Arquivo da tag: ciência

The Weather Man (Stanford Magazine)

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Daniel Swain studies extreme floods. And droughts. And wildfires. Then he explains them to the rest of us.

February 6, 2024

    

An illustration of Daniel Swain walking through the mountains and clouds.

By Tracie White

Illustrations by Tim O’Brien

7:00 a.m., 45 degrees F

The moment Daniel Swain wakes up, he gets whipped about by hurricane-force winds. “A Category 5, literally overnight, hits Acapulco,” says the 34-year-old climate scientist and self-described weather geek, who gets battered daily by the onslaught of catastrophic weather headlines: wildfires, megafloods, haboobs (an intense dust storm), atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones. Everyone’s asking: Did climate change cause these disasters? And, more and more, they want Swain to answer.

Swain, PhD ’16, rolls over in bed in Boulder, Colo., and checks his cell phone for emails. Then, retainer still in his mouth, he calls back the first reporter of the day. It’s October 25, and Isabella Kwai at the New York Times wants to know whether climate change is responsible for the record-breaking speed and ferocity of Hurricane Otis, which rapidly intensified and made landfall in Acapulco as the eastern Pacific’s strongest hurricane on record. It caught everyone off guard. Swain posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) just hours before the storm hit: “A tropical cyclone undergoing explosive intensification unexpectedly on final approach to a major urban area . . . is up there on list of nightmare weather scenarios becoming more likely in a warming #climate.”

Swain is simultaneously 1,600 miles away from the tempest and at the eye of the storm. His ability to explain science to the masses—think the Carl Sagan of weather—has made him one of the media’s go-to climate experts. He’s a staff research scientist at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability who spends more than 1,100 hours each year on public-facing climate and weather communication, explaining whether (often, yes) and how climate change is raising the number and exacer­bating the viciousness of weather disasters. “I’m a physical scientist, but I not only study how the physics and thermo­dynamics of weather evolve but how they affect people,” says Swain. “I lead investigations into how extreme events like floods and droughts and wildfires are changing in a warming climate, and what we might do about it.”

He translates that science to everyday people, even as the number of weather-disaster headlines grows each year. “To be quite honest, it’s nerve-racking,” says Swain. “There’s such a demand. But there’s a climate emergency, and we need climate scientists to talk to the world about it.”

No bells, no whistles. No fancy clothes, makeup, or vitriolic speech. Sometimes he doesn’t even shave for the camera. Just a calm, matter-of-fact voice talking about science on the radio, online, on TV. In 2023, he gave nearly 300 media interviews—sometimes at midnight or in his car. The New York Times, CNN, and BBC keep him on speed dial. Social media is Swain’s home base. His Weather West blog reaches millions. His weekly Weather West “office hours” on YouTube are public and interactive, doubling as de facto press conferences. His tweets reach 40 million people per year. “I don’t think that he appreciates fully how influential he is of the public understanding of weather events, certainly in California but increasingly around the world,” says Stanford professor of earth system science Noah Diffenbaugh, ’96, MS ’97, Swain’s doctoral adviser and mentor. “He’s such a recognizable presence in newspapers and radio and television. Daniel’s the only climate scientist I know who’s been able to do that.”

Illustration of Daniel Swain's reflection in a puddle.

There’s no established job description for climate communicator—what Swain calls himself—and no traditional source of funding. He’s not particularly a high-energy person, nor is he naturally gregarious; in fact, he has a chronic medical condition that often saps his energy. But his work is needed, he says. “Climate change is an increasingly big part of what’s driving weather extremes today,” Swain says. “I connect the dots between the two. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about how a warming climate affects day-to-day variations in weather, but my goal is to push public perception toward what the science actually says.” So when reporters call him, he does his best to call them back. 

Decoration

7:30 a.m., winds at 5 mph from the east northeast

Swain finishes the phone call with the Times reporter and schedules a Zoom interview with Reuters for noon. Then he brushes his teeth. He’s used to a barrage of requests when there’s a catastrophic weather event. Take August 2020, when, over three days, California experienced 14,000 lightning strikes from “dry” thunderstorms. More than 650 reported wildfires followed, eventually turning the skies over San Francisco a dystopian orange. “In a matter of weeks, I did more than 100 interviews with television, radio, and newspaper outlets, and walked a social media audience of millions through the disaster unfolding in their own backyards,” he wrote in a recent essay for Nature.

Swain’s desire to understand the physics of weather stretches back to his preschool years. In 1993, his family moved from San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Rafael, and the 4-year-old found himself wondering where all that Bay City fog had gone. Two years later, Swain spent the first big storm of his life under his parents’ bed. He lay listening to screeching 100 mile-per-hour winds around his family’s home, perched on a ridge east of Mount Tamalpais. But he was more excited than scared. The huge winter storm of 1995 that blew northward from San Francisco and destroyed the historic Conservatory of Flowers just got 6-year-old Swain wired.

‘Climate change is an increasingly big part of what’s driving weather extremes today. I connect the dots between the two.’

“To this day, it’s the strongest winds I’ve ever experienced,” he says. “It sent a wind tunnel through our house.” It broke windows. Shards of glass embedded in one of his little brother’s stuffies, which was sitting in an empty bedroom. “I remember being fascinated,” he says. So naturally, when he got a little older, he put a weather station on top of that house. And then, in high school, he launched his Weather West blog. “It was read by about 10 people,” Swain says, laughing. “I was a weather geek. It didn’t exactly make me popular.” Two decades, 550 posts, and 2 million readers later, well, who’s popular now?

Swain graduated from UC Davis with a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric science. He knew then that something big was happening on the weather front, and he wanted to understand how climate change was influencing the daily forecast. So at Stanford, he studied earth system science and set about using physics to understand the causes of changing North Pacific climate extremes. “From the beginning, Daniel had a clear sense of wanting to show how climate change was affecting the weather conditions that matter for people,” says Diffenbaugh. “A lot of that is extreme weather.” Swain focused on the causes of persistent patterns in the atmosphere—long periods of drought or exceptionally rainy winters—and how climate change might be exacerbating them.

The first extreme weather event he studied was the record-setting California drought that began in 2012. He caught the attention of both the media and the scientific community after he coined the term Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, referring to a persistent ridge of high pressure caused by unusual oceanic warmth in the western tropical Pacific Ocean. That ridge was blocking weather fronts from bringing rain into California. The term was initially tongue-in-cheek. Today the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge (aka RRR or Triple R) has a Wikipedia page.

“One day, I was sitting in my car, waiting to pick up one of my kids, reading the news on my phone,” says Diffenbaugh. “And I saw this article in the Economist about the drought. It mentioned this Ridiculously Resilient Ridge. I thought, ‘Oh, wow, that’s interesting. That’s quite a branding success.’ I click on the page and there’s a picture of Daniel Swain.”

Diffenbaugh recommended that Swain write a scientific paper about the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, and Swain did, in 2014. By then, the phrase was all over the internet. “Journalists started calling while I was still at Stanford,” says Swain. “I gave into it initially, and the demand just kept growing from there.”

Decoration

11:45 a.m., precipitation 0 inches

Swain’s long, lanky frame is seated ramrod straight in front of his computer screen, scrolling for the latest updates about Hurricane Otis. At noon, he signs in to Zoom and starts answering questions again.

Reuters: “Hurricane Otis wasn’t in the forecast until about six to 10 hours before it occurred. What would you say were the factors that played into its fierce intensification?”

Swain: “Tropical cyclones, or hurricanes, require a few different ingredients. I think the most unusual one was the warmth of water temperature in the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Mexico. It’s much higher than usual. This provided a lot of extra potential intensity to this storm. We expect to see increases in intensification of storms like this in a warming climate.”

Swain’s dog, Luna, bored by the topic, snores softly. She’s asleep just behind him, next to a bookshelf filled with weather disaster titles: The Terror by Dan Simmons; The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodell; Fire Weather by John Vaillant. And the deceptively hopeful-sounding Paradise by Lizzie Johnson, which tells the story of the 2018 Camp Fire that burned the town of Paradise, Calif., to the ground. Swain was interviewed by Johnson for the book. The day of the fire, he found himself glued to the comment section of his blog, warning anyone who asked about evacuation to get out.

“During the Camp Fire, people were commenting, ‘I’m afraid. What should we do? Do we stay or do we go?’ Literally life or death,” he says. He wrote them back: “There is a huge fire coming toward you very fast. Leave now.” As they fled, they sent him progressively more horrifying images of burning homes and trees like huge, flaming matchsticks. “This makes me extremely uncomfortable—that I was their best bet for help,” says Swain.

Swain doesn’t socialize much. He doesn’t have time. His world revolves around his home life, his work, and taking care of his health. He has posted online about his chronic health condition, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a heritable connective tissue disease that, for him, results in fatigue, gastrointestinal problems, and injuries—he can partially dislocate a wrist mopping the kitchen floor. He works to keep his health condition under control when he has down time, traveling to specialists in Utah, taking medications and supplements, and being cautious about any physical activity. When he hikes in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, he’s careful and tries to keep his wobbly ankles from giving out. Doctors don’t have a full understanding of EDS. So, Swain researches his illness himself, much like he does climate science, constantly looking for and sifting through new data, analyzing it, and sometimes sharing what he discovers online with the public. “If it’s this difficult to parse even as a professional scientist and science communicator, I can only imagine how challenging this task is for most other folks struggling with complex/chronic illnesses,” he wrote on Twitter. 

‘“There is a huge fire coming toward you very fast. Leave now.” This makes me extremely uncomfortable—that I was their best bet for help. ’

It helps if he can exert some control over his own schedule to minimize fatigue. The virtual world has helped him do that. He mostly works from a small, extra bedroom in an aging rental home perched at an elevation of 5,400 feet in Boulder, where he lives with his partner, Jilmarie Stephens, a research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

When Swain was hired at UCLA in 2018, Peter Kareiva, the then director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, supported a nontraditional career path that would allow Swain to split his time between research and climate communication, with the proviso that he find grants to fund much of his work. That same year, Swain was invited to join a group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) located in Boulder, which has two labs located at the base of the Rocky Mountains. 

“Daniel had a very clear vision about how he wanted to contribute to science and the world, using social media and his website,” says Kareiva, a research professor at UCLA. “We will not solve climate change without a movement, and communication and social media are key to that. Most science papers are never even read. What we do as scientists only matters if it has an impact on the world. We need at least 100 more Daniels.”

And yet financial support for this type of work is never assured. In a recent essay in Nature, Swain writes about what he says is a desperate need for more institutions to fund climate communication by scientists. “Having a foot firmly planted in both research and public-engagement worlds has been crucial,” he writes. “Even as I write this, it’s unclear whether there will be funding to extend my present role beyond the next six months.”

Decoration

4:00 p.m., 67 degrees F

“Ready?” says the NBC reporter on the computer screen. “Can we just have you count to 10, please?”

“Yep. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10,” Swain says.

“Walk me through in a really concise way why we saw this tropical storm, literally overnight, turn into a Category 5 hurricane, when it comes to climate change,” the reporter says.

“So, as the Earth warms, not only does the atmosphere warm or air temperatures increase, but the oceans are warming as well. And because warm tropical oceans are hurricane fuel, the maximum potential intensity of hurricanes is set by how warm the oceans are,” Swain says.

An hour later, Swain lets Luna out and prepares for the second half of his day: He’ll spend the next five hours on a paper for a science journal. It’s a review of research on weather whiplash in California—the phenomenon of rapid swings between extremes, such as the 2023 floods that came on the heels of a severe drought. Using atmospheric modeling, Swain predicted in a 2018 Nature Climate Change study that there would be a 25 percent to 100 percent increase in extreme dry-to-wet precipitation events in the years ahead. Recent weather events support that hypothesis, and Swain’s follow-up research analyzes the ways those events are seriously stressing California’s water storage and flood control infrastructure.

“What’s remarkable about this summer is that the record-shattering heat has occurred not only over land but also in the oceans,” Swain explained in an interview with Katie Couric on YouTube in August, “like the hot tub [temperature] water in certain parts of the shallow coastal regions off the Gulf of Mexico.” In a warming climate, the atmosphere acts as a kitchen sponge, he explains later. It soaks up water but also wrings it out. The more rapid the evaporation, the more intense the 
precipitation. When it rains, there are heavier downpours and more extreme flood events.

‘What we do as scientists only matters if it has an impact on the world. We need at least 100 more Daniels.’

“It really comes down to thermo­dynamics,” he says. The increasing temperatures caused by greenhouse gases lead to more droughts, but they also cause more intense precipitation. The atmosphere is thirstier, so it takes more water from the land and from plants. The sponge holds more water vapor. That’s why California is experiencing these wild alternations, he says, from extremely dry to extremely wet. “It explains the role climate change plays in turning a tropical storm overnight into hurricane forces,” he says.

Decoration

October 26, expected high of 45 degrees F

In 2023, things got “ludicrously crazy” for both Swain and the world. It was the hottest year in recorded history. Summer temperatures broke records worldwide. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported 28 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion—among them a drought, four flooding events, 19 severe storm events, two tropical cyclones, and a killer wildfire. Overall, catastrophic weather events resulted in the deaths of 492 people in the United States. “Next year may well be worse than that,” Swain says. “It’s mind-blowing when you think about that.” 

“There have always been floods and wildfires, hurricanes and storms,” Swain continues. “It’s just that now, climate change plays a role in most weather disasters”—pumped-up storms, more intense and longer droughts and wildfire seasons, and heavier rains and flooding. It also plays a role in our ability to manage those disasters, Swain says. In a 2023 paper he published in Communications Earth & Environment, for example, he provides evidence that climate change is shifting the ideal timing of prescribed burns (which help mitigate wildfire risk) from spring and autumn to winter.

The day after Hurricane Otis strikes, Swain’s schedule has calmed down, so he takes time to make the short drive from his home up to the NCAR Mesa Lab, situated in a majestic spot where the Rocky Mountains meet the plains. Sometimes he’ll sit in his Hyundai in the parking lot, looking out his windshield at the movements of the clouds while doing media interviews on his cell phone. Today he scrolls through weather news updates on the aftermath of Hurricane Otis, keeping informed for the next interview that pops up, or his next blog post. In total, 52 people will be reported dead due to the disaster. The hurricane destroyed homes and hotels, high-rises and hospitals. Swain’s name will appear in at least a dozen stories on Hurricane Otis, including one by David Wallace-Wells, an opinion writer for the New York Times, columnist for the New York Times Magazine, and bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. “It’s easy to get pulled into overly dramatic ways of looking at where the world is going,” says Wallace-Wells, who routinely listens to Swain’s office hours and considers him a key source when he needs information on weather events. “Daniel helps people know how we can better calibrate those fears with the use of scientific rigor. He’s incredibly valuable.”

From the parking lot in the mountains, Swain often watches the weather that blows across the wide-open plains that stretch for hundreds of miles, all the way to the Mississippi River. He never tires of examining weather in real time, learning from it. He studies the interplay between the weather and the clouds at this spot where storms continually roll in and roll out.

“After all these years,” he says, “I’m still a weather geek.” 

Tracie White is a senior writer at Stanford. Email her at traciew@stanford.edu.

Reinaldo José Lopes: Camadas do fundo de um lago retratam como presença humana transformou radicalmente a Terra (Folha de S.Paulo)

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Opinião

3.dez.2023 às 23h15

“O mundo está mudando: sinto-o na água, sinto-o na terra e farejo-o no ar.” Quem só assistiu aos filmes da série “O Senhor dos Anéis” se acostumou a ouvir essa frase na voz augusta de Cate Blanchett (a elfa Galadriel); nos livros, quem a pronuncia é o ent (gigante arvoresco) Barbárvore. Trata-se, no fundo, de um resumo da conclusão do romance de fantasia de J.R.R. Tolkien: o fim de uma era e o começo de outra, caracterizada pelo Domínio dos Homens. E se fosse possível detectar diretamente algo muito parecido com isso no nosso mundo do século 21? Algo que prove, para além de qualquer dúvida, que a nossa espécie passou a moldar a Terra de forma irreversível?

A resposta a essa pergunta pode ser encontrada em muitos lugares, mas tudo indica que a versão mais contundente e consolidada dela, a que entrará para os livros de geologia e de história, vem do lago Crawford, no Canadá. Os cientistas encarregados de definir formalmente o início do chamado Antropoceno –a época geológica caracterizada pela intervenção humana maciça em diversos aspectos do funcionamento do planeta– estão usando o lago como o exemplo por excelência desse fenômeno.

É por isso que convido o leitor para um mergulho naquelas águas alcalinas. Entender os detalhes que fazem do lugar um exemplo tão útil para entender o Antropoceno é, ao mesmo tempo, uma pequena aula de método científico e um retrato do poderio –frequentemente destrutivo– que desenvolvemos como espécie.

Uma das análises mais completas da lagoa canadense foi publicado na revista científica The Anthropocene Review por uma equipe da Universidade Brock, no Canadá. A primeira coisa a se ter em mente é que o lago Crawford parece um grande funil: relativamente pequeno (2,4 hectares de área) e fundo (24 m entre a superfície e o leito). Isso faz com que as camadas d’água, embora bem oxigenadas, misturem-se pouco. Por causa da salinidade e alcalinidade elevadas, há pouca vida animal no fundo.

E esse é o primeiro grande pulo do gato: tais características fazem com que camadas muito estáveis de sedimento possam se depositar anualmente no leito do lago Crawford. Todo ano é a mesma história: durante o outono, uma lâmina mais escura de matéria orgânica desce ao fundo (como estamos no Canadá, muitas árvores perdem as folhas nessa época); no verão, essa camada é recoberta por outra, mais clara, de minerais ricos em cálcio. Essa regularidade nunca é bagunçada pela chamada bioturbação (invertebrados aquáticos cavando o leito, por exemplo).

Ou seja, o fundo do lago é um reloginho, ou melhor, um calendário. Cilindros de sedimento tirados de seu fundo podem ser datados ano a ano com pouquíssima incerteza.

Isso significa que dá para identificar com precisão o aparecimento do elemento químico plutônio –resultado direto do uso de armas nucleares, principalmente em testes militares– a partir de 1948, com um pico em 1967 e uma queda nos anos 1980. Dada a natureza dos elementos radioativos, essa assinatura estará lá rigorosamente “para sempre” (ao menos do ponto de vista humano).

Algo muito parecido vale para as chamadas SCPs (partículas esferoidais carbonáceas, na sigla inglesa). Elas são produzidas pela queima industrial, em altas temperaturas, de carvão mineral e derivados do petróleo. Começam a aparecer nos sedimentos da segunda metade do século 19, mas sua presença só dispara mesmo, de novo, no começo dos anos 1950. Nada que não seja a ação humana poderia produzir esse fenômeno.

É por isso que os cientistas estão propondo o ano de 1950 como o início do Antropoceno. Ainda que a proposta não “pegue” nesse formato exato, o peso de evidências como as camadas do lago Crawford é dificílimo de contrariar. Está na água, na terra e no ar. E, para o bem ou para o mal, a responsabilidade é nossa.

Consciousness theory slammed as ‘pseudoscience’ — sparking uproar (Nature)

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nature.com

Researchers publicly call out theory that they say is not well supported by science, but that gets undue attention.

Mariana Lenharo

20 September 2023

Scanning electron micrograph of human brain cells.
Some research has focused on how neurons (shown here in a false-colour scanning electron micrograph) are involved in consciousness.Credit: Ted Kinsman/Science Photo Library

A letter, signed by 124 scholars and posted online last week1, has caused an uproar in the consciousness research community. It claims that a prominent theory describing what makes someone or something conscious — called the integrated information theory (IIT) — should be labelled “pseudoscience”. Since its publication on 15 September in the preprint repository PsyArXiv, the letter has some researchers arguing over the label and others worried it will increase polarization in a field that has grappled with issues of credibility in the past.Decades-long bet on consciousness ends — and it’s philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0

“I think it’s inflammatory to describe IIT as pseudoscience,” says neuroscientist Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK, adding that he disagrees with the label. “IIT is a theory, of course, and therefore may be empirically wrong,” says neuroscientist Christof Koch, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, and a proponent of the theory. But he says that it makes its assumptions — for example, that consciousness has a physical basis and can be mathematically measured — very clear.

There are dozens of theories that seek to understand consciousness — everything that a human or non-human experiences, including what they feel, see and hear — as well as its underlying neural foundations. IIT has often been described as one of the central theories, alongside others, such as global neuronal workspace theory (GNW), higher-order thought theory and recurrent processing theory. It proposes that consciousness emerges from the way information is processed within a ‘system’ (for instance, networks of neurons or computer circuits), and that systems that are more interconnected, or integrated, have higher levels of consciousness.

A growing discomfort

Hakwan Lau, a neuroscientist at Riken Center for Brain Science in Wako, Japan, and one of the authors of the letter, says that some researchers in the consciousness field are uncomfortable with what they perceive as a discrepancy between IIT’s scientific merit and the considerable attention it receives from the popular media because of how it is promoted by advocates. “Has IIT become a leading theory because of academic acceptance first, or is it because of the popular noise that kind of forced the academics to give it acknowledgement?”, Lau asks.If AI becomes conscious: here’s how researchers will know

Negative feelings towards the theory intensified after it captured headlines in June. Media outlets, including Nature, reported the results of an ‘adversarial’ study that pitted IIT and GNW against one another. The experiments, which included brain scans, didn’t prove or completely disprove either theory, but some researchers found it problematic that IIT was highlighted as a leading theory of consciousness, prompting Lau and his co-authors to draft their letter.

But why label IIT as pseudoscience? Although the letter doesn’t clearly define pseudoscience, Lau notes that a “commonsensical definition” is that pseudoscience refers to “something that is not very scientifically supported, that masquerades as if it is already very scientifically established”. In this sense, he thinks that IIT fits the bill.

Is it testable?

Additionally, Lau says, some of his co-authors think that it’s not possible to empirically test IIT’s core assumptions, which they argue contributes to the theory’s status as pseudoscience.Decoding the neuroscience of consciousness

Seth, who is not a proponent of IIT, although he has worked on related ideas in the past, disagrees. “The core claims are harder to test than other theories because it’s a more ambitious theory,” he says. But there are some predictions stemming from the theory, about neural activity associated with consciousness, for instance, that can be tested, he adds. A 2022 review found 101 empirical studies involving IIT2.

Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University, in Israel, who co-led the adversarial study of IIT versus GNW, also defends IIT’s testability at the neural level. “Not only did we test it, we managed to falsify one of its predictions,” she says. “I think many people in the field don’t like IIT, and this is completely fine. Yet it is not clear to me what is the basis for claiming that it is not one of the leading theories.”

The same criticism about a lack of meaningful empirical tests could be made about other theories of consciousness, says Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist and writer who lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, and who is a former student of Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is a proponent of IIT. “Everyone who works in the field has to acknowledge that we don’t have perfect brain scans,” he says. “And yet, somehow, IIT is singled out in the letter as this being a problem that’s unique to it.”

Damaging effect

Lau says he doesn’t expect a consensus on the topic. “But I think if it is known that, let’s say, a significant minority of us are willing to [sign our names] that we think it is pseudoscience, knowing that some people may disagree, that’s still a good message.” He hopes that the letter reaches young researchers, policymakers, journal editors and funders. “All of them right now are very easily swayed by the media narrative.”

Mudrik, who emphasizes that she deeply respects the people who signed the letter, some of whom are close collaborators and friends, says that she worries about the effect it will have on the way the consciousness field is perceived. “Consciousness research has been struggling with scepticism from its inception, trying to establish itself as a legitimate scientific field,” she says. “In my opinion, the way to fight such scepticism is by conducting excellent and rigorous research”, rather than by publicly calling out certain people and ideas.

Hoel fears that the letter might discourage the development of other ambitious theories. “The most important thing for me is that we don’t make our hypotheses small and banal in order to avoid being tarred with the pseudoscience label.”

Não espere que uma ‘teoria de tudo’ explique tudo (Folha de S.Paulo)

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Dennis Overbye

14 de setembro de 2023

Nem mesmo a física mais avançada pode revelar tudo o que queremos saber sobre a história e o futuro do cosmos, ou sobre nós mesmos

Para que servem as leis da física, se não podemos resolver as equações que as descrevem?

Essa foi a pergunta que me ocorreu ao ler um artigo no The Guardian escrito por Andrew Pontzen, um cosmólogo do University College London que passa os dias realizando simulações computacionais de buracos negros, estrelas, galáxias e do nascimento e crescimento do universo. O que ele queria dizer era que ele e todos nós estamos fadados ao fracasso.

“Mesmo que imaginemos que a humanidade acabará descobrindo uma ‘teoria de tudo’ que abrange todas as partículas e forças individuais, o valor explicativo dessa teoria para o universo como um todo será provavelmente marginal”, escreveu Pontzen.

Não importa o quanto pensemos conhecer as leis básicas da física e a lista cada vez maior de partículas elementares, não há poder computacional suficiente no universo para acompanhar todas elas. E nunca poderemos saber o bastante para prever com segurança o que acontece quando todas essas partículas colidem ou interagem de outra forma. Um ponto decimal adicionado a uma estimativa da localização ou velocidade de uma partícula, digamos, pode repercutir ao longo da história e alterar o resultado bilhões de anos depois, por meio do chamado “efeito borboleta” da teoria do caos.

