The Best Australian Science Writing 2012

by Elizabeth Finkel

  But here’s the crunch: science is predominantly based on uncertainty, while fringe beliefs are often based on providing more certainty. We are actually wired to favour non-scientific beliefs and values in many cases.

  So what are we to do? Here’s the issue boiled down simply: we are living in a technology-driven world for which our innate instinctive reasoning equips us poorly.

  There is some good news, though, as evidence shows that adults with more science training will more often reject astrology or lucky numbers, and more often accept evolution.

  Likewise a 2002 PhD study by Alyssa Taylor from the University of Virginia found that a course on critical thinking led to a significant decline in belief in the paranormal.

  However, we need to temper this finding with the results of a Canadian study which found that a 13 week lecture course critically examining belief in paranormal events led to a reduction in belief from 56 per cent to 41 per cent. But that figure crept back up to 50 per cent a year later.

  So we clearly need to educate people before attitudes and beliefs are strongly formed. And in this it is more important to teach them how to think than what to think. The only way to make people bullet-proof to pseudoscience is to effectively teach the values and ways of science thinking while they are still young, before alternative belief systems have formed.

  There is no guarantee it will work with everybody, which is evidenced by the many mixed attempts by totalitarian regimes to indoctrinate their young into certain beliefs and values.

  But without it we are left at the mercy of our mental short cuts, our fears, our intuitions and our desire for simple answers to complex questions.

  These will not serve us very well for the challenges of the future, particularly when marketing gurus, such as Australian social researcher and demographer Mark McCrindle, tell us that modern consumers are engaged much more on an emotive level than a cognitive level.

  * * * * *

  American astronomer, astrophysicist and cosmologist Carl Sagan was an early advocate of science-based thinking over non science-based thinking, and argued in his book The Demon-Haunted World that scientific thinking was necessary to safeguard our democratic institutions and our technical civilisation.

  He said we need to teach both the scepticism and wonderment of scientific thought.

  If it was widely understood that any claim to knowledge needed adequate evidence before it could be accepted, he said, then there would be no room for pseudoscience.

  So we should judge a society’s scientific literacy not on what we do or don’t know, but on how we think.

  Despite surveys that regularly criticise society’s lack of knowledge about things as vital as how many kilometres the Sun is from the Earth, or whether oxygen occurs naturally in the air we breathe or is released by plants, it’s more important that we are educated about how to make decisions that are based on evidence, rather than on vague claims that align with our emotions.

  Without that we will continue to vainly argue science facts against non-science values, in an arena where facts and logic have little impact.

  Julian Cribb, a Canberra-based science communicator and author, recently described the implications succinctly: ‘It is not in anybody’s interests for Australia to become more technologically backward, belief-driven, irrational, or based-on-bullshit rather than on hard-won, meticulously gathered evidence and its skilled analysis.’

  * * * * *

  But – and this is a very big but – we need to be clear that the overall purpose of understanding the drivers of belief in pseudoscience or alternative beliefs is not to ridicule, but to understand.

  The ‘Ha ha ha, aren’t you dumb’ approach, common among some sceptics and critical thinkers, wins few arguments. It might feel easy to triumphantly declare that one way of looking at the world is superior to another, but people get enormous purpose and meaning from the way they look at the world, and we fail to note that at our peril.

  But what do we make of the fact that research – yes, scientific research – shows that those who believe in, and invoke, good luck or blessings, tend to have higher performance scores across a range of tests than those who don’t?

  Or the more tricky ethical question of who has the right to say that traditional beliefs are based on superstitions, not science, and are therefore less valid?

  We are also wired to tend to divide people into us and them camps – which the CSIRO science communicator Mike McRae describes in his recent book Tribal Science: Brains, beliefs and bad ideas, as our ‘tribes of similar-minded beliefs’.

  If we can rise above instinctive fears to embrace a scientific evidence-based approach to thinking, we can surely rise above instinctive tribalism and look for points of common value that allow for a complexity of world views.

  Equally, every individual on the planet also has the right to be a contender for the Darwin Awards, a tongue-in-cheek honour created by American scientist Wendy Northcutt to recognise those who have contributed to human evolution by ‘removing themselves from the gene pool’ through beliefs or acts of amazing stupidity that are ultimately fatal. That’s evolution at work.

  But to allow dangerous beliefs or behaviours to be spread unchallenged throughout society – well, that’s detrimental to the collective gene pool. And that’s something we must challenge, no matter whether it is based on our instinct or our scientific reasoning.

  Beliefs

  Scientific method

  Painting the rainforests REDD

  William Laurance

  In the ten minutes it’ll take you to read this article, some 120,000 rainforest trees will come crashing down. That’s scary if you’re a resident orangutan or a tree kangaroo, but it should concern you, too. The rampant clearing of tropical forests imperils us all, even if we live too far away to hear the growl of the approaching bulldozers.

  In a rainforest, every tree is a small green city of life – festooned with epiphytes and vines, and bustling with myriad insects and wildlife. But these forests are not merely the world’s most biologically rich real estate; they also keep our planet liveable by limiting floods, cleaning our water supply and helping stabilise the climate.

