Reason Magazine - Topics > Science

Michael Crichton, R.I.P.

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

Pop novelist, television producer, movie director, medical doctor, creator of the long-running hospital drama E.R., and sometime public-policy provocateur Michael Crichton has died of cancer at age 66 in Los Angeles.

Crichton's books have sold more than 150 million copies worldwide. His reputation rests chiefly on a prolific stream of techno-thriller novels exploiting the well-worn formula pioneered by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein: Scientific hubris leads to disaster. For example, in The Andromeda Strain (1969), Army scientists in search of biological-warfare agents endanger humanity by bringing back a space virus that infects a town. In The Terminal Man (1972), the epileptic protagonist goes on a murderous rampage under the influence of computerized mind control. Crichton makes the Frankenstein-reanimation theme even more explicit in Jurassic Park (1990), in which a paleontologist uses biotechnology to bring dinosaurs back to life. In his anti-nanotech tale Prey (2002), a greedy corporation inadvertently releases swarms of flesh-eating nanoparticles.

Crichton's villains were often corporations whose minions killed for profit. Crichton's anti-Japanese mystery/thriller Rising Sun (1992) stoked xenophobic fears of a new Yellow Peril buying up all of America. These nativist anxieties shortly afterwards melted away with the bursting of the Japanese-asset price bubble.

In recent years, Crichton turned his attention more explicitly toward public policy. In particular, he became highly skeptical of archly ideological environmentalism. His 2005 book State of Fear was actually the novelization of a speech he delivered at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club in 2003, arguing that environmentalism is essentially a religion, a belief system based on faith, not fact. State of Fear not only became a bestseller, but propelled its author into public-policy circles. Crichton was invited to make speeches around the country on science policy; in 2005 he even testified in front of a Senate committee about the politicization of climate-change science.

In his biogenetic tale, Next (2006), Crichton has a wicked corporation engaging, as usual, in all manner of skullduggery. However, he turns his customary Frankenstein formula on its head by ending with a vision of a happy trans-species blended family, including a multi-lingual African grey parrot and four-year old humanzee, as being pretty normal for the 21st century.

Despite his repeated success with scientific scare stories, that upbeat, though decidedly offbeat, ending was actually in keeping with Crichton's own temperament. Despite his worries about human technological hubris, he did confess in an interview back in 1993, "I am optimistic by nature. My prejudice is that we are sufficiently resourceful to see the road ahead, and that we have the capacity to change our behavior. I envision a long lifespan for the species. We've got a few million years ahead of us."

Over the years Crichton and I had a number of friendly interactions as our paths crossed at various conferences. In Next, Crichton even kindly mentioned my book Liberation Biology (2005), praising it as "the clearest and most complete response to religious objections to biotechnology." Nevertheless, I have long been annoyed by the Luddite and Frankensteinian themes of his novels. I was particularly exasperated by Jurassic Park's misguided portrayal of biotechnology as being inherently dangerous.

Eventually, over drinks at a conference at Cold Spring Harbor a couple years ago, I got to tell him how I thought he could have gotten the same narrative bang for his buck if he had instead celebrated the achievement of bringing dinosaurs back to life. In my alternative plot, a kindly old paleontologist, using the miracle of biotechnology, conjures dinosaurs back into existence to delight the world's children. Things go wrong only when a cadre of evil anti-biotechnologists led by Jeremy Rifkin break into the peaceful island zoo to kill the dinosaurs. This revised scenario would provide Crichton with all of the gunfire, gore, chase scenes, and satisfying explosions without the Luddite baggage of the original.

Crichton, slightly miffed at my presumption, asked why I preferred my alternative plot. I answered that I worried that his novels were helping to promote a technophobic attitude among the public that could unnecessarily slow the development of new technologies. He responded that I must be kidding. He doubted that anyone paid any attention to his novels other than to be momentarily entertained by them. I still think he was wrong. After all, two centuries later we're still reading Mary Shelley's thinly plotted potboiler and worrying about mad scientists.

Crichton fans (of which I am definitely one) can look forward to one more novel from HarperCollins. It will close out his published oeuvre but certainly not his presence, either in the world of letters or in public policy debates.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent.

A Non-Socialist Alternative to Today's Capitalism

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:00:00 EDT

In the latest issue of The New Scientist, Yale University's Gus Speth says he seeks a non-socialist alternative to today's capitalism as a way to put a stop to economic growth. Speth is a contributor to the magazine's special issue detailing "The Folly of Growth." Economic growth is folly because "our economy is killing the planet." Speth outlines his vision of his "non-socialist alternative" in The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (2008). Among other things, Speth argues that the "environmental agenda should expand to embrace a profound challenge to consumerism and commercialism and the lifestyles they offer" and "the democratization of wealth." The "alternative to endlessly pumping up an environmentally destructive economy" includes measures that "address the need for good jobs, income security, and social and medical insurance." To save the earth, Speth also advocates political reforms including "a minimum of free television and radio time for all federal candidates meeting basic requirements, reducing the perks of incumbency, bringing back the Fairness Doctrine requiring equal air time for competing political views and so forth."

Another contributor is Tim Jackson, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey and the economics commissioner on the United Kingdom's Sustainable Development Commission. Jackson declares that we cannot rely on renewable technologies to help us avert climate change without sacrifices to our lifestyles. To show why sacrifices will be necessary, Jackson candidly calculates how much carbon dioxide human beings will be allowed to emit in 2050 to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gases at 450 parts per million. According to Jackson, producing $1,000 worth of goods and services today emits half a metric ton of carbon dioxide. Adding it all up, some 28 billion tons are currently emitted and that must be reduced to only 5 billion tons by 2050.

Assuming 9 billion people by 2050, that means that each person can emit only 0.6 tons of carbon dioxide annually, which is lower than the average emissions in India today. In fact, if one divides the 1360 pounds of carbon dioxide annually allotted in 2050 to each person by 365 days per year that means each person would be allowed to emit only 3.6 pounds of carbon dioxide every day. That is the equivalent of burning less than a quart of gasoline or one-and-a-quarter pounds of coal per day. Burning that much coal would keep a single 60 watt light bulb lit for nearly 20 hours. According to some calculations, producing half a cheeseburger would exceed an individual's daily carbon dioxide quota. But in fact, Jackson says, it's much worse than that.

Assuming no economic growth for the next four decades, Jackson's calculations imply that people will be permitted to emit only 0.1 tons of carbon dioxide for every $1,000 of GDP in 2050. What if global economic growth proceeds at current rates? Jackson calculates that that would mean producing $1,000 of GDP emitting only 0.03 tons of carbon dioxide. That is equal to 66 pounds of carbon dioxide which is slightly more than burning 3 gallons of gasoline or 23 pounds of coal. Jackson calculates relentlessly on. Assuming that humanity wants to pursue the goal of global poverty eradication, he eventually reckons that "the carbon content of the economic output must be reduced to just 2 percent of the best currently achieved anywhere in the European Union." His upshot? "It is time to stop pretending that mindlessly chasing economic growth is compatible with sustainability." (Note that Jackson's carbon calculations are very similar to those reported in Russell Seitz' article "Carbon-Based Prohibition" in reason's August/September 2008 issue.)

An addtional contributor to The New Scientist special issue, Susan George, who is chair of the board of Amsterdam's Transnational Institute, advocates "ecological Keynesianism" as the solution to excessive economic growth. She specifically cites the U.S. war economy of the 1940s as a model for how to proceed globally. How would George pay for ecological Keynesianism? That's easy—tell the world's 10 million richest people who hold $40 trillion in "investable cash" and their banks that "they must devote X percent of their loan portfolios to environment-friendly products and processes at below market interest rates." George recognizes that that these eco-friendly investments will underperform, but she suggests that banks "can make up the difference by lending to big greenhouse gas polluters at 10 percent." George is even more ambitious, declaring, "The environmental crisis provides an ideal opportunity to get the global financial system under control. Taxing international currency transactions and other market operations needs only political determination and some software." As compensation for the expropriated, George suggests creating an Order of Carbon Conquerors and giving "them shiny green-gold silk rosettes for their buttonholes."

