Comment: No defense to torture

In a recent letter to its 150,000 members, the American Psychological Association (APA) took its strongest stand ever against psychologist involvement in torture or other illegal forms of interrogation.

“Torture in any form, at any time, in any place, and for any reason, is unethical for psychologists and wholly inconsistent with membership in the American Psychological Association,” the association wrote. “The APA Ethics Committee will not accept any defense to torture in its adjudication of ethics complaints.”

This unequivocal stance was not achieved easily. It took years of divisive private and public debate, which culminated in a September, 2008 vote by the entire membership on a resolution forbidding psychologists from working in settings where “persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution.”

Responding to that nearly 60 percent vote in support of the resolution, the APA leadership, which for years had argued that psychologists could play valuable roles in interrogations in support of national security and even as protectors of detainees, has made a decisive about-face.

“Let’s set the record straight,” wrote APA president James H. Bray in April of this year. “It is a clear violation of professional ethics for a psychologist to have played a role in the torture of CIA detainees, as described in the recently released Bush administration memos.”

Among other revelations about the Bush-era torture practices and how the Bush administration tried to justify them, those memos, made public by the Obama administration, documented what anti-torture advocates had said for years, that some psychologists were implicated in torture.

American psychologists contributed substantially—and ethically--to the US military’s SERE (for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) program. SERE, which started in the 1950s following the Korean War and expanded during the Vietnam War, tried to prepare potential captives to cope with the kinds of abuse and torture that US military personnel had been subjected to during those conflicts.

However, under the Bush administration, SERE was “reversed engineered” to devise “softening up” and “enhanced interrogation” techniques that were inflicted on US-designated “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, and CIA-operated “black sites” in Afghanistan and several Eastern European countries.

A number of media reports have documented that psychologists advocated or were involved in adapting and transferring SERE techniques to Guantanamo and other US-controlled sites.

In other words, the US turned the torture techniques that had been used against their soldiers—decried at the time as brainwashing—on its own captives, and psychologists were involved.

In New Scientist of September 29, 2007, I argued that psychologists ought to find involvement in such activities particularly abhorrent. Psychologists define themselves as practitioners of a healing profession, and decades of their own research has shown how easily ordinary people can be influenced to hurt others and be corrupted by involvement in abuse seemingly sanctioned by authorities.

APA President Bray now strongly condemns such misuse of psychological expertise. “These techniques, when applied in this manner, are tantamount to torture as defined by APA and international law,” he writes. “APA stands ready to adjudicate reports that any APA member has engaged in prohibited techniques.”

Even the argument that military psychologists were simply obeying orders will not stand. “There is one ethical response to an order to torture,” Bray writes. “Disobey the order” (emphasis his).

The APA deserves praise for the exceptionally clear stance it has now taken. With an estimated 500,000 torture victims in the US alone, APA members now have the chance, if not the obligation, to try to ease the lifelong emotional pain carried by torture victims.

And, hopefully, never again will psychologists help create more victims.

President Obama likewise deserves credit for his reversal of many of the Bush-era practices and attempts to legitimize torture, announced on Obama’s second day in office.

However, the battle against torture is by no means over.

As has been widely reported, ex-Vice President Cheney continues to advocate torture—or rather, “enhanced interrogation" by the US as both necessary and useful.

New Scientist recently reported that 104 out of 150 nations studied by Amnesty International continue to practice torture. There are millions of torture victims worldwide.

It is likely that the US continueS to outsource torture—that is play an active role in abusive interrogations carried out in countries with fewer scruples about torture such as Bangladesh or Pakistan.

Despite calls for accountability from many sources, most recently the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the US is not showing any significant willingness to investigate, much less prosecute officials who instigated, developed, justified and utilized torture.

If government-sponsored torture is ever to be stopped, not only psychologists and practitioners of other healing professions, but everyone who agrees that torture is indefensible, needs to press for an end to thIS abhorrent practice and accountability for those who ordered and carried it out.

Robert Adler

for the institute

This is the second in a series of "Road Sign" commentaries designed to bring under-noticed events that may turn out to be of global significance to public attention.

Road Signs: Climate change

Kiss your coastline goodbye

Climate scientists have predicted for many years that rising sea levels caused by melting ice and warming oceans will threaten and eventually inundate low-lying islands and coastlines—including parts of Florida, the Eastern and Western seaboards of the U.S., and the Gulf coast. 

Worldwide, large coastal cities, home to hundreds of millions of people, are at risk.

Residents of Pacific islands such as Kiribati have already seen the ocean erode beaches and kill crops, and have understandably been among the most vocal advocates for global action to slow human-caused climate change.

Now, however, the Carteret Islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea have become the unfortunate poster child for climate change. As reported in The Guardian/UK, the Carteret’s 2600 inhabitants are in the process of abandoning the island, their ancestral home, to the encroaching Pacific. They are being moved, five or ten families at a time, to Bougainville, also part of Papua New Guinea.