  How do rainforests promote a healthy climate? When undisturbed, forests store a great deal of carbon, keeping it safely locked up in their biomass rather than in the atmosphere, where it accelerates global warming. The razing and felling of forests currently expels 3–4 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. That’s roughly as much as the entire global transport sector, including every single petrol-burning car, truck, boat, train and aeroplane on Earth.

  In addition, rainforests are natural cloud-making machines. Each year they release billions of tonnes of water vapour into the atmosphere (the vapour diffuses out of tiny pores in plant leaves as they absorb CO2 for photosynthesis). This vapour often forms fluffy, low-level clouds that reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the planet and producing life-giving rainfall. In this way the rainforest helps generate its own vibrant, self-perpetuating climate – one that keeps us all happy, and healthy too.

  * * * * *

  Because of their planet-cooling effects, saving rainforests has to be a key part of any plan to slow global warming, many experts believe. The most popular idea is to use carbon trading to slow deforestation in tropical developing nations, such as Papua New Guinea (PNG), Brazil and Indonesia. In effect, wealthy nations would help meet their own carbon targets by paying these countries to maintain and regenerate their rainforests.

  Known as REDD – short for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation – the idea is simple. Under international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol and its successors, most industrial nations have agreed to reduce their carbon emissions below their present levels.

  Industrial nations trying to meet their reduction targets are allowed to buy carbon credits from other countries that either have no target (as is currently the case for developing nations) or whose emissions are b
elow permitted levels. As with any tradeable commodity, the price of carbon credits is mostly determined by supply and demand, so rainforests have the potential to become an economic commodity for developing nations – even more valuable, in many cases, than the farmland that’s now replacing them.

  In theory, everyone should win with REDD. Wealthier nations, such as Australia, can pay to slow deforestation as part of an overall effort to meet their emissions target. And saving rainforests turns out to be a surprisingly cost-effective way to cool the climate. Protecting an imperilled forest in Madagascar, for instance, might lead to the same net reduction of carbon emissions as – and be far cheaper than – paying for a dirty old coalfired power station to clean up its act.

  In a deal like this, dangerous carbon emissions are reduced, a biologically unique forest is protected and Madagascar gains direly needed cash. So, it’s all good, right? Well, yes and no. The first effort to implement REDD, as part of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, met with surprisingly fierce opposition. European green groups feared that wealthy nations – most notably the US, then the world’s biggest polluter – would simply buy their way out of any international agreement to permanently cut their burgeoning carbon emissions.

  Others have argued that forest conservation is a risky way to battle greenhouse gases. For instance, if you try to slow deforestation by establishing a new national park in Indonesia, ‘leakage’ can occur if slash-and-burn farmers simply move to other areas and continue destroying other forests. Finally, Brazil, which alone contains one-third of the world’s tropical forest – and thereby qualifies as the 900-pound gorilla in the corner – adamantly opposed REDD and pressured other developing nations to do so too. Brazil feared that any long-term deal to protect forests could potentially limit its options for future development.

  * * * * *

  Fortunately, things changed at the UN’s Bali climate conference in 2007, with REDD finally getting the green light. A coalition of small, forest-rich countries, led by PNG and Costa Rica, negotiated with great skill, skirting some of the concerns about REDD.

  Those worried about leakage were happy with the coalition’s proposal of tallying deforestation at the national level. Hence, if a carbon-offset project slowed deforestation in one part of, say, Cameroon, but simply allowed it to increase elsewhere in the country, Cameroon would receive no benefit. And the fact that the coalition was led by developing nations reduced fears that carbon trading would limit their future development options.

  Furthermore, European green groups have grown increasingly alarmed by the sharp rise of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly with China and India now joining the industrial nations as major polluters. If we want to keep from cooking ourselves, the Europeans realised, ignoring rainforest destruction was a risk too great to take.

  REDD is now ready, but some tall hurdles remain. For a developing nation to receive cash for its carbon, it must first measure its baseline rate of deforestation – the typical amount of forest it has destroyed each year in the past. It must then show how much its current rate of forest cutting has fallen, so it can be paid for the difference. Satellites are increasingly being used to generate these numbers, but much work remains to ensure reliable estimates for all developing nations.

  Another concern is governance. For instance, Norway and Australia have offered Indonesia more than US$1 billion to slow its rampant forest loss. What will happen to that money? Will it reach local farmers and provincial governments, or merely disappear into some central government coffer (or, worse, into somebody’s secret bank account)? Scandals have already erupted in PNG, where ‘carbon cowboys’ duped local indigenous groups into buying fake certificates to sell carbon credits.

  And finally, there’s some serious hypocrisy. The US spews out more CO2 than any nation except China, but still hasn’t ratified an agreement to cut emissions. And Australia exports coal – the world’s dirtiest fuel – to China, and has an alarmingly high rate of deforestation itself. Indeed, from 2005 to 2010, Australia, the only developed nation to have tropical forest, had the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s top forest-destroying countries.

