I don’t know if it is just being in my 40′s now and noticing the deterioration of my body (primarily the dreaded far sightedness that’s started to show) but I am starting to pay a lot closer attention to a lot of these studies. I’d really like it if I could be in my 60′s and be as healthy as now. The biggest excitement were those mouse studies that may have found a way to reverse a lot of aging effects. Now of course lots of things look great in mice studies that don’t work in humans. And this relies of stem cells and scientists really have found a good way to produce the massive quantities of stem cells all these stem cell therapies need. (In a few cases you can harvest them from the patient – but in general getting stem cells is still the biggest issue)

Of course this is all an area where there’s more hype than results. Further even if drugs and treatments get on the market there’s not guarantee they’ll be widely dispersed. Rather once approved they’ll probably be limited to more narrow treatments whether people want it that way or not.

There’s lots of stuff that has looked very fruitful. Even if they are limited you have to hope that some will have success with minimal side effects in larger human studies.

Related posts:

1. Spraying Stem Cells to Heal
2. Problems of Non-embryonic Stem Cells
3. Cancer & Stem Cells

Physicists are surprisingly good in the verbal area. Not the top but quite high.  I’m not sure why that is. My theory is that the way physicists solve problems ends up utilizing a lot of verbal rather than mathematical reasoning. Typically the hard part in physics is figuring out the problem so you can make it mathematical. The math phase is often the easiest part. (To a physicist anyway)

Related posts:

1. Follies of Economics
2. XKCD on Physicists
3. Gender, Nations and Math Performance

Razib unexpectedly got a lot of flack for the post (he is after all an atheist) and did a followup on what atheism and autism may have in common. The basic idea is that the kinds of intuitions held by those on the autistic spectrum (including very high functional autistics – i.e. the majority of scientists) tend to not lead to a belief in God. This opposite to most autistic like cognitive styles (i.e. the very social) tend to believe in God more.

As an aside, as I mentioned at a BCC thread today, I think this may be a partial explanation of the long noted difference in religiosity between men and women. Even women with Asperger’s tend to be much more social than men with the same disorder. However 80% of people diagnosed with autistic spectrum conditions are male. I don’t claim that this explains everything but it is an interesting hypothesis.

The final post on the topic today was on intuition and cognitive style influences on belief in God. Perhaps unsurprisingly those who rely more on intuition than reflection believe in God more. The connection isn’t huge but it is interesting, even acknowledging the limits of the study. Of course breaking out what we mean by intuition is important. (As I note in the comments)

Anyway it’s all quite interesting although probably unsurprising to those who’ve studied the relationship between cognition and religious belief. I’d suggest checking out the posts. They’re definitely worth reading. (Please, if you comment, remember the majority of readers are scientists and atheists – don’t embarrass us with silly comments about religion. Mormons have a pretty good rep over there. Let’s keep it that way.)

Related posts:

1. Intuitions in Philosophical Argument
2. On Intuitions in Argument
3. Intuitions and Responsibility

Of course when you stop and think about it this gets at the idea of positive and negative freedoms quite well. One reason I’m not a libertarian.

Related posts:

1. Stop Printing Phone Books
2. Effects of Ending Drugs
3. Stop that Crow

In the meantime I saw a link to the BBC story about laser fusion over at Slashdot today. Interestingly this is what I worked on back in my days at LANL. It seems to me that these stories tend to focus so much on the physics that they ignore a lot of the big engineering problems of positioning your fuel such that lasers can hit it and produce a symmetrical implosion. That’s fine when you’re just working on one pellet at a time. However even if you solve the physics problems and manage to scale the energy up a few orders of magnitude you still have the problem of how to build a reactor with the technology. It seems to me no one has come close to cracking that nut.

A regular fission reactor is frankly a pretty simple design. Most of the modern technology is figuring out how to deal with the radioactive waste and how to avoid meltdowns like that which recently happened in Japan. However the basic engineering of it as a power source is pretty straightforward. Honestly it’s WWII technology.

With laser fusion it’s a whole lot trickier. It’s not just an issue of funding. I think there’s a real question of whether the funding is worth it. After being in it for a few years back in the day (when honestly a lot of the money was coming from the military as a way to get around the test ban treaty) I kind of questioned whether the money spent under Clinton was worth it.

The saying that fusion is perpetually 50 years in the future seems as true today as it was 50 years ago. Honestly I just can’t see the two main approaches (magnetic confinement or laser) as being capable of making a real practical energy source. For that I think fusion is a lost cause until someone comes up with a new technique.

Don’t get me wrong – there may be some interesting physics in all this. I just think it is very deceptive to market it as energy research when really it’s basic research in a narrow area of applied physics. (Symmetries in high pressure plasmas)

Related posts:

1. Fusion Dying on the Vine?
2. Cold Fusion Redux?
3. Bubble Fusion Misconduct

Anyway let me quote from Jonathan Adler’s post:

Those attacking Christie are suggesting there is only one politically acceptable position on climate science — that one’s ideological bona fides are to be determined by one’s scientific beliefs, and not simply one’s policy preferences. This is a problem on multiple levels. Among other things, it leads conservatives to embrace an anti-scientific know-nothingism whereby scientific claims are to be evaluated not by scientific evidence but their political implications. Thus climate science must be attacked because it provides a too ready justification for government regulation. This is the same reason some conservatives attack evolution — they fear it undermines religious belief — and it is just as wrong.

