Science From Multiple World Views?

Recently I stumbled upon a small publisher of home school materials called Gravitas Publications. This publisher's main product is called Real Science 4 Kids by Dr. Rebecca Keller. I have no expertise in home school curricula, and from what I have seen some aspects of her approach seem sensible.

What bothers me is her claim that science can be taught from the point of view of multiple world views in a strictly neutral sort of way.

She writes:

"Yes! Real science doesn’t choose sides. So when teaching science, it’s important that the lessons let kids explore all sides. Otherwise, choosing one side can get in the way of understanding the real science. Darwinism, creationism, intelligent design theory, and all the other “isms” are simply paradigms (or “lenses”) through which science is viewed. The “-isms” are philosophies based on perceptions for how science is interpreted. Students need to learn how “-isms” play a role in science."

Ok, science doesn't choose sides in that is ideologically neutral- there is no conservative science, or Christian science, or Buddhist science. There ideally is just science. And she is right- our world view does affect how we interpret science. But is science really neutral in terms of the world view it admits?

Personally I think not. For example I don't see much support in science for the notion that the Universe or the Earth is say 10,000 years old or that the goal of a liquid is to seek its lowest level, or that magic is real. At the very least science since it is empirical forces scientific explanations and tests of scientific ideas to be mechanistic and transparent.

At any rate, check out Dr. Keller's video discussing the issue of multiple world views and see what you think:

A New Word.

Picked up a new word today courtesy of an article in Scientific American on Freeman Dyson. The word is "bunkrapt." The neologism coined by Peter Medawar in the 1980's means, to according to the article, to be "infatuated with bunk." So I guess it is from bunk + rapture. I can't wait to use this on my favorite intelligent design hipster or anti-vaccine fanatic.

The article's author John Horgan notes referring to what he sees as some of the wacky beliefs of Freeman Dyson that:

"The gleeful rebel Dyson, it seems to me, embodies our bunkrapt era, when the delineation between knowledge and pseudo-knowledge is becoming increasingly blurred; genuine authorities are mistaken for hucksters and vice versa; and we all believe whatever damn thing we want to believe."

Oops that's not right!

In my distant past I was a research assistant working with a scientist who had a whole bunch of pair wise correlations between variables in a very large data set. The researcher found some interesting correlations between some of these variables and complained that the statistician involved with the research said that the correlations were not significant even though looked at in isolation they were significant. I had to agree with the statistician and fortunately was able to convince my boss that the statistician was indeed correct here. My reasoning was basically by analogy-if you flip 100 coins you expect to find on average 50 heads and 50 tails and your results should vary around that by chance. Further, every once in a while, you expect to find say 20 heads and 50 tails just by chance and you would not get excited about that. In the same way if you have a slew of uncorrelated variables by chance you can get some significant correlations.

Scientists love statistically "significant" results but this last year a very interesting article titled "The Truth Wears Off" appeared in the New Yorker looking at a disturbingly common pattern in science, called the decline effect. Often, especially with complex phenomena initial experimental results are highly significant , but then with replication the results either are not so pronounced or disappear entirely. The results cannot be replicated. The article's author Jonah Lehrer gives a wide range of examples from both basic and applied science and lists a number of reasons why this phenomenon happens.

Some of the reasons discussed are bias toward positive results, include regression toward the mean, and publication bias, none of which by themselves explain what is going on. The most likely culprit seems to be selective reporting and this has actually itself been tested by a biologist by the name of Richard Palmer. Lehrer says the following about Palmer's investigation:

"Palmer’s most convincing evidence relies on a statistical tool known as a funnel graph. When a large number of studies have been done on a single subject, the data should follow a pattern: studies with a large sample size should all cluster around a common value—the true result—whereas those with a smaller sample size should exhibit a random scattering, since they’re subject to greater sampling error. This pattern gives the graph its name, since the distribution resembles a funnel....after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn’t random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results."

Palmer's results suggest that reporting bias is everywhere in science and Palmer concludes that:

“We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated.”

The article gives a range of disturbing examples from a wide range of disciplines and gloomily concludes that:

"Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions."

