It is very , very depressing reading.

The way I understand it, from the book I was reading, the first chimps were bred for other experiments and Harlow raised them in isolation to try and keep them free of cross-infection but found out that the isolation severaly damaged the chimps emotionally. I think most normal people would have regretted that, but he thought that the emotional damage was interesting in itself and then continued. The results of these experiments have really shed a lot of light on the workings of the human mind, but I don’t think that justifies the nature of them.

The Geek Manifesto by Mark Henderson

Over the weekend I finished reading an advance copy of The Geek Manifesto by Mark Henderson that Amazon sent me. The book is to be published in May and more information about it can be found at www.geekmanifesto.co.uk

Amazon don’t really encourage lengthy reviews, so what I wrote only scratches at the surface of what I thought about the book. I may expand a bit on my thoughts here, but this is what I wrote about it:

I found this to be a surprising book in many ways, particularly in the specific limitations of its demands and the willingness of the author to stir up some controversy towards the end, in unexpected directions.

The main demand is that the political system, dominated as it is by humanities graduates, should take a more scientific, evidence-based approach. The limitiation, or compromise, is the recognition that, having weighed that scientific evidence the politicians are quite within their rights to not follow it and to base their decision on other considerations – as long as they are honest about that and don’t try to mis-represent the science. This might be a step too far for some politicians and a step short for some scientists, but it strikes me as a step in the right direction.

For a change, this is a book evangelising science without specifically targeting religion. That is not to say it promotes religion, it just concentrates on the political system instead as that is where the real decision-making goes on. There are some scary statistics about how many elected representatives in the US and UK governments have any scientific background (very, very few) how many primary school teachers have a science degree (hardly any) how many secondary school science teachers teach the subject they studied themselves (fewer than you would think) and many more that can easily lead to despair.

Perhaps that is the worst thing about the book: it is too good at stating the scale of the problem, and then doesn’t offer a magic wand to wave in order to overcome them, but proposes lots of things which all sound like hard work – but if you want a miracle cure you should be reading the Daily Express instead.

The book is organised well, with manageable chapters concentrating on specific policy areas, and not always in the way I was expecting. For example, when I saw that a chapter was about education I expected it to be all about how few science teachers there are and how few students choose science, maths or engineering. Instead it launched into how policies are introduced without any way to reliably measure their effectiveness. I had not considered that before, so it was an education for me.

The controversy becomes most apparent towards the end, in the chapter about the environment and the attitude of green pressure groups and the Green party towards scientific matters, especially in relation to nuclear power and GM crops. I can see that stirring up a few arguments.

The whole book is summed up in five pages at the end, with some specific points distilled from the earlier chapters. These points were too long to be snappy and memorable but too short to include any examples or re-inforcement and thus felt like a bit of an anticlimax after 245 pages of very strong argument, but that is a small criticism for a book that is, I am sure, destined to become a fixture on any self-respecting geek’s bookshelf, and besides that it is an impossible dilemma to resolve.

Following the conclusion is another 50 pages of references, many of which are URLs. Some of these are quite long and will be quite laborious to type in. There is no problem with having such a comprehensive set of references, given the subject matter it should be expected, but this book is crying out for an e-book version where the links can be followed easily or the use of shortened URLs – bit.ly, tr.im, or similar.

As somebody who has dabbled in politics myself, I found this inspiring even if it left me with all sorts of regrets that I didn’t know all this while I was still involved in the local council.

Quite early on in the book, about page 22 or 23, it raised an issue about politics which has bothered me for a while now. It is a fundamental problem with politics, possibly too entrenched to shift easily, quickly or at all, and one of the things that has increasingly turned me off of conventional politics and despite it bothering me immensely I had never really thought of it as anti-scientific but just bloody stupid and it is the inability to say “I don’t know”, to change one’s mind in the face of new evidence, or admit to ever having been wrong about anything.

The standout quote is “What science admires as intellectual honesty is seen in Westminster and Whitehall as the stuff of the gaffe.”

This isn’t even the fault of politicians as individuals, or not entirely. It is the whole system, including the media and the public. A scientist can carry out several experiments, and the ones that don’t work are not failures but learning points that eliminate bad hypotheses and in an ideal world lead towards the ultimately successful experiment. You can’t progress without acknowledging the bad results and building on them, but in politics that is unacceptable.

