Category: science communication

We can't handle the scientific truth

"If the muscles and other cells of the body burn sugar instead of oxygen…"

Do they think we cannot handle the scientific truth?

I should really have gone to bed, but I was just surfing the channels in case there was some 'must watch' programme I might miss, and I came across a screening of the film 'A few good men'. This had been a very popular movie at one time, and I seem to recall watching it with my late wife. I remembered it as an engaging film, and as an example of the 'courtroom drama' genre: but beyond that I could really only remember Tom Cruise as defence advocate questioning Jack Nicholson's as a commanding officer – and the famous line from Nicholson – "You can't handle the truth!".

This became something of a meme – I suspect now there are a lot of people who 'know' and use that line, who have never even seen the film and may not know what they are quoting from.

So, I  though I might watch a bit, to remind myself what the actual case was about. In brief, a marine stationed at the U.S. Guantánamo Bay naval base and detention camp had died at the hands of two of his comrades. They had not intended to kill, but admitted mistreating him – their defence was they were simply obeying orders in subjecting a colleague who was not measuring up, and was letting the unit down, to some unpleasant, but ultimately (supposedly) harmless, punishment.

The film does not contain a lot of science, but what struck me was the failure to get some science that was invoked right.  I was so surprised at what I thought I'd heard being presented as science, that I went back and replayed a section, and I then decided to see if I  could find the script (by Aaron Sorkin*, screenplay adapted from his own theatre play) on the web, to see if what was said had actually been written into the script.

One of the witnesses is a doctor who is asked by the prosecuting counsel to explain lactic acidosis.

Burning sugar instead of oxygen?

The characters here are:

Capt. Jack Ross (played by Kevin Bacon) the prosecuting counsel,

Dr. Stone (Christopher Guest) and

 

 

 

Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Cruise's character).

On direct examination:

Ross: Dr. Stone, what's lactic acidosis?

Stone: If the muscles and other cells of the body burn sugar instead of oxygen, lactic acid is produced. That lactic acid is what caused Santiago's lungs to bleed.

Ross: How long does it take for the muscles and other cells to begin burning sugar instead of oxygen?

Stone: Twenty to thirty minutes.

Ross: And what caused Santiago's muscles and other cells to start burning sugar? [In the film, the line seems to be: And what caused this process to be speed up in Santiago's muscles?]

Stone: An ingested poison of some kind.

Later, under cross-examination

Kafee: Commander, if I had a coronary condition, and a perfectly clean rag was placed in my mouth, and the rag was accidentally pushed too far down, is it possible that my cells would continue burning sugar after the rag was taken out?

Stone: It would have to be a very serious condition.

What?

If a student suggested that lactic acid is produced when the muscles burn sugar instead of oxygen we would likely consider this an alternative conception (misconception). It is, at best, a clumsy phrasing, and is simply wrong.

Respiration

Metabolism is a set of processes under very fine controls, so whether we should refer to metabolism as burning or not, is a moot point. Combustion tends to be a vigorous process that is usually uncontrolled. But we can see it as a metaphor: carbohydrates are 'burnt' up in the sense that they undergo reactions analogous to burning.

But burning requires oxygen (well, in the lab. we might burn materials in chlorine, but, in general, and in everyday life, combustion is a reaction with oxygen), so what could burning oxygen mean?

In respiration, glucose is in effect reacted with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and water. However, this is not a single step process, but a complex set of smaller reactions – the overall effect of which is

glucose + oxygen → carbon dioxide + water

Breaking glucose down to lactic acid also acts as an energy source, but is no where near as effective. Our muscles can undertake this ('anaerobic') process when there is insufficient oxygen supply –  for example when undertaking high stamina exercise – but this is best seen as a temporary stop-gap, as lactic acid build up causes problems (cramp for example) – even if not usually death.

Does science matter?

Now clearly the science is not central to the story of 'A few good men'. The main issues are (factual)

  • whether the accused men were acting under orders;

(ethical)

  • the nature of illegal orders,
  • when service personal should question and ignore orders (deontology) given that they seldom have the whole picture (and in this film one of the accused men is presented as something of a simpleton who viewer may suspect should not be given much responsibility for decision making),
  • whether it is acceptable to use corporal or cruel punishment on an under-performing soldier (or marine) given that the lives of many may depend upon their high levels of performance (consequentialism, or perhaps pragmatics)…

There is also a medical issue, regarding whether the torture of the soldier was the primary cause of death, or whether there was an underlying health issue which the medical officer (Stone) had missed and which might also explain the poor performance. [That is a theme which featured large in a recent very high profile real murder case.]

Otherwise the film is about the characters of, and relationships among, the legal officers. Like most good films – this is film about people, and being human in the world, and how we behave towards and relate to each other.

The nature of lactic acidosis is hardly a key point.

But if it is worth including in the script as the assumed cause of death, and its nature relevant – why not get the science right?

Perhaps, because science is complicated and needs to be simplified for the cinema-goer who, after all, wants to be entertained, not lectured?

Perhaps there is no simple account of lactic acidosis which could be included in the script without getting technical, and entering into a long and complicated explanation.

In teaching science…

But surely that is not true. In teaching we often have to employ simplifications which ignore complexity and nuance for the benefit of getting the core idea across to learners. We seek the optimal level of simplification that learners can make good sense of, but which is true to the core essence of the actual science being discussed (it is 'intellectually honest') and provides a suitable basis for later more advanced treatments.

It can be hard to find that optimum level of simplification – but I really do not think that explaining lactic acidosis as burning sugar instead of oxygen could be considered a credit-worthy attempt.

Dr. Stone, can we try again?

What about, something like:

Dr. Stone, what's lactic acidosis?

It occurs when the body tissues do not have sufficient oxygen to fully break down sugar in the usual way, and damaging lactic aid is produced instead of carbon dioxide and water.

I am sure there are lots of possible tweaks here. The point is that the script did not need to go into a long medical lecture, but by including something that was simply nonsensical, and should be obviously wrong to anyone who had studied respiration at school (which should be everyone who has been to school in the past few decades in many countries), it distracts, and so detracts, from the story.

All images from 'A few good men' (1992, Columbia Pictures)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* I see that ("acclaimed screenwriter") Aaron Sorkin is planning a new live television version of 'A Few Good Men' – so perhaps the description of lactic acidosis can be updated?

Do nerve signals travel faster than the speed of light?

Keith S. Taber

I have recently posted on the blog about having been viewing some of the court testimony being made available to the public in the State of Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin court case (27-CR-20-12646: State vs. Derek Chauvin).

[Read 'Court TV: science in the media']

Prof. Martin J. Tobin, M.D., Loyola University Chicago Medical Center

I was watching the cross examination of expert witness Dr Martin J. Tobin, Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine by defence attorney Eric Nelson, and was intrigued by the following exchange:

Now you talked quite a bit about physics in your direct testimony, agreed?

Yes

And you would agree that physics, or the application of physical forces, is a constantly changing, er, set of circumstances.

I did not catch what you said.

Sure. You would agree with me, would you not, that when you look at the concepts of physics, these things are constantly changing, right?

Yeah, all of science is constantly changing.

Constant! I mean,

Yes.

in milliseconds and nanoseconds, right?

Yes.

And so if I put this much weight [Nelson demonstrating by shifting position] or this much weight [shifting position], all of the formulas [sic] and variations, will change from second to second, from millisecond to millisecond, nanosecond to nanosecond, agreed.

I agree.

Similarly, biology sort of works the same way. Right?

Yes.

My heart beats, my lungs breathe [sic], my brain is sending millions of signals to my body, at all times.

Correct.

Again, even, I mean, faster than the speed of light, right?

Correct.

Millions of signals every nanosecond, right?

Yes.

Day 9. 27-CR-20-12646: State vs. Derek Chauvin

Agreeing – but talking about different things?

The first thing that struck me here concerns what seems to me to be Mr Nelson and Dr Tobin talking at cross-purposes – that neither participant acknowledged (and so perhaps neither were aware of).

I think Nelson is trying to make an argument that the precise state of Mr George Floyd (who's death is at the core of the prosecution of Mr Chauvin) would have been a dynamic matter during the time he was restrained on the ground by three police officers (an argument being made in response to the expert's presentation of testimony suggesting it was possible to posit fairly precise calculations of the forces acting during the episode).

This seems fairly clear from the opening question of the exchange above:

Now you talked quite a bit about physics in your direct testimony, agreed? … And you would agree that physics, or the application of physical forces, is a constantly changing, er, set of circumstances.

However, Dr Tobin does not hear this clearly (there are plexiglass screens between them as COVID precautions, and Nelson acknowledges that he is struggling with his voice by this stage of the trial).

Nelson re-phrases, but actually says something rather different:

You would agree with me, would you not, that when you look at the concepts of physics, these things are constantly changing, right?

