9-12 project, then he cannot continue to advocate for the social control that is part and parcel of conservative political thought. Although he says that he is libertarian in thought, and that he trusts the American people, he cannot quite match his thought to those words. Lately, as Glenn has become increasingly a preacher in the Great Awakening style of Jonathan Edwards or George Whitfield, I have begun to suspect that this inability to bring home the most logical conclusion to his chain of reasoning may lie in the contradiction between the idea that human beings are fit for liberty, and his religious notion that man is fatally flawed by original sin.

Two of these problems are weighty enough to deserve blog entries of their own, and so I shall go into much more detail about Glenn's fundamental misunderstanding and ignorance with respect to the modern theory of evolution in my second part. In the third, I shall address the philosophical knots he mananged to contort himself into with his claim that those who accept the evidence for evolution by natural selection must deny the inherent nature of the rights of man. The ignorance of the first leads directly to the ignorance of the second. That is, the misunderstanding and misapprehensions that Glenn speaks with regard to what Dennett calls "Darwin's dangerous idea", lead directly to his ignorance of the history of the idea, and the wicked stepchildren it has been distorted to create: Social Darwinism and Lysenkoism. The first, in the hands of the American Progressives, gave us eugenics and forced sterilization, and the second, in the hands of Soviet Communists, gave us the planned famine that killed millions of Kulaks.

These discussions are worth taking a bit of time and blog-space to have, because the issues that Darwinian evolution bring up, and the ignorance of what the theory actually means, is widespread, and not limited to one political pole. If the religious right has used such ignorance to advance their cause of social control, the left has turned a scientific theory into a dogma and ideology to be decided not by the evidence, and not by hypothesis testing, but through the ideology of consensus science, something that never was and never can be. This has grave implications for new and unfounded pseudo-scientific theory that is more akin to religion than it is to science: global warming. The secular, collectivist left is using this idea to advance their own agenda of social control. And the implications are just as totalitarian as anything your hot-farting fundamentalist dominionist can dream up.

Reality Bites: Physical Limitations and Political Magical Thinking

Science education in the United States has suffered.

I was going to talk about the problem solving that BP engineers have to deal with in order to deal with a damaged well-head in 5000 feet of salt water, but I realized that the problem that they have in being confronted by Obama-like politicians has to do with a lack of scientific understanding among the pols and the general public.
So I'll begin by restating my first sentence and continue from there.

Science education in the United States has suffered. And the main reason that it has suffered has nothing to do with the intelligence of the students or of the teachers.
Science education in the United States has suffered because of the prevailing philosophy in our schools of education and in the humanities in general. That philosophy is post-modernism, which can be crudely stated as teaching that there is no objective reality.

But working scientists and engineers deal with objective reality every time they put on their lab coats and hard hats and go confront the real world. There is no way to evade it or obviate it; the laws of physics remain the same everywhere in the known universe. This is the meaning behind the ultimate geek bumper sticker:

3.14 X 10 ee 6 meters per second: It's not just a good idea--it's the LAW!

Politicians, on the other hand, due to the prevelent philosophical sloppiness in the humanities at our colleges and universities, and due to what cannot be called anything else but magical thinking, do not feel the need to actually deal with reality; their eyes glaze over when the calculators come out, and so they believe that energy can be created by decree, and that no trade-offs are necessary to maintain the modern standard of living that is made possible by what they call "miracles" of science and technology.

And that brings us to the present oil well accident in the Gulf of Mexico, what it would take for BP engineers to "fill that hole, Daddy", and why lawsuits are not going to either fill it or prevent future accidents of this nature. (Unless we could plug the line with lawyers, which could kill two problem birds with one stone).

Although we do not yet know the proximate causes of the well breach a mile under the ocean in the Gulf, we do know the ultimate problem. It is that BP was drilling for oil with a well head in the continental shelf under the Gulf that was one mile under water down to a reservoir whose surface was 13,000 feet under the surface rock below that. This kind of deep water drilling is currently at the very edge of our current technological development, mainly because of the pressures involved. When people are operating on the thin edge of technology, one small problem can become one huge nightmare; and in this case, an explosion that breaches the line at the top of the rock formation can rapidly spin out of control, because the technology developed to fix it operates much less efficiently at the high pressures involved.

The question then becomes, so why was BP drilling at a location that places the well at the laser-edge of technology? And the answer is not because they are irresponsible; the answer is because politicians and environmentalists, neither of whom appear to have any clue about risk/benefit calculations will not permit drilling in shallower water, where our technology is much more robust for solving the inevitable problems that develop when moving parts and entropy collide. (Entropy--the tendency of any system to go to maximum disorder unless energy is brought into it--is another physical constant that politicians tend to ignore and evade. This is why much of the infrastructure of this country is in such poor shape).

I will give the answer to the problem here, before I detail the problem: For the nonce, DRILL ON LAND OR IN SHALLOW WATER. There, it's in capitals so the Pols in Washington can read it without putting on their spectacles.

So what, in reality, would it take for Obama to answer in the affirmative to the question, "Daddy, did you plug that hole yet?"

