In an old post I argued that Inteligent Design really is science, just very bad science. Since then several people have suggested that the scientific theory that humans were designed by intelligent beings doesn’t count as intelligent design and that intelligent design is an inherently more religious theory. However, seeing this interview with Michael Behe on the Colbert report reminded me why I never found this response that compelling.

While people like Behe clearly defend Intelligent Design for religious or spiritual motives this doesn’t change the fact that the thesis he advanced in this video and (at least according to wikipedia) the one he advanced in his book are ultimately a purely secular argument that is fully consistent with the conclusion that aliens made human beings in an irreducibly complex fashion. Since we obviously could get evidence for such a conclusion¹ what Behe is presenting is a scientific theory whatever his motives², just a very bad one.

But the portrayal of Behe in the media makes it clear that Behe’s proposal of irreducible counts as Intelligent Design, at least in the public’s understanding of these terms. Therefore to insist on saying intelligent design isn’t science is at best extremely misleading. Yes, intelligent design is just a cover for the teaching of religious beliefs in school but it is a cover not those beliefs itself. Of course teaching even Behe’s scientific theory to school children in a science class would falsely suggest that the biblical account of creation had scientific plausibility and that would violate the separation of church and state. However, it’s pretty swallow that most people would understand the claim “Intelligent Design isn’t science,” in this fashion. Now maybe this technically false claims is a necessary Machiavellian counter to the Discovery Institute’s schemes but it is still false and I worry that it will ultimately do more harm than good.

More on this subject and why the National Academy of Science’s definition of a scientific theory is misleading after the break.

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A couple weeks ago I came across a post on Ars Technica bemoaning the current state of science journalism. Today when I came across a long post suggesting that the traditional culture of science journalism is irretrievably broken and we need to replace it with direct communication between scientists and the public I decided it was finally time to get around to posting on the topic.

Clearly science journalism does a very bad job of educating the public about science. Now perhaps in disciplines like linguistics all that is needed is a communications channel to the public that doesn’t report that cows have dialects but at least in disciplines like physics, mathematics, chemistry and biology (and perhaps lingustics as well) the problem seems to run much deeper than this. There is no shortage of physics¹ popularization books and articles written by physicists² but this doesn’t seem to have made the slightest dent in public misconceptions of physics. If anything it may have made things worse by convincing large segments of the population that quantum mechanics validates their spiritual view that everything is connected or that objects can be in two places at the same time.

One might chalk this up to the corrupting influence of book deals or simple inability of scientists to communicate to the general public but I think the problem really stems from the nature of scientific theories. As philosophers of science have long been aware most scientific statements aren’t testable or even truly meaningful in isolation. Unfortunately in subjects like physics, mathematics and chemistry the relevant background is something that takes years of schooling to absurd and is not something we could hope to communicate to the general public. This leads directly to the insoluble dilemma of science popularization. Either you use metaphors that the public doesn’t have the background to correctly interpret or you refactor your description into correct, but throughly boring, observational language, e.g., just describing the observational implications of quantum mechanics or general relativity. If you choose the former route you create the illusion of understanding and encourage absurd misconceptions and if you choose the latter you lose your audience.

When I was a little kid I read a lot of science popularization but looking back on it after having taken real science courses I realized that I hadn’t really learned anything from it. For instance the standard popularization of general relativity is that mass warps space thereby attracting nearby masses much like a bowling ball placed on a rubber sheet would draw nearby marbles into the depression it creates. This might be a reasonable metaphor for the expert but for the lay observer it creates the false impression that they understand how General Relativity explains gravity even though they had to suppose a gravitational force to make the metaphor work. The metaphors for quantum mechanics are even worse. Talking about the wave/particle duality may be enlightening for physicists who can understand this to mean the wave function sometimes behaves like a classical wave and sometimes like a classical particle but the general public interprets this to say that particles are two things at once rather than understanding that they just sometimes behave different ways. I could go on here forever but I think the point has been made.

Ultimately the problem is that physicists (or chemists or biologists) adopt whatever metaphors and descriptions that help them make better theories. They don’t pick theories based on how the general public would interpret their ontological commitments or project on them based on their experience with every day items. The real content of scientific theories is the predictions they make and their usefulness in creating new theories. The real significance of special relativity is not the philosophical claim that there is no such thing as true simultaneity³ but the empirical claim that the best theories will always be invariant under the Lorentz transformation. Since the public doesn’t have the background to understand the significance of the metaphors and claims used in high level descriptions of science they can’t possibly really be educated by this sort of popularization.