Considere algo tão simples quanto, por exemplo, a órbita da Terra em torno do sol, diz Pontzen. Deixado à sua própria conta, nosso mundo, ou seu fóssil crocante, continuaria para sempre na mesma órbita. Mas na amplidão do tempo cósmico os empurrões gravitacionais de outros planetas do sistema solar podem alterar seu curso. Dependendo da precisão com que caracterizamos esses empurrões e do material que está sendo empurrado, os cálculos gravitacionais podem produzir previsões extremamente divergentes sobre onde a Terra e seus irmãos estarão daqui a centenas de milhões de anos.

Como resultado, na prática, não podemos prever o futuro nem o passado. Cosmólogos como Pontzen podem proteger suas apostas diminuindo o zoom e considerando o panorama geral —grandes aglomerações de materiais, como nuvens de gás, ou sistemas cujo comportamento coletivo é previsível e não depende de variações individuais. Podemos ferver macarrão sem monitorar cada molécula de água.

Mas existe o risco de se presumir muita ordem. Veja um formigueiro, sugere Pontzen. Os movimentos de qualquer formiga parecem aleatórios. Mas se você olhar o todo, o formigueiro parece fervilhar com propósito e organização. É tentador ver uma consciência coletiva em ação, escreve Pontzen, mas “são apenas formigas solitárias” que seguem regras simples. “A sofisticação emerge do grande número de indivíduos que seguem essas regras”, observa ele, citando o físico Philip W. Anderson, de Princeton: “Mais é diferente”.

Na cosmologia, formou-se uma explicação plausível da história do universo através de suposições simples sobre coisas sobre as quais nada sabemos —matéria escura e energia escura—, mas que, no entanto, constituem 95% do universo. Supostamente, esse “lado negro” do universo interage com 5% da matéria conhecida —átomos— apenas através da gravidade. Depois do Big Bang, conta a história, formaram-se poças de matéria escura, que puxaram a matéria atômica, que se condensou em nuvens, que se aqueceram e se transformaram em estrelas e galáxias. À medida que o universo se expandiu, a energia escura que o permeia também se expandiu e começou a afastar as galáxias cada vez mais rapidamente.

Mas essa narrativa falha logo no início, nas primeiras centenas de milhões de anos, quando estrelas, galáxias e buracos negros se formavam num processo confuso e pouco compreendido que os investigadores chamam de “gastrofísica”.

Sua mecânica é espantosamente difícil de prever, envolvendo campos magnéticos, a natureza e composição das primeiras estrelas e outros efeitos desconhecidos. “Certamente ninguém pode fazer isso agora, partindo simplesmente das leis confiáveis da física, independentemente da quantidade de potência de computação oferecida”, disse Pontzen por e-mail.

Dados recentes do Telescópio Espacial James Webb, revelando galáxias e buracos negros que parecem demasiado maciços e demasiado precoces no universo para serem explicados pelo “modelo padrão” da cosmologia, parecem ampliar o problema. Isso é suficiente para fazer os cosmólogos voltarem às suas pranchetas?

Pontzen não está convencido de que chegou a hora de os cosmólogos abandonarem seu modelo de universo duramente conquistado. A história cósmica é complexa demais para ser simulada em detalhes. Só o nosso sol, salienta ele, contém 1057 átomos, e existem trilhões e trilhões dessas estrelas por aí.

Há meio século, astrônomos descobriram que o universo, com suas estrelas e galáxias, estava repleto de radiação de micro-ondas que sobrou do Big Bang. O mapeamento dessa radiação permitiu que eles criassem uma imagem do cosmos bebê, como existia apenas 380 mil anos após o início dos tempos.

Em princípio, toda a história poderia estar incorporada ali nos caracóis sutis da energia primordial. Na prática, é impossível ler o desdobrar do tempo nessas micro-ondas suficientemente bem para discernir a ascensão e a queda dos dinossauros, o alvorecer da era atômica ou o aparecimento de um ponto de interrogação no céu bilhões de anos mais tarde. Quase 14 bilhões de anos de incerteza quântica, acidentes e detritos cósmicos permanecem entre então e agora.

Na última contagem, os físicos identificaram cerca de 17 tipos de partículas elementares que constituem o universo físico e pelo menos quatro formas de interação —através da gravidade, do eletromagnetismo e das chamadas forças nucleares fortes e fracas.

A aposta cósmica que a ciência ocidental empreendeu é mostrar que essas quatro forças, e talvez outras ainda não descobertas, agindo sobre um vasto conjunto de átomos e seus constituintes, são suficientes para explicar as estrelas, o arco-íris, as flores, nós mesmos e, de fato, a existência do universo como um todo. É uma enorme montanha intelectual e filosófica para escalar.

Na verdade, apesar de toda a nossa fé no materialismo, diz Pontzen, talvez nunca saibamos se tivemos sucesso. “Nossas origens estão escritas no céu”, disse ele, “e estamos apenas aprendendo a lê-las.”

Tradução de Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves

The Mystery Genes That Are Keeping You Alive (Wired)

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Nobody knows what around a fifth of your genes actually do. It’s hoped they could hold the secret to fixing developmental disorders, cancer, neurodegeneration, and more.

Original article

dna molecule illustration

Roger Highfield – Aug 8, 2023 2:00 PM

One could be forgiven for a little genetic déjà vu.

Launched in 1990, the Human Genome Project unveiled its first readout of the human DNA sequence with great fanfare in 2000. The human genome was declared essentially complete in 2003—but it took nearly 20 more years before the final, complete version was released.

This did not mark the end of humankind’s genetic puzzle, however. A new study has mapped the yawning gap between reading our genes and understanding them. Vast parts of the genome—areas the study authors have nicknamed the “Unknome”—are made of genes whose function we still don’t know.

This has important implications for medicine: Genes are the instructions for making the protein building blocks of the body. Plenty of those still shrouded in darkness could have profound medical significance and may hold the keys to disorders of development, cancer, neurodegeneration, and more.

The study makes it embarrassingly clear just how many important genes we know little to nothing about. It estimates that a fifth of human genes with a vital function are still essentially a mystery. The good news is that the research also outlines how scientists can focus on those mystery genes. “We might now be at the beginning of the end of the Unknome,” says Matthew Freeman of the Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford, a coauthor of the study.

The research team used two tools to find the gaps in our knowledge. First, using the plethora of existing databases of genetic information, they compared the genetic codes of many different species to reveal genes that look roughly similar.

These riffs on a genetic theme are known as conserved genes, and even if we don’t understand what they do, we know that they must be important because nature is parsimonious and tends to use the same genetic machinery to do important jobs in different organisms. “The one thing we could be confident of is that, if important, these genes would be quite well-conserved across evolution,” says Freeman.

Once they had found similar genetic riffs in worms, humans, flies, bacteria, and other organisms, the researchers could look at what was known about the function of these clearly important genes and score them accordingly, with a high “knownness” score reflecting solid understanding.

Because so much genetic information is already available on hundreds of genomes and recorded in a standardized way, it was possible to automate this scoring process. “We then asked how many of those [conserved genes] have a score of less than one, where essentially nothing is known about them,” says Freeman. “To our surprise, two decades after the first human genome, it is still an extraordinary number.”

In all, the total number of human genes with a knownness score of 1 or less is currently 1,723 out of 19,664.

By the same token, the top 10 genes identified by the team’s rummage through genetic databases corresponded with “all the most famous genes, which is reassuring,” says Sean Munro of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, a study coauthor. “We recognized every single one of them, and there are already thousands of papers about each of them.”

When it came to the substantial number that were unknown, the team conducted one more study, using the best understood (at the genetic level) organism of all: Drosophila melanogaster. These fruit flies have been the subject of research for more than a century because they are easy and inexpensive to breed, have a short life cycle, produce lots of young, and can be genetically modified in numerous ways.

The team used gene editing to dial down the use of around 300 low-scoring genes found in both humans and fruit flies. “We found that one-quarter of these unknown genes were lethal—when knocked out, they caused the flies to die, and yet nobody had ever known anything about them,” says Freeman. “Another 25 percent of them caused changes in the flies—phenotypes—that we could detect in many ways.” These genes were linked with fertility, development, locomotion, protein quality control, and resilience to stress. “That so many fundamental genes are not understood was eye-opening,” Freeman says. It’s possible that variation in these genes could have very big impacts on human health.

All of this “unknomics” information is held on a database, which the team is making available for other researchers to use to discover new biology. The next step may be to hand the data on these mystery genes and the mystery proteins they create over to AI.

DeepMind’s AlphaFold, for example, can provide important insights into what mystery proteins do, notably by revealing how they interact with other proteins, says Alex Bateman of the European Bioinformatics Institute, based near Cambridge, UK. So can cryo-EM, which is a way of producing images of large, complex molecules, he says. And a University College London team has shown a systematic way to use machine learning to figure out what proteins do in yeast.

The Unknome is unusual in that it’s a biology database that will shrink as we understand it better. The paper shows that over the past decade “we have moved from 40 percent to 20 percent of the human proteome having a certain level of unknownness,” says Bateman. However, at current progress rates, working out the function of all human protein-coding genes could take more than half a century, Freeman estimates.

The discovery that so many genes remain misunderstood reflects what is called the streetlight effect, or the drunkard’s search principle, an observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look. In this case, it has caused what Freeman and Munro call a “bias in biological research toward the previously studied.”

The same goes for researchers, who tend to get funding for research in relatively well-understood areas, rather than going off into what Freeman calls the wilderness. This is why the database is so important, Munro explains—it fights back against the economics of academia, which avoids things that are very poorly understood. “There is a need for a different type of support to address these unknowns,” says Munro.

But even with the database becoming available and researchers picking through it, there will still be some knowledge blind spots. The study focused on genes that are responsible for proteins. Over the past two decades, uncharted areas of the genome have also been found to harbor the code for small RNAs—scraps of genetic material that can affect other genes, and which are critical regulators of normal development and bodily functions. There may be more “unknown unknowns” lurking in the human genome.

For now, there’s still plenty to get into, and Freeman hopes this work will encourage others to study the genetic Terra Incognita: “There’s more than enough Unknome for anyone who wants to explore genuinely new biology.”

Amid Indian Nationalism, Pseudoscience Seeps Into Academia (Undark)

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Scientists and students participate in the 2019 March for Science at Rajabazar Science College, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Visual: Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

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In recent years, falsehoods have spread to institutions, where the next generation of scientists are being educated.

By Arbab Ali & Nadeem Sarwar

07.26.2023

In Oct. 2022, India’s Ministry of Science and Technology, in collaboration with other ministries and departments, announced that it would host a four-day conference called “Akash For Life” at a university in the northern Indian city of Dehradun.

“Akash” translates to “sky” or “spirit” in Hindi, and refers to one of five universal elements according to Hinduism. The event, according to its organizers, would integrate such traditional concepts into an academic sphere, and seek to “educate the youth of India to the wisdom of ancient science along with modern scientific advancements.”

But no sooner than the event was announced, it stirred furor in the Indian scientific community.

Related: The Threat of Pseudoscience in India

In a statement issued later that month, the Karnataka chapter of the nonprofit India March for Science wrote, “We reject the concept of Panchabhootas” — referring to the Hindu concept of the five elements. “The sky, earth, water are not elements. Such concepts have been deleted from science books a long time back.”

The West Bengal chapter was similarly clear in its disapproval: “Any attempt to belittle or trivialize humanity’s quest for knowledge through the scientific method has to be debunked and thoroughly rejected.”

The Ministry of Science and Technology did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Undark.

The “Akash” conference was just one of the latest events in India to face charges of pseudoscience as academics grow concerned about the country’s rise of conspiracies and falsehoods. Journalist Ruchi Kumar reported on this phenomenon for Undark in 2018, but experts say such discourse has only picked up in pace — and increasingly spread to institutions, where the next generation of scientists are being educated.

Aniket Sule, an associate professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, noted that while fringe voices can be few and far between, they are still given prominence at conferences and meetings, which paints a wrong picture for the entire faculty.

“Now, what has happened is that these fringe right-wing sympathizers have been given prominence,” said Sule. “Even if, for example, out of a hundred people, if there is one right-wing sympathizer, then that one person would be called to all events.”

Many experts have tied the rise of pseudoscience in India to the Bharatiya Janata Party, a right-wing political party that came to power in 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was elected. Members of the party have repeatedly amplified scientific falsehoods — for instance, that cow urine can cure cancer, or that ancient Indians invented the internet.

“It is clear that the government is propagating this sort of pseudoscience,” said Soumitro Banerjee, an engineering professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Kolkata.

Such claims often tout the superiority of traditional knowledge over modern science and cite ancient Hindu texts as evidence. In recent years, they have leapt over to academic circles.

A screenshot of the audience in attendance at “Akash For Life” in the fall of 2022. Visual: Uttaranchal University/YouTube

In 2019, for example, G. Nageswara Rao, then vice chancellor of Andhra University, said that the Kauravas — who appear in the Hindu epic Mahabharata — were born of “stem cell and test tube technology.”

More recently, news came out that Laxmidhar Behera, director of the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, once claimed to have performed an exorcism with holy chants. When asked about the experience, Behera later told the newspaper The Indian Express, “Ghosts exist, yes.”

Scientific falsehoods have not only been espoused by academics, but have also made their way into course teachings.

In 2020, the Indian Institute of Technology Indore introduced a class to impart mathematical and scientific knowledge from ancient texts in the Sanskrit language. And in February of this year, IIT Kanpur — one of the country’s most elite universities — invited Rajiv Malhotra for a guest lecture. In the past, Malhotra cited an satirical article in denying the Greek civilization’s existence and touted the spiritual concept of the “third eye” as a substitute for medical diagnosis.

The same month, a group of scientists and researchers criticized the National Commission for Indian System of Medicine — the regulatory body governing public medical institutions’ policies — for introducing medical astrology as an elective in the Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery program, which is offered at hundreds of institutions in India. The course material offers remedies in the form of mantras, amulets with protective powers, rituals, and counseling based on astrological calculations.

Aniket Sule noted that while fringe voices can be few and far between, they are still given prominence at conferences and meetings.

Ayurveda is a traditional system of Indian medicine that takes a natural approach to healing. Practitioners believe that diseases happen due to an imbalance in a person’s consciousness, and therefore, rely on a healing system that involves herbs, exercises, and meditation.

But Ayurveda is a topic of contention, and its claims can be at odds with modern medical science. Cyriac Abby Philips, an Indian liver doctor based in Kerala who regularly debunks pseudoscientific claims on social media, said the alternative Ayurvedic medical system is based on pseudoscientific principles.

Ayurveda has no basis in science, “but the whole aspect is that it has deep links to culture, tradition, and religion in India,” Philips told Undark. Yet, he said, the government is promoting Ayurvedic practices. A few years ago, for example, the National Health Mission, a government program that aims to improve access to health care, introduced a bridge course — designed to help students transition from one academic level to another — to allow Ayurveda doctors to prescribe treatments based on western medical sciences despite never studying it as part of their degree course. The move, according to the government, was to address the lack of doctors in rural areas, but the president of the Indian Medical Association has said there is no shortage. While the bridge course was ultimately dropped, some states have allowed Ayurveda doctors to prescribe and dispense medicines.

The National Health Mission did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Undark.

Meanwhile, the University Grants Commission, the statutory body responsible for maintaining the country’s higher education standards, asked all universities in India to “encourage” their students to take the Kamdhenu Gau Vigyan Prachar-Prasar Examination, a national-level test on “gau vigyan” or “cow science” — referring to research on the animal, which is considered sacred in Hinduism. The syllabus for the exam made claims including that earthquakes happen due to cow slaughter, and that cow byproducts are capable of curing a whole host of diseases.

The University Grants Commission did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Undark.

“It is clear that the government is propagating this sort of pseudoscience,” said Soumitra Banarjee.

In India, higher education institutions are intricately tied to the national government.“Save for a few exceptions, almost every single academic institution is reliant heavily on government funding,” said Mohammad Nadeem, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Aligarh Muslim University.

Nadeem said that, while he believes it’s important to take pride in Indian culture and heritage, glorifying its past with false claims does not serve anyone.

Natesan Yogesh, an assistant professor of physics at the National Institute of Technology Calicut, noted that many professors at these prestigious universities believe in superstitions, but “it is not just a single faculty is approving and they come up with certain ideas. From the top itself, they are asking for proposals.”

In April, the exclusion of Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution from high school textbooks became national news in India. More than 1,800 scientists, educators, and community members signed a letter condemning the move, calling it a “travesty of education.”

But while some students and academics have been vocal in speaking out against the rise of pseudoscience and Hindu nationalism, experts noted that many are quiet, whether it be out of fear of retaliation — including denying funding and promotional opportunities — or simple opportunism.

According to Banerjee, higher-ups at Indian scientific institutes have tried to stymie anti-pseudoscience protests since they are nearing retirement. “These people have aspirations or ambitions of being vice chancellors somewhere,” Banerjee added.

“In India, save for a few exceptions, almost every single academic institution is reliant heavily on government funding,” said Mohammad Nadeem.

In an email to Undark, G.L. Krishna, an Ayurvedic physician and a visiting scholar at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, wrote that dissenting voices are often “unnecessarily scared.” But according to Sule, the professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, even though those who actually believe in pseudoscience are a minority, such public statements can impact careers.

In universities and institutions “where promotions are in the hands of top authorities, there this political favoritism is happening a lot,” said Sule. He, along with other faculty members interviewed by Undark, said that political affiliations dictate progress in academic careers, so people often choose to stay silent.

Indeed, many heads of educational institutions in India have been vocal supporters of or involved in the national government. Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit, for example, was named the vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University early last year, and has voiced support for the ruling BJP party as well as called for “China-style” persecution of left-leaning voices. Rupinder Tewari, a previous candidate for the vice-chancellor post in Panjab University, alleged that only BJP-affiliated candidates were called in for the interview.

The Panjab University did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Undark.

    Some academics wonder what effect the pseudoscientific trend might have on India’s reputation among the international scientific community. “But in the long run, it’s these pseudoscience peddlers who are being watched and earning the ire of the international academia and science diaspora,” said Sule.

    Still, dissenting voices such as Banerjee and Krishna are hopeful that more people will speak out, and that scientific methods will take precedence in Indian academic spheres.

    “Reality-based thinking as opposed to belief-based thinking must carry weight,” wrote Krishna. “That’s the only way.”

    Arbab Ali and Nadeem Sarwar are independent reporters based in Delhi, India.

    Pack up the parachute: why global north–south collaborations need to change (Nature)

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    nature.com

    Gewin, Virginia

    July 24, 2023

    Marine scientist Ocean Mercier says requests to collaborate with researchers in the global south should be sincere and respectful. Credit: Grant Maiden

    Most scientific-journal articles come from wealthy countries in the global north. Often, well-funded researchers initiate short-term projects in southern countries — which are typically poorer and often have a history of colonial occupation — frequently without seeking substantive local input or expertise. Dubbed parachute or helicopter research, this is a long-standing tradition steeped in colonialism, say those campaigning for change.

    In 2018, global-north countries produced an average of more than 35,000 scientific and technical journal articles each, whereas global-south countries, excluding India and China, produced 4,000 articles each. Less than 2% of the articles from the global south made it into the top 1% of most-cited articles globally. A host of reasons — notably, lower rates of English proficiency, less investment and institutional biases against global-south researchers — are to blame. But another important factor is that there are fewer researchers in the global south: 713 per million people compared with 4,351 per million in the global north in 2017 (B. Albanna et al. Scientometrics 126, 8375–8431; 2021).

    The geosciences offer an extreme example of how parachute research is alive and well, particularly in Africa. Around 3,500 high-impact geoscience articles are published each year, with roughly 3.9% of them relating to an area in Africa. Yet only 30% of those articles had an African researcher as an author.

    Nature spoke to four global-south researchers who say that it’s time for their global-north colleagues to pack up the parachute and have frank discussions about how to conduct equitable collaborations.

    OCEAN MERCIER: Put Indigenous people, not their knowledge, first

    Marine and freshwater researcher at Victoria University of Wellington.

    Indigenous researchers such as myself often receive floods of invitations to be the Indigenous or Māori voice on grant applications, despite there being few of us. Earlier this year, several Indigenous scholars met a US National Science Foundation delegation that came to Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand) seeking feedback on their plans to have a co-funded Indigenous grant. I liked that they were not rushing the conversation. We sent the message — and it’s not a new one — that Indigenous scholars don’t really want further amplification. We get enough requests from our non-Indigenous compatriots to collaborate.

    Related: Decolonizing science toolkit

    I typically get a couple of cold calls per week. It ranges from people wanting advice on some school curriculum, to invitations to speak at a conference or to get involved in a research project. The time it takes to respond adds up.

    I can share insights into what gets a request rejected. First, Indigenous researchers can tell the difference between spam and an actual request. Sometimes it’s quite a fine line. If the request is not right up my alley, and there’s no kind of recognition of the time that I’m putting in, then that usually gets a spike. There are also trigger words or sentences that get an automatic spike. For example, if it looks extractive in any way, as in simply wanting Māori knowledge, it’s spiked. Also, if the request states that they are required to reach out to Māori people, or policy dictates they need to incorporate knowledge from our community, it’s spiked.

    Although I prefer to be included from a project’s conception, I will join a collaboration that has already been planned as long as I am certain that my knowledge will not be discounted. There’s a bit of a tension there, however, because I don’t necessarily have the time to be involved in two years of lead-up conversations for every project.

    In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the government’s Vision Mātauranga policy focuses on unlocking “the science and innovation potential of Māori knowledge, resources and people”. Unfortunately, this wording puts Māori people last. The approach is a bit grabby, as if to say, ‘what we really need is your knowledge’. It feels like another kind of colonial grip on information. I think we need to put people first, rather than digging into treasure boxes for our knowledge.

    I have really liked working with people from the global north, such as those from Canada and the United States. But our happy place as Indigenous peoples is working with our communities and diving into the deep end to solve issues, rather than advance conventional science.

    Samia Chasi speaking on a panel with two other people at a German Academic Exchange Service event.
    Samia Chasi (centre) says equitable collaborations get everyone on board from the start.Credit: Stefan Zeitz/DAAD

    SAMIA CHASI: Shift lingering colonial power dynamics

    Internationalization practioner-scholar at the International Education Association of South Africa in Johannesburg.

    About ten years ago, I worked in the international office at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Several times a week, we would receive a request from a researcher looking for a collaborator at the university. But the project was often already fully conceived and funded. I saw a number of academics turn down these offers, which surprised the global-north researchers. Some Witwatersrand researchers were not interested in collaborations that they knew did not expect any meaningful intellectual input from them. The offers were even described as academic tourism. I should highlight that this was at one of the top institutions in the country, where there was a certain confidence and assertiveness to say ‘we are leaders in our own right’. But it’s nuanced. Many institutions, or individuals, in the global south need the funding and prestige that comes with international partnerships and will take whatever comes along.

    Since 2018, I have worked with several funding organizations in northern Europe to discuss how to move away from the typical funding logic or methodology, which is rooted in the belief that global-north institutions have all the knowledge and technologies, and are looking to transfer them to partners in the global south. We need instead to form reciprocal, mutually beneficial engagements.

    Related: Institutions must acknowledge the racist roots in science

    Sometimes, I make a deliberate effort to say south–north partnerships, because I want to highlight that I’m looking from a southern perspective. We need new language, new terms. But we haven’t found them yet. During my PhD on decolonization and internationalization, I came across the idea that one way to forgo binary thinking was to create a third space. By leaving terms such as north and south behind, we could create a space that allows participants to begin to shift power dynamics that have been entrenched by colonial or imperial legacies.

    An equitable collaboration begins when everyone is at the table when the research question is first identified — not when some members are picked up later on. North–south collaborators will typically have different ideas on how to approach the core research question. A lot of qualitative research and methods have been shaped by global-north perspectives and traditions. But how can we formulate these questions together? Do we come up with something that actually serves everyone’s needs, and not just those of one person, institution or country? Which literature are we citing? Whose knowledge matters? And once a research project comes to an end, what knowledge have you generated and how are you going to share it? More-critical engagement is one of the biggest challenges.

    These dynamics are not just between north and south; they also happen between privileged and historically disadvantaged universities. The African Research Universities Alliance was formed in 2015 to identify Africa’s own problems and work on solutions — from the driver’s seat. We are determining the research agenda. We now have two African Centres for the Study of the United States; one at Witswatersrand and the other at the University of Pretoria. It is a way to create our own knowledge and critical reflection about the United States — rather than just believing what the country is telling us.

    ALINE GHILARDI: Demand repatriation of extracted fossils

    Palaeontologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Natal, Brazil.

    In palaeontology, there is a lingering aspect of colonialism: global-north academics who extract fossils from countries in the global south.

    Since 2010, I have advocated for the repatriation of fossils. In 2019, once I got tenure, I became more vocal in the fight. On 4 June, after three years of effort, the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe in Germany returned a fossil that it had kept for 25 years. The fossil was that of the first known non-avian dinosaur with spear-like feathers on its shoulders (Ubirajara jubatus). It was found in the state of Ceará, Brazil. Scientists learnt about the fossil in 2020, but it had been sitting in a drawer in the German museum until then. That fossil could have changed the path of palaeontology in this country. I was angry and decided to do something.

    Related: Decolonizing the biosciences: Turning lip service into action

    I first wrote to the Brazilian national agencies responsible for fossil permits, but decided to go public, too. With more than 30,000 followers on Twitter, I have considerable reach and used it to explain to the public why this was problematic. Many Brazilian people agreed that the fossil was outstanding and couldn’t understand why it was in Germany. We started a social-media campaign around the hashtag #UbirajaraBelongsToBrazil, tweeting about the legal framework, explaining what parachute research is and why this fossil could benefit the Brazilian people.

