trust in science at an all time low

Ryan_m_b

No worries that intro contains links links to other sites which go into more detail if you're interested.

chiro

I don't want to derail this thread so I'll just make my one question as brief as possible.

The question is does this evolution biology think that things involve in absolute competition, absolute collaboration or somewhere in-between and not just for for one isolated group like one species, but for the entire ecosystem and biology of the planet?

In other words, what is the extent of the competition and the colloboration currently theorized to be?

If you have a recommended book or website to read that would be fantastic, but if not and you know of current discussions or people working on this or providing open ideas that would be great as well.

If the answer is simply that we don't currently know then that would be great to know that as well. I imagine though that at least one person or group of researchers out there has probably thought about this (I imagine quite a few though have done so practically).

SixNein

Here is a good article on this topic:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/

Ryan_m_b

Feel free to post questions in the biology forum if you like.
The answer as always is a mixture. There's two avenues that would be good to point you down if you're interested in things like this. Firstly within species you have collaboration in the form of altruism (as SixNein has mentioned) which is a facinating area of study, of particular note is kin selection which is prevelant in many eusocial species wherein an organism sacrifices its own reproductive fitness for a relative's.

The other avenue is interaction between species, for that it would be good to read into the various forms of symbiosis and how they can evolve. What's quite interesting in this case is how symbiosis can evolve into parasitism.

I know there's a lot of wiki links there but it should be a good place to look into some basic terms before moving onto something like a text book. Enjoy!

russ_watters

There also is a problem of clarity when it comes to liberal anti-science ideas. Two examples that should be simple:

1. When the Catholic church convinces an African country not to distribute condoms, resulting in thousands of people dying of AIDS, that's a clear-cut case of a religious anti-science stance. We know it and the Church knows it.

2. When Greenpeace convinces an African country to reject GM food, resulting in thousands of people dying of starvation, that's....what? A pseudo-scientific anti-science stance? Ignoring science in favor of anti-corporatism? Naturalistic science over man-made science? A little of each?

So while religious conservatives who are anti-science almost certainly know they are anti-science, I think the issue is a lot fuzzier on the other side of the aisle. That would show up in a poll as a Greenpeace activist saying "yes" they trust science even while manipulating it or fighting against it while the religious conservative just answers "no".

SixNein

Europe isn't exactly accepting it either. And I'm not sure how successful GM will be for the poor since it is being heavily protected by patents.

I personally have two main concerns with GM crops:
1. Seed contamination (And the simple lack of information on how widespread it is occurring)
2. Resistant weeds. See: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...-09082011.html

#2 This is the problem that Greenpeace has been bitching about.

Galteeth

Science doesn't tell us what crops people should use. Nor does it tell people anything about whether to use condoms. This is the crux of the problem. Science is a method of investigation of natural phenomenon. Using science, technology like condoms and GM crops, can be developed. But science can't tell people what to do. THIS is where people get confused. They think that trusting the method of science to produce reliable conclusions about nature is equivalent to accepting any policy wherein the conclusions of science were used in some way. Which is an absurd equivalence, but it's one you're accidentally making! (Nothing personal, this is a super common fallacy.)

Ryan_m_b

I would argue that you're making a fallacy yourself by simplifying the issue. Science can tell us the ramifications of what we are discussing here i.e. what are the physical and social implications of plentiful food and condom use? At some point you have to inject some value judgements to decide whether or not health is something you desire but so what

chiro

While I think science is one of the best ideas we have got in our current development, it is important that people don't twist it or use it in a deceptive manner to achieve things that are either outright deceptive or not sound.

Human beings have a tendency to choose what information suits their needs and to use that in a way that suits their needs. Religious people are extremely guilty of this, but they are not the only group.

The greatest thing about science IMO is the transparency: in a good piece of science you make absolutely everything available to the rest of the community and then they can take that recipe and 'bake the cake themselves' to see if it comes out as a cheesecake or instead as a ice-cream cake.

The next thing on top of this is (and this is going to sound rather heartless but I think it needs to be said) is that we need to lose the 'human' element.