So what's to be done? From my perspective there are several things, some of which are discussed int he article. First of all scientists have to avoid what the article terms significance chasing-getting excited about seemingly significant correlations as my old boss did. Related to that, scientists need to be sure that they are indeed using appropriately conservative tests, that is tests that minimize the chance that an incorrect hypothesis will be accepted. Data needs to be open and available for scrutiny and experimental controls carefully laid out. When I teach, one one thing I tell my students is that the hypothesis and the experimental design has to be worked out in advance of testing the hypothesis including the sample sizes.

Maybe we forget- and don't properly train our students to remember- that a hypothesis is just that - it is a guess, perhaps informed by theory but it is still a guess and non significant results are still meaningful. Of course it would help if funding agencies by they governmental or private would remember that as well!

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer

Practical pantheism?

The movie Avatar must really be a great movie because it has struck so many nerves on the left and the right. My favorite (and I use that word advisedly) take is from the loony right by Phil Kline Kansas's former attorney general. I am not going to dissect his whole scree which you can read here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2415427/posts?page=64

Kline predictably thinks it is pro-environmental propaganda, for he writes:

"The natives are one with their native planet, including their mother-god Eywa. Eywa is the planet, and the natives reach oneness by entwining fibers from their bodies with the fibers of the planet. This representative sexual union allows them to hear their departed ancestors and gain rhythm with the planet — a séance orgy so to speak. All life on the planet is one, with one spirit and one energy."

Notice how nicely he works in the evil SEX into his rhetoric.

Later on we get the evil bugaboo of evolution:

"Such a prayer represents atheistic Hollywood's dilemma. The only way to reconcile a godless Darwinistic worldview with a deeply spiritual American culture is to convert environmentalism into religion. For what greater purpose for man than to save mother earth, or Pandora? And thus, our purpose in a purposeless world."

And he says that that culture of the Pandorans is Pantheistic. Well that is true I suppose but if Kline would take off his blinders a bit he would see that it is really a practical pantheism. After all, on Pandora evolution (sorry Phil that is the way the world works) has led to a system where the Pandorans can little plug into each other and indeed that is necessary for their survival. So it's not some really some sort of mystical new age Pantheism, but quite practical.

Now we don't have the same explicit connections to our environment that the Pandorans have but we are interconnected much more and need the rest of the biosphere a lot more than Kline seems to care about. At simplest level we are not even a single organism but a community of roughly 100 trillion human cells and 10 times that many bacterial cells that are symbiotic with us. And I don't think that includes the mitochondria which were believed derived from free living bacteria. And examples of how we are interconnected can be multiplied repeatedly at other levels of biological organization.

So Kline and company may scream but maybe we need a good dose of practical pantheism.

Why do peope repeat falsehoods?

A few months ago I saw a claim that if theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking were in Britain with its socialized medicine he would have been dead by now. I blew it off as another stupid comment but apparently this comment has gotten repeated all over the web. The problem of course is the it is not true as Larry Krauss reminds us in this article in Scientific American:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=war-is-peace

So why do people repeat that sort of tripe?

Krauss asks

"What makes people so susceptible to nonsense in public discourse? Is it because we do such a miserable job in schools teaching what science is all about—that it is not a collection of facts or stories but a process for weeding out nonsense to get closer to the underlying beautiful reality of nature? Perhaps not."

My thought is that whether we are dealing with health care, global warming or various sorts of social issues, we get an emotional high from thinking we are going to win, pull the wool over our opponent's head. Or maybe repetition of simple nostrums and unexamined falsehoods provides us with a sense of security when dealing with the unknown. Maybe such behavior was at one point adaptive maintaining some sort of group cohesion.

Krauss phrases his arguments with examples from the right, but I don't think people of any ideology are immune to this. As I commented in a post to one of my readers it is if we are stuck in a strange attractor or the sort of cycling that a person's brain might get into when they are depressed and can't get out.

As Krauss so ably observes, quoting apparently from an earlier Krauss commentary:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

The Evolution of Beauty

I am never away from thinking about evolution. Being at Disney last week taking lots of pictures of flowers, got my thinking about evolution and beauty. Take this shot of a flower from Disney:



Actually this structure is called a spathe and it really a group of fused flowers wrapt around by a leaf. Think of Jack in the Pulpit and you have idea.


At first glance, not a traditionally beautiful picture and yet if you really look at it I suspect you will see a certain sensuousness to this image. I am reminded of Georgia O'Keeffe who allegedly said she painted flowers because she couldn't afford models. The traditional explanation for why flowers are beautiful is that that this is a by product of the coevolution between flowers and pollinators. But that really doesn't explain why they are beautiful for us. Part of the answer maybe that flowers also coevolved with us and breeders selected for beauty. But why beauty in the first place?