    I’m willing to use my voice to get more fossils back to Brazil. We expect more than 1,000 fossils to be returned later this year from France. And we have had 39 spider fossils returned from researchers in Texas who asked how to repatriate them. Who knows how many more fossils are out there that we don’t know about?

    This is not a new phenomenon. Often, fossils get illegally trafficked, even though we have laws that say that fossils are cultural objects in Brazil and cannot be sold. We also have strict laws governing how foreign researchers should proceed when studying local fossils. Also, some local Indigenous people believe that these fossils are from another dimension, so when researchers parachute in and remove them, it’s not just the scientific but also the social and cultural context that gets harmed.

    The Ceará region is extremely socio-economically vulnerable but also an exceptional place for palaeontology. Sometimes, global-north researchers buy fossils from the area with good intentions, thinking that they are helping the community. But not only is it illegal, it is robbing Brazilian researchers of collaborations and encouraging a trade that can destroy crucial original fossil features and details about the environment that the specimen lived in.

    Related: Weaving Indigenous knowledge into the scientific method

    Discussing the problematic legacy of colonialism is new in this field. The typical view of palaeontologists is one of white men from aristocratic backgrounds who travel to ‘savage’ lands in search of fossils. But palaeontology has changed a lot in the past 20 years, and now includes more voices of people who understand what it is like to be oppressed. I have worked with wonderfully respectful global-north colleagues, but also with some who actively dismissed my knowledge. It is very frustrating.

    In 2022, I became vocal about how, over the past 30 years, in roughly 90% of research published about fossils from this area, the fossils were housed in foreign institutions. My colleagues and I published a paper that found that almost 60% of the 71 publications between 1990–2020 on Cretaceous macrofossils from the Araripe Basin in northeastern Brazil were led by foreign researchers, and more than half of foreign-led publications did not collaborate with local researchers (J. C. Cisneros et al. R. Soc. Open Sci. 9, 210898; 2022).

    Some global-north colleagues say that I am being unnecessarily aggressive by pointing out this problem. But researchers from both the global north and the global south need to talk about these colonial legacies — from legal, moral and ethical perspectives — to solve them. I’m optimistic that the conversation is heading in a constructive direction. But I would like to see journals require researchers to add a statement in publications about how the fossils were acquired and the legal background on their acquisition. This would be an interesting step to stop many of the currently harmful actions by global-north researchers.

    Minal Pathak talking to a colleague in between sessions at the 8th Session of the IPCC.
    Minal Pathak (right) says ‘collaboration’ without true intellectual exchange is insulting.Credit: IISD/ENB/Anastasia Rodopoulou

    MINAL PATHAK: Abandon tokenism and gatekeeping

    Climate-change scientist at Ahmedabad University in Ahmedabad, India.

    In 2021, the news agency Reuters released its list of 1,000 top climate scientists. It included only one woman in the top 20 and only 7 in the top 100. Authors from lower-income countries were barely represented. It was ridiculous. But, along with several other editors at the journal Climate and Development, we published an editorial response around three weeks later, highlighting steps that scholars, editors and publishers could take to close the inequality gap between the global north and global south (E. L. F. Schipper et al. Clim. Dev. 13, 853–856; 2021).

    Related: Decolonization should extend to collaborations, authorship and co-creation of knowledge

    I have noticed both positive and negative changes around equity in publishing. One positive shift is that now, when I submit a paper, often the journal wants to know about my background, including geographical location and gender. They want to know who is submitting papers. It’s a small step forward. By contrast, tokenism has increased. I feel like I get invited only to add colour to an author list. Recently, I joined a policy brief being written mostly by men from the global north. I was one of two brown women. But before I added my input, I received an e-mail saying that the paper had been submitted. I wrote back saying I should have been consulted. I didn’t want to be an author if I hadn’t contributed. Inviting someone just because they are from the global south is worse than not inviting them at all. If there is no intellectual exchange or idea development, it’s not a real collaboration. It’s insulting.

    I don’t think academia can solve structural inequalities in the world, but academics should avoid perpetuating them. Small, lesser-known institutions such as mine in India get left behind. Because just one top-tier journal subscription can cost roughly £2,000–3,000 per year (US$2,600–4,000), it can be difficult for an institution to access all of the literature, which would be something that could help to advance science globally.

    A number of global reports, such those by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, mandate contributions from global-south authors. Without those types of requirement, however, our inclusion isn’t a given. Take climate models and scenarios: their computer codes are effectively owned by select institutions in the global north. As a result, the few that can access them will always have the dominant position. These extreme examples have to go. It’s just not fair.

    These interviews edited for length and clarity.

    Transição para energias renováveis também terá impacto no planeta, diz cientista (Folha de S.Paulo)

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    Lucas Lacerda

    9.mai.2023 às 18h54

    A busca por energias mais limpas, um dos principais desafios para reduzir emissões de gases-estufa e enfrentar as mudanças climáticas, também vai custar recursos ao planeta. Oito bilhões de seres humanos detêm, juntos, um poder de impacto que vai deixar as marcas dessa decisão —seja ela tomada ou não.

    É o que afirma o geólogo Colin Waters, secretário do AWG, sigla em inglês para Grupo de Trabalho do Antropoceno. Formado por 40 cientistas, o coletivo se prepara para apresentar, em junho, uma proposta para o “golden spike”, ponto em algum lugar da Terra que servirá de base para a definição do Antropoceno, a chamada “época dos humanos”.

    Para os cientistas do AWG, a nova época geológica da Terra é marcada pela atividade humana, com a expansão da produção industrial e a elevação do consumo em cadeia global. Seu ponto de início é debatido desde 2009 pelos pesquisadores do grupo.

    Waters, professor na Universidade de Leicester, no Reino Unido, tem sido o porta-voz do AWG para traduzir as implicações de uma nova época no planeta e por que isso é importante. Nesta semana, ele visita o Brasil pela primeira vez, para participar da reunião magna de 2023 da Academia Brasileira de Ciências, no Rio de Janeiro.

    O evento acontece no Museu do Amanhã, com entrada grátis. Waters dará palestra às 11h30 desta quarta (10).

    “Nosso pequeno grupo de trabalho sabe que há evidência científica [do Antropoceno]. Tudo que podemos fazer é usar isso para guiar nossas decisões. Como isso vai ser usado pelas pessoas é papel de políticos”, afirma Waters, em entrevista exclusiva à Folha. “Mas você começa a se perguntar: como lidamos com esse planeta que está mudando?”

    Popularizado no início dos anos 2000 pelo vencedor do Nobel Paul Crutzen, o Antropoceno seria uma nova época geológica, que substituiria o atual Holoceno, iniciado após a última era do gelo, há 11,7 mil anos.

    A década de 1950 se firmou nas discussões como o ponto de início do Antropoceno em razão do aumento generalizado da queima de combustíveis fósseis, da realização de testes nucleares feitos a céu aberto, espalhando quantidades de plutônio pelo mundo, além das detonações de bombas de hidrogênio.

    A ideia inicial de Crutzen sobre o começo do Antropoceno apontava para a revolução industrial, na Inglaterra, no século 18. Mas, naquela etapa, diz Waters, a revolução acontecia na Europa, e para se espalhar levaria boa parte de um século.

    “Quanto mais investigamos, mais perto chegamos da década de 1950. Todos passavam por grandes mudanças na economia e no grau de industrialização. Temos a China decolando entre os anos 1950 e 1960”, explica. “E mesmo a Amazônia estaria ao alcance da contaminação atmosférica por partículas da queima de combustíveis fósseis.”

    E por que não em 1949? “Porque há uma gradação”, diz o geólogo. “As evidências apontam para uma mudança drástica no meio do século 20.”

    Além de pesquisar o marco temporal, é preciso achar um lugar no planeta —o chamado “golden spike”— que possa ser comparado a outros locais para identificar os sedimentos de poluição deixados pela atividade humana.

    A proposta para a definição desse marcador, que deve ser feita em junho, vai escolher um entre 12 locais, que incluem lagos, gelo no Ártico ou corais. Os últimos, segundo o pesquisador, são bons candidatos porque permitem a visualização anual da mudança de partículas.

    Após a decisão do grupo, o tema será votado em outras três instâncias. A última, que vai ratificar a decisão, é a União Internacional de Ciências Geológicas.

    O desafio atual consiste no fato de que definir uma época geológica sempre foi uma tarefa de olhar para o passado —e continua sendo, já que geólogos analisam sedimentos e fósseis—, mas agora há uma outra escala temporal em questão.

    “Uma das boas coisas é que a ciência de hoje permite monitorar esses efeitos quase em tempo real”, diz Waters.

    E esses efeitos dizem respeito a como o planeta se calibra após eventos geológicos como um degelo em larga escala. “Erupções vulcânicas massivas, por exemplo, lançam uma quantidade enorme de gases estufa na atmosfera, com alta rápida, num tempo geológico, de temperatura.”

    A partir daí, o planeta passa por um período de adaptação, com o equilíbrio de temperatura e do nível de oceanos. “Esses níveis se recuperam, mas a biologia, não. As espécies, nessa mudança dramática, se perdem, enquanto o planeta pode voltar a se parecer com o que era 100 mil anos antes”, destaca.

    Para exemplificar os riscos que vivemos hoje, Waters relembra que a mudança desde a última glaciação, que definiu a passagem do Pleistoceno (iniciado há cerca de 1,8 milhão de anos), era gradual até que se tornou intensa a ponto de extinguir espécies e redesenhar o mundo.

    No entanto, na visão do geólogo, a humanidade tem hoje capacidades tecnológicas que podem ser usadas para reduzir a emissão de gases que levam às mudanças climáticas.

    “O problema é saber como manejar o destino dessa trajetória, porque temos poderes para isso. Sabemos quais são os problemas.“

    O pesquisador alerta ainda para o custo dessas decisões. “Temos oito bilhões de pessoas que vivem e buscam um certo padrão de vida. Mesmo se fizermos isso com recursos mais sustentáveis, vamos precisar de materiais cuja extração, como a de minérios, terá um efeito verificável no planeta.“

    O projeto Planeta em Transe é apoiado pela Open Society Foundations.

    Cientistas vão sugerir local de referência para o Antropoceno nesta terça-feira (Folha de S.Paulo)

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    www1.folha.uol.com.br

    11.jul.2023 às 9h01

    3–4 minutes

    A ideia de que humanos já teriam causado um impacto suficiente para marcar uma diferença geológica no planeta está mais perto de se concretizar. Nesta terça-feira (11), um grupo de geólogos vai apresentar sua sugestão de ponto de referência para o Antropoceno, o chamado “golden spike”.

    Esse ponto será usado para comparar as diferenças entre os sedimentos e, no caso do Antropoceno, concentrações distintas de poluentes produzidos pela atividade humana.

    Em relação ao tempo, o marco mais aceito até o momento pelos pesquisadores é o dos anos 1950. O período tem sido sugerido, após mais de uma década de debates, por causa do aumento, em escala mundial, da produção industrial e da elevação do consumo, além de testes nucleares que espalharam partículas plutônio pelo mundo.

    Como o plutônio não ocorre naturalmente nessas quantidades, identificar sua presença no fundo de lagos, por exemplo, é visto como um bom referencial para estudos.

    Esse marco temporal é proposto para retratar a passagem do Holoceno —até agora tido como a nossa época geológica atual, iniciada período da última glaciação, há 11,7 mil anos— para o Antropoceno.

    As muitas localidades possíveis para o “golden spike” foram sendo gradativamente reduzidas, até sobrarem nove, que incluem lagos, gelo no Ártico ou corais. Os últimos, por exemplo, seriam bons candidatos porque seu crescimento é anual, e permitiriam a visualização também anual da mudança de partículas.

    Definir uma época parte de evidências científicas, mas há também uma dimensão simbólica nessa decisão. Segundo especialistas, ela pode ajudar a promover reflexão sobre como queremos lidar com um planeta que está sofrendo efeitos de mudanças climáticas e um aquecimento generalizado, por exemplo.

    Outro ponto de atenção é como a nossa “pegada” sempre vai se manifestar no planeta. Mudar as matrizes de energia para reduzir o uso de combustíveis fósseis também terá um impacto relevante no planeta.

    O processo não termina nesta terça. Após a apresentação da proposta, a sugestão do AWG (sigla em inglês para o Grupo de Trabalho do Antropoceno) precisa ser validada pela Comissão Internacional de Estratigrafia, antes de ser votada na União Internacional de Ciências Geológicas.

    Para a nova época ser aprovada, é necessário haver ao menos 60% de aprovação em cada instância.

    Ciência Fundamental: O Antropoceno dá um passo à frente (Folha de S.Paulo)

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    Ciência Fundamental

    11 de julho de 2023

    Uma revolução fervilha, em fogo baixo, no mundo da geologia. E um anúncio dessa terça-feira, 11 de julho, acaba de aumentar a intensidade da chama: pesquisadores do Grupo de Trabalho do Antropoceno (AWG, na sigla em inglês) elegeram um ponto de referência geológica para demonstrar o advento da “época dos humanos”, ou Antropoceno.

    Na prática, é um avanço na decisão sobre se o Antropoceno deve entrar ou não na escala de tempo geológico que demarca oficialmente eras, períodos, épocas e outros intervalos da idade da Terra como conhecemos.

    Ilustração: Clarice Wenzel, Instituto Serrapilheira

    De uma lista de 12 sítios geológicos que poderiam comprovar o surgimento da nova época, pesquisadores do AWG escolheram o lago Crawford — situado numa reserva natural ao sul de Ontário, no Canadá — como representante físico da mudança.

    Com base em amostras coletadas em 2019 e 2022, um grupo de pesquisadores fez uma importante descoberta: as águas no fundo daquele lago continham oxigênio. Segundo a paleoclimatóloga Francine McCarthy — pesquisadora da Brock University, no Canadá, e coordenadora dos estudos no local —, encontrar oxigênio lá foi importante porque, assim, as camadas de rocha no leito do lago “conseguiram gravar, muito claramente, traços de plutônio liberado na detonação de bombas nucleares no início dos anos 1950” — marco temporal proposto como ponto de partida para o Antropoceno.

    Para cravar um marco novo na cronologia geológica, os cientistas devem, antes de mais nada, recolher diversas amostras de rocha — e elas precisam espelhar uma grande mudança que tenha acontecido simultaneamente em escala global. No caso do Antropoceno, a explosão de bombas de hidrogênio poderia ser esse grande evento, já que nenhum continente escapou da radioatividade dessas explosões.

    Uma vez eleita a amostra mais significativa, a discussão muda de patamar e é encaminhada para instâncias superiores. Agora a proposta do AWG precisa ser aprovada pela União Internacional de Ciências Geológicas, quando então a nomenclatura se tornará oficial. “A exigência de passar por três níveis de votação obriga a proposta a ser muito sólida. É um processo muito conservador, e há uma razão para tanto: não se pode formalizar uma unidade [estratigráfica] sem o apoio de evidências robustas,” diz o geólogo Colin Waters, coordenador do AWG.

    Popularizado em 2000 pelo biólogo Eugene Stoermer e pelo Nobel de Química Paul Crutzen, o termo Antropoceno deriva do grego — combinação de anthropos (humano) e ceno (novo) — e batiza uma nova divisão geológica, na qual as atividades humanas tiveram um impacto decisivo na mudança ambiental. Assim a Terra deixa para trás o Holoceno, iniciado no fim da última glaciação, há cerca de 11.700 anos.

    Foi no Holoceno que a humanidade conseguiu seus maiores avanços, da criação de sistemas de agricultura a progressos no âmbito da política e da economia, passando pelo surgimento da escrita e da ciência. “Como o clima no Holoceno se manteve extraordinariamente estável, a Europa, sobretudo no Renascimento, se deu o luxo de criar uma filosofia que não levava a natureza em conta, como se apenas a relação entre humanos fosse decisiva,” diz Renzo Taddei, professor de antropologia da Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp).

    Por isso Taddei, que vem se debruçando sobre o tema há quase duas décadas, considera o Antropoceno uma “virada de chave” dramática, já que confere protagonismo à natureza na esfera do pensamento humano. “O Antropoceno nos mostra que o otimismo renascentista com relação à técnica, ao domínio da natureza e posteriormente ao capitalismo industrial era uma ilusão”, ele acrescenta.

    Para o físico e historiador da ciência Jürgen Renn, diretor do Instituto Max Planck para a História da Ciência, em Berlim, um dos grandes desafios que a possível nova época propõe é fazer “uma geologia do presente”: abrir um novo capítulo no livro geológico enquanto testemunhamos a escrita dessa nova página — ou camada estratigráfica. Além disso, pelas perguntas filosóficas e questionamentos que suscita, a nova época “cria uma ponte entre as ciências naturais e as humanidades”.

    Taddei observa que, enquanto a geologia decide se oficializa o termo ou não, disciplinas como a filosofia e a própria antropologia adotaram-no imediatamente. O conceito não é perfeito, ele diz, “mas consegue encapsular nossa relação disfuncional com o planeta em múltiplas dimensões”. Não porque tomamos consciência de que a reflexão era necessária, mas porque a natureza a impôs, com seu equilíbrio alterado e eventos extremos cada vez mais frequentes e intensos.

    “O Antropoceno nos pegou desavisados. Vejo essa época como um imenso ‘tapa na cara’ da arrogância ocidental moderna, que efetivamente julgava estar resolvendo todos os problemas históricos,” conclui o antropólogo.

    *

    Meghie Rodrigues é jornalista de ciência.

    O blog Ciência Fundamental é editado pelo Serrapilheira, um instituto privado, sem fins lucrativos, que promove a ciência no Brasil. Inscreva-se na newsletter do Serrapilheira para acompanhar as novidades do instituto e do blog.

    The Problem With Weather Apps (The Atlantic)

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    theatlantic.com

    Charlie Warzel

    April 10, 2023

    How are we still getting caught in the rain?

    An illustration of a guy on his phone standing in rain showers.
    Illustration by Daniel Zender. Source: Getty.

    Technologically speaking, we live in a time of plenty. Today, I can ask a chatbot to render The Canterbury Tales as if written by Taylor Swift or to help me write a factually inaccurate autobiography. With three swipes, I can summon almost everyone listed in my phone and see their confused faces via an impromptu video chat. My life is a gluttonous smorgasbord of information, and I am on the all-you-can-eat plan. But there is one specific corner where technological advances haven’t kept up: weather apps.

    Weather forecasts are always a game of prediction and probabilities, but these apps seem to fail more often than they should. At best, they perform about as well as meteorologists, but some of the most popular ones fare much worse. The cult favorite Dark Sky, for example, which shut down earlier this year and was rolled into the Apple Weather app, accurately predicted the high temperature in my zip code only 39 percent of the time, according to ForecastAdvisor, which evaluates online weather providers. The Weather Channel’s app, by comparison, comes in at 83 percent. The Apple app, although not rated by ForecastAdvisor, has a reputation for off-the-mark forecasts and has been consistently criticized for presenting faulty radar screens, mixing up precipitation totals, or, as it did last week, breaking altogether. Dozens of times, the Apple Weather app has lulled me into a false sense of security, leaving me wet and betrayed after a run, bike ride, or round of golf.

    People love to complain about weather forecasts, dating back to when local-news meteorologists were the primary source for those planning their morning commutes. But the apps have produced a new level of frustration, at least judging by hundreds of cranky tweets over the past decade. Nearly two decades into the smartphone era—when anyone can theoretically harness the power of government weather data and dissect dozens of complex, real-time charts and models—we are still getting caught in the rain.

    Weather apps are not all the same. There are tens of thousands of them, from the simply designed Apple Weather to the expensive, complex, data-rich Windy.App. But all of these forecasts are working off of similar data, which are pulled from places such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Traditional meteorologists interpret these models based on their training as well as their gut instinct and past regional weather patterns, and different weather apps and services tend to use their own secret sauce of algorithms to divine their predictions. On an average day, you’re probably going to see a similar forecast from app to app and on television. But when it comes to how people feel about weather apps, these edge cases—which usually take place during severe weather events—are what stick in a person’s mind. “Eighty percent of the year, a weather app is going to work fine,” Matt Lanza, a forecaster who runs Houston’s Space City Weather, told me. “But it’s that 20 percent where people get burned that’s a problem.”

    No people on the planet have a more tortured and conflicted relationship with weather apps than those who interpret forecasting models for a living. “My wife is married to a meteorologist, and she will straight up question me if her favorite weather app says something different than my forecast,” Lanza told me. “That’s how ingrained these services have become in most peoples’ lives.” The basic issue with weather apps, he argues, is that many of them remove a crucial component of a good, reliable forecast: a human interpreter who can relay caveats about models or offer a range of outcomes instead of a definitive forecast.

    Lanza explained the human touch of a meteorologist using the example of a so-called high-resolution forecasting model that can predict only 18 hours out. It is generally quite good, he told me, at predicting rain and thunderstorms—“but every so often it runs too hot and over-indexes the chances of a bad storm.” This model, if left to its own devices, will project showers and thunderstorms blanketing the region for hours when, in reality, the storm might only cause 30 minutes of rain in an isolated area of the mapped region. “The problem is when you take the model data and push it directly into the app with no human interpretation,” he said. “Because you’re not going to get nuance from these apps at all. And that can mean a difference between a chance of rain all day and it’s going to rain all day.”

    But even this explanation has caveats; all weather apps are different, and their forecasts have varying levels of sophistication. Some pipe model data right in, whereas others are curated using artificial intelligence. Peter Neilley, the Weather Channel’s director of weather forecasting sciences and technologies, said in an email that the company’s app incorporates “billions of weather data points,” adding that “our expert team of meteorologists does oversee and correct the process as needed.”

    Weather apps might be less reliable for another reason too. When it comes to predicting severe weather such as snow, small changes in atmospheric moisture—the type of change an experienced forecaster might notice—can cause huge variances in precipitation outcomes. An app with no human curation might choose to average the model’s range of outcomes, producing a forecast that doesn’t reflect the dynamic situation on the ground. Or consider cities with microclimates: “Today, in Chicago, the lakefront will sit in the lower 40s, and the suburbs will be 50-plus degrees,” Greg Dutra, a meteorologist at ABC 7 Chicago, told me. “Often, the difference is even more stark—20-degree swings over just miles.” These sometimes subtle temperature disparities can mean very different forecasts for people living in the same region—something that one-size-fits-all weather apps don’t always pick up.

    Naturally, meteorologists think that what they do is superior to forecasting by algorithm alone, but even weather-app creators told me that the challenges are real. “It’s impossible for a weather-data provider to be accurate everywhere in the world,” Brian Mueller, the founder of the app Carrot Weather, told me. His solution to the problem of app-based imprecision is to give users more ability to choose what they see when they open Carrot, letting them customize what specific weather information the app surfaces as well as what data sources the app will draw from. Mueller said that he learned from Dark Sky’s success how important beautiful, detailed radar maps were—both as a source of weather data and for entertainment purposes. In fact, meteorology seems to be only part of the allure when it comes to building a beloved weather app. Carrot has a pleasant design interface, with bright colors and Easter eggs scattered throughout, such as geography challenges based off of its weather maps. He’s also hooked Carrot up to ChatGPT to allow people to chat with the app’s fictional personality.

    But what if these detailed models and dizzying maps, in the hands of weather rubes like myself,  are the real problem? “The general public has access to more weather information than ever, and I’d posit that that’s a bad thing,” Chris Misenis, a weather-forecasting consultant in North Carolina who goes by the name “Weather Moose,” told me. “You can go to PivotalWeather.com right now and pull up just about any model simulation you want.” He argues that these data are fine to look at if you know how to interpret them, but for people who aren’t trained to analyze them, they are at best worthless and at worst dangerous.

    In fact, forecasts are better than ever, Andrew Blum, a journalist and the author of the book The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast, told me. “But arguably, we are less prepared to understand,” he said, “and act upon that improvement—and a forecast is only as good as our ability to make decisions with it.” Indeed, even academic research around weather apps suggests that apps fail worst when they give users a false sense of certainty around forecasting. A 2016 paper for the Royal Meteorological Society argued that “the current way of conveying forecasts in the most common apps is guilty of ‘immodesty’ (‘not admitting that sometimes predictions may fail’) and ‘impoverishment’ (‘not addressing the broader context in which forecasts … are made’).”

    The conflicted relationship that people have with weather apps may simply be a manifestation of the information overload that dominates all facets of modern life. These products grant anyone with a phone access to an overwhelming amount of information that can be wildly complex. Greg Dutra shared one such public high-resolution model from the NOAA with me that was full of indecipherable links to jargony terms such as “0-2 km max vertical vorticity.” Weather apps seem to respond mostly to this fire hose of data in two ways: By boiling them down to a reductive “partly sunny” icon, or by bombarding the user with information they might not need or understand. At its worst, a modern weather app seems to flatter people, entrusting them to do their own research even if they’re not equipped. I’m not too proud to admit that some of the fun of toying around with Dark Sky’s beautiful radar or Windy.App’s endless array of models is the feeling of role-playing as a meteorologist. But the truth is that I don’t really know what I’m looking at.

    What people seem to be looking for in a weather app is something they can justify blindly trusting and letting into their lives—after all, it’s often the first thing you check when you roll over in bed in the morning. According to the 56,400 ratings of Carrot in Apple’s App Store, its die-hard fans find the app entertaining and even endearing. “Love my psychotic, yet surprisingly accurate weather app,” one five-star review reads. Although many people need reliable forecasting, true loyalty comes from a weather app that makes people feel good when they open it.