I once worked for a very short time in the oil industry as a geologist. My husband is a mechanical engineer who has worked in the Geotechnical Engineeering Department at Sandia National Laboratory for 28 years. He has extensive experience with underground oil storage, and the associated fluid mechanics and materials required to get oil out of the ground or into it. Between us, we came up with the following calculations of what it would take to plug the hole using extant technology. All numbers are reasonable approximations. Data was obtained from information received from BP. NOTE: BP is not able to "plug the hole" because of the enormous pressures and the material constraints involved.

The current well head is broken at the surface of the rock formation, under 5,000 feet of water, which has a specific gravity of 1, and which is exerting an absolute pressure of 2,300 PSI(A) on the wellhead. The top of the oil reservior is ~ 13,000 feet below that, under a continental shelf formation that has various layers catalogued by mudloggers, each of which has a density somewhere between that of concrete and that of granite, and the average density of the whole formation exerts an absolute pressure of 13,000 PSI(A) on the reservior. Together then, the total absolute pressure on the top of reservior is that of the mile of water and the more than two miles of rock sitting on top of it, which is approximately 15,300 PSI(A). (The pressure exerted by the atmosphere above the ocean, which is approximately 15 PSI(A) at sea level, is negligible in comparison). The line from the wellhead to the reservior is likely a 20" line, extending 13,000 feet down. And since the wellhead is broken, the oil is flowing with a pressure difference of 8500 PSI(D),and the gauge pressure at the top is ~ 3,000 PSI(A).

Given that living on the surface of the earth, we are used to a pressure of 15 PSI(A), and can withstand a maximum of a bit more than that, the pressures calculated here are truly impressive. And given these impressive pressures, here is what it would take to "plug the hole". To place a plug near the reservoir surface, which would be necessary, because at the wellhead the pressure would increase to 15,300 PSI(A) once the flow is stopped, BP would need to lower a packer that weighs in at ~3 million pounds. Oil mixed with mud injected earlier, would flow past the packer and back up the well. When the packer is in place, it would be expanded to make a seal, but even so, at those depths and pressures, some oil would continue to flow past it. Once the packer is sealed, the line would then need to be backfilled with about 4 million pounds of concrete. BP will most likely not be doing this because solutions that have already been tried have made it nigh unto impossible to do it this way.

FYI: BP had a plan in place for dealing with this accident, and had possible solutions ranked from first to last according to increasing difficulty and likelyhood of failure. There is some evidence that the Obama administration dictated a different order, most likely for political reasons or worse. If so, the hubris of these men--who have no real world experience doing much of anything other than community organizing--is absolutely astounding.

Ideally, when this accident occured, the Obama adminstration should have followed an EPA plan already in place to use the Coast Guard and various state agencies belonging to the states the border the gulf to contain the oil and mitigate the damage to the coastal waters. In the meantime, BP would be working to stop the flow or oil at the well. But the administration did not follow the plan that was in place, choosing instead to "study the problem" at the behest of environmental groups concerned that burning the oil at the surface would cause air pollution. It is certain that there would have been smoke, but all in all, the damage from that would have been much less severe than the damage caused by oil drifting to the Gulf Coast. At the same time the administration was dithering about whether to follow the EPA plan, it was also engaging in empty rhetoric about "pushing BP out of the way" and having a "foot on the neck" of BP, presumably to point fingers elsewhere and try to mitigate the political damage to the president. Because this kind of political behavior is an evasion of the real situation, it only succeeded in making the admininstration look more and more foolish.

Case in point: As Barack "Emperor Hadrian" Obama was commanding the tides to stop by magical insults hurled at BP, Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana sought permits to construct artificial barrier islands to stop the oil. The EPA dithered and Obama, indecisive as ever, promised to "study the problem" and get back to Jindal, after his Memorial Weekend vacation and Paul McCartney concert. Jindal waited in vain, and thus missed the opportunity to prevent coastal damage.

This failure of leadership seems to result from the fact that Washington D.C. sits inside a magic beltway, where the laws of physics, and the trade-offs made necessary by the needs of a technologically complex society that must deal with entropy, are less important than fingerpointing and blame games intended to obviate political damage. I have no illusions that any other politician would have done much better; however, Obama, whose real-world experience is negligible, and whose socialist political philosophy has already been demonstrated to be a total failure during the last century, seems to personify the absolute nadir of leadership.

Good leadership in a crisis requires that one first focus on solving the immediate problem, and only after that problem is dealt with, doing a thorough investigation that considers both the technological failures and any decision-making errors that exacerbated them. As the immediate problem is dealt with, evidence of what actually went wrong is often uncovered, but the general procedure is to get rid of the alligators before determining what went wrong with draining the swamp.

Further, human error is always part of the equation of any accident, but human error does not automatically translate into moral culpability. In general, there is a good body of law that deals with accidents like this, and BP--knowing its fiduciary responsibility--has already exceeded the legal cap on the amount of damages recoverable and has already volunteered to pay all costs related to the mitigation and clean-up effort. They have done so, even though the damage has been substantially multiplied by federal inaction over six weeks now, caused directly by the failure of leadership coming from the President of the United States himself.

Ideally then, a good leader deals with the immediate problem, and then considers the why's and wheretofores of an accident rationally and without immediately assigning blame. What has our president done? Filed a lawsuit.
Because that's really going to "plug the hole, Daddy."