In terms of sexual beauty and attractiveness, it appears that humans and other animals have innate neurological biases that operate in conjunction with Darwinian sexual selection leading to elaboration of certain characteristics. But why these biases? Why not just respond to the narrow signs required for our reproduction and not feel rewarded emotionally by flowers and other things that we see as beautiful be it a flower, a poem or a butterfly?




Of course, I would want an evolutionary explanation because of my (innate perhaps?) desire for explanation. How do things come about? How do they work? But just because scientists are interested in these sorts of questions no way diminishes the emotional response and appreciation of beauty in all its forms.

Nor does beauty exist in a vacuum. Our innate neurological biases may be enhanced or over ridden by our experience or cultural preconceptions. For instance for me the beauty of the Rhododendron in the picture above is enhanced by the presence of these little bug (actually Katydid) nymphs:



There is a richness of connection that the nymphs add that for me is itself part of beauty and would be missing if I had taken a shot of the flower alone.

A Big Dog of a Robot

While people are running around in a panic over the economy, new innovations are constantly happening. It's beginning to look like robots are the new "Next Big Thing". Of course robots have been used for years in the assembly of automobiles, but what's new are completely independent robots that can coexist with us as part of our daily environment.

Most familiar are iRobot's rug and floor cleaning robots. But iRobot also makes a number of robots for the use in dangerous environments. If you watch CSI or similar shows, you may have seen these 'bots.

So check out this video from a start up company called Boston Dynamics which has developed an autonomous robot called Big Dog:



I am not sure what the loud noise is due to. But since Big Dog doesn't seem to make the noise when tethered to cables, perhaps the noise is due to some sort of power generator.

Speaking of iRobot, people I know who use the rug cleaning 'bots all have super neat houses and they probably really don't need the robot. So as an iRobot stockholder, I keep trying to get the company to beta test its housecleaning robots under real battle conditions- namely my house.

What are they afraid of? Don't they want to see if they can pass the cleaning 'bot Turing test?

Needless to say, these robots do raise a number of ethical issues. As robots become more and more autonomous do we want robots to make life and death decisions in the battlefield? I would argue probably not. But decision making speed is important so this will put pressure on developers such as iRobot to work towards robots that can make independent decisions to kill, at least in certain situations.

Can use of these robot weapons be justified in terms of the rules of war? Ethicists have begun wrestling with those sorts of issues. Here for instance is a paper from the Georgia Institute of Technology: Governing Lethal Behavior. It is a large file. The article notes though that we already have semi robotic systems in place that do make decisions whether or not to fire.

This paper quotes a government study which says:

"Armed UMS [Unmanned Systems] are beginning to be fielded in the current battlespace, and will be extremely common in the Future Force Battlespace…
This will lead directly to the need for the systems to be able to operate autonomously for extended periods, and also to be able to collaboratively engage hostile targets within specified rules of engagement… with final decision on target engagement being left to the human operator….

Fully autonomous engagement without human intervention should also be
considered, under user-defined conditions, as should both lethal and non-lethal engagement and effects delivery means."

Note the last sentence. Now warfare often is constrained by various sorts of rules of engagement and conventions, but what's going to happen when these systems begin to fall into the hands of a determined foe who isn't constrained by the same sorts of rules. What about our government finding some justification for a previously taboo use of these systems? And I am not being partisan here. Linguistic shenanigans are not a monopoly of Republicans or Democrats, shocking as that may be.

Suppose humans are left in the decision making loop. Is the result going to be any better? As warfare becomes more and more like a video game, will the detachment of humans from the actual battlefront lead to greater abuse of these systems?

Geesh! What ever happened to those good old ethical issues-embryonic stem cells for instance. We haven't adjusted to issues raised by those technologies and here is a whole set of new issues. And I just want a 'bot that can clean my floors!

Cross posted from Dangerous Ideas.

What happens when we die?

I'm not thinking of the big question here, but as our lives get more and more online, what happens to all those pieces of stuff that we leave online? And equally important, will anyone know we are gone as opposed to merely lost interest or a bad connection?

Well a Second Life cyber friend of mine, Mike Burleigh has set up a cyber memorial oriented mainly to Second LIfe Life Residents who have died.