George evidently thinks that the $40 trillion in "investable cash" is being hoarded under Bill Gates' and Warren Buffett's mattresses, rather than being used to finance other productive activities. And just who would decide which environment-friendly products and processes should get George's concessionary loans? And how can she be so sure that "big polluters" will borrow at 10 percent anyway? Maybe they will just generate internal cash flows and self-finance while merrily continuing those activities that George dislikes.

Another anti-growth guru in the special issue is former World Bank ecological economist Herman Daly, who claims that "we are heading for environmental and economic disaster." Why? Because "the scale of the global economy is approaching the limits of what our planet can cope with." Daly discerns certain signs of these impending limits. "As the oceans are emptied, forests shrink from logging and levels of pollutants and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rise, the environmental and social costs of further growth are likely to intensify until we reach a point at which the price we pay for each unit of extra growth becomes greater than the benefits we gain," writes Daly. Daly is right that the oceans are emptying, some forests are shrinking, and some pollution increasing, but he gets his diagnosis wrong. Those things are happening not just because of capitalism's rapacious urge for economic growth, but because those resources are unowned in open access commons available for anyone to grab or abuse. Capitalism is "blind to [these] environmental costs" because they have been excluded from its ambit.

For example, Science just published an article in September pointing out that private property in fisheries actually halts their collapse and promotes sustainable harvests. And what about shrinking forests? It is true that tropical forests are shrinking in poor countries in which such forests "belong" to the government. However, a 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that "among 50 nations with extensive forests reported in the Food and Agriculture Organization's comprehensive Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005, no nation where annual per capita gross domestic product exceeded $4,600 had a negative rate of growing stock change." Daly blames deforestation on logging, but the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research points out that the "main threat to tropical forests" comes from slash-and-burn agriculture practiced by poor farmers who have no other option for feeding their families. The result is the loss or degradation of some 25 million acres of land per year. As Jesse Ausubel, the director of the program for the human environment at Rockefeller University says, "The last 15 to 20 years have seen a widespread reversal in forest trends." The chief exceptions are Indonesia and Brazil. And air pollution trends? They have been declining in developed countries for nearly three decades.

Capitalist economic growth is what has paid for both the technological progress and the compliance with regulations that have made environmental improvements possible. Daly is correct that greenhouse gases continue to accumulate, but can he be so sure that "each unit of extra growth becomes greater than the benefits we gain" from burning fossil fuels to produce energy?

So what might a "non-socialist alternative to today's capitalism" look like? Well, the New Scientist's editors describe how following Daly's economic prescriptions could set the developed countries on a path to a "sustainable society" by 2020. In the new society, "scientists set the rules." Growth is allowed, but "only as long as it doesn't breach the limits set by ecologists." In other words, ecological central planning. For example, during this transition, a new carbon tax makes "petrol-fueled travel prohibitively expensive."

In addition, in Daly's world, bank reserve ratios are raised substantially and commercial lending declines. Interest rates fall to very low levels. In Daly's 2020 ecological society, "we can't maintain full employment," but he tells us not to worry, because now "people work part time, generally as a co-owner of a business rather than as an employee. The whole pace of life is more relaxed. Incomes are lower but we are rich in something that many of us had never experienced before: time." Daly adds that we will have to stabilize our population, "and that includes immigration rates as well as birth rate." This will put pressure on the pensions system, but finally the economists have something to do; they are "busy working out what contributions will be needed to make it sustainable."

Daly, however, does accept that the value of goods can increase by means of technological innovation. But he fails to understand that this concession overthrows his assertion that humanity must settle for a steady-state economy. For example, Jesse Ausubel and Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station researcher Paul Waggoner show that technological progress is helping humanity to wring ever more value out of less physical stuff. For example, they report that the average global consumer, including those in China, increased affluence by 45 percent while using only 13 percent more energy in 2006 than in 1980. Without China, the average consumer increased affluence by 34 percent with little change to energy use. In addition, the average global consumer only consumed 22 percent more crops while richer consumers actually used 20 percent less wood. Between 1980 and 2005, the world's farmers nearly doubled crop production while increasing cropland only 7 percent. If farmers around the world produced crops as efficiently as American farmers, global cropland could be cut in half.

Technological progress and changes in consumer behavior are both offsetting the ecological impacts of population growth and increasing affluence. "An annual 2-3 percent progress in consumption and technology over many decades and sectors seems a robust, understandable, and workable benchmark for sustainability," concludes Ausubel and colleagues. In other words, human creativity is producing more wealth through economic growth by progressively decoupling it from physical resources and the natural environment.

Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki complains in the special issue that economists "believe humans are so creative and productive that the sky's the limit." As Ausubel and others have shown, there is considerable evidence on the side of the disparaged economists. Finally, the New Scientist contributors demand that we keep our hands off nature, while they are disturbingly eager to impose policies that would be the moral equivalent of bulldozing the world's economy.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Heat on PBS Tonight

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:15:00 EDT

The new Frontline documentary, Heat, aims to investigate what big business is doing to address the climate change problem. "As I've traveled through America's energy landscape this past year, it's become increasingly clear that the big energy corporations are not about to tackle climate change on their own. It's going to take a big push from government," concludes Frontline correspondent Martin Smith. But in Heat, Smith details, without apparent irony, the failure of many past government "pushes," such as the Clinton administration's Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles and the Bush administration's corn-based ethanol subsidies. Given these fiascos, Smith fails to make clear why he thinks that a "big push" from government will succeed in dealing with climate change now. In fact, Heat ends up showing viewers that the energy policies of our two major party presidential candidates are in thrall to parochial interests, opinion polls, and the price of gasoline.

Heat opens with correspondent Smith recounting the litany of woes that man-made global warming may visit upon the planet. He travels with mountaineer David Brashears to the Himalayan Mountains, which lie between China and India, to gaze upon their rapidly shrinking mountain glaciers. The Rongbuk glacier photographed in 1921 by explorer George Mallory, for instance, has since lost 40 percent of its ice. Melting glaciers are a problem because they store water that is released every summer to the vast rivers that supply hundreds of millions of people in China, India, and Southeast Asia. Once the glaciers are gone, some rivers may not flow year round.

Smith reprises other dangers posed by man-made global warming as well, including rising sea levels, ocean acidification, more violent storms, and more frequent droughts. Interestingly, Smith interviews Joseph Romm, a former Clinton Administration Energy Department official and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, who says, "I think it's important for people to understand global warming is not the sole cause of everything that happens." Why interesting? Because Smith includes concerns such as failing fisheries and expanding deserts on his list of global warming horrors.

While global warming may contribute to the decline of some fisheries, the chief reason that fisheries fail is overfishing due to a lack of property rights. With regard to the expansion of deserts, the trends are not at all clear. In fact, recent reports find that the world's largest desert, the Sahara, has been shrinking. In addition, some climate models suggest that further global warming could turn much of the Sahara green by significantly increasing the amount of rainfall it receives. Despite his caveat, Romm clearly is alarmed by man-made global warming, arguing that it may push the climate over certain thresholds that will produce irreversible deleterious changes.

In order to avoid the damage caused by climate change, Heat reports that the vast majority of climate scientists warn that the world will have to "dramatically reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases, cutting them by 60 to 80 percent by mid-century." But can humanity actually reduce emissions that much? Smith travels to India and China, two countries whose rapidly expanding economies are using vast amounts of energy and producing increasing amounts of greenhouse gases. Chinese and Indian people want to enjoy the good life, including cars for increased mobility, electronics for work and entertainment, and climate-controlled houses.

Smith talks to the CEO of China's largest privately owned carmaker, Geely Automobile, who plans to more than quadruple production from 160,000 to 700,000 cars in just two years. The CEO of China's biggest electric utility, Shenhua Energy, forthrightly tells Smith that shareholder profits trump concerns about climate change. China builds two new coal-fired electric generation plants per week and is now the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. India will also be emitting significantly more greenhouse gases as it strives to bring electricity to its 350 million or so citizens who are still without it. Economic growth is the priority of poor countries, not dealing with climate change.