['These things' presumably refers to 'the application of physical forces', but if Dr Tobin did not hear Mr Nelson's previous utterance then 'these things' would be taken to be 'the concepts of physics'.]

So, now it is not the forces acting in a real world scenario which are posited to be constantly changing, but the concepts of physics. Dr Tobin's response certainly seems to make most sense if the question is understood in terms of the science itself being in flux:

Yeah, all of science is constantly changing.

Given that context, the following agreement that these changes are occurring "in milliseconds and nanoseconds" seems a little surreal, as it is not quite clear in what sense science is changing on that scale (except in the sense that science is continuing constantly – certainly not in the sense that canonical accounts of concepts shift at that pace: say, in the way Einstein's notions of physics came to replace those of Newton).

In the next exchange the original context Nelson had presented ("the application of physical forces, is … constantly changing") becomes clearer:

And so if I put this much weight [Nelson demonstrating by shifting position] or this much weight [shifting position], all of the formulas and variations, will change from second to second, from millisecond to millisecond, nanosecond to nanosecond, agreed.

I agree.

As a pedantic science teacher I would suggest that it is not the formulae of physics that change, but the values to be substituted into the system of equations derived from them to describe the particular event: but I think the intended meaning is clear. Dr Tobin is a medical expert, not a physicist nor a science teacher, and the two men appear to be agreeing that the precise configurations of forces on a person being restrained will constantly change, which seems reasonable. I guess that is what the jury would take from this.

If my interpretation of this dialogue is correct (and readers may check the footage and see how they understand the exchange) then at one point the expert witness was agreeing with the attorney, but misunderstanding what he was being asked about (how in the real world the forces acting are continuously varying, not how the concepts of science are constantly being developed). Even if I am right, this does not seem problematic here, as the conversation shifted to the intended focus quickly (an example of Bruner's 'constant transnational calibration' perhaps?).

However, this reminds me of interviews with students I have carried out (and others I have listened to undertaken by colleagues), and of classroom episodes where teacher and student are agreeing – but actually are talking at cross purposes. Sometimes it becomes obvious to those involved that this is what has happened – but I wonder how often it goes undetected by either party. (And how often there are later recriminations – "but you said…"!)

Simplifying biology?

The final part of the extract above also caught my attention, as I was not sure what to make of it.

My heart beats, my lungs breathe, my brain is sending millions of signals to my body, at all times.

Correct.

Again, even, I mean, faster than the speed of light, right?

Correct.

Millions of signals every nanosecond, right?

Yes.

How frequently do our brains send out signals?

I am a chemistry and physicist, not a biologist so I was unsure what to make of the millions of signals the brain is sending out to the rest of the body every nanosecond.

I can certainly beleive that perhaps in a working human brain there will be billions of neutrons firing every nanosecond as they 'communicate' with each other. If my brain has something like 100 000 000 000 neurons then that does not seem entirely unreasonable.

But does the brain really send signals to the rest of the body (whether through nerves or by the release of hormones) at a rate of nx106/10-9 s-1 ("millions of signals every nanosecond"), that is,  multiples of 1015 signals per second, as Mr Nelson suggests and Dr Tobin agrees?

Surely not? Dr Tobin is a professor of medicine and a much published expert in his field and should know better than me. But I would need some convincing.

Biological warp-drives

I will need even more convincing that the brain sends signals to the body faster than the speed of light. Both nervous and hormonal communication are many orders of magnitude slower than light speed. The speed of light is still considered to be a practical limit on the motion of massive objects (i.e., anything with mass). Perhaps signals could be sent by quantum entanglement – but that is not how our nervous and endocrine systems function?

If Mr Nelson and Dr Tobin do have good reason to believe that communication of signals in the human body can travel faster than the speed of light then this could be a major breakthrough. Science and technology have made many advances by mimicking, or learning from, features of the structure and function of living things. Perhaps, if we can learn how the body is achieving this impossible feat, warp-drive need not remain just science fiction.

A criminal trial is a very serious matter, and I do not intend these comments to be flippant. I watched the testimony genuinely interested in what the science had to say. The real audience for this exchange was the jury and I wonder what they made of this, if anything. Perhaps it should be seen as poetic language making a general point, and not a technical account to be analysed pedantically. But I think it does raise issues about how science is communicated to non-experts in contexts such as courtrooms.

This was an expert witness for the prosecution (indeed, very much for the prosecution) who was agreeing with the defence counsel on a point strictly contrary to accepted science. If I was on a jury, and an expert made a claim that I knew was contrary to current well-established scientific thinking (whether the earth came into being 10 000 years ago, or the brain sends out signals that travel faster then the speed of light) this would rather undermine my confidence in the rest of their expert testimony.

 

 

 

Court TV: science in the media

Keith S. Taber

Images from Pixabay

I realised that there was something fascinating about the forensic nature of legal proceedings some years ago (1985) when I saw a television dramatisation of the tribunal into the death of Steve Bantu Biko in police custody in (then still apartheid) South Africa. Although this was a re-enactment, it used actual transcripts to present a reconstruction.

Although like most people I was disgusted with apartheid, I probably would not have known about Steve Biko if it had not been for Peter Gabriel's (1980) anthem ('Biko') protesting his killing – that was the hook that got me to take a look at the film. Although expecting I might find it dry or distressing – it was fascinating. Something that I intended to watch almost out of a sense of liberal duty was totally engrossing.

The cover of the single version of 'Biko' https://petergabriel.com/release/biko/

I  have recently spent some time looking at footage of the trial of former police office Derek Chauvin regarding the death of George Floyd. (A case which of course has parallels with Biko's death.)  This came from discovering I had access to a whole TV channel (currently) dedicated to showing the court case. I have largely moved from that (as I had less interest in all the commentary which added little to the court 'action'*) to reviewing some of the daily footage from the courtroom available on line.

[Read 'Do nerve signals travel faster than the speed of light?']

(* I was especially unimpressed by the trailers for forthcoming cases in U.S. States with the death penalty, where the show anchor gleefully told viewers we could watch verdicts where we would see the the accused as they found out if they were to live or die.)

Scene from inside the courtroom: Derek Chauvin represented by his attorney Eric Nelson

The application of science

In this particular case there is a good deal of physics, chemistry and biology (and indeed their interactions) being presented and argued over. I am not sure I would encourage children to watch (and certainly not to approach as an alternative form of entertainment) such serious proceedings – but any who are watching the expert testimony being presented may appreciate a lot about the nature of science (and in particular how data does not become evidence in isolation ). There is a potential counter here to all those TV shows where the whole history of the universe is unproblematically pieced together from some DNA collected by a detective offering a suspect a drink of water. (Okay, I exaggerate, if only a little.)

I initially, accidentally, fell upon coverage of pre-trial arguments about what evidence might be admissible in the forthcoming trial – and started to see how the defence may be offering a story quite inconsistent with the widely accepted narrative (based on the much shared film of the incident). I realised that despite thinking I was the kind of person who tries to always look at different perspectives and seek alternative understandings, and reserve judgement until it is due, I had (without being aware of it) already decided what had happened in this case, and in my own head the presumption of innocence had not really been applied.

This then led to me watching some of the footage of jury selection. This is a process I had been aware of, but had not considered in that much detail – and had certainly not fully appreciated why it might take so much time. After all, if I already had a pretty strong assumption of guilt, and I do not even live on the same continent, selecting people from the local area who have lived through the aftermath (protests and riots) and could put aside everything they had previously learnt, to focus purely on what was presented at trial, was not going to be easy.

There is a television programme, 'Would I lie to you?', where celebrities are given tall autobiographical tales to tell, some of which are true (though I suspect sometimes embellished in the telling) and where points are awarded to the two sides according to whether a person on one team misleads the other team into incorrectly determining 'truth or lie'. This came to mind in watching jury selection.

BBC Promotional shot for 'Would I lie to you?'

As the potential jurors were interviewed I found myself forming hunches of when the judge might excuse someone (who clearly was not going to be able to be fair to both sides) or when one of the attorneys might ask for a potential juror not to be selected to sit. Of course, there is a very big difference in nature between a popular entertainment show where some people act out the telling of a 'lie' (which is not really a lie, as there is no intention to mislead beyond the point of reveal within the game), and the very serious matter of jury selection, but the process of thinking about 'what will they think about this person's presentation?' in observing these different events seemed very similar.

Clearly, the Chauvin prosecution is a very high profile case, given the viral video of the incident and its importance (especially given its wider context as just one more in a continuing sequence of incidents with similar outcomes) in triggering worldwide condemnation of racism and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

However, my interest was piqued less by the highly charged public interest in this particular case (important as it is even in its own terms – a man has died in police 'care'; another may be incarcerated for 20 years or more depending on the verdict) than as the window into a real court. I was fascinated by aspects of the legal process. One feels very familiar with the U.S Court system though fictional works (Ally McBeal, The Good Wife/The Good Fight, etc.) but that is entertainment, and accounts of the legal process are very much condensed.