Now we can certainly try to make sure that popularizations of science get the actual predictions right (we won’t be able to teleport, the earth will warm if we keep releasing greenhouse gases) but I think doing much more than that while keeping public interest is hopeless. Thus we face a choice, should we commit to bore the public in the name of scientific accuracy or resign ourselves to creating the illusion of understanding via misleading metaphors to prop up funding. I tend to be in favor of the later option but if we are going to take that route we should quit bitching about the poor quality of science coverage since even coverage we thought was good wouldn’t be any better for the general public. Ultimately while there is some science popularization that is better and some that is worse the idea that we can take a subject which is ultimately concerned with creating complex mathematical models to predict the behavior of the physical world and substantially communicate what is going on in the subject to people who are totally unfamiliar with this process of mathematical model building seems crazy.

It really pisses me off when I’m listening to the radio or read something on the web and I hear someone say something like, “People of different races have more similarities than differences.”

What the fuck does this mean? If we list off all possible properties (natural kinds?) there are more people of the different races share than differ on? But if this even makes sense surely there are more similarities between a person and a rock (both made of matter, primarily fermions etc..) than there are differences. Even ignoring the obvious difficulties of comparing arbitrary members of extremely non-uniform groups this assertion just doesn’t make any literal sense.

Of course I realize that effectively this claim is just a place holder for the belief that ‘racism is wrong’ or ‘the differences between the races aren’t very important’ but I object to the way it is asserted as a fact to support this position as if it was some objectively verified fact rather than a mere restatement of you conclusion. Sure racism sucks but that’s no excuse to pointlessly use misleading arguments against it. If you really need to cite some fact at least say something meaningful like: the genetic variation inside ethnic groups is larger than the variation between them.

In an earlier post post I reviewed the mathematical significance of Tarski’s definition of truth and promised that I would explain why it is philosophically useless in a later post. I wasn’t sure anyone was interested and never got around to making that post but thanks to a comment I’ve finally gotten around to this post.

Briefly Tarski’s ‘defines’ truth by endorsing the following scheme (called the T-schema) for every sentence S:

‘S is true’ if and only if S

To take the canonical example:

“‘Snow is white’ is true” if and only if ‘Snow is white’

Now I don’t dispute that this scheme indeed holds (perhaps even necessarily) for the concept truth. I’m even willing to grant that this scheme may ‘define’ truth in some sense but what I dispute is that it tells us anything significant about truth.

Although we normally expect a definition to explain¹ the concept in question not all definitions do so. For instance consider the definition of a ‘good action’ as “an action one morally ought to take.” While such a definition might explain the term ‘good action’ to someone who didn’t speak the language or help organize a philosophical theory in no way could it be said to explain what a good action was or give us a grip on the nature of morality. That is the definition merely reveals trivial linguistic connections between words that all make use of the same underlying opaque concept.

Tarski’s definition of truth is just the same. Sure if one didn’t know how to translate the English word ‘true’ into German communicating the T-schema in English could help your listener realize that ‘wahr’ was the correct translation. However, the T-schema only manages this by bootstrapping off the fact that your listener already understands assertability in English. In other words all the T-schema expresses is the connection between the predicate ‘true’ and assertability. In order to find the fact that “‘Snow is white’ is true” if and only if ‘Snow is white’ enlightening you must already understand what it means for snow to be white. If you don’t see this just imagine a linguistic practice where uttering ‘Snow is white’ conveyed your disbelief in the whiteness of snow. In that case the the word defined by the T-schema would have the same meaning as our word ‘false’.

When philosophers ask “What is truth?” they don’t want to know when they should term a sentence ‘true’ supposing they already know when to endorse it as fact. Rather they want to know what it means to assert something as fact, e.g., what is the relationship between ‘Snow is white’ and the external world. Tarski’s ‘definition’ of truth does nothing to explain truth in this sense, it is up to other theories like the correspondence theory of truth to answer this question. The T-schema (in a philosophical context) only illustrates the obvious and trivial relationship between asserting a sentence and asserting that sentence is true. As I outlined in my previous post on the subject Tarski’s definition of truth is a substantial mathematical contribution but it just doesn’t cut much philosophical ice.

Note that nothing I’ve said here conflicts with the deflationist position that the T-schema is the only thing that can be cogently said about truth. I actually find this position quite appealing but the substance of this view is not that the T-schema says something substantial about truth but that there isn’t anything substantial to say about truth. Intuitively this seems right because you must already understand what it means to assert things to even make sense of any other proposal but I haven’t thought about it enough to be totally convinced.

In addition to the cost I usually find closed source text editors and similar utilities to be lacking in features and insufficently extensible. Textmate for OS X, however, is a glaring exception. It is well worth the cost and I’m constantly surprised by the many useful bundles and customizations available (for instance convienient remote editing with Cyber Duck or easy blog posting using the MetaWeblog API). So when Texmaker started slowing down on large complex files¹ I resolved to switch over to using textmate to write up my mathematics in LaTeX.

