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Kofi Annan’s commencement speech at MIT in 1997

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I recently came across the transcript of Kofi Annan’s commencement speech at MIT in 1997. It’s interesting to read his speech, especially this paragraph, in the context of current events. I liked reading this; I feel like it’s more candid than a public speech.

I begin with the struggle between reason and unreason. When the history of the twentieth century is written, this struggle will figure very prominently in it. On the plane of international affairs, the outbursts of unreason in this century surpass in horror and human tragedy any the world has seen in the entire modern era. From Flanders’ fields to the Holocaust and the aggressions that produced World War II; from the killing fields of Cambodia and Rwanda to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia; from the twenty-five million refugees who roam the world today to untold millions, many of them children, who die the slow death of starvation or are maimed for life by land-mines–our century, even this generation, has much to answer for.

Quite a nice summary, isn’t it? He toots his own horn and that of the UN quite a bit, but it’s interesting how he draws a parallel between international relations(“the project of international organization”) and the scientific process.

But you kill babies, right?

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I was volunteering at a benefit banquet for a local charity, which meant that I stood there and occasionally served food to people in exchange for being able to eat and drink all I wanted. While I was trying to brew coffee with broken equipment that PJ’s delivered but didn’t staff, I was conversing with someone who was eagerly awaiting the first cup of that bitter brown elixir of awareness. “It’ll just be a minute more”, I kept telling him as the machine heated the water. To distract him I asked what he did for a living:

“I’m an artist”, he said, but did not elaborate, “what do you do?”
“Oh really? That’s cool. I’m a graduate student in molecular biology.”
“So do you study the genome project and all that stuff?”
“Not too much. Right now I’m working on a project studying differentiation signals of stem cells. Stem cells, as you may have heard in the news(yeah, right!), are cells that retain the ability to turn into any other cell in your body, so they could potentially be used to repair nerve injuries like spinal cord injuries, which would be great because nerves can’t regrow on their own, or treat Alzheimer’s, or any number of things. It’s been show that these cells will migrate to the site of an injury, and then turn into the specific type of cell needed to repair that injury. These cells eventually lose their ability to differentiate into different cell types as they grow, however, and no one really knows why, so we’re trying to study that process. We are looking for something, and have had a little success, in finding something that allows cells to retain their multipotentiality(I was really getting into it now, getting excited, using words like multipotentiality). It would also be great if we could somehow reset the state of differentiated cells. The problem is, though, the current administration has enacted anti-cloning laws that are so broad that they’re making even life-saving stem cell research illegal.”
“But you get those cells from babies, right?”
“We don’t have to, and unless we can study them, we can’t find out ways to get them from other sources and to use them to save lives. (trying to change the subject, because I knew where this was going) I once saw this artist who had a bunny engineered to glow green(not really, read the article). What do you think about that?”
“Kinda like playing God, isn’t it? That’s what worries me about this genetic technology, you don’t know what the effects are going to be.”
“I guess it is kinda like playing God, but if we can save lives, it’s worth it, right? We make a huge effort to study the potential effects of things, so I’m not really worried that stem cells are going to get out and take over the world.”
“But we don’t know what the consequences of these things will be, how they will affect the environment long term.”
“…and if we can’t study them, not only will we never know, but we’ll be denying sick people the development of live-saving therapies.”
Silence for about a minute.
“I’ll come back and check on that coffee in a little while.”
“Ok, I’m expecting it to be ready any time now.”

The dangerous trend of moralizing and politicizing science

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Here’s some quotes from the Guardian’s article on the dangerous trend of moralizing and politicizing science. It covers Michael Dini, Intelligent Design, and has some good quotes from both sides, such as this one from Professor Michael Behe of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, the Intelligent Design movement’s foremost academic advocate. When asked how he accounts for the very visible evolution of, say, viruses, he remarks, “It’s just that I don’t think [evolution] can explain everything. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example, is one of the things it can explain.”