Interpreting data as evidence for a theory

I have always felt an interest in the law, and I think that is not surprising, given that the law acts as a set of formal guidelines (on process, and what is admissible and so forth), and the legal process is forensic, and evidence based, and adopts arguments to suggest how data can be construed as evidence within particular narratives of events.

This all seems parallel to science, and research more generally.

I have even used the law as an analogy in my teaching to suggest how one difference between the kind of theory-directed research which offers generalisable findings and is suitable for publication and context-directed research that may inform a practitioner's day-to-day decisions in the classroom as these can be seen to have a different burden of proof akin to the difference between criminal and civil courts (Taber, 2013). That is:

  • theory-directed research (claimed to be generalisable and worth reporting in the research literature) – should make its case beyond reason
  • context-directed research (such as action research carried out to address a local issue) – should make its case on the balance of probabilities, that is, (local) action should be informed by what the evidence suggests is most likely the case

Moreover, in many cases (and certainly very much in the Chauvin trial) science is heavily involved in making arguments and developing the cases for prosecution and/or defence.

The examination of witnesses in trials has a strong, if warped, parallel with research interviewing. The warping comes in because in research an interviewer should look to be unbiased and should be seeking 'the truth' as their informant understands it. In a trial, however, the lawyers for the two sides are each seeking to build a case, and so to ask questions that seek answers most in keeping with the scenario they are looking to establish as best representing the actual situation around an alleged crime.

So, there is much of interest in terms of how science is applied in expert testimony, but perhaps also some lessons from the advocates in how not to  do science by seeking to re-shape all the data to fit one's hypothesis.

Work cited:

Not me, I'm just an ugly chemist

Keith S. Taber

Actress Francesca Tu playing an 'ugly chemist', apparently.

The 1969 film 'The Chairman' (apparently released in the UK as 'The Most Dangerous Man in the World') was just shown on the TV. I had not seen it before, but when I noticed it was on I vaguely recalled having heard something about it suggesting it was a film worth watching, so thought I would give it a try. And it had "that nice Gregory Peck" in it, which I seem to recall was the justification given for one of my late wife's sweet little Aunties going to see 'The Omen' (wasn't that also about the The Most Dangerous Man in the World?).

Nobel prize winner AND man of action

Dr John Hathaway (played by Gregory Peck): scientist and international man of mystery

Peck plays a Nobel laureate chemist, so I got interested. He had received a letter from a Chinese scientist, an old mentor who had worked with him at Princeton, warning him not to go to visit him in China, which (a) piqued his interest as (i) he had had no contact with the colleague for a decade, and (ii) he had no plans to go to China, and (b) told us viewers he would be off to China.

Peck's character, Hathaway, is an American who is currently a visiting professor at the University of in London. He contacts his embassy, suspecting there must be something of international significance in the message.

Hathaway's love interest (played by Anne Heywood) is seen teaching in the biophysics department

It transpires that this Nobel prize winning chemist had some kind of background in "the game" – intelligence work (of course! Well, at least this gets away from the stuffy stereotype of the scientist who never leaves the lab.), but had reached an epiphany three years earlier when his wife had been killed in a road accident while he was driving, and the experience of being with her as she died had led to him deciding that every life was unique and precious (as he later explained to Mao Zedong, the eponymous Chairman of the title) and he would no longer take on a job that would oblige him to kill. (Later in the film Hathaway seemed to have forgotten his high principles when he accepted a pistol as he made an escape in a stolen armoured car.) The intelligence communities had become aware that China had identified a natural product that could be extracted in tiny quantities, an enzyme which allowed any crop to be grown under any conditions.

The film seemed to be intended to make some serious points about detente, the cold war, the cultural revolution and the cult of Mao, and political and moral imperatives.

It is the responsibility of all to cultivate themselves, and study Marxism-Leninism deeply. / [Thinks: Sure, as soon as we've finished cultivating this rice.]
The allies argue that China will keep the new discovery to itself and use it to bring developing countries with food shortages into its sphere of influence, and Hathaway seems motivated to ensure all of humanity should share the benefits, thus he accepts the mission to go to China; later Mao agrees to provide a written promise that if Hathaway helps in the research then he can leave China at any time he likes and take with him whatever information he wishes to share with the world.

For the rest of the film to make any sense, Hathaway and the viewer have to assume that the promise and document will not be honoured (and it seems to be assumed that a character simply suggesting this is all Hathaway, or indeed any of us, need to be convinced of this). Yet, (SPOILER ALERT) when Hathaway is safely back in London, and has decoded the structure, he is told that the Western authorities have decided not to share the discovery.

I was not sure what a young audience who do not remember the context might make of some aspects of the film. We are told that the operation to obtain the enzyme, operation Minotaur *, has according to the US officer in charge cost half a billion federal dollars (which seems a lot for 1969, even allowing for some exaggeration) and was supported by the UK with a contribution a British intelligent officer suggests was likely "two pounds ten" (i.e., £2.50).

I wondered whether Chinese agents actually operated so easily in moving into and out of Hong Kong as is suggested, and there was some interesting brief news footage  playing on a hotel television suggesting (British) Hong Kong police were responding to civil unrest in a way that does not seem so different from contemporary reports under the already notorious 2020 Hong Kong national security law.

Anyway, I will try and avoid too many plot spoilers, but suffice to say I was interested and intrigued in how matters would pan out for the first three quarters of the film (until people started firing guns and throwing grenades, at which point I lost any investment I'd had in what would happen.)

Science in the media in 1969

The science in the film was far-fetched, but perhaps not too far fetched for a general audience in 1969. 1969 was after all, a different age. (In 1969 the Beatles were still together, 'In the Court of the Crimson King' was released, and NASA's landing on the moon showed just what the USA could achieve when a President believed in, and encouraged, and resourced, the work of scientists and engineers.)

A transmitter made of undetectable plastic parts, suppposedly

Hathaway was bugged (through a sinus implant) such that his US /UK handlers (and USSR observer) could hear everything he said and everything said to him from half a world away through a bespoke satellite that the Chinese had not noticed recently appearing over their territory. The Americans initially had serious trouble with signal:noise and just made out the odd consonant, and so could not understand any speech, but a UK intelligence officer suggested simply filling in the gaps with uniform white noise, which, amazingly, and (even more amazingly) immediately at first attempt, gave a much cleaner sound than I can get on FaceTime or Zoom or Skype today (Implied message: the British may be the poor relatives, but have the best ideas?)

High stakes communication

What Hathaway did not know (but perhaps he should have been paying more attention when he was told the implanted transmitter was a 'remedy' in case the Chinese would not let him leave the country?) was that the implanted transmitter also had an explosive device that could be used if he needed to be terminated.

Indeed there was supposedly enough plastic explosive that when Hathaway was invited to meet Chairman Mao (was he meant to be 'the most dangerous man in the world'?) it raised the issue of whether the device should be used to remove the Chairman as he played table tennis with Hathaway (asking us to believe that democratic governments might sanction the violent summary execution of perceived enemies, without due legal process, in foreign lands) *.

Is it stretching credibility to believe that democratic governments would sanction the violent summary execution of perceived enemies, without due legal process, on foreign soil?

The command code to explode the device was stored on magnetic tape that took over thirty seconds to execute the instructions (something that seems ridiculous even for 1969, and was presumably only necessary to provide faux tension at the point where the clock counts down and the audience are supposed to wonder if the British and Americans are going to have to kill the film's star off before the movie is over).

Equally ridiculous, the implant supposedly had the same density as human tissue so that it would not show up on  X-rays. (A wise precaution: when in  Hong Kong, Hathaway is lured to some kind of decadent, Western, casino-cum-brothel where Chinese agents manage to covertly X-ray him from the next room as he enjoys a bowl of plain rice with a Chinese intelligence officer – quite a technical feat).

Of course, human tissue is not all of one 'density' (in the sense of opaqueness to X-rays), or else there would be little point in using X-rays in medical diagnosis – actually a sinus should show up on an X-ray as an empty cavity!

Would blocked sinuses show on an X-ray?

Highly technical information appeared on screens at the listening post as displays little more complex than sine waves – not even the Lissajous figures so popular with 1970s sci-fi programmes.

I think it's just the carrier wave, sir

At one point Hathaway broke into a room through a thick solid metal floor by using just a few millilitres of nitrohydrochloride acid (aqua regia) that was apparently a standard bench reagent in the Chinese biochemistry laboratory (these enzymes must be pretty robust, or perhaps Professor Soong had a side project that involved dissolving gold), and which Hathaway was quite happy to carry with him in a small glass bottle in his jacket pocket. The RSC's Education in Chemistry magazine warns us that "because its components are so volatile, [aqua regia] is usually only mixed immediately prior to use". Risk assessment has come on a lot since Dr Hathaway earned his Nobel.

