Sean Carroll

Author: Sean Carroll

  • Wedgies

    Intelligent Design isn’t science, it’s simply a public-relations strategy to force religion into public high schools. Duh. But the ID folks will swear on a stack of Bibles that it has nothing to do with religion, it’s just a natural product of the scientific process. Which makes it remarkably dumb to actually write a strategy document detailing how ID is used to sneak religion into public life — these things have a way of leaking out into the public. Wedge Document But they did, and it did, and the result is the famous Wedge Document.

    Now the story can be told of how the Wedge Document was secretly copied and released onto the internets. Turns out it was the heroic clandestine efforts of Matthew Duss and Tim Rhodes, who are clearly worthy of a Nobel or a MacArthur or some kind of prize. (I doubt they’re eligible for the Templeton Prize.) Pharyngula has the story, as well as a pdf version of the Wedge Document itself, complete with the Discovery Institute address and email at the bottom, not to mention some sort of weird Masonic pyramid logo. Priceless.

  • First they came for the liberals wearing T-shirts…

    We all know that, especially under the current administration, Republicans are a mite touchy when it comes to T-shirts, those notorious vehicles of seditious speech. Cindy Sheehan, as you may have heard, got bounced from her seat at the State of the Union (as a guest of Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey) for wearing such a T-shirt. Glenn Greenwald respectfully comments.

    But alas, the problem with thought police is that they can get somewhat overly enthusiastic, and it can be really hard to tell which thoughts are supposed to be policed. So poor Beverly Young, wife of Republican Congressman C.W. Bill Young, also got bounced from the SOTU for wearing a T-shirt. (Via Shakespeare’s Sister.) Hers read “Support the Troops – Defending Our Freedom.”

    Young said she was sitting in the gallery’s front row, about six seats from first lady Laura Bush, when she was approached by someone from the Capitol Police or sergeant-at-arms office who told her she needed to leave the gallery.

    She reluctantly agreed but argued with several officers in the hallway outside the House chamber.

    “They said I was protesting,” she said in a telephone interview late Tuesday. “I said, “Read my shirt, it is not a protest.’ They said, “We consider that a protest.’ I said, “Then you are an idiot.”‘

    She said she was so angry that “I got real colorful with them.”

    You see what all this postmodernism and irony has done? It’s become wicked difficult to tell the difference between old-fashioned support and subversive protest. Better to be rigorously fair, and stomp out all T-shirt-based speech acts.

    Freedom is on the march!

    Update: The Capitol Police have dropped the charges they had filed against Sheehan, and are now apologizing to both Sheehan and Young. Turns out that wearing T-shirts with slogans during the State of the Union is not, in fact, against the law! Who knew?

  • The Science President

    If Chris Mooney didn’t seem so serious, I would think this was a joke. He’s predicting that George W. Bush will use the State of the Union Speech to stake his claim as “the Science President.”

    A while back I blogged about an idea floated by Morton Kondracke: That George W. Bush should try to become the “science” president by emphasizing, in his State of the Union speech, themes of global scientific competitiveness and the need to ensure that the good old USA is leading the pack. Well, it now seems official: According to the Boston Globe, in his speech tonight Bush plans to highlight Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin CEO who “last year led a congressionally mandated National Academies team that issued a report warning that America is ‘on a losing path’ in the global marketplace.” Why are we falling behind? If you believe the NAS, it’s because of inadequate scientific and mathematical training for our high school students, not enough funding of basic scientific research, etc etc.

    That’s right. George “Let’s teach intelligent design” Bush. George “Let’s censor climate scientists” Bush. George “Let’s watch while particle physics withers away” Bush. George “Let’s slash funding for basic research” Bush. George “Let’s politicize the scientific decision-making process and suppress results we don’t like” Bush. George “Let’s divert research funding to my Moon-Mars boondoggle” Bush. George “Most anti-science President ever” Bush.

    I understand that, after staking his claim as the Science President, Bush will present himself with a coffee mug that says “World’s Greatest Leader, Ever.” And a pony.

  • Mitochondrial Eve and you

    We’re all brothers and sisters under the skin — or at least distant cousins. According to the popular Single-Origin Hypothesis (the “Out of Africa” theory), the human race originated in eastern Africa something like 100,000-200,000 years ago. The alternative Multiregional Hypothesis (which seems less likely to me, but what do I know) says that Homo sapiens evolved independently in several places, but even then there were Homo habilis ancestors that evolved in Africa — the question is really which populations should and should not count as Homo sapiens.

    That means that we share common ancestors. And no, you needn’t be one of the three million Irish descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, or the sixteen million people worldwide descended from Genghis Khan. If you go back far enough, you’ll eventually hit the human race’s most recent common ancestor, some lucky breeder with billions of living descendants — possibly as late as the first or second millenium BCE. We can also imagine tracing back to Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam — our most recent common ancestors through purely matrilineal and patrilineal lines, respectively. (Adam and Eve didn’t know each other; he lived 60,000-90,000 years ago, while she was perhaps 150,000 years ago.) The point is, if you follow your family tree backwards, it keeps branching into more and more ancestors, and eventually all of our individual trees get mixed together. So, for example, Bill O’Reilly and Michael Moore are distantly related, although the family reunions are likely a bit awkward.