    Our weather-app ambivalence is a strange pull between feeling grateful for instant access to information and simultaneously navigating a sense of guilt and confusion about how the experience is also, somehow, dissatisfying—a bit like staring down Netflix’s endless library and feeling as if there’s nothing to watch. Weather apps aren’t getting worse. In fact they’re only getting more advanced, inputting more and more data and offering them to us to consume. Which, of course, might be why they feel worse.

    O mistério do ‘genoma obscuro’ que compõe 98% do nosso DNA (Folha de S.Paulo)

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    Menos de 2% das três bilhões de letras do genoma humano são dedicados às proteínas

    David Cox

    17 de abril de 2023

    Em abril de 2003, o sequenciamento completo do “livro da vida” codificado no genoma humano foi declarado “encerrado”, após 13 anos de trabalho. O mundo estava repleto de expectativas.

    Esperava-se que o Projeto Genoma Humano, depois de consumir cerca de US$ 3 bilhões (R$ 15 bilhões), trouxesse tratamentos para doenças crônicas e esclarecesse todos os detalhes determinados geneticamente sobre as nossas vidas.

    Mas, enquanto as entrevistas coletivas anunciavam o triunfo desta nova era de conhecimento biológico, o manual de instruções para a vida humana já trazia consigo uma surpresa inesperada.

    A convicção que prevalecia na época era que a ampla maioria do genoma humano consistiria de instruções para a produção de proteínas — os “tijolos” que constroem todos os organismos vivos e desempenham uma imensa variedade de papéis nas nossas células e entre elas.

    E, com mais de 200 tipos diferentes de células no corpo humano, parecia fazer sentido que cada uma delas precisasse dos seus próprios genes para realizar suas funções necessárias.

    Acreditava-se que o surgimento de conjuntos exclusivos de proteínas fosse vital na evolução da nossa espécie e dos nossos poderes cognitivos. Afinal, somos a única espécie capaz de sequenciar o nosso próprio genoma.

    Mas o que descobrimos é que menos de 2% dos três bilhões de letras do genoma humano são dedicados às proteínas. Apenas cerca de 20 mil genes codificadores de proteínas foram encontrados nas longas linhas de moléculas que compõem nossas sequências de DNA.

    Os geneticistas ficaram assombrados ao descobrir que os números de genes produtores de proteínas dos seres humanos são similares a algumas das criaturas mais simples do planeta. As minhocas, por exemplo, têm cerca de 20 mil desses genes, enquanto as moscas-das-frutas têm cerca de 13 mil.

    Foi assim que, do dia para a noite, o mundo científico passou a enfrentar uma verdade bastante incômoda: grande parte do nosso entendimento sobre o que nos torna seres humanos talvez estivesse errada.

    “Eu me lembro da incrível surpresa”, afirma o biólogo molecular Samir Ounzain, principal executivo da companhia suíça Haya Therapeutics. A empresa procura utilizar nosso conhecimento sobre a genética humana para desenvolver novos tratamentos para doenças cardiovasculares, câncer e outras enfermidades crônicas.

    “Aquele foi o momento em que as pessoas começaram a se perguntar ‘será que temos um conceito errado do que é a biologia?'”

    Os 98% restantes do nosso DNA ficaram conhecidos como matéria escura, ou o genoma obscuro — uma enorme e misteriosa quantidade de letras sem propósito ou significado óbvio.

    Inicialmente, alguns geneticistas sugeriram que o genoma obscuro fosse simplesmente DNA lixo, uma espécie de depósito de resíduos da evolução humana. Seriam os restos de genes partidos que deixaram de ser relevantes há muito tempo.

    Mas, para outros, sempre ficou claro que o genoma obscuro seria fundamental para nosso entendimento da humanidade.

    “A evolução não tem absolutamente nenhuma tolerância com o lixo”, afirma Kári Stefánsson, o principal executivo da empresa islandesa deCODE Genetics, que sequenciou mais genomas inteiros do que qualquer outra instituição em todo o mundo.

    Para ele, “deve haver uma razão evolutiva para manter o tamanho do genoma”.

    Duas décadas se passaram e, agora, temos os primeiros indícios da função do genoma obscuro. Aparentemente, sua função primária é regular o processo de decodificação, ou expressão, dos genes produtores de proteínas.

    O genoma obscuro ajuda a controlar o comportamento dos nossos genes em resposta às pressões ambientais enfrentadas pelo nosso corpo ao longo da vida, que vão desde a alimentação até o estresse, a poluição, os exercícios e a quantidade de sono. Este campo é conhecido como epigenética.

    Ounzain afirma que gosta de pensar nas proteínas como o hardware que compõe a vida. Já o genoma obscuro é o software, que processa e reage às informações externas.

    Por isso, quanto mais aprendemos sobre o genoma obscuro, mais compreendemos a complexidade humana e como nos tornamos quem somos hoje.

    “Se você pensar em nós enquanto espécie, somos mestres da adaptação ao ambiente em todos os níveis”, afirma Ounzain. “E essa adaptação é o processamento das informações.”

    “Quando você retorna à questão sobre o que nos faz ser diferentes de uma mosca ou de uma minhoca, percebemos cada vez mais que as respostas estão no genoma obscuro”, segundo ele.

    Os transposons e o nosso passado evolutivo

    Quando os cientistas começaram a examinar o livro da vida, em meados dos anos 2000, uma das maiores dificuldades foi o fato de que as regiões não codificadoras de proteínas do genoma humano pareciam estar repletas de sequências de DNA repetidas, conhecidas como transposons.

    Essas sequências repetitivas eram tão onipresentes que compreendiam cerca da metade do genoma em todos os mamíferos vivos.

    “A própria compilação do primeiro genoma humano foi mais problemática devido à presença dessas sequências repetitivas”, afirma Jef Boeke, diretor do centro médico acadêmico chamado Projeto Matéria Escura da Universidade Langone de Nova York, nos Estados Unidos.

    “Analisar simplesmente qualquer tipo de sequência é muito mais fácil quando se trata de uma sequência exclusiva.”

    Inicialmente, os transposons foram ignorados pelos geneticistas. A maior parte dos estudos genéticos preferiu concentrar-se puramente no exoma — a pequena região codificadora de proteínas do genoma.

    Mas, ao longo da última década, o desenvolvimento de tecnologias mais sofisticadas de sequenciamento de DNA permitiu aos geneticistas estudar o genoma obscuro com mais detalhes.

    Em um desses experimentos, os pesquisadores excluíram um fragmento específico de transposon de camundongos, o que fez com que a metade dos filhotes dos animais morresse antes do nascimento. O resultado demonstra que algumas sequências de transposons podem ser fundamentais para a nossa sobrevivência.

    Talvez a melhor explicação sobre o motivo da existência dos transposons no nosso genoma possa ser o fato de que eles são extremamente antigos e datam das primeiras formas de vida, segundo Boeke.

    Outros cientistas sugeriram que eles provêm de vírus que invadiram o nosso DNA ao longo da história humana, antes de receberem gradualmente novas funções no corpo para que tivessem algum propósito útil.

    “Na maioria das vezes, os transposons são patógenos que nos infectam e podem infectar células da linha germinal, [que são] o tipo de células que transmitimos para a geração seguinte”, afirma Dirk Hockemeyer, professor assistente de biologia celular da Universidade da Califórnia em Berkeley, nos Estados Unidos.

    “Eles podem então ser herdados e gerar integração estável ao genoma”, segundo ele.

    Boeke descreve o genoma obscuro como um registro fóssil vivo de alterações fundamentais no nosso DNA que ocorreram há muito tempo, na história antiga.

    Uma das características mais fascinantes dos transposons é que eles podem se mover de uma parte do genoma para outra — um tipo de comportamento que gerou seu nome — criando ou revertendo mutações nos genes, às vezes com consequências extraordinárias.

    O movimento de um transposon para um gene diferente pode ter sido responsável, por exemplo, pela perda da cauda na grande família dos primatas, fazendo com que a nossa espécie desenvolvesse a capacidade de andar ereta.

    “Aqui você tem esse evento único que teve enorme efeito sobre a evolução, gerando toda uma linhagem de grandes primatas, incluindo a nós”, segundo Boeke.

    Mas, da mesma forma que nossa crescente compreensão sobre o genoma obscuro explica cada vez mais sobre a evolução, ela pode também esclarecer o motivo do surgimento das doenças.

    Ounzain ressalta que, se olharmos para os estudos de associação genômica ampla (GWAS, na sigla em inglês), que pesquisam as variações genéticas entre grandes quantidades de pessoas para identificar quais delas são relacionadas a doenças, a grande maioria das variações ligadas a doenças crônicas, como a doença de Alzheimer, diabetes e doenças cardíacas, não está nas regiões de codificação de proteínas, mas sim no genoma obscuro.

    O genoma obscuro e as doenças

    A ilha de Panay, nas Filipinas, é mais conhecida pelas suas cintilantes areias brancas e pelo fluxo regular de turistas. Mas este local idílico esconde um segredo trágico.

    Panay abriga o maior número de casos existentes no mundo de um distúrbio dos movimentos incurável, chamado distonia-parkinsonismo ligado ao X (XDP, na sigla em inglês).

    Como no mal de Parkinson, as pessoas com XDP desenvolvem uma série de sintomas que afetam sua capacidade de andar e reagir rapidamente a diversas situações.

    Desde a descoberta do XDP nos anos 1970, a doença só foi diagnosticada em pessoas de ascendência filipina. Este fato permaneceu um mistério por muito tempo, até que os geneticistas descobriram que todos esses indivíduos possuem a mesma variante exclusiva de um gene chamado TAF1.

    O início dos sintomas parece ser causado por um transposon no meio do gene, que é capaz de regular sua função de forma a causar prejuízo ao corpo ao longo do tempo. Acredita-se que esta variante genética tenha surgido pela primeira vez cerca de 2.000 anos atrás, antes de ser transmitida e se estabelecer na população.

    “O gene TAF1 é um gene essencial, ou seja, ele é necessário para o crescimento e a multiplicação de todos os tipos de células”, afirma Boeke.

    “Quando você ajusta sua expressão, você tem esse defeito muito específico, que se manifesta como uma horrível forma de parkinsonismo.”

    Este é um exemplo simples de como algumas sequências de DNA do genoma obscuro podem controlar a função de diversos genes, seja ativando ou reprimindo a transformação de informações genéticas em proteínas, em resposta a indicações recebidas do ambiente.

    O genoma escuro também fornece instruções para a formação de diversos tipos de moléculas, conhecidas como RNAs não codificantes. Eles podem desempenhar diversos papéis, desde ajudar a fabricar algumas proteínas, bloquear a produção de outras ou ajudar a regular a atividade genética.

    “Os RNAs produzidos pelo genoma obscuro agem como os maestros da orquestra, conduzindo como o seu DNA reage ao ambiente”, explica Ounzain. E estes RNAs não codificantes, agora, são cada vez mais considerados a ligação entre o genoma obscuro e diversas doenças crônicas.

    A ideia é que, se fornecermos sistematicamente os sinais errados para o genoma obscuro com o nosso estilo de vida — por exemplo, com o fumo, má alimentação e inatividade —, as moléculas de RNA produzidas por ele podem fazer com que o corpo entre em um estado de doença, alterando a atividade genética, de forma a aumentar as inflamações do corpo ou promover a morte celular.

    Acredita-se que certos RNAs não codificantes podem desligar ou aumentar a atividade de um gene chamado p53, que age normalmente para evitar a formação de tumores.

    Em doenças complexas, como a esquizofrenia e a depressão, todo um conjunto de RNAs não codificantes pode agir em sincronia para reduzir ou aumentar a expressão de certos genes.

    Mas o nosso reconhecimento cada vez maior da importância do genoma obscuro já está trazendo novos métodos de tratamento dessas doenças.

    A indústria de desenvolvimento de remédios costuma se concentrar nas proteínas, mas algumas empresas estão percebendo que pode ser mais eficaz tentar interromper os RNAs não codificantes, que controlam os genes encarregados desses processos.

    No campo das vacinas contra o câncer, por exemplo, as empresas realizam sequenciamento de DNA em amostras de tumores dos pacientes para tentar identificar um alvo adequado a ser atacado pelo sistema imunológico. E a maioria dos métodos concentra-se apenas nas regiões codificantes de proteínas do genoma.

    Mas a empresa alemã de biotecnologia CureVac é pioneira em um método de análise das regiões não codificantes de proteínas, na esperança de encontrar um alvo que possa interromper o câncer na fonte.

    Já a empresa de Ounzain, a Haya Therapeutics, atualmente está realizando um programa de desenvolvimento de drogas dirigido a uma série de RNAs não codificantes que dirigem a formação de tecidos de cicatrização, ou fibrose, no coração — um processo que pode causar insuficiência cardíaca.

    Uma das esperanças é que este método possa minimizar os efeitos colaterais decorrentes de muitos remédios de uso comum.

    “O problema quando medicamos as proteínas é que existem apenas cerca de 20 mil delas no corpo e a maioria é expressa em muitas células e processos diferentes, que não têm relação com a doença”, afirma Ounzain.

    “Mas a atividade do genoma obscuro é extraordinariamente específica. Existem RNAs não codificantes que regulam a fibrose apenas no coração, de forma que, ao medicá-los, temos um remédio potencialmente muito seguro”, explica ele.

    O desconhecido

    Paralelamente, parte desse entusiasmo precisa ser atenuada pelo fato de que, em termos de compreensão do funcionamento do genoma obscuro, apenas acabamos de arranhar a superfície.

    Sabemos muito pouco sobre o que os geneticistas descrevem como regras básicas: como essas sequências não codificantes de proteínas comunicam-se para regular a atividade genética? E como exatamente essas teias complexas de interações se manifestam por longos períodos de tempo até se tornarem traços de doenças, como a neurodegeneração observada no mal de Alzheimer?

    “Estamos ainda no começo”, afirma Dirk Hockemeyer. “Os próximos 15 a 20 anos ainda serão assim – [iremos] identificar comportamentos específicos em células que podem gerar doenças e, em seguida, tentar identificar as partes do genoma obscuro que podem estar envolvidas na modificação desses comportamentos. Mas, agora, temos ferramentas para nos aprofundar nisso, algo que antes não tínhamos.”

    Uma dessas ferramentas é a edição genética.

    Jef Boeke e sua equipe estão atualmente tentando aprender mais sobre a forma de desenvolvimento dos sintomas de XDP, reproduzindo a inserção de transposons genéticos TAF1 em camundongos.

    No futuro, uma versão mais ambiciosa deste projeto poderá tentar compreender como as sequências de DNA não codificantes de proteínas regulam os genes, construindo blocos de DNA sintético a partir do zero, para transplante em células de camundongos.

    “Estamos agora envolvidos em pelo menos dois projetos, usando um enorme pedaço de DNA que não faz nada e tentando instalar nele todos esses elementos”, afirma Boeke.

    “Colocamos um gene ali, uma sequência não codificante em frente a ele e outra mais distante, para ver como esse gene se comporta”, explica ele. “Agora, temos todas as ferramentas para realmente construir pedaços do genoma obscuro de baixo para cima e tentar entendê-lo.”

    Hockemeyer prevê que, quanto mais aprendermos, mais surpresas inesperadas o livro genético da vida continuará a nos apresentar, da mesma forma que ocorreu quando o primeiro genoma foi sequenciado, 20 anos atrás.

    Para ele, “as questões são muitas. O nosso genoma ainda está evoluindo ao longo do tempo? Conseguiremos decodificá-lo totalmente?”

    “Ainda estamos nesse espaço escuro em aberto que estamos explorando e existem muitas descobertas realmente fantásticas à nossa espera.”

    Leia a versão original desta reportagem (em inglês) no site BBC Future.

    Socially constructed silence? Protecting policymakers from the unthinkable. (Open Democracy)

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    The scientific community is profoundly uncomfortable with the storm of political controversy that climate research is attracting. What’s going on?

    Paul Hoggett and Rosemary Randall

    6 June 2016

      PaulHoggetcroppede.jpg

      Credit: By NASA Scientific Visualization Studio/Goddard Space Flight Center. Public Domain, Wikimedia.org.

      Some things can’t be said easily in polite company. They cause offence or stir up intense anxiety. Where one might expect a conversation, what actually occurs is what the sociologist Eviator Zerubavel calls a ‘socially constructed silence.’

      In his book Don’t Even Think About It,George Marshall argues that after the fiasco of COP 15 at Copenhagen and ‘Climategate’—when certain sections of the press claimed (wrongly as it turned out) that leaked emails of researchers at the University of East Anglia showed that data had been manipulated—climate change became a taboo subject among most politicians, another socially constructed silence with disastrous implications for the future of climate action.

      In 2013-14 we carried out interviews with leading UK climate scientists and communicators to explore how they managed the ethical and emotional challenges of their work. While the shadow of Climategate still hung over the scientific community, our analysis drew us to the conclusion that the silence Marshall spoke about went deeper than a reaction to these specific events.

      Instead, a picture emerged of a community which still identified strongly with an idealised picture of scientific rationality, in which the job of scientists is to get on with their research quietly and dispassionately. As a consequence, this community is profoundly uncomfortable with the storm of political controversy that climate research is now attracting.

      The scientists we spoke to were among a minority who had become engaged with policy makers, the media and the general public about their work. A number of them described how other colleagues would bury themselves in the excitement and rewards of research, denying that they had any responsibility beyond developing models or crunching the numbers. As one researcher put it, “so many scientists just want to do their research and as soon as it has some relevance, or policy implications, or a journalist is interested in their research, they are uncomfortable.”

      We began to see how for many researchers, this idealised picture of scientific practice might also offer protection at an unconscious level from the emotional turbulence aroused by the politicisation of climate change. 

      In her classic study of the ‘stiff upper lip’ culture of nursing in the UK in the 1950s, the psychoanalyst and social researcher Isobel Menzies Lyth developed the idea of ‘social defences against anxiety,’ and it seems very relevant here. A social defence is an organised but unconscious way of managing the anxieties that are inherent in certain occupational roles. For example, the practice of what was then called the ‘task list’ system fragmented nursing into a number of routines, each one executed by a different person—hence the ‘bed pan nurse’, the ‘catheter nurse’ and so on.

      Ostensibly, this was done to generate maximum efficiency, but it also protected nurses from the emotions that were aroused by any real human involvement with patients, including anxiety, something that was deemed unprofessional by the nursing culture of the time. Like climate scientists, nurses were meant to be objective and dispassionate. But this idealised notion of the professional nurse led to the impoverishment of patient care, and meant that the most emotionally mature nurses were the least likely to complete their training.

      While it’s clear that social defences such as hyper-rationality and specialisation enable climate scientists to get on with their work relatively undisturbed by public anxieties, this approach also generates important problems. There’s a danger that these defences eventually break down and anxiety re-emerges, leaving individuals not only defenceless but with the additional burden of shame and personal inadequacy for not maintaining that stiff upper lip. Stress and burnout may then follow. 

      Although no systematic research has been undertaken in this area, there is anecdotal evidence of such burnout in a number of magazine articles like those by Madeleine Thomas and Faith Kearns, in which climate scientists speak out about the distress that they or others have experienced, their depression at their findings, and their dismay at the lack of public and policy response.

      Even if social defences are successful and anxiety is mitigated, this very success can have unintended consequences. By treating scientific findings as abstracted knowledge without any personal meaning, climate researchers have been slow to take responsibility for their own carbon footprints, thus running the risk of being exposed for hypocrisy by the denialist lobby. One research leader candidly reflected on this failure: “Oh yeah and the other thing [that’s] very, very important I think is that we ought to change the way we do research so we’re sustainable in the research environment, which we’re not now because we fly everywhere for conferences and things.”

      The same defences also contribute to the resistance of most climate scientists to participation in public engagement or intervention in the policy arena, leaving these tasks to a minority who are attacked by the media and even by their own colleagues. One of our interviewees who has played a major role in such engagement recalled being criticised by colleagues for “prostituting science” by exaggerating results in order to make them “look sexy.”“You know we’re all on the same side,” she continued, “why are we shooting arrows at each other, it is ridiculous.”

      The social defences of logic, reason and careful debate were of little use to the scientific community in these cases, and their failure probably contributed to internal conflicts and disagreements when anxiety could no longer be contained—so they found expression in bitter arguments instead. This in turn makes those that do engage with the public sphere excessively cautious, which encourages collusion with policy makers who are reluctant to embrace the radical changes that are needed.

      As one scientist put it when discussing the goal agreed at the Paris climate conference of limiting global warming to no more than 2°C: “There is a mentality in [the] group that speaks to policy makers that there are some taboo topics that you cannot talk about. For instance the two degree target on climate change…Well the emissions are going up like this (the scientist points upwards at a 45 degree angle), so two degrees at the moment seems completely unrealistic. But you’re not allowed to say this.”

      Worse still, the minority of scientists who are tempted to break the silence on climate change run the risk of being seen as whistleblowers by their colleagues. Another research leader suggested that—in private—some of the most senior figures in the field believe that the world is heading for a rise in temperature closer to six degrees than two. 

      “So repeatedly I’ve heard from researchers, academics, senior policy makers, government chief scientists, [that] they can’t say these things publicly,” he told us, “I’m sort of deafened, deafened by the silence of most people who work in the area that we work in, in that they will not criticise when there are often evidently very political assumptions that underpin some of the analysis that comes out.”

      It seems that the idea of a ‘socially constructed silence’ may well apply to crucial aspects of the interface between climate scientists and policy makers. If this is the case then the implications are very serious. Despite the hope that COP 21 has generated, many people are still sceptical about whether the rhetoric of Paris will be translated into effective action.

      If climate change work is stuck at the level of  ‘symbolic policy making’—a set of practices designed to make it look as though political elites are doing something while actually doing nothing—then it becomes all the more important for the scientific community to find ways of abandoning the social defences we’ve described and speak out as a whole, rather than leaving the task to a beleaguered and much-criticised minority.

      The rise and fall of peer review (Experimental History)

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      experimentalhistory.substack.com

      Adam Mastroianni

      Dec 13, 2022

      Photo cred: my dad

      For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.

      Most of those folks didn’t even realize they were in an experiment. Many of them, including me, weren’t born when the experiment started. If we had noticed what was going on, maybe we would have demanded a basic level of scientific rigor. Maybe nobody objected because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don’t pass muster. They called it “peer review.”

      This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church. Scientific journals appeared in the 1600s, but they operated more like magazines or newsletters, and their processes of picking articles ranged from “we print whatever we get” to “the editor asks his friend what he thinks” to “the whole society votes.” Sometimes journals couldn’t get enough papers to publish, so editors had to go around begging their friends to submit manuscripts, or fill the space themselves. Scientific publishing remained a hodgepodge for centuries.

      (Only one of Einstein’s papers was ever peer-reviewed, by the way, and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.)

      That all changed after World War II. Governments poured funding into research, and they convened “peer reviewers” to ensure they weren’t wasting their money on foolish proposals. That funding turned into a deluge of papers, and journals that previously struggled to fill their pages now struggled to pick which articles to print. Reviewing papers before publication, which was “quite rare” until the 1960s, became much more common. Then it became universal.

      Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don’t please reviewers get rejected. You can still write to your friends about your findings, but hiring committees and grant agencies act as if the only science that exists is the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals. This is the grand experiment we’ve been running for six decades.

      The results are in. It failed. 

      Peer review was a huge, expensive intervention. By one estimate, scientists collectively spend 15,000 years reviewing papers every year. It can take months or years for a paper to wind its way through the review system, which is a big chunk of time when people are trying to do things like cure cancer and stop climate change. And universities fork over millions for access to peer-reviewed journals, even though much of the research is taxpayer-funded, and none of that money goes to the authors or the reviewers.

      Huge interventions should have huge effects. If you drop $100 million on a school system, for instance, hopefully it will be clear in the end that you made students better off. If you show up a few years later and you’re like, “hey so how did my $100 million help this school system” and everybody’s like “uhh well we’re not sure it actually did anything and also we’re all really mad at you now,” you’d be really upset and embarrassed. Similarly, if peer review improved science, that should be pretty obvious, and we should be pretty upset and embarrassed if it didn’t.

      It didn’t. In all sorts of different fields, research productivity has been flat or declining for decades, and peer review doesn’t seem to have changed that trend. New ideas are failing to displace older ones. Many peer-reviewed findings don’t replicate, and most of them may be straight-up false. When you ask scientists to rate 20th century discoveries in physics, medicine, and chemistry that won Nobel Prizes, they say the ones that came out before peer review are just as good or even better than the ones that came out afterward. In fact, you can’t even ask them to rate the Nobel Prize-winning physics discoveries from the 1990s and 2000s because there aren’t enough of them.

      Of course, a lot of other stuff has changed since World War II. We did a terrible job running this experiment, so it’s all confounded. All we can say from these big trends is that we have no idea whether peer review helped, it might have hurt, it cost a ton, and the current state of the scientific literature is pretty abysmal. In this biz, we call this a total flop.

      What went wrong?

      Here’s a simple question: does peer review actually do the thing it’s supposed to do? Does it catch bad research and prevent it from being published?

      It doesn’t. Scientists have run studies where they deliberately add errors to papers, send them out to reviewers, and simply count how many errors the reviewers catch. Reviewers are pretty awful at this. In this study reviewers caught 30% of the major flaws, in this study they caught 25%, and in this study they caught 29%. These were critical issues, like “the paper claims to be a randomized controlled trial but it isn’t” and “when you look at the graphs, it’s pretty clear there’s no effect” and “the authors draw conclusions that are totally unsupported by the data.” Reviewers mostly didn’t notice.