I don't mean that we need to lose compassion or similar values but rather lose the distortion and the urges that we use to distort the data in any form we wish to achieve the results we 'want' and 'expect' to achieve.

You can't make good decisions when you either bury your head in the sand to either a) avoid the data by pretending it's not there or b) just avoid the problem intentionally to achieve some pre-determined conclusion for a pre-determined action.

Many people would think that this kind of thinking would reduce us to robots, or computers, or something similar but for me I actually welcome this kind of change. Really important decisions require someone without biases, but still enough empathy, compassion, and real understanding (not some narcisist, sociopath or psychopath or other similar kind of personality) to make decisions.

To do this as a society we need to be honest not only about the faults of others but also of ourselves. It means that we have to admit that we are wrong when we are wrong and be willing to tell potentially the world that we screwed up. It means indirectly that we have to tell the world that 'yes, I am human, I made a bad call, I screwed up and this is what I did wrong' and unfortunately this is something that in some societies (if not all) is not practiced. Everyone wants to win, and nobody wants to lose.

It reminds me of a scene in the movie 'Margin Call' (which is one I recommend others to watch as well) which says two things (and I paraphrase here): 'If everything works out, then nothing will change. If it all works out then we get called a bunch of pussies. If it doesn't work out, then people are going to crucify us'

This is a great scene and it emphasizes what I mean about winners and losers, and the truth is so startling that personally it should be what they should teach in school rather than the absolute rubbish they do currently.

So with this said, are people of all backgrounds and classifications willing to take the leap? To realize that a) humans make mistakes b) it's good to make mistakes and c) the winner/loser paradigm/mindset needs a change? is a huge task.

I personally don't see science being used to it's absolute full potential that it can offer us as human beings unless the above is addressed (not only for religious people, but for everyone).

Galteeth

But it is relevant. Since the "trust" here is getting confused by scientists, it's not hard to see why it would confuse lay people.

Ok, clearly science can tell us that condom use will prevent or significantly reduce the risk of HIV transmission.
Distributing condoms in Africa would almost certainly reduce the spread of HIV.
Now you are saying, ok, well given that, surely the policy of distributing condoms is a good idea. And I'm not disagreeing with you. But you skipped a step there. You went from the facts to a policy based on those facts.
Those value judgements that are used seem trivial to you. But they're not for say, people who have a religious objection to condom use. By making an equivalence of facts with value judgements, you are getting to the core of why "mistrust" in science is on the rise.
Now, religious objections to condom are seriously misguided and irresponsible granted, but that's not what I'm arguing.

Let's do a different example. Ok, we can agree that chimpanzess and humans have a common ancestor right? Scientific fact. Also, the same areas of the brain are activated in both species after a close family member dies, so it's logical to conclude that chimps feel something akin to grief. Therefore, science says we shouldn't do experiments on chimps.

See what i did there. That's the problem. I am muddling the issue. I take scientific evidence, make a value judgement based on that evidence, then say that my value judgement is backed by science. But it's a linguistic trick and a disingenous one. While I can use facts to form my values or argue my case, i can't fairly equate "trust in science that humans and chimps have a common ancestor" with "trust in science that we shouldn't experiment on chimps." One injects a value, and I think lay people have a hard time distinguishing between statements of fact or theory and statements of principal and policy based on facts or theory.

Ryan_m_b

Perhaps I didn't explain my point well enough, I understand all this and agree with it but my point is that this is not a criticsm of science. Furthermore when you say "science can't tell us what crops to use" that is an oversimplified linguistic trick. We can use science to accumulate facts about our situation such as societal health, food availability, economic concerns etc and judge that if we grew crops X instead of Y we could increase these metrics in a positive way. Now obviously there is going to be some ethical decision as to whether or not these things are desirable and yes there may be major conflicts but it's not right to say that science can't tell us what we should do because it ignores the fact that science tells us how to get to where we want. Either way this discussion is going a bit off topic and I get the impression we're arguing pedantic points.

chiro

It would probably a good idea for people who engage in some social contract to specifically outline what they know and what they speculate. You can make this feasible without making it too bearucratic by making the information publically available (like at say a public library or through a government website of sorts).

