Fact Checking is Important

Today I leave for Germany, so I am up early doing some last minute things. While eating breakfast and drinking tea, I was watching the news and saw Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell being interviewed. During the course of the interview, the intervewer presented Mr. McConnell with some statistics displaying massive support for a government health plan. Mr. McConnel responded first with, "Well, it's how you phrased the question. Had you phrased it, 'Do you want the government between you and your doctor?', you would have had much worse support." Of course, McConnell is conveniently leaving out the fact that currently it is the insurance company between you and your doctor, and the insurance company has far more incentive to deny health-care than the government. Anyway, what followed was worse, however. In trying to explain his boneheaded rephrasing of the question, McConnell said something along the lines of, "Because that what it will be. We see in countries that have national health plans long waits and delays in treatment, and that is reflected in their life spans."

When you are going to make a statement like that, know what the hell you are talking about. Canada and France both have life expectancies beyond the American life expectancy (According to the UN estimates, both Canada and France have an average life expectancy of 80.7 while the U.S. has one of 78.2). Likewise, countries that have a mixture of government and private health care (but a predominant emphasis on the government provided health care) like Norway and Japan also have longer life expectancies (Japan has an exceedingly impressive 82.6 years and Norway 80.2). While a few years seems quibbling, it is still a few years in the exact opposite direction implied by Mr. McConnell. I wish journalists would challenge politicians for sources a little more often.

Quotations for the Ages

This is going to be my last Quotations post for a while. I am certainly not going to be dragging my Oxford Dictionary of Quotations with me to Germany, and tomorrow afternoon I am taking the train out to stay the weekend with my girlfriend's family before I fly out on Sunday for Goettingen. Thus, this is my last chance to make some headway through the 'B' section, so this is going to be a little longer than the usual list.

"It's not perfect, but to me on balance Right Now is a lot better than the Good Old Days." - Maeve Binchy, Irish novelist, 1940-

"We French, we English, never lost our civil war,
endure it still, a bloodless civil bore;
no wounded lying about, no Whitman wanted.
It's only by our lack of ghosts we're haunted."
- Earle Birney, Canadian poet, 1904-95

"The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia."
"If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans."
- Otto von Bismarck, German statesman, 1815-98

"If I'd known I was gonna live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself." - Eubie Blake, American ragtime pianist, 1883-1983

"Architecture should be at the head of the arts, not at the foot of the professions." - Reginald Blomfield, English architect, 1856-1942

Speaking of quantum mechanics:
"Anybody who is not shocked by this subject has failed to understand it." - Niels Bohr, Danish physicist, 1885-1962

"A fool can always find a greater fool to admire him." - Nicolas Boileau, French critic and poet, 1636-1711

Also, as a random aside, I thought it was neat to point out that Earle Birney, while born in Calgary, grew up in my hometown in BC. Oddly, I don't ever remember learning about him in elementary school. When you understand how small my hometown is, one would think it would at least be mentioned. We had a famous (for Canada) poet grow up in the area! Considering that really the only other noteworthy features of the area on a national scale are beer and close proximity to polygamists, I think a famous poet is worth a mention. Of course, there is a good chance that all my childhood friends who actually went to highschool in the area studied him in English class, and he was simply deemed too complicated to mention to grade 6 students.

Another Reason to Suggest Favourite Posts

Even if you don't think I am deserving of best science post of the year (a conjecture I would truthfully have to agree with... there are a lot of bloggers out there, many of whom write much better than I), there are two more reasons why I would appreciate some feedback on which posts you have enjoyed and which you have not. The first is that I am planning to add a sidebar element which will highlight a selection of five or so posts which might be worthwhile for new readers to have a look at. So far, I thought perhaps my series on top-down visual processing, my post on free will, and my post explaining the nature of brain waves might all be candidates. Of course, I am not always the best judge of my own work, which leads me to the second reason why feedback would be much appreciated. While a large part of my reason for maintaining this blog is the selfish desire to expound at length about whatever subjects strike my fancy, I also hope it will be an enjoyable reading endeavour. Therefore, I would like to get as broad a sense as possible from my current readership of which posts worked and which did not.