      In fact, we’ve got knock-down, real-world data that peer review doesn’t work: fraudulent papers get published all the time. If reviewers were doing their job, we’d hear lots of stories like “Professor Cornelius von Fraud was fired today after trying to submit a fake paper to a scientific journal.” But we never hear stories like that. Instead, pretty much every story about fraud begins with the paper passing review and being published. Only later does some good Samaritan—often someone in the author’s own lab!—notice something weird and decide to investigate. That’s what happened with this this paper about dishonesty that clearly has fake data (ironic), these guys who have published dozens or even hundreds of fraudulent papers, and this debacle:

      Why don’t reviewers catch basic errors and blatant fraud? One reason is that they almost never look at the data behind the papers they review, which is exactly where the errors and fraud are most likely to be. In fact, most journals don’t require you to make your data public at all. You’re supposed to provide them “on request,” but most people don’t. That’s how we’ve ended up in sitcom-esque situations like ~20% of genetics papers having totally useless data because Excel autocorrected the names of genes into months and years.

      (When one editor started asking authors to add their raw data after they submitted a paper to his journal, half of them declined and retracted their submissions. This suggests, in the editor’s words, “a possibility that the raw data did not exist from the beginning.”)

      The invention of peer review may have even encouraged bad research. If you try to publish a paper showing that, say, watching puppy videos makes people donate more to charity, and Reviewer 2 says “I will only be impressed if this works for cat videos as well,” you are under extreme pressure to make a cat video study work. Maybe you fudge the numbers a bit, or toss out a few outliers, or test a bunch of cat videos until you find one that works and then you never mention the ones that didn’t. 🎶 Do a little fraud // get a paper published // get down tonight 🎶

      Here’s another way that we can test whether peer review worked: did it actually earn scientists’ trust? 

      Scientists often say they take peer review very seriously. But people say lots of things they don’t mean, like “It’s great to e-meet you” and “I’ll never leave you, Adam.” If you look at what scientists actually do, it’s clear they don’t think peer review really matters.

      First: if scientists cared a lot about peer review, when their papers got reviewed and rejected, they would listen to the feedback, do more experiments, rewrite the paper, etc. Instead, they usually just submit the same paper to another journal. This was one of the first things I learned as a young psychologist, when my undergrad advisor explained there is a “big stochastic element” in publishing (translation: “it’s random, dude”). If the first journal didn’t work out, we’d try the next one. Publishing is like winning the lottery, she told me, and the way to win is to keep stuffing the box with tickets. When very serious and successful scientists proclaim that your supposed system of scientific fact-checking is no better than chance, that’s pretty dismal.

      Second: once a paper gets published, we shred the reviews. A few journals publish reviews; most don’t. Nobody cares to find out what the reviewers said or how the authors edited their paper in response, which suggests that nobody thinks the reviews actually mattered in the first place. 

      And third: scientists take unreviewed work seriously without thinking twice. We read “preprints” and working papers and blog posts, none of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals. We use data from Pew and Gallup and the government, also unreviewed. We go to conferences where people give talks about unvetted projects, and we do not turn to each other and say, “So interesting! I can’t wait for it to be peer reviewed so I can find out if it’s true.”

      Instead, scientists tacitly agree that peer review adds nothing, and they make up their minds about scientific work by looking at the methods and results. Sometimes people say the quiet part loud, like Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner:

      I don’t believe in peer review because I think it’s very distorted and as I’ve said, it’s simply a regression to the mean. I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system.

      I used to think about all the ways we could improve peer review. Reviewers should look at the data! Journals should make sure that papers aren’t fraudulent! 

      It’s easy to imagine how things could be better—my friend Ethan and I wrote a whole paper on it—but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to make things better. My complaints about peer review were a bit like looking at the ~35,000 Americans who die in car crashes every year and saying “people shouldn’t crash their cars so much.” Okay, but how? 

      Lack of effort isn’t the problem: remember that our current system requires 15,000 years of labor every year, and it still does a really crappy job. Paying peer reviewers doesn’t seem to make them any better. Neither does training them. Maybe we can fix some things on the margins, but remember that right now we’re publishing papers that use capital T’s instead of error bars, so we’ve got a long, long way to go.

      What if we made peer review way stricter? That might sound great, but it would make lots of other problems with peer review way worse. 

      For example, you used to be able to write a scientific paper with style. Now, in order to please reviewers, you have to write it like a legal contract. Papers used to begin like, “Help! A mysterious number is persecuting me,” and now they begin like, “Humans have been said, at various times and places, to exist, and even to have several qualities, or dimensions, or things that are true about them, but of course this needs further study (Smergdorf & Blugensnout, 1978; Stikkiwikket, 2002; von Fraud et al., 2018b)”. 

      This blows. And as a result, nobody actually reads these papers. Some of them are like 100 pages long with another 200 pages of supplemental information, and all of it is written like it hates you and wants you to stop reading immediately. Recently, a friend asked me when I last read a paper from beginning to end; I couldn’t remember, and neither could he. “Whenever someone tells me they loved my paper,” he said, “I say thank you, even though I know they didn’t read it.” Stricter peer review would mean even more boring papers, which means even fewer people would read them.

      Making peer review harsher would also exacerbate the worst problem of all: just knowing that your ideas won’t count for anything unless peer reviewers like them makes you worse at thinking. It’s like being a teenager again: before you do anything, you ask yourself, “BUT WILL PEOPLE THINK I’M COOL?” When getting and keeping a job depends on producing popular ideas, you can get very good at thought-policing yourself into never entertaining anything weird or unpopular at all. That means we end up with fewer revolutionary ideas, and unless you think everything’s pretty much perfect right now, we need revolutionary ideas real bad.

      On the off chance you do figure out a way to improve peer review without also making it worse, you can try convincing the nearly 30,000 scientific journals in existence to apply your magical method to the ~4.7 million articles they publish every year. Good luck!

      Peer review doesn’t work and there’s probably no way to fix it. But a little bit of vetting is better than none at all, right?

      I say: no way. 

      Imagine you discover that the Food and Drug Administration’s method of “inspecting” beef is just sending some guy (“Gary”) around to sniff the beef and say whether it smells okay or not, and the beef that passes the sniff test gets a sticker that says “INSPECTED BY THE FDA.” You’d be pretty angry. Yes, Gary may find a few batches of bad beef, but obviously he’s going to miss most of the dangerous meat. This extremely bad system is worse than nothing because it fools people into thinking they’re safe when they’re not.

      That’s what our current system of peer review does, and it’s dangerous. That debunked theory about vaccines causing autism comes from a peer-reviewed paper in one of the most prestigious journals in the world, and it stayed there for twelve years before it was retracted. How many kids haven’t gotten their shots because one rotten paper made it through peer review and got stamped with the scientific seal of approval?

      If you want to sell a bottle of vitamin C pills in America, you have to include a disclaimer that says none of the claims on the bottle have been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Maybe journals should stamp a similar statement on every paper: “NOBODY HAS REALLY CHECKED WHETHER THIS PAPER IS TRUE OR NOT. IT MIGHT BE MADE UP, FOR ALL WE KNOW.” That would at least give people the appropriate level of confidence.

      Why did peer review seem so reasonable in the first place?

      I think we had the wrong model of how science works. We treated science like it’s a weak-link problem where progress depends on the quality of our worst work. If you believe in weak-link science, you think it’s very important to stamp out untrue ideas—ideally, prevent them from being published in the first place. You don’t mind if you whack a few good ideas in the process, because it’s so important to bury the bad stuff.

      But science is a strong-link problem: progress depends on the quality of our best work.Better ideas don’t always triumph immediately, but they do triumph eventually, because they’re more useful. You can’t land on the moon using Aristotle’s physics, you can’t turn mud into frogs using spontaneous generation, and you can’t build bombs out of phlogiston. Newton’s laws of physics stuck around; his recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone didn’t. We didn’t need a scientific establishment to smother the wrong ideas. We needed it to let new ideas challenge old ones, and time did the rest.

      If you’ve got weak-link worries, I totally get it. If we let people say whatever they want, they will sometimes say untrue things, and that sounds scary. But we don’t actually prevent people from saying untrue things right now; we just pretend to. In fact, right now we occasionally bless untrue things with big stickers that say “INSPECTED BY A FANCY JOURNAL,” and those stickers are very hard to get off. That’s way scarier.

      Weak-link thinking makes scientific censorship seem reasonable, but all censorship does is make old ideas harder to defeat. Remember that it used to be obviously true that the Earth is the center of the universe, and if scientific journals had existed in Copernicus’ time, geocentrist reviewers would have rejected his paper and patted themselves on the back for preventing the spread of misinformation. Eugenics used to be hot stuff in science—do you think a bunch of racists would give the green light to a paper showing that Black people are just as smart as white people? Or any paper at all by a Black author? (And if you think that’s ancient history: this dynamic is still playing out today.) We still don’t understand basic truths about the universe, and many ideas we believe today will one day be debunked. Peer review, like every form of censorship, merely slows down truth.

      Nobody was in charge of our peer review experiment, which means nobody has the responsibility of saying when it’s over. Seeing no one else, I guess I’ll do it: 

      We’re done, everybody! Champagne all around! Great work, and congratulations. We tried peer review and it didn’t work.

      Honesty, I’m so relieved. That system sucked! Waiting months just to hear that an editor didn’t think your paper deserved to be reviewed? Reading long walls of text from reviewers who for some reason thought your paper was the source of all evil in the universe? Spending a whole day emailing a journal begging them to let you use the word “years” instead of always abbreviating it to “y” for no reason (this literally happened to me)? We never have to do any of that ever again.

      I know we all might be a little disappointed we wasted so much time, but there’s no shame in a failed experiment. Yes, we should have taken peer review for a test run before we made it universal. But that’s okay—it seemed like a good idea at the time, and now we know it wasn’t. That’s science! It will always be important for scientists to comment on each other’s ideas, of course. It’s just this particular way of doing it that didn’t work.

      What should we do now? Well, last month I published a paper, by which I mean I uploaded a PDF to the internet. I wrote it in normal language so anyone could understand it. I held nothing back—I even admitted that I forgot why I ran one of the studies. I put jokes in it because nobody could tell me not to. I uploaded all the materials, data, and code where everybody could see them. I figured I’d look like a total dummy and nobody would pay any attention, but at least I was having fun and doing what I thought was right.

      Then, before I even told anyone about the paper, thousands of people found it, commented on it, and retweeted it. 

      Total strangers emailed me thoughtful reviews. Tenured professors sent me ideas. NPR asked for an interview. The paper now has more views than the last peer-reviewed paper I published, which was in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And I have a hunch far more people read this new paper all the way to the end, because the final few paragraphs got a lot of comments in particular. So I dunno, I guess that seems like a good way of doing it?

      I don’t know what the future of science looks like. Maybe we’ll make interactive papers in the metaverse or we’ll download datasets into our heads or whisper our findings to each other on the dance floor of techno-raves. Whatever it is, it’ll be a lot better than what we’ve been doing for the past sixty years. And to get there, all we have to do is what we do best: experiment.

      The Scientist’s Warning: Climate Change Has Pushed Earth To ‘Code Red’ (Forbes)

      Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

      David Bressan

      Oct 27, 2022,07:10am EDT

      Reports Indicate 2016 Was Hottest Year On Record
      Greenhouse gases are among the chief causes of global warming and climate change. Getty Images

      An international team led by Oregon State University researchers says in a report published today that the Earth’s vital signs have reached “code red” and that “humanity is unequivocally facing a climate emergency.”

      In the special report, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2022,” the authors note that 16 of 35 planetary vital signs they use to track climate change are at record extremes. The report’s authors share new data illustrating the increasing frequency of extreme heat events and heat-related deaths, rising global tree cover loss because of fires, and a greater prevalence of insects and diseases thriving in the warming climate. Food insecurity and malnutrition caused by droughts and other climate-related extreme events in developing countries are increasing the number of climate refugees.

      The researchers note that in 2022 atmospheric carbon-dioxide peaked at levels not seen for millions of years. Earth is on track to heat up between 2.1 and 2.9 degrees by the end of the century compared to pre-industrial times, according to a new report from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

      William Ripple, a distinguished professor in the OSU College of Forestry, and postdoctoral researcher Christopher Wolf are the lead authors of the report, and 10 other U.S. and global scientists are co-authors.

      “Look at all of these heat waves, fires, floods and massive storms,” Ripple said. “The specter of climate change is at the door and pounding hard.”

      The report follows the original World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity, published in 1992, and the 2017 updated version World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, co-signed by more than 15,000 scientists in 184 countries.

      “As we can see by the annual surges in climate disasters, we are now in the midst of a major climate crisis, with far worse to come if we keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them,” Wolf said.

      “As Earth’s temperatures are creeping up, the frequency or magnitude of some types of climate disasters may actually be leaping up,” said the University of Sydney’s Thomas Newsome, a co-author of the report. “We urge our fellow scientists around the world to speak out on climate change.”

      “The Scientist’s Warning” is a documentary by the research team summarizing the report’s results and can be watched online:

      Material provided by the Oregon State Universityand the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

      Psi and Science (Psychology Today)

      Uncategorized, , , , , ,

      Why do some scientists refuse to consider the evidence for psi phenomena?

      Original article

      Posted June 17, 2022 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

      Key points

      • In a 2018 survey, over half of a sample of Americans reported a psi experience; a 2022 Brazilian survey revealed 70% had a precognitive dream.
      • Some scientists will not engage with the evidence for psi due to scientism.
      • The ideology of “scientism” is often associated with science, but leads to a lack of open-mindedness, which is contrary to true science.

      Psi phenomena, like telepathy and precognition, are controversial in academia. While a minority of academics (such as me) are open-minded about them, others believe that they are pseudo-scientific and that they can’t possibly exist because they contravene the laws of science.

      However, the phenomena are much less controversial to the general public. Surveys show significant levels of belief in psi. A survey of 1200 Americans in 2003 found that over 60% believed in extrasensory perception.1

      This high level of belief appears to stem largely from experience. In a 2018 survey, half of a sample of Americans reported they had an experience of feeling “as though you were in touch with someone when they were far away.” Slightly less than half reported an experience of knowing “something about the future that you had no normal way to know” (in other words, precognition). Just over 40% reported that they had received important information through their dreams.2

      Interestingly, a 2022 survey of over 1000 Brazilian people found higher levels of such anomalous experiences, with 70% reporting they had a precognitive dream at least once.3 This may imply that such experiences are more likely to be reported in Brazil, perhaps due to a cultural climate of greater openness.

      How can we account for the disconnect between the dismissal of psi phenomena by some scientists, and the openness of the general population? Is it that scientists are more educated and rational than other sections of the population, many of whom are gullible to superstition and irrational thinking?

      I don’t think it’s as simple as this.

      Evidence for Psi

      You might be surprised to learn that the evidence for phenomena such as telepathy and precognition is strong. As I point out in my book, Spiritual Science, this evidence has remained significant and robust over a massive range of studies over decades.

      In 2018, American Psychologist published an article by Professor Etzel Cardeña which carefully and systemically reviewed the evidence for psi phenomena, examining over 750 discrete studies. Cardeña concluded that there was a very strong case for the existence of psi, writing that the evidence was “comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines.”4

      For example, from 1974 to 2018, 117 experiments were reported using the “Ganzfeld” procedure, in which one participant attempts to “send” information about images to another distant person. An overall analysis of the results showed a “hit rate” many millions of times higher than chance. Factors such as selective reporting bias (the so-called “file drawer effect”) and variations in experimental quality could not account for the results. Moreover, independent researchers reported statistically identical results.5

      So why do some scientists continue to believe that there is no evidence for psi? In my view, the explanation lies in an ideology that could be called “scientism.”

      Scientism

      Scientism is an ideology that is often associated with science. It consists of a number of basic ideas, which are often stated as facts, even though they are just assumptions—e.g., that the world is purely physical in nature, that human consciousness is a product of brain activity, that human beings are biological machines whose behaviour is determined by genes, that anomalous phenomena such as near-death experiences and psi are unreal, and so on.

      Adherents to scientism see themselves as defenders of reason. They see themselves as part of a historical “enlightenment project” whose aim is to overcome superstition and irrationality. In particular, they see themselves as opponents of religion.

      It’s therefore ironic that scientism has become a quasi-religion in itself. In their desire to spread their ideology, adherents to scientism often behave like religious zealots, demonising unwelcome ideas and disregarding any evidence that doesn’t fit with their worldview. They apply their notion of rationality in an extremist way, dismissing any phenomena outside their belief system as “woo.” Scientifically evidential phenomena such as telepathy and precognition are placed in the same category as creationism and conspiracy theories.

      One example was a response to Eztel Cardeña’s American Psychologist article (cited above) by the longstanding skeptics Arthur Reber and James Alcock. Aiming to rebut Cardeña’s claims of the strong evidence for psi, they decided that their best approach was not to actually engage with the evidence, but simply to insist that it couldn’t possibly be valid because psi itself was theoretically impossible. As they wrote, “Claims made by parapsychologists cannot be true … Hence, data that suggest that they can are necessarily flawed and result from weak methodology or improper data analyses.”6

      A similar strategy was used by the psychologist Marija Branković in a recent paper in The European Journal of Psychology. After discussing a series of highly successful precognition studies by the researcher Daryl Bem, she dismisses them because three investigators were unable to replicate the findings.7 Branković neglects to mention that there have been 90 other replication attempts with a massively significant overall success rate, exceeding the standard of “decisive evidence” by a factor of 10 million.8

      Beyond Scientism

      It’s worth considering for a moment whether psi really does contravene the laws of physics (or science), as many adherents to scientism suggest. For me, this is one of the most puzzling claims made by skeptics. Tellingly, the claim is often made by psychologists, whose knowledge of modern science may not be deep.

      Anyone with a passing knowledge of some of the theories of modern physics—particularly quantum physics—is aware that reality is much stranger than it appears to common sense. There are many theories that suggest that our common-sense view of linear time may be false. There are many theories that suggest that our world is essentially “non-local,” including phenomena such as “entanglement” and “action at a distance.” I think it would be too much of a stretch to suggest that such theories explain precognition and telepathy, but they certainly allow for their possibility.

      A lot of people assume that if you’re a scientist, then you must automatically subscribe to scientism. But in fact, scientism is the opposite of true science. The academics who dismiss psi on the grounds that it “can’t possibly be true” are behaving in the same way as the fundamentalist Christians who refuse to consider the evidence for evolution. Skeptics who refuse to engage with the evidence for telepathy or precognition are acting in the same way as the contemporaries of Galileo who refused to look through his telescope, unwilling to face the possibility that their beliefs may need to be revised.

      References

      1. Wahbeh H, Radin D, Mossbridge J, Vieten C, Delorme A. Exceptional experiences reported by scientists and engineers. Explore (NY). 2018 Sep;14(5):329-341. doi: 10.1016/j.explore.2018.05.002. Epub 2018 Aug 2. PMID: 30415782.

      2. Rice TW. Believe It Or Not: Religious and Other Paranormal Beliefs in the United States. J Sci Study Relig. 2003;42(1):95-106. doi:10.1111/1468-5906.00163

      3. Monteiro de Barros MC, Leão FC, Vallada Filho H, Lucchetti G, Moreira-Almeida A, Prieto Peres MF. Prevalence of spiritual and religious experiences in the general population: A Brazilian nationwide study. Transcultural Psychiatry. April 2022. doi:10.1177/13634615221088701

      4. Cardeña, E. (2018). The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review. American Psychologist, 73(5), 663–677. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000236

      5. Storm L, Tressoldi P. Meta-analysis of free-response studies 2009-2018: Assessing the noise-reduction model ten years on. J Soc Psych Res. 2020;(84):193-219.

      6. Reber, A. S., & Alcock, J. E. (2020). Searching for the impossible: Parapsychology’s elusive quest. American Psychologist, 75(3), 391–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000486

      7. Branković M. Who Believes in ESP: Cognitive and Motivational Determinants of the Belief in Extra-Sensory Perception. Eur J Psychol. 2019;15(1):120-139. doi:10.5964/ejop.v15i1.1689

      8. Bem D, Tressoldi P, Rabeyron T, Duggan M. Feeling the future: A meta-analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events. F1000Research. 2015;4:1188. doi:10.12688/f1000research.7177.2

      Queen of the corvids: the scientist fighting to save the world’s brainiest birds (The Guardian)

      Uncategorized, , , , , , , ,

      Original article

      Professor Nicola Clayton: “Obviously, I’m emotionally attached, so showing people the birds at the moment is very difficult.”
      Professor Nicola Clayton: “Obviously, I’m emotionally attached, so showing people the birds at the moment is very difficult.” Illustration: Peter Strain/The Observer
      A pioneering research laboratory in Cambridge proves that corvids are delightfully clever. Here, its founder reveals what the crow family has taught her – and her heartbreak at the centre’s closure

      Will Coldwell

      Sun 19 Jun 2022 14.00 BST

      Leo, an 18-year-old rook, is playing mind games. It’s a street-corner classic – cups and balls. Only this time the venue is the Comparative Cognition Laboratory in Madingley, Cambridge, and the ball is a waxworm. Leo – poised, pointy, determined – is perched on a wooden platform eager to place his bet. A wriggling morsel is laid under one of three cups, the cups shuffled. Leo cocks his head and takes a stab. Success! He snatches the waxworm in his beak and retreats to enjoy his prize. Aristotle, a fellow resident donned in a glossy black feather coat, who has been at the aviary almost as long as the lab itself, looks on knowingly.

      Watching alongside me is Professor Nicola Clayton, a psychologist who founded the lab 22 years ago, and we are joined by Francesca Cornero, 25, a PhD researcher (and occasional cups and balls technician). Clayton, 59, who is short, with blonde hair, large glasses and is wearing loose, black tango trousers, studies the cognitive abilities of both animals and humans, but is particularly known for her seminal research into the intelligence of corvids (birds in the crow family, which includes rooks, jays, magpies and ravens). Corvids have long proved to be at odds with the “bird-brain” stereotype endured by most feathered creatures and her lab, a cluster of four large aviaries tucked behind a thatched pub, has paved the way for new theories about the evolution and development of intelligence. Thanks to Clayton’s own eclectic tastes, which span consciousness to choreography (her other love, besides birds, is dance), the lab also engenders a curious synthesis of ideas drawn from both science and the arts.

      For Clayton, who has hand-reared many of the 25 jays and four rooks that live at the lab herself, the birds are like family. She introduces me to Hoy and Romero, a pair of Eurasian jays, and greets her test subjects with affection. “Hello, sweetpeas,” she says, in a sing-song soprano. “I love you.” Hoy responds by blowing kisses: a squeaky mwah mwah. Many corvids, like parrots, can mimic human speech. One of Clayton’s fondest memories of the lab is when a young Romero said: “I love you,” back. To Clayton, the Comparative Cognition Lab is more than just an aviary, or a place of scientific research. It’s a “corvid palace”. And having presided over it for more than two decades, Clayton, undoubtedly, is its queen.

      But all is not well in her kingdom. Last year she learned that the lab would not have its grant renewed by the European Research Council. Her application had been made amid the turmoil of Brexit and Clayton believes she is now among a growing number of academics facing funding complications as a result of the UK’s departure from the EU. The pandemic has only exacerbated the challenge of finding alternative financing. And while the university has supported the lab in the meantime, at the end of July, this money is also due to cease. Without a benefactor, Clayton’s lab is on borrowed time. The corvid palace faces closure. Her clever birds, released or rehomed. A lab that has transformed our understanding of animal cognition – and continues to reveal new secrets – soon may no longer exist. “Obviously, I’m emotionally attached,” she says, looking fondly up at Hoy and Romero, “so showing people the birds at the moment is very difficult.”

      ‘You wonder what’s going on behind their beady eyes’: Professor Nicola Clayton has run the Comparative Cognition Lab for 22 years.
      ‘You wonder what’s going on behind their beady eyes’: Professor Nicola Clayton has run the Comparative Cognition Lab for 22 years. Photograph: Nasir Kachroo/Rex/Shutterstock

      In many ways, humans have always suspected something was up with corvids. As Clayton puts it: “You wonder what’s going on behind that beady eye, don’t you?” These birds are shrouded in mysticism and intrigue. Corvids feature prominently in folklore, often depicted as prophetic, tricksters, or thieves. Ravens keep the Tower of London from falling down, and we count magpies to glimpse our fortune. In his poem of the same name, Edgar Allan Poe chose a raven – a talking bird – to accompany his narrator’s descent into madness, and few images are quite as ominous as the conspiring flock of crows gathering on a climbing frame in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. The semiotics of corvids are rooted in an innate sense that the birds are intelligent. Here, Clayton has been able to test some of the true reaches of their mental capacities.

      One of the big questions for her concerned “mental time travel” – the ability to remember the past or plan for the future. “People assumed this is something that only humans have,” she says. “That animals didn’t have these experiential memories that require us to project the self in time.” Clayton had already found that scrub jays showed evidence of episodic memory – remembering not only where, but when they had hidden food. But, at Madingley, she observed that jays were also capable of thinking about the future. A study conducted with Dr Nathan Emery, a fellow researcher in animal cognition (and her husband), found that a jay with prior experience as a thief was more cautious when hiding its food – if a thieving bird knew it was being watched when it was caching, it would move the food to a new hiding place later. Birds that had not previously stolen food for themselves remained blissfully ignorant. It seemed that jays could not only relate to a previous experience, but put themselves in the eyes of another bird and make decisions based on the possibility of future events. The results of the study were published in Nature in 2001. It was, Clayton says, a “gamechanger”.