What about reducing emissions in the United States? Both major party presidential candidates, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are promising to dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions. And both are big enthusiasts for carbon capture and storage from coal-fired electric plants—so-called clean coal technologies. Why? "In order to run for President in this country in 2008, you have to be for clean coal," explains former Fortune managing editor Eric Pooley. "You can't go to Indiana and Ohio and say, you know, ‘I want to do away with coal.' There's an amazing correlation between being a swing state and being dependent on coal."

Heat points out that more than half of our electricity is generated by 600 coal-fired plants. What are the prospects that carbon dioxide produced by burning coal be captured and stored safely underground? For one, no utility currently does it. Why not? First, because many generating plants are not near places that are geologically suitable for sequestering it. Burying power plant carbon dioxide would require building a massive new pipeline system at least equivalent in size to the one used to ship petroleum products around the country. As Southern Company CEO David Ratcliffe notes, "We haven't come close to defining what will be required in storage, what are the legal liabilities and what are the permitting requirements." Legal liabilities? Well, yes. As Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal, reminds Smith, "The problem is carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant." Leaking carbon dioxide kills people. How much would it cost to capture and store carbon dioxide? Mike Morris, CEO of American Electric Power, suggests capturing carbon dioxide would add 20 to 30 percent to the cost of energy. Smith notes that neither Obama nor McCain mentions how much of carbon capture and storage would boost their constituents' electric bills.

Besides power generation, transportation is the second biggest generator of greenhouse gases. Smith claims that America's cars generate more greenhouse gases than all the cars in Europe, Japan, China, and India combined. Heat then makes something of a hero out of California's Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who tried to mandate an average automobile fuel economy standard of 42.5 miles per gallon. The automobile companies furiously lobbied against it Washington, D.C. The details are murky, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency refused to grant California a waiver to vary its fuel economy standards from the new national fuel economy standard of 35 miles per gallon by 2020.

When someone criticizes cars, can Big Oil be far behind? Smith observes that the world's biggest publicly-traded oil company, Exxon Mobil, is "investing in less than one-tenth of one percent of its profits in renewable energy; much to the consternation of environmentalists." Why is that? Jeffrey Ball, The Wall Street Journal's environmental reporter, tells Smith that ExxonMobil and other oil companies "don't think that any of those [renewable energy] technologies have gotten to the point of economic viability." Another way to look at it is that oil companies are oil companies, not energy companies. Just as wagon companies did not generally become automobile companies, oil companies are unlikely to become wind or solar power companies. In the meantime, Ball gets it right when he says, "Exxon will do what Exxon knows best how to do, which is, run around the world trying to pull oil out of the ground." And why not? As Smith points out, Exxon Mobil made $40 billion in profits last year. Oil companies—and their record profits—will fade away if cheaper renewable energy sources are ever developed.

Smith goes after ExxonMobil's support for "climate change denier groups," specifically mentioning the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The hapless Exxon Mobil spokesperson squirms and apparently accepts Smith's characterization.

Throughout the documentary, Smith follows the twists and turns of how energy and climate issues are affecting this year's electoral politics. As gasoline prices soared earlier this year, Sen. McCain came out strongly in favor of offshore oil drilling. After initially resisting calls to "drill baby drill," Sen. Obama conceded that more domestic oil exploration should take place.

The failure of ExxonMobil and other oil companies to invest as much as Smith thinks they should in renewable energy sources is what provokes him to conclude only a "big push" from government will work. But as a good reporter, Smith did look at some earlier "pushes" and found them "instructive." For example, the Clinton administration subsidized the Big Three automakers in a program called the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles. At its inception, the head of General Motors declared, "We've made a commitment to have a hybrid vehicle in production by the year 2001." That didn't happen. Gas prices hovered around $1 per gallon and Americans chose to buy SUVs. A GM spokeswoman tells Smith that Toyota beat GM to the hybrid car because Toyota didn't mind losing money on it for a while whereas GM couldn't justify building hybrids as a business case.

Another example of where government energy policies produced unintended bad consequences is the push to subsidize corn ethanol for transport fuel. The documentary notes that ethanol is now a huge business garnering more than $7 billion in annual government subsidies. There are only a couple of problems: corn-based ethanol marginally reduces greenhouse gas emissions and its production has contributed to the recent run-up in world food prices. "The corn-based ethanol program is going to be considered one of the biggest follies ever implemented in energy policy anywhere in the world in the history of energy policy," says Amy Jaffe, an energy expert at Rice University. Smith points out that Sen. McCain opposed ethanol subsidies and Sen. Obama supported them. Why? It's simple, really—Arizona is not a corn producing state whereas Illinois most certainly is. Obama has recently softened his stance on corn-based ethanol.

On the other hand, Smith rather likes European subsidies of solar and wind power. He points out that Germany produces six times more electricity using solar power than does the United States. Sounds impressive until Smith reveals that solar power supplies 0.6 percent of Germany's electricity while wind power provides 7 percent. While Smith fails to mention it, viewers might be interested to learn that Germans pay about double what Americans do for electricity.

Smith next talks with legendary Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens about his scheme to build a gigantic wind farm in Texas involving 2,500 wind turbines rated to produce 4,000 megawatts of electricity. "He's expecting to gross hundreds of millions of dollars a year," says Smith. And a lot of that money would come from federal production tax credits worth 2.1 cents per kilowatt hour generated. Pickens also needs the government to open transmission corridors so that he can sell his power to distant markets. "You can't go in and invest a huge amount of money and not have a way to get your money back and make a profit," says Pickens. It surely helps if the government agrees to hand over taxpayer dollars to guarantee that one makes a profit.

Heat briefly considers nuclear power as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Smith hints that nuclear power is now hugely expensive due to over-regulation in the United States. By comparison, France, which produces 80 percent of its electricity using nuclear power, has some of the lowest electricity rates in Europe. I'm not suggesting that this is the proper model, but the French government owns most of the country's electrical generation capacity and thus makes sure that its own regulations don't get in the way.

Again, Smith points to the differences between the two major party candidates—McCain favors building 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030, whereas Obama worries about plant safety and wants the waste storage problem solved before allowing more nuclear plants to be constructed.

Heat ends with the Warner-Lieberman Climate Security Act debacle on Capitol Hill this past June. This legislation would have mandated that carbon dioxide emissions be cut by 60 percent from where they were in 2005 by 2050. The bill would have set up a cap-and-trade scheme to ration carbon dioxide emissions. Such rationing aims to increase the price of fossil fuels relative to carbon neutral sources of energy and thus encourage consumers and energy producers to shift to higher-priced climate-friendly energy. The bill's proponents had the bad luck to propose it just as gasoline prices were soaring to historic highs. Senators McCain and Obama did not show up to vote on procedural motions that aimed to push the bill forward. "The candidates were hiding. The candidates both support the concept of cap and trade, but neither of them showed up," says Eric Pooley.

Heat does a good job illustrating the interplay between politics and economics that drives and stymies global and domestic energy and climate policies. But there is one glaring flaw. Heat treats cutting greenhouse gases as the only way to deal with climate change. There is another strategy—adaptation. Adopting policies that encourage people to build better roads, erect more hospitals, supply sanitation, improve farming practices, raise sea walls, construct superior houses, provide access to electricity, and expand communication networks would make them less vulnerable to whatever weather disasters a changing climate might bring. The best way to do this is the old-fashioned way: encourage economic growth and free trade to alleviate poverty, illiteracy, maternal and infant mortality, and so forth. Heavy-handed government efforts to cut greenhouse gases could easily result in lowered economic growth and thus diminish humanity's ability to adapt to climate change. The big question that Heat does not attempt to answer is: Is global warming worse than what governments might try to do about it?

Heat airs this evening (Tuesday, October 21) at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations. Check your local listings.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: I was interviewed for this documentary, but I ended up on the cutting room floor. I bear the producers no malice. Also, I have in the past been accused of being a climate change denier.

Friday Mini Book Review: What is Your Dangerous Idea?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:26:00 EDT

Mini Book Reviews of yesterday.