Laboratory safety glasses: check. Bench mat: check. Gloves: check. Lab coat: check. Fume cupboard: check.

The focal enzyme was initially handled rather well – the molecular models looked convincing enough, and the technical problem of scaling up by synthesising it seemed realistic. The Chinese scientist could not produce the enzyme in quantity and hoped Hathaway could help with the synthesis – a comparison was made with how producing insulin originally involved the sacrifice of many animals to produce modest amounts, but now could be readily made at scale. I seem to recall from my natural products chemistry that before synthetic routes were available, sex hormones were obtained by collecting vast amounts of 'material' from slaughterhouses and painstakingly abstracting tiny quantities – think the Curies, but working with with tonnes of gonads rather than tonnes of pitchblende.

Before Hathaway had set out on his mission he had pointed out that the complexity of an enzyme molecule was such that he could never memorise the molecular structure as it would contain anything from 3000 to 400 000 atoms. So, the plot rather fell apart at the end (SPOILER ALERT) as he brings back a copy of Mao's little red book, in which his mentor had hidden the vital information – as the codes for three amino acids.

Ser – Tyr – Pro

Hm.

Beauty and the chemist

You are beautiful, just like your mother – but OBVIOUSLY not as clever as your dad.

But, what sparked me to wrote something about this film, was some dialogue which brought home to me just how long ago 1969 was (I was still in short trousers – well, to be honest, for about half the year I am still in short trousers, but then it was all year round). Hathaway is flown to China from Hong Kong, and on arrival is met by the daughter of his old mentor:

Soong Chu (Francesca Tu): I am Professor Soong's daughter

Dr. John Hathaway (Peck): You look a great deal like your beautiful mother.

Soong Chu: Not I. I am just an ugly chemist

Hathaway: I read your recent paper on peptides. I thought it was brilliant – for a woman.

Soong Chu: Oh, I agree, but my father helped a great deal.

Working in the dark to avoid any more comments on her looks?

I was taken aback by the reference to just being an ugly chemist, and had to go back and check that I'd heard that correctly. Was the implication that one could not be beautiful, and a chemist? Nothing more was said on the topic, but that seemed to be the implication. And what is meant by being 'just' a chemist?

Hathaway's comment that Soong Chu's paper had been brilliant, was followed by a pause. Then came "…for a woman". Did he really say that?

Not bad for a girl

I was waiting for the follow-up comment which would resolve this moment of tension. This surely had to be some kind of set up for a punch line: "It would have been beyond brilliant for a man", perhaps.

But no, Soong Chu just agreed. There did not seem to be intended to be any tension or controversy or social critique or irony or satire there. So much for Soong Chu's membership of the Red Guard and all the waving of the thoughts of the Chairman (she would have known that "Women represent a great productive force in China, and equality among the sexes is one of the goals of communism").

"The red armband is the most treasured prize in China…[representing] responsibility…[as] a leader of our revolution"
Soong Chu had needed the help of her father to prepare her paper, but he had presumably declined to be a co-author, not because his input did not amount to a substantial intellectual contribution (the ethics of authorship have also come on a bit since then), but because his daughter was a woman and so not able to stand on her own two feet as a scientist.

This dialogue is not followed up later in the film.

So, this is not planting a seed for something that will later turn out to be of significance for character development or plot, or that will be challenged by subsequent scenes. It is not later revealed that Soong Chu has a parallel career as Miss People's Republic of China (just as Hathaway is a chemist and also a kind of James Bond figure). Nor does it transpire that Professor Soong had been senile for many years and all of his work was actually being undertaken for him by his even more brilliant daughter.

Sadly, no, it just seems to be the kind of polite conversation that the screenwriters assumed would be entirely acceptable to an audience that was presumably well aware that females cannot be both beautiful and scientists; and that women need help from men if they are to be successful in science.

Times have changed … I hope.

 

 

* Interestingly, I've now found a poster for the film which seems to suggest that the whole purpose of the operation was not to acquire the enzyme structure at all, but to get Hathaway close enough to Mao to assassinate him.

Getting viewers to watch the film under false pretences

This seems to describe a very different cut to one I watched – where the audience with Mao seems to have surprised everyone, and the senior intelligence officers contacted their governments to alert them of this unexpected opportunity!

Intergenerational couplings in the family

A thought experiment about ancestry

Keith S. Taber

(An 'out-take' from 'The Nature of the Chemical Concept', Taber, 2019*)

It would seem (rightly) indecent for your great great grandfather to have procreated with your sister – but if you could go back far enough in your family tree you would surely find even more extreme examples of intergenerational couplings!

Skulls images by Parker_West from Pixabay

Some approaches to conceptualising speciation may by definition impose sharp distinctions: in one version of cladistics it is assumed that at any speciation event the ancestor species ceases to be extant, and the new species comes into existence at one moment in time – if members of (what was) the ancestral species happily carry on living their lives despite this conventional extinction, as a new species branches off from the ancestral line, they are judged now to be members of another new species. That is, in this system a species is never considered to give rise to a new species and also continue, but rather transitions into two new species, even if one contains individuals indistinguishable from those in the ancestral line (LaPorte 2004). However, I am going to take the position here that if experts in the field cannot distinguish specimens as being from different species then it is reasonable to consider those specimens as conspecific.

To take an example close to home, consider the species Homo sapiens. Every human alive today had parents who were, like themselves, specimens of the species Homo sapiens. These parents also had parents who were specimens of the species Homo sapiens. So did their parents – and (to avoid this text becoming extremely tedious) so on, through a large number of generations. However, modern humans are understood to have evolved from earlier hominids (who in turn evolved from non-human primates, who evolved from non-primate mammals, who evolved from non-mammalian chordates, and so forth.)

A thought experiment about ancestry

So, consider a thought experiment where scientists had physical evidence of the full ancestry of someone, some specimen of Homo sapiens, alive today – bones, DNA, whatever. It is only a thought experiment, so it only has to be possible in principle, not feasible in practice. And forensic science today achieves things that might have seemed fantastic just a few decades ago – so who can say what might become feasible in time?

Experts in anatomy or genetics would agree that the generation of the parents of our human friend were Homo sapiens, as were the previous generation, and the generation before that, and… However, at some point many, many generations back, the experts would agree that the scientific evidence showed these more distant ancestors were not Homo sapiens, but something else – perhaps Homo heidelbergensis.

We would be going back something of the order of tens of thousands of generations. Perhaps (for the sake of this thought experiment – the actual numbers are not critical to the argument) all the experts agree that the ancestors in generation n-14000 (n minus fourteen thousand, where n is the current generation, our living person) were members of our species, Homo sapiens, and perhaps these experts also all agree that the ancestors in generation n-17000 were a different species, not Homo sapiens: but where does this transition occur?

It seems unlikely that the experts would be able to agree, based on clear distinctions in the material evidence (even if we assumed the evidence available, as this is a thought experiment), that ancestors in generation n-15777 (for example) were the earliest ancestors who were members of Homo sapiens and that the ancestors in generation n-15778 were members of a different species.

Gradual change

This is not simply unlikely because the experts would not agree as some would be more expert than others, and so be more likely to get things right: it is simply that the distinctions between species are not sudden and abrupt, but occur over time. Those transitions may often appear rapid when looking at the geological record, in terms of what is sometimes called 'deep time', but even allowing that evolution may not be as gradual and even as was once widely considered (Gould and Eldredge 1993/2000), the shift between distinct species is gradual in terms of our experience of the natural world. Our lives occupy a tiny period in the vastness of the history of the biota on Earth, so we experience the living things in our environment as if a single cross-section of a cone of biological development.

We are in effect living upon one cross-section, one microtome slice as it were, of deep-time – and so species appear as discrete kinds (Figure from Taber, 2013/2017.)
A compromised geometric progression?

Before moving on, it is worth highlighting the absurdity of extrapolating what seems commonplace on a 'local' (temporal) scale to a geological scale. Most people have 2 (21) parents, who were probably alive at the same time (i.e., their lives must have overlapped for them to be parents, unless there was some cryogenic storage of sperm or eggs – something that is now possible and means a very small proportion of people alive today have been conceived at a time when only one biological parent was alive), and 4 (22) grandparents whose lives nearly always overlapped in time, and 8 (23) great-grandparents whose lives probably overlapped in time… We might be tempted to generalise to having 2n ancestors if we go back n generations.

This pattern does not necessarily repeat indefinitely however. So, the British Head of State, at the time of writing, is Queen Elizabeth II. Two of her great-great grandparents were Queen Victoria and her escort Prince Albert. Elizabeth is married to Prince Philip. Two of his great-great grandparents were (also) Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The Children of the current Queen (Charles, Anne, Andrew and Edward) therefore do not have a full, unique set of great-great-great grandparents, as Victoria and Albert each occupy positions on their family tree that could in principle have been filled by two different people (although that of course, would not have given rise to the existence of the particular individuals Charles, Anne, Andrew and Edward who are alive today).