Given that millions of people have been displaced over the centuries because of floods, droughts and famines, the inhabitants of the Carterets are not the first climate-change refugees, nor even the first to be displaced by human activities—human-caused deforestation and desertification have been taking place for centuries.

They are, however, the first community who, as a whole, are being uprooted due to one of the predicted impacts of modern, man-made climate change.

Since atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising more rapidly than ever, ice in Antarctica and elsewhere is melting even faster than predicted, and atmospheric and oceanic warming are expected to create stronger and more destructive hurricanes and storm surges, the residents of the Carterets will definitely not be the last climate change refugees this century.

We ignore their plight at our peril. 

Robert Adler

for the institute

This is the first in a series of "Road Sign" commentaries designed to bring under-noticed events that may turn out to be of global significance to public attention.

Road Signs:  The Middle East 

Recent largely unnoticed reports of what an Associated Press source labels an “unprecedented” public rebuke of Iranian President Ahmadinejad by the country’s supreme religious  authority,  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over a seemingly-minor domestic dispute, may, in fact, reflect a much more significant shift underway, not only in Iran’s political leadership but in its relations with the Western world. 

 With national elections scheduled for June 13, scarcely a month away, such public disapproval of one of Ahmadinejad’s actions by the ruling clerical authorities could well have a decisive effect in undermining the President’s remaining support within the Iranian power structure.

While the global economic downturn and consequent decrease in oil revenue have stirred public discontent, further tarnishing his public image, Ahmadinejad has, until this point, managed to retain the critical backing of Iran’s religious leadership.  The current dispute over his dismissal of the chief official responsible for managing the Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization, important though it may be in an Iranian domestic context, potentially provides the ruling ayatollahs the opportunity to demonstrate a new flexibility in foreign relations—the area in which Ahmadinejad has played a particularly provocative and controversial role .

What has changed most notably in recent months is the foreign policy of the United States, with strong signals being sent by the Obama Administration that it is interested in pursuing a new relationship with Iran following more than a quarter-century of mutual hostility.  In that context, Ahmadinejad, whatever his domestic virtues, is a definite liability, having positioned himself as an extreme hard-liner on relations not only with Israel—whose very legitimacy he has denied—but with the US and West whose values and policies he has repeatedly demeaned and attacked.

While the ayatollahs may share many of his opinions, and have clearly found it convenient to use him as a lightning-rod for international opprobrium, the diplomatic opening offered by the Obama Administration to initiate a new and less-rancorous relationship with the US and its Western allies may outweigh any lingering loyalty they may feel to Ahmadinejad himself.  In short, he may have outlived his usefulness.  And the upcoming election may provide the perfect opportunity to bring in new and less polarizing leadership.

Reading Iranian tea leaves is a notoriously difficult art, but in addition to this   largely unreported public scolding of Ahmadinejad, two other recent events: the announcement by Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, that the organization had stopped firing rockets at Israel for the time being; and the sudden release of Iranian-American journalist, Roxana Saberi, should be taken as serious signs that Iran is rethinking its options on multiple fronts, and carefully testing the temperature of the international waters. 

In contrast to the previous events, however, Saberi’s case did capture public, media and diplomatic attention with both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama denouncing the obviously trumped-up nature of the charges against her.  While important, and a likely further signal of Iranian interest in pursuing better relations with the United States, the Saberi case should not be seen in isolation.  Taken as one more step in the delicate diplomatic dance occurring between Iran and the United States, it is part of a much larger drama, which, if successful, may help defuse one of the world’s potentially most explosive situations.

Les Adler for The Institute

"Humans have always walked this way because that is the way we were 'designed'"

I recently wrote an online news story for New Scientist about 1.5-million-year-old footprints discovered in Kenya. I found some of the readers' comments disturbing. It took me a while to figure out why.

The research article appeared in Science on February 27, 2009. It described the discovery and study by an international team of researchers of the second oldest footprints left by human ancestors--the oldest showing unambiguous evidence of modern foot anatomy and our efficient way of walking.

Although bipedalism dates back several million years earlier, the footprints reveal that our ancestors--from foot size and shape almost certainly early Homo erectus--had evolved anatomically modern feet and a springy stride like ours by 1.5 million years ago.

At first I was pleased to see that the story generated lots of comments. It's good to know that people are reading what one writes.

The first few comments were fine, but I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the conversation quickly devolved into an exchange between creationists and supporters of evolution.

I had several reactions. The first was irritation, like finding that an uninvited guest has crashed your party. The second was frustration, even anger, at the creationists' glib dismissal of the dozen scientists who had discovered, painstakingly excavated, and carefully analyzed the footprints, not to mention a century or more of physics, geology, paleontology and, of course, evolution.