What is Your Dangerous Idea?, edited by John Brockman (Harper Perennial, 2007). Dozens of thinkers from the hepcat sciences of evolutionary biology and psychology, cutting-edge neuroscience, artificial intelligence, biotech and computer tech contribute very short essays laying out ideas that might be considered “dangerous,” a locution never defined with great sharpness here, but roughly falls into categories such as “politically incorrect,” or "could lead to technologies of domination or destruction" or “destructive of certain notions held dear by many of us” (whether religious or philosophical).

Editor Brockman runs the site edge.org, where the science and tech types who he thinks are superseding traditional humanities/literary/social science intellectuals here in the fabulous 21^st century gather to think big

Thousand word (approx.) essays are not where anyone expresses their full intellectual effulgence, of course, but this book still manages to be disappointing even when considering that limitation, like an overly long and bloated Wired mag roundtable feature with an ill-defined context.

Some of the essays are mind-blowing, sure, but without the actual scientific reasoning or evidence behind them presented because of lack of space, they tend to come across more druggy-goofy than profound or smart (“what if time doesn’t exist?” “What if the Internet becomes self-aware?”). Some of them just drip with scientistic hubris, like Carolyn C. Porco’s call for a literal Fritz Leiberesque “church of Science.”

A lot of its is basic, and pretty old, religion-baiting: there is no God (and so what if there was?), there is no soul, murder is embedded in our DNA; much of it is a newer variant on same (we have no wills or choices, and are just robots and puppets of our genes and chemicals in our brain). Essays touching on some variation of those two overarching ideas makes up at least a third of the book.

Then there’s some chewing over global warming, with a lean toward non-alarmism. Some of the book is quite interesting and relatively fresh (of course, what strikes any individual reader as "fresh" is dependent on how closely he pays attention to various fields), like Judith Rich Harris's declaration that there is "zero parental influence" on children's personality or intelligence or behavior outside the home (environmental influence, not genetic), or the controversial Rupert Sheldrake's thought that our lack of full understanding of how animals navigate may mean we are all wrong about the nature of life itself.

Of course, people come forward to declare both that it's dangerous to think any idea is dangerous; and dangerous to encourage people to think of dangerous ideas. There are encouraging (to the libertarian...) flashes of libertarianism in not just some, but most, of the political entries, including Roger C. Schank's call to end organized public education. It's nice to see libertarianism so casually accepted (generally not self-consciously) among Brockman's science and tech elite.

If the book ultimately feels as if it did not reward the time it took to read, it's more the fault of the length restrictions than the writers or their thinking. Still, the short length does make it a more-than-usually interesting variant on the "bathroom reader."

Medical Paternalism and Genetic Testing

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Last week, the Icelandic company deCODE Genetics began offering a new breast cancer gene test that it claims measures genetic risk for the common forms of the disease. The new test assesses seven single-letter variations (a.k.a., single nucleotide polymorphisms) in the human genome that researchers have linked to higher risk of breast cancer. The average lifetime risk for women of European descent is 12 percent. The company claims that its new test can tell a woman if her lifetime risk of breast cancer is as low as 5 percent to as high as 48 percent (from 0.4-fold to 4-fold lifetime risk). deCODE notes that the test has not yet been validated for women of other ethnic backgrounds.

Not everyone is happy with deCODE's test. Some biomedical paternalists want the Food and Drug Administration to forbid deCODE from selling it. "Sadly, the tests deCODE and other companies are offering are more likely to empty family pocketbooks and leave women with a false sense of security than they are to prevent breast cancer," writes University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan. "There is at least a significant chance this test will could falsely reassure some women and alarm others," said Eric Winer, a breast cancer expert at Harvard Medical School to the Washington Post. "I fear for many women the results could be quite misleading." The Post also reported that University of Washington geneticist and breast cancer expert Mary-Claire King said, "I wouldn't recommend to anyone that she have such a test. I certainly wouldn't want my daughter to have such a test." These opponents argue that the test has not been sufficiently validated and that it could result in more harm than good as women spooked by false positive tests seek invasive treatments.

deCODE Genetics claims that its new test can identify "the roughly 5 percent of women who are at a greater than 20 percent lifetime risk of the common forms of breast cancer (about twice the average risk in the general population), and the 1 percent of women whose lifetime risk is roughly 36 percent (about three-times average)." American Cancer Society guidelines recommend that women whose lifetime risk as currently measured by some standard risk assessment models is greater than 20 percent should be annually screened using more sensitive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in addition to mammography. The idea is women who test as being at a higher risk will be more vigilant about detecting any cancer early on, enabling them to receive treatment before the cancer has spread. In addition, some higher risk women may choose to begin taking the drug tamoxifen, which clinical studies show can dramatically lower the risk of breast cancer.

The deCODE test is based on published scientific research that shows that certain variants of each of the seven SNPs confers a greater risk of breast cancer. While it is true that some of the research has not been replicated by other investigators, one should keep in mind that this is not a drug, but a risk assessment test. The test does not detect cancer; it is more like a test for cholesterol levels that are associated with higher risks for heart disease. For example, patients whose total blood cholesterol level is 240 mg/dl or more have double the risk of a heart attack as someone with a cholesterol level of 200 mg/dl or lower. Just as having higher cholesterol levels does not guarantee a heart attack, an indication of higher genetic risk does not presage breast cancer.

Diagnostic tests, however, do not have to be perfect to be useful. For example, the false positive rate in the widely used prostate specific antigen (PSA) test is between 15 and 30 percent, which means that for every four to six men who test positive for the disease only one will actually have cancer. However, since the advent of the PSA test, the death rate for prostate cancer has fallen from 39 per 100,000 men in 1990 to 27 per 100,000 in 2003. Although many attribute a good bit of this decline to PSA testing, it is still not known for sure that prostate cancer screening has actually resulted in a reduction of prostate cancer mortality. Yet the PSA test has been used for 22 years. As the limitations of the older PSA test became more evident, researchers have been competing to develop more accurate prostate cancer detection tests.

What about the claim that the deCODE breast cancer test could result in more harm? The chief concern is that women would be unnecessarily alarmed by a result suggesting higher risk. But how have women responded to other breast cancer tests, specifically the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene tests? Women with an altered BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene are 3 to 7 times more likely to develop breast cancer than women without alterations in those genes. A recent study looked at how 215 women who had undergone BRCA gene testing reacted to their results. The study found that after four years none of the three groups—those who tested negative, positive, and inconclusive—had "adverse psychological consequences" from BRCA testing. In fact, the study found that "in all three groups, the women were less worried than before they were tested."

As the era of widespread genetic testing unfolds over the next decade, physicians and citizens will become increasingly familiar with how to interpret test results. Testing companies also have an interest in making the risk information they provide understandable and useful to their clients. "A lot of women are afraid of breast cancer. They just don't know what their risk is," said Kay Wissmann of the Breast Cancer Network of Strength, a Chicago-based advocacy group, to the Washington Post. "For those women who choose it, this test could provide information that could potentially help women make better decisions. It could empower them."

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Escape From Berkeley...By Any Non-Petroleum Means Necessary

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 11:48:00 EDT

The alt-energy experimenters who I wrote about in this May reason feature are sponsoring a unique road race this weekend, which launched from Berkeley yesterday and is expected to end in Vegas on Monday. The idea is, from the event's own site:

the rally challenges contestants to start their “engines” on something other than petroleum based fuel, and by any means necessary, cause their “vehicles” show up in Las Vegas three days later- using only fuels/power/motive force scavenged “for free” along the route.
All types of vehicles are welcome. All schemes for non-petroleum based transport are encouraged. In short, everything is permitted– just as long as your “fuel” is from a non-petroleum based source, your acquisition of “it” does not require money, and you start the race with no more than 10kwh of “it” on board.
The full field of power generation and conversion is open for your pleasurable scavenging and creative hacking– biomass gasifiers, WVO, steam, on board fermentation stills, fast starch anaerobic digesters, solar, pneumatic, creek side hydro and lots of batteries, tesla free energy vortexes, cold fusion, humans, hamsters, etc etc etc.
Want to test out your 40% efficiency triple junction PV cell covered Prius? Or maybe see if your steam cracking anaerobic digester hydrogen producer can keep up with the intake of your fuel cell Honda Civic prototype? We welcome you to join us- and risk getting beat by a young punk on a rat bike, running on granulated McDonald’s napkins and hair spray.
DARPA had a Grand Challenge. . . the rednecks a Cannonball Run. . . and the hippies a bunch of WVO buses broken down on the side of the road. Now, NASA scientists and junkyard fabricators go head-to-head in a no holds barred battle of engineering prowess and creative excess. Hanging somewhat in the balance, are bragging rights for saving the world. That, and a grand prize of $5,000.