I hope this is the beginning of some sanity on this issue. However my sense is that if any of the non-Mormon Republicans win the nomination (i.e. Perry or Bachmann) it’ll get worse not better.

Related posts:

1. Where Did Warming go
2. NS on Global Warming Ended in 1998
3. Unexpectedl Support cientific consensus on global warming

Now I’ve argued before that questions like these can be tricky. I especially think they are tricky for Mormons who often have a fairly nuanced view of the issues. Unless you phrase things in just the right way to pick out the appropriate view people get confused. Yet the way the questions often get cast is from a fully secular view which can be misleading.  The question in the above is, “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals” to which one had to say true or false. Honestly, that’s a pretty good take on the question. Better than most.

I wanted to find a more wide ranging poll though in terms of countries. The best I could find was from April of this year. It was a Reuters poll and can be found at the Ipsos site. It was a poll trying to tease out religious belief from 23 countries. What I liked about the poll is that it tries to present three options: Creationism, Evolutionism or Both. (As a believer in both evolution and God I think something like the “both” option is correct)  However while I loved the attempt the question was a bit more problematic. Here’s the question:

There has been some debate recently about the origins of human beings. Please tell me which of the following is closer to your own point of view:

• Some people are referred to as ‘creationist’s’ and believe that human beings were in fact created by a spiritual force such as the God they believe in and do not believe that the origin of man came from evolving from other species such as apes.
• Some people are referred to as ‘evolutionist’s’ and believe that human beings were in fact created over a long period of time of evolution growing into fully formed human beings they are today from lower species such as apes.
• Some people simply don’t know what to believe and sometimes agree or disagree with theories and ideas put forward by both creationist’s and evolutionist’s.

Why do I have a problem with this? OK, maybe it’s me being nit-picky but I hate the introduction of, “some people simply don’t know what to believe.” In other words it’s not really a choice of both but more a choice of “I don’t know.” So I think that may bias things somewhat. Still it’s a much better question than most. What was very interesting were the results. (Sorry I don’t have fancy graphs – I don’t do graphs a lot so you’re getting pretty bare-bones ones)

It seems to me that the “both” choice in particular is much more all over the place. Admittedly it is more pulling out the folks who have strong views one way or the other. (i.e. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, German and Sweden) But looking at any of the graphs you see that you get a bit more nuanced view. I think for instance that the % evolutionist graph is much more linear with a few outliers (Saudi Arabia, US, China, and India)

Anyway, no terribly significant point to make from this beyond agreeing that there does appear to be a strong relationship between wealth and belief in evolution.

Related posts:

1. Schelling, Heidegger, Freedom
2. PoMo Conservative against Atheists
3. Mormons Worse at Believing Evolution?

When asked to name a scientist, Americans are stumped. In one recent survey, the top choice, at 47 percent, was Einstein, who has been dead since 1955, and the next, at 23 percent, was “I don’t know.” In another survey, only 4 percent of respondents could name a living scientist.

That’s pretty bad.  I found the original poll, a June 2009 survey in USA Today.  Here are the results:

47% named Albert Einstein
23% could not name anyone
6% named Marie Curie
4% named Louis Pasteur
4% named Thomas Edison

That’s a bit surprising. I’d have thought Stephen Hawking would have made an appearance. But I guess his star has faded the past decade. I’m actually impressed that Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur scored so high. I wonder what the figure would have been if they asked them to name three scientists. I suspect Einstein is such an easy choice that even people who knew of other scientists would name him. He’s such a pop icon figure that he almost makes the statistics meaningless. (Although he’s a perfectly acceptable answer if you are merely asked to name a single scientist — I’d probably have answer Einstein too)

The NYT suggests a problem since Einstein has been dead since 1955. But that’s really not a problem with the poll – just what they want to draw from the poll. Which frankly is unwarranted. I don’t dispute that the public at large likes science in the abstract but never really engages with it much. While it would be nice for the public to know more science, economics and the details of our political institutions I’m not sure it’s fair to expect that.

The bigger question I have is the claim of only 4% being able to name a living scientist. I’ve found lots of references to the claim — primarily via the NYT article — but couldn’t find the poll. (I think it a little irresponsible for the NYT to refuse to reference polls simply because they appear in competing papers, btw) The closest poll I could find was the 2009 New Voices for Research Poll. According to this poll 65% said they couldn’t name a living scientist. 18% tried but got it wrong. However that’s far from the claim that only 4% could.  Interestingly in that poll Hawking topped Einstein with 7% and 4% respectively. Interestingly Pasteur and Curie were both prominently represented with 2% each.

So where is this poll claiming only 4% knowledge? I’m pretty skeptical. Interestingly while searching for the origin of the poll I came across this blog post debunking the figure. It’s a compelling argument noting that probably more than 4% of Americans have a degree or training in science.

Related posts:

1. Einstein Wrong?
2. Kurt Gödel and the Misprint Demons
3. God vs. the Multiverse