It is a common view that the degree of inbreeding among the royal houses of Europe was responsible for the instances of certain medical conditions among the royals. Indeed, haemophilia was referred to as 'the royal disease'

Finding a mate

Although marriage and breeding within the extended family has been particularly noted among royalty, it was by no means their exclusive practice. In highly stratified societies where marrying above or below one's supposed rank was not acceptable, the range of potential mates in one's social circle might be very limited (as reflected in novels of the likes of Jane Austen).

Marrying relatives who were not immediate family was common and often productive. Charles Darwin married a cousin, Emma Wedgewood, which led to a very happy marriage, and some highly achieving offspring. Charles and Emma shared a grandfather – Josiah Wedgwood (the famous potter) – and grandmother. Social circle and extended family could overlap considerably.

A trivia quiz question might be:

How was John Allen Wedgwood able to legally marry two of his cousins on the same day? **

For much of human pre-history people lived in small groups where the range of potential mates would have been severely limited, leaving aside questions of social status. Indeed it is possible that the common taboo on sexual relations with very close relatives, i.e. incest, developed in a context where the number of feasible candidates for a mate was often very small.

A paradox? You have more human ancestors than the number of people who have ever lived

Returning, then, to our thought experiment. If each of their theoretical possible ancestors in generation n-15777 were discrete, individual, specimens (of whatever species) then our contemporary subject would have 215777 ancestors in that generation. That is a number vastly greater that the number of people living today (which is less than 233) or indeed who have ever existed – and is even vastly greater than estimates of the number of particles in the whole universe! (One estimate for the total number of quarks plus electrons is 'only' around 2268.) Some estimates for the size of the early Homo sapiens population are around 214 – rather less than 215777!

The vast discrepancy here then comes from assuming that the number of ancestors doubles in each generation. Most people have two parents, four grandparents, and eight great grandparents – but if one goes back a large number of generations there must have been considerable redundancy in the sense of individual ancestors taking up a number of positions on one's personal family tree. And we cannot even assume these multiple roles fall within the same generation.

The notion that anyone alive today would have all their ancestors from generation n-15777 alive at the same time is unreasonable.

If we assume that through most of human history the time lapse between generations was largely in a range 15-25 years (and clearly there will have been plenty of children born to parents younger than 15 and older than 25, so this is a conservative range) then it becomes obvious that at the time when one of our ancestors in generation n-15777 was alive, so were many of our ancestors in a wide range of other generations.

If the mean gap between generations was 20 years, then 15 777 generations ago was about 315 540 years ago. At the same time a line of descent with an average gap between generations of 15 years would be a little more than 21 036 generations ago, and a line of descent with an average gap between generations of 25 years would be 12 622 generations ago.

A schematic representation of the distribution of a person's ancestors living c.316 000 years ago in terms of how many generations separate them from that person. Many (most) ancestors will be represented many times (by different lines of descent) across a spread of points in the distribution.

It may seem strange to think that some of the ancestral pairings that led to us were between individuals that from our (temporally reversed) perspective were in generations that were hundreds or perhaps even thousands apart***: but of course the point is they were alive at the same time.

A highly simplified scheme showing descent along only two lines. Using the simplified example that people are born when their mother is 18 but their father is 24 (clearly there will normally be much variation in any 'branch' of any 'tree') it does not take many generations before ancestors alive (and of reproductive age) at the same time can be considered to be from different generations.*** Bearing in mind that we all have far fewer direct ancestors than potentially unique places on the 'tree', we could in principle trace many of our ancestors through multiple routes relating to different generations. In this simplified scheme the person's father's father's father is also their mother's mother's mother's father. So the same person could be your great-grandfather and also your great-great-grandfather. M = mother; FF = father's father; MMMF = mother's mother's mother's father, etc.
You are a member of the 15 778th generation of Homo sapiens, and you are a member of the 15 779th generation of Homo sapiens, and you are a member of the 15 777th generation of Homo sapiens, and…

By the same (or, if you prefer, the reverse) logic, even if we were (adopting a cladistic approach) able to pinpoint a precise moment in time when Homo sapiens appeared, generation 'Homo sapiens 1', then a person alive today would not by comparison be unequivocally in generation 'Homo sapiens 15778' (or whatever), at least, not unless we adopted a convention to count down through a particular line (e.g., always the mother). Rather, they would be in a hybrid generation with a wide range, say generation 'Homo sapiens 11 246-to-19 975', or whatever.

As a final observation, a common definition of species refers to breeding populations that can produce viable (fertile) offspring. If the distinction between Homo sapiens and, say Homo heidelbergensis, is a gradual shift and not a sharp cut off, then the question of interbreeding between co-existing species is somewhat avoided: but there is much evidence that our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals, even though they are traditionally considered to be a distinct species (Homo neanderthalensis).

Waking up a different species

So the biological species concept, whilst being extremely useful in science, would seem to either be somewhat arbitrary (if we adopt a cladistics perspective, and just define by fiat specific speciation events at which point old species become extinct and new ones are said to come into existence), or to have rather fuzzy edges.

The cladistic perspective keeps things rather nice and tidy but it would seem a bit like living in Europe during the restoration, when a person could go to bed an orthodox believer and wake up the next day a heretic because the sovereign had decided to switch the National faith from Catholicism to Protestantism (or vice versa). The person had not changed, but the definitions had. A helpful perspective, perhaps, is to treat the notion of biological species as a scientific hypothesis (Knapp 2017), in that when a scientist proposes a species this is a hypothesis about a certain regularity in the natural world: a hypothesis which is then the basis for further investigation.

** The answer does not relate to a tragic wedding-reception death followed by an indecently short whirlwind romance, but rather that the Rev. Wedgwood officiated at the wedding of his cousin Emma to his cousin Charles.

*** Of course, by definition the couple were in the same generation back along the line of descent they shared, but possibly in very different generations back along alternative lines of descent. So, the individual highlighted with the pink circle in the preceding figure has children with two different partners in the ancestral 'tree' (really, a network) as MMMMMMMM mating with MMMMMMMF, and as FFFFFM mating with FFFFFF. In both cases she is the same number of generations back as her partner in terms of their child on the particular ancestral line, BUT she is both a great-great-great-great grandmother and a great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother of the same individual. So in that sense, she belongs to two different generations. That is only considering 'fruitful' couplings that led to an offspring in the direct ancestory of some individual.  There will clearly be many couplings that did not lead to offspring among someone's ancestors (or indeed no offspring at all) where the couple concerned only appear in the ancestral 'tree' of some individual in different generations.

Sources cited:

* When writing 'The Nature of the Chemical Concept' I was discussing the idea of natural kinds in chemistry (for example, 'potassium' has a better claim to refer to a natural kind than 'acid'), and the limitations of the notion of a natural kind. An example that I assumed would be familiar to readers was that of species. Species used to be considered different natural kinds each with their own essence, that were, largely at least, found distinct in nature:

Species as Natural Kinds? A Warning from Biology

"People, not just scientists, tend to naturally (sic, automatically) notice kinds in nature: for example, kinds of mineral, kinds of meteorological conditions (e.g., types of clouds), and perhaps most obviously, kinds of living thing…. When children, we all readily notice and learn that the world contains different kind of living things. There are birds and horses and dogs and fish and so forth. We come to recognise levels of classification without difficulty: this animal is a dog, and also a Labrador; this creature is both a sparrow and a bird. Later, when we study science in school we find that such distinctions are made formally by scientists, although not always in ways that entirely fit with informal everyday use… so mushrooms should not be considered plants, for example.

More advanced study might lead us to realise that the recognition of species and other higher-level taxa is not so straightforward. When I was at school, it was considered that the dinosaurs, the 'terrible lizards', as a group became extinct around 66 million years ago at the time of the formation of the Cretaceous-Paleogene (aka KT, Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary, but since then 'lizard' has become a questionable category of natural kind, whilst many biologists now claim that birds are technically extant (rather than extinct) dinosaurs.

Having learnt that the main orders of vertebrates were fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, it appears that not only might birds be considered reptiles, but that reptiles are by some biological criteria not actually an essential kind (that is a kind with a particular essence). Even fish are not exempt. Leaving aside the tendency of the term fish to sometimes be used in a vernacular sense of sea creature (to include whales and 'shell-fish' for example), it seems that by some criteria fish do not share a particular essence as a group, as some fish are more closely related to members of other groups than they are to some other fish…. Guinea pigs are no longer seen as members of the mammalian group of rodents. In addition, these are just some examples from the vertebrates, among the most familiar groups of animals to most people….

