WATCH ‘EM GO, GO, GO:

Scientists Dropped Gophers Onto Mount St Helens For 1 Day. 40 Years Later, The Effect Is Astonishing (Francesca Benson. 11/11/24, IFL Science)

Two years after the eruption of Mount St Helens, local gophers were sent to the area in what must have been quite a confusing day trip, even if the animals were not aware of the news. The gophers were placed in enclosed areas for the experiment and spent their day digging around in the pumice.

Despite only spending one day in the area, the impact they had was remarkable. Six years after their trip, there were over 40,000 plants thriving where the gophers had gotten to work, while the surrounding land remained, for the most part, barren. Studying the area over 40 years later, the team found they had left one hell of a legacy.

“Plots with historic gopher activity harbored more diverse bacterial and fungal communities than the surrounding old-growth forests,” the team explained. “We also found more diverse fungal communities in these long-term lupine gopher plots than in forests that were historically clearcut, prior to the 1980 eruption, nearby at Bear Meadow.”

The Great Chain of Being

IT’S EARLY STAGE CAPITALISM IN AMERICA’S YOUTH:

How Nigh Is the End? Predictions for Geysers, Marriages, Poker Streaks and the Human Race (John Tierney, July 16, 2007, NY Times Tierney Lab)

Imagine you have just landed on another planet and entered Geyser Intergalactic Park. You know nothing about geysers except that they sometimes start shooting liquid and sometimes stop. You see two active geysers, each with a digital stopwatch next to it recording how long it’s been shooting. One geyser has been shooting for 100 million years. The other has been shooting for 10 seconds.

Can you predict which of these geysers will stop first?

You may think there’s an easy answer, but it’s not so clear to the philosophers and probability experts who have been debating the predictions of J. Richard Gott III, the Princeton physicist whom I discuss in my Findings column. He says you can make forecasts with 95-percent certainty about the likely longevity of the human race – or your marriage, or your winning streak at the poker table — simply by looking at how long it has existed. The longer something’s been around, the longer he expects it to last.

By that logic, you should expect the 10-second geyser to stop first, but it’s not so simple, as Bradley Monton and Brian Kierland explain in an excellent article in the Philosophical Quarterly. These philosophers – at the University of Colorado and the University of Missouri, respectively – took a long look at the debate over Dr. Gott’s forecasting method.

Dr. Gott’s Copernican Formula assumes that whatever you’re observing is unlikely to still be in the first one-fortieth of its lifespan, so if it’s already been around for x amount of time, it’s unlikely to last an additional 39x amount of time. Conversely, it’s probably not very close to its demise — – it’s probably still in the first 39/40 of its total lifespan, not in the final 1/40 — so you can predict that its remaining life is likely to be at least 1/39th of x.

Dr. Gott applied his formula to the plays and musicals that were open on Broadway the day his original paper was published in Nature in 1993. Of the 44 Broadway productions, 40 have closed within the forecast limits (including “Cats,” then being advertised as “now and forever.”) Depending on what happens with the remaining four – none is yet near its upper limit – Dr. Gott’s accuracy rate will be somewhere between 90 and 100 percent, which jibes nicely with the 95-percent accuracy rate that his formula is supposed to yield.

Human extinction could come within 5,100 years (Christopher Ingraham, October 16, 2017, Washington Post)

Every day, it seems, brings with it fresh new horrors. Mass murder. Catastrophic climate change. Nuclear annihilation. It’s all enough to make a reasonable person ask: How much longer can things go on this way? A Princeton University astrophysicist named J. Richard Gott has a surprisingly precise answer to that question.

Assuming that you and I are not so special as to be born at either the dawn of a very long-lasting human civilization or the twilight years of a short-lived one, we can apply Gott’s 95 percent confidence formula to arrive at an estimate of when the human race will go extinct: between 5,100 and 7.8 million years from now.

IT’S ALL ULTIMATELY AESTHETICS:

Stop Blaming Foucault: It’s ontological absolutism, not the postmodern emphasis on deconstruction and contingency, that is turning the humanities into a race-obsessed, pro-genocidal wasteland (Ari Gandsman, October 21, 2024, The Tablet)

Sadly, the vision of academic pursuit in the social sciences and humanities being guided by disinterested inquiry is obsolete. Job descriptions, not just in the humanities but also in the empirical sciences, increasingly demand explicit ideological and activist orientations (e.g., decolonialism, environmental justice, anti-racism). Analytic distance and critical detachment are denounced as outmoded colonial vestiges of cisgendered white male supremacy. Meanwhile, a scholar’s identity and therefore their experience is privileged, especially if they are from underrepresented groups where a tacit and often condescending expectation often exists that their topics of research overlap with their identity. Academic pursuit guided by nondogmatic, open-ended inquiry hears its death knell.

A popular explanation for this larger shift blames the abandonment of the pursuit of truth as root cause and points the finger at social constructivists like my doctoral adviser. This argument is epitomized by public intellectual Yascha Mounk’s recent book The Identity Trap which names the usual suspects—the French philosopher Michel Foucault, critical theory, and the bogeyman known as “postmodernism”—as key culprits of the new dogmatism. With truth dead, everything is permitted.