Everything was fair game, from the identification of the footprints--"The look like gorilla prints to me,"--to the dating--"1.5 million years ago? Was someone there to make a record of the date?"--to the theory of evolution as a whole--"None of which is supported by any evidence except what men decide to believe."

It was obvious that when any mere field of science got in the way of creationism, the science had to be trashed.

In the end, however, I realized that my strongest feeling was boredom. When I tried to read the creationists' comments, my attention wandered, my eyes glazed over, and I wanted to be doing anything other that trying to make sense of comments like "All features of a species have an ability to adapt to an environment . . . but that is a far cry from turning a fish into a bird."

Creationism, I realized, is God-awful boring.

Creationsim collapses the vast grandeur of the cosmos into a morality play about--you guessed it--us.

Not counting old-Earth creationists, who accept a geological time scale but still reject evolution, creationists pancake the universe's nearly 14 billion year history into a few thousand years.

Here on earth, creationists replace the chaotic creativity of more than four billion years of geological, chemical, and biological churning with six days of check-list Creation.

In the end, creationism answers every question about how we and everything we find around us got that way with, "God (excuse me, the Intelligent Designer) made it that way."

How did those footprints end up buried under layer after layer of distinct, datable sediments? God put them there.

What does it mean that, suitably measured, the ratio of argon-40 to argon-39 in the volcanic ash above the footprints is a tad lower than in the ash below them? Could it mean that the lower layer is a few hundred thousand years older? Nope. God salted those isotopes in just that way.

What can we learn by comparing these footprints to the 3.7-million-year-old Laetoli prints? Could their differences shed light on the evolution of our feet and walking style? Nah. God made the Laetoli prints smaller, wider and flatter, and these new prints longer, slimmer and more arched. Don't ask why.

What's the relationship between the increased mobility of Homo erectus that these prints confirm and the fact that it became the first hominin to leave Africa and thrive across Europe and Asia? Hmm. Must have something to do with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. Check out Genesis 1:26 through 3:24 for the details.

It's not that an omnipotent Intelligent Designer isn't a good-enough answer to such questions, it's that it is way to good an answer. It's a game ending, that's-all-she-wrote, one-size-fits-all, alpha-to-omega, end-of-story, let's-all-go-gome, hydrogen bomb answer.

By answering everything, it answers nothing.

I obvioiusly don't understand the need for capital-C Certaintly and capital-T Truth that creationists seem to share. 

I'm much more curious about what the next dig will turn up, how the next fossil or footprint of flower-strewn burial will change our understanding of our past, what a more detailed understanding of the changing geology and climate of east Africa two or three million years ago will tell us about the challenges our ancestors faced and why some of them survived and reproduced (and yes, evolved), while others faded away.

I know that I'll never get Certainty or Truth from science. What excites me is what science gives us every day--new and better answers to old questions, and answers that provoke new and better questions.

God may be The Answer, as the bumper stickers and billboards tell me. Perhaps to some people and some questions, but just not to the questions that science and scientists ask.

Robert Adler

for the institute

Economics—the infantile science

At the start of the 21^st Century, it shouldn’t take a Nobel-Prize-winning mind to understand that all dynamic systems need regulation in order to function and last.

The first steam engines ran away with themselves and blew up. Physicists and engineers came up with a simple, elegant, and totally non-controversial solution. They added a governor, a device that throttled back the flow of steam into the engine when it revved up too much.

No 18^th Century Ronald Reagan emerged, to my knowledge, to argue that steam engines were being over-regulated, and that the world could power more trains and ships by de-regulating their engines and pouring on more coal.

Biologists and physicians have learned that the human body is an intricate network of dynamic systems, every one of which is held closely in check by one or more “governors”—negative feedback loops.

Flexing your biceps stretches your triceps. That sends a nerve signal that keeps your biceps from contracting too much. If that feedback fails, your muscles can break your bones.

Down a sugar-laden dessert and your blood sugar level surges. In response, your pancreatic islet cells pour insulin into your bloodstream. The insulin drives your blood sugar back into a healthy range. If the feedback fails, you develop diabetes.

Did you ever wonder how it is that your body temperature stays so close to 98.6 degrees? Or how all those variables that show up on your blood test results stay in a normal range?

It doesn’t happen by accident, nor from the intervention of some “invisible hand.” It happens because every system in your body is regulated, kept within its functional range, by negative feedback loops.

Cells in your skin, your gut, your liver and your bones are constantly dying and being replaced. Those billions of reproducing cells are held in check by multiple inhibitory loops. If enough of those feedback loops fail, the result is cancer, and often, death.

Do doctors wish away these intricate regulatory pathways? Do they yearn for the days when they didn’t have to think about how the body regulates itself? Do they encourage you to eat all the sugar you want, spend unprotected hours in the sun, or dose yourself with carcinogens?