Environmentalists, because they refuse to face the reality of entropy, and because they discount the place of human beings on the earth, refuse also to acknowledge that all life alters the environment, and that every technology involves trade-offs and hard choices. There is no magic bullet that lets any species function without changes on the earth. This magical thinking is exacerbated inside the beltway due to the unreality of the political game--which is not about taking responsibility--a key leadership trait--but rather obviating blame and political fallout. The combination has turned an accident into a crisis.

One that will undoubtedly not be wasted in Obama's march to fascism.

Talk about fiddling while Rome burns!

You Must Agree . . .

Some of my conversations with certain friends have become annoying because at the point where I say, "Look, I disagree with you on the very premises you are asserting", they respond by saying, "But you have to research this thoroughly." And when I respond, "I have looked into it enough to satisfy myself that these premises are false," they then respond, "Well, you haven't researched it enough!" Often they then begin explaining very loudly what the premises are again, although I already know what they are, as if I am dense and if it can just be explained loudly enough and slowly enough, I will have to agree. This makes me very impatient because I have a life to live outside of entertaining ab endless supply of pet crackpot theories.

The current crackpot theory that has become a series of annoying stand-offs is the cherished myth among some patriots that a group of some private individuals incoporated the United States without the knowledge of the government of the people, and that this legal maneuver renders us subjects to Corp USA rather than citizens whose rights are protected by the Constitution. They tend to assert a great deal of case law that may or may not be related to what they are saying.

Now I have very little training in the subtleties of case law, but my education as a scientist has trained me to look for problems in the logic of an argument as well as in the evidence presented. And when someone makes the statement "But you have to research this topic, whatever it is, to my satisfaction before you can disagree with me on it," I recognize that we have moved from any well-constructed presentation of facts and/or theory to a desperate attempt at coercion. In other words, this is another way to to force the argument to continue beyond reason; to hammer away at it until the other party can be pushed to concede by sheer exhaustion.

In my work as a scientist, I did not consider it my obligation to research and refute every crackpot theory that someone with no background in the particular discipline can dream up. Such distractions from the work at hand would have been a waste of my time, because in order to actually convince such a person of the problems with the idea, I would have had to give them an education in the basic science of the discipline and any related ones as well. And most of the time, the person would have simply refused to listen, or would refuse to accept the basic laws and scientific principles, leaving us no place from which to build agreement based on knowledge.

For example, there are those people out there who are desperate to convince the world that they have discovered the secret to a perpetual motion machine. And they can and will argue ad infinitum that such machines have been invented, but have been supressed by "establishment science" because the advance would destroy their monopoloy on "big oil" or whatever. The point that if such a thing were possible it would not only overturn all of Newtonian physics, as well as the laws of thermodynamics, but would also be impossible to hide is impossible to get across to such a person. And he will run kicking and screaming from any demonstration of the validity of these rock-solid scientific principles or claim that he is being snowed by "book learning." And yet, those who advance such arguments have never been able to produce the machine itself or explain how it would work to bring something out of nothing. It is always out there "somewhere", hidden by some persecuted genius, an amorphous claim without any real physical or theoretical evidence.

Such a claim is based on faith rather than reason. There is no way to have a rational argument about an object of someone else's non-rational faith. It is as futile as entertaining an argument about whether the head of a pin will hold 10 or 20 dancing angels. And if the weary recipient of such an argument says, "I have examined the evidence to my satisfaction and I do not agree that there are angels dancing on the head of the pin," she will be treated to the loud assertion that if she would only research it properly, she would would change her mind and "believe" in angels. But belief is not predicated on evidence, and requires no research.

With respect to any such argument, I really don't have to do very much research at all to dismiss the claim. All I have to do is suss out the the premises upon which the claim is built. In the case of the perpetual motion machine, one premise is that the large-scale universe does not operate by Newtonian mechanics. And since Newton's three laws of motion are scientific laws--that is they have been not only demonstrated over and over by observation, but mathematically supported--the premise is false. If the arguer wants to continue to believe this false premise, he must do so without the help of science or reason. And if he desperately tries to force such an argument, that only indicates the non-rational nature of the claim.

So to with the argument about the claim that a private corporation has taken over the United States, although the argument here does not hearken back to scientific law, but rather legal principles. I do not have to be a lawyer to know that the Constitution of the United States is the Charter that any legislation, statute, or ordinance must not violate. Further, the Constitution itself is a guarantee of the natural rights of individuals declared to be unalienable in the Declaration of Independence.

The premise of the "Corp USA" claim is that it would be lawful to secretly enslave the entire population of the country, so that by filing a birth certificate or obtaining a driver's license, one is automatically subject to a corporate contract that he must then go to court to become free. The premise is false, because it would be a violation of the natural rights of the individual, as well as a violation of the Constitution of the United States to so enslave an individual or subject him to an unknowing contract. In a word, such action would be unlawful. Therefore, even if a group of people actually formed a conspiracy to turn the United States into a private corporation, and even if all the t's were crossed and the i's dotted, and the papers were filed, they would be null and void. And even if the courts were in on the conspiracy, the proper action of the people of the United States would be to impeach the courts, not to plead with them.

I do not need to waste any time reading pages and pages of arguments about case law or precendent in order to satisfy myself that the claim is false because I disagree with the basic premise. Thus the proper answer to the assertion that I need to do any research at all, is:
"I don't have to do anything. I am a free human being with a life to live. And if that is your only argument, you are wasting my time and yours."