  In summary, I think we have to throw support behind REDD to slow the loss of these most biodiverse forests, and all those orangutans and tree kangaroos. And while we’re urging our tropical neighbours to clean up their act, let’s take a long, hard look at our own backyard as well.

  Economic forces

  Climate change

  The evolution of the inadequate modern male

  Peter McAllister

  Very early in my career as an anthropologist I stumbled across a curious report about a mid-19th century Aboriginal man, a whaler called Thomas Chaseland, who was said to have extraordinary physical capabilities – particularly eyesight. Chaseland’s shipmates claimed he could see land from 30 miles (48km) out to sea, spot whales surfacing outside of telescope range, and see a full mile (0.6km) underwater. A huge man of apparently prodigious strength, Chaseland also survived several shipwrecks at the hands of thrashing whales, on one occasion swimming six miles (9.6km) through freezing waters that killed his fellow whalemen.

  But the attribute that stands out is his vision. Could it really be true, I wondered, that this Aboriginal man’s eyesight was so much better than that of his European shipmates?

  It was hard to believe, for several reasons. Chaseland’s reported eyesight was, for a start, better than most scientists thought theoretically possible. There was also the problem that the stories had something of the ‘noble savage’ myth about them – the hardy native whose ‘wild essence’ gives him superhuman powers.

  A little research, however, showed that Chaseland’s shipmates were probably right. Aboriginal men, even today, do have eyesight four times as good as men of European ancestry. A 1980s survey of Aboriginal eye health proved it.

  This made me wonder how many other stories about the extraordinary abilities of pre-modern men were true. And what about males in our very distant, evolutionary past? I decided to find out, starting with that most male of characteristics: physical strength.

  Surprisingly, some evidence can be gleaned about the physical strength of ancient men – from their bones. Anatomists have long known that bone grows in response to the muscular load placed upon it – so the bigger the muscles, the bigger the bones.

  This gives us a crude measure by which we can judge how strong pre-modern men may have been. Using it, I was able to estimate from fossil arm bones, for example, that even an average Neanderthal woman would probably have been able to armwrestle a modern bodybuilder like Arnold Schwarzenegger to the table. Her male companion might well have been able to pick the Governator up and throw him.

  The physical strength of even earlier humans, or hominins, can likewise be estimated from what we know of our closest primate relatives. Chimp muscle, for example, can exert approximately four times the force of modern human muscle. This seems to be because chimp muscle fibres fire in one explosive movement, as opposed to the more staggered manner in which ours fire.

  Chimp muscle is actually among the strongest in the animal kingdom, probably because chimps need to throw their heavy bodies around acrobatically in the treetops. Since our earliest ancestors apparently shared this semi-arboreal lifestyle for our first two million years, it is highly likely they had such explosive muscle power too.

  Other archaeological evidence, this time from fossilised footprints in the Willandra Lakes region of Australia dated to 20,000 years ago, shows that even ancient men of our own species were apparently capable of remarkable athletic feats. Those footprints, indelibly pressed into the soft mud of a shallow temporary lake by Aboriginal hunters, allowed archaeologist Stephen Webb to calculate that one of the men, a 194cm giant named T8, reached speeds of 37.3km/h. This is only slightly slower than Usain Bolt at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and probably indicates that T8 could have run even faster if he was put on a rubberised track in spiked shoes.

  Webb’s estimates have, of c
ourse, been recently questioned, and it is true that calculation of running speed from fossilised tracks is open to varying interpretations. Yet much of our disbelief of the physical feats of pre-modern men is not based on proper scientific scepticism, but on the pseudo-sceptical belief that if we just reject the remarkable we’re being true to scientific principles.

  There is also the problem that many of us assume we ourselves are the highest benchmark of human achievement, and that all evidence to the contrary must be unreliable. Sometimes, however, science really is remarkable, and the evidence totally believable, as several references from ancient Greek historians illustrate.

  In the 4th century BCE, the Greek soldier and author Xenophon wrote that an oar-powered Athenian warship, a trireme, could row from Byzantium to Heraclea, 236km away, in a day – meaning that Athenian oarsmen averaged 7–8 knots over a 12–16 hour trip. Xenophon wasn’t boasting: he simply mentioned the figure in passing, so his estimate is almost certainly true.

  Exercise physiologists attempted to duplicate the feat in 2007, but were astonished to find that trained modern rowers could manage just 6 knots, and then for only an hour. They simply couldn’t reach the VO2max (the benchmark of oxygen use and energy output) needed. Since the city of Athens alone had more than 30,000 of these oarsmen, the implication is that even ordinary Greek galleymen were as fit as, or possibly fitter than, modern elite athletes.

  How could this be? After all, sports science, and particularly nutrition, have improved dramatically since ancient Greek days. Nutrition in the Athenian navy, for example, was so primitive that oarsmen ate little but barley mixed with olive oil and wine. Men today are also around 10cm taller, thanks to our improved nutrition, than ancient Greek men.

  So how were the undernourished, diminutive Athenians able to row us out of the water with their superior speed and endurance? It seems unlikely that genetics could explain their athleticism and our sloth, as we are all still, essentially, the same people. Instead, the explanation seems to come down to lifestyle.