My large take aways from the exercise was that people are scientifically illiterate. Scientific terms have no meaning and they are willing to rely on other people's opinions to inform there own. The real issues here are that, I assume, they view science like magic, something that works and you don't need to understand like cellphones, and that they can't possibly figure it out on their own; they believe that it would take too long to understand it, so why bother. Several years ago, I was contacted by a friend in a panic because the Large Haydron Collider was powering up and she had been informed that it could create miniature black holes; she was afraid that the scientists were going to destroy the world. That is a very common thought, because we have been told for our entire lives that Blackholes are very bad to be near. That recent reboot of StarTrek did not help at all.
Our science fears are being spoon fed to the public by other scientifically illiterate frauds, who are bent on becoming famous through scaring people. The Food Babe is a big one, but there are others. The words of science have entered in to the common speech of us all and we use them in was that pervert their meanings. We say that we have a theory about something, but we mean an idea, but then science uses the word theory and we give it the same weight as just an unproven idea— they are not the same, they never were.
Here are a few words that people don't use correctly:
Theory. A theory is a body of scientific study. It is an idea, but not a simple one, as it is backed up with example after example of solid research and observation. It is not something that can be disproved with one piece of new information, but new contradictory information can modify it. Science is a process and any theory of science has to fit the current understanding of the evidence. Theories have stood the tests of time, at their core they are unchanged, but as new evidence comes to light it can alter the knowledge that we have, but it would rarely prove that it is false. The Theory of Gravity is over three hundred years old and at its core it has remained unchanged in all that time, but new information allows science to modify what we know about gravity. The same with all the other Theories. There are not ideas that can be dismissed with a good counter argument, they are hard facts.
Hypothesis is something like a Theory. It is an idea though that a scientist is testing with his experiment. Science is not the way that people try to prove something works or exists but the reverse; it is the methodology of trying to prove that it incorrect and failing to do so. This is something that people misunderstand all the time. Science is trying its hardest to prove ideas wrong and when it fails to do this it finds the ways the universe works. Here is an example. People think that Bill Gates is a nice person. We could look at all his charity work and say he is a nice person That is not how science works, because by looking for something, we tend to stop when we find it, so Science would instead do the reverse. Science would make the hypothesis that Bill Gates in not is nice person and would then exhaustively search and try to prove that the statement is true. If they found anything that proves the statement correct, then science would say Bill Gates is not nice, but if they can't find anything to prove the statement, then we would know he is a nice person. This is called the Null-Hypothesis and it is the cornerstone of science. In science we try very hard to prove that something is false, because it is the best way to find the truth.
Significance. We common people thing this means something that is important, but in science it is a measurement of improbability. Roll two dice there is a one and six chance that you will roll a seven and a one in thirty-six chance that a twelve would come up. We know this because we know the odds that the numbers would be rolled. And if we rolled two dice a million times we would expect that we would get close to the expected probabilities. If we rolled the dice three times though we might get two twelves and one seven, through random chance. It could happen too. The sample size is too small to tell. If we rolled the dice more times though we would expect a more probable spread of numbers. In the world of Statistics, we know how often things should happen in an average world, but when things deviate from the normal expected results these are Significant. In science when we are looking for something we want it not to be something that could happen by chance alone. We want the findings to be improbable and the more improbable the findings are the more believable they are. Generally this means a very high sample number. In the above example if we rolled the dice a million times and we found that we rolled a twelve greater or less than the expected one in thirty-six probability the more significant the results would be. If we rolled too many or too few twelves given the number of times we rolled the dice it might mean that dice have properties than normal dice, that something is not right to result in unexpected results.
If three in four fruit flies wander around a dish in a counter clockwise direction the significance of the findings increases if there are more than four flies, and is very significant if you looked at a million flies. Significance tells researchers if the result could be explained by chance alone. When scientist are trying to discover something new they try their hardest to make the results as firm as possible. As such they tend to look for a five or six sigma significance, sigma meaning standard deviations. A six sigma significance is similar to a one in a million chance that the results had occurred by chance alone. One sigma by comparison is 68:100, sigma two is 5:100, sigma three is 3:1000.