At least one of the cars had not quite moved a block in the first hour--they were still chopping wood for their gasifier engine.

This long East Bay Express feature profiles some of the racers and their scheme. Wired.com does the same in this story.

I have the good fortune to be one of the event's official judges (important in a race where actually reaching the finish line could be unlikely for many entrants) and expect to be reporting on some of what I learned here in the future.

Does Religion Make People Nicer?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

In his new movie Religulous, comedian Bill Maher makes wicked fun of the religiously credulous. But it turns out that the folks who believe in talking snakes and seventy-two virgins per martyr may be on to something. As whacky as some dogmas are, religions do appear to encourage generosity and honesty. At least that is the claim made in a fascinating review article, "The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality" (subscription required) published in the current issue of Science.

Evolutionary biologists argue that there's nothing surprising about genetically related individuals making sacrifices for their kin: They are helping some of their own genes get passed along to the next generation. But what might cause people to make sacrifices for the good of unrelated strangers? Here, according to University of British Columbia social psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff, religion plays a key role.

The authors have winnowed three decades of empirical evidence looking for examples of religious prosociality, which they define as "the idea that religions facilitate acts that benefit others at a personal cost." Specifically, their hypothesis is that religion encourages people to sacrifice their individual fitness for the benefit of unrelated individuals or for their group. For example, young men may risk sacrificing themselves in war to protect their tribe. So how does religion encourage prosociality? The answer is that being watched by a Big-Brother-in-the-Sky tends to make believers nervous about being selfish.

This observation accords with numerous studies showing that people behave better when they think that someone may be watching them. For example, one remarkable study in 2006 found that just being under the gaze of eyes on a poster nearly tripled the contributions to an office coffee kitty. Exposing participants in a laboratory economic game to computer-generated eyespots while they played made them twice as generous as those who were not. Another study found that participants in a laboratory economic game were nearly four times stingier with other players when they thought they were anonymous than when they thought they were being observed. In other words, watched people are nicer people. Why should that be? It's because we want to have the reputation of being cooperative and prosocial so that other people, especially strangers, will want to cooperate with us.

"The cognitive awareness of gods is likely to heighten prosocial reputational concerns among believers, just as the cognitive awareness of human watchers does among believers and non-believers alike," hypothesize the authors. But supernatural oversight is even better because it "offers the powerful advantage that cooperative interactions can be observed even in the absence of social monitoring."

So does religion work, in the sense of encouraging prosocial other-regarding behavior? It depends. In one famous 1973 study, degrees of religiosity did not predict which students would stop to help someone lying on a sidewalk appearing to be sick. However, in another experiment, two players would simultaneously decide how much money to withdraw from the same envelope—if their combined withdrawals exceeded the amount in the envelope, neither would get any money. Systematically, less money was withdrawn when the game was played at religious kibbutzim than when it was played at secular kibbutzim. This finding supported the researchers' prediction that "men who participate in communal prayer most frequently will exhibit the highest levels of cooperation."

So why do religious believers tend cooperate more? In one illuminating study cited by the researchers, volunteers were given the option to raise money for a sick child's medical bills. Some would-be volunteers were told that it was very likely that they would be asked to help, while others were told that there was only a small chance that they would be called on. "In the latter condition, participants could reap the social benefits of feeling (or appearing) helpful without the cost of the actual altruistic act. Only in the latter situation was a link between religiosity and volunteering evident," claim Norenzayan and Shariff. Religion played a role when it appeared that volunteering would improve one's reputation without much personal cost.

Even more interesting are studies that find that invoking an unseen watcher enhances moral behavior. In one amazing experiment, when participants were told that the ghost of a dead student was haunting the experimental room, they cheated less on a computer test. Other researchers report that when experimental subjects were primed with religious words, they cheated significantly less on a subsequent task. Similarly, Norenzayan and Shariff found that subjects in experimental economic games were more generous when God concepts were implicitly activated before play.

The authors hypothesize that the belief in morally concerned gods who keep track of who's been naughty or nice helps create and stabilize large-scale societies. "Large groups, which until recently lacked institutionalized social-monitoring mechanisms, are vulnerable to collapse because of high rates of freeloading. If unwavering and pervasive belief in moralizing gods buffered against such freeloading, then belief in such gods should be more likely in larger human groups where the threat of freeloading is most acute," suggest the authors. In fact, a cross cultural analysis of 186 societies confirms this prediction: The larger a society, the more likely its members believe in deities that are concerned about human morality.

In small hunter-gatherer bands or subsistence farming villages, it's pretty easy to keep track of just how cooperative your neighbors are. But when groups grow to encompass thousands and eventually millions of strangers, a Big-Brother-in-the-Sky can watch how your fellow citizens behave when you can't. And even better, Sky Big Brother can punish them with eternal damnation if they swindle you. One big downside is that groups have different Sky Big Brothers, which means that "the same mechanisms involved in ingroup altruism may also facilitate outgroup antagonism." In other words, kill the infidels!

Shariff and Norenzayan note that while religion remains a powerful facilitator of prosociality in large groups, modern societies have devised secular replacements for Sky Big Brother, including courts, police, and other contract-enforcing institutions. Also, the modern world is headed toward a transparent society in which social monitoring will be nearly as omnipresent as that of a hunter-gatherer band. Increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies will enable anyone to assess your reputation for prosociality with a few mouse clicks. Sky Big Brother is being outsourced to the Web.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Are You Carbon Beta Rated?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

...

Zeroing Out Nuclear Bombs

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:30:00 EDT

In Reykjavik, Iceland, on October 12, 1986, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev seriously discussed the possibility of the two countries completely eliminating their nuclear weapons. An agreement could not be reached, but the Reykjavik Summit laid the groundwork for treaties aimed at eliminating intermediate range nuclear missiles and making deep cuts in each country's strategic arsenals. The result is that the number of nuclear weapons has been cut in half—down from 65,000 to 26,000 since the height of the Cold War. However, the U.S. retains 10,685 nuclear bombs and Russia is estimated to have around 14,000. In 2002, the U.S. and Russia signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty which commits each side to reducing its number of warheads to between 1700 and 2200 by 2012.

Currently, both countries maintain 2,000 weapons on hair-trigger alert, ready for launching in 15 minutes after an order is given. Just how dangerous the situation remains was made clear in 1995 when the launch of a Norwegian satellite designed to study the northern lights nearly provoked a nuclear response from Russia. Estimates of the stockpiles of other known nuclear powers vary, but the total is probably less than 850 weapons. According to the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed elBaradei, some 40 countries could currently build atomic weapons if they chose to. The possibility of a nuclear war would be significantly magnified if there existed that many nuclear-armed countries.

The goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons is embodied in the 40-year old Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The treaty's 190 signatories, including the United States, are supposed to pursue "general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control." As former ambassadors and nuclear weapons negotiators Max Kampelman and Thomas Graham point out, the NPT was a bargain between the vast majority of countries that agreed not to develop their own nuclear weapons and the then-five nuclear powers that agreed to share peaceful nuclear technology and pursue eventual nuclear disarmament. On the way toward disarmament, the non-nuclear states wanted countries with nuclear weapons to agree to interim measures, including "a comprehensive nuclear weapon test ban, a prohibition on the further production of nuclear explosive material, a significant world-wide reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, and binding obligations not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear NPT parties." So far none of these measures have been adopted.

To its credit, the Bush administration did sign the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, but it has made unilateral decisions that undermine the NPT goal of complete nuclear disarmament. For example, the Bush administration has opposed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which commits parties not to conduct any nuclear test explosions. The U.S. signed the treaty in 1996, but the Senate failed to ratify it in 1999.