For those who have taken the time to send me your thoughts, thank you. For those who will do so in the future, thank you in advance.

Not My Puzzle

Thanks to Deus Ex Malcontent, I have been pointed in the direction of a fun puzzle put out by Empire Magazine. Called The Cryptic Canvas, you have a painting full of references to fifty films. Most of the films are relatively recent, but some of them do go back a ways. I haven't finished (my girlfriend and I made it to 29/50 before we decided to take a break), but there are some fun ones. You can save your progress and go back to it, so it is well worth having a look at.

Note: I am tagging this post with the puzzle label, but it is not part of the general run of puzzles I have been doing. So, as it should be obvious, I don't expect any emails with solutions. I will be quite confused if I do get them.

Pseudo-self-promotion

Through my internet wanderings, I have been made aware of a blog contest by a group called 3 Quarks Daily. They are currently looking for science submissions (with nominations ending June 1st). I am posting the link to the contest partly to help them promote it (they asked for bloggers to do so, and I think it sounds like a neat contest), but also partly for my own self-interest. After all, I write a blog (ostensibly) about science. So, in flagrant self-promotion, if any of my readers think I have done a wonderfully grand job of writing about a particular science topic within the last year, I would be very flattered to be nominated (they also allow self-nomination, which I am not above doing. So, even if you don't feel like nominating me but have some strong feelings about previous posts, feel free to send me an email letting me know what your favourite/least favourite posts are to give me an idea of what I might want to submit to the contest). After all, the prize is a thousand dollars, and the worst that could happen is I could be mocked across the amorphous lands of cyberspace as an amateur intellectual groupie. While that might hurt my feelings, I think it is a risk I am willing to take.

Animal Intelligence Continued

I have been meaning to write an elaboration and comment response to my post on animal intelligence, but I kept putting it off for some reason. I think the main reason is because I find it to actually be a fairly daunting subject. There is a lot of nuance to it, as well as a lot of competing preconceptions and wildly differing interpretations by a lot of highly intelligent people. This makes it difficult to get a handle on the subject, but I think it is time I stop putting it off and give my attempt.

To start off with, I would like to briefly come to the defense of Noam Chomsky. Robert first brought him up saying that he "claims that humans are the only species that have the ability for language". Regan then adds his own comment in which he disparages Chomsky with a parting shot. While I think both Robert and Regan have the correct sentiment, I think there is a subtlety to Chomsky's claims that is being missed, thereby translating his claims into the territory in which they deserve the given disparagement. In the nature of full disclosure, I have not actually read a lot of Chomsky's work on linguistics, so much of my argument here will actually be based on Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct. Throughout the book, Pinker draws heavily upon Chomsky's work and ideas, which is why I feel comfortable weighing in on Chomsky's defense. The thing is, as I understand it, Chomsky did not make the blanket claim that humans are the only species with the ability for language, but rather that we are the only species with a generative grammar based on an innate universal grammar. While I still think the statement that humans are the only species with this ability is still overly strong (there is evidence that some species of monkey are capable of a limited form of generative grammar, and our investigations into the cognitive abilities of other animals are far from complete), Chomsky's ideas are much more defensible than the patently false claim that humans are the only species with linguistic abilities (something which Regan rightly pointed out should immediately be rejected by anyone who has ever had a dog). Essentially, I think Chomsky is correct in pointing to our propensity for complex communication as one of the major cognitive advantages we have (though, like I said, I would modify his statements from we are the only species with these abilities to perhaps we are the most successful at utilizing them - much like one would correctly say a cheetah is the fastest land mammal instead of incorrectly saying the cheetah is the only land mammal to have mastered sprinting), but I do not necessarily agree with him on many of the subtler aspects of his analysis.

