Why should religion get a free ride?

Chris Dillow notes that Gordon Brown is privileging religion:

What is a conscience? This is the question Brown opened when he said that “exercising your conscience will mean for Labour Party members a free vote” on parts of the embryology bill.

But, as Janine asks, why should conscience only permit a free vote here? To take just one example, many Labour MPs consciences might - or should - stop them wanting to put people in jail for 42 days without charge. But there’s little hope of a free vote on the Counter Terrorism bill.

What Brown means by “conscience”, then, is “religious belief.” Which raises the question: why should religious beliefs have a special status in politics that allows MPs free votes when they don’t get them on other grounds?

Why should religion be privileged above other belief systems? Dillow says it shouldn’t be. I go further than that: religious beliefs should be accorded less respect, less status, than for example secular liberal beliefs.

There are about 6 billion people in the world, and about 100 million of them die every year. Most of these people die of diseases, many (or all) of which could be curable over time with medical research. So medical research saves lives, and being against medical research — which opponents of the embryology bill are — kills people. Hitler only killed 50 million or so; these people want 100 million potentially preventable deaths to happen every year.

Most of the religious people who oppose the embryology bill are I suppose in their private lives good and decent people; certainly the vast majority don’t personally go round killing people. Which leads me to the conclusion that although good people do good things, and bad people do bad things, it takes religion to make good people do bad things.

Free will versus science

Quaequam blog has as thoughtful post up about how modern science is dissolving commonly-held notions about free will:

I’m becoming increasingly conscious of the fact that science and our notions about free will are increasingly coming into conflict. On one level that tension does not, and never will be particularly meaningful. Science is unlikely to ever become so adept at understanding our genes, brains, bodies and environment to such an extent that it can predict exactly what anyone is likely to do at any given moment. But on another level, it is likely to throw up all sorts of inconvenient truths such as levels of intelligence and modes of behaviour which have fundamentally chemical bases and can thus be altered in a similar way. We’ve created distinctions between “disorders” and personality traits which are looking increasingly unsustainable. Surely there needs to be some kind of distinction between a negative thing that we should seek to cure or otherwise discourage, and a neutral thing that we should tolerate in a pluralistic society? But that line seems to be becoming increasingly blurred and just as we are having to seriously consider reclassifying some things from the former to the latter, so we may have to consider others going the other way. Or is it to be anything goes?

One point is that the “we” who are going to have to decide how to deal with these issues doesn’t jusdt include the West, it includes societies like China, which might be described as paternalistically authoritarian and will probably have less reluctance to change human brain chemistry if they thing society will benefit from it.

How it will eventually turn out probably depends on what is the most efficient, so that if one society alters human brain chemistry in a way that makes them vastly more efficient than their competitors (e.g. by making people cleverer and harder-working, or less likely to commit crimes) then other societies will have to match them or they will be consigned to the dustbin of history.

All three of my parents were genetic scientists

You know you’re living in the 21st century when someone can say “All three of my parents were genetic scientists“.

Exams for terrorists

Do you have an A level or AS level in biology or chemistry? Then you must be one of those evil terrorists the government is always warning us about. At least that’s the conclusion one can draw from this report in Nature:

A British resident who is under surveillance for suspected terrorist activities is being prohibited from taking secondary-school-level science courses by the government, Nature has learned.

The man, referred to as A.E., is contesting the decision in court, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind. The preliminary hearing over whether A.E. should be allowed to take AS-level courses in human biology and chemistry took place on 16 November at London’s High Court. The UK Home Office, which has an order restricting A.E.’s actions and affiliations, argues that such coursework could be turned towards terrorism. His solicitors counter that the knowledge is public, and that the furthering of A.E.’s education poses no threat.

I was in Waterstone’s the other day and they had a whole shelf of revision guides for AS levels. I guess they must be in league with the terrorists too, which demonstrates that the terrorist conspiracy is much bigger than I had hitherto suspected, and that the government is therefore right to throw away all our civil liberties to combat it.

Goldacre on homeopathy

Ben Goldacre has a long, good post debunking homeopathy.

However it is unlikely to have any effect on true believers, since for them homeopathy is their religion and is thus immune to criticism. These people are either irrational or are charlatans preying on the gullible, or both.

Shock as British government says something sensible

Feòrag writes:

The British government has issued the promised guidelines for teaching creationism in school, and they make it perfectly clear that the only place it has is in the science curriculum is to explain why it’s not science.

One of the advantages of being a cynic is you can be pleasantly surprised when the powers that be get something right.

Should some additives be banned from food?

Regarding the latest evidence suggesting food additives harm children’s health, Tom Watson says this:

Until junior Watson was able to tell that not all food on the end of a small blue plastic spoon was the same, I’d not fully appreciated just how poweful ‘E’ number stories are.

I can guarantee that whatever is being discussed in the world of politics today, the only issue that parents with young kids will be talking about is whether drink X or yoghurt Y will be in or out of the weekend shopping trolley. And then they’ll be talking about how they can persuade junior that an alternative product is the new favourite.

I find myself becoming much more ’statist’ in matters of children’s policy. Every time I pass a McDonalds sited next to a Toys ‘R’ Us or endure TV adverts whilst watching ‘Sponge Bob Square Pants’, I turn into Victor Meldrew.