Tribute Dr. Norman Borlaug Z"L

Today I read that an icon of my first career as a plant/soil ecologist died at the ripe old age of 95.

Dr. Norman Borlaug, called the father of the Green Revolution, died yesterday after a long and fulfilling life. He won the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his agricultural work in Mexico.

His work resulted in agricultural advances that saved millions from starvation and made it possible for countless millions more to come to be.

The Green Revolution made it possible for countries such as Mexico and India to become self-sufficient with respect to agriculture through the use of nitrogen fertilizers, and integrated pest management.

Dr. Borlaug did not see his work as transformative, but rather as "a step in the right direction" for agriculture.

According to Greg Easterbrook, writing for the Atlantic Monthly, despite the clear benefits for poor people worldwide:

". . . by the 1980s finding fault with high-yield agriculture had become fashionable. Environmentalists began to tell the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and Western governments that high-yield techniques would despoil the developing world. As Borlaug turned his attention to high-yield projects for Africa, where mass starvation still seemed a plausible threat, some green organizations became determined to stop him there." (cited below).

However, Dr. Borlaug lived and worked in countries that directly benefited from the Green Revolution, where he observed directly the real-life consequences of primitive agricultural practices. About environmental lobbyists he observed:

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things." (Easterbrook, G. (1997). Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity. The Atlantic Monthly, Online Edition).

I was fortunate to hear Dr. Borlaug speak years ago at a seminar at the University of Illinois. Seldom have I had the privilege of being in the presence of a scientist whose work has made such a profound difference to so many. He has, as Easterbrook so ably put it, "saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived."

The Very Large Array

NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

The Boychick is hosting his cousin D., in from Illinois for a two-week visit.
The first week was a tour of the skate parks of the Greater Albuquerque area, but at the beginning of the second week the Engineering Geek and I decided that, not to be outdone by Camp Aunt Madge, we needed to take at least one educational field trip somewhere else in New Mexico.

The guys said a decided "No" to Fanta Se and the museums, Old Town, or the Salinas National Monument. But they said "Okay" to the Very Large Array, which is officially part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Featured in many films, it was the setting for much of the action in the movie based on Carl Sagan's novel, Contact. I don't know if it was the big machines or the movie that hooked them, but off we went on a jaunt to to the Plains of San Augustin, where the radio telescopes are.

I insisted that we take the back roads, South NM 14 to Mountain Air, and then U.S. 60 to Bernardo and Socorro, Magdalena and the VLA. Here is a view looking south to Chupadera Mesa from Torreon, NM. Chupadera blocked any outlet of Glacial Lake Estancia into the ancenstral Rio Grande, creating salt flats as blow-out dunes. But we were headed for the other big, ancient lake bed in West-Central New Mexico.

A view of the two arms of the VLA from the photo stop on US 60. What is amazing is that each of the dishes is the diameter of a major league baseball diamond, but here they are, almost lost in the immensity of the Plains of San Augustin, an old glacial lake-bed.

Three radio recievers pointing to the eastern sky. The foreground shows a blow-out dune of lake sand and silt, deposited here more than 10,000 years ago, during the Pluvial (wet, lake) period of the Wisconsin glaciation.

And the politicians think they discovered global climate change?

The guys walk and discuss whether or not the radio receivers could be made into senders, in order to make contact with whatever might be "out there."

This summer, the receivers are in the "C" position, the axis of the Y formation being pretty short. This gives them more resolution for detail, but a narrower "view" of the part of the sky they are "looking" at. Here one receiver is "looking" at a different point than the other two.


The radio signals are a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we are accustomed to "listening" to, but computers make images of the radio sources, using color to show doppler shifts created by movement.





Each receiver has four orienting/tracking motors, and its own air-conditioning unit to keep the temperature low, which filters out earth-based "noise" in order to better received the faint radio signals from space. Standing under them, one can the faint hum of the tracking motors that keep the receiver oriented to a fixed point in the sky as the earth turns them toward the west.

They are huge, and yet gracefully beautiful in proportion to the vastness of the Plains of San Augustin.

The axes of the Y configuration in the the most outstreached "A" form, would cross the whole Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, stretching in Virginia, Mayland and Pennsylvania. But that is not the logest axis. The VLA is part of a continent wide Very Long Baseline Array, 3,000 miles long. You can "see" detail from very far away with the VLBA.

And of course, the farther out you look, the further back in time you see. One image captured at the VLA showed Quasars 10 billion light years away. The light left them 10 billion years ago. Before the sun was born, and the earth was formed. Space-time is inconceivably immense. And growing bigger every second . . .

What great vision our technology gives us . . .

TANSTAAFL: The Sum of the Laws of Thermodynamics

"If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
--Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1915)

The Magicians won in Congress yesterday.
It was expected, because I believe that the set called Pols is overwhelmingly populated by people who live in unreality so massive that it is rapidly approaching maximum entropy.
They do not accept the laws of thermodynamics, especially the second law, and therefore they believe that there is such a thing as a free lunch.
Would that they would collapse in utter humiliation. Instead, as we live in dangerous times, I fear it is the economy of this country and all that it has built that will do the collapsing. Unfortunately.