I’ve blogged about this in the past: the principle scientific criteria for a theory is falsifiability. It’s taken for granted that there may be some things any theory can’t explain. Note that this expert does not really answer the most obvious question, “What things can’t it explain?” Evolution is currently the best available scientific theory that fits the available facts. When it’s shown that a theory cannot be true by positive evidence, most good scientists drop that theory like last weeks news, or adapt it to fit the new data. Absence of evidence, however, isn’t sufficient to discount a theory because it’s absence of evidence – it proves nothing. It’s pretty hard to state an observation that the theory of evolution cannot explain, in terms of a question that can be positively answered. That’s why it’s such a good theory. Think about it. Science in some ways is fundamentally opposed to responding to religiously based theories, because science doesn’t disprove things – we only show that something is more likely than something else. Currently our theory fits the facts better than, “God did it because he felt like it.” or to restate it as an ID argument, “God or his agent may have done it, because he felt like it, and you can’t prove he didn’t.”

99% of the time we’re working on curing disease and improving the human condition, but since the general public doesn’t have the level of scientific understanding necessary to resist the advance of religion into places it shouldn’t be on their own, we have to do it.

Here’s the quotes:

Some other signs: if you were contemplating an abortion and were worried about the rumour that it might increase your risk of breast cancer, you might visit the website of the government-funded National Cancer Institute to read their factsheet, which noted that most scientists doubt a link. Or, at least, you might have done so until June last year, when the page, criticised by some Republicans in Congress, simply vanished. (A replacement page was posted last month.) Or maybe you were an Aids activist, elated by the president’s unexpected (and genuinely revolutionary) announcement in the State of the Union address of $15bn ($9.7bn) in funding for fighting the epidemic worldwide – and then surprised to find that only around 10% was destined for the Global Aids Fund, while the rest would be funnelled through US agencies, where it is more likely to be accessible to American abstinence-only groups campaigning against condoms.

“It’s not that I don’t think Darwinian evolution can’t explain anything,” says Professor Michael Behe of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, the movement’s foremost academic advocate, when asked how he accounts for the very visible evolution of, say, viruses. “It’s just that I don’t think it can explain everything. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example, is one of the things it can explain.”

Similarly, the White House’s strategy on global warming is not to scoff at the scientific establishment’s warnings on climate change. Rather, it trumpets the importance of their research activities and calls for even more research – years more, in fact – before any action is taken. In the same fashion, one of the most popular arguments currently circulating on anti-condom websites claims not that they encourage promiscuity but that they can’t protect against HIV. The reason, it argues, is because the virus is 0.1 microns in diameter, while there are tiny pores in latex measuring 10 microns. (There is no evidence for this.)

The two men inside the Bush administration who have had the most to do with this: One is Karl Rove, the president’s senior political aide, a master tactician who has been Bush’s main strategist since his earliest days campaigning for the governorship of Texas. (He does not seem overly bothered by scruples: in one campaign, for another politician, he claimed to have discovered a bug in his office on the day of a major debate. The opponent, tarnished by the insinuation of dirty tricks, lost the race, but the ensuing police investigation found nothing.)

Some saw Rove’s influence at play when John Marburger, Bush’s new science advisor, was informed that the role would no longer be a cabinet position. The White House had decided that “they don’t need that level of scientific input,” Allan Bromley, the first President Bush’s science advisor, said glumly at the time. The other man is Leon Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics. The occupant of that role was always going to be a central figure in an administration as morality-driven as Bush’s.

[Of course, this evil-doer has to be involved:] John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice has proved active: when Michael Dini, a Catholic biology professor at Texas Tech University, announced that he would not write academic recommendations for students who did not “affirm” that there is a scientific explanation of the origin of the species, a creationist student launched a lawsuit. Such lawsuits aren’t uncommon. What was uncommon was that Dini soon received a call from government lawyers … threatening to make a minor local dispute into a high-profile federal case.

A good bit of the article concerns the Intelligent Design movement. Kenneth Miller, a professor at Brown University says ID is “stealth creationism…which is a quasi-political theory.” The new trend for creationists is for them to say they simply want fair consideration for their rival scientific theories.

“It’s a very good rhetorical strategy, because it appeals to the very American sense of openness and fair play,” says Miller. “But there’s something called the scientific process, you know – involving open publication, criticism, and rejection of things that aren’t convincing. We don’t teach both sides of the germ theory of disease and faith-healing. Evolution isn’t in the classroom because of political action or court decisions. It’s in the classroom because it made it through, it stood up to scrutiny and became the scientific consensus. It fought the battle and won.”