Some people ascribe words to mean one thing when they mean something else. Sometimes people label words with properties that they don't have and then make value judgements on things with these things. Some of these words are Natural, Chemicals or Organic. Natural and Organic are considered good and chemicals are considered bad, but this is not the case. In Nature some things are good for people and some things are not good for them and labeling them Natural, Organic or Chemicals is false. Uranium and Lead are both natural elements that you can find in Nature and both are deadly to humans. Aspartame is a man made chemical not found in nature and was made be humans and used appropriately will not hurt you.
In science Organic means that has a carbon atom in its makeup. Organic foods are supposed to mean that they were raised without unnatural crops and pesticides. They can be raised with natural pesticides though. Most people don't realize that all the crops that we eat have been modified by humans. For millennia humans have been selecting the biggest and tastiest plants and planting only their seeds until after thousands of years we have the foods that we have today. Before scientists unlocked the genetic code, we subjected fields to radiation to increase the rate of mutation to find new beneficial crops faster than the old way. All the foods we eat have had both of these processes done to them. The process has always been about chance, but with the new technology we can get a new plant to be better than it was before in one try, in one generation, when before it took many.
Organic farmers are allowed to use BTU on their crops, because it is an organic approved pesticide, but scientist have added BTU to the plant itself to ward of insects. Organic farmers spread the pesticide everywhere and it affects all pests, while the GMO crops only affect the insects that eat the crop. There are other examples.
Dose is another word that people do not understand. Everyone knows that Formaldehyde is used in preserving dead tissue because it is toxic, but they don't know that our bodies produce it when we digest our food. People get upset when they see formaldehyde in our bread and people say that it is poisonous. The answer is that it depends on the dose. A large dose will kill people and a small dose will not. Another example? Vitamins, everyone knows that we need vitamins to survive, vitamins are essential molecules that we need to live. Many people believe that if a little is good for you, then a lot must be great for you and this is not true. We need a little iron for blood cells and other organs, but if we get too much it can kill us. Many vitamins have a minimum and a maximum dosage and too much of one or another will kill us faster than if we had none. Take water, you need it to live, but if you drink too much of it too fast it will kill you.
Half Life is self explanatory, it is the time it takes for half of the substance to disappear. Change in the case of radioactive minerals and leave the body in the case of other substances. The half life of radioactive materials is simple and people get it, but in relation to the human body they don't. When you take a chemical into your body sometimes it will spend time inside the body, other times it will just pass through. When you eat something that is contaminated it will stay in the body and slowly pass out. How quickly it passes out is called the half life time. Some very toxic materials are toxic because they can build up inside the body and affect the individual. Methyl Mercury has a half life in the body of about 50-70 days, which means that it takes that long for half of the material to leave the body. If you are eating contaminated material regularly it will quickly build up to a toxic level. Ethyl Mercury has a smaller half life of about 14 days which means that it clears up much faster. Fluoride has a half life in e body of about 8 hours, so it quickly leaves the body so the only way you could get a toxic dose of Fluoride is to ingest a very large dose several times a day. From drinking fluoridated drinking water, the water would kill you before you get even a mildly toxic dose of fluoride.
Chemicals are those man made toxins that you see in rusted barrels, and they are also every other place you look. Chemicals are all different arrangements of atoms in existence. Water is a chemical and alcohol is a chemical. Pesticides are chemicals and sugar is a chemical. Your food is made of chemicals and you are made of chemicals. Most chemicals are naturally occurring and some chemicals are completely man made. Some chemicals are useful and some chemicals are dangerous, depending on the dose. Gasoline is a chemical and so is insulin. The air we breathe is a chemical, the air that the dinosaurs breathed was filled with chemicals. It is all about the dose. Oxygen makes up about 20% of the air, if we breathed in 100% oxygen we would fall asleep and a lit candle would explode and metal would burn. Get it, it is all about the dose.
Gravity is the interaction of two masses. The mass attracts mass and the more massive object has a greater effect on a lesser mass. Everything is effectively stuck on this planet because the planet has a lot more mass than we do. If I had as much mass as the planet, then the center of gravity would shift from somewhere towards the middle of the planet to half way to the surface, to me. The idea that most people don't understand is that two objects with the same mass, but different sizes would have the same gravitational pull as the other. A black hole is a huge star at the end of its life and all its mass is concentrated into a single point. A black hole has such strong gravity that light cannot escape from it, the light gets sucked into it—that is the reason why it is black, but it is this way because of its density and gravity.
