Science

This is fascinating. It is truly a bizarre universe we inhabit.

A friend e-mailed a link to “What Is Your Dangerous Idea?” from Edge. She came by way of A&L and said it was worth browsing. I suspect Chicagoboyz & readers will find something of interest in these transgressive notions.

The series of “dangerous ideas” tend toward the scientific; I suspect about everyone else on this site will have more thoughtful positions than mine. Several are about global warming and some are about the nature of man. (Pinker apparently suggested the question last year.)

Joel Garreau’s dangerous idea is that perhaps Faulkner was right:

If Faulkner is right, however, there is a third possible future. That is the one that counts on the ragged human convoy of divergent perceptions, piqued honor, posturing, insecurity and humor once again wending its way to glory. It puts a shocking premium on Faulkner’s hope that man will prevail “because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” It assumes that even as change picks up speed, giving us less and less time to react, we will still be able to rely on the impulse that Churchill described when he said, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing—after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”

But more discuss hard science & stats. They led me to a topic for my more scientifically oriented brethren. Bart Kosko discusses bell curves; he observes

Thick-tailed bell curves further call into question what counts as a statistical “outlier” or bad data: Is a tail datum error or pattern? The line between extreme and non-extreme data is not just fuzzy but depends crucially on the underlying tail thickness.

Our understanding of such curves may misread ones with thick tails; of course, some have thick, some thin; some straggle out and others end quite abruptly after a sharp decline.

Ever since I first came back to teaching, I’ve found my rigorous & objective tests net a concave curve. After the first couple of semesters, I spoke to more seasoned teachers. They weren’t surprised, calling the inverse curve a junior college one. I have found it an accurate reflection of my students’ command of the material. But I wonder if it is a pattern often useful in understanding other data.

I used to raise dogs professionally. (Golden retrievers if anyone is interested.) Get involved in the business, or any biological industry, and you’ll see that selective breeding works.

My thing was breeding dogs with short haired coats. Everyone always complains about the hair littering the couch when their golden starts to shed, so I decided to do something about it. I simply chose dogs with short hair for breeding while keeping those with longer hair penned up. I didn’t do it long enough to see a significant change, but just a glance at all the different breeds out there will show that it would have worked eventually.

That is pretty much at the heart of evolution. Some sort of environmental cause either reduces the chance for organisms with a certain inherited trait from breeding, or it increases the chances for individuals from the same species with a different trait. Undesired traits are bred out of the species while those that increase the chance of hooking up become commonplace. This is, in fact, the basis for just about all of our modern biological science.

Today a judge in PA banned the teaching of Intelligent Design in public school biology classes, saying that it was thinly disguised religion.

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Planning an Everglades camping trip? Maybe it’s time to reconsider.