Yet as someone who grew up intellectually in this milieu, I believe that today’s stridency and moral absolutism is less explained by social constructivism but by its rejection. While social constructivists emphasized doubt, ambivalence, and uncertainty, academics now speak with absolutist, if imaginary, moral clarity on a host of issues ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A main explanation for this is “the ontological turn” that swept many disciplines, including my own, anthropology, in the first decade of the 21st century. While social constructivist approaches are associated with epistemology—questions of knowledge and how we know what we know—ontologists are concerned with questions of being, the essence of existence, and the nature of reality. To see all knowledge as socially constructed means seeing our own knowledge is too. This leads to a modesty of what we can claim to know about the world.

In a major article from my minor discipline of anthropology 40 years ago, my doctoral adviser argued against thinking we could pierce through our own cultural precepts to access “demystified reality.” He cautioned against uncritically believing our own beliefs were the true ones or that our own concepts and interpretations of the world were necessarily better than others. This required embracing what the late great philosopher Richard Rory referred to as “contingencies.” Or as the influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz once put it, lifting from the great sociologist Max Weber, we are “an animal suspended in webs of significance” that we ourselves spun.

Geertz cites an apocryphal Indian story in which the world was described to an Englishman as resting on the back of an elephant that rested on the back of a turtle. When the Englishman asked what the turtle rested on, he was told, “it is turtles all the way down.” We were trapped in our own representations and could never get to the essence of existence, yes—but we did not see this as a bad thing. We took seriously Nietzsche’s famous observation that believing in a “true world” was both myth and error.

Ontologists not only make broad and foundational claims about the world but also normative claims about how it should be. If knowledge-oriented social constructivists were focused on how our ways of seeing the world were filtered through our own cultural and historical lenses, ontologists attempt to break through the filters to get to absolutes.

Post-modernism is a return to pre-modernism. Once you get back you have to choose your faith. the oncologists above choose a particularly ugly one.

THE TEXT AND EVERYTHING AFTER:

First Moon Colony: A star physicist teaches us how to read the Torah, book by book. First up: Genesis. (Jeremy England, October 21, 2024, The Tablet)

Editor’s note: This is the first of five columns by Jeremy England. England is an American-born physicist noted for his argument that the spontaneous emergence of life may be explained by the extra energy absorbed and dissipated during the formation of exceptionally organized arrangements of molecules. He is also a rabbi. In this series, he will teach modern readers how to understand the Torah, one book at a time. First up is Genesis, a book that, according to England, establishes a specific truth—one that many of us, under the sway of the Enlightenment’s caricature of biblical thinking, misunderstand: “God is not a claim about the facts of the world to be proved or disproved, but rather is the focus for a method we are meant to use to interpret the events of our lives and the world.” —The Editors

Here are a few tips for how to read Genesis. Assume the book’s account of God is absolutely correct, which means He wrote it, as well as all other books and your genome. Assume God knows everything you know, everything you could know, and more. Assume God is the unfettered author of your life, world history, and the universe. Infer, therefore, that the Hebrew Bible—“Tanakh”—is unique not because its existence expresses the Creator’s will (since that’s true of everything there is) but rather because its content serves as the Creator’s official autobiography and a job description for His willing servants. Given all this, note that trying to prove its statements to be factually true or false is about as confused as trying to reach someone on the phone by dialing the license plate number on his car.

You don’t have to be an Albert Einstein or a Richard Feynman to know that plants need sun to grow. So when plants make their first appearance in Genesis “before” the sun does, even the most skeptical student of the text might conclude that he is not, in fact, perusing a simple chronology. If he manages, just for a moment, to forget how our post-biblical culture expects us to read biblical text, he might even notice that a basic message of the seven days of creation is that true statements about God are guaranteed to sound enigmatic in some way.

While this is an evident enough point to discuss with an interested 7-year-old Jewish day school student, it was lost on a great many Jewish atheist theoretical physicists during the last hundred years. Never has so much intelligence done so little to justify arrogance as when Feynman or Steve Weinberg mouthed off about theology. For all their genius, these Wicked Sons were never taught to read, and so, sadly, when it came to the subject of Eden or Abraham they applied their intellects to bludgeoning straw men and sniping at a heritage they did not even try to understand.

I too was once a Jewish atheist theoretical physicist, who, like many others, grew up worshipfully reading Feynman’s memoirs, hoping to understand “the universe” as profoundly as he and Weinberg and a dozen other Torah-rein 20th-century yidden had. However, through a series of providentially happy accidents, I managed eventually to get a glimpse past the smokescreen. Imagine my shock to discover that the most profound and free-ranging intellectual pursuit I had ever experienced—Torah study—had been distorted or even deliberately obscured from view by the pontifications of my childhood heroes. Weinberg once said, “[Scientific education] is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing, too!” Today I can retort that quantum field theory may be fun and useful, but it only ever amounts to playing around in one little sandbox according to a stultifyingly narrow set of mathematical rules. Maybe one day I will forgive Weinberg and Feynman for the way they stunted my understanding of the world and mankind’s condition in it, but I’ll have to avenge myself on them first.

