Obama's Birth and the Falsification Gods we Worship

This is not about politics. He that hath an ear, let him hear.

The release of Barack Obama's long-form certificate will likely settle the question of his birthplace for most people. However, I want to point out that the matter has not been settled with a high level of scientific certainty. This is because the hypothesis that Obama was born in the U.S. is not falsifiable. He could have been born in Kenya, or anywhere else, but because of poor record keeping we don't have any way to know.

True, the birth certificate is strong evidence and the newspaper announcement of his birth is also significant. However, the newspaper announcement was not a prediction of the hypothesis, and if it had not been discovered, it would not have altered support for the hypothesis. People would simply have made excuses for the lack of corroborating evidence.

Instead of simply looking for evidence that confirms their hypothesis, Obamists should carry out a rigorous test that can address both possibilities. Obama's deceased mother needs to give birth to him again under public observation. Only in this way can we truly know which country he is born in.

In the meantime we should not condemn Obamists. Given the evidence at hand, theirs is the most strongly supported scientific hypothesis. It's ultimate worth, however, will be determined by whether they carry out a definitive test and what its results are. Birtherism is a perfectly rational and philosphically legitimate position to take, and the longer Obamists choose to simply assert their dominance rather than carrying out a definitive test, the more apparent it will be that the emperor has no citizenship.

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Smoking Guns

I finally finished reading Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk by Massimo Pigliucci. Pigliucci is an evolutionary biologist turned philosopher of science who is one of the main participants in the fine podcast Rationally Speaking. It turns out that science and bunk cannot be distinguished by hard and fast rules, but there are some guidelines. Along the way he examines examples of controversial science, clear pseudoscience, and other auxiliary phenomena such as the rise of think tanks and postmodern critiques of science.

The second chapter deals with the notion that there are so-called 'hard' sciences (e.g. physics) and 'soft' sciences (e.g. sociology). Physics, with its exactness and predictive power, is often held up as the ideal to which all other sciences should aspire. However, Pigliucci argues that the sciences are heterogeneous because they deal with different problems of different complexity, and that their methods reflect those differences. In this view, physics is not somehow better than, say, biology, it's just different.

Early in the chapter he discusses the concept of strong inference. This is where a crucial experiment can be used to rule out one or more mutually exclusive hypotheses. Essentially you set up a situation where either X or Y is true, and then perform an experiment to unambiguously rule one of them out. This kind of approach can work well in physics. However, although it is a very logical way to proceed, not all scientific questions are amenable to this method because of the complexity of the subject matter and because not all answers are black and white. (For example, you might find that many people with a disease show improvement with a particular drug. It's not a cure vs. no cure, nobody vs. everybody dichotomy.)

He then goes on to discuss historical sciences (e.g. geology, paleontology) which are sometimes maligned as having untestable theories. In this view, experimental findings are privileged above all else, and since you cannot perform experiments with past occurrences, those occurrences must remain unverifiable. (This is a common argument made by creationists seeking to cast doubt on evolution or anything else that contradicts their interpretation of the Bible). However, as Pigliucci points out, science is about more than doing experiments (e.g. astronomy), and drawing on work by Carol E. Cleland he argues that historical hypotheses can indeed be verified with a high degree of certainty. It's worth spending a moment on this.

A difference between historical and experimental sciences is captured in the philosophical (and certainly philosophical-sounding) term, asymmetry of overdetermination. This term simply refers to the difference in our ability to know cause and effect when looking into the future vs. the past. Cleland uses the example of a house fire: someone investigating a house fire may be able to determine that it was caused by a short circuit. This is because of all of the clues left behind after the event. However, that knowledge does not translate into the ability to predict whether a particular future short circuit will result in a fire. Similarly, police investigating a crime often have many clues with which to reconstruct what happened, but they cannot predict how and when a future crime might occur. On the other hand (my own interpretation), an instructor at a fire fighting school might be able to arrange things such that a short circuit reliably causes a fire, but this is because the instructor has eliminated variables that might prevent the fire from starting and constrained conditions to give a reliable result.

Historical sciences rely on the fact that historical occurrences leave behind many clues, only a few of which may be needed in order to establish the reality of the occurrence. Scientists in this mode of investigation look for 'smoking guns' from which they can infer what happened. Experimentalists, on the other hand, seek to limit variables that might interfere with the experiment in question--trying to eliminate false negatives and false positives. These constrained conditions allow them to make more precise predictions and measurements, but that precision can quickly disappear in a more complex context. It's also worth pointing out that these two approaches can be employed together such that they inform one another.

Cleland summarizes:

When it comes to testing hypotheses, historical science is not inferior to classical experimental science. Traditional accounts of the scientific method cannot be used to support the superiority of experimental work. Furthermore, the differences in methodology that actually do exist between historical and experimental science are keyed to an objective and pervasive feature of nature, the asymmetry of overdetermination. Insofar as each practice selectively exploits the differing information that nature puts at its disposal, there are no grounds for claiming that the hypotheses of one are more securely established by evidence than are those of the other.

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Further reading:

Cleland, Carol E. (2001). "Historical science, experimental science, and the scientific method," Geology 29, pp. 987-990.