Doing this would mean that they would have to inform the people as an obligation to their social contract of what they have actually found vs what they are extrapolating or speculating either from what they have found or even as a combination of what others have reported to be found.

The judgement call of course is always left to the end user and if the end user disregards things or other similar things, then that is their business.

It used to be that the aristocracy and ruling class made sure that the peasants were illiterate, didn't know mathematics, science, logic or anything that could otherwise help them make sense of the world to know that they were getting screwed over big-time and also for the use that they could not construct a good argument.

Nowadays things have changed with the access people have to information of all kinds, but in some ways things haven't changed that dramatically.

It is also important to remember that a lot of people on this forum are highly educated people and that we are not necessarily in a majority. I am also not talking about formal education in isolation, but education in a general sense that is made of observation, personal learning and experiences and everything inbetween: not just formal learning you do that is part of some assessment-based scenario.

chiro

Science, like the financial system thrives in a situation where trust is present and there is a level of confidence in the system both in terms of it's integrity and also in it's ability to benefit the people who use it.

twofish-quant said in a previous response of his to my own response in another old thread that (and I paraphrase here) that 'In finance, when things go badly, they get really bad.'

I think that a relationship between science and the financial system is a good one because both are based on a high level of intrinsic integrity (and thus confidence) and both are far reaching with regard to the impact that they have on society.

When people lose faith in the system underlying exchange of goods and services (trade), then countries stop trading with each other and this causes chaos. When people lose faith in their own country with regard to the currency, things get chaotic and people end up going from a very orderly existance to a situation not unlike the Mad Max kind of movies. If you think that this can't happen, take a look at what is happening in Greece right now with the riots. Think about what happened when Hurricane Katrina hit and what happened with the social order over there at that time.

If science ends up in the same kind of situation we will have even more chaos and like the financial one, it too will have a huge effect across all sectors of society.

In this vein, it is important that we not only place confidence in the scientific method like you are advocating, but that we also work to maintaining the highest standards of integrity, transparency and clarity with regards to intrinsic functioning and all of this has a direct correspondence with confidence and trust of not just science, but any system that uses or encompasses it.

Unfortunately because there are misuses of scientific knowledge and processes, I do see that we could get the same kind of thing happening that we do get in some areas of the financial system which will open up all kinds of problems.

At the same time, it is good to have situations that expose corruption, misuse, intentional deception, and other similar activities that help create the scene for a system that has even stronger characteristics of integrity and clarity simply due to the fact of how important this mechanism is for maintaining social cohesion and a well functioning society.

I am not sure personally that everyone realizes how important the enforcement of these principles are in the greater scope of social cohesion, although I imagine a great majority of scientists take their oath, jobs, and responsibility seriously. The thing is it takes only a few bad apples and a disaster or two to not only upset the apple-cart but to derail it completely.

mheslep

These responses are very similar in form to intelligent design arguments. Cast dispersion on motivations (they're in it for the money); cite off topic problems (weeds are about over use of herbicides); strawman (proponents want to use science to tell us what to do).

Now, these may indeed be valid objections to an agenda of some group or business, but they are all non responsive to the scientific point, in this case whether or not GM provides superior food yields and thus health over time. Russ has chosen an excellent counter example.

SixNein

I didn't say GM plants didn't provide higher food yields. I simply stated concerns.

http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documen...ticide-use.pdf

This little problem is simply left out of the GM crop cost vs benefit equation.

But as far as the claim on all of those hungry people, I remain a skeptic until its demonstrated. I'm curious how seed contamination will play out in patent courts.

russ_watters

That paper is just a restatement of your previous error. Herbicide use increase is an intentional BENEFIT of GM crops.

The side effect of increasing resistance is unfortunate but doesn't negate the benefit. Your objection could identically be applied to antibiotics: you may as well suggest we stop using antibiotics because they cause bacteria to become resistant.

SixNein

An analogy here is that my objection is to the inappropriate use of antibiotics. The increase use of herbicide(s) has mostly been of one particular thing.

http://www8.nationalacademies.org/on...RecordID=12804





Global number of weed populations resistant to two or more types of herbicides
Mortensen et al./BioScience