The best revenge I can think of is to turn the eye of a physicist to righting the false trail laid out by Weinberg and others. Proper scientific education is favorable to proper religious belief, and vice versa, and it’s a good thing, too.

So let’s begin.

rEASON FAILS THE TEST OF REASON:

Mind and Matter (Erwin Schroedinger)

In this chapter I have tried by simple examples, taken from the humblest of sciences, namely physics, to contrast the two general facts (a) that all scientific knowledge is based on sense perception, and (b) that none the less the scientific views of natural processes formed in this way lack all sensual qualities and therefore cannot account for the latter. Let me conclude with a general remark.

Scientific theories serve to facilitate the survey of our observations and experimental findings. Every scientist knows how difficult it is to remember a moderately extended group of facts, before at least some primitive theoretical picture about them has been shaped. It is therefore small wonder, and by no
means to be blamed on the authors of original papers or of text-books, that after a reasonably coherent theory has been formed, they do not describe the bare facts they have found or wish to convey to the reader, but clothe them in the terminology of that theory or theories. This procedure, while very useful for our remembering the facts in a well-ordered pattern, tends to obliterate the distinction between the actual observations and the theory arisen from them. And since the former always are ofsome sensual quality, theories are easily thought to account for sensual qualities; which, of course, they never do.

AND THAT’S HOW THE LEOPARD GOT ITS SPOTS…:

Coyotes have the face muscles for that ‘sad-puppy’ look (Susan Milius, 10/01/24, Science News)

Coyotes turn out to have face muscles that look capable of making that big-eyed, sad-puppy face that dogs have used to melt human hearts for eons.

SUBLIME:

Problem-solving matter: Life is starting to look a lot less like an outcome of chemistry and physics, and more like a computational process (David C Krakaueris & Chris Kempes, 9/18/24, Aeon)

Today, ‘adaptive function’ is the primary criterion for identifying the right kinds of biotic chemistry that give rise to life, as the theoretical biologist Michael Lachmann (our colleague at the Santa Fe Institute) likes to point out. In the sciences, adaptive function refers to an organism’s capacity to biologically change, evolve or, put another way, solve problems. ‘Problem-solving’ may seem more closely related to the domains of society, culture and technology than to the domain of biology. We might think of the problem of migrating to new islands, which was solved when humans learned to navigate ocean currents, or the problem of plotting trajectories, which our species solved by learning to calculate angles, or even the problem of shelter, which we solved by building homes. But genetic evolution also involves problem-solving. Insect wings solve the ‘problem’ of flight. Optical lenses that focus light solve the ‘problem’ of vision. And the kidneys solve the ‘problem’ of filtering blood. This kind of biological problem-solving – an outcome of natural selection and genetic drift – is conventionally called ‘adaptation’. Though it is crucial to the evolution of life, new research suggests it may also be crucial to the origins of life.

This problem-solving perspective is radically altering our knowledge of the Universe. Life is starting to look a lot less like an outcome of chemistry and physics, and more like a computational process.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNISTS:

Richard Dawkins on reverse engineering evolution’s optimal beauty (Richard Dawkins, 9/17/24, Big Think)

Reverse engineering assumes that the object facing us had a purpose in the mind of a competent designer, a purpose that can be guessed. The reverse engineer sets up a hypothesis as to what a sensible designer might have had in mind, then checks the mechanism to see if it fits the hypothesis. Reverse engineering works well for animal bodies as well as for man-made machines. The fact that the latter were deliberately designed by conscious engineers while the former were designed by unconscious natural selection makes surprisingly little difference…

Sublime. Dawkins has always been a self-parody.

IT’S A HOMOCENTRIC UNIVERSE:

Scientists Discovered Something Kinda Alarming: The Universe Shouldn’t Actually Exist
(Jackie Appel, Aug. 8th, 2024, Popular Mechanics)

The research team asserts that if primordial black holes existed during this early period of inflation as many current models suggest, the field would have been bubbling away like a shaken can of soda. So much so, in fact, that nothing should have ever been able to form in the first place.

But we exist, as does everything around us. So, where does that leave us?

Science always affirms Design.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

A Test for Life Versus Non-Life (Carl Zimmer, July 31, 2024, NY Times)

Life, the scientists argue, emerges when the universe hits on a way to make exceptionally intricate things.

The book arrives at an opportune time, as assembly theory has attracted both praise and criticism in recent months. Dr. Walker argues that the theory holds the potential to help identify life on other worlds. And it may allow scientists like her to create life from scratch.

“I actually think alien life will be discovered in the lab first,” Dr. Walker said in an interview.

Dr. Walker went to graduate school planning to become a cosmologist, but life soon grabbed her attention. She was struck by how hard it was to explain life with standard physics theories. Gravity and other forces are not enough to produce the self-sustaining complexity of living things.

As a result, scientists still struggled to explain how an assortment of chemicals reacting with each other might give rise to life. Scientists had no way to measure how life-like a group of chemicals were, in the way they might use a thermometer to measure how hot something is. […]

Dr. Cronin focused on the fact that the proteins and the other molecules that make up our bodies do not jump into existence. They have to be assembled step by step from simpler building blocks.