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Well, I'll Be Darned

The first I ever heard of Richard Sherlock, a professor of philosophy at Utah State University, was when I purchased the book, The Search for Harmony: Essays on Science and Mormonism. His historical chapters treating the spectrum of reactions to evolution and the B.H. Roberts/Joseph Fielding Smith/James E. Talmage argument were among the best of the book. Later I was a little disappointed when he defended intelligent design in the FARMS Review, which I took issue with on this blog. I was also a little disappointed when, in his founding essay for Square Two, he came out strongly against embryonic stem cell research. "Well," I thought, "I guess we disagree on some things, but those evolution essays were great." Meanwhile I saw his name pop up here and there, such as at FAIR, etc.

Now I see that Sherlock has converted to Catholicism. Another curve ball in life, I guess. I hope he finds fulfillment in his choice, but for not otherwise knowing him from Adam, I have to admit that I'm a little disappointed.

So once again, I guess we disagree on some things. But those evolution essays were great.

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If I Had a Side Blog

1. A fitting summary of Glenn Beck's time at Fox News.

A low-lights reel of Beck’s worst moments on Fox would take hours to watch, but it would offer a useful seminar on the politics of incitement and near-mainstreaming of conspiracy theories in the Obama era. A talented broadcaster, Beck used his perch to echo old narratives straight out of the paranoid style in American politics—sinister plots to impose one-world government, the intentional subversion of the Constitution, the oppression of the faithful at the hands of a secular socialist elite hell-bent on replacing the American experiment with tyranny. “The Glenn Beck Show” is the closest the John Birch Society has ever come to having their own national program, reaching millions and poisoning political debate in the process.

2. When ground-breaking scientists go bad: Lynn Margulis edition.

3. Tennessee leads the nation in trying to get creationism back into schools. Texas and Florida follow close behind.

4. A skeptic of climate science finds that the experts may have been right all along; tells Congress.

5. Food for thought: "The rise of the Tea Party and its anti-intellectual, anti-establishment, anti-elite worldview has brought both a mainstreaming and a radicalization of antiscientific thought."

6. If you like popping zits, you'll love this. [Not for the easily disgusted.]

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Peak Oil

I've been casually reading a little bit about the issue of 'peak oil'. It seems like this topic doesn't get much attention--or as much as it, perhaps, deserves. The general concept is pretty simple: The easy sources of oil have mostly been found and the rate of their discovery is declining. When a new oil field is discovered and developed, the rate of oil production increases from zero to a certain point where oil cannot be extracted any faster. And then the rate of production begins to fall. You haven't run out of oil, but you can't produce it as quickly any more.

Here's a little analogy that helps me to think about this. Imagine a towel soaked with water. As you begin to wring it out, the water flows increasingly fast until it pours out at a maximum rate, then begins to decline. You rest a moment, and then try again. A lot of water comes out, but not as quickly as before, and each subsequent attempt yields less and less. Your rate of water production from the towel has peaked, and although you can continue producing water, the rate of production is diminishing.

This basic scenario applies on a global scale. When you aggregate all global oil fields together and consider that the rate of discovery of easy sources is declining, you are set up for the worldwide rate of production to peak, and then decline. This is a problem if demand for oil continues to increase, as it is expected to as the world population increases by billions and India and China become more prosperous, because supply will not be able to keep up with demand.

The main tricky part is uncertainty of timing because there usually isn't much warning that an oil field's peak is coming, so you don't know that you've hit the peak until after you've already passed it, and the same applies on a global scale. Although it remains uncertain, a lot of forecasters see the world hitting peak oil within the next 20-30 years. The rate of oil production in the continental U.S. peaked in the 1970s, and in the U.K. it peaked in 1999. A news article in the March 25 issue of Science opens with this:

Five years ago, many oil experts saw trouble looming. In 10 years or so, they said, oil producers outside the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) would likely be unable to pump oil any faster and OPEC would gain an even stronger hand among the world's oil producers. Five years on, it appears those experts may have been unduly optimistic—non-OPEC oil production may have been peaking as they spoke. Despite a near tripling of world oil prices, non-OPEC production, which accounts for 60% of world output, hasn't increased significantly since 2004. And many of those same experts, as well as some major oil companies, don't see it increasing again—ever.

Those major oil companies include Shell and ExxonMobil. In fact a graphic from the article (shown below) comes from an ExxonMobil energy outlook report.



Now for a little perspective. How much of the world's produced oil does the U.S. use? Answer: about 22%, with a little over half of that coming from imports, as shown in this graph [source]:



At this point you might think (aside from, "Hey, that looks like Pac-Man!"), "Well, we better pull out all the stops and drill everywhere we can in the U.S." Aside from the negative side-effects such an approach might have, there is one little problem which is illustrated with this graph:



As you can see, U.S. oil reserves are diddly-squat compared to the rest of the world--about 1.4% [source]. Here is another way to look at it [source]. (Click for large):




This, then, is what it means to say that we cannot drill our way out of the problem of oil dependence.

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Further Reading:

For more, see the Hirsch Report, published in 2005 at the request of the Department of Energy. The summary version [PDF] is quite readable.

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