However, textmate’s prompt syntax highlight combined with the depreciated use of ‘$$’ to start displaymath mode was really annoying. Each time I would start to add inline mathematics by typing ‘$’ textmate would automatically provide the closing ‘$’ leaving me a line like this:

every $g \fungeq f$ that is ‘close’ to $f$ can compute $$

Of course textmate now interprets the remainder of my file as part of a displaymath block started by the ‘$$’ consequently changing the syntax highlighting. Since writing up theorems involves lots of inline mathematics this quickly became very annoying.

Anyway in case anyone else runs into the same problem let me share the quick fix I used. Go into your bundle editor and in the Latex bundle edit the language TeX. Find the following section

name = 'string.other.math.block.tex';
   begin = '\$\$';
   end = '\$\$;

and change it to:

name = 'string.other.math.block.tex';
   begin = '\[';
   end = '\]';

Of course this is something of a dirty hack since it disables the correct syntax highlighting for the ‘$$’ abbreviation. But since that is depreciated you always use ‘[' and ']‘ right?

If anyone knows the ‘right’ way to do this I’d love to hear.

So after I went to a great deal of effort to compile a custom version of php on dreamhost to support GMP (long integer library) and jumped through several other hoops just to get openid support working I forgot to change the trust_root after I changed the URL. Anyway long story short openid logins are now working.

If you don’t know what that means check out a site like myopenid.com which will explain all about it. However, if you have a livejournal or other sixapart hosted blog you may already have your own openid. Google will reveal all if you ask.

So I couldn’t resist commenting on this story at Gene Expression about how smarter people have less sex. Tyler Cowen’s original post on the subject can be found here but it’s the analysis from the first link that I really wanted to talk about. In particular the arguments made suggesting that more intelligent individuals have a lower libido are particularly dubious.

For instance here is the primary argument that individuals with high IQ may have lower libidos (emphasis/links from original):

Perhaps more revealing, HS, also showed that intelligence correlates with less sex within marriage for the same age range. While still consistent with pregnancy fears and competing interests, lower sex drive seems like a better fit. In fact another revealing finding from the Counterpoint survey was that while 95% of US men and 70% of women masturbate, this number is only 68% of men and 20% of women at MIT!

Looking only at MIT seems to be a huge biasing factor given that we know foreign students are massively overrepresented at MIT. With many students coming from societies with more traditional attitudes (or just different) about sexuality it would be an error to try and chalk up these differences to intelligence. Still intuitively it seems plausible that nerds (rather than smart people in general) masturbate less than other groups but a much better explanation for this is that sexual experience makes people comfortable with sex. It stands to reason that having had regular sex in a relationship would make one more comfortable with your sexuality than you would have been if you had remained a virgin. In other words there is no reason to believe that the lack of masturbation at MIT causes the lack of sex at MIT rather than vice versa.

The study about sex during marriage is equally uncompelling as it only gives self-reported sexual frequency. Thus this could just as well reflect a correlation between lower intelligence and exaggeration of sexual frequency. Either because of a desire to live up to some macho ideal or simple self-projection of a ‘normal’ amount¹ of sex². In any case it isn’t very conclusive.

Finally let’s look at what Gene Expression cites as the supposed explanation of this effect:

So intelligent people have lower libidos and less masculine physiques. What hormone is responsible for both sex drive and masculine builds? That’s right: testosterone. And two new papers suggest that testosterone may depress IQ. One team found that salivary testosterone levels were lower for preadolescent boys with IQs above 130 and below 70. (the same two groups most likely to be virgins in adolescence)

While there seems to be some fairly compelling research connecting testosterone levels in the low male range/high female range with high intelligence the correlation between Testosterone levels and sex drive is weak and it’s far from obvious that adding more Testosterone to healthy individuals would increase their sex drive.

Also I want to challenge the duality proposed between people with higher intelligence being more sexually conservative or more sexually adventurous. It can both be true that smarter people are more likely to visit a prostitute (there is a larger high risk tail) while the median individual is actually more sexually conservative. I’ll avoid giving personal examples here but based on the people I know this certainly seems like a reasonable possibility.

Ultimately I’m not sure why smarter people end up getting less sex. I suspect some of it has to do with being told they are less sexually desirable, either directly by reducing their pool of sexual partners or indirectly by reducing their confidence. But it could also be that most sex is the result of bad judgment (drunk party sex) or girls being pressured into sex and smart girls/guys are less susceptible to these things. It could be a lot of things but right now we don’t have much hard evidence for any of them.