Of course not. They devote themselves to understanding and working with those vital regulatory loops. If systems are out-of-whack, they try to tweak them back into range. If they are broken, they try to replicate their functions with carefully controlled doses of medication.

Is this news to anyone? It was, when the dynamics of diabetes were first understood. That was in 1901.

Actually, you don’t need to know anything about physics, biology or medicine to understand the need for regulation.

Think about any game, from marbles to NFL football. Every game has its rules and regulations, and—beyond the elementary school playground—its referees and commissioners. Without rules, and rules that are enforced, games stop being fun or even playable. They degenerate into chaos.

So how is it that the brilliant minds that have been in charge of our markets—arguably the biggest and most important game around--over the past 30 years convinced themselves and tried their damnedest to convince the rest of us that markets not only could function without regulation and regulators, but would automatically create more and more wealth and prosperity as more and more regulatory loops were disabled?

As an aside, it’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time that experts got important things dead wrong.

Learned doctors kept bleeding patients, and supporting rivers of blood-letting with elegant arguments, for centuries.

Other leading physicians shunned the innovator Ignaz Semmelweis and his reality-based demand that they scrub their hands on the way from the autopsy table to the delivery room. By doing so, they condemned hundreds of thousands of women to needless death from “childbed fever,” a deadly disease whose occurrence they “explained” without reference to their filthy hands by a plethora of passionately defended theories.

One of America's “best and brightest,” Robert McNamara, truly believed that revving up the bombing of Vietnam would win the war. The more it didn't work, the more he believed it.

And of course we should not forget the highly experienced, Olympic Class Captain, Edward J. Smith, whose “full speed ahead” order doomed the Titanic.

Many pundits have offered “explanations” for the expert insanity of the people who have just run the global financial system into the iceberg of reality.

--Greed, for one, and short-sightedness for another. By report, the entire system was rigged to grossly reward people for any scheme they could come up with that would produce impressive short-term gains and disguise risk.

To hell with the future, and the public be damned.

--Others have noted a self-reinforcing coterie of economists pursuing the same agenda and lauding each other’s brilliance, up to and including the experts who have awarded a series of Nobel Prizes in economics for a set of abstruse theories about how markets function and how risk should be calculated, all of which were based on the assumption that market moves follow a normal distribution, like height, weight, or IQ.

Unfortunately, that fundamental assumption is blatantly wrong. As we have just seen for ourselves, market moves can be enormous, the equivalent of finding a person who is a mile tall, or has an IQ of 10,000.

The result, it seems, was a self-reinforcing system of theories and the financial instruments that flowed from them, all based on a grossly flawed assumption. Both the theory-builders and the traders who applied them were, and continue to be, more-than-amply awarded.

--Not to mention that even the scattered and tattered regulations that had survived thirty years of regulatory clear-cutting were not enforced for the biggest players, for example, Bernard Maddoff and his $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

Too bad that it was all a house of cards, and that the house collapsed, and that we all live in that house.

Although greed, short-sightedness, and institutionalized arrogance all played their role, I think that a more accurate assessment of how our economic and financial experts got all this so very wrong is that economics remains not just a dismal but an infantile science.

Infants live in a world of magical thinking. They imagine that they have unlimited power to shape reality to their will; that every wish will be fulfilled. If they were infant philosophers, they might even invent an “invisible hand” that feeds them when they are hungry, sooths them when they are upset, and will continue to do so forever.

Growing up means leaving magical thinking behind, accepting that people can’t fly (at least without building airplanes equipped with thousands of carefully designed feedback loops), that there’s no Santa Claus, no free lunch.

Growing up means living within the limits of nature and accepting the need for rules.

That’s pretty much what the great deregulator, Alan Greenspan, admitted when he told Congress on October 23, “I made a mistake.”

That mistake, by this very brilliant and remarkably wrong-headed man, and his colleagues, cost U.S. investors about $7 trillion, and investors worldwide perhaps $30 trillion, so far.

That’s almost $23,000 for each man, woman and child in the U.S., or $4,450 for every inhabitant of the world.

During the last few weeks of 2008, the S&P 500 index jittered around a 40% loss for the year.

That means that 40% of the value that almost everyone believed those stocks represented on January 1, 2008, was hot air.

If the stock market was a gleaming, 100-story tower on January 1, 2008, with more floors fully expected, on December 31 it was a smoldering wreck, with the top 40 stories pancaked into shards and dust.

And, as we saw on September 11, 2001, it will be something of a miracle if the whole tower doesn’t come crashing down.

(Note March 10, 2009) As of the stock market close yesterday, the major indexes have lost over 25% of their value so far this year. So make that 55 stories gone; 45 to go. In the crash of 1929, the market pancaked to 10% of its pre-crash peak, and took until the 1950s to climb back to that level!