    An obvious question is: how did we get from there to here? How did human DNA mix and match, spread out through various locales and ethnicities, and focus together to create that pinnacle of biological achievement: you? Well, a new project from National Geographic, IBM, Spencer Wells, and the Waitt Foundation aims to find out: the Genographic Project (hat tip to Maria). They are collecting DNA samples from all over the world, and using genetic markers characteristic of certain populations to infer how humans migrated across the globe, cheerfully (or not so cheerfully, often enough) reproducing along the way.

    Best of all: you can participate! Sadly, you have to pay ($100) to join the project, rather than receiving recompense for your services; but it’s pretty cool. You get a kit that allows you to take a sample of your own DNA and send it in for analysis. The results won’t tell you about your immediate family, but they’ll reveal the geographical origins of your deeper ancestry. C’mon, you want to know where your haplogroup originated, don’t you? And we need to hurry, before the intimate (as it were) interconnectivity of the global village scrambles our genetic markers once and for all.

  • Perspective

    Political humor is always a tricky business; taking a strong stand tends to annoy more than half of your potential audience rather than make them laugh, while wishy-washy moderation just isn’t that funny. This post at Joe’s Dartblog pops open the hood on an editorial cartoon and looks inside, showing something we don’t usually get to see: three cartoons about a single topic, by the same artist, taking three different ideological perspectives (left, moderate, right). Even though I love political humor when it’s insightful and agrees with my predelictions, this exercise actually highlights the rhetorical limitations of the medium. A joke isn’t an argument, and the techniques of humor can be much more directly employed to bolster opinions that people already have than to make them see things in a new way. (Via the Volokh Conspiracy.)

  • The future of the universe

    This month’s provocative results on the acceleration of the universe raise an interesting issue: what can we say about our universe’s ultimate fate? In the old days (like, when I was in grad school) we were told a story that was simple, compelling, and wrong. It went like this: matter acts to slow down the expansion of the universe, and also to give it spatial curvature. If there is enough matter, space will be positively curved (like a sphere) and will eventually collapse into a Big Crunch. If there is little matter, space will be negatively curved (like a saddle) and expand forever. And if the matter content is just right, space will be flat and will just barely expand forever, slowing down all the while.

    Fate of the universe This story is wrong in a couple of important ways. First and foremost, the assumption that the only important component of the universe is “matter” (or radiation, for that matter) is unduly restrictive. Now that we think that there is dark energy, the simple relation between spatial curvature and the ultimate fate of the universe is completely out the window. We can have positively curved universes that expand forever, negatively curved ones that recollapse, or what have you. (See my little article on the cosmological constant.) To determine the ultimate fate of the universe, you need to know both how much dark energy there is, and how it changes with time. (Mark has also written about this with Dragan Huterer and Glenn Starkman.)

    If we take current observations at face value, and make the economical assumption that the dark energy is strictly constant in density, all indications are that the universe is going to expand forever, never to recollapse. If any of your friends go on a trip that extends beyond the Hubble radius (about ten billion light-years), kiss them goodbye, because they won’t ever be able to return — the space in between you and them will expand so quickly that they couldn’t get back to you, even if they were moving at the speed of light. Meanwhile, stars will die out and eventually collapse to black holes. The black holes will ultimately evaporate, leaving nothing in the universe but an increasingly dilute and cold gas of particles. A desolate, quiet, and lonely universe.

    However, if the dark energy density actually increases with time, as it does with phantom energy, a completely new possibility presents itself: not a Big Crunch, but a Big Rip. Explored by McInnes and by Robert Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and Nevin Weinberg, the Big Rip happens when the universe isn’t just accelerating, but super-accelerating — i.e., the rate of acceleration is perpetually increasing. If that happens, all hell breaks loose. The super-accelerated expansion of spacetime exerts a stretching force on all the galaxies, stars, and atoms in the universe. As it increases in strength, every bound structure in the universe is ultimately ripped apart. Eventually we hit a singularity, but a very different one than in the Big Crunch picture: rather than being squashed together, matter is torn to bits and scattered to infinity in a finite amount of time. Some observations, including the new gamma-ray-burst results, show a tiny preference for an increasing dark energy density; but given the implications of such a result, they are far from meeting the standard for convincing anyone that we’ve confidently measured any evolution of the dark energy at all.

    So, it sounds like we’d like to know whether this Big Rip thing is going to happen, right? Yes, but there’s bad news: we don’t know if we’re headed for a Big Rip, and no set of cosmological observations will ever tell us. The point is, observations of the past and present are never by themselves sufficient to predict the future. That can only be done within the framework of a theory in which we have confidence. We can say that the universe will hit a Big Rip in so-and-so many years if the dark energy is increasing in density at a certain rate and we are sure that it will continue to increase at that rate. But how can we ever be sure of what the dark energy will do twenty trillion years from now? Only by actually understanding the nature of the dark energy can we extrapolate from present behavior to the distant future. In fact, it’s perfectly straightforward (and arguably more natural) for a phase of super-accelerated expansion to last for a while, before settling down to a more gently accerated phase, avoiding the Big Rip entirely. Truth is, we just don’t know. This is one of those problems that ineluctably depends on progress in both observation and theory.