The memorial is at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cassandra/147/188/79. Second Life users who are on a machine with SL installed can paste the slurl into their web browser to launch the SL map and teleport over.

Seems macabre at first until you think about how intertwined we are with the web.

A Strange Website

Here is a site that I became aware of when the editor took issue with some comments I made about DDT and the Junk Science site on my local science blog, Dangerous Ideas.

http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/index.html

The site editor claims:

"Our unique collection of editors and scientific advisers maintain an ongoing intellectual dialogue with leading thinkers in many areas, including biology, physics, space science, oceanography, nuclear energy, and ancient epigraphy. Original studies by the controversial economist Lyndon LaRouche have challenged the epistemological foundations of the von Neumann and Wiener-Shannon information theory, and located physical science as a branch of physical economy. In science policy areas, we have challenged sacred cows, from the theory of global warming to the linear threshold concept of radiation."

Lyndon LaRouche? Now having a bit of a Romantic streak, I do like rooting for the maverick but I find LaRouche incomprehensible and always did. I remember patiently listening to one of campaign speeches on the tube and going "say what?" Some times I get obscure, but LaRouche is really beyond obscure all the time.

What is curious is that he seems to have attracted a following as described in these Washington Post articles. I am sure they only present one side but they are fascinating reads.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/cult/larouche/main.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46883-2004Oct20.html

According to the first Washington Post report:

"LaRouche, who expresses loathing for timid conformists, wears belligerence like a badge. He and his supporters accuse perceived enemies of slander, crimes, plots and perversions. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda had nothing to do with the September 11, 2001, attacks, LaRouche says. Elements within the U.S. military launched the attacks as an attempted coup. Defense Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz was one of the conspirators, LaRouche claims, along with former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and the Israeli army."

What is it that attracts people to these sorts of convoluted conspiracy theories, be it this one or any one of the many that propagate through the web? Strangely enough I don't like to completely dismiss these LaRouche sites any more than I completely dismiss creationist sites. There is a certain sense that they can ground us be making us revisit how we think know what we think we know (See, I told you I could be obscure if you didn't follow that).

That's perhaps a good thing especially for the young, but also for any one from time to time. After all, much of our conventional wisdom does turn out to be as Douglas Adams might say were he alive - almost completely unlike what is really going on. Most of us though don't get too hung up on these sorts of epistemological issues and go about with our little rules of thumb about how things work.

So what gives? Am I just, well, obtuse? Maybe its just the virus I have been fighting.

Conservatives and Evolution

Lest you are one of those people who think that belief in evolution is restricted to the "liberal elite", what ever that is, then I would urge you to take a gander at Darwinian Conservatism, the newest blog on my blogroll.

http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/

I don't agree with everything there of course, but Larry Arnhart is one conservative who is out there tackling the demons from the Discovery Institute. See for instance:

http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2007/12/questions-and-answers-for-john-west.html

and response to questions from the DI's John West:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/12/the_questions_larry_arnhart_wo.html#more

Also see this interesting exchange:
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/ArnhartDarwinDesign.shtml

Essentialism and abortion

At the Journal World in Lawrence there has been a lively discussion of abortion-actually lots of name calling so discussion is used very loosely and over at Dangerous Ideas I attempted to bring some rationality to the discussion. But not too many people on either side of the abortion issue seem interested in rational arguments that cannot be encapsulated in a short sentence with consisting solely of 3 letter words one of which must be an expletive.

Some one did finally ask me when I thought an embryo or fetus becomes human. Here is my response:

"If you mean identifiably human as opposed to some other animal then even
the egg and sperm are human. Do you mean developing as a unique entity
potentially capable of developing into an adult? That would be the formation of
the zygote. Do you mean sufficient development of the nervous system to feel
pain? That is later at some stage of fetal development. Or do you mean
sufficient cognitive development to be aware of self? Exactly what are
you asking?

Maybe you are asking the wrong question. To illustrate consider another
one of my infamous thought experiments. Consider a mother whose life would be in
serious peril if she did not abort her potential offspring at different
developmental stages. Would the mother be more likely to put her life at risk
for a zygote or a 4 week old fetus, an 8 week old fetus? A 21 week old fetus? A
bet the mother's calculus would change the closer and closer the fetus is to
full term.