If the current financial collapse teaches us anything, it’s that it is time for economists, theoretical and applied, to grow up, and fast.

Want a watch that keeps good time? Buy one with good feedback loops.

Want a car whose engine doesn’t blow up? Buy one with good feedback loops.

Want your computer to keep working? Buy a good voltage regulator.

Want traffic to keep flowing? Keep paying for those pesky traffic lights and peskier cops.

Want the world’s financial markets to work long term? 

We, voters and investors, need to grow up and not buy castles in the air.

And, to make sure that the world’s markets and the people who run them act like grownups, regulate them, regulate them well, and enforce the damn rules, especially for the biggest players.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How much atmospheric CO2 can we live with?

That’s the question James Hansen, director of the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies, addressed on October 7 at the Joint Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America, in Houston, Texas.

His short answer is less than 350 parts per million—the level Hansen believes will preserve Earth’s ice sheets, mountain glaciers, and head off a devastating sea-level rise.

The fact that we have now surged past 387 parts per million of CO2, with no effective control in sight, is alarming. 

A state of emergency

“I believe we’ve reached a state of emergency,” Hansen said, “although it’s not easy to see. But if you look at the science, it becomes clearer and clearer.”

It’s enough of an emergency to force him to rethink nuclear power, an issue on which he’s previously been “an agnostic.” Renewable energy alone in sufficient quantities, he said, would be too costly.

 

Hansen walked the audience through the science—ice cores that reveal CO2 levels over the past 800,000 years, microscopic shells from under the sea floor that track ocean bottom temperature and salinity for the past 35,000,000 years, reconstructions of past glaciations and sea levels, the current rates at which the Earth is warming and its ice sheets disintegrating, and computer models of the climate system.

The bottom line is that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere drives Earth’s climate, and that we are driving CO2 off the charts.

“All we have to do is graph the greenhouse gas forcing over the past several hundred thousand years,” says Hansen. “When we choose the right scale, it’s a hand and glove fit. Humans are now completely in charge of the composition of the atmosphere. CO2 and methane are far outside the range they’ve been in for millions of years.”

We’re in charge but out of control

Did you catch that—“Humans are now completely in charge of the composition of the atmosphere.” In charge, but out of control, like airplane without a pilot.

We’re not even close to heading in the right direction. Even countries that signed on to the Kyoto Accord have increased their carbon emissions. There’s more CO2 in the atmosphere than at any time in the last 650,000 years, and the rate at which it’s increasing is itself increasing.

“The actual actions of countries worldwide are inconsistent with stopping the CO2 rise,” Hansen said. “Energy departments around the world are assuming we can burn all the remaining fossil fuel. That will double or triple atmospheric CO2.”

What that means, he said, is that unless global carbon emissions are cut drastically, and soon, we’re headed for “. . . a completely different planet than the one that’s existed in the past. Obviously, it would be an ice-free planet, warmer than it’s been in any of the recent interglacials.” 

Among other impacts Hansen foresees is the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas, Rockies, and Andes within the next few decades, threatening the water and food supplies of hundreds of millions of people. 

Hmm. Where would they go, and what kinds of upheavals would that kind of mass migration cause?

Irreversible tipping points

Hansen also warned about climatic and environmental tipping points, “where the dynamics of the system take over and you don’t need any more forcing and there’s the potential to lose control.”

One example is the disintegration of the ice sheets. “It takes thousands of years to build up an ice sheet from snowfall,” he said. “If we cause the West Antarctic ice sheet to disintegrate, that’s essentially irreversible.”

“I think that the metric for what is dangerous should be headed by these irreversible effects, such as the extermination of species,” he said. “We know that when there have been warmings of several degrees in the past, more than half of the species on Earth at that time went extinct.”

Remarkably, Hansen remains optimistic about our ability to push CO2 levels back below 350 parts per million and turn this looming catastrophe around. The keys are technology and public policy.

One necessary ingredient, he says, is to cut back immediately on the burning of coal as well as other fossil fuels. “We could say that we’ll only use coal at power plants where we will capture and sequester it,” he said.

Hansen also wants to see carbon emissions taxed. “The public has to understand that we have to put a price, a tax, on carbon emissions,” he said. “That has to be given back, so the person who reduces his carbon emissions more than average will make money.”

Hansen is now re-examining nuclear power. In principle, he says, fourth generation reactors can burn nuclear fuel far more efficiently than in the past, while generating much less--and less dangerous--waste.

“I think we should be doing the research on nuclear power and having a trial of fourth generation technology, because that may very well be necessary,” he said.

Crimes against humanity and nature

From Hansen’s point of view, business-as-usual versus re-stabilizing the climate is an intergenerational conflict with enormous moral and legal implications.