Modern scientific thinking, post-Darwin, suggests that there are no absolute distinctions between species. Darwin himself thought he had done biology a service in offering the perspective on the biota suggested by his theory of natural selection. Descent of different groups from common ancestors, should (Darwin thought) have brought an end the interminable wrangling about whether particular groups were 'really' different species or actually varieties of the same species. For Darwin, understanding the origin of species suggested there could be no absolute distinct essence of any particular biological grouping such that there would always be an absolute distinction between specimens of one species and another"

Taber, 2019: 121-123

In writing about how the shift between species was a gradual process I went into the ideas about how over a long period of time the number of generations separating two individuals becomes ambiguous and how most of our ancestors must appear multiple times on our 'tree' of descent (which also means that if you go back far enough, most of those alive then, who have offspring alive today, are probably shared ancestors of most of us). However, this was getting somewhat peripheral to my key point about species and natural kinds. So I excised that material, thinking I might find another use for it. That text is reproduced above.

The moon is a long way off and it is impossible to get there

Does our whole system of physics forbid us from believing someone has been on the moon?

Keith S. Taber

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay (with Emoji superimposed)

I never had the chance to interview Ludwig for my research, but was intrigued when I found out about his outright dismissal of the possibility of manned missions to the moon.

There are of course people who are strongly committed to ideas at odds with current scientific consensus – suggesting the earth is flat; that evolution does not occur; that COVID-19 was deliberately produced in a laboratory; that governments have physical evidence of alien visitors, but deny it and keep all relevant documentation classified; and so forth.

Moon landing deniers

Even in the United States of America, the home of the Apollo missions, surveys regularly show that a substantial minority of people doubt that people ever actually went to the moon, and think the Apollo moon landings were faked. Why would NASA have gone to such trouble with the collusion of the US Government machinery and the support of Hollywood studios?

As President Kennedy had put such weight on (American) people getting to the moon before the end of the 1960s, then – the argument goes – once it became clear this was technically impossible, it became important to convince the population that JFK's challenge had been met by a massive initiative to forge and disseminate evidence. There has been something of an industry in explaining how the photographs released by NASA can be seen to have been clearly faked if one looks carefully enough and knows a little science.

Unreasonable doubt?

I try to be someone who is always somewhat sceptical (as any scientist should be) of any claims, no matter how widely believed, as in time some canonical ideas are found to be flawed – even in science. But I tend to give little credence to such conspiracy theories.

Sometimes there are good reasons why science is doubted by sections of the public when it seems to conflict with well established world-view beliefs deriving from religious traditions or traditional ecological knowledge which has sustained a culture for a great many generations. So, even when the science is well supported, we can sometimes understand why some people find it difficult to accept. But the Apollo missions being faked in a film studio: surely that is just the kind of nonsense that only ignorant cranks like to believe – isn't it?

Ludwig on the sure belief that no one has been to the moon

Thus my interest in Ludwig, who was certainly not an ignorant person. Indeed he was highly intelligent, and something of an intellectual – a deep thinker who was very interested in the nature of knowledge and considered issues of how we could ground our beliefs, given that the evidence was never sufficient to be absolutely sure.

He thought that individual ideas were convincing when they were embedded in a 'nest' of related ideas – what we might call a conceptual framework. One example he discussed was his accepting that people always had parents: he thought this "sure belief" was based "not only on the fact that I have known the parents of certain people but on everything that I have learnt about the sexual life of human beings and their anatomy and physiology: also on what I have heard and seen of animals". Ludwig thought that although this could not be considered definite proof, it was robust grounds for someone to accept the belief.

Another example of such a sure belief was that a person could be confident that they had never been on the moon,

A principal ground for [a person] to assume that he was never on the moon is that no one ever was on the moon or could come [i.e., get] there; and this we believe on grounds of what we learn.

¶171

Physics forbids moon landings

Ludwig seemed to consider the impossibility of people getting to be on the moon was something he could be pretty sure of,

"But is there no objective truth? Isn't it true, or false, that someone has been on the moon?" If we are thinking within our system, then it is certain that no one has ever been on the moon. Not merely is nothing of the sort ever seriously reported to us by reasonable people, but our whole system of physics forbids us to believe it. For this demands answers to the questions "How did he overcome the force of gravity?" "How could he live without an atmosphere?" and a thousand others which could not be answered…

The intellectual status of unreasonable people

So someone making such a claim would not be a 'reasonable' person in Ludwig's evaluation. So how would Ludwig feel about such an unreasonable person?

We should feel ourselves intellectually very distant from someone who said this.

¶108

But of course there are people who claim this has indeed happened, that we have been to the moon,and walked there and whilst there collected rocks and indeed played golf. (Had this been more recent, we would perhaps instead have danced the tango and baked cakes.) NASA astronauts have since often acted as ambassadors for space science, and told their stories across the world, including to the young – enthusing many of them about space and science.

How might Ludwig respond to a child who had met one of those Apollo astronauts who claimed to have walked on the moon?

Suppose some adult had told a child that he had been on the moon. The child tells me the story, and I say it was only a joke, the man hadn't been on the moon, no one has ever been on the moon, the moon is a long way off and it is impossible to climb up there or fly there.

Ludwig adds, rhetorically,

If now the child insists, saying perhaps there is a way of getting there which I don't know, etc. what reply could I make to him?

¶106

Believers in moon landings are ignorant and wrong

So how could Ludwig explain that there are many people, indeed a majority today, who do believe that people have visited the moon, and returned to earth to tell others about the experience?

What we believe depends on what we learn. We all believe that it isn't possible to get to the moon; but there might be people who believe that that is possible and that it sometimes happens. We say: these people do not know a lot that we know. And, let them be never so sure of their belief-they are wrong and we know it.

If we compare our system of knowledge with theirs then theirs is evidently the poorer one by far.

¶286

So, just as I might suspect the moonshot deniers are somewhat ignorant, for Ludwig it is the reverse: it is those who think people can get to the moon who have poor knowledge systems and are simply wrong.

Now I suggested above that Ludwig was an intelligent and reflective person – indeed he worked as a school teacher, both in primary and secondary education – so his views may seem incongruent. As some readers may have suspected, I am being a little unfair to Ludwig. I pointed out at the outset that I never had the chance to interview Ludwig – indeed I never met him, although he did spend part of his life in Cambridge where I now work.

We can all be wrong

Ludwig did not live to see the moon landings, as he died in 1951 almost a decade before I was born (of parents – he was right about that), shortly after he wrote the material that I have quoted above. That is a few years before Sputnik was launched by the Soviet Union and the 'space race' began. So, Ludwig was not a denier of the moon landings as such, refusing to accept the media accounts, but rather a denier of the possibility of there ever being moon landings at a time when no one was yet actively planning the feat.

Ludwig was wrong. But had he lived another 20 years I am pretty sure he would have changed his mind. That's because one of the things he was best known for was changing his mind.

Having written a highly influential book of philosophy that convinced many intellectuals he was one of the greatest thinkers of his time, if not all time (the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) he took a long sabbatical from Academia, only to later write an equally influential and profound book (that he did not live to see published – the Philosophical Investigations) that contradicted his earlier ideas. Had Ludwig seen the technological developments of the 'space race' in the 1960s, it seems certain – well, a sure belief – that he would have accepted the possibility of people going to the moon.

However, when I first read the comments I quote above I was struck by how such a highly intelligent and deep thinker could be so sure that getting people to the moon was not possible that he actually chose to use the idea of people on the moon as an exemplar of something that was impossible ("it is certain that no one has ever been on the moon"), and indeed contrary to the laws of physics.

Presumably at the time he was writing he could assume most intelligent people would fully accept his position (as "we all believe that it isn't possible to get to the moon") and see the suggestion of people going to the moon as absurd enough to stand as an example of an idea that could not be accepted by us reasonable people, only by someone "intellectually very distant" from us.

However, barely a decade later JFK was convinced enough of the possibility of getting people safely to the moon and back to commit his nation to achieving it – and a decade after that men being on the moon was already ceasing to be seen as anything out of the ordinary (until the near disaster of the Apollo 13 mission got the flights back into the popular imagination).

I do not present this example to ridicule Ludwig Wittgenstein. Far from it. But it does make me reflect on those things that we think we can treat as 'sure beliefs'. Even the most intelligent and reflective of us can be very wrong about things we may treat as certain knowledge. That's always worth keeping in mind.

Nothing is absolutely certain, except, perhaps, uncertainty itself!

All citations are from ¶ in Wittgenstein, L. (1975). On Certainty (D. Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. v. Wright Eds. Corrected 1st ed.). Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing.

Lies, damned lies, and COVID-19 statistics?

A few days ago WHO reported that the UK had had over 300 000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, but now WHO is reporting the cumulative total is many fewer. How come?

Keith S. Taber

I have been keeping an eye on the way the current pandemic has been developing around the world by looking at the World Health Organisation website (at https://covid19.who.int) which offers regularly updated statistics, globally, regionally, and in those countries with the most cases.