A mother would probably not risk her life for the zygote as readily as when
the fetus was close to term. According to my Church's teaching the zygote
is fully human but would even the best Catholic mother risk her life for a
zygote? For her child yes, but for a zygote?"

By the way the discussion was sparked by a Cal Thomas article on Roe v. Wade. See the article and associated discussion here.

Have You Changed Your Mind?

One of my favorite online reads is Edge which bills itself as representing the third culture. The third culture refers to those intellectuals who bridge the sciences and the humanities, what C.P. Snow referred to as the "Two Cultures". One feature of Edge is a series of contributed response to some important question of the year. This year's question is "What have you changed your mind about?" and the responses are quite fascinating. At least the scientist's responses should put to rest the notion often bandied about by non scientists that scientists are inflexible and dogmatic.

Here are some mind changers worth checking out:

Paul Davies used to be a committed Platonist. About time he came around to my type of thinking.

Lera Boroditsky has decided that language can change our sensory perceptions after her experimental data contradicted her original and long held belief.

William Calvin has changed his mind about global warming after visiting Greenland.

Roger Bingham has given up evolutionary psychology..or at least what had been the prevailing notion of how the human mind worked.

Finally on a pessimistic note but he may be right, Lee Silver concludes that in contrast with what intellectuals like to often believe:

" While its mode of expression may change over cultures and time, irrationality and mysticism seem to be an integral part of normal human nature, even among highly educated people. No matter what scientific and technological advances are made in the future, I now doubt that supernatural beliefs will ever be eradicated from the human species."

What have I changed my mind about? Over time I have gradually shifted my belief in the balance of nature, now believing that the biological world consists of populations opportunistically evolving and that the balance of nature, like design, is an illusion.

What other mind changers are out there? How have your beliefs changed?

Conservatives split over Darwin

Often times conservatives are portrayed as being anti evolution. But an article in today's NY Times, notes a growing split among conservatives. Some conservatives take the intelligent design/ creationist approach, that evolution negates God and thus undermines the fundamental rationale for human rights and morality.

Other conservatives argue that evolutionary thinking is consistent with conservative thought. For instance conservatives and evolutionary biologists, according to this argument, both believe that humans are imperfect. Social systems have evolved and such systems evolved from the ground up "have more wisdom than rationally planned reforms". This argument reminds me of the free market idea that individuals making their own decisions make for more efficient markets then centrally planned systems.

From my way of thinking there are flaws in both approaches. The intelligent design/creationist argument is flawed because they present no scientifically credible alternative to evolution. Unless of course you consider the Creation Science Museum credible. The flaw in the second approach is Hume's Guillotine. Hume argued that you cannot argue what ought to be from what is. This means for instance, that just because other animals behave in a certain way that means we can behave the same way. Or just because a certain institution has operated the same way for hundreds of years doesn't mean that it is relevant today.

David Hume (Scottish National Portrait Gallery)

My approach is a bit more pragmatic. First I believe that the bottom up approach that evolution takes suggests that markets ought to generally be free. This also applies to most other sorts of freedom of choice issues. Yet we also know that evolution is blind and that there are issues that need a rational look ahead approach to certain key problems facing us as a civilization and species.

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The Tyranny of the Dichotomous Mind

Richard
Dawkins in his book, The Ancestor's
Tale, bemoans what he calls the Tyranny of the Dichotomous Mind. What he means is that when we look at the world around us, we tend to want to classify everything
into discrete groups. That makes some sort of sense after all, from
our perspective, the world is made out of discrete objects that it is
adaptive in an evolutionary sense for us to recognise. Being able to
distinguish a lion from a gazelle is certainly adaptive. This ability
to classify into distinct groups is not limited to humans. For instance
in a recent study by Chris Templeton (see http://acp.eugraph.com/news/news05/templeton.html
) suggest that at least some birds recognise different predators and
cnvey this information in their warning calls. Many organisms are able
to distinguish individuals that belong to their group from those that
do not. When you think about it this sort of dichotomous behavior in
very basic. Indeed, one of the things the immune system has to do
is discriminate between cells that belong in the body from those that
do not.