      Another experiment at the lab conducted by Chris Bird, a PhD student, drew on the rich cultural heritage of corvids for inspiration. Its starting point was Aesop’s fable, The Crow and the Pitcher. The study found that – just like the “clever crow” – rooks were capable of manipulating water by dropping rocks in it until food was raised within reach of its beak. Another experiment found that rooks – which don’t use tools in the natural habitat – could use their creativity to make task-specific tools, such as bending wire into a hook to lever a small bucket out of a tube. “I always had a big respect for birds,” Clayton says. “But I was stunned by how intelligent they were.”

      Studies such as these have helped establish that animals which followed a different evolutionary path to humans were in fact capable of intelligent thought – that intelligence evolved independently in separate groups. To Clayton, corvids are as intelligent as chimpanzees, and her research into these “feathered apes” has shaped the thinking of many academics in the field. Henry Gee, an evolutionary biologist and a senior editor at Nature, told me that Clayton has proved that intelligence has nothing much to do with how brains are wired, or even how big they are. “She has shown that corvids are capable of a ‘theory of mind’. They can conceive of themselves as agents in their own lives. They can plot, plan, scheme and even lie, something human beings cannot do until they reach the age of about three. In other words, corvids think very much like we do.”

      ‘Corvids can plot, plan, scheme and even lie. They think like we do.’
      ‘Corvids can plot, plan, scheme and even lie. They think like we do.’ Photograph: Arterra Picture Library/Alamy

      As news that the lab faces closure has rippled through the scientific community, the reaction has been of sadness and dismay. An open letter signed by 358 academics from around the world has called on the university to reconsider. One signatory, Alex Thornton, a professor of cognitive evolution at Exeter University, said it would represent an act of “scientific vandalism and monumental self-sabotage”. Gee said it showed a “lack of intelligence”. Emery told me that creating something similar somewhere else would be pretty difficult, “if not impossible”, and incredibly expensive. “These birds cannot be purchased ‘off the shelf’,” he said. “If Nicky’s corvid lab closes down, then it couldn’t really start up again.” As the letter states, the lab at Madingley is the only one of its kind in the UK, and remains “globally unique in its size and capability”.

      For Jonathan Birch, an associate professor at LSE, it is this years-long approach that makes Clayton’s lab so significant. “I see some big cultural problems in science as it is now, with a focus on the short term,” he told me. “All around the world, not just in Cambridge, this is squeezing out funding for long-term studies. Clayton’s lab shows us a different way of doing animal research: an approach where we see animals for what they are – sentient beings with their own individual lives to lead. And where we study them over the long term to find out how they think and solve problems. The international significance of the lab is hard to overstate. Its closure would be a terrible loss to the sciences of mind and brain.”

      In a statement, Cambridge University praised Clayton’s work, but said that continued investment was “not sustainable at a time of rapidly rising costs and when funds could otherwise be allocated to support the research of early- and midcareer academics”. It added that it would be “delighted” to work with an external funder to keep the aviaries open, should one emerge in the next few months. It is hard to put a precise figure on what it would cost to keep the lab open in the long run, but Clayton estimates it could cost £300,000 to £500,000 to secure the birds for another five or six years. She has received some partial offers from potential donors, though nothing has been confirmed.

      Clayton’s work remains pivotal in changing how we think about animals. As the New Scientist reported, studies conducted at her lab are “part of a renaissance in our understanding of the cognition of other creatures… but there is still much more to learn”. And to learn from animals in this way is a slow process. These sorts of experiments, says Clayton, require years of preparation. You can’t just teach any old crow new tricks (well, perhaps you can, but it wouldn’t be scientifically valid). The corvids cannot be wild caught, as researchers would not know the prior experiences of the bird. For these sorts of experiments, the birds must be handraised in controlled conditions. It also takes considerable time to build up the trust required to run an experiment. “It’s a privilege,” says Clayton, “to get the opportunity to see inside their minds, and for them to trust us enough to share what they know with us.”

      ‘It’s a privilege to get the opportunity to see inside their minds, and for them to trust us enough to share what they know with us’: Professor Nicola Clayton.
      ‘It’s a privilege to get the opportunity to see inside their minds, and for them to trust us enough to share what they know with us’: Professor Nicola Clayton. Photograph: Dan Burn-Forti/The Observer

      Cornero, who is researching how rooks understand language, tells me that it took a year before she could start working effectively with Hoy. She has now taught him to respond to a number of verbal commands. When she says, “Come,” he comes. When she says, “Speak,” he mumbles something in corvid. It raises further questions about our assumptions of which animals we consider “smart”; if a rook can be trained much like a dog, then is domestication really a prerequisite to “intelligent” behaviours? “In the context of conservation and the climate disaster,” says Cornero, “I think it’s really important for humans to be increasingly aware that we aren’t the only ones that think and feel and exist in this space.”

      If anyone is equipped to bring these ideas into the public consciousness, it’s Clayton. She has always had a knack for creating tantalising work – for nurturing a creative frisson around different ideas, approaches and perspectives. For inspiring new thought. She is the first scientist in residence at the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance and has a long-term collaboration with the artist Clive Wilkins, who is a member of the magician’s circle (and her tango partner).

      “Magic reveals a lot about the blind spots we have,” says Clayton, and lately magic has opened up a new line of inquiry for the lab. Last year, a study led by Elias Garcia-Pelegrin used magicians’ sleight of hand as a means to test the perceptual abilities of jays. You don’t have to be an evolutionary biologist or an expert in animal cognition to find these experiments alluring.

      Much like a magic trick, this research leaves you with more questions than answers, but now Clayton is reluctantly preparing her birds for departure. The younger birds are being readied to be released into the wild. The others have all, thankfully, been found suitable homes; and the rooks may continue their lives at a similar research lab in Strasbourg. Really, Clayton remains hopeful that the lab will find some way to continue its work. Since she could walk, she says, all she ever wanted to do was “dance and watch the birds”. It’s not easy to let go of what she has built here. As we stand in the aviary, listening to Hoy chirp, “What’s that noise?”, I ask her what it really means when a corvid mimics a human phrase, or a jay says, “I love you”. “Well,” says Clayton, “It’s their way of connecting, isn’t it?”

      Reformation in the Church of Science (The New Atlantis)

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      thenewatlantis.com

      How the truth monopoly was broken up

      Andrea Saltelli and Daniel Sarewitz

      Spring 2022

      We are suffering through a pandemic of lies — or so we hear from leading voices in media, politics, and academia. Our culture is infected by a disease that has many names: fake news, post-truth, misinformation, disinformation, mal-information, anti-science. The affliction, we are told, is a perversion of the proper role of knowledge in a healthy information society.

      What is to be done? To restore truth, we need strategies to “get the facts straight.” For example, we need better “science communication,” “independent fact-checking,” and a relentless commitment to exposing and countering falsehoods. This is why the Washington Post fastidiously counted 30,573 “false or misleading claims” by President Trump during his four years in office. Facebook, meanwhile, partners with eighty organizations worldwide to help it flag falsehoods and inform users of the facts. And some disinformation experts recently suggested in the New York Times that the Biden administration should appoint a “reality czar,” a central authority tasked with countering conspiracy theories about Covid and election fraud, who “could become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis.”

      Such efforts reflect the view that untruth is a plague on our information society, one that can and must be cured. If we pay enough responsible, objective attention to distinguishing what is true from what is not, and thus excise misinformation from the body politic, people can be kept safe from falsehood. Put another way, it is an implicitly Edenic belief in the original purity of the information society, a state we have lapsed from but can yet return to, by the grace of fact-checkers.

      We beg to differ. Fake news is not a perversion of the information society but a logical outgrowth of it, a symptom of the decades-long devolution of the traditional authority for governing knowledge and communicating information. That authority has long been held by a small number of institutions. When that kind of monopoly is no longer possible, truth itself must become contested.

      This is treacherous terrain. The urge to insist on the integrity of the old order is widespread: Truth is truth, lies are lies, and established authorities must see to it that nobody blurs the two. But we also know from history that what seemed to be stable regimes of truth may collapse, and be replaced. If that is what is happening now, then the challenge is to manage the transition, not to cling to the old order as it dissolves around us.

      Truth, New and Improved

      The emergence of widespread challenges to the control of information by mainstream social institutions developed in three phases.

      First, new technologies of mass communication in the twentieth century — radio, television, and significant improvements in printing, further empowered by new social science methods — enabled the rise of mass-market advertising, which quickly became an essential tool for success in the marketplace. Philosophers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were bewildered by a world where, thanks to these new forms of communication, unabashed lies in the interest of selling products could become not just an art but an industry.

      The rise of mass marketing created the cultural substrate for the so-called post-truth world we live in now. It normalized the application of hyperbole, superlatives, and untestable claims of superiority to the rhetoric of everyday commerce. What started out as merely a way to sell new and improved soap powder and automobiles amounts today to a rhetorical infrastructure of hype that infects every corner of culture: the way people promote their careers, universities their reputations, governments their programs, and scientists the importance of their latest findings. Whether we’re listening to a food corporation claim that its oatmeal will keep your heart healthy or a university press office herald a new study that will upend everything we know, radical skepticism would seem to be the rational stance for information consumers.

      Politics, Scientized

      In a second, partly overlapping phase in the twentieth century, science underwent a massive expansion of its role into the domain of public affairs, and thus into highly contestable subject matters. Spurred by a wealth of new instruments for measuring the world and techniques for analyzing the resulting data, policies on agriculture, health, education, poverty, national security, the environment and much more became subject to new types of scientific investigation. As never before, science became part of the language of policymaking, and scientists became advocates for particular policies.

      The dissolving boundary between science and politics was on full display by 1958, when the chemist Linus Pauling and physicist Edward Teller debated the risks of nuclear weapons testing on a U.S. television broadcast, a spectacle that mixed scientific claims about fallout risks with theories of international affairs and assertions of personal moral conviction. The debate presaged a radical transformation of science and its social role. Where science was once a rarefied, elite practice largely isolated from society, scientific experts were now mobilized in increasing numbers to form and inform politics and policymaking. Of course, society had long been shaped, sometimes profoundly, by scientific advances. But in the second half of the twentieth century, science programs started to take on a rapidly expanding portfolio of politically divisive issues: determining the cancer-causing potential of food additives, pesticides, and tobacco; devising strategies for the U.S. government in its nuclear arms race against the Soviet Union; informing guidelines for diet, nutrition, and education; predicting future energy supplies, food supplies, and population growth; designing urban renewal programs; choosing nuclear waste disposal sites; and on and on.

      Philosopher-mathematicians Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz recognized in 1993 that a new kind of science was emerging, which they termed “post-normal science.” This kind of science was inherently contestable, both because it dealt with the irreducible uncertainties of complex and messy problems at the intersection of nature and society, and because it was being used for making decisions that were themselves value-laden and contested. Questions that may sound straightforward, such as “Should women in their forties get regular mammograms?” or “Will genetically modified crops and livestock make food more affordable?” or “Do the benefits of decarbonizing our energy production outweigh the costs?” became the focus of intractable and never-ending scientific and political disputes.

      This situation remained reasonably manageable through the 1990s, because science communication was still largely controlled by powerful institutions: governments, corporations, and universities. Even if these institutions were sometimes fiercely at odds, all had a shared interest in maintaining the idea of a unitary science that provided universal truths upon which rational action should be based. Debates between experts may have raged — often without end — but one could still defend the claim that the search for truth was a coherent activity carried out by special experts working in pertinent social institutions, and that the truths emerging from their work would be recognizable and agreed-upon when finally they were determined. Few questioned the fundamental notion that science was necessary and authoritative for determining good policy choices across a wide array of social concerns. The imperative remained to find facts that could inform action — a basic tenet of Enlightenment rationality.

      Science, Democratized

      The rise of the Internet and social media marks the third phase of the story, and it has now rendered thoroughly implausible any institutional monopoly on factual claims. As we are continuing to see with Covid, the public has instantly available to it a nearly inexhaustible supply of competing and contradictory claims, made by credentialed experts associated with august institutions, about everything from mask efficacy to appropriate social distancing and school closure policies. And many of the targeted consumers of these claims are already conditioned to be highly skeptical of the information they receive from mainstream media.

      Today’s information environment certainly invites mischievous seeding of known lies into public discourse. But bad actors are not the most important part of the story. Institutions can no longer maintain their old stance of authoritative certainty about information — the stance they need to justify their actions, or to establish a convincing dividing line between true news and fake news. Claims of disinterest by experts acting on behalf of these institutions are no longer plausible. People are free to decide what information, and in which experts, they want to believe. The Covid lab-leak hypothesis was fake news until that news itself became fake. Fact-checking organizations are themselves now subject to accusations of bias: Recently, Facebook flagged as “false” a story in the esteemed British Medical Journal about a shoddy Covid vaccine trial, and the editors of the journal in turn called Facebook’s fact-checking “inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.”

      No political system exists without its share of lies, obfuscation, and fake news, as Plato and Machiavelli taught. Yet even those thinkers would be puzzled by the immense power of modern technologies to generate stories. Ideas have become a battlefield, and we are all getting lost in the fog of the truth wars. When everything seems like it can be plausible to someone, the term “fake news” loses its meaning.

      iStock

      The celebrated expedient that an aristocracy has the right and the mission to offer “noble lies” to the citizens for their own good thus looks increasingly impotent. In October 2020, U.S. National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, a veritable aristocrat of the scientific establishment, sought to delegitimize the recently released Great Barrington Declaration. Crafted by a group he referred to as “fringe epidemiologists” (they were from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford), the declaration questioned the mainstream lockdown approach to the pandemic, including school and business closures. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down,” Collins wrote in an email to fellow aristocrat Anthony Fauci.

      But we now live in a moment where suppressing that kind of dissent has become impossible. By May 2021, that “fringe” became part of a new think tank, the Brownstone Institute, founded in reaction to what they describe as “the global crisis created by policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.” From this perspective, policies advanced by Collins and Fauci amounted to “a failed experiment in full social and economic control” reflecting “a willingness on the part of the public and officials to relinquish freedom and fundamental human rights in the name of managing a public health crisis.” The Brownstone Institute’s website is a veritable one-stop Internet shopping haven for anyone looking for well-credentialed expert opinions that counter more mainstream expert opinions on Covid.

      Similarly, claims that the science around climate change is “settled,” and that therefore the world must collectively work to decarbonize the global energy system by 2050, have engendered a counter-industry of dissenting experts, organizations, and websites.

      At this point, one might be forgiven for speculating that the public is being fed such a heavy diet of Covid and climate change precisely because these are problems that have been framed politically as amenable to a scientific treatment. But it seems that the more the authorities insist on the factiness of facts, the more suspect these become to larger and larger portions of the populace.

      A Scientific Reformation

      The introduction of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century triggered a revolution in which the Church lost its monopoly on truth. Millions of books were printed in just a few decades after Gutenberg’s innovation. Some people held the printing press responsible for stoking collective economic manias and speculative bubbles. It allowed the widespread distribution of astrological almanacs in Europe, which fed popular hysteria around prophesies of impending doom. And it allowed dissemination of the Malleus Maleficarum, an influential treatise on demonology that contributed to rising persecution of witches.

      Though the printing press allowed sanctioned ideas to spread like never before, it also allowed the spread of serious but hitherto suppressed ideas that threatened the legitimacy of the Church. A range of alternative philosophical, moral, and ideological perspectives on Christianity became newly accessible to ever-growing audiences. So did exposés of institutional corruption, such as the practice of indulgences — a market for buying one’s way out of purgatory that earned the Church vast amounts of money. Martin Luther, in particular, understood and exploited the power of the printing press in pursuing his attacks on the Church — one recent historical account, Andrew Pettegree’s book Brand Luther, portrays him as the first mass-market communicator.

      “Beginning of the Reformation”: Martin Luther directs the posting of his Ninety-five Theses, protesting the practice of the sale of indulgences, to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517.
      W. Baron von Löwenstern, 1830 / Library of Congress

      To a religious observer living through the beginning of the Reformation, the proliferation of printed material must have appeared unsettling and dangerous: the end of an era, and the beginning of a threatening period of heterodoxy, heresies, and confusion. A person exposed to the rapid, unchecked dispersion of printed matter in the fifteenth century might have called many such publications fake news. Today many would say that it was the Reformation itself that did away with fake news, with the false orthodoxies of a corrupted Church, opening up a competition over ideas that became the foundation of the modern world. Whatever the case, this new world was neither neat nor peaceful, with the religious wars resulting from the Church’s loss of authority over truth continuing until the mid-seventeenth century.

      Like the printing press in the fifteenth century, the Internet in the twenty-first has radically transformed and disrupted conventional modes of communication, destroyed the existing structure of authority over truth claims, and opened the door to a period of intense and tumultuous change.

      Those who lament the death of truth should instead acknowledge the end of a monopoly system. Science was the pillar of modernity, the new privileged lens to interpret the real world and show a pathway to collective good. Science was not just an ideal but the basis for a regime, a monopoly system. Within this regime, truth was legitimized in particular private and public institutions, especially government agencies, universities, and corporations; it was interpreted and communicated by particular leaders of the scientific community, such as government science advisors, Nobel Prize winners, and the heads of learned societies; it was translated for and delivered to the laity in a wide variety of public and political contexts; it was presumed to point directly toward right action; and it was fetishized by a culture that saw it as single and unitary, something that was delivered by science and could be divorced from the contexts in which it emerged.

      Such unitary truths included above all the insistence that the advance of science and technology would guarantee progress and prosperity for everyone — not unlike how the Church’s salvific authority could guarantee a negotiated process for reducing one’s punishment for sins. To achieve this modern paradise, certain subsidiary truths lent support. One, for example, held that economic rationality would illuminate the path to universal betterment, driven by the principle of comparative advantage and the harmony of globalized free markets. Another subsidiary truth expressed the social cost of carbon emissions with absolute precision to the dollar per ton, with the accompanying requirement that humans must control the global climate to the tenth of a degree Celsius. These ideas are self-evidently political, requiring monopolistic control of truth to implement their imputed agendas.

      An easy prophesy here is that wars over scientific truth will intensify, as did wars over religious truth after the printing press. Those wars ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, followed, eventually, by the creation of a radically new system of governance, the nation-state, and the collapse of the central authority of the Catholic Church. Will the loss of science’s monopoly over truth lead to political chaos and even bloodshed? The answer largely depends upon the resilience of democratic institutions, and their ability to resist the authoritarian drift that seems to be a consequence of crises such as Covid and climate change, to which simple solutions, and simple truths, do not pertain.

      Both the Church and the Protestants enthusiastically adopted the printing press. The Church tried to control it through an index of forbidden books. Protestant print shops adopted a more liberal cultural orientation, one that allowed for competition among diverse ideas about how to express and pursue faith. Today we see a similar dynamic. Mainstream, elite science institutions use the Internet to try to preserve their monopoly over which truths get followed where, but the Internet’s bottom-up, distributed architecture appears to give a decisive advantage to dissenters and their diverse ideologies and perspectives.

      Holding on to the idea that science always draws clear boundaries between the true and the false will continue to appeal strongly to many sincere and concerned people. But if, as in the fifteenth century, we are now indeed experiencing a tumultuous transition to a new world of communication, what we may need is a different cultural orientation toward science and technology. The character of this new orientation is only now beginning to emerge, but it will above all have to accommodate the over-abundance of competing truths in human affairs, and create new opportunities for people to forge collective meaning as they seek to manage the complex crises of our day.

      Editorial: Misinformation is blocking climate action, and the U.N. is finally calling it out (Los Angeles Times)

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      latimes.com

      By The Times Editorial Board March 7, 2022 3 AM PT

      A landmark U.N. climate report on the escalating effects of global warming broke new ground by finally highlighting the role of misinformation in obstructing climate action. It was the first time one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s exhaustive assessments has called out the ways in which fossil fuel companies, climate deniers and conspiracy theorists have sown doubt and confusion about climate change and made it harder for policymakers to act.

      The expert panel’s report released last week mostly focused on the increasing risk of catastrophe to nature and humanity from climate change. But it also laid out clear evidence of how misinformation about climate change and the “deliberate undermining of science” financed and organized by “vested economic and political interests,” along with deep partisanship and polarization, are delaying action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to their impacts.

      The assessment describes an atmosphere in which public perception about climate change is continually undermined by fossil fuel interests’ peddling of false, misleading and contrarian information and its circulation through social media echo chambers; where there’s an entrenched partisan divide on climate science and solutions; and people reject factual information if it conflicts with their political ideology.

      Sound familiar? It should, because the climate misinformation landscape is worse in the United States than practically any other country.

      While the section on misinformation covers only a few of the more than 3,600 pages in the report approved by 195 countries, it’s notable that it’s in a chapter about North America and calls out the U.S. as a hotbed for conspiracy theories, partisanship and polarization. A 2018 study of 25 countries that was cited in the IPCC report found that the U.S. had a stronger link between climate skepticism and conspiratorial and conservative ideology than in any other nation tested. These forces aren’t just a threat to democracy, they are major roadblocks to climate action and seem to have sharpened with the Trump presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic.

      Misinformation was included in the North America chapter for the first time this year “because there has been a lot of research conducted on the topic since the last major IPCC report was published in 2014,” said Sherilee Harper, one of the lead authors and an associate professor at the University of Alberta in Canada. “Evidence assessed in the report shows how strong party affiliation and partisan opinion polarization can contribute to delayed climate action, most notably in the U.S.A., but also in Canada.”

      The IPCC’s language is measured but leaves no doubt that the fossil fuel industry and politicians who advance its agenda are responsible. It is shameful that fossil fuel interests have been so successful in misleading Americans about the greatest threat to our existence. The industry has engaged in a decades-long campaign to question climate science and delay action, enlisting conservative think tanks and public relations firms to help sow doubt about global warming and the actions needed to fight it.

      These dynamics help explain why U.S. politicians have failed time after time to enact significant federal climate legislation, including President Biden’s stalled but desperately needed “Build Back Better” bill that includes $555 billion to spur growth in renewable energy and clean transportation. And they show that combating disinformation is a necessity if we are to break through lawmakers’ refusal to act, which is increasingly out of step with Americans’ surging levels of alarm and concern about the overheating of the planet.

      “We’ve seen misinformation poisoning the information landscape for over three decades, and over that time the public has been getting more and more polarized,” said John Cook, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University in Australia. “The U.S. is the strongest source of misinformation and recipient of misinformation. It’s also the most polarized on climate.”

      Cook and his colleagues studied misinformation on conservative think-tank websites and contrarian blogs over the last 20 years and charted the evolution of the climate opposition from outright denial of the reality of human-caused climate change and toward attacking solutions such as renewable energy or seeking to discredit scientists.

      Cook said his research has found the most effective way to counter climate obstruction misinformation is to educate people about how to identify and understand different tactics, such as the use of fake experts, cherry-picked facts, logical fallacies and conspiracy theories. For example, seeing words such as “natural” or “renewable” in fossil fuel advertising raises red flags that you’re being misled through greenwashing.

      “It’s like teaching people the magician’s sleight-of-hand trick,” Cook said.

      There have been important efforts recently to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for disinformation. In a hearing that was modeled on tobacco industry testimony from a generation ago, House Democrats hauled in oil executives last fall to answer to allegations that their companies have concealed their knowledge of the risks of global warming to obstruct climate action (they, unsurprisingly, denied them).

      Perhaps we are getting closer to a turning point, where public realization that we’ve been misinformed by polluting industries begins to overcome decades of planet-endangering deceit and delay. Having the world’s scientists finally begin to call out the problem certainly can’t hurt.

      Marcelo Leite: Virada Psicodélica – Artigo aponta injustiça psicodélica contra saber indígena (Folha de S.Paulo)

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      www1.folha.uol.com.br

      Marcelo Leite

      7 de março de 2022

      A cena tem algo de surreal: pesquisador europeu com o corpo tomado por grafismos indígenas tem na cabeça um gorro com dezenas de eletrodos para eletroencefalografia (EEG). Um membro do povo Huni Kuin sopra rapé na narina do branco, que traz nas costas mochila com aparelhos portáteis para registrar suas ondas cerebrais.

      A Expedition Neuron aconteceu em abril de 2019, em Santa Rosa do Purus (AC). No programa, uma tentativa de diminuir o fosso entre saberes tradicionais sobre uso da ayahuasca e a consagração do chá pelo chamado renascimento psicodélico para a ciência.

      O resultado mais palpável da iniciativa, até aqui, apareceu num controverso texto sobre ética, e não dados, de pesquisa.

      O título do artigo no periódico Transcultural Psychiatry prometia: “Superando Injustiças Epistêmicas no Estudo Biomédico da Ayahuasca – No Rumo de Regulamentação Ética e Sustentável”. Desde a publicação, em 6 de janeiro, o texto gerou mais calor que luz –mesmo porque tem sido criticado fora das vistas do público, não às claras.

      Os autores Eduardo Ekman Schenberg, do Instituto Phaneros, e Konstantin Gerber, da PUC-SP, questionam a autoridade da ciência com base na dificuldade de empregar placebo em experimentos com psicodélicos, na ênfase dada a aspectos moleculares e no mal avaliado peso do contexto (setting) para a segurança do uso, quesito em que cientistas teriam muito a aprender com indígenas.

