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Wildlife-Friendly Backyard

At the museum’s center is a huge recreation of North Carolina’s many ecosystems, filled with both living and taxidermied animals. One of my favorite side displays was on how to build an eco-friendly yard that invites, feeds, and shelter’s wildlife.

The Four Fundamentals of Wildlife-Friendly Landscapes:

1. Offer a year-round food supply along with a variety of feeders. Native plants that seasonally produce seeds, berries, nuts, and flower nectar are ideal.
2. Provide water for drinking and bathing. Watering holes can be a simple shallow saucer on the ground or an elaborate minipond.
3. Provide a place to rest and escape predators. Evergreen shrubs and thick vegetation lend protection to wildlife–as do rock and brush piles.
4. Create nesting spots; some animals have specific needs. Add birdhouses and leave dead trees standing when possible.

Complete Flickr set here.

It’s time we stopped using the word “theoretically,” the word is an oxymoron unto itself, at least in the way we use it:

• “Is it theoretically possible for science to someday create a real lightsaber? (source)”
• “Antimatter galaxies theoretically possible, but unlikely (source)”
• “Critics say the White House’s theoretical arguments may fly in the face of empirical evidence. (source)”
• “…academics/media do a big disservice by raising issues that are theoretically possible, but not at all important in reality. (source)”
• “Are MMORPG goods theoretically taxable? (source)”
• “A science is most exciting when there are two or more strong, competing theories. (source)”

In science a theory is a “comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature that is supported by many facts gathered over time.” A theory is not synonymous with fact, but it is the best approximation to it.

The way everyday people use the word theory is synonymous with speculation, and this leads to much confusion when debating scientific issues. People who don’t understand science argue that evolution and Anthropogenic Global Warming are only theories, not realizing that what they have actually said is that Evolution and AGW are only practically facts.

The word people should be using in the above examples is hypothetically. In science, we move from hypothesis through experimentation to theory.

There is no such thing as “competing theories.” This is an oxymoron. If they are competing, then they are hypotheses. If you have to ask if something is “theoretically possible,” then it probably isn’t, it’s merely “hypothetically possible.”

Remember Gravity is only a Theory.

I love books that shake up my preconceptions, and reading Pinker’s book was like experiencing one big personal iconoclasm. The thoroughness with which he engaged gender, violence, intelligence, and other aspects of our social understandings unsettled my positions on much of the whole “Nature VS Nurture” debate. While it did not convince me entirely, it did work effectively to move me a few degrees along the debate spectrum.

Where Pinker and I were in full agreement was in rejecting the antiquated idea of the noble savage, the idea that we are born pure and innocent, living in harmony with nature and it is civilization that corrupts us. The fossil evidence shows human on human violence and environmental destruction in primitive times. The noble savage is an idealized concept that we need to put away in order to understand the histories of all the civilizations that have failed before ours.

Where Pinker’s arguments got weak is when tackling the role of media on our perceptions. He criticizes the logic behind political correctness and efforts to have minorities portrayed respectfully:

Since images are interpreted in the context of a deeper understanding of people and their relationships, the “crisis of representation,” with its paranoia about the manipulation of our mind by media images, is overblown. People are not helplessly programmed with images; they can evaluate and interpret what they see using everything else they know, such as the credibility and motives of the source. (pinker, 216)

Putting the obvious straw man aside (no one claims we are “helplessly programmed“), what are images and language but an effort to construct context? Why do people rally against the crass distortions of perspective on Fox News? What are political advisors, advertisers, artists, and opinion columnists of all types doing but to try and move the line of scrimmage?

Pinker’s writing suffers from a wealth facts that he takes for granted on subjects he obviously hasn’t looked into with much scrutiny. He dismisses the hypothesis that the United States Constitution was in part inspired by the Iroquois Federation as “1960s granola (Pinker, 296);” however, this is an unsettled dispute among historians, and the Smithsonian has admitted to striking similarities between the two government models. He makes the claim that people irrationally lobby to remove carcinogenic chloroform from drinking water, but peanut butter 100 times more carcinogenic. This statement is pure bullox. As is his use of the Darwin awards to argue that men are gender-biased to daredevil stunts (Pinker is very fond of anecdotal evidence throughout the book).

So Pinker is prone to some unsupported claims, urban legends, and exaggerations to make his case. Nobody’s perfect, but it does give us perspective on Pinker’s approach to his subject matter.

