Cross-posted at dailykos and mleftwing
Apparently the Bush administration’s war on science is now being assisted by the New York Times, who were so helpful in facilitating the war on Iraq. From the New York Times Book Review:
Modern man can choose from a veritable smorgasbord of Type 1 errors: string theory, neo-Darwinism, cosmology, economics, God. Astrology is as good as any…
Oh, now I get it. Science is just a bunch of nice stories, kind of like in the Bible.
But who is this writer, and why did the NYTwits let him get away with such an idiotic statement? More after this mouse-click…
Perhaps the editors at the NYTimes felt that the book under review, ‘The Fated Sky: Astrology in History’ by Benson Bobrick was so full of bullshit, given its subject, that there wasn’t much that the reviewer could do to make matters worse. But they weren’t prepared for reviewer Dick Teresi:
Shortly into my marriage (about six hours) my wife purchased a white-noise generator to counteract my night terrors. White noise is a mishmash of random sound waves that interfere with other waves, and thus flatten and nullify them. Within a few weeks, however, I heard the generator calling my name. “Dick . . . Dick . . . Dick . . . ,” it moaned. “What? What? What?” I moaned back. Recently, it has begun dispensing orders: “Kill, kill your publisher.”
Okay, is this guy just violating the terms of his poetic license, or it he really nuts? The review continues:
The mathematician Michael Sutherland diagnosed my condition. “It’s called apophenia,” he said. In statistics, apophenia is a “Type 1 error,” a false alarm, the experience of seeing patterns in meaningless data. I must have caught it from the theorists I interview.
Now this is a fairly amusing, if completely disingenuous, way of introducing the idea that humans are wired to see patterns where there aren’t any. All scientists are familiar with this tendency – when I was in grad school and I thought I saw a bump (a lot of experimental particle physics consists of hunting for bumps in data plots), the more experienced physicists would turn the plot upside-down and ask if I now saw a trough which, of course, I wasn’t predisposed to fixate on. Random data is almost never smooth, it clumps, and these random clumps can mimic all kinds of patterns. So far so good.
But here is where it gets just, well, stupid:
In the early 20th century, experimenters demonstrated that randomness rules: physicists found that particles are unpredictable; geneticists discovered that evolution is fueled by squillions of chance mutations. Yet today superstring theorists insist they will reconcile the lumpy, acausal quantum world with the smooth determinism of relativity; and neo-Darwinists emphasize natural selection, a god-like mechanism that sorts through mutations and chooses only the optimal ones. To them, every feather, fetlock and pubic hair bristles with meaning.
This is so far off base that it is, as Wolfgang Pauli once said, not even wrong. But, like the good little scientific reductionists that we are, let’s take it apart and see what is going on in there.
- Small particles, roughly atom-size and below, obey the rules of quantum mechanics, which describes their motions with probability distributions of the kind used to predict coin-flipping, rather than the trajectories used by newtonian mechanics to describe the motions of billiard balls. Check.
- Genetic replication includes errors that have a random character. Check.
- Those kooky string theorists think they can reconcile “acausal” quantum mechanics with “smooth” relativity. Hey, wait a minute.
- Neo-Darwinists believe that “god-like” natural selection always chooses the “optimal” genetic mutations. Whaaaaaa?
Having a physics background, I can easily dispose of item 3. Quantum mechanics is completely causal, it just isn’t deterministic for individual events. However the Schrodinger equation, which describes the time evolution of a wave function is, completely causal and even deterministic.
What’s more, relativity and quantum mechanics were unified long ago in the form of quantum field theories like quantum electrodynamics. String theory attempts to bring gravity into the quantum fold, but gravity isn’t any “smoother” than the other forces, such as the electric and magnetic fields, which were relativistically quantized in the 1940’s. Such bullshit.
Moving on to evolution, item 4 would have a neo-darwinist like Steven Jay Gould spinning in his (recent, alas) grave. The idea that evolution produces an inexorable progress toward “optimal” organisms is the kind of silly high-school mistake that might keep a student after school, writing “evolution is not deterministic” on the blackboard a hundred times.
But in the NYTimes such crap is published without qualm, very much like the time the physicist Alan Sokal submitted a completely bogus pseudoscientific paper to the journal Social Text, which was published without anyone at Social Text understanding what he had written (they couldn’t have, it was gibberish mixed in with trendy lit-crit terms).
Now, the Social Text editors cried foul when Prof. Sokal revealed his hoax (on the eve of publication). They accepted his work because of his reputation as a physicist. Maybe the NYTimes book review editor simply thought that he couldn’t question the authoritative source of the review.
Who is this Dick Teresi? Well, his scientific credentials are flawless:
Dick Teresi is the author or coauthor of several books about science and technology, including The God Particle. He is cofounder of Omni magazine and has written for Discover, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly, and is a frequent reviewer and essayist for The New York Times Book Review. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Ah, so the NYTimes published this drivel because they know him and have published his stuff before. Of course, they liked his previous work and, after all, he writes about science so he must know his stuff. Kinda like that other emminent NYTimes writer, uh, former writer, Judith Miller.
Well, at least they are consistent.
A hat-tip to Digby for bringing this up originally.