For the benefit of our scientifically illiterate Congress, I present the laws of thermodynamics translated into a form that even a Pol can undertand --if and only if he doesn't try to think and chew gum at the same time.

A most basic law zero has been stated:
0. When two objects or systems A and B are in equilibrium with each other, the energy that flows from A to B will be the same as the energy that flows from B to A.
Translation: There is a game.

Now on to the original three.

1. The Law of Conservation of Energy: Energy out cannot exceed energy in. You cannot get more than 100% efficiency.
Translation: You can't win the game. (You can't get something for nothing).

2. The Law of Entropy*: Any process in a closed system will increase the entropy of said closed system. Any process in an open system will increase the entropy of the universe. The entropy of the universe can never decrease. Loophole: You can have 100% efficiency only at a temperature of absolute zero, meaning you can't get 100% efficiency.
Translation: You can't break even.

*Entropy (S) can be defined as the tendency of a system towards disorder. The second law thus says that a closed system will accumulate disorder, and that an open system can become ordered only at the expense of the universe. Thus, as a bumper sticker I got when I passed P-Chem states, "S happens."

3. The Law of Absolute Zero*: It is impossible to reach the temperature of absolute zero. Thus the loophole above is not real.
Translation: You can't even quit the game.

*Absolute Zero is the temperature at which there is minimal molecular energy so that energy cannot be transferred among systems. Absolute zero, defined as -273.15 degrees C, cannot be achieved artificially or naturally (the third law).

All three laws can be summed up as: TANSTAAFL! There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

And I end with another quote:

"Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.
--Seth Lloyd, Nature 430 (2004) p. 971

Occultation

MORE NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

This morning, as I went out to get the newspaper, I looked up to see the beginning of an occultation of Venus with the waning crescent moon. I was quite surprised, because I didn't know it was going to happen. Usually, the Engineering Geek, who is quite the amateur astronomer, keeps me apprised of these things!
I dropped the paper on the porch and ran in to grab the EG, shaving lather all over his face, as well as my camera.

I also got the Boychick up. I have learned never to say, "Hey, Boychick, do you want to see an occultation of Venus and the Moon?"

Instead, I pounded on the door and yelled, "Hey, Boychick! Hurry! You've got to see this!"

He responded, "What?"

I pretended not to hear. I yelled, banging louder, "Hurry up! You'll miss it!"

Pure curiosity thus achieved what an invitation to learning alone would not.

Here is the rare and wonderful sight

just a moment before first contact,

which is when the planet Venus

appears to just touch the bright curve

of the lunar crescent.

April 22, 2009, 6:13 AM MDT

A few minutes later we see the moment of second contact, when the planet Venus seems

to disappear behind the crescent moon!

Unfortunately, we were not able to see the end of the occultation, when Venus would appear to emerge from behind the shadowy dark of the waning moon. The sun was up by 7:05 AM, and we could scarcely see the Crescent, and we could not find Venus at all!

There are more wonders in the natural world than we can imagine. And today! Today, thank goodness I stopped to see this great sight!

For more on the occultation, check out the Sky and Tel' site.

Great Backyard Bird Count

Despite the problems of the larger world, here in our Sedillo home, we have been enjoying the little things that make our individual lives rich and happy.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the birds are back singing in the mornings as we take our walks.

This weekend is the annual Great Backyard Birdcount 2009 which is sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Audubon Society. The count started on Friday and continues through Monday (Presidents' Day). Thus far, 27,220 checklists have been submitted (we have submitted three), 532 species have been observed, and over three million individual birds have been counted. You can still participate today and tomorrow, and you have several weeks to submit your checklists. Just go to the website linked above and the rest is very easy!

Here is my best picture this year, taken through the bedroom clerestory. This is a Stellar's Jay perched in the bare branches of the Aspen on the northwest side of the house. Unfortunately, the light was such that you see the bird in silhouette. Stellar's Jays are actually a very bright blue. There were two beautiful birds in the tree, but never occupied the same frame at the same time.

We have counted the usual species seen here: Black-capped Chickadees, Common Ravens, Red-tailed Hawks, Pinyon Jays, Stellar's Jays, Crows, and Dark-eyed Juncos (the slate-gray variety common to the Southern Rockies). But most unusually this year, I saw three Lincoln Sparrows in the tree outside my window. It's pretty early for them, so I have no idea why they are here. It was so unusual that I had to check my book (twice) and the internet, too. And when I submitted my checklist, Cornell wanted the ID confirmed. Unfortunately, I was so busy checking my book that I did not get a picture. By the time I thought of it, they had flown away.

Joel Stein Throws Numbers Around

I read several blogs written by mothers of children who have food allergies.
The food allergies are incidental to the purpose of their blogs for all of them.
Nevertheless, I have seen each one need to defend their concerns for their allergic children several times. Most recently, my blog-friend Rational Jenn wrote about the juxtaposition of a (thankfully) false alarm with her son, and a mocking diatribe by LA Times columnist Joel Stein suggesting that allergies to nuts are a figment of the Yuppie-Parent-Who-Wants-Attention's imagination. (You can read Rational Jenn's blog entry I'm Not An Attention-Seeking Psycho by clicking the linked title).