Where Pinker makes his strongest arguments, and justifies his book, is in arguing that, just because something isn’t Nurture, doesn’t justify eugenics, discrimination, and inequality. Wherever you fall on the NvN debate, Feminism was a good thing for women and society in general. Everyone deserves the same shot at an education because, even if intelligence were hereditary, everyone must still start on the same footing. Equality makes civilization stronger regardless of NvN

While Pinker makes great strides in banishing the false division between nature and nurture, he ultimately makes the mistake of estimating it at a 50/50 ratio (pinker, 388), keeping the false dichotomy firmly in place when he should have concluded it was time to do away with it. In psychology the whole NvN debate is considered naive since nature and nurture are so interwoven that their influences are ultimately indistinguishable.

Consider the meta argument that ultimately everything is innately nature since we are ultimately products of the physical laws of our universe, and the same case is true for nurture, as we are ultimately products of the environment of those physical laws. Environment and genetics are wrapped up in one another, so let’s stop trying to pin one down as the root cause for what we are. So while Pinker is correct that Nurture is over-hyped, he is equally guilty of over-hyping Nature.

Every year Green Sea Turtles travel 1,300 miles across the Atlantic Ocean from their nesting grounds in the middle of the South Atlantic to their feeding grounds on the Brazilian Coast. Why do the turtles undertake this incredibly taxing journey each year?

135 million years ago, South America and Africa were a single super-continent called Gondwanaland. At this time, the turtles probably inhabited a small bay or sea, nesting on one side and feeding on the other.

Over time, a process known as plate tectonics split the continents apart at about the same rate your fingernails grow. The change was imperceptible to the turtles, who traveled a few inches farther each year out of habit until, millions of years later, they were migrating the incredible distances they traverse today.

Doesn’t the epic nature of this tale, crossing oceans of time, distance, and generations of turtles, just tickle the imagination delightfully? Isn’t this an absolutely fantastic hypothesis?

It’s also completely discredited¹. We know this because the fossil evidence and geological timelines don’t match up. Sea Turtles didn’t evolve that way. Please don’t go around spreading this scientific urban legend.

The Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, once said, “The tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” It seems like what science knows is always changing, and indeed this is the case. Every day new articles appear in peer-review journals disproving formerly established paradigms, rendering what we assumed were facts into falsehoods.

Just look at a decade’s worth of news articles on health and nutrition to see the wealth of contradictory information that field of research produces. Eat a low-fat diet. No, wait, eat a low-carb diet. Eat how many servings of meat? Dairy?

Many people characterize the mercurial nature of scientific knowledge as a weakness. Science is unstable, they argue, it claims to know the truth, but the truth doesn’t change. The fact that scientific knowledge is perpetually evolving is actually its greatest virtue, because scientists know how to admit when they are wrong.

The famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking published ground-breaking theories on Black Holes. Today we refer to the x-rays Black Holes emit as “Hawking Radiation” in his honor. In July 2004 Hawking acknowledge he was in error about a characteristic of black holes for 30 years.

The Biologist Richard Dawkins regularly tells the story of when he was an undergraduate at Oxford. A respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department there believed and taught that the Golgi Apparatus was not real. One day a visiting lecturer came and presented convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, Dawkins tells us, the elder statesman “strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said–with passion–’My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.’ We clapped our hands red”²

Western Civilization once thought the Earth was the center of the Universe and that the stars, moon, and sun orbited around it. Then Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and other astronomers developed the theory of a Heliocentric (sun-centered) Universe. Today we know the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and our galaxy moves through the Universe as well. Because Science has the power to admit when its wrong, it has the power to grow and improve. Our understanding of reality grows and improves with it.

Daniel Dennet, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, New York, 1995. (footnote on p245)

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, United Kingdom, 2006.

Fish Specimens in Jars

I have a morbid fascination with animals preserved in jars, and that’s what drew me into the Natures Explorers exhibit; however, it was not the Cabinet of Curiosities I expected to find. Instead, I met with an exhibit about the lives of those who assemble such cabinets and the history behind the practice of Naturalism.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

My father, former head of the Microbiology Department at ODU, responded to an e-mail my hippie brother sent out about the recent Prozac debunking:

I seriously doubt that the PLOS Journal of Medicine, which I’ve never heard of in all my 35 years in the field, has any merit. If it even does exist, then I doubt that it is a refereed Journal which requires no less than three outside reviewers to substantiate the data, the statistics and the conclusions. While one cannot dispute the placebo effect, I wonder why this article was not submitted to a more prestigious journal.

Attention people who work at the Public Library of Science: You need to do a better job of getting the word out.

Attention Academia: You need get more involved with new media.

That is all.