“It’s an inequity and an injustice for the young and the unborn,” he said. I think it raises ethical and legal questions about liability. There has been intentional misinformation of the public, which makes the companies that engage in that and fund the contrarians to misinform the public ethically and I think legally liable for what I call crimes against humanity and nature.”

Hansen does not believe that the free market alone can or will solve this problem. “The profit motive seems to be so strong that I don’t think we can rely on their conscience to change things,” he said. “We have to rely on public policy.”

Hansen has consistently and courageously advocated on behalf of a stable climate and a viable future for our children. We need to make sure our leaders know he's not alone, and that this may be our last chance to act.

McCain sucker-punches Obama

Remember the Clint Eastwood movie Million Dollar Baby?

The rising star, Maggie Fitzgerald, is winning a crucial match against Billie "The Blue Bear," an older boxer with a nasty reputation. The bell rings at the end of a round. Both boxers lower their guard and turn toward their corners. But from out of Maggie's sight, Billie decks her with a vicious sucker punch. Maggie falls, hits her head on the corner stool, breaks her neck, and ends up paralyzed.

Minus the broken neck, that's pretty much what happened to Barack Obama today.

With Sarah Palin's luster fading and the economy in meltdown mode, Obama surged to a nine point lead in a Washington Post-ABC poll. At 8:30 this morning, Obama called McCain to suggest that, since they agree on many of the key issues, they issue a joint statement on the financial crisis. McCain called back six hours later and said sure, good idea, and went on to suggest that they consider suspending their campaigns until Congress passes a bailout bill. Obama said he'd need to think about that, and suggested that their staffs talk it over.

Obama put down the phone, turned away, and got to watch McCain go on national TV to announce that he, for the sake of the economy and the country, was suspending his campaign and proposing to move back the presidential debate set for this Friday.

It was a nasty but brilliant move, worthy of Carl Rove at his best. To say that it caught Obama flat-footed is a major understatement.

And, just to rub it in, McCain innocently announced that he'll still be happy to work on that joint statement.

In the movie, Clint Eastwood made sure that everyone saw the sucker punch in sickening detail, and despised Billie for throwing it.

In real life, McCain comes out looking like a great statesman, the one candidate who really cares about us.

Assuming that Obama gets sponged off and climbs back in the ring, let's hope that the next time around he won't be quite so naive, nor quite so quick to lower his guard and hold out his hand.

It's a lesson he urgently needs to learn if he's going to be President, and not just in dealing with John McCain.

APA backs out of the torture business

 It took several years of grass-roots advocacy and a rare vote by the entire membership, but the American Psychological Association (APA) have finally bowed out of the dark realms where torture is carried out.

 Following a long series of revelations about how American psychologists have wittingly or unwittingly abetted the Bush administration’s programme of coercion and abuse of prisoners in the war on terror, activists within the APA forced a ballot on an unequivocal anti-torture resolution.

 The mail-in balloting closed on 15 September. Nearly 60 percent of the 15,000 APA members who voted supported the resolution, which will take effect no later than the next APA meeting in August, 2009.

 The heart of the resolution forbids APA psychologists from working in settings where “persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.”

 By taking this stance, even belatedly, the APA have not only joined other professional associations worldwide in condemning torture and prohibiting their members from abetting it, but have taken the right side in the long historical struggle to end torture.

 In 1563, the Dutch physician Johann Weyer published his great work, On the illusions of demons and on spells and poisons, in which he argued forcefully against the witch-hunting madness sweeping through Europe and condemned the use of the torture to force suspected witches to confess to satanic acts and name others.

 It’s no coincidence that Weyer, a physician who believed in the Hippocratic admonition, “First, do no harm,” was one of the few voices of humanity and reason in a fear-wracked time not entirely unlike our own.

 The APA could have taken this stance earlier, as did the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, and still need to implement the resolution.

 Still, they deserve praise for joining the ranks of true healers throughout history who have refused to be associated with the practice of torture, however strongly advocated by the authorities of the day.

Robert Adler

 

 

 

 

Sarah Palin--Black Swan rising

A Black Swan, according to philosopher/stock trader Nassim Taleb, is an intrinsically unpredictable, completely unexpected event with major consequences.

Based on a lifetime of studying and trying to deal with Black Swans, Taleb believes that in our highly dynamic, intimately interlinked, and intensely non-linear world, these rare but extremely potent bolts-from-the-blue actually dominate most human affairs, including economics and history.

We may be seeing a Black Swan in the making in John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States.

Given that the current race appears extremely close, and that McCain is 72 years old and has a history of a potentially life-threatening form of skin cancer, Palin is arguably a few key votes--or voting machines--plus a few rogue skin cells away from becoming the 45th President.

Palin, a 44-year-old self-described "hockey mom," attended a string of community colleges before earning a bachelor's degree in communications, with a minor in political science, from the University of Idaho. She was a very competitive basketball player in high school, the runner-up, and winner of the Miss Congeniality Award, in the Miss Alaska pageant of 1984, and worked as a sports reporter and in her husband's business before entering politics.