So given the obvious adaptive advantage to doing this sort of
classification, why does Dawkins speak of the Tyranny of the
dichotomous mind? First of all not all phenomena have sharp boundaries
as suggested by a dichotomy. Consider color. Most humans can look at an
individual monochromatic color swatch and classify it as to perceived
spectral color(Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet). But when one
looks at the visible spectrum as a whole this gets more difficult since
it is clear that the colors blend in a continuous or if you will,
analog manner. Second of all, we confuse classification with the
thing itself. For instance Dawkins discusses some of the problems
inherent in trying to distinguish one biological species from another.
The boundaries are not at all clear in many cases. Indeed, I like to
tell my students that even were there no transitional fossils (and there
plently inspite of Creationist claims to the contrary), we have plenty
of evidence that the different kinds of organisms we see arise
from preexisting kinds. The evidence is in the messy boundaries we see
when we try to impose dichotomy on the species around us.


The tyranny of the dichotomous mind is related to another tyranny, I
call the "Tyranny of the Type" or Typological Tyranny. People who are
prone to this tyranny assume that objects have some sort of intrinsic
nature which defines a class of objects uniquely. Clearly this is
many times true, or else classification schemes would not be
feasable. Hunter gatherering tribes, with no formal training in
taxonomy recogise the same sorts of species of birds that a trained
taxomist might recognize at least most of the time. But this sort of
discreteness and non arbitraryness in many classification schemes is
often burdened with extra meaning which makes it difficult to deal with
some fundamental issues our society such as when does human life begin
or end, our identity in terms of gender or race and even our identity
as a species.



For instance Senator Brownback of Kansas proposed a bill
(S. 659—The
Human Chimera Prohibition Act of 2005), which
bans the use of so called human chimeras. See http://www.asbmb.org/ASBMB/site.nsf/0/AF98278139BC60FB85256FE1006784A6?OpenDocument.
A chimera is defined in biology as an organism composed of cells from
unrelated organisms, two or more species. Chimeras are routinely used
today in plant biology and have become increasingly important in animal
biology to gain an understanding of animal development, including human
development. A good lay person's review of some of the ethical issues
raised by animal chimeras, especially chimeras involving human cells is
an article by Maryann
Mott in National Geographic, which is very
heavily cited today. The ethical issues surrounding chimeras involving
human cells mixed with animal cells revolve around two basic concerns.
First is the concern about blurring the lines between humans and
animals: Brownback in a a recent Lawrence Journal World article ( http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/jul/05/brownback_works_ban_humanhybrid_research/
) notes:

“From the moral perspective, to create a human that is less than fully human or to create an animal that possesses particularly unique human aspects should be a serious concern for all of humankind”

and the text of his Senate Bill contains this narrative:

"Congress finds that-- advances in research and technology have made possible the creation of chimeras, which are beings with diverse human and non-human tissue; serious ethical objections are raised to some types of chimeras because they blur the lines between human and animal, male and female, parent and child, and one individual and another individual; respect for human dignity and the integrity of the human species may be threatened by chimeras; the uniqueness of individual human beings is manifested in a particular way through their brain and their reproductive organs/cells";

and...

"...with an increase in emerging zoonotic infection threatening the public health,
both domestically and abroad, chimeras present a particularly optimal means of genetic transfers that
could increase the efficiency or virulence of diseases threatening both
humans and animals."

This narrative points out the second concern, namely that the jump of
viruses and other infectious agents to humans from other animals could
be facilitated by animal human chimeras since the cells are obviously
in contact. Personally I think that Brownback is right to be concerned
about the ethics of chimeras and some sort of ethical guidelines, and
restrictions are needed. Indeed the National Academy of Science has
released a set of proposed ethical guidelines covering stem cell and
and chimera research: http://www.nap.edu/books/0309096537/html/.

I suspect these guidelines will be controversial and it is going to
take sometime to reach a reasonable consensus. What I call your
attention to is Senator Brownback's comment about the integrety of the
human species and about blurring the lines between human and animal,
male and female...one individual and another. These are nice
sounding phrases, and as indivuals we don't like threats to our own
identity. As an aside I fund in amusing that we often want to tell
people what their identity ought to be in addition to be concerned
about our own identity. But banning human chimera research will
not prevent blurring of the lines between human and animal, male and
female parent and child, one individual and another because in biology
these lines are already blurred.