“They keep pounding their fists on reality, hoping it will break.” Ani Difranco – Lost Woman Song.

Filtration of sensory input occurs at the organ level?

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While browsing, I came across these three articles independently of each other. Perhaps it’s the new issue of Japanese Journal of Taste and Smell Research?

  • Male sweat brightens women’s mood
  • Girl hit by ‘fish odour syndrome’
  • Elderly armpits can lift your spirits

    • Here’s an interesting bit from the MSNBC article:

    Wysocki, a study co-author, said the research could point to a “chemical communication” subtext between the sexes that enables men and women to coordinate their reproductive efforts subliminally.

    Compare that with the BBC article:

    Jeannette Haviland, who also worked on the research, suggested that hormones in the body odour of the young might act as a signal of aggression. Hormonal changes in old age, she said, were likely to make the odour of the elderly, particularly women, signal approachability.

    So it’s clear: During “that time of the month” women are feeling bad, so they pick a fight with their man or men in general to enhance his agressive smell, thereby cheering themselves up a little. I smell a conspiracy!

    More seriously, and especially interesting since I will be starting to do some work in stem cell research is something I read here:

    With further study it became clear that growth factors in saliva and nasal mucus influenced stem cell development in both taste and smell systems. Dr. Henkin discovered, isolated, and sequenced growth factors responsible for development and maintenance of stem cells in the taste and smell systems and, thereby responsible for taste and smell function since these stem cells were the progenitor cells for all taste bud and olfactory epithelial cell anatomy, respectively. He discovered that the parotid glands in the mouth and the nasal serous glands in the nose secrete these growth factors into saliva and nasal mucus, respectively. These growth factors act on stem cells in the taste and smell systems through paracrine effects similar in some ways that hormones secreted from various glands in the body into blood influence metabolism through endocrine effects.

    So endocrine and paracrine signalling is important for smell and taste function and development. I don’t know if any of the cited research addresses whether the signalling affects smell and taste function in the differentiated epithelia, or if the functions are limited to development, acting only on the stem cells. I am reminded of some research that suggested a role for new cell synthesis in memory formation, and of the way your house smells different when you come back from a long vacation. I’ve realized that cat owners often don’t realize that their houses quite frankly stink, and perhaps they don’t, to them, because of changes in the olfactory epithelia. This is mostly ignorant speculation since I don’t know much about how smell works on the molecular level, but there has to be something for smell that allows us to weed out extraneous input to focus on the ones most important to us, and it doesn’t all have to be done in the brain. Aside, I speculate that it’s because smell nerves don’t go through the thalamus on the way to the brain that smell has such powerful ability to evoke memory. Check out what cognitive psychology has to say about processing of input information. I’ll sum this up with the following hypothesis: All senses are filtered of repetitive input at the organ level, as well as the brain level.

  • Skin filters repetitive touch by developing calluses.
  • Vision filters repetitive sights by loss of specialized rod and cone cells in the eye. Older people have better peripheral color vision than when they’re looking directly at something.
  • Taste and smell filter repetitive inputs through signalling from growth factors, perhaps even ingredients in food can have activity here.
  • I can’t think of something specific for hearing, other than the general obvious observation that people grow deaf faster in the presence of continual loud noise.

    • Any comments?

    The Nine Warning Signs of Bogus Science

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    Secular Blasphemy, which has several other great articles, has a summary of the seven warning signs of bogus science. I’ve added two of my own. For laypeople trying to sort through some of the difficult issues today, these are good to keep in mind:

  • The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
  • The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
  • The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
  • Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
  • The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
  • The discoverer has worked in isolation.
  • The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.
  • The discoverer refuses to show his data.(I’m not linking to the R-elians here, but you know what I mean)
  • The discoverer claims only he or she can do the technique

    • The foundation of scientific integrity is peer-review and reproducibility. One scientist making a claim doesn’t make the claim true. See rhetorical strategies. Getting an article published in a major scientific journal doesn’t even mean that it is an eternal truth, but if someone is making a big claim by himself, and no colleagues nor journals are backing him up, then check your bogometer.