Nevertheless, the U.S., Russia, Britain, and France have been observing a de facto nuclear testing moratorium since 1992. China joined the moratorium in 1996 and Pakistan and India have also stopped testing since 1998. However, the U.S. has continued subcritical tests (ones that involve fissile material but do not produce a sustained nuclear chain reaction). In addition, the Bush administration has hinted it may want to test bunker busting nuclear weapons in the future. Furthermore, the Bush administration produced a new draft Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT), which would ban the new production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons. The problem is that its new version of the treaty contained no provisions for verifying compliance.

The Bush administration is winding down. So where do the two major party presidential candidates stand? In a 2007 foreign policy speech, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), declared, "Here's what I'll say as President: America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons." Obama was careful to add, "We will not pursue unilateral disarmament. As long as nuclear weapons exist, we'll retain a strong nuclear deterrent." Obama also promised to seek a global ban on the production of fissile material that could be used to make bombs. He will also make ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty a priority.

In a May 2008 speech on nuclear policy, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) stated, "A quarter of a century ago, President Ronald Reagan declared, ‘our dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.' That is my dream, too." In addition, McCain wants to "move quickly with other nations to negotiate a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty to end production of the most dangerous nuclear materials." He would cancel all work on the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, a.k.a. the bunker buster. Although he voted against the CTBT in 1999, he would "take another look at it" and, in the meantime, McCain pledged to "continue America's current moratorium on testing."

Is the total eradication of nuclear weapons really feasible? Certain unsavory regimes are seeking nuclear weapons as a way to deter assaults from the U.S. and other countries. Had Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons, it is doubtful that the coalition of the willing would have risked attacking Iraq. It is this deterrence calculation that is behind the drive of NPT scofflaws like North Korea, Iran, and Syria to develop nuclear weapons. Frankly, it is difficult to see what incentives would persuade these regimes to put aside their nuclear ambitions. In the case of Iran, Stanford University political scientist Scott Sagan argues, "Relinquishing the threat of regime change by force is a necessary and acceptable price for the United States to pay to stop Tehran from getting the bomb." Just how to make such assurances really credible to suspicious tyrants is not clear.

And there is another problem. In the past, negotiations to cut nuclear weapons have chiefly involved the U.S. and Russia. This would change. As the U.S. and Russia draw down their arsenals, the relatively smaller forces of other countries rise in comparative strategic importance. In other words, cutting U.S. and Russian arsenals might actually encourage proliferation because such reductions could tempt some countries to try to seek nuclear parity. Avoiding this outcome will require dramatically strengthening the inspection provisions of the NPT well in advance. Fortunately, there is an NPT review conference scheduled for 2010 at which such measures can be negotiated.

As the cuts mandated by the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty are achieved, the U.S. and Russia should embark on negotiations with smaller nuclear powers to reduce the number of their nuclear weapons. One way such a phased build-down might take place is outlined in a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention being submitted to the NPT review conference in 2010. For example, five years after the model convention is adopted, all nuclear weapons would have to be destroyed except for 1,000 in each of the stockpiles of the U.S. and Russia and 100 each in the stockpiles of China, France, and the United Kingdom. At ten years, the U.S. and Russian stockpiles would contain 50 warheads each, while those of China, France, and the U.K. would fall to 10 weapons each. At fifteen years, all stockpiles of warheads would be demolished.

Nearly 22 years after Reykjavik and 17 years after the demise of the Soviet Union, it is time to revive the goal of completely eliminating nuclear weapons.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Hope They Bought the Service Plan

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:34:00 EDT

Buried in the election and Wall Street coverage last week: The Hadron Collider is broken.

Partisan Politics and the Science-Industrial Complex

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:00:00 EDT

"Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress," declared Vannevar Bush in a letter introducing his report, Science: The Endless Frontier, to President Harry Truman in 1945. In that report, Bush, the director of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development, argued that some areas of science "are likely to be cultivated inadequately if left without more support than will come from private sources." Ever since, the federal government has been deeply involved in scientific research and technology policy and has used the results of that research as the basis of public policy. It is instructive, then, to compare and contrast the science and technology policy proposals in the platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties. Let's look at how each party claims it will deal with issues like human embryonic stem cells, reproductive health, scientific integrity, space exploration, the Internet, and research funding. (Energy and climate policy was discussed last week.)

Stem Cells:

The Democratic platform declares, "We will lift the current Administration's ban on using federal funding for embryonic stem cells—cells that would have otherwise have been discarded and lost forever—for research that could save lives." President George W. Bush limited federal research support to stem cell lines that had been derived from human embryos prior to August 9, 2001. The Democratic platform would evidently expand research funding to include using stem cells derived from embryos left over from fertility treatments. It is silent on the question of whether or not stem cells derived from embryos made specifically for research would qualify.

The Republican platform says, "We call for a ban on human cloning and a ban on the creation of or experimentation on human embryos for research purposes." This seems to flatly ban both public and private human embryonic stem cell research. The human cloning ban also appears to ban both reproductive cloning (to make babies) and therapeutic cloning (to make immunologically matched cells and tissues for transplant). Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) says that he favors federal funding for stem cell research, but he has also supported legislation that would have banned therapeutic cloning. The Democratic platform is silent on the issue of human cloning, but its general support for human embryonic stem cell research can reasonably be interpreted as supporting the cloning of embryos from which to derive transplant cells and tissues that are matched to specific patients. On the other hand, the Republicans do call for a major expansion of research using adult stem cells, umbilical cord blood, and cells reprogrammed into pluripotent stem cells.

Reproductive Health:

With regard to sex education, the Republican Party's slogan is, "Just say no!" The platform calls for "replacing ‘family planning' programs for teens with increased funding for abstinence education, which teaches abstinence until marriage as the responsible and expected standard of behavior." The platform goes further, stating, "We oppose school-based clinics that provide referrals, counseling, and related services for abortion and contraception." However, scientific support for the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education is lacking. A 2007 report done for the Department of Health and Human Services found that youth in abstinence-only education programs were no more likely than youth in regular sex education programs to have abstained from sex. In addition, the report found that students in abstinence-only programs "had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age." Interestingly, kids who had received abstinence-only instruction were no more likely to engage in unprotected sex than those who hadn't.

In contrast, the Democratic Party platform "strongly supports access to comprehensive affordable family planning services and age-appropriate sex education which empower people to make informed choices and live healthy lives." The platform further claims, "We also recognize that such health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions." While there is some evidence to support the latter claim, there is also countervailing evidence against it. The debate over sex education is fraught with assertions based more on ideology than evidence. In essence, the platforms are expressing each party's larger cultural attitudes toward human sexuality.

Scientific Integrity:

"We will end the Bush Administration's war on science, restore scientific integrity, and return to evidence-based decision-making," declares the platform of the party of progressives. It is true that the Bush administration has been more ham-fisted than previous administrations when trying to suppress scientific information that seemed to go against its policies. The Republican platform makes no specific statements about scientific integrity, but often mentions its support for "sound science" in guiding public policy. Republicans make it clear that scientific findings do not drive policy by themselves; costs and benefits must be weighed in order to come up with the proper policies. For example, the GOP platform says, "We can—and should—address the risk of climate change based on sound science without succumbing to the no-growth radicalism that treats climate questions as dogma rather than as situations to be managed responsibly."

Space Exploration:

The conservative party insists, "We share the vision of returning Americans to the moon as a step toward a mission to Mars." For their part, the Democrats promise to "invest in a strong and inspirational vision for space exploration." The Democrats only mention the moon in the context of uniting the country behind great projects such as a push to achieve energy independence. Pretty clearly both major parties see space chiefly as a stage for enacting dramas of national greatness rather than a medium for practicing science.

The Internet:

The really good news is that the Republicans and Democrats both claim that they want to use the Internet to make the federal government more transparent and accountable. The former self-described party of fiscal conservatism, a.k.a. the Republican Party, asserts, "If billions are worth spending, they should be spent in the light of day. We will insist that, before either the House or Senate considers a spending bill, every item in it should be presented in advance to the taxpayers on the Internet." In addition, taxpayers should be able to monitor all federal contracts via the Internet.

