Appeal to Nature

BBC News (and others) used a very interesting word to describe the growth of galaxies in their article. Will any sane person claim that cannibalism in nature justifies cannibalism among humans? Will anyone call for suppressing this theory of galactic cannibalism because it may encourage cannibalism among humans?

Claims like these are made all the time. Sane, intelligent people, in all their seriousness, have claimed that because "survival of the fittest" happens in nature, it has to be ethical. Especially if you completely misunderstand the meaning of "fittest". Or, far more popularly, it is claimed that the idea of natural selection must be wrong, and even if it is true it should be suppressed, because it will inevitably lead "fit" humans to exterminate "unfit" ones.

Maybe the example of galactic cannibalism is too extreme. Everyone should be able to see through the metaphor. But what about gravity? A consequence of gravity is that everyone on Earth is subject to a downward acceleration. Does this mean that it is unethical to be anywhere higher than the ground floor (1st floor in the U.S. and elsewhere)? Is flying in an airplane a sin?

Of course the c-word does not appear once in the abstract of the original paper. I don't have access to the full text but it might as well not appear there either. But, guess what. "Survival of the fittest" did not appear in the first four editions of the "Origin of Species". And it was supposed to be a metaphor too.

Level playing field

Brights are individuals in an international Internet constituency who assert that they hold “a naturalistic worldview—free of supernatural and mystical elements.” By the way, if you happen to be one and you didn't know that there was a name for it, or that there are other people like you out there, you should check The Brights' Net. What they stand for, according to the Brights' net, is a "level playing field". You can see that the playing field is not level, and that there is a bias against people with a naturalistic worldview if you have a look at some of the opinion polls for the 2008 US Presidential Election. Of course, in these polls a very negative term was used instead of the more accurate "person who holds a naturalistic worldview". And of course not every country is the USA.

What I find even more disturbing is that there is not a level playing field when it comes to solid, mainstream (in a good sense), scientific thought, and "anything goes", incoherent, sloppy or fake scientific thought. This is independent of naturalistic or supernatural worldview. For example, hypotheses about continents that sank in to the ocean in a single day millenia ago, are completely compatible with a naturalistic worldview, although one would really have to stink at geology to believe them.

Let's hold a thought experiment. Present to a friend a really blurry photograph, and claim it is you with Miss Universe (or a male equivalent) in a romantic date. The response you are probably going to get is that even if they were very willing to believe you (they're almost certainly not), the evidence is of very low quality. Now present to a friend a really blurry photograph, and claim it is a 7 meter monster which lives in the bottom of a medium-sized lake on an big island. In this case there is actually some hope that the response will be: "It could be. After all, there are so many things out there we don't know about...".

What's wrong? Same evidence, different responses. Is it that the existence of the monster is more probable than the existence of Miss Universe? It should be the other way (again, if you're not really bad in Biology and Ecology). I'm not sure what's wrong. What I know is that I have a hard time when I have to explain simple scientific facts like this one to friends or students (and this is exactly what is supposed to happen. They shouldn't buy anything I say) but the same people seem to be very easily convinced by the TV-show kind of "science", which claims it rewrites science textbooks every week.

So, if there is such a thing as "mainstream" or "established" science (I think it's nothing more than hypotheses with evidence supporting them), it should not seek priority, or precedence over "alternative" science (another name for hypotheses without evidence supporting them), but a level playing field. Same quantity and quality of evidence scores the same number of points.

I'm 1 in 12! Now I feel special!

My first impression of Blogspot was not a good one. In my profile, my "astrological sign" and "zodiac year" seem to be the 3rd and 4th most defining information about me, following my age and gender. They tell more about me than, say, where I live, or what my interests are. Of course, my problem is not if people can make anything from what constellation the Sun was (yeah, right. See below) when I was born, or, for that matter, what the weather was like, or if it was Artillery Day in Greece, or who were Division Two football champions in Iceland. The problem is that exposing my visitors to all this nonsense is somewhat forced, as the only way to get rid of it is to delete my date of birth. Anyway, this is what I did.
This thing with stars and constellations (yes I know the difference between constellation and astrological sign, but it doesn't add any more sense to astrology) made me wonder where the planets really were the day I was born. I used Stellarium, which is a piece of software that simulates the view to the sky from a given place at a given time. And even better, it works when the sky is cloudy, you can see objects very close to the Sun, you can see stars at daytime, and you can see objects which are too dim or too remote for the naked eye to see. Here are the results:

• The Sun is supposed to be in Sagittarius on 12/4 according to the horoscopes in the newspapers. In fact it is much closer to Ophiuchus, but if you had to choose between Sagittarius and Scorpius, it would be Scorpius.
• The Moon is not a planet, but anyway I checked it too, and it happened to be in Cancer.
• Mercury and Venus are always close to the Sun, because their orbit is inside the orbit of every observer I have ever met (they were all on, or near Earth), so they too were in Scorpius. In fact, Venus was in Ophiuchus, but it is out of contest. Only the twelve signs can claim planets.
  
• Mars in Libra.
• Jupiter in Aquarius.
• Saturn in Gemini.
• Uranus in Virgo.
• Neptune happened to be on the other side of the Sun at the time, so it too was in Scorpius.
• Non-planet Pluto was in Virgo, moving really slowly.

It seems that now you have all the data you need to find out everything about me! Make a comment about it, and let's see what you got right!