An example of the stats. reported by the WHO (June 23rd 2020)
Note: on this day the UK Prime Minister reported: "In total, 306,210 people have now tested positive for coronavirus" which almost matches the figure shown by WHO (306 214) the next day.

Whilst the information is very interesting (and in view of what it represents, very saddening) there are some strange patterns in the graphs presented – reminding one that measurements can never just be assumed to precise, accurate and reliable. Some of the data looks unlikely to accurate, and in at least one case what is presented is downright impossible.

Questionable stats.

One type of anomaly that stands out is how some countries where the pandemic is active suddenly have a day with no new cases – before the level returning to trend.

This appeared to be the case in both Spain and Italy on 22nd March, and the two months later the same thing happened in Iran. One assumes this has more to do with reporting procedures than blessed days when no one was found to have the infection – although if that was the case should there not be some compensation in the following days (perhaps so in Spain above, but apparently not in Italy, and certainly not in Iran)?

Less easy to explain away is a peak found in the graph for Chile.

Suddenly for one day, 18th June, a much larger number of cases is reported: but then there is an immediate return to the baseline:

How is it possible that suddenly on one day there are seven times as many cases reported – as a blip superimposed on an otherwise fairly flat trend-line? Perhaps there is a rational explanation – but unfortunately the WHO site is rich in stats, but does not seem to offer interpretation or explanations *. Without a rationale, one wonder just how trustworthy the stats actually are.

Obviously false information

Even if there are explanations for some of these odd patterns due to the practicalities of reporting, and the ongoing development of systems of testing and reporting, in different jurisdictions, there is one anomaly that cannot be feasibly explained – where the data is surely, and clearly, wrong.

An example of the stats reported by the WHO (July 6th 2020)

So the graph above shows the nations with the most reported cases as of the last few days. This is a more recent update than the similar image at the top of this page. Yet, the cumulative total of confirmed cases for the United Kingdom in this figures is something like 20 000 cases LESS than the figure quoted in the EARLIER set of graphs. (Note that this has allowed the UK to have lower cumulative totals than either Chile or Peru – which would not have been the case without this reduction in cumulative total.)

The total number of confirmed cases in the UK is now (7th July) LESS that it was a week ago (see above). How come? Well, a close look the graph below explains this. The drop in cumulative numbers is due to the number of new cases that WHO gives as reported on 3rd July, when there were -29 726 new cases. Yes, that's right minus 29 thousand odd cases.

The WHO data show negative cases (-525 new cases) for the UK on May 21st as well, but on the 3rd July the magnitude of the negative number of confirmed cases is over three times as many as the highest daily number of positive new cases on any single day (April 12th, i.e., 8719 new cases).

I can imagine that if it was identified that a previous miscalculation had occurred it might be necessary to revise previous data. But surely an adjustment would be made to the earlier data: not the cumulative total corrected by interjecting a large negative number of cases on some arbitrary date in order to put the total right. [Note: the most recent data I can find on the UK government site cites 309,360 confirmed cases as of 26th June (2020-06-26 COVID-19 Press Conference Slides) so as of yet the UK data does not show the reduction in cumulative total being published by WHO.**]

Yet surely someone at WHO must have spotted that the anomaly is bizarre and brings their reports into question. The negative cases claimed for the UK on that one day are so great that the UK line has since burrowed into the graphics for completely different countries. (See below. On the day the UK graph was located above the graphic for Mexico, the UK line actually went down so far it actually crossed below the line for Mexico.)

Of course, each unit in these figures represents someone, a fellow human somewhere in the world, who has been found to be infected with a very serious, and sometimes fatal, virus. Fixating on the stats can distract from the real human drama that many of these cases represent. Yet, when the data reflect something so important, and when data are so valuable in understanding and responding to the global pandemic, such an obvious flaw in the data is disappointing and worrying.

*I could not find a link to send an email; a tweet did not get a response from @WHO; and an invitation to type my question on the website was met by the site bot with a suggestion to return to the data I was asking about.

** If I subsequently learn of the reason for the report of negative numbers of cases in these statistics, I will post an update here.

Update at 2020-07-12: duplicate testing

As of Saturday 11 July 2020 at 6:20pm
The UK government reports
Total number of lab-confirmed UK cases
288,953
Total number of people who have had a positive test result

So this is less than they were reporting a week earlier, despite their graph (for England, where most cases are because it is the most populous county of the UK) not showing any dip:

However, I did find this explanation:

"The data published on this website are constantly being reviewed and corrected. Cumulative counts can occasionally go down from one day to the next, and on some occasions there have been major revisions that have a significant effect on local, regional, National or UK totals. Data are provided daily from several different electronic data collection systems and these can experience technical issues which can affect daily figures, usually resulting in lower daily counts. The missing data are normally included in the data published the following day.

From 2 July 2020, Pillar 2 data [from "swab testing for the wider population" i.e., than just "for those with a clinical need, and health and care workers"] has been reported separately by all 4 Nations. Pillar 2 data for England has had duplicate tests for the same person removed by PHE [Public Helth England] from 2 July 2020. This means that the cumulative total number of UK lab-confirmed cases is now around 30,000 lower than reported on 1 July 2020."

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/about

So that explains the mystery – but duplicate reporting at that level seems extraordinary! It does not support confidence in official statistics. An error of c.10% suggests a systemic flaw in the methodology being used. It also makes one wonder about the accuracy of some of the figures being quoted for elsewhere in the world.

This can only mean…it's the core of a giant planet

Keith S. Taber

Image by LoganArt from Pixabay 

My interest was piqued by an item in the BBC Radio 4 news bulletin broadcast at 17.01 today (Wed 1st July 2020). Science reporter, Paul Rincon, reported:

Giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn have a solid planetary core beneath a thick atmosphere of gas, but no one has ever been able to see what these solid cores are like.
Now a team of astronomers has found an object that fits the description, orbiting a star like the sun that's 730 light years away.
The team knew the object must be the core of a giant planet,
because it is unusually dense for its size. It's about three and a half times bigger than earth, but thirty nine times heavier.
Objects with these properties are thought to draw gas in to form giant planets. Astronomers are planning more observations which could test ideas about how planets form.

Item on BBC Radio 4 PM News on 1st July 2020

Some years back I wrote a Reflection on Teaching and Learning Physics column called 'Documentaries can only mean one thing', as a response to my frustration about how science in the media was presented. Even quality science programmes that I really enjoyed, such as Horizon documentaries, would commonly include the phrase "this could only mean".

This was seldom, if ever, justified. What was meant was that the scientist concerned considered one particular interpretation to be convincing. The scientists themselves were unlikely to ever claim that there was only one possible interpretation of the data – but the writers and journalists clearly thought that viewers needed certainty.

This is important, of course, because we try to teach young people about the nature of science – and that means that all theories are underdetermined by evidence, and that scientific knowledge is technically provisional – open to being revisited in the light of new evidence or a new perspective that makes better sense of the data. Science involves argumentation to seek to persuade the community, and even when consensus is reached, the community can later revisit the issue.

So any suggestion that "this can only mean [whatever]" belongs in a different domain to the natural sciences – perhaps logic or mathematics. Any journalists who insist on presenting science in this way are undermining the work of school science teachers charged with teaching young people about the nature of science. So my question here is:

[did] the team know the object [that is, the object believed to be 730 light years away] must be the core of a giant planet?

No, of course not. This might be their current preferred interpretation, but it is not something they know for certain.

Because, they are not ideologues, or prophets, but scientists.

And the one thing a scientist can know for certain, is that scientific knowledge is never certain.

Natural rates of infection and the optimum level of simplification

How much dumbing down is good for our health?

Keith S. Taber

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay 

I just heard the UK Prime Minister introduce a public information message about what would be considered when deciding to ease current measures to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two particular statements in the clip played gained my attention:

  • "All viruses, like normal 'flu, have a rate of infection. Scientists call this R. R is the average number of people one infected person passes the virus onto."
  • "In March, at its peak, R was around 3, which seems to be the natural rate for this virus."

Neither of these statements seemed strictly correct to me.

To make things clearer, let's call a spade, a fork

Surely the rate of infection is the number of people who are infected in a unit time period – say per day. R is something else – the reproduction number. Now, those working in the public understanding of science, just as in science education, have to seek an optimum level of simplification when communicating with non-experts. There is no point using complex language that will be unclear to people, and so likely lead to them disengage with the message. So, simplification may indeed be needed. But not such a degree of simplification that what we say no longer adequately represents the ideas we are trying to convey.

But the term 'reproduction number' is not some really obscure and inaccessible jargon – it uses words that most people are quite familiar and comfortable with.It does not seem any more technical and frightening that the term 'rate of infection'. Now I accept that perhaps the compound phrase 'reproduction number' is itself unfamiliar, whereas 'rate of infection' is more commonly heard. BUT rate of infection already has a meaning, a different one – so is it sensible to confuse matters by defining rate of infection with a new meaning inconsistent with the existing common usage?