    (more…)

  • Crank up your word processors

    I’m sure we have a slew of budding Pynchons and Stoppards out there in the CV audience. Here’s your chance to break into the big time: the Second Annual Seed Magazine Fiction Supplement.

    In the June/July issue Seed will publish its Second Annual Fiction Supplement. We are not looking for traditional Sci-Fi — we are looking for fiction that reflects the significant role science plays in our culture; fiction that uncovers the rich narratives in science; and fiction wherein scientists are fallible and human. We are looking for Science-In-Fiction, Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction — in the tradition of Andrea Barrett, Richard Powers, Margaret Atwood and Alan Lightman, writing that brings new meaning to our understanding of Science Fiction.

    Scientists are fallible and human? Sorry, can’t help them there. Remember, if anyone who reads this post goes off and writes a story that gets into the magazine, we want to hear about it.

    Update: Apparently we’re talking about an entire genre of fiction here — LabLit. (Via grrlscientist.)

  • Extremophilia

    D. RadioduransThe Astronomy Picture of the Day from Sunday was a cool one — a nutrient agar plate of Deinococcus radiodurans, a/k/a “Conan the Bacterium.” (Photo: M. Daly, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.) D. rad is quite the remarkable little microbe — it’s an extremophile, an organism that thrives in conditions that you and I would deem overly harsh. (And no, not the internet.) It even has a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records under “World’s Toughest Bacterium.”

    D. rad is able to survive in vacuum and through extremes of temperature as well as dehydration, but its special ability is to shrug off large amounts of radiation: a dosage 3,000 times what would kill a strapping young human. Now, you may perhaps wonder why the Intelligent Designer would bother to equip a certain unicellular organism with such an impressive, but not manifestly adaptive, kind of superpower. It could be that radiation tolerance was quite useful in the environment of the very young Earth, but biologists are also thinking that the radiation resistance may come along with resistance to dehydration (which is something that obviously is useful) — radiation and dehydration seem to cause similar types of DNA damage, and D. rad has a remarkable ability to keep its DNA in good working order. It carries along several copies of its genome, stacked on top of each other, ready to step in at the first sign of damage. It’s like towing an entire repair shop behind your car at all times.

    Which means, of course, that we meddling humans want to put it to work. D. rad has already been genetically engineered to clean up spills of toxic mercury, which can be highly radioactive. And now, NASA is exploring the possibility of recruiting the plucky bacteria into the astronaut corps. They are imagining adapting D. rad to help with a variety of tasks that humans might face on a trip to Mars — synthesizing drugs, recycling wastes, producing food, all the way up to terraforming the planet. If I were in charge of this project, I would tread pretty lightly here. These are some tough bacteria — I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re just biding their time until we can fly them to Mars, at which point they’ll rise up and take over both planets.

  • Get out the vote!

    Sir Isaac Newton may have written the greatest physics work of all time, but he shouldn’t rest easy — he has heavy competition for being the greatest experimenter. Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles aims to find out. He’s assembled an impressive list of nominees for the greatest physics experiment ever (and is drumming up interest in the greatest in other fields). Contenders include such household names as Galileo, Roemer, Faraday, Cavendish, Michelson and Morley, Hertz, Rutherford, Hubble, Mossbauer, and Aspect, not to mention Newton himself. Greedy bastard. Be sure to go vote.

    On the opposite side of the practicality/speculation scale, Christine Dantas has the somewhat more modest goal of finding the Best Quantum Gravity Paper of 2005. Help out, she needs both nominees and votes. Of course what we think is the best paper now might not be what we remember a hundred years later.

    A final way to have your own bit of vox populi be heard is to visit Wampum and vote for the Koufax awards (previously mentioned here). You’ll have to keep checking in, as posts where you can actually vote are gradually being assembled; so far we’ve seen

    If I’m good I’ll keep a list here. We’ve been nominated in a few categories, including Best New Blog; I have high hopes for a respectable third-place showing in the Best Expert Blog category behind Pharyngula and Informed Comment.

  • Word crisis

    Forget about Peak Oil, here’s the real looming crisis: we’re running out of new words. Do you realize how hard it is, in our hyperactive age, to come up with a word that hasn’t already been invented for some purpose or another? Surely we’ve all had the experience of mistyping a word into Google and nevertheless hitting a handful of results. So as a little experiment, I made up some strings of letters that sounded like they could be words, checked in the dictionary that none of them actually exists as a conventional English word, and asked Google to go look for them. Here’s how many hits I got.

    • antrith (865)
    • splicky (230)
    • queigh (43)
    • nurdle (885)
    • tobnet (53)

    “Splicky” is a pretty sweet-sounding word, actually; I’ll have to start dropping it into conversation. Admittedly, most non-words appear on Google as abbreviations or computer terms or simple nonsense, and furthermore it’s not that hard to invent random strings that don’t get any hits. Still, I’m worried. If Shakespeare were alive today, I’m pretty sure he’d feel that Google was cramping his style, coinage-wise.