As soon as a minister admits that some new policy didn’t work he will find himself on the move at the next re-shuffle, after being held to ridicule by the media and probably branded a flip-flopper and accused of a U-turn. If they stick to their opinions in the face of very obvious failure they will be praised as a ‘conviction politician’.

I wonder where we would be if ‘conviction chemists’ were similarly praised, or ‘conviction doctors’? We would probably be treating common ailments with blood-letting and trepanning still.

The temptation to cherry-pick evidence is strong. Whenever there was an example of a Labour politician doing the right thing or a Tory politician like Nadine Dorries being an idiot I was lapping it up. When there was an example of a Tory being sensible about science or a Labour minister making up evidence I was metaphorically reading the book from behind the sofa and between my fingers, and by the time the Green party came in for a good kicking I was cheering, but the fact is that there is a failure of the political class and not of any particular party and the book remains admirably neutral.

I had that entire rant in my head just from reading a couple of pages, and on just about every page there was something similarly stimulating. This isn’t a book you can easily read passively.

At first I was a bit worried. Wearing varifocals means that everything in even slightly peripheral vision was odd. I kept thinking I saw something but it was an effect of the glasses, then I was worried that I might not see the real thing because it might not be exactly where I was looking – even from the confines of our garden the sky is pretty big.

And then the first one flew across so brightly I realised I was being silly: no way I could have missed that.

I only saw a few, but even the normal sky was impressive enough.  I don’t look up very often and had fogotten just how brilliant the night sky can be.  I am no astronomer.  All the stars are just stars to me, but even so I just felt so small looking up there and thinking how big all those points of light really are.  It was awesome enough as it was and the meteors were just the icing on the cake.

While I was looking up I could totally understand how primitive or uneducated people can feel the need to invent a god to explain it all. How must it all look if you have never had any sort of street lighting and can always see the stars clearly?  And then one night its different: there are dozens of stars moving or one that looks brigher then normal.

Also surprised how bloody cold it was considering it is supposed to be the height of summer.

I think I have a fairly rational, science-based readership here so I probably don’t need to labour the point about all the total point-missing in the story and comments.   Suffice to say, they are not burning bodies for fuel.  I am no expert in cremation science but it seems pretty obvious that corpses are not a source of fuel – otherwise we would not need furnaces.  The amount of energy put into cremation far outweighs any that might be gained.  All this machinery does is recover some of the energy that is put in.

Granted, it does sound macabre.

Very surprised the headline didn’t make it onto one of the famous Argus advertising boards.

When I was leaving work yesterday I noticed the crescent moon, low in the sky and looking large.  I thought at the time that it looked unusually good, with a really bright star right next to it.  Had I known it was a once-in-a-lifetime grouping of the moon, Venus & Jupiter I would have got out the binoculars when I got home. Or the telephoto lens.

The thing is, that even without knowing what was going on, having no real interest for stargazing, and even with the amount of light pollution (and air pollution), I was drawn to the moon and felt there was something special about it.  I can see how the ancient civilisations came up with all those myths and theories: imagine how it was then with perfectly clear skies and no streetlights and the moon, which does exactly the same thing on a strict 28-day cycle for as long as anyone can remember suddenly doing something different.  And of course, people looked at the stars, sun and moon a lot more then.  They had to in order to navigate or tell the time.

Little wonder that the really spectacular stufff like comets and eclipses generated fear, awe, and religious panic.

Any more astronomical events to look forward to soon?

I was commenting on the difficulty I have in imagining what the routine of a scientist might be like.  Taking the field of medicine as an example, I can understand the principle of all the tests you would have to do with a new treatment and how that could be routine, but what about the process that leads to the initial idea for using a particular chemical to treat a specific condition?  How do you get that initial spark of an idea, that first bit of inspiration?

I can’t imagine a scientist starting work at 9 and sitting down to decide to come up with a new idea.  Do you just play with random things until inspiration strikes?  It has always been something that fascinates me.  At this point I said how I thought that you could not set up a structured routine to come up with new ideas, and that there is no algorithm for pure invention…   My colleague said “Actually…  I did my PhD in programming computers to be creative”.

There is no come-back to that!