This seems an odd way to promote public understanding of science to me. This is a bit like deciding that the term 'electrical field' may seem a bit too technical for an audience, so it will be a good idea to instead start calling it 'gravity' from now on, because people are used to that term. Or thinking that 'water of crystallisation' sounds obscure, so deciding to refer to the copper sulphate crystal incorporating 'ice cubes' when talking to non-experts because they know what ice cubes are (i.e., something other than molecules of water of crystallisation!).

So what is natural about rates of viral infection?

I was not sure precisely what a normal 'flu was (in relation to an abnormal 'flu, presumably?), but was more surprised to the reference to a virus having a natural rate of infection – even if this actually meant a natural reproduction number.

Will this not depend on the conditions in which the virus exists?* R will surely be very different in a population that is sparsely spread with small social group sizes than in a population that is largely living in extended family groups in overcrowded slums – so what is the natural environment for that virus?

We have reduced R by social distancing and increased hygiene measures. Are we to assume what is natural is the work and social (and hygiene) habits of the UK population as it was in February 2020, rather than now? If so, were the social conditions in the UK in 1920 or 1820 'unnatural'? So, I think the reference to the rate (actually R) being 3 is not a natural rate, but the R value contingent on the specific conditions of UK social and economic activity at a particular historical moment. To believe that the way WE live NOW (or, actually, two months ago) reflects what is natural seems a very anthropocentric notion of 'natural'.

The natural state of things (Image by Samuele Schirò from Pixabay )

I guess I am being pedantic (one of the few things I tend to be good at – and we all need to work to our strengths) but it seems to me that if you are going to commission a public health message at a time when the public understanding of science is actually a matter of life and death, then it is worth trying to get the science right.

* This seemed intuitively obvious, but I thought I ought to check. A quick web-search led to lots of different estimates of R (or R0, that is R whilst a population is all susceptible) presented as if there was a single right value (even if we do not know it precisely) that applied across different contexts globally. Hm. So, I was reassured to come across: "Firstly, R0 is not an intrinsic variable of the infectious agent, but it is calculated through at least three parameters: the duration of contagiousness; the likelihood of infection per contact between; and the contact rate, along with economical, social and environmental factors, that may vary among studies aimed to estimate the R0", Viceconte and  Petrosillo, 2020, COVID-19 R0: Magic number or conundrum?, Infectious Disease Reports, 12(1).

So who's not a clever little virus then?

The COVID-19 virus is not a clever or sneaky virus (but it is not dumb either) 1

Keith S. Taber

Image by Syaibatul Hamdi from Pixabay 

One of the things I have noticed in recent news reports about the current pandemic is the tendency to justify our susceptibility to the COVID-19 coronavirus by praising the virus. It is an intelligent and sneaky foe, and so we have to outwit it.

But no, it is not. It is a virus. It's a tiny collection of nucleic material packaged in a way that it can get into the cells which contain the chemical resources required for the virus to replicate. It is well suited to this, but there is nothing intelligent about the behaviour. (The virus does not enter the cell to reproduce any more than an ice cube melts to become water; or a hot cup of coffee radiates energy to cool down; or a toddler trips over to graze its knee rather than because gravity acts on it.) The virus is not clever nor sneaky. That would suggest it can adapt its behaviour, after reflecting upon feedback from its interactions with the environment. It cannot. Over generations viruses change – but with a lot of variations that fail to replicate (the thick ones in the family?)

Yet any quick internet search finds references to the claimed intellectual capacities of these deadly foes. Now of course an internet search can find references to virtually anything – but I am referring to sites we might expect to be authoritative, or at least well-informed. And this is not just a matter of a hasty response to the current public health emergency as it is not just COVID 19, but, it seems, viruses generally that are considered intellectually superior.

Those smart little viruses

The site Vaccines Today has a headline in a posting from 2014, that "Viruses are 'smart', so we must be smarter", basing its claims on a lecture by Colin Russell, Royal Society University Research Fellow at Cambridge University. It reports that "Dr Russell says understanding how 'clever' viruses are can help us to outsmart them". (At least there are 'scare quotes' in some of these examples.)

An article from 2002 in an on-line journal has the title "The contest between a clever virus and a facultatively clever host". Now I have moaned about the standard of many new internet journals, but this is the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, and the article is in volume 95, so I think it is safe to apply the descriptor 'well-established' to this journal.

A headline in Science news for Students (published by Society for Science & the Public) from 2016 reads "Sneaky! Virus sickens plants, but helps them multiply". I am sure it would not take long to find many other examples. An article in Science refers to a "nasty flu virus".

Sneaky viruses

COVID-19 is a sneaky virus according to a doctor writing in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Quite a few viruses seem to be sneaky – the the human papillomavirus is according to an article in the American Journal of Bioethics. The World Health Organisation considers that a virus that causes swine fever, H1N1, is sneaky according to an article in Systematic Reviews in Pharmacy, something also reported by the BMJ.

There are many references in the literature to clever viruses, such as Epstein‐Barr virus according to a piece in the American Journal of Transplantation. The Hepatitis C virus is clever according to an article in Clinical Therapeutics.

Science communication as making the unfamiliar, familiar

Science communication is a bit like teaching in that the purpose of communication is often to be informative (rather than say, social cohesion, like a lot of everyday conversation {and, by the way,it was another beautiful day here in Cambridgeshire today, blue sky – was it nice where you are?}) and indeed to make the unfamiliar, familiar. Sometimes we can make the unfamiliar familiar by showing people the unfamiliar and pointing it out. 'This is a conical flask'. Often, however, we cannot do that – it is hard to show someone hyperconjugation or hysteresis or a virus specimen. Then we resort to using what is familiar, and employing the usual teacher tricks of metaphor, analogy, simile, modelling, graphics, and so forth. What is familiar to us all is human behaviour, so personification is a common technique. What the virus is doing, we might suggest, is hijacking the cell's biochemical machinery, as if it is a carefully planned criminal operation.

Strong anthropomorphism and dead metaphors

This is fine as far as it goes – that is, if we use such techniques as initial pedagogic steps, as starting points to develop scientific understanding. But often the subsequent stage does not happen. Perhaps that is why there are so many dead metaphors in the language – words introduced as metaphors, which over time have simple come to be take on a new literal meaning. Science does its fair share of borrowing – as with charge (when filling a musket or canon). Dead metaphors are dead (that is metaphorical, of course, they were never actually alive) because we simply fail to notice them as metaphors any more.

There are probably just as many references to 'clever viruses' referring to computer viruses as to microbes – which is interesting as computer viruses were once only viruses metaphorically, but are now accepted as being another type of virus. They have become viruses by custom and practice, and social agreement.

Whoever decided to first refer to the covalent bond in terms of sharing presumably did not mean this in the usual social sense, but the term has stuck. The problem in education (and so, presumably, public communication of science) is that once people think they have an understanding, an explanation that works for them, they will no longer seek a more scientific explanation.

So if the teacher suggests an atom is looking for another electron (a weak form of anthropomorphism, clearly not meant to be taken too seriously – atoms are not entities able to look for anything) then there is a risk that students think they know what is going on, and so never seek any further explanation. Weak anthropomorphism becomes strong anthropomorphism: the atom (or virus) behaves like a person because it has needs and desires just like anyone else.

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay 

Why does it matter?

Perhaps in our current situation this is not that important – the public health emergency is a more urgent issue than the public understanding of the science. But it does matter in the long term. Viruses are not clever – they have evolved over billions of years, and a great many less successful iterations are no longer with us. The reason it matters is because evolution is often not well understood.

As an article in Evolution News and Science Today (a title that surely suggests a serious science periodical about evolution) tells us again that "Viruses are, to all appearances, very clever little machines" and asks "do they give evidence of intelligent design" (that is, rather than Darwinian natural selection, do they show evidence of having an intelligent designer?) After exploring some serious aspects of the science of viruses, the article concludes: "So it seems that viruses are intelligently designed" – that is, a position at odds with the scientific understanding that is virtually a consensus view based on current knowledge. Canonical science suggests that natural processes are able to explain evolution. But these viruses are so clever they must surely have been designed (Borg technology, perhaps?)

This is why I worry when I hear that viruses are these intelligent, deliberate agents that are our foes in some form of biological warfare. It is a dangerous way of thinking. So, I'm concerned when I read, for example, that the cytomegalovirus is not just a clever virus but a very clever virus. Indeed, according to an article in Cell Host & Microbe "CMV is a very clever virus that knows more about the host immune system and cell biology than we do". Hm.

(Read about 'anthropomorphism')

Footnote:

1. The subheading was amended on 4th October 2021, after it was quite rightly pointed out to me that the original version, "COVID-19 is not a clever or sneaky virus (but it is not dumb either)", incorrectly conflated the disease with the virus.