What's the use of a child?

The importance of basic research

The secretary of the Royal Society of Sciences stood up and said:

“Mr. Faraday has the floor.”

“In today’s lecture, rather than speaking about a scientific subject, I’ll perform an experiment before your eyes. But first, allow me a short historical introduction. As you know, Oersted, Ampère and Arago proved that an electric current can give rise to magnetic phenomena. If you set a magnetic needle near an inactive copper wire, the needle points North. If a current passes through the wire, the needle deflects. If the wire is coiled and a current goes through it, the coil behaves as a magnet with two poles, North and South, the same as a typical ordinary magnet.

Scientists and religion

In 1914, psychologist James Henry Leuba surveyed 1,000 randomly selected scientists in the United States, asking them if they believed in a personal God, defined in this way: a God in intellectual and affective communication with man... to whom one may pray in the expectation of receiving an answer. Among those who answered the survey, 41.8% answered the question affirmatively, 41.5% negatively, the remainder did not know or refused to answer. From these data, Leuba drew the conclusion that faith in God would decrease with the advance of science, and predicted that by the late twentieth century virtually all scientists would be atheists.

In 1996, Larson and Witham repeated Leuba's survey using exactly the same question, so that the results were comparable. They found that 39.3% answered affirmatively, while 45.3% answered negatively. These numbers were therefore approximately the same as eighty years earlier. As the authors say in their paper, if in 1914 the high number of atheists was surprising, what was surprising in 1996 was the high number of believers.

These two surveys present a problem: Leuba and his followers consider atheists those who answered their question negatively. But who would answer negatively such a question? Not just atheists, also agnostics and indifferent, plus those who believe in a non-personal God.

Hallucinations

In a paper (Visions for all) published in its April 7th 2012 issue, Science News summarizes the work of Tanya Luhrmann about the God experiences that many people claim to have felt. After four years of research, the anthropologist believes that she has proved the surprising conclusion that normal people can have hallucinations. But since hallucinations are common in diseases like schizophrenia and psychosis, she predicts that people who have many of these experiences are likely to end up psychotic. In particular, the article says, it is possible that Joan of Arc would have become psychotic if the British had not burned her.

This argumentation has a hidden premise. If we make it explicit, the associated reasoning can be summarized as follows:

The precariousness of scientific theories

It is better to keep a certain skepticism about scientific theories,. Not only because these theories are always simple approximations tuned by further advances, as in the case of Newtonian gravitation and Einstein’s general relativity, quoted in a previous article. It may also be the case that a scientific theory, after decades, centuries or even millennia of total domination, turns out to be simply wrong. This has happened many times in all the sciences, as will be seen with a sample of a few selected cases.

·         In astronomy, Aristotle’s theory of quintessence, arguing that the heavenly bodies are not made of the same stuff as the Earth, was the standard theory for nearly two thousand years.

·         In mathematics, the problem of squaring the circle with ruler and compass wasted efforts for centuries until it was shown to have no solution. Although amateurs keep trying, at least professionals no longer have to waste their time with the alleged demonstration they regularly receive.

Lavoisier

·         In chemistry, the phlogiston theory, which dominated for nearly a century, tried to solve the problem of combustion assuming that a burning body loses a part of its substance (the mysterious phlogiston). The real process turned out to be precisely the opposite. Rather than losing phlogiston, burning bodies absorb oxygen, as Lavoisier showed in the late eighteenth century.

·         In physics, for almost half a century in the late nineteenth century, no one doubted the existence of the ether, a mysterious substance with strange properties, which should provide support for the movement of electromagnetic waves. In the early twentieth century it was concluded that the ether does not exist.

Cultural evolution and biological evolution

Cultural and biological evolution are similar because natural selection acts in both cases. Cultural productions compete against one another and many become extinct. As in the case of living beings, not always the best win. Chance has an influence. In this way, for instance, Windows-95 threw OS-2 out of the market, even though at that time the second operating system was better. Another example is the result of the war between the three competing models of video recording: Betamax, 2000 and VHS.

In the same way that living beings exhibit genetic variability (many varieties of the same gene co-existing in the same population), there is also a cultural variability, represented by the co-existence of old and new makes and models of the same product. At times of big change in the environment (we are just now experiencing one) a cultural product may escape extinction thanks to its variability, by combining versions and producing something new, better adapted to the new circumstances.

The parallel is quite impressive. What we call a species in the biological world, may be considered similar to a civilization. But there are also deep differences between both phenomena.

While studies about biological evolution get back in time to one century and a half ago, those about cultural evolution are more recent: not even half a century. One of its pioneers, Richard Dawkins (who invented the term meme for cultural elements equivalent to genes) made the mistake of considering biological and cultural evolution as identical processes, forgetting their differences. Cultural evolution is almost exclusively typical of man and exhibits new phenomena, emergent features that make it quite different from biological evolution:

Solution to the time machine problem

Answer to the problem posed in a previouspost, on August 18th 2014:

This is what happened in the second scenario: 

At 16:01, the original Max traveled to the future in the second time machine. When he arrived, he found there the second Max waiting for him with the first time machine. He moved to the other machine and traveled back to the past, arriving at 15:59. After changing machines again, he traveled to the future in the original time machine. He never returned.

Only these two scenarios are possible. Any other you may try to build would be inconsistent (try and you will see).

Consequences: 

It is easy to see that the world line for the machine is the same in both scenarios. What changes is the traveler’s world line.

1.            In scenario 1, the traveler does not change machines either in the present or in the future.

2.            In scenario 2, the traveler changes machines both in the present and in the future.

Therefore, if time travel to the past were possible, the traveler would not be free. What he does in the present logically determines what he must do in the future. If he changes machines now, he must change in the future. If he doesn’t, he mustn’t.

Conclusion: 

Nobody doubts that a human being is free to take an elementary decision such as changing chairs or not. 

Therefore time travel towards the past must be impossible.

Thematic thread on Time: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

This is what science says about human life

With respect to current discussions about abortion, protection of life, and the rights of the pregnant woman, I think it timely to recall the scientific consensus about human life:

·        The life of every living being generated by means of sexual reproduction begins with the fertilization of the female by the male gamete, i.e. with the formation of the zygote. That is the point in time when a new being appears, of the same species as its parents, whose genetic endowment (its DNA) is different from that of its parents and any other living being of the same species, except for identical twins. This new living being will keep its genetic endowment until its death. This is the reason why the eggs of sea turtles and other endangered species are protected, because they are individuals of those species.

·        In every species of living beings who do not go through metamorphosis (including all reptiles, birds and mammals, and of course man) there is no sharp change in their development from the zygote to death. The different phases we use to make out (embryo, fetus, neonate, child, teenage, adult and old) are arbitrary, without any discontinuities. Not even the birth is anatomically discontinuous (it consists in cutting a blood vessel; physiologically it has other effects). There is no doubt that in all those phases, from the first to the last, the same individual is involved.

·        In every placental mammal (including man), the first phase of the life of the new individual takes place inside the body of the mother. Pregnancy is equivalent and replaces development inside the egg, which in reptiles and birds takes place outside the mother’s body. In both cases, maternity begins in fertilization, not in birth, whose equivalent is the rupture of the egg shell. A woman is a mother from the moment she becomes pregnant.