      Entre os alvos das críticas figuram pesquisas empreendidas na última década pelos grupos de Jaime Hallak na USP de Ribeirão Preto e de Dráulio de Araújo no Instituto do Cérebro da UFRN, em particular sobre efeito da ayahuasca na depressão. Procurados, cientistas e colaboradores desses grupos não responderam ou preferiram não se pronunciar.

      O potencial antidepressivo da dimetiltriptamina (DMT), principal composto psicoativo do chá, está no foco também de pesquisadores de outros países. Mas outras substâncias psicodélicas, como MDMA e psilocibina, estão mais próximas de obter reconhecimento de reguladores como medicamentos psiquiátricos.

      Dado o efeito óbvio de substâncias como a ayahuasca na mente e no comportamento da pessoa, argumentam Schenberg e Gerber, o sistema duplo-cego (padrão ouro de ensaios biomédicos) ficaria inviabilizado: tanto o voluntário quanto o experimentador quase sempre sabem se o primeiro tomou um composto ativo ou não. Isso aniquilaria o valor supremo atribuído a estudos desse tipo no campo psicodélico e na biomedicina em geral.

      Outro ponto criticado por eles está na descontextualização e no reducionismo de experimentos realizados em hospitais ou laboratórios, com o paciente cercado de aparelhos e submetido a doses fixadas em miligramas por quilo de peso. A precisão é ilusória, afirmam, com base no erro de um artigo que cita concentração de 0,8 mg/ml de DMT e depois fala em 0,08 mg/ml.

      A sanitização cultural do setting, por seu lado, faria pouco caso dos elementos contextuais (floresta, cânticos, cosmologia, rapé, danças, xamãs) que para povos como os Huni Kuin são indissociáveis do que a ayahuasca tem a oferecer e ensinar. Ao ignorá-los, cientistas estariam desprezando tudo o que os indígenas sabem sobre uso seguro e coletivo da substância.

      Mais ainda, estariam ao mesmo tempo se apropriando e desrespeitando esse conhecimento tradicional. Uma atitude mais ética de pesquisadores implicaria reconhecer essa contribuição, desenvolver protocolos de pesquisa com participação indígena, registrar coautoria em publicações científicas, reconhecer propriedade intelectual e repartir eventuais lucros com tratamentos e patentes.

      “A complementaridade entre antropologia, psicanálise e psiquiatria é um dos desafios da etnopsiquiatria”, escrevem Schenberg e Gerber. “A iniciativa de levar ciência biomédica à floresta pode ser criticada como uma tentativa de medicalizar o xamanismo, mas também pode constituir uma possibilidade de diálogo intercultural centrado na inovação e na resolução de ‘redes de problemas’.”

      “É particularmente notável que a biomedicina se aventure agora em conceitos como ‘conexão’ e ‘identificação com a natureza’ [nature-relatedness] como efeito de psicodélicos, mais uma vez, portanto, se aproximando de conclusões epistêmicas derivadas de práticas xamânicas. O desafio final seria, assim, entender a relação entre bem-estar da comunidade e ecologia e como isso pode ser traduzido num conceito ocidental de saúde integrada.”

      As reações dos poucos a criticar abertamente o texto e suas ideias grandiosas podem ser resumidas num velho dito maldoso da academia: há coisas boas e novas no artigo, mas as coisas boas não são novas e as coisas novas não são boas. Levar EEG para a floresta do Acre, por exemplo, não resolveria todos os problemas.

      Schenberg é o elo de ligação entre o artigo na Transcultural Psychiatry e a Expedition Neuron, pois integrou a incursão ao Acre em 2019 e colabora nesse estudo de EEG com o pesquisador Tomas Palenicek, do Instituto Nacional de Saúde Mental da República Checa. Eis um vídeo de apresentação, em inglês:

      “Estamos engajados, Konstantin e eu, em projeto inovador com os Huni Kuin e pesquisadores europeus, buscando construir uma parceria epistemicamente justa, há mais de três anos”, respondeu Schenberg quando questionado sobre o cumprimento, pelo estudo com EEG, das exigências éticas apresentadas no artigo.

      Na apresentação da Expedition Neuron, ele afirma: “Nessa primeira expedição curta e exploratória [de 2019], confirmamos que há interesse mútuo de cientistas e uma cultura indígena tradicional da Amazônia em explorar conjuntamente a natureza da consciência e como sua cura tradicional funciona, incluindo –pela primeira vez– registros de atividade cerebral num cenário que muitos considerariam demasiado desafiador tecnicamente”.

      “Consideramos de supremo valor investigar conjuntamente como os rituais e medicinas dos Huni Kuin afetam a cognição humana, as emoções e os vínculos de grupo e analisar a base neural desses estados alterados de consciência, incluindo possivelmente experiências místicas na floresta.”

      Schenberg e seus colaboradores planejam nova expedição aos Huni Kuin para promover registros de EEG múltiplos e simultâneos com até sete indígenas durante cerimônias com ayahuasca. A ideia é testar a “possibilidade muito intrigante” de sincronia entre cérebros:

      “Interpretada pelos Huni Kuin e outros povos ameríndios como um tipo de portal para o mundo espiritual, a ayahuasca é conhecida por fortalecer intensa e rapidamente vínculos comunitários e sentimentos de empatia e proximidade com os outros.”

      Os propósitos de Schenberg e Gerber não convenceram a antropóloga brasileira Bia Labate, diretora do Instituto Chacruna em São Francisco (EUA). “Indígenas não parecem ter sido consultados para a produção do texto, não há vozes nativas, não são coautores, e não temos propostas específicas do que seria uma pesquisa verdadeiramente interétnica e intercultural.”

      Para a antropóloga, ainda que a Expedition Neuron tenha conseguido autorização para a pesquisa, algo positivo, não configura “epistemologia alternativa à abordagem cientificista e etnocêntrica”. Uma pesquisa interétnica, em sua maneira de ver, implicaria promover uma etnografia que levasse a sério a noção indígena de que plantas são espíritos, têm agência própria, e que o mundo natural também é cultural, tem subjetividade, intencionalidade.

      “Todos sabemos que a bebida ayahuasca não é a mesma coisa que ayahuasca freeze dried [liofilizada]; que o contexto importa; que os rituais e coletivos que participam fazem diferença. Coisas iguais ou análogas já haviam sido apontadas pela literatura antropológica, cujas referências foram deixadas de lado pelos autores.”

      Labate também discorda de que os estudos com ayahuasca no Brasil negligenciem o reconhecimento de quem chegou antes a ela: “Do ponto de vista global, é justamente uma marca e um diferencial da pesquisa científica brasileira o fato de que houve, sim, diálogo com participantes das religiões ayahuasqueiras. Estes também são sujeitos legítimos de pesquisa, e não apenas os povos originários”.

      Schenberg e Palenicek participaram em 2020 de um encontro com outra antropóloga, a franco-colombiana Emilia Sanabria, líder no projeto Encontros de Cura, do Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa Científica da França (CNRS). Ao lado do indígena Leopardo Yawa Bane, o trio debateu o estudo com EEG no painel virtual “Levando o Laboratório até a Ayahuasca”, da Conferência Interdisciplinar sobre Pesquisa Psicodélica (ICPR). Há vídeo disponível, em inglês:

      Sanabria, que fala português e conhece os Huni Kuin, chegou a ser convidada por Schenberg para integrar a expedição, mas declinou, por avaliar que não se resolveria a “incomensurabilidade epistemológica” entre o pensamento indígena e o que a biomedicina quer provar. Entende que a discussão proposta na Transcultural Psychiatry é importante, apesar de complexa e não exatamente nova.

      Em entrevista ao blog, afirmou que o artigo parece reinventar a roda, ao desconsiderar um longo debate sobre a assimilação de plantas e práticas tradicionais (como a medicina chinesa) pela ciência ocidental: “Não citam a reflexão anterior. É bom que ponham a discussão na mesa, mas há bibliografia de mais de um século”.

      A antropóloga declarou ver problema na postura do artigo, ao apresentar-se como salvador dos nativos. “Não tem interlocutor indígena citado como autor”, pondera, corroborando a crítica de Labate, como se os povos originários precisassem ser representados por não índios. “A gente te dá um espacinho aqui no nosso mundo.”

      A questão central de uma colaboração respeitosa, para Sanabria, é haver prioridade e utilidade no estudo também para os Huni Kuin, e não só para os cientistas.

      Ao apresentar esse questionamento no painel, recebeu respostas genéricas de Schenberg e Palenicek, não direta e concretamente benéficas para os Huni Kuin –por exemplo, que a ciência pode ajudar na rejeição de patentes sobre ayahuasca.

      Na visão da antropóloga, “é linda a ideia de levar o laboratório para condições naturalistas”, mas não fica claro como aquela maquinaria toda se enquadraria na lógica indígena. No fundo, trata-se de um argumento simétrico ao brandido pelos autores do artigo contra a pesquisa psicodélica em ambiente hospitalar: num caso se descontextualiza a experiência psicodélica total, socializada; no outro, é a descontextualização tecnológica que viaja e invade a aldeia.

      Sanabria vê um dilema quase insolúvel, para povos indígenas, na pactuação de protocolos de pesquisa com a renascida ciência psicodélica. O que em 2014 parecia para muitos uma nova maneira de fazer ciência, com outros referenciais de avaliação e prova, sofreu uma “virada capitalista” desde 2018 e terminou dominado pela lógica bioquímica e de propriedade intelectual.

      “Os povos indígenas não podem cair fora porque perdem seus direitos. Mas também não podem entrar [nessa lógica], porque aí perdem sua perspectiva identitária.”

      “Molecularizar na floresta ou no laboratório dá no mesmo”, diz Sanabria. “Não vejo como reparação de qualquer injustiça epistêmica. Não vejo diferença radical entre essa pesquisa e o estudo da Fernanda [Palhano-Fontes]”, referindo-se à crítica “agressiva” de Schenberg e Gerber ao teste clínico de ayahuasca para depressão no Instituto do Cérebro da UFRN, extensiva aos trabalhos da USP de Ribeirão Preto.

      A dupla destacou, por exemplo, o fato de autores do estudo da UFRN indicarem no artigo de 2019 que 4 dos 29 voluntários no experimento ficaram pelo menos uma semana internados no Hospital Universitário Onofre Lopes, em Natal. Lançaram, com isso, a suspeita de que a segurança na administração de ayahuasca tivesse sido inadequadamente tratada.

      “Nenhum desses estudos tentou formalmente comparar a segurança no ambiente de laboratório com qualquer um dos contextos culturais em que ayahuasca é comumente usada”, pontificaram Schenberg e Gerber. “Porém, segundo nosso melhor conhecimento, nunca se relatou que 14% das pessoas participantes de um ritual de ayahuasca tenham requerido uma semana de hospitalização.”

      O motivo de internação, contudo, foi trivial: pacientes portadores de depressão resistente a medicamentos convencionais, eles já estavam hospitalizados devido à gravidade de seu transtorno mental e permaneceram internados após a intervenção. Ou seja, a internação não teve a ver com terem tomado ayahuasca.

      Este blog também questionou Schenberg sobre o possível exagero em pinçar um erro que poderia ser de digitação (0,8 mg/ml ou 0,08 mg/ml), no artigo de 2015 da USP de Ribeirão, como flagrante de imprecisão que poria em dúvida a superioridade epistêmica da biomedicina psicodélica.

      “Se dessem mais atenção aos relatos dos voluntários/pacientes, talvez tivessem se percebido do fato”, retorquiu o pesquisador do Instituto Phaneros. “Além da injustiça epistêmica com os indígenas, existe a injustiça epistêmica com os voluntários/pacientes, que também discutimos brevemente no artigo.”

      Schenberg tem vários trabalhos publicados que se encaixariam no paradigma biomédico agora em sua mira. Seria seu artigo com Gerber uma autocrítica sobre a atividade pregressa?

      “Sempre fui crítico de certas limitações biomédicas e foi somente com muito esforço que consegui fazer meu pós-doc sem, por exemplo, usar um grupo placebo, apesar de a maioria dos colegas insistirem que assim eu deveria fazer, caso contrário ‘não seria científico’…”.

      “No fundo, o argumento é circular, usando a biomedicina como critério último para dar respostas à crítica à biomedicina”, contesta Bia Labate. “O texto não resolve o que se propõe a resolver, mas aprofunda o gap [desvão] entre epistemologias originárias e biomédicas ao advogar por novas maneiras de produzir biomedicina a partir de critérios de validação… biomédicos.”

      Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Other Groups Declines (Pew Research Center)

      Uncategorized, , ,

      pewresearch.org

      Republicans’ confidence in medical scientists down sharply since early in the coronavirus outbreak

      By Brian Kennedy, Alec Tyson and Cary Funk

      February 15, 2022

      How we did this

      Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand how much confidence Americans have in groups and institutions in society, including scientists and medical scientists. We surveyed 14,497 U.S. adults from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12, 2021.

      The survey was conducted on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP) and included an oversample of Black and Hispanic adults from the Ipsos KnowledgePanel. A total of 3,042 Black adults (single-race, not Hispanic) and 3,716 Hispanic adults were sampled.

      Respondents on both panels are recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.

      Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

      This is made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts, which received support from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

      Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand how much confidence Americans have in groups and institutions in society, including scientists and medical scientists. We surveyed 14,497 U.S. adults from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12, 2021.

      The survey was conducted on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP) and included an oversample of Black and Hispanic adults from the Ipsos KnowledgePanel. A total of 3,042 Black adults (single-race, not Hispanic) and 3,716 Hispanic adults were sampled.

      Respondents on both panels are recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.

      Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

      This is made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts, which received support from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

      Americans’ confidence in groups and institutions has turned downward compared with just a year ago. Trust in scientists and medical scientists, once seemingly buoyed by their central role in addressing the coronavirus outbreak, is now below pre-pandemic levels.

      Chart shows public confidence in scientists and medical scientists has declined over the last year

      Overall, 29% of U.S. adults say they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public, down from 40% who said this in November 2020. Similarly, the share with a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests is down by 10 percentage points (from 39% to 29%), according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

      The new findings represent a shift in the recent trajectory of attitudes toward medical scientists and scientists. Public confidence in both groups had increased shortly after the start of the coronavirus outbreak, according to an April 2020 survey. Current ratings of medical scientists and scientists have now fallen below where they were in January 2019, before the emergence of the coronavirus.

      Scientists and medical scientists are not the only groups and institutions to see their confidence ratings decline in the last year. The share of Americans who say they have a great deal of confidence in the military to act in the public’s best interests has fallen 14 points, from 39% in November 2020 to 25% in the current survey. And the shares of Americans with a great deal of confidence in K-12 public school principals and police officers have also decreased (by 7 and 6 points, respectively).

      Large majorities of Americans continue to have at least a fair amount of confidence in medical scientists (78%) and scientists (77%) to act in the public’s best interests. These ratings place them at the top of the list of nine groups and institutions included in the survey. A large majority of Americans (74%) also express at least a fair amount of confidence in the military to act in the public’s best interests. Roughly two-thirds say this about police officers (69%) and K-12 public school principals (64%), while 55% have at least a fair amount of confidence in religious leaders.

      The public continues to express lower levels of confidence in journalists, business leaders and elected officials, though even for these groups, public confidence is tilting more negative. Four-in-ten say they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in journalists and business leaders to act in the public’s best interests; six-in-ten now say they have not too much or no confidence at all in these groups. Ratings for elected officials are especially negative: 24% say they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in elected officials, compared with 76% who say they have not too much or no confidence in them.

      The survey was fielded Nov. 30 through Dec. 12, 2021, among 14,497 U.S. adults, as the omicron variant of the coronavirus was first detected in the United States – nearly two years since the coronavirus outbreak took hold. Recent surveys this year have found declining ratings for how President Joe Biden has handled the coronavirus outbreak as well as lower ratings for his job performance – and that of Congress – generally.

      Partisan differences over trust in medical scientists, scientists continue to widen since the coronavirus outbreak

      Democrats remain more likely than Republicans to express confidence in medical scientists and scientists to act in the public’s best interests.

      Chart shows Democrats remain more confident than Republicans in medical scientists; ratings fall among both groups

      However, there has been a significant decline in public confidence in medical scientists and scientists among both partisan groups.

      Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, nine-in-ten express either a great deal (44%) or a fair amount (46%) of confidence in medical scientists to act in the public’s best interests. However, the share expressing strong confidence in medical scientists has fallen 10 points since November 2020.

      There has been a similar decline in the share of Democrats holding the strongest level of confidence in scientists since November 2020. (Half of the survey respondents were asked about their confidence in “medical scientists,” while the other half were asked about “scientists.”)

      Still, ratings for medical scientists, along with those for scientists, remain more positive than those for other groups in the eyes of Democrats and independents who lean to the Democratic Party. None of the other groups rated on the survey garner as much confidence; the closest contenders are public school principals and the military. About three-quarters (76%) of Democrats and Democratic leaners have at least a fair amount of confidence in public school principals; 68% say the same about the military.

      There has been a steady decline in confidence in medical scientists among Republicans and Republican leaners since April 2020. In the latest survey, just 15% have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists, down from 31% who said this in April 2020 and 26% who said this in November 2020. There has been a parallel increase in the share of Republicans holding negative views of medical scientists, with 34% now saying they have not too much or no confidence at all in medical scientists to act in the public’s best interests – nearly three times higher than in January 2019, before the coronavirus outbreak.

      Republicans’ views of scientists have followed a similar trajectory. Just 13% have a great deal of confidence in scientists, down from a high of 27% in January 2019 and April 2020. The share with negative views has doubled over this time period; 36% say they have not too much or no confidence at all in scientists in the latest survey.

      Republicans’ confidence in other groups and institutions has also declined since the pandemic took hold. The share of Republicans with at least a fair amount of confidence in public school principals is down 27 points since April 2020. Views of elected officials, already at low levels, declined further; 15% of Republicans have at least a fair amount of confidence in elected officials to act in the public’s best interests, down from 37% in April 2020.

      Race and ethnicity, education, partisan affiliation each shape confidence in medical scientists

      People’s assessments of scientists and medical scientists are tied to several factors, including race and ethnicity as well as levels of education and partisan affiliation.

      Chart shows confidence in medical scientists declines among White, Black and Hispanic adults since April 2020

      Looking across racial and ethnic groups, confidence in medical scientists declined at least modestly among White and Black adults over the past year. The decline was especially pronounced among White adults.

      There is now little difference between how White, Black and Hispanic adults see medical scientists. This marks a shift from previous Pew Research Center surveys, where White adults were more likely than Black adults to express high levels of confidence in medical scientists.

      Among White adults, the share with a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public has declined from 43% to 29% over the past year. Ratings are now lower than they were in January 2019, before the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S.

      Among Black adults, 28% say they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the public’s best interests, down slightly from November 2020 (33%).

      The share of Hispanic adults with a strong level of trust in medical scientists is similar to the share who expressed the same level of trust in November 2020, although the current share is 16 points lower than it was in April 2020 (29% vs 45%), shortly after measures to address the coronavirus outbreak began. Ratings of medical scientists among Hispanic adults continue to be lower than they were before the coronavirus outbreak. In January 2019, 37% of Hispanic adults said they had a great deal of confidence in medical scientists.

      While the shares of White, Black and Hispanic adults who express a great deal of confidence in medical scientists have declined since the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., majorities of these groups continue to express at least a fair amount of confidence in medical scientists, and the ratings for medical scientists compare favorably with those of other groups and institutions rated in the survey.

      Chart shows White Democrats express higher levels of confidence in medical scientists than Black, Hispanic Democrats

      Confidence in scientists tends to track closely with confidence in medical scientists. Majorities of White, Black and Hispanic adults have at least a fair amount of confidence in scientists. And the shares with this view continue to rank at or above those for other groups and institutions. For more on confidence in scientists over time among White, Black and Hispanic adults, see the Appendix.

      Confidence in medical scientists and scientists across racial and ethnic groups plays out differently for Democrats and Republicans.

      White Democrats (52%) are more likely than Hispanic (36%) and Black (30%) Democrats to say they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the public’s best interests. However, large majorities of all three groups say they have at least a fair amount of confidence in medical scientists.

      Among Republicans and Republican leaners, 14% of White adults say they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists, while 52% say they have a fair amount of confidence. Views among Hispanic Republicans are very similar to those of White Republicans, in contrast to differences seen among Democrats.

      There are similar patterns in confidence in scientists. (However, the sample size for Black Republicans in the survey is too small to analyze on these measures.) See the Appendix for more.

      Americans with higher levels of education express more positive views of scientists and medical scientists than those with lower levels of education, as has also been the case in past Center surveys. But education matters more in assessments by Democrats than Republicans.

      Chart shows college-educated Democrats express high levels of confidence in medical scientists

      Democrats and Democratic leaners with at least a college degree express a high level of confidence in medical scientists: 54% have a great deal of confidence and 95% have at least a fair amount of confidence in medical scientists to act in the public’s interests. By comparison, a smaller share of Democrats who have not graduated from college have confidence in medical scientists.

      Among Republicans and Republican leaners, college graduates are 9 points more likely than those with some college experience or less education to express a great deal of confidence in medical scientists (21% vs. 12%).

      There is a similar difference between those with higher and lower education levels among Democrats when it comes to confidence in scientists. Among Republicans, differences by education are less pronounced; there is no significant difference by education level in the shares holding the strongest level of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s interests. See the Appendix for details.

      Report Materials

      Complete Report PDF

      Topline Questionnaire

      Weaving Indigenous knowledge into the scientific method (Nature)

      Uncategorized, , , , ,

      nature.com

      Saima May Sidik

      11 January 2022; Correction 24 January 2022

      Dominique David-Chavez working with Randal Alicea, a Caribbean Indigenous farmer, in his tobacco drying shed in Cidra, Borikén.
      Dominique David-Chavez works with Randal Alicea, an Indigenous farmer, in his tobacco-drying shed in Cidra, Borikén (Puerto Rico).Credit: Norma Ortiz

      Many scientists rely on Indigenous people to guide their work — by helping them to find wildlife, navigate rugged terrain or understand changing weather trends, for example. But these relationships have often felt colonial, extractive and unequal. Researchers drop into communities, gather data and leave — never contacting the locals again, and excluding them from the publication process.

      Today, many scientists acknowledge the troubling attitudes that have long plagued research projects in Indigenous communities. But finding a path to better relationships has proved challenging. Tensions surfaced last year, for example, when seven University of Auckland academics argued that planned changes to New Zealand’s secondary school curriculum, to “ensure parity between mātauranga Māori”, or Maori knowledge, and “other bodies of knowledge”, could undermine trust in science.

      Last month, the University of Auckland’s vice-chancellor, Dawn Freshwater, announced a symposium to be held early this year, at which different viewpoints can be discussed. In 2016, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) launched Navigating the New Arctic — a programme that encouraged scientists to explore the wide-reaching consequences of climate change in the north. A key sentence in the programme description reflected a shift in perspective: “Given the deep knowledge held by local and Indigenous residents in the Arctic, NSF encourages scientists and Arctic residents to collaborate on Arctic research projects.” The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment have made similar statements. So, too, have the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

      But some Indigenous groups feel that despite such well-intentioned initiatives, their inclusion in research is only a token gesture to satisfy a funding agency.

      There’s no road map out of science’s painful past. Nature asked three researchers who belong to Indigenous communities in the Americas and New Zealand, plus two funders who work closely with Northern Indigenous communities, how far we’ve come toward decolonizing science — and how researchers can work more respectfully with Indigenous groups.

      DANIEL HIKUROA: Weave folklore into modern science

      Daniel Hikuroa is an Earth systems and environmental humanities researcher at Te Wānanga o Waipapa, University of Auckland, New Zealand, and a member of the Māori community.

      We all have a world view. Pūrākau, or traditional stories, are a part of Māori culture with great potential for informing science. But what you need to understand is that they’re codified according to an Indigenous world view.

      For example, in Māori tradition, we have these things called taniwha that are like water serpents. When you think of taniwha, you think, danger, risk, be on your guard! Taniwha as physical entities do not exist. Taniwha are a mechanism for describing how rivers behave and change through time. For example, pūrākau say that taniwha live in a certain part of the Waikato River, New Zealand’s longest, running for 425 kilometres through the North Island. That’s the part of the river that tends to flood. Fortunately, officials took knowledge of taniwha into account when they were designing a road near the Waikato river in 2002. Because of this, we’ve averted disasters.

      Sometimes, it takes a bit of explanation to convince non-Indigenous scientists that pūrākau are a variation on the scientific method. They’re built on observations and interpretations of the natural world, and they allow us to predict how the world will function in the future. They’re repeatable, reliable, they have rigour, and they’re accurate. Once scientists see this, they have that ‘Aha!’ moment where they realize how well Western science and pūrākau complement each other.

      We’re very lucky in New Zealand because our funding agencies help us to disseminate this idea. In 2005, the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology (which has since been incorporated into the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment) developed a framework called Vision Mātauranga. Mātauranga is the Māori word for knowledge, but it also includes the culture, values and world view of Māori people. Whenever a scientist applies for funding, they’re asked whether their proposal addresses a Māori need or can draw on Māori knowledge. The intent of Vision Mātauranga is to broaden the science sector by unlocking the potential of Māori mātauranga.

      In the early days of Vision Mātauranga, some Indigenous groups found themselves inundated with last-minute requests from researchers who just wanted Indigenous people to sign off on their proposals to make their grant applications more competitive. It was enormously frustrating. These days, most researchers are using the policy with a higher degree of sophistication.