The Democrats grandly promise even more transparency to be overseen by a "Chief Technology Officer for the nation." The progressive platform vows, "We will lift the veil of secret deals in Washington by publishing searchable, online information about federal grants, contracts, earmarks, loans, and lobbyist contacts with government officials. We will make government data available online and will have an online video archive of significant agency meetings." They also swear that all bills passed by Congress will be put online for five days where Americans can review and comment on them before they are signed into law. But wouldn't it be better if the bills were put online for comment before Congress passed them? The Democrats say that they will require Cabinet officials to participate in online town hall meetings in which the public can question them about issues before their agencies.

Both promise to punish people who use the Internet to harm children. The Democrats vow to "toughen penalties" and then "prosecute those who exploit the Internet to try to harm children." The Republicans agree: "The Internet must be made safe for children." The GOP traditionalists proudly claim that they have "led efforts to increase the funding necessary to track down and jail online predators." The Republicans support the federal ban on Internet gambling, but promise to "permanently ban Internet access taxes and stop all new cell phone taxes." The Democrats don't mention Internet gambling, nor do they say anything about Internet taxes, but Congress did pass a 7-year moratorium on Internet taxes last year.

Research Funding:

Both the Republicans and the Democrats strongly favor making the Research and Development Tax Credit permanent. The idea is that this tax break will spur technological innovation. The Republican platform says, "We support federal investment in basic and applied biomedical research." Why? Because such funding is supposed to boost America's global competitiveness and lead to innovative cures.

The Democrats declare, "Over the past eight years, the current Administration has not only failed to promote biomedical and stem cell research, it has actively stood in the way of that research." Actually, the Bush administration's support for the National Institutes of Health has held steady at around $30 billion per year. However, the Democrats pledge, "We will increase funding to the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the National Cancer Institutes." By how much? "We will double federal funding for basic research," the progressives promise.

Both Democrats and Republicans clearly recognize the centrality of science and technology in driving economic growth, and also believe that the government has some responsibility for managing the cultural disorientation that technological progress can induce. But was Vannevar Bush right? Do we really need a national research establishment funded and, to some extent, directed by the federal government to engender economic growth? Perhaps not. A 2003 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report, The Sources of Economic Growth, found "a marked positive effect of business-sector R&D, while the analysis could find no clear-cut relationship between public R&D activities and growth, at least in the short term." While the Republicans express a bit more skepticism than the Democrats, the platforms show that both parties still buy the vision of a government-funded science-industrial complex.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Partisan Plans for Energy and Climate Change

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:30:00 EDT

At their conventions this past month, the Democrats and Republicans each laid out their differing solutions to our nation's energy and climate troubles. Energy and climate change are intertwined because burning fossil fuels that power the modern world produces carbon dioxide emissions that are warming the planet. In addition, higher oil prices have raised concerns about the nation's energy security.

Combing through both platforms, it appears that the Republicans endorse a far more sweeping set of energy and climate change policies than do their Democratic counterparts. The GOP platform declares, "In the long run, American [energy] production should move to zero-emission sources, and our nation's fossil fuel resources are the bridge to that emissions-free future." Zero-emission energy obviously means energy sources that don't produce greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. The Democratic platform only pledges to "implement a market-based cap and trade system to reduce carbon emissions by the amount scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic change."

But let's put aside the proposed climate change policies of the two major parties for the moment and look at their energy security concerns. The Democrats promise "we will break our addiction to foreign oil." The Republicans also vow to reduce "our excessive reliance on foreign oil." So just how do our politicos plan to attain this elusive goal? "We know we can't drill our way to energy independence," declares the Democratic Party platform. Instead, the Democrats want to dramatically increase the fuel efficiency of automobiles and crack down on speculators who are driving up oil prices beyond the natural market rate.

The Republicans, however, think that drilling can help. "We simply must draw more American oil from American soil," insists the GOP. The alleged party of business wants companies to produce crude and natural gas from the outer continental shelves and from shale formations in the West. It even opposes "any efforts that would permanently block access to the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." The Democratic platform doesn't come right out against opening these areas to energy exploration, though perhaps that's because its presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), now supports at least some additional offshore drilling.

So what do the Republicans say about climate change? "The same human economic activity that has brought freedom and opportunity to billions has also increased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere," notes the party's platform. "While the scope and long-term consequences of this are the subject of ongoing scientific research, common sense dictates that the United States should take measured and reasonable steps today to reduce any impact on the environment." The Republicans acknowledge that man-made climate change is a potential problem, but they "caution against the doomsday climate change scenarios peddled by the aficionados of centralized command-and-control government."

The tone of Democratic platform is far more ominous. "Global climate change is the planet's greatest threat, and our response will determine the very future of life on this earth," it warns. The party of Al Gore predicts that climate change "will lead to devastating weather patterns, terrible storms, drought, conflict, and famine."

So what to do? "Because the issue of climate change is global, it must become a truly global concern as well," say the Republicans. "All developed and developing economies, particularly India and China, can make significant contributions in dealing with the matter." How a Republican administration (and Congress) would deal with climate change policy at the international level is passed over with decorous silence. The Democrats, on the other hand, argue, "We need a global response to climate change that includes binding and enforceable commitments to reducing emissions, especially for those that pollute the most: the United States, China, India, the European Union, and Russia." One wonders, would these commitments make Democrats into aficionados of centralized command-and-control government?

Oddly, the Democratic platform seems to be taking a page from the detested Bush administration's playbook on how to handle climate change. For example, the platform calls for reaching "out to the leaders of the biggest carbon emitting nations and ask them to join a new Global Energy Forum that will lay the foundation for the next generation of climate protocols...Clean energy development must be a central focus in our relationships with major countries in Europe and Asia." The Global Energy Forum proposal is more than a little reminiscent of President Bush's Major Economies Summit on Energy Security and Climate Change which met in September 2007. And the focus on "clean energy development" sounds a lot like the goals of President Bush's Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate initiative.

What do the two major parties think should be done at home to address the problem of man-made climate change? The GOP platform claims that Republicans will deal with it by supporting "technology-driven, market-based solutions." Sounds good, but what does that mean? Apparently, it means that "alternate power sources must enter the mainstream." Must? The Republicans happily acknowledge, "The technology behind solar energy has improved significantly in recent years, and the commercial development of wind power promises major benefits both in costs and in environmental protection." This is clearly true, but the Republicans forgot to mention that these improvements have been driven by billions in tax credits and government mandates generally favored by Democrats, not the free market. Or maybe it's not an oversight at all. Perhaps the Republican platform is implying that new energy technology markets do need a little help. After all, the GOP platform does advocate "a long-term energy tax credit equally applicable to all renewable power sources." Extending current solar and wind tax credits is being held up in Congress as part of a legislative stalemate over authorizing offshore drilling.

Unlike the Republican platform, the Democrats clearly state how they plan to encourage Americans to switch to low-carbon energy—by imposing "an economy-wide cap and trade program." The idea is that the cap on greenhouse emissions will be lowered over time, meaning that emitters will trade ever fewer greenhouse gas permits among themselves. Naturally, the Democratic platform discreetly fails to mention that the cap and trade proposal is actually equivalent to an energy tax that will boost the prices Americans pay for their electricity and gasoline. (To be fair, the GOP's presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), unlike the Republican platform, also favors a cap and trade scheme.)

So if fossil fuels are a no-no, from what sources will Americans get their energy? "We Democrats commit to fast-track investment of billions of dollars over the next ten years to establish a green energy sector that will create up to five million jobs," declares the progressive party's platform. Green energy means solar, wind, and geothermal. Of course, the billions "invested" in green energy will come from the pockets of taxpayers who will be shelling out more for energy under the new cap and trade scheme.

The Republicans aim to "usher in a renaissance in the American auto industry" and declare that America "must...produce more vehicles that operate on electricity and natural gas." Again, the platform remains silent on just how Republican policies will conjure up this auto industry renaissance. Perhaps Republican fat cats will all go out and buy a Ford Escape hybrid or a GM Volt? The Democratic platform makes it clear that corporate handouts are just fine so long as your company doesn't produce oil or pharmaceuticals. In order to get plug-in hybrids to start rolling off the assembly lines in Michigan, the Democrats promise to "help auto manufacturers and parts suppliers convert to build the cars and trucks of the future." And what "help" can be more sincere than a nice fat subsidy?

