The kingdom of lies

Abraham Lincoln

 Abraham Lincoln is credited with having said this:

You can deceive some people all the time. You can deceive everybody part of the time. But you can't deceive everybody all the time.

When I was young, if a politician was caught lying, he must resign, because he had deceived the people. This was true back then. Famous politicians who resigned during that time because they had lied included John Profumo, the British minister, in 1963, and Richard Nixon, the US president, in 1974.

This is quite rare now. Today, politicians who resign when they are caught lying are not the rule, but the exception. Many politicians lie whenever they speak, they know that everyone knows that they are lying, but don't care about it. This is an example of the discredit into which the concept of truth has fallen, which was one of the most important criteria in history, not just for politics, but for science and all forms of human thought.

Religious persecution of scientists?

William Harvey

This summer, Jesús Lizcano published an article in El Imparcial entitled. A memory for the scientists persecuted in history (my translation). He classifies the persecuted scientists into three groups: a) persecuted for political reasons; b) persecuted for religious reasons; and c) persecuted for reasons of sexual orientation. Here I am going to refer to those in the second group, which I find debatable.

Of course, among the eleven scientists persecuted for religious reasons, according to Lizcano, Hypatia and Galileo could not be missing. They are mentioned once and again, often with obvious exaggerations, as shown by the fact that many people believe that Galileo was burned alive by the Inquisition, when in fact he was sentenced to house arrest, softened over time. But here I am going to talk about the other nine mentioned in the article.

Information paradoxes

Woody Allen

As I have mentioned before, time travel, if it were possible, would cause many paradoxes. In a previous post I mentioned the paradox of unsourced information, which can be summarized thus:

A time traveler who lives in time 3 knows that a person A said or did something at time 2, prior to time 3. 

The traveler goes back from time 3 to time 1, prior to time 2, where he meets A. 

While they are together, the traveler suggests person A the idea of ​​doing or saying what he knows that person will do or say in the future, which has not yet taken place. 

Whose idea was it originally? Not the traveler’s, because he learned it from the history of person A at time 3. Not from person A, because the traveler suggested the idea to person A at time 1. 

The information in question has come out of nowhere, without anyone having thought it out.

The following diagram explains it.

Mistakes regarding natural selection

Charles Darwin

Since Charles Darwin coined this term, and included it in the title of his famous book, published in 1859, the term natural selection has been poorly understood, especially by non-specialists. Let’s review a few of the most frequent mistakes:

• Natural selection is a force that acts on living beings to cause evolution. This is not true. Natural selection is not a force, nor an object, nor an interaction, nor a phenomenon. It is simply a statistical observation. What is observed is the fact that, in general, individuals better adapted to their environment tend to leave more descendants than those less adapted. Nothing else. It is, therefore, a matter of common sense, not the result of the external action of a mysterious force.

Longevity and aging

Almost eight years ago I wrote a post on this topic in this blog, which contained a figure that I built starting from data provided by the Spanish Institute of Statistics, which showed mortality data for Spain in three different years: 1900, 1991 and 2013. The three curves in the figure represent the percentage of people who have reached a certain age and will die during the next year. I’m showing here an equivalent figure, with updated data that correspond to the years 1900, 1991 and 2022, as we now have more recent data.

As I said then, the figure shows that medical advances have reduced mortality, especially at the beginning and the end of life, but their effects are little noticeable for people between 20 and 40 years old. The mortality curve, which in 1900 was U-shaped, is approaching an inverted L, with a very low rate for almost all of life and a fairly abrupt rise after age 80.

Singularities

Hal 9000, from the film
2001, a space odyssey

A singularity is a mathematical concept applied to a function of a variable that reaches an infinite value for one or several finite values of its independent variable.

For example, the function y=1/x presents a singularity for x=0, since it is often said that 1 divided by zero is equal to infinity.

What happens with cholesterol?

Cholesterol is an essential lipid, used to build the membrane of many of our cells. In addition, various steroids, bile acids and vitamin D are synthesized from cholesterol within the body. High cholesterol increases the chances of suffering from heart attacks and strokes. On the other hand, too low cholesterol is associated with depression that can even lead to suicide.

When someone says: I have had an analysis and it turns out that I have cholesterol, we should answer: If you didn’t have cholesterol, you’d be dead. What you have is high cholesterol.