Talking about libertarians, Tyler Cowen quotes this:

This is the other thing I don’t get about small government types. You protest so vociferously that government takes choices away from you. But a whole lot of choices are BORING. If I never once think about car bumper safety standards for 25mph crashes, I will never miss it. I do not want to carefully match my car safety standards to my most likely driving patterns and save two grand in the process. I would not enjoy that process. (Perhaps you would, and you would rather have the money.) I’ve never been a comparison shopper or a meticulous consumer. Maybe my model of the individual is too biased by my experience. But I don’t want to figure out how much coliform bacteria I can tolerate on my spinach, given my health…

…*I can hear you already: “But you are FORCING me to take that deal too.”. Yes. But right now our system FORCES me to comparison shop. Either way, someone gets FORCED to do something, and I don’t see a justice interest on one side or the other. Absent a justice interest, we might as well just go with the system that creates the most utility overall.

I suggest a compromise. People should be allowed to sell food (and other products) thatthe government says is unsafe, but if they do so, they should have to say so clearly in big letters on the label, the way cigarette packets look now. So a bottle of fizzy drink might have to have a message like this:

WARNING

UK government scientists say the additives in this product are harmful to children.

That way everyone wins. People who don’t want to have to check the details of every product they buy can just choose the government-approved ones. And people who prefer to check out the details themselves can do so.

An idea along the same lines is Robert Hanson’s one of would-have-banned stores:

Paternalism is policy intended to benefit some people by limiting their choices, like a parent who stops a kid from playing in the street. Examples include laws requiring professional licensing and product safety features, or banning risky buildings, food, drugs, and financial investments.

A warning is usually a feasible alternative to a requirement or ban. Parents could just say “Playing in the street is a very bad idea,” and if the kid believed them, the result would be the same as a ban. Similarly, governments could just tell us that certain doctors or drugs are unsafe, instead of outlawing them.

Now one can imagine inefficient warning systems, such as having to go look up each drug at some badly organized government website. But we can also imagine no-fuss government warnings: let anything the government would have banned be sold only at special “would have banned” stores, whose customers pass a test showing they understand that regulators disapprove.

Another aspect is this: if an additive harms children’s health, it probably doesn’t do a lot of good for adults’ health either. There doesn’t seem to be a good reason for having many of them — I don’t need my food to be brightly coloured, nor do I have any requirement for fizzy drinks to have a shelf life measured in years — so it’s probably best to do without.

Artificial organism can make proteins

A number of groups of scientists are trying to build artificial organisms.

One team is led by Dr Giovanni Murtas, at the Enrico Fermi research centre at Roma Tre University. They are using the “bottom-up” approach of putting together lots of simpler molecules to make a cell. Recently they have got their proto-cell to make proteins:

To the untrained eye, the tiny, misshapen, fatty blobs on Giovanni Murtas’s microscope slide would not look very impressive. But when the Italian scientist saw their telltale green fluorescent glint he knew he had achieved something remarkable - and taken a vital step towards building a living organism from scratch.

The green glow was proof that his fragile creations were capable of making their own proteins, a crucial ability of all living things and vital for carrying out all other aspects of life.

The achievement is a major advance for the new field of “synthetic biology”. Its proponents hope to construct simple bespoke organisms with carefully chosen components.

Dr Murtas, at the Enrico Fermi research centre at Roma Tre University in Italy, and Pier Luigi Luisi aim to build a living thing from the bottom up. “The bottom-up approach has the possibility of creating living systems from entirely non-living materials,” said Tom Knight, an expert in synthetic biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Italian team’s advance is to make simple cells which are essentially bags made up of a fatty membrane containing just 36 enzymes and purified ribosomes - microscopic components common to all cells which translate the genetic code into protein. The primitive cells are capable of manufacturing protein from one gene.

The team chose a fluorescent green protein found in jellyfish because it was easy to see, using a microscope, when the protein is being made. “We are trying to minimise any system we put in place for the cell,” said Dr Murtas. “We can prove at this point that we can have protein synthesis with a minimum set of enzymes - 36 at the moment.” He hopes the project will teach him about the earliest stirrings of life in Earth’s primeval slime some 3.5bn years ago.

(link from Slashdot)

The Flynn Effect is real

The Flynn Effect — the observation that average IQ test scores are rising, and have been doing so, in many industrialised countries throughout the 20th century — has been known about for some time, and it’s been debated whether this is because people are actually getting more intelligent (whatever that means), or whether it’s just an artifact of how IQ tests are measured (e.g. in a society where people have more contact with IQ-test-like puzzles, you might expect their test scores to rise, without any corresponding rise in other cognitive abilities).

Matt McIntosh at Gene Expression notes that here has been physiological changes in the population over this time period which suggests the Flynn Effect corresponds to real increases in intelligence:

To my mind, the most compelling evidence in favor of Flynn Effect gains being real is physiological: it’s well known that there have been increases in height concurrent with increases in intelligence in all the countries where the FE has been operative. What’s less well known is that there have also been recorded increases in cranial capacity [...] and in brain size.

Given an increase in brain size and the correlation between IQ and brain size (0.4), it’d be pretty remarkable if there wasn’t any corresponding increase in intelligence. Also, in support of Lynn’s nutrition hypothesis, there have been correlations found in developed countries between IQ and presence of certain micronutrients.

Also, there have been a few studies showing that FE gains tend to be disproportionately located at the left half of the curve rather than the right, which is the nutrition theory would predict given that the less bright people tend to be poorer and thus benefit more than the wealthier (who tend to be smarter) from nutritive improvements.

So there you have it — we really are cleverer than our ancestors.