Speaking of unique cognitive abilities, this leads me to the apt question posed by jbrydle of whether or not our brains are fundamentally different from the brains of other creatures. The answer to this question is not straightforward, but my answer is that essentially we do not know for sure. I would now like to qualify that statement of ignorance with an extensive ramble of conjecture based on what we do know, and explain why that leads us to a state of ignorance. To start with, I would like to propose as an analogy the human hand. In plain appearance, we are capable of easily differentiating between a human hand and those of other species. However, in terms of function and arrangement, making the precise distinction becomes much harder. We are certainly not the only primate species with opposable thumbs, nor are primates the only mammalian species capable of gripping and manipulating objects with their hands (beavers, squirrels, and many other rodents have quite dextrous front paws). Likewise, elephants have adapted their noses rather than hands to the fine manipulation of objects, with the appendages on the end of their trunks capable of many of the same abilities as people. Outside of mammals, most birds have an opposable digit on their feet which allows them to manipulate and grip objects. Of course, this is quite a cursory and shallow view of the gross properties of the hand, but my point is that even something as basic and highly visible as the hand does not have a simple answer to what makes the hand of one species unique from others, especially when one is focusing on functional abilities rather than simple physical dimensions.

Moving from the hand to the immensely more complicated brain, therefore, one can see how the question is easily bogged down by nuance and qualifications. When one looks at the gross anatomy of the brain, the human brain does tend to have a more wrinkled outer exterior, known as the neocortex, than most other mammals (this increases the surface area of the cortex, since the functional setup of the cortex is a thin set of cellular layers. There are other anatomical differences as well, but I am going to try to avoid making this post into one long rendition of specific anatomical details). The neocortex is usually just referred to as the cortex, but there is more than one area of cortex in the brain as there is also a cerebellar cortex forming the outer layer of the cerebellum, which I have discussed in some detail before, so the neocortex is the term used to specifically speak about the more recently evolved cortical regions that comprise the outer shell of the cerebrum. It is also sometimes called the cerebral cortex, and it is only found in mammals. In non-mammals with advanced cognitive abilities (like many birds), quite different neural structures have evolved, often through the extension of primitive structures shared with our own brain. An example of this is in the different forms of visual perception between birds and mammals. In primates, most of our visual processing takes place in the visual cortex of the occipital lobe (the lobe at the back of one's head). There is also small midbrain structure called the superior colliculus (it is kind of like a little knob on the anterior dorsal surface of the midbrain), however, which plays an important role in visual perception. The superior colliculus provides a map of the visual field and is primarily used in spatial navigation. Its existence in the human brain allows for a condition known as type one blindsight, in which damage to a person's visual cortex has left them consciously blind. They are often, however, capable of fairly competent spatial navigation (such as walking through a room with scattered furniture without a large number of collisions) due to their superior colliculus. One interesting side-note to this condition is that because of the loss of cortical visual processing, a person suffering from blindsight is no longer consciously aware of the presence of light in their environment. Therefore, while they will be able to navigate an environment with the lights on, if you turn the lights off and ask them to walk back through the room, they will be unable to avoid collisions in the same manner (and will be rather confused about why they are suddenly having a much greater degree of difficulty).

Why am I focusing so much on the superior colliculus? Because in non-mammals it is called the optic tectum and it is particularly well developed in several predatory bird species such as owls, eagles, and hawks. Researchers have found, for example, that crows can visually differentiate between specific individuals among both crows and people. The ability to visually distinguish individuals is quite a complex task, and requires far more visual processing than that available in the standard mammalian superior colliculus. Thus, this rather long-winded example illustrates the first of many difficulties for anyone trying to definitively differentiate between the cognitive abilities of species. Because the brain is essentially a computational device providing behavioural control for an animal based on the interaction of its neurons, many different architectures can yield similar computational power. Thus, even if we have evolved novel cognitive abilities beyond those of our other ape relatives, it is extremely hard to definitively say whether or not those same abilities have independently evolved in other species.

This has grown quite long already, so I think I might stop it here. Hopefully this provides at least a little bit of explanation and feedback for the comments to my earlier post, as well as prompts some more thought and input on the subject.

Startling Development

My post from a few days ago on the rights of parents to choose for their children now takes a dramatic development: Daniel Hauser's mother has fled the country with him rather than follow through with medical treatment. PZ Myers discusses the story with his charactistic flair for emotive godlessness, and I think it is something worth reading.