If our sun could be compressed into a black hole in an instant, it would not change the Earth's or any other planet's orbit, because the gravitational influence of the sun would be the same as it was before. It would be compressed into a tiny spot and light would not be able to escape it a few kilometers from its surface, but at the distance to all the planets the effect of the gravity would be identical. Gravity is a relationship between the mass of an object and the distance between it and the object and by compressing one into a black hole the mass and the distance do not change.
Another example, if you were to compress large rock into a black hole and dropped it on the earth it would drop between the atoms of the earth. A very large rock the size of a mountain would be smaller than an atom and it would have an event horizon (the distance from the core where light could not escape from it) smaller than an atom. So the Earth would have a greater gravity than the new black hole and it would drop into the center of the Earth and because it would be so small, it would not interact with the earth at all. Perhaps a few unlucky atoms might get sucked in to the core, but that is it and it would be in the center of the earth until the end of time, or until it evaporated, which ever comes first.
Geological timescales. Unless you are a Young Earth Creationist, you know e Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. The oldest rocks on the Earth are about that many years old. The history of the Earth has been written over the face of the planet in the rocks of the continents. The timescale of these changes has been measured in the tens of millions of years. The human scale of time is a little smaller: all of our recorded history fits into less than five thousand years. The real human scale is more like twenty years. Humans look at the world and they see it as unchanging, because in the space of twenty years there are no changes. Before Climate Change, no human would ever see changes in the world, but now we can see them in climate but also in glaciers and ice packs. Humans will never see continents move, except in a few locations on the world. It takes around 2000 years for a continent to drift a single kilometer at 5 cms a year, so in all of human history, a continent may have only moved two and a half kilometers. That would mean only a few minutes longer trip, in a boat, on a trip that would take hundreds of hours or a couple minutes on a jet. Changes on the Earth take a long time to see. Geological timescales are therefore necessarily long.
Genes vs alleles. A gene is a undetermined length of a string of genetic material that does one thing. It can govern an aspect of a living thing. Like hair or insulin production. An allele is an expression of a specific gene in the larger population, representing the variety of the way e gene can be expressed. Genes are for hair, alleles are the colour if the hair, (red, blond, brown, black, grey, white) the thickness, the style, or any other variant aspect of hair. Alleles are mutations of the original gene that make all things diverse. We look at humans and we see differences in everyone's alleles but we recognize that we are all human genetically.
Genetically modified organisms and not genetically modified necessarily, they could be allelecally modified. For example Glyphosate inhibits plant enzyme production of three essential amino acids, the typical allele of that gene was replaced with a different allele that was not affected by Glyphosate. These crops allow farmers to use a simple and relatively nontoxic herbicides to kill competing plants with their crops. This is what Round Up Ready crops are.
Survival of the fittest is a misnomer, because fitness and fittest are often used interchangeably—they are different. Survival of the fittest in the environment which they live, is the complete sentence which that phrase belongs. The fittest individual may not be the strongest or the smartest or the most fecund or the one that can hold their breath the longest. Evolutionary fitness has to do with surviving and reproducing. I for example, do not meet those requirements. I am strong, smart, have charisma, but I don't meet the requirements for reproduction in my environment. In a different time or place I would be very evolutionarily fit but I live in these times and this place I don't. I am not going to contribute my genetic material to another generation, I am a dead end. I am fit though. I an strong and physically healthy. I also have morals that hold me back from going out and making women pregnant at random. A evolutionarily fit individual is one that spreads their genetic material through into another generation, but it may not be a very responsible thing to do. The other aspect of evolution is not seen in DNA spread to another generation. I could strengthen others. I can write and help people understand things, I can teach people to be strong moral individuals in society and thus strengthen our species as a whole, contribute to the fitness of my species. So now Survival of the Fittest does not mean what those words imply personally, nor even on a level of a total species.
Hey, do you have a worry or a concern about anything scientific, whether what it means or what it does? Just leave me a comment below. I will ,if you request delete it and answer it anonymously, if that is what you want. Just ask, and don't live in ignorance. I will research it if I don't know.
No comments:
Post a Comment