I followed the link Jenn provided to the Joel Stein piece, entitled Nut Allergies--A Yuppie Invention, and I read the column and the comments. According to some of the comments, the Stein column is supposed be witty and humorous. I failed to see either characteristic, but then I believe that humor and wit require more skill than was demonstrated in the writing I found. In fact, the Stein piece did a lot to help me understand why newspapers around the country are crying for a government bail-out. Stein cannot write well enough to clearly explain the facts he was throwing around, and the so-called humor was on the level of the TV sit-com that combines a continuous stream of put-downs and foul language with a laugh track and calls it funny. (This is why I have helped the Feds and the press go into crisis mode because I have not yet modified my TV for HD reception . . . but that's another blog entry).

Since I fail to even begin to see what is funny about Stein's column, I will instead put on my scientist hat and discuss his uncritical and uncomprehending way of throwing scientific language and statistics at the reader. Being an Educational Anarchist, I also discussed how to read and critique this kind of nonsense with my 15 year-old budding scientist, because even really bad writing can be an educational experience. So here we go . . .

NOTE: I will use quite a few biological terms below that are second-nature to me. Since they might not be for you, I will provide definitions at the bottom of the post.

Stein says: "genes don't mutate fast enough to have caused an 18% increase in childhood food allergies between 1997 and 2007 . . ."

There are two problems with this statement.

First, Stein is attributing an increase in childhood food allergies to mutations only, and he is thereby assuming that all food allergies are caused by one gene. In so doing, he is also applying the unstated assumption that no food allergies are polygenic (in which the phenotype expressed is created by a number of genes) or that there are epigenetic factors (the phenotype is created by gene-by-environment interactions). He is also assuming that all food allergy traits found in the population are attributable to genes alone (the heritability is 1), meaning that there is no environmental influence on the gene expression whatsoever. Given what we know about allergic reactions, and the number of proteins involved, as well as the variety of food allergies diagnosed each year, he is almost certainly wrong about every one of these assumptions. Finally, the statement indicates that Stein also assumes that there is no difference in gene frequencies among different populations, an assumption he states again, as we shall see. This statement, as Stein makes it indicates that Stein is ignorant of genetics and of evolutionary theory.

Secondly, Stein not only betrays his ignorance of genetics and evolution here, but he also demonstrates that he does not think critically about the numbers he throws around. Statistics do represent something real, and in bandying them about, it makes sense to think about what they mean. Let's look at the numbers he uses and how he uses them. I will repeat the statement he made to refresh our memories:
". . .genes don't mutate fast enough to have caused an 18% increase in childhood food allergies . . ."

First off, Stein does not provide the mutation rate for the genes in question. This may be because he does not know what genes are mutating, and if there is more than one gene that is mutating, and if so, how many genes he is talking about, and which genes are responsible for each food allergy, and if each gene is solely responsible for that particular food allergy (see above). But even if we give him all of this, his statement implies that an 18% increase in 10 years is a large number. However, to understand whether or not this is true, Stein should have asked himself this simple question: "What is the original number that has been increased by 18% ?" If the number of childhood food allergies is a small to begin with, and if we multiple that number by 18/100 (18%), we would get a very small number that represents the increase.

For example, although I do not know the number of total food allergies in the population, I do know that the number of peanut allergies diagnosed is about 1% of the population in the United States. That's a very small number. 18% of 1% (here you are multiplying two fractions) is smaller still. It is 0.018. This means that the actual increase is 0.118 per 100 individuals. That number is quite small, and since you can expect variance in the number of peanut allergies diagnosed from year to year, such an increase is not even statistically significant.

The statement quoted above also discusses all food allergies and the title of the article refers to nut allergies alone, but in the text Stein switches between these two and allergies to peanuts as if these three terms were interchangable. This verbal sleight of hand reduces the clarity of the writing further, and obfuscates the real meaning of the numbers Stein throws on the page.

Although much of the article is, in Stein's own words, "saying something outrageous to get attention," he does throw another sentence at the page that shows his abyssmal ignorance of population genetics:

"A study of Jews of similar demographics and genetics in Britain and Israel found that British kids were 10 times more likely to have peanut allergies than Israelis."

First, the clarity of the writing suffers in that the reader must assume that he means "British Jews" rather than the more general "British kids." But more importantly, although he states that these two populations have "similar genetics" (by which he likely means that both are Ashkenazi), they are still separate breeding populations. This means that the founding gene pool of each was not identical, and that changes in the gene pool since the divergence between them have taken different trajectories due to natural selection, migration into and out of the gene pool, mutation, and genetic drift. The two populations are therefore diverging genetically with each generation. Joel Stein clearly does not have even an introductory-level understanding of genetics, population genetics and evolution.

And of course, my arguments above are made assuming that the phenotypes for food allergies are the result of genes alone. It is much more certain that they are not, which means that many other factors can account for changes in the frequency of the phenotype in question. Genetic expression in the somatic cell can be influenced by a whole host of environmental conditions that themselves change at the cell level, the organismal level and the population level. And on top of that, the frequency of diagnosis can change dramatically due to better analysis of symptoms, more efficient testing, and more widespread public understanding of a condition. With respect to this last, it is very likely that disparities in access to diagnosis (health insurance coverage, regular physician visits) could account for the class differences seen in the numbers of diagnosed food allergies.

Overall, Stein's column shows his ignorance of science, his woeful innumeracy, and his inability to critically think about what his sources are telling him. He also demonstrates a remarkably mean ill-will towards upper-middle class parents. It could be spite or envy, but whatever it is, the meanness obscures the feeble attempts at humor.

I am glad my local, independent newspaper, The Albuquerque Journal, buys syndicated columnists across the political spectrum that reflect much higher writing standards and much more sophisticated senses of humor. I would certainly not pay to read Stein's drivel.

________________________________________________________________

Definitions:

genotype--the actual genes the individual carries on their DNA

phenotype--how those genes are expressed, or more commonly, what traits the individual displays due to the combination of genes inherited

gene expression--the transcription and translation of the genetic code in the cell, which results in the making of proteins; gene expression is influenced by environmental factors and ultimately results in the phenotype

polygenic--a trait influenced by more than one gene

epigenetics--the combination of genetic and environmental influences on the expression of genes

heritability--the proportion of phenotype in a population that is due to genetics. A heritability of 0 would mean that the trait is question is entirely environmentally determined, and a heritability of 1 means that the trait is entirely determined by genes. Most traits of interest in a population are somewhere in between these two extremes.

allele--an alternative form of a gene that is located at a specific position on a specific chromosome

gene frequency (a.k.a. allelic frequency)--the number of alternative forms of the same gene in a population. If the allelic frequency of a gene is changing in a population, we can say that the population is evolving with respect to that trait.

mutation--a change in a gene (alleles are the result of mutation)

genetic flow--the movement of genes into and out of a breeding population (this occurs by migration of individuals into and out of the population)

genetic drift--the accumulation of random genetic changes that change the gene pool of a population

natural selection--the process whereby heritable traits become more or less common in a population due to their influence on survival and reproduction (some traits may be undergoing selection in an environment whereas others are not); also natural selection acts on the traits--that is the phenotype NOTE: the level of at which natural selection occurs is the population, individuals do not evolve

biological evolution--a change in gene frequencies in a population over time

divergence (divergent evolution)--when one gene pool becomes two due to some physical separation, the combination of natural selection due to different environmental conditions and gene flow, genetic drift, and mutation, changes the gene frequencies in each population independent of the other

Road Construction Complete: An Ode to Practical Genius

NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

The heavy equipment is gone and the
road signs are up!
The Los Pecos Trail extension and
Los Pecos Loop are complete!

The utilities are humming at the side of road.

Until Los Pecos Homeschool made a project

out of following all the phases of

road construction across previously undeveloped land,

we had no idea what really goes into building a road. It has been a great learning to experience this project from start to finish. Such learning does not come everyday.

It is kind of amazing to consider that ten months ago, this road was a line on a map, and before that it was a spark of inspiration in the developers head as he walked through the tangled woods.

Now, it is something new under the sun!

Everything is in place: the grades, the drainage, the utility lines underneath. Soon we will forget that this hill was a tangled mass of juniper and scrub-oak, and very difficult to navigate. It is already beginning to seem like this road belongs here; that it has always been here.

And therin lies a certain danger. Many people in this country have no idea what is required to have roads, utilities and houses. They do not understand the creativity and ingenuity that go into our modern infrastructure.

And thus it has been neglected. From highways to levees, we just expect it to be there. We often don't stop to consider the amazing work of the human mind and imagination it takes to build even a simple road. We don't believe we should have to put up with the cost and inconvenience that go along along with maintaining infrastructure. And so we don't appreciate this kind of practical genius that makes our lives so rich and full, and immensely easier.

Driving the Turquoise Trail: The Ortiz

NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

I took my camera on the drive to Santa Fe intending to take some pictures and I even started out early to have plenty of time! I thought to put those pictures of this beautiful drive up as part of Nearly Wordless Wednesday. Alas! I had left the digital disc in the USB port of my computer!

Next week I'll get pictures. Today, you get a Geological Map from the US Geological Survey with San Pedro Watershed overlay by Kathy Lathrop of New Mexico Tech.

I drive across the San Pedro Watershed and the Ortiz mountains on the Turquois Trail (NM Highway 14) every Wednesday. On this map, NM 344 is clearly visible in the Estancia Basin, near the eastern margin. The little pink road to the west that run northward just east of the the Sandia Mountain Granite (Yg) across the faulted Permian limestone is Highway 14.

The Ortiz mountains are a source for gold, and the Ortiz Mine was one of the first western US gold mines. The San Pedro Watershed has much placer gold brought down from the Ortiz by streams. Look for the pale yellow rock labeled QTs (for Quaternary-Tertiary sediments). Indeed, NM 344 and 14 (the Turquoise Trail) meet up just south of the town of Golden, NM just north of this map's top margin.

You can guess from the faulting and the many colors indicating many contacts between different rock, that my drive is quite beautiful.

Next Week: Pictures! (I Promise!).

It's a Political Neologism: The Problem with "Consensus" Science

I have been thinking about writing this entry for at least a month.
And I have shied away from it because of the flaming I will probably receive
from the BSer ideologues of the blogosphere, but I remembered this little quote:

"He said: 'G-d hates a coward.'
'So you came because you didn't want to lose a bet?'
"No. I would never bet on a lady. I just figured that he was right.'"
(This may be slightly paraphrased. I read the book in fourth grade. Many HSers will know which book).

My other excuses are gone: I have finished three papers, an exam, and an NIH draft proposal.
And even though I am in training for my summer job, and that is quite extensive, it does not take the same intellectual energy that writing closely argued papers about big ideas does.

I want to start with a story.

At the beginning of the last century, a geologist in Germany called Alfred Wegener went for a walk on a spring day and got caught up watching the ice break up on the river. As he did so, he was thinking about the interesting fact that similar fossils from similar strata were found on different continents. The ice breaking up in the river was one of those "aha" moments, and he said something akin to "Eureka! I have found Pangea!" (My apologies to Archemedes). He wrote extensively about his idea of Continental Drift and he even developed a mechanism for it--that centrifugal force caused the continents to drift about the planet. But that mechanism was not very plausible, and he was ridiculed severely by his fellow geologists. Wegener did not live to see the modern scientific revolution in the Earth Sciences resulting in the paradigm of Plate Tectonics.

Were Wegener's colleagues defenders of "consensus" science? This idea has been recently bandied about by those who have a bone to pick with Global Climate Change (often inaccurately called "global warming").

The answer is no. Although the ridiculing of Wegener was over the top,
inpolite, and generally shows that many scientists lack the social graces, a characteristic they share with the rest of humanity,
this has nothing to do with why his idea was rejected back at the beginning of the 20th century. His idea was rejected because, although he had a good deal of circumstantial evidence (fossils of ferns in Antarctica, the shape of South America and Africa), he could demonstrate no plausible mechanism for his theory. It was not exactly a crack-pot idea--it had possibilities--but it was also not scientifically defendable at the time. It was not until the International Geophysical Year of 1956 brought about a decade of accumulating evidence that the old paradigm (geosynclinal) could not explain, that a good mechanism for continental drift was found, and the theory of Plate Tectonics was born.

Scientists do not generally speak in terms of "consensus" in their fields.
This is not because there is none--most working scientists do work under the dominant paradigm in their fields (such as evolutionary theory in biology)--but because scientific questions are not decided by consensus. They are decided by evidence that supports a theory or not.

Scientific paradigms do not change just because a bunch of scientists get together in smoke filled rooms and decide that they are tired of the old paradigm and they'd like to trade it in for a new one, like an old-model car. A paradigm shift is not brought about by a vote or political pressure by concerned citizens. It is not created because someone goes on a fishing expedition to disprove an unpopular idea. Neither is one caused by a few crusaders for scientific truth battling it out with the forces of complacency and the need to get NSF grants and media coverage.

Scientific paradigms shift because of the accumulation of evidence by many people working in the field, (most of whom are not out to create a scientific revolution), evidence that does not support the current theory. Consensus, for good or ill, has nothing to do with it. Science does not work that way. And contrary to popular belief, the inception of a new paradigm does not automatically cast the old one into the outer darkness of scientific untruth. Bohr and Einstein (Quantum Mechanics) did not, for example, overturn Newton (Classical Mechanics). Newton's laws are still with us and they still work. Don't go to Mars without them!

Consensus is a social phenomenon and a political term.
It is about getting together and hammering out a deal that everyone in an argument can agree to, even if they don't like all of the parts of it.
One cannot hammer out a deal about gravity, or the duel nature of light (particle and wave), or the role of the electron in chemical reactions. One cannot vote the theory of evolution up or down.
Consensus is simply not a scientific term.

So when I see the term 'consensus science' bandied about in the press, among pols, and in common parlance, I know that the discussion is not a scientific one.
I know the discussion has become political.

Take Global Climate Change (GCC)--please! (Sorry. I just had to do that. It's in my genes ;).
There is little question that the earth's climate has changed over the 4.6 billion years of its existence. It is not surprising that climate has continued changing even though humanity has built civilization over the past 10,000 years. (Oh the temerity of nature! Oh, the duplicity of nature's God! How dare this happen just now, when the Boomers are in charge)!

Scientific questions about GCC center on how it is changing, what modeling procedures give the best predictions for future change, what forces intensify or mitigate the change, how the change will affect weather in different localities and so forth. All of these questions involve factors of great complexity and are hotly debated, and rightly so. The scientific controversy is over the evidence and what it tells us.
There should be no premature closure on questions like these because "four out of five scientists say so." Science is not done by taking polls.

The politics of GCC is, as we used to say in the midwest, "a whole 'nother animal."
Questions of a political nature about GCC are, for example, what (if anything) should we do about GCC, can and should we try to alter its course (to which I say sardonically, "Good luck!"), who should be blamed, and how can GCC be "spun" in order to fit a favorite political ideology.

Science does not work by consensus.
When you see the term "consensus science" used,
your gut should be telling you that the discussion has gone political.
Whether it is used to promote Carbon Credits, or demand equal time for Intelligent Design,
matters not. The right, the left, the rigid and the looney, are all equally guilty of hijacking the term "science" to promote their own political ends.

Science is a method of discovering how the physical world works through the use of physical evidence. It cannot tell us what to believe about supernatural beings, nor can it tell us the best way to deal with the current price of oil.

Consensus science?
Science is science.
The arguments about consensus a la Al Gore and Ben Stein are political.