Her rise in the political world can only be seen as meteoric. She served on the Wasilla, Alaska city council for two terms, as mayor of Wasilla for two terms, and became the governor of Alaska on December 4, 2006.

Wasilla is a town of 7,025 inhabitants. As mayor, Palin oversaw a budget of $6 million and a staff of 53. Alaska is the largest state in the U.S. in terms of area, but the 47th in population, with fewer than 700,000 inhabitants.

Not surprisingly, not a lot is known about Palin's character or politics. She appears to be a deeply committed Christian conservative who appeals strongly to the Religious Right, a crucial voting block that McCain has had difficulty inspiring. She clearly is a powerful speaker who effortlessly conveys the common touch that so strikingly eluded Al Gore and has bedeviled Democratic presidential candidates from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama. At least some Alaskans see her as determined, even ruthless, in getting her way.

It's also clear that despite Palin's lack of national or international experience and, until now, visibility, she has dramatically energized the Republican base and sapped any momentum that the Democrats gained from their convention. Since Palin's nomination, McCain has surged ahead of Obama in national polls.

This commentary is not meant to criticize Palin or bemoan her candidacy. Rather, it is to alert readers to a Black Swan taking wing as we watch.

According to Taleb, totally unpredictable high-impact events--Black Swans--increasingly dominate economics, politics, and other aspects of human affairs. He argues that pretty much all of us, including key decision makers, blind ourselves to the existence and impact of these rare, but world-changing surprises. We blissfully go on making plans and predictions as if Black Swans didn't exist, leaving ourselves vulnerable to enormous unforeseen risks.

Even when a catastrophe like 9/11 shocks the world, Taleb notes, leaders may learn enough lessons to ward off an exact repetition, for example by increasing airport security, while learning nothing at all about the inevitability of future, equally unforeseen Black Swans, such as the mortgage meltdown that started here and is now rippling through the global economy.

So here we are, in September of 2008, with a planet full of problems from shaky economies to edgy international relatiions, with climate change and shortanges of energy, food, and water looming ahead. On January 20th, 2009, we may see John McCain take the oath of office, and, quite possibly within the next few years, Sarah Palin.

For Palin to take the reins of the most powerful nation on Earth would indeed be a striking Black Swan.

She might, of course, be a great president. The relatively inexperienced Harry Truman took office following the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April, 1945, with World War II still raging. Truman had the grace to admit that he felt "like the moon, the stars, and all the planets" had fallen on him. Yet many historians now consider him one of America's best presidents.

Or, the McCain-Palin ticket may lose, and the U.S. will have a different, yet also relatively young and inexperienced President.

The point is not to try to predict who will be President, nor how good or bad he or she may be. It's to join Taleb in recognizing, really facing the fact that despite the best efforts of pundits, politicos and professors, the unfolding of history is truly unpredictable.

If Palin does become President, I'll certainly feel some satisfaction that I recognized a Black Swan before it was fully fledged, and may have helped alert others to it and to Taleb's fascinating--and frightening--view of the unpredictability of human affairs.

Still, as Taleb writes about how he felt when the stock market crash of October 19, 1987 shocked even the savviest of his fellow traders--"I felt vindicated intellectually, but I was afraid of being too right and seeing the system crumble under my feet. I didn't want to be that right."

Me neither!

Bush and Cheney--lame ducks or dangerous dinosaurs?

Here’s a real-life scene worthy of a Hollywood thriller:

Three U.S. senators huddle over a document, closely watched by a team of White House lawyers. The senators have been granted a quick view of a zealously guarded report. They’re allowed to scribble a few notes before the papers are whisked away.

What could this eyes-only document be? A warning of an impending terror attack? The discovery of a killer asteroid plummeting towards Earth? The truth about UFOs?

None of the above. This scene, which took place in the U.S. Senate on 25 July, was just a skirmish in one of many battles that the Bush administration continues to wage as their final five months in power tick away--in this case furthering their program to derail any meaningful action on climate change.

For the lame ducks that they supposedly are, Bush et al. continue to show a lot of teeth and claws.

The much-fought-over document is a report on the impacts of greenhouse-gas-driven climate change on the U.S. It was grudgingly prepared by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) only after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the agency to determine if greenhouse gas emissions threaten public health or the environment.

The study reportedly corroborates what most of the world has long accepted—that the world’s climate is changing in response to greenhouse gas emissions, that future emissions will exacerbate climate change, and that those changes will impact the U.S.—not to mention the rest of the world—to such a degree that unchecked emissions are likely to endanger public welfare.

Those conclusions are far from radical today, but remain anathema to President Bush and especially Vice President Cheney—who has strenuously pushed the agenda of the most reactionary of the petrochemical and coal behemoths on energy and climate issues.