When the film Gattaca came out in 1997 the project had been running for seven years with no sign of it finishing (it eventually did come up with results six years later) making the movie seem implausible for two reasons: that sequencing could be done on demand in minutes, and that the results of gene mapping would totally dominate society. Not that any of that detracted from it being a visually stunning film, but back then it seemed about as plausible as Star Wars.
Now that scientists say they have completed a gene mapping in a mere four weeks at a cost of only $100,000 with a trend that could lead to the whole thing taking only two days for a cost of $100 I’m not so sure.  From that to a 15-minute test is only a small step.

In theory this opens the door to all sort of eugenicists’ wet dreams.   Using the results to prevent children being born with certain congenital conditions is the benign possibility, but the darker possibilities are to ‘breed out’ certain characteristics deemed to be unwanted or try to encourage other characteristics.  While I don’t think we are going to produce a government that wants to do that sort of thing I wouldn’t have the same confidence in all the various governments of the world.

That isn’t a reason to stifle the technology of course,  but suddenly all sorts of science fiction plots come to mind – like the time machine or Brave New World with ‘epsilons’ or ‘morlocks’ being created deliberately to provide a slave caste.  Its scary when the fiction of the possible becomes the fiction of the plausible.

I imagine Michael Crichton is already polishing off the first draft of a novel based on an extrapolation of this breakthrough…

It’s a good thing for people to examine an alternative , but dissatisfaction with the norm can also panic people into falling into love with the first philosophical piece of tail that falls upon their inward eye.  I think that there can only be one alternative  creed for a life sensibly lived and that the proper alternative to all your alternatives is.. wait for it…  SCIENCE!!!

The author?  Graham Chapman from Monty Python in an essay in the book Calcium Made Interesting, which touches on fascism, hippies, Bob Geldof, tabloid journalism, and AIDS

Obviously I am not a physicist.  To be honest I can’t really get my head around quantum mechanics, super string theory and stuff like that, but I still keep buying the books in case one of them manages to explain it in a way I can understand. I think it might be worth trying Atom by Jim Al-Khalili & Piers Bizony, because if its anything like the TV programme it will at least not be boring.

The bit of the TV show I saw was all about a conference in Brussels in 1927, about the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum mechanics. I could not believe it.  Amongst the participants were Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, Max Planck,  Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Lorentz and Madame Curie – and that’s just the ones I had heard of – all in the same room.  Not only that, there was a photo of the whole lot together and some film footage of them mingling about.

I looked it up on Wikipedia.  It was the 5th Solvay Conference in 1927.  There were 27 scientists taking part and 19 of them were, or later became, Nobel Prize winners.  Do follow that link and look at the photo of them all together.  I was fascinated as I wasn’t aware that so many of the big names had got together: it sounded like the Live Aid of nuclear physics, except Einstein and Curie together is a bigger deal than Paul Young and Alison Moyet doing a duet. (Sorry Alf)

That part of the programme was humanising science, in the same way that Stephen Jay Gould does in his more biographical essays.  I really hope the whole thing is as good – I am now resolved to watch all three parts.

A lot of the comments I have now read about the presenter, Jim Al-Khalili, are putting him on a par with Bronowski, Sagan, Attenborough, James Burke and crew for presenting science in a popular, accessible manner.  There might be a certain amount of hyperbole involved there, but the signs so far are encouraging, despite some slightly annoying, over-the-top, and un-necessary camerwork at the end.
The programme was a repeat.  I have no idea when it was first shown – it totally passed me by at the time and nearly did so again this time.  Why do the BBC not do more to promote programmes like this when they make them?  A bit of a plug before Dr. Who would have reached a lot of potential viewers.

In fact its so counter-intuitive that I find it hard to believe. The bloke in charge of the study says:

The widespread assumption that human evolution has slowed down because it’s easier to live and we’ve conquered nature is absolutely not true. We didn’t conquer nature, we changed it in ways that created new selection pressures on us

Something about that doesn’t sound right. I understood the assumption that human evolution had slowed down to be based on the idea that possessing genetic disadvantages no longer made it less likely to pass those traits on. Maybe that’s what he means but he decided that “it’s easier to live” summed it up in a dumbed-down way.

Of course I am basing everything on a Euro-centric perspective, where most people have children and pass their genes on but those with all the genetic advantages – or at least who are most successful – seem to have fewer children.

But that’s just my first impression, and only part of the story. Perhaps the bit about more mutations is what makes a difference. And that sounds feasible. Actually it sounds a bit like ‘Heroes’… (I’ll have Peter Petrelli’s powers please, with flying as a second choice)

Anyway, I do wonder how the creationists will take it all.