So Now I'm a Global Warming Denier
Last week, I was feeling a little down about my work. To pick myself up, I tried to describe my two main projects in 10 words or less and came up: 1) "To improve safety in nuclear power plants" and 2) "To mathematically describe behavior inside the cell." That made me feel cool, which is, as you know, unusual.
Now that I've started to study biology a little bit, I've become a lot more sensitive to the abuse of science and the behavior of science denialists who are convinced that scientists the world over are involved in some massive conspiracy that involves lying to the public for some nebulous reason to achieve some nebulous, but most certainly nefarious, end. These people tend to leave engineering alone, as engineering as a discipline tends not to make claims regarding the origins of life. Its claims tend to be more along the lines of "We can build this."
Even a small foray into biology leads me to wonder how any work I do could be twisted by someone whose religious or political views require a willing suspension of empiricism. Systems biology is a prime target for misrepresentation as much of its population of researchers is engineers, who use words like "design" to draw analogies to similarities between biological structures and engineering structures. Of course, once you use that word "design," a lot of creationists and the intelligent designers cherry-pick your writings in order to find quotations that justify their views.
The way I see systems biology is that the objective of the field is to find a new way of describing biological processes. To use an engineering analogy, I feel that the current approach to understanding how a living organism works is roughly equivalent to trying to understand how a computer works be describing the behaviors of every electron in every n-type or p-type semiconductor. We know that in a computer or a human-engineered system, we can divide the architecture into functional blocks and describe its behavior in terms of those blocks. The goal of systems biology is to discover what those blocks are in living organisms, which is extremely hard because these processes are not physically separated like they usually are in systems we build. The hope is that by doing this, we can design new organisms to accomplish new tasks that would never be an outcome of natural evolution. That fact that it may be possible to design an organism (even from scratch) does not imply that organisms that already exist must have been designed.
The misuse of statistics and the imbecilic arguments thrown out by denialists and conspiracy theorists is horrifying. A new example is this piece of crap I found through fark.com claiming that most scientists don't believe humans are responsible for global warming because, in a survey of 528 papers, only 45% endorsed this view. Only 6% of papers in the survey specifically rejected this view. 48% didn't say anything either way.
What this bullshit artist (possibly deliberately) fails to understand is that a lack of clear endorsement of human-caused global warming does not imply disapproval with this hypothesis. A researcher can study the effects of global warming on say, Arctic ice levels, without having to make any statements regarding the cause of warming. The cause is not relevant to the study of the effect. Given the limited space most scientific journals provide, there's no room to put in an opinion as to the cause of global warming if it's not relevant.
It's reasonable to assume that support for the human-caused global warning hypothesis is the same among the researchers behind papers that expressed no opinion and the researchers beside those that did. In that case, we find that 45/51 = 88% of researchers support this hypothesis. Sounds pretty close to a consensus to me.
Of course, I don't belief in human-cause global warming because none of the papers I've written specifically endorse this hypothesis. I also don't believe in evolution and neither do most of the researchers and the biology conference I went to this month, because few of them specifically endorsed it on their posters. Here's a list of other hypotheses I must support because I have not specifically denied them in my published work:
Now that I've started to study biology a little bit, I've become a lot more sensitive to the abuse of science and the behavior of science denialists who are convinced that scientists the world over are involved in some massive conspiracy that involves lying to the public for some nebulous reason to achieve some nebulous, but most certainly nefarious, end. These people tend to leave engineering alone, as engineering as a discipline tends not to make claims regarding the origins of life. Its claims tend to be more along the lines of "We can build this."
Even a small foray into biology leads me to wonder how any work I do could be twisted by someone whose religious or political views require a willing suspension of empiricism. Systems biology is a prime target for misrepresentation as much of its population of researchers is engineers, who use words like "design" to draw analogies to similarities between biological structures and engineering structures. Of course, once you use that word "design," a lot of creationists and the intelligent designers cherry-pick your writings in order to find quotations that justify their views.
The way I see systems biology is that the objective of the field is to find a new way of describing biological processes. To use an engineering analogy, I feel that the current approach to understanding how a living organism works is roughly equivalent to trying to understand how a computer works be describing the behaviors of every electron in every n-type or p-type semiconductor. We know that in a computer or a human-engineered system, we can divide the architecture into functional blocks and describe its behavior in terms of those blocks. The goal of systems biology is to discover what those blocks are in living organisms, which is extremely hard because these processes are not physically separated like they usually are in systems we build. The hope is that by doing this, we can design new organisms to accomplish new tasks that would never be an outcome of natural evolution. That fact that it may be possible to design an organism (even from scratch) does not imply that organisms that already exist must have been designed.
The misuse of statistics and the imbecilic arguments thrown out by denialists and conspiracy theorists is horrifying. A new example is this piece of crap I found through fark.com claiming that most scientists don't believe humans are responsible for global warming because, in a survey of 528 papers, only 45% endorsed this view. Only 6% of papers in the survey specifically rejected this view. 48% didn't say anything either way.
What this bullshit artist (possibly deliberately) fails to understand is that a lack of clear endorsement of human-caused global warming does not imply disapproval with this hypothesis. A researcher can study the effects of global warming on say, Arctic ice levels, without having to make any statements regarding the cause of warming. The cause is not relevant to the study of the effect. Given the limited space most scientific journals provide, there's no room to put in an opinion as to the cause of global warming if it's not relevant.
It's reasonable to assume that support for the human-caused global warning hypothesis is the same among the researchers behind papers that expressed no opinion and the researchers beside those that did. In that case, we find that 45/51 = 88% of researchers support this hypothesis. Sounds pretty close to a consensus to me.
Of course, I don't belief in human-cause global warming because none of the papers I've written specifically endorse this hypothesis. I also don't believe in evolution and neither do most of the researchers and the biology conference I went to this month, because few of them specifically endorsed it on their posters. Here's a list of other hypotheses I must support because I have not specifically denied them in my published work:
- The Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy are real.
- Rob Schneider is a terrific actor.
- JFK was killed by the Freemasons.
- The one-quadrillionth digit of pi is 7.
- Michael Vick loves puppies.