If the EPA findings were to become official policy, the agency could be mandated to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. To an administration that has done everything in its power to block public awareness of climate change in the U.S., and, a fortiori, official studies, recognition of the problem, or—heaven forebid—national or international action, the report had to be derailed.

So, when the EPA emailed the report to the White House in December of 2007, Bush et al. finessed the potential threat by the remarkable ploy of simply refusing to open the email. Remember those hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys?

That report is not the only casualty in the administration’s climate-and-energy war. Last October, for example, John Marburger, the President’s chief science advisor, reportedly gutted a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control on the health effects of climate change. In December, Stephen Johnson, who heads the EPA, overrode his own staff recommendation, and scuttled California’s attempt to regulate its own greenhouse gas emissions. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA have also run into the administration’s climate-change firewall.

On the international front, this administration has consistently sabotaged attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions and other meaningful steps to head off potentially catastrophic climate change at meetings of the G8 and at the UN climate summit at Bali, Indonesia, in December, 2007. As the world tries to craft a successor to the Kyoto accord, the U.S. continues to push any numerical caps to carbon dioxide production into the distant future.

The conventional wisdom in the U.S. and much of Europe right now has it that Bush and Cheney are lame ducks waddling towards the door, and that the world should look past them to a hopefully more enlightened administration.

That would be fine if action on climate change were not so urgent. A series of recent studies in leading science journals has made it clear that the pace of climate change is accelerating to a degree that is surprising and alarming to many climatologists. Runaway ice melt, carbon-dioxide-bubbling permafrost, methane-belching seafloors, and changing ocean currents are just a few of the dangerous tipping points that Earth's climate could soon cross.

Testifying before Congress on 23 June, 2008, NASA climatologist Jim Hansen redlined six “tipping elements” that Earth’s climate is likely to crash through unless we cut atmospheric carbon dioxide from the current 385 parts per million to 350 or less. This is crucial, Hansen writes, “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.”

Even economists have started to sense the same urgency. Rajendra Pachauri, an IPCC economist says—"If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

The community of nations is now preparing to negotiate the agreement that will replace Kyoto. That new accord, which needs to be in place by December of 2009, looks to be our last best chance to head off catastrophic climate change.

If this is in fact “the defining moment” for Earth’s climate, then the Bush administration’s continued determination to block or delay any meaningful domestic or international action until they are ushered from the White House makes them look a lot more like velociraptors than lame ducks.

The U.S. Congress needs to be encouraged to redouble its efforts to reign in this still dangerous administration and act forcefully on climate change, and the international community needs to do everything it can to ensure that the next president is committed to getting the U.S. up and running on this vital issue from his first day in the oval office.

If instead we let the dinosaurs continue to run the world, we should not complain when we find ourselves back in the Cretaceous.

Robert Adler

Pinko Polar Bears

On May 22, columnist George Will recast the U.S. government's reluctant decision to protect polar bears as part of a supposed war against all things good, true and American by the "green left," which he then equates with the "red left." He makes a big deal over some worries about global cooling that appeared three decades ago. You can read his rather slimy diatribe here. The institute's response follows:

Dear George,

I think you confuse the assiduous work of the scientific community
with a leftist agenda to establish complete government control.

If you would read the data and reports of the scientists instead of
relying upon your ideological perspective you might find that the
international community has come up with a broad consensus and a few
articles from 33 years ago do not prove them wrong.

When large insurance (and reinsurance) companies, most of the Fortune 500, every
other industrial nation, financial institutions, and stockholders such as
the Rockefeller family agree that climate change/global warming is a
threat that needs to be attacked immediately, one has to wonder why
all of these entities with their own scientific teams have decided
one way, and you with a seemingly impermeable ideological bent have
decided the other.

Perhaps, George, the experts--including the 1700 leading scientists who just published yet another urgent warning on climate change--are right and you are wrong.

Lou Miller, PhD

To catch a failing star

For the first time in history, astronomers have caught a supernova—a star blowing itself to bits at the end of its life—at the instant of detonation.

The unprecedented new observations flowing from this discovery are giving astronomers a deeper understanding of just what happens when a star explodes.

Credit: NASA/Swift Science Team/Stefan Immler.

On January 9, Alicia Soderberg, an astronomer at Princeton University, was using NASA’s SWIFT satellite to study x-rays from an earlier supernova in the galaxy NGC 2770, 90 million light years from Earth, in the constellation Lynx.

What she had the amazing luck to witness instead was a brilliant burst of x-rays so intense that they overwhelmed the satellite’s detector.

“I truly won the astronomy lottery,” Soderberg says. “A star exploded right before my eyes,”

She instantly realized that the blast was the long-sought signature of the birth of a supernova. Within minutes she alerted astronomers around the world, allowing them to observe the first