The major parties really do differ on the future of climate-friendly nuclear power. The Republicans promise to "pursue dramatic increases in the use of all forms of safe, affordable, reliable—and clean—nuclear power." In fact, Sen. McCain has set the goal of building 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030. In contrast, the Democratic platform mentions "nuclear power" once and then only in the context of countries that use it as a sneaky ruse to develop nuclear weapons. The platform also promises to "protect Nevada and its communities from the high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, which has not been proven to be safe by sound science." Obama may not be completely on board with his party's platform, however, since he has said, "We should explore nuclear as part of the mix."

What about biofuels? The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandates that the country use 36 billion gallons of biofuels per year by 2022. Most of the ethanol produced in the United States is currently made from corn. In other words, food and feed are being turned into fuel. A lot of experts believe that the biofuel mandates have contributed substantially to the recent steep run up in global food prices. Rather than turn food into fuel, both parties favor a fast ramp up to cellulosic ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol is produced using feedstocks such as wood, agricultural waste, and switch grass instead of corn. To the party's credit, the Republican platform declares, "The U.S. government should end mandates for ethanol and let the free market work." The Democratic platform is mum on the biofuels mandate.

Will the party platforms actually influence the policies eventually adopted by the victors in the presidential contest? There are reasons to doubt that. For example, last time around both major parties strongly promoted the "hydrogen economy" as the solution to our energy woes. The 2004 Republican platform declared, "The Republican Party supports research and investment designed to realize the enormous benefits of a hydrogen economy and put the United States on the cutting edge of energy technology." The 2004 Democratic platform asserted, "We are also committed to developing hydrogen as a clean, reliable domestic source of energy." In 2008, the hydrogen economy fad is completely passé, with neither party platform so much as mentioning it. Finally, while the two major parties may have big differences in their proposed energy and climate change policies, they are completely bipartisan when it comes to touting the benefits of their proposals while ignoring the costs.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

A 1-in-1,000 Chance* of Gotterdammerung

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Will the world come to an end on September 10? That fear is motivating two lawsuits—one American, another European—that aim to stop the physicists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) from switching on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on that day. The LHC is a $10 billion 17-mile long particle accelerator lying in a circular tunnel beneath the border of France and Switzerland. Its massive superconducting magnets cooled with liquid helium accelerate two beams of protons and lead nuclei to nearly the speed of light. These particle beams will eventually be crashed into each other to produce temperatures and particles not seen since microseconds after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

One of the chief goals of the LHC experiments is to find the elusive Higgs boson, the only fundamental particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics that has not been directly observed. The Higgs boson plays a key role in explaining the origins of mass in other elementary particles. Exciting, if esoteric research, to be sure, but why oppose it?

Walter Wagner, a former nuclear safety officer, and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho, have filed a civil suit in federal district court in Hawaii asking for a temporary restraining order to stop the researchers at CERN from switching on the LHC until further safety analyses are completed. In Europe, Professor Otto Rössler, a chemist at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany filed a similar suit with the European Court of Human Rights.

These LHC opponents fear that the Earth could be destroyed by vacuum bubbles, magnetic monopoles, microscopic black holes, or strangelets produced by the high-energy proton-proton collisions planned by CERN physicists. Vacuum bubbles have been described as a kind of "cosmic cancer." If it turns out that there is a lower energy state into which the universe could settle, then the LHC might produce "bubbles" of such a state which would then expand, ripping apart the Earth and eventually the entire universe. If magnetic monopoles were produced they might induce protons to decay and thus destroy normal matter. Microscopic black holes might grow by gobbling up the Earth. And strangelets are combinations of quarks that theoretically interact with normal matter and transform it into strange matter.

At the Global Catastrophic Risks conference at Oxford University this past July, CERN's Michelangelo Mangano described the findings of a report released in June by the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG). The bottom line: "There is no basis for any conceivable threat from the LHC."

While the LHC safety report goes through a number of scenarios, its chief point is that the energies produced in the LHC are "far below those of the highest-energy cosmic-ray collisions that are observed regularly on Earth." In fact, cosmic rays produced by phenomena in the universe "conduct" more than 10 million LHC-like experiments per second. If such energies actually produced vacuum bubbles, microscopic black holes, magnetic monopoles, or strangelets that could destroy planets and stars, physicists wouldn't be here to perform experiments in the LHC now.

At the Global Catastrophic Risk conference, Future of Humanity Institute research associate Toby Ord asked an interesting question: How certain should we be about safety when there could be a risk to the survival of the human species? As Ord argued, "When an expert provides a calculation of the probability of an outcome, they are really providing the probability of the outcome occurring, given that their argument is watertight. However, their argument may fail for a number of reasons such as a flaw in the underlying theory, a flaw in their modeling of the problem, or a mistake in their calculations."

In other words, for the argument that the LHC poses no existential risk to humanity to be sound, the theory underlying it must be adequate. But physical theories have been upended in the past. Ord pointed out that Lord Kelvin had calculated the age of the sun. Using the best physics of his time, Lord Kelvin concluded that the sun was 100 million years old. It was not until the discovery of radioactivity that the current estimate of 4.6 billion years could be calculated. So Ord argued that it's not unreasonable to think that there is a 1-in-1,000 chance that the theories underlying the LHC are flawed in some important details.

In addition, the model of the problem itself could be flawed. As an example of how flawed models can impact the real world, Ord cited the Castle Bravo 15-megaton thermonuclear bomb test in 1954, the explosive yield of which was two and half times what had been calculated by the bomb's designers at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Those experts had missed the fact that the lithium-7 isotope, when bombarded by high energy neutrons, decomposes into tritium and boosts neutron production. As a more recent example, Ord claimed that Lloyds of London's insurance models for New Orleans had failed to consider the risk that the city's levees might fail.

And finally, it's possible that errors in calculation could slip into errors of analysis. Ord cited the frequency of miscalculations in medication dosages as an example of such errors. To get an estimate of argument failure, Ord cited survey evidence which found that 1-in-1,000 to 1-in-100 articles are retracted from high-impact scientific journals. For an article to be retracted something must be found to be seriously wrong with it. "If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect," argued Ord. He suggested that multiplying the probabilities that the theory, model, and/or calculations on which the operation of the LHC rests are wrong dramatically increases the probability estimates that switching it on will destroy the world. Thus Ord concluded that the LHC should not be switched on.

Mangano from CERN objected furiously to Ord's presentation, arguing, "I can apply that estimate of a 1-in-1,000 chance to everything." Ord responded that his analysis should only apply to experiments that pose an existential risk to humanity, not to experiments whose outcomes can be ameliorated later. I asked Ord if he could think of another experiment or situation to which he would apply his analysis. He looked surprised for a moment and then reluctantly said, "No." Over canapés after Ord's talk, several of his colleagues expressed glee at the prospect that a philosopher's arguments might derail a $10 billion physics experiment. Personally, I estimate the probability of that happening at less than 1-in-1,000.

As intriguing as Ord's argument is, I am ultimately unpersuaded by it. Why? Largely because the empirical evidence is that the universe has been running trillions of these high-energy physics "experiments" for billions of years without disastrous results. In fact, Ord's colleagues Nick Bostrom and Max Tegmark from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculate that the empirical evidence suggests a conservative estimate of the annual risk that LHC-like experiments would destroy the earth is 1-in-a-trillion. At the end of his talk, Mangano reminded the Oxford conferees, "Jeopardizing the future of scientific research would be a global catastrophe." Any theory, model, or calculation that suggests otherwise is clearly flawed.

*Correction: Toby Ord from Oxford University points out that the headline is not accurate. In addition, the quotation from CERN's Mangano gives a misleading impression of his actual estimates. Ord informs me that his overall estimate of disaster from switching on the LHC is between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 1,000,000. I thank him very much for his correction.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.