Back of the Envelope

Richard Doerflinger has a long and fact-filled article up at National Review where he discusses the hype surrounding therapeutic cloning:

In fact there is, as yet, no published evidence of “therapeutic” benefit even in animals from stem cells derived from cloned embryos. But when Congressman Dave Weldon (R., Fla.), prime sponsor of the federal cloning ban, noted this during the House’s 2003 debate on the bill, his comment was publicly attacked as “embarrassing,” “asinine” and “Luddite” by Lanza himself and Nobel laureate Paul Berg. On further examination, it turned out these pro-cloning researchers were using the now-well-established “bait and switch” technique: Every study they cited to rebut Dr. Weldon either didn’t involve cloning, or didn’t involve embryonic stem cells at all.

The Korean “egg scandal” has made international headlines. Largely unreported is the fact that the entire propaganda campaign for research cloning has been filled with misrepresentations, hype, and outright lies.

In their op-ed, Caplan and McGee worry that the Hwang scandal may lead people to ask “whether or not [embryonic] stem cell researchers are a rogue lot, not to be trusted.” It would be about time.

A certain amount of hype is expected from scientific researchers, but the amount that is coming from this field is scandalous.

I'm thinking of getting some business cards. Not for work, but for blogging. Of course, by "get," I mean design them with Microsoft Publisher and buy some business card stock and print them out on my color inkjet at home. That's really all that's needed to get business cards these days. In any case, here are a couple of designs I came up with.

First design:


Second design:

What do you think? You notice that they're both based on the new Back of the Envelope logo I now have on my page (if it looks like the old one to you, hit reload to make sure the new image is used rather than the old one you have in your cache). I decided to update it to a better looking envelope with a more quantum computation-specific equation. <0|+>=1/2^½ is actually a dot product of two vectors (one-dimensional arrays). If |0> and |1> are the two qubit states zero and one in vector form, then <0| and <1| are their conjugate transposes. (That's just what it sounds like--take the conjugate of the complex numbers and transpose the vector.) Using the usual 0 and 1 basis, we define the vector |0>=[1;0] and |1>=[0;1]. (The semicolons indicate that the elements are in separate rows--it's hard to show here.) Thus, <0|=[1 0] and <1|=[0 1]. <0|0>=1 and <1|1>=1, but <0|1>=0 and <1|0>=0. It's an orthonormal basis set, where each vector has a unit length and is orthogonal to the other vectors in that set, and by multiplying them by scalars you can create any vector in that space. Meanwhile, |+>=1/2^½(|0>+|1>) and |->=1/2^½(|0>-|1>), forming a separate orthonormal basis set. I've discussed different bases before. The key idea is that while |0> and |1> are orthonormal to one another, as are |+> and |->, |0> and |1> are not orthonormal to |+> amd |->, giving <0|+>=1/2^½.

Want to live forever? Not Tony Long. He offers some reasons in his article, most of them humorous, but this one seems pretty likely to happen:

Science fiction deals extensively with the whole eternal-life thing. In his Robot series, Isaac Asimov posits a world divided into two groups: those with the economic means of living thousands of years and those who, not having those means, are doomed to live a normal life span. It's the ultimate power trip, with the eternals exploiting their advantage over the mortals to make the gulf between haves and have-nots even worse. Cautionary? Yeah. Plausible? Assuming that thousand-year life spans are plausible at all, you bet.

Count on it. If it happens, eternal life will be limited to those who 1.) can afford it, or 2.) make their Faustian bargain with someone who can. Living forever is a concept you'll buy at the Sharper Image, not from the Sears catalog.

I'm not sure whether the fact that only a priveleged class can afford it is a really good reason not to do it. It's certainly not capitalistic to oppose it for that reason. That's hardly the reason I don't intend to eke eteranl life out of modern technology. I fully intend to live forever, I just think it's masochistic to just indefinitely extend life on earth for no other reason than to avoid death. Eternal life is about more than not getting old.

That said, I'm not sure I'd outright refuse the chance to extend life for fifty or a hundred years, assuming a corresponding vitality and not just a really long old age. But if people start living 200 years, they're really going to have to raise the retirement age.

Don't tell Derbyshire, but there's some Darwin-skepticism going on at National Review:

In my book, I quote Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, telling a professional audience at the American Museum in New York that there was "not one thing" he knew about evolution. He had asked the evolutionary-morphology seminar at the University of Chicago if there was anything they knew about it, and, he said: "The only answer I got was silence."

Patterson, who died a few years ago, was an atheist and once told me that he regarded the Bible as "a pack of lies." There was no way he could be accused of Biblical primitivism. People would ask him, with a note of alarm, "Well, you do believe in evolution, don't you?" He would respond that science wasn't supposed to be a system of belief.

So let's look at the evidence adduced for evolution. The fossil record is sparse. Bats, for example — the only mammals capable of powered flight — appear suddenly in the fossil record, with their sonar systems already fully developed. "There are no half bats," as a world expert on bats once said. The experts have no idea what animal gave rise to the first bat.

The creatures that evolution purports to explain are fantastically complex. The cell, thought at the time of Darwin to be a "simple little lump of protoplasm," is as complicated as a high-tech factory. We have no actual evidence that it evolved — and yet we are asked, indeed obliged, to believe that it did.
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This is the science before which all knees must bend? These explanations are no better than "Just-So stories" (as one or two Harvard professors have rightly said). No actual digging in the dirt is needed: The theorist merely contemplates the trait in question and makes up a plausible story as to how it might have been advantageous.

We fear questioning the evolutionist dogma. Someone might call us fanatical. "Intemperate" was the word George Will used. So we go along with the dogmas of materialism, lest we be considered ignorant or uneducated or driven by a religious agenda.
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George Will has made one accurate criticism of the idea he so dislikes: "The problem with intelligent design is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis." This is true; but he should have added that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is not falsifiable either. Darwin's claim to fame was his discovery of a mechanism of evolution; he accepted "survival of the fittest" as a good summary of his natural-selection theory. But which ones are the fittest? The ones that survive. There is no criterion of fitness that is independent of survival. Whatever happens, it is the "fittest" that survive — by definition. This, just like intelligent design, is not a testable hypothesis. As the eminent philosopher of science Karl Popper said, after discussing this problem that natural selection cannot escape: "There is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this." Popper was the first to propose falsification as the line of demarcation between theories that are scientific and those that are not; both intelligent design and natural selection fall by this standard.

There's more, by Tom Bethell, and it's worth reading. I don't usually get involved in the intelligent design debate, but I'm a big fan of the free marketplace of ideas. These days, the marketplace is less free than it should be.