      Vision Mātauranga is at its best when researchers develop long-term relationships with Indigenous groups so that they know about those groups’ dreams and aspirations and challenges, and also about their skill sets. Then the conversation can coalesce around where those things overlap with the researchers’ own goals. The University of Waikato in Hamilton has done a great job with this, establishing a chief-to-chief relationship in which the university’s senior management meets maybe twice a year with the chiefs of the Indigenous groups in the surrounding area. This ongoing relationship lets the university and the Indigenous groups have high-level discussions that build trust and can inform projects led by individual labs.

      We’ve made great progress towards bridging Māori culture and scientific culture, but attitudes are still evolving — including my own. In 2011, I published my first foray into using Māori knowledge in science, and I used the word ‘integrate’ to describe the process of combining the two. I no longer use that word, because I think weaving is a more apt description. When you weave two strands together, the integrity of the individual components can remain, but you end up with something that’s ultimately stronger than what you started with.

      DOMINIQUE DAVID-CHAVEZ: Listen and learn with humility

      Dominique David-Chavez is an Indigenous land and data stewardship researcher at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, and a member of the Arawak Taíno community.

      People often ask how can we integrate Indigenous knowledge into Western science. But framing the question in this way upholds the unhealthy power dynamic between Western and Indigenous scientists. It makes it sound as though there are two singular bodies of knowledge, when in fact Indigenous knowledge — unlike Western science — is drawn from thousands of different communities, each with its own knowledge systems.

      At school, I was taught this myth that it was European and American white men who discovered all these different physical systems on Earth — on land, in the skies and in the water. But Indigenous people have been observing those same systems for hundreds or thousands of years. When Western scientists claim credit for discoveries that Indigenous people made first, they’re stealing Indigenous people’s contributions to science. This theft made me angry, but it also drove me. I decided to undertake graduate studies so that I could look critically at how we validate who creates knowledge, who creates science and who are the scientists.

      To avoid perpetuating harmful power dynamics, researchers who want to work in an Indigenous people’s homeland should first introduce themselves to the community, explain their skills and convey how their research could serve the community. And they should begin the work only if the community invites them to. That invitation might take time to come! The researchers should also build in time to spend in the community to listen, be humbled and learn.

      If you don’t have that built-in relational accountability, then maybe you’re better off in a supporting role.

      Overall, my advice to Western researchers is this: always be questioning your assumptions about where science came from, where it’s going and what part you should be playing in its development.

      MARY TURNIPSEED: Fund relationship building and follow-ups

      Mary Turnipseed is an ecologist and grantmaker at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Palo Alto, California.

      I’ve been awarding grants in the Arctic since 2015, when I became a marine-conservation programme officer at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. A lesson I learnt early on about knowledge co-production — the term used for collaborations between academics and non-academics — is to listen. In the non-Indigenous parts of North America, we’re used to talking, but flipping that on its end helps us to work better with Indigenous communities.

      Listening to our Indigenous Alaskan Native partners is often how I know whether a collaboration is working well or not. If the community is supportive of a particular effort, that means they’ve been able to develop a healthy relationship with the researchers. We have quarterly check-ins with our partners about how projects are going; and, in non-pandemic times, I frequently travelled to Alaska to talk directly with our partners.

      One way in which we help to spur productive relationships is by giving research teams a year of preliminary funding — before they even start their research — so that they can work with Indigenous groups to identify the questions their research will address and decide how they’re going to tackle them. We really need more funding agencies to set aside money for this type of early relationship-building, so that everyone goes into a project with the same expectations, and with a level of trust for one another.

      People working on the Ikaaġvik Sikukun collaboration in the snow cutting on ice core samples.
      Members of the Ikaaġvik Sikukun collaboration at the Native Village of Kotzebue, Alaska.Credit: Sarah Betcher/Farthest North Films

      Developing relationships takes time, so it’s easiest when Indigenous communities have a research coordinator, such as Alex Whiting (environmental programme director for the Native Village of Kotzebue), to handle all their collaborations. I think the number of such positions could easily be increased tenfold, and I’d love to see the US federal government offer more funding for these types of position.

      Funding agencies should provide incentives for researchers to go back to the communities that they’ve worked with and share what they’ve found. There’s always talk among Indigenous groups about researchers who come in, collect data, get their PhDs and never show up again. Every time that happens, it hurts the community, and it hurts the next researchers to come. I think it’s essential for funding agencies to prevent this from happening.

      ALEX WHITING: Develop a toolkit to decolonize relationships

      Alex Whiting is an environmental specialist in Kotzebue, Alaska, and a formally adopted member of the Qikiktagrukmiut community.

      A lot of the time, researchers who operate in a colonial way aren’t aware of the harm they’re doing. But many people are realizing that taking knowledge without involving local people is not only unethical, but inefficient. In 1997, the Native Village of Kotzebue — a federally recognized seat of tribal government representing the Qikiktagrukmiut, northwest Alaska’s original inhabitants — hired me as its environmental programme director. I helped the community to develop a research protocol that lays out our expectations of scientists who work in our community, and an accompanying questionnaire.

      By filling in the one-page questionnaire, researchers give us a quick overview of what they plan to do; its relevance and potential benefit to our community; the need for local involvement; and how we’ll be compensated financially. This provides us with a tool through which to develop relationships with researchers, make sure that our priorities and rights are addressed, and hold researchers accountable. Making scientists think about how they’ll engage with us has helped to make research a more equitable, less extractive activity.

      We cannot force scientists to deal with us. It’s a free country. But the Qikiktagrukmiut are skilled at activities such as boating, travelling on snow and capturing animals — and those skills are extremely useful for fieldwork, as is our deep historical knowledge of the local environment. It’s a lot harder for scientists to accomplish their work without our involvement. Many scientists realize this, so these days we get 6–12 research proposals per year. We say yes to most of them.

      The NSF’s Navigating the New Arctic programme has definitely increased the number of last-minute proposals that communities such as ours get swamped with a couple of weeks before the application deadline. Throwing an Indigenous component into a research proposal at the last minute is definitely not an ideal way to go about things, because it doesn’t give us time to fully consider the research before deciding whether we want to participate. But at least the NSF has recognized that working with Indigenous people is a thing! They’re just in the growing-pains phase.

      Not all Indigenous groups have had as much success as we have, and some are still experiencing the extractive side of science. But incorporating Indigenous knowledge into science can create rapid growths in understanding, and we’re happy we’ve helped some researchers do this in a respectful way.

      NATAN OBED: Fund research on Indigenous priorities

      Natan Obed is president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, and a member of the Inuit community.

      Every year, funding agencies devote hundreds of millions of dollars to work that occurs in the Inuit homeland in northern Canada. Until very recently, almost none of those agencies considered Inuit peoples’ priorities.

      These Indigenous communities face massive social and economic challenges. More than 60% of Inuit households are food insecure, meaning they don’t always have enough food to maintain an active, healthy life. On average, one-quarter as many doctors serve Inuit communities as serve urban Canadian communities. Our life expectancy is ten years less than the average non-Indigenous Canadian’s. The list goes on. And yet, very little research is devoted to addressing these inequities.

      Last year, the Inuit advocacy organization Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (the name means ‘Inuit are united in Canada’) collaborated with the research network ArcticNet to start its own funding programme, which is called the Inuit Nunangat Research Program (INRP). Funding decisions are led entirely by Inuit people to ensure that all grants support research on Inuit priorities. Even in the programme’s first year, we got more requests than we could fund. We selected 11 proposals that all relate directly to the day-to-day lives of Inuit people. For example, one study that we’re funding aims to characterize a type of goose that has newly arrived in northern Labrador; another focuses on how social interactions spread disease in Inuit communities.

      Our goal with the INRP is twofold: first, we want to generate knowledge that addresses Inuit concerns, and second, we want to create an example of how other granting agencies can change so that they respect the priorities of all groups. We’ve been moderately successful in getting some of the main Canadian granting agencies, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, to allocate more resources to things that matter to Inuit people. I’d like to think that the INRP gives them a model for how to become even more inclusive.

      We hope that, over the next ten years, it will become normal for granting agencies to consider the needs of Indigenous communities. But we also know that institutions change slowly. Looking back at where we’ve been, we have a lot to be proud of, but we still have a huge task ahead of us.

      These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

      For better science, increase Indigenous participation in publishing (Nature)

      Uncategorized, , , , , ,

      10 January 2022

      Amending long-established processes to include fresh perspectives is challenging, but journal editor Lisa Loseto is trying to find a path forward.

      Saima May Sidik

      Lisa Loseto at a campfire, where she is shutting down a research site at a traditional whaling camp.
      Lisa Loseto stands by a campfire.Credit: Oksana Schimnowski

      Lisa Loseto is a research scientist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, a federal government department whose regional offices include one in Winnipeg, where she is based. Some of Northern Canada’s Indigenous people have shaped her research into how beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) interact with their environments, and have taught her to rethink her own part in the scientific method. As co-editor-in-chief of the journal Arctic Science since 2017, she is looking at ways to increase Indigenous representation in scientific publishing, including the editorial and peer-review processes.

      What got you thinking about the role of Indigenous people in scientific publishing?

      In 2020, Arctic Science published a special issue centred on knowledge co-produced by Western scientists and Indigenous people. As production of that issue progressed, the peer-review and editorial processes stuck out as aspects lacking Indigenous representation. We were soliciting papers to highlight the contributions of Indigenous knowledge — but the peer-review process was led by non-Indigenous editors like myself, and academics to review the articles. A few members of the editorial board thought, ‘Let’s talk about this and think about ways to provide more balance.’ We discussed the issue in a workshop that included representatives from several groups that are indigenous to Canada’s Arctic.

      What did the workshop reveal about the Indigenous participants’ perceptions of scientific publishing?

      For a lot of people, publishing seemed like a distant concept, so we explained how the editorial and peer-review processes work. We described peer review as a method for validating knowledge before it’s published, and many Indigenous participants recognized similarities between that process and one in their own lives: in the Arctic, each generation passes down knowledge of how to live in a harsh environment, and over time this knowledge is tested and refined. The Indigenous workshop participants said, “We would die if we didn’t have the peer-review process.”

      The scientific method used by Westerners is colonial: it emphasizes objectivity and performing experiments in the absence of outside influences. This mindset can feel alienating for many Indigenous people, who see themselves as integral parts of nature. This makes me think scientific publishing doesn’t fit an Indigenous framework.

      The dense jargon and idiosyncratic structures of scientific publications make them difficult for people without a formal scientific education to jump into. Even people training to become scientists often don’t get involved in publishing until they’re in graduate school because there’s so much background knowledge that they need to have first.

      If a journal article draws on Indigenous knowledge, should it include an Indigenous peer reviewer?

      Perhaps, but trying to force Indigenous perspectives into a process that was created to advance Western priorities can come with its own problems. Scientific publications serve the dual purposes of disseminating information and acting as a tool of measure for scientists’ careers. Most members of Indigenous groups aren’t concerned with building up their academic CVs; in fact, some are uncomfortable with being named as authors because they see their knowledge as part of a collective body, rather than belonging solely to themselves. So do publications have the same weight for Indigenous people? Maybe not. In light of this, is participating in this system really the best use of time for Indigenous people who aren’t in academia — especially when their communities are already overtaxed with researchers’ requests for guidance through prepublication aspects of performing research in remote areas?

      In Arviat, Nunavut, Canada, a local woman demonstrates historic tools used by Inuit, with a polar tent in background.
      Indigenous communities hold a wealth of knowledge that can advance science.Credit: Galaxiid/Alamy

      As an alternative to contributing to research articles, we’re considering starting a commentary section of Arctic Science. This could give more Indigenous people a venue to publish their views on the scientific process, and their observations of natural trends, in a less technical format.

      Can Indigenous journal editors help to bridge the divide between Indigenous people and academic publications?

      Yes, but there are very few Indigenous journal editors. Historically, editor positions have been reserved for senior scientists, and many senior scientists are white men. I’m trying to bring on more early-career scientists as editors, as this group is often more diverse. By moving away from offering these positions to only the most senior scientists, I think we’ll see a shift in demographics. At the same time, I don’t want to put the burden of bridging current divides entirely on Indigenous people. That job is for all of us.

      What is Arctic Science planning to do moving forward?

      My hope is to build an Indigenous advisory group that can advise Arctic Science on the peer-review process generally and consider, on a case-by-case basis, whether articles could benefit from an Indigenous peer reviewer. Beyond that, we’re still figuring out how to engage more people without being prescriptive about how they’re engaged.

      What do you hope these actions will achieve?

      Publications are power. Policy decisions are based on things that are written down and tangible: peer-reviewed papers and reports. Not only do scientific publications guide policy decisions, they also determine who gets money. The more you publish, and the better the journals you publish in, the more power you have.

      Indigenous communities have tremendous knowledge, but much of it is passed down orally rather than published in written form. I think the fact that Indigenous representation is weak in academia, including in publishing, upholds the power imbalance that exists between Indigenous people and settlers. I want to find a better balance.

      doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00058-x

      This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

      ‘Não há linha clara que separe ciência da pseudociência’, diz professor de Princeton (BBC News Brasil)

      Uncategorized, , , , , ,

      bbc.com

      Carlos Serrano – @carliserrano

      BBC News Mundo

      12 dezembro 2021

      Frenologia
      A relação entre o conhecimento genuíno e as doutrinas marginais é mais próxima do muitos querem aceitar, diz historiador especialista em história da ciência

      Terraplanistas, antivacinas, criacionistas, astrólogos, telepatas, numerólogos, homeopatas…

      Para as instituições científicas, essas práticas e movimentos enquadram-se na categoria das “pseudociências”. Ou seja, doutrinas baseadas em fundamentos que seus adeptos consideram científicas e, a partir daí, criam uma corrente que se afasta do que é normalmente aceito pelo mundo acadêmico.

      Mas como distinguir o que é ciência daquilo que se faz passar por ciência?

      Essa tarefa é muito mais complicada do que parece, segundo Michael Gordin, professor da Universidade Princeton, nos Estados Unidos, e especialista em história da ciência. Gordin é autor do livro On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (“Na Fronteira: Onde a Ciência Encontra a Pseudociência”, em tradução livre).

      Seu livro detalha como operam as pseudociências e como, do seu ponto de vista, são uma consequência inevitável do progresso científico.

      Em entrevista à BBC News Mundo (o serviço em espanhol da BBC), Gordin detalha a complexa relação entre o que se considera ciência verdadeira e o que ele chama de doutrinas marginais.

      Michael Gordin
      Michael Gordin, autor do livro “Na Fronteira: Onde a Ciência Encontra a Pseudociência” (em tradução livre do inglês)

      BBC News Mundo – O senhor afirma que não existe uma linha definida separando a ciência da pseudociência, mas a ciência tem um método claro e comprovável. Esta não seria uma diferença clara com relação à pseudociência?

      Michael Gordin – Acredita-se normalmente que a ciência tem um único método, mas isso não é verdade. A ciência tem muitos métodos. Os geólogos fazem seu trabalho de forma muito diferente dos físicos teóricos, e os biólogos moleculares, dos neurocientistas. Alguns cientistas trabalham no campo, observando o que acontece. Outros trabalham em laboratório, sob condições controladas. Outros fazem simulações. Ou seja, a ciência tem muitos métodos, que são heterogêneos. A ciência é dinâmica, e esse dinamismo dificulta a definição dessa linha. Podemos tomar um exemplo concreto e dizer que se trata de ciência ou de pseudociência. É fácil com um exemplo concreto.

      O problema é que essa linha não é consistente e, quando você observa uma maior quantidade de casos, haverá coisas que antes eram consideradas ciência e agora são consideradas pseudociências, como a astrologia. Existem temas como a deriva dos continentes, que inicialmente era considerada uma teoria marginal e agora é uma teoria básica da geofísica.

      Quase tudo o que hoje se considera pseudociência já foi ciência no passado, que foi refutada com o passar do tempo e os que continuam a apoiá-la são considerados lunáticos ou charlatães. Ou seja, a definição do que é ciência ou pseudociência é dinâmica ao longo do tempo. Esta é uma das razões da dificuldade desse julgamento.

      astrología
      Considerada ciência no passado, a astrologia encontra-se hoje no rol das pseudociências – ou doutrinas marginais, segundo Michael Gordin

      BBC News Mundo – Mas existem coisas que não se alteram ao longo do tempo. Por exemplo, 2+2 sempre foi igual a 4. Isso quer dizer que a ciência trabalha com base em princípios que não permitem interpretações…

      Gordin – Bem, isso não é necessariamente certo. Dois óvnis mais dois óvnis são quatro óvnis.

      É interessante que você tenha escolhido a matemática que, de fato, não é uma ciência empírica, pois ela não se refere ao mundo exterior. É uma série de regras que usamos para determinar certas coisas.

      Uma das razões pelas quais é muito complicado fazer a distinção é o fato de que as doutrinas marginais observam o que é considerado ciência estabelecida e adaptam a elas seus argumentos e suas técnicas.

      Um exemplo é o “criacionismo científico”, que defende que o mundo foi criado em sete dias, 6.000 anos atrás. Existem publicações de criacionismo científico que incluem gráficos matemáticos sobre as razões de decomposição de vários isótopos, para tentar comprovar que a Terra tem apenas 6.000 anos.

      Seria genial afirmar que usar a matemática e apresentar gráficos é ciência, mas a realidade é que quase todas as doutrinas marginais usam a matemática de alguma forma.

      Os cientistas discordam sobre o tipo de matemática utilizada, mas existem, por exemplo, pessoas que defendem que a matemática avançada utilizada na teoria das cordas já não é científica, porque perdeu a verificação empírica. Trata-se de matemática de alto nível, feita por doutores das melhores universidades, mas existe um debate interno na ciência, entre os físicos, que discutem se ela deve ou não ser considerada ciência.

      Não estou dizendo que todos devem ser criacionistas, mas, quando a mecânica quântica foi proposta pela primeira vez, algumas pessoas diziam: “isso parece muito estranho”, “ela não se atém às medições da forma em que acreditamos que funcionem” ou “isso realmente é ciência?”

      Terra plana
      Nos últimos anos, popularizou-se entre alguns grupos a ideia de que a Terra é plana

      BBC News Mundo – Então o sr. afirma que as pseudociências ou doutrinas marginais têm algum valor?

      Gordin – A questão é que muitas coisas que consideramos inovadoras provêm dos limites do conhecimento ortodoxo.

      O que quero dizer são basicamente três pontos: primeiro, que não existe uma linha divisória clara; segundo, que compreender o que fica de cada lado da linha exige a compreensão do contexto; e, terceiro, que o processo normal da ciência produz doutrinas marginais.

      Não podemos descartar essas doutrinas, pois elas são inevitáveis. Elas são um produto derivado da forma como as ciências funcionam.

      BBC News Mundo – Isso significa que deveríamos ser mais tolerantes com as pseudociências?

      Gordin – Os cientistas, como qualquer outra pessoa, têm tempo e energia limitados e não podem pesquisar tudo.

      Por isso, qualquer tempo que for dedicado a refutar ou negar a legitimidade de uma doutrina marginal é tempo que deixa de ser usado para fazer ciência — e talvez nem surta resultados.

      As pessoas vêm refutando o criacionismo científico há décadas. Elas trataram de desmascarar a telepatia por ainda mais tempo e ela segue rondando à nossa volta. Existem diversos tipos de ideias marginais. Algumas são muito politizadas e chegam a ser nocivas para a saúde pública ou o meio ambiente. É a estas, a meu ver, que precisamos dedicar atenção e recursos para sua eliminação ou pelo menos explicar por que elas estão erradas.

      Mas não acho que outras ideias, como acreditar em óvnis, sejam especificamente perigosas. Acredito que nem mesmo o criacionismo seja tão perigoso como ser antivacinas, ou acreditar que as mudanças climáticas são uma farsa.

      Devemos observar as pseudociências como algo inevitável e abordá-las de forma pragmática. Temos uma quantidade de recursos limitada e precisamos escolher quais doutrinas podem causar danos e como enfrentá-las.

      Devemos simplesmente tratar de reduzir os danos que elas podem causar? Esse é o caso da vacinação obrigatória, cujo objetivo é evitar os danos, mas sem necessariamente convencer os opositores que eles estão equivocados. Devemos persuadi-los de que estão equivocados? Isso precisa ser examinado caso a caso.

      Antivacuna
      Existem em várias partes do mundo grupos que se opõem às vacinas contra a covid-19

      BBC News Mundo – Como então devemos lidar com as pseudociências?

      Gordin – Uma possibilidade é reconhecer que são pessoas interessadas na ciência.

      Um terraplanista, por exemplo, é uma pessoa interessada na configuração da Terra. Significa que é alguém que teve interesse em pesquisar a natureza e, por alguma razão, seguiu a direção incorreta.

      Pode-se então perguntar por que isso aconteceu. Pode-se abordar a pessoa, dizendo: “se você não acredita nesta evidência, em qual tipo de evidência você acreditaria?” ou “mostre-me suas evidências e vamos conversar”.

      É algo que poderíamos fazer, mas vale a pena fazê-lo? É uma doutrina que não considero perigosa. Seria um problema se todos os governos do mundo pensassem que a Terra é plana, mas não vejo esse risco.

      A versão contemporânea do terraplanismo surgiu há cerca de 15 anos. Acredito que os acadêmicos ainda não compreendem muito bem como aconteceu, nem por que aconteceu tão rápido.

      Outra coisa que podemos fazer é não necessariamente persuadi-los de que estão equivocados, porque talvez eles não aceitem, mas tentar entender como esse movimento surgiu e se expandiu. Isso pode nos orientar sobre como enfrentar ameaças mais sérias.

      cálculos
      As pessoas que acreditam nas doutrinas marginais muitas vezes tomam elementos da ciência estabelecida para traçar suas conclusões

      BBC News Mundo – Ameaças mais sérias como os antivacinas…

      Gordin – As vacinas foram inventadas no século 18, sempre houve pessoas que se opusessem a elas, em parte porque todas as vacinas apresentam risco, embora seja muito baixo.

      Ao longo do tempo, a forma como se lidou com a questão foi a instituição de um sistema de seguro que basicamente diz o seguinte: você precisa receber a vacina, mas se você receber e tiver maus resultados, nós compensaremos você por esses danos.

      Tenho certeza de que isso ocorrerá com a vacina contra a covid, mas ainda não conhecemos todo o espectro, nem a seriedade dos danos que ela poderá causar. Mas os danos e a probabilidade de sua ocorrência parecem ser muito baixos.

      Com relação aos antivacinas que acreditam, por exemplo, que a vacina contra a covid contém um chip, a única ação que pode ser tomada para o bem da saúde pública é torná-la obrigatória. Foi dessa forma que se conseguiu erradicar a pólio na maior parte do mundo, mesmo com a existência dos opositores à vacina.

      BBC News Mundo – Mas torná-la obrigatória pode fazer com que alguém diga que a ciência está sendo usada com propósitos políticos ou ideológicos…

      Gordin – Tenho certeza de que, se o Estado impuser uma vacina obrigatória, alguém dirá isso. Mas não se trata de ideologia. O Estado já obriga tantas coisas e já existem vacinas que são obrigatórias.

      E o Estado faz todo tipo de afirmações científicas. Não é permitido o ensino do criacionismo nas escolas, por exemplo, nem a pesquisa de clonagem de seres humanos. Ou seja, o Estado já interveio muitas vezes em disputas científicas e procura fazer isso segundo o consenso científico.

      BBC News Mundo – As pessoas que adotam as pseudociências o fazem com base no ceticismo, que é exatamente um dos valores fundamentais da ciência. É um paradoxo, não?

      Gordin – Este é um dos motivos por que acredito que não haja uma linha divisória clara entre a ciência e a pseudociência. O ceticismo é uma ferramenta que todos nós utilizamos. A questão é sobre qual tipo de assuntos você é cético e o que pode convencê-lo de um fato específico.

      No século 19, havia um grande debate se os átomos realmente existiam ou não. Hoje, praticamente nenhum cientista duvida da sua existência. É assim que a ciência funciona. O foco do ceticismo se move de um lado para outro com o passar do tempo. Quando esse ceticismo se dirige a assuntos que já foram aceitos, às vezes ocorrem problemas, mas há ocasiões em que isso é necessário.

      A essência da teoria da relatividade de Einstein é que o éter — a substância através da qual as ondas de luz supostamente viajavam — não existe. Para isso, Einstein concentrou seu ceticismo em um postulado fundamental, mas o fez dizendo que poderiam ser preservados muitos outros conhecimentos que já eram considerados estabelecidos.

      Portanto, o ceticismo deve ter um propósito. Se você for cético pelo simples fato de sê-lo, este é um processo que não produz avanços.

      Mulher
      O ceticismo é um dos princípios básicos da ciência

      BBC News Mundo – É possível que, no futuro, o que hoje consideramos ciência seja descartado como pseudociência?

      Gordin – No futuro, haverá muitas doutrinas que serão consideradas pseudociências, simplesmente porque existem muitas coisas que ainda não entendemos.

      Existem muitas coisas que não entendemos sobre o cérebro ou o meio ambiente. No futuro, as pessoas olharão para muitas teorias e dirão que estão erradas.

      Não é suficiente que uma teoria seja incorreta para que seja considerada pseudociência. É necessário que existam pessoas que acreditem que ela é correta, mesmo que o consenso afirme que se trata de um equívoco e que as instituições científicas considerem que, por alguma razão, ela é perigosa.