Not only are we perfectly good
animals, but it turns out we are also chimeras or at least have our
origin as a chimeric sort of relationship. First in our gut, we have a
large numbers of bacteria that live in a symbiotic relationship.
Even our cells are chimeral in nature. Consider that the mitochondria
in our cells apearantly arose from free living aerobic bacterial that
became associated with the ancestors of eukaryotic cells. Further there
is appearently lateral gene transfer between the mitochondrial genome
and the genome in the cell nucleus.

Above the cellular level, consider gender. The
concept of male and female useless for many groups of organisms. For instabce,
What's male and female in yeasts or in certain protists which have a
number of mating strains but the 'gametes' are the same size? What's
male and female in flowering plants that often have 'male' and 'female'
flower parts on the same plant and often in the same flower? In
non human animals- certain fish, such as clown fish, change from
male to female situationally. Even in humans- sex and gender lines are
blurred a lot more often the typical person might think. See Lynn
Conway http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html
for some interesting and eye opening estimates on the frequency of
transsexuality. Some of her numbers are inflated I suspect but the
point is even in humans some of our fundamental boundaries say between
male and female are blurred.

How about the distinction between humans and other animals? I am
astounded that my students seem blind to the fact that we humans
are perfectly good animals. As a species we may well have adaptations
that are unique to us, but as Dawkins notes, genetically the gap
between us and the rest of the apes is quite small. In fact we are so
close that even though chimpanzees are apparently our closest
relatives, some of us actually have certain genes (more precisely
alleles) found in Gorillas but not in Chimpanzees. What makes us human may be the
result of subtle changes in the timing and regulation of
developmental events related to the nervous system. Some scientists
have implied a few key events among them a mutation related to jaw size
and muscle attachment as being critical in human evolution. What
these key events are is not clear, but it seems to me that these events
are probably quite prosaic such that were we to go back in space and
time we would not be able to say "ah this ape is really human and this
one is not." It much the same as in our own lives where little events
may go unnoticed as being critical in shaping us exept with the benefit
of hindsight.

Darwin recognized that we really are not distinct from the rest of the
animals. This evolutionary kinship is reflected in our laws and
ethical stance toward other animals. Not anything goes: we have laws
against animal cruelty; animal experimentation today involves oversight
by animal care committies. Indeed there has been an ethical progression
toward increased concern and oversight about the treatment of animals.
When I was an undergraduate I was repeatedly warned to not be
anthropomorphic about othe animals because they don't have the same
sorts of cognitive abilities and awareness that we have. That is
true to some degree, but carried to an extreme, this
anti-anthropomorphic stance was used to justify cruel experimentation.
I am not an antivivisectionist but the recognition that we are not
separate from animals in a scientific sense clearly affects our ethical
stance toward non human animals and how we treat them as experimental
subjects.

I don't think it is any accident that the rise of animal
welfare organizations such as the SPCA stems from the time of
Darwin. Darwin was actually sometimes excessively
anthropomorphic, even giving earthworms greater credit for cognitive
abilities they do not really possess.

The tyranny of the type is still wide spread in medicine and
psychiatry, mercifully less so. But the idea is that there is a normal
physiological state for the human organism or perhaps some optimum
mental state and deviations from that are illness. So people
suffer from minor depression or mood swings and they take medication. A
child with ADHD is given Ritalin, a person whose body mass index is
above or below a certain level is considered obese or perhaps the
reverse. a person with a fever might take aspirin or some other
antipyretic to reduce the fever.

Now I am not arguing against use of medications; for me certain types of medications have literally been a life saver but sometimes the symptom may actually be an adaptive response. For instance, today we understand that fever is an adaptive
response to infection rather than an accidental symptom. The immune
system tends to work better at higher temperatures and higher
temperatures aslo seem to inhibit viral replication.


The tyranny of the dichotomous mind, the type: it divides us from
Nature; it divides us from each other and it divides us from ourselves
and from our own identies. It all springs from a logical fallacy that
since recognizing objects is an useful idea, it is therefore an over
arching idea that ought to apply to all spheres of our lives and yet it
clearly does not. The best analogy to the fallacy is from physics in
which we find Newtonian mechanics useful in our every day experience.
And yet, when we get down to very small scales we find that physics
becomes decidedly non Newtonian and particles become wavelike and we
struggle to hold two ideas at the same time and a multiplicity of
possibilities. It is not comfortable and we like comfort and cling to
the notion or either or, that we are human not animal, man or not
woman, normal or not normal and we find ourselves in a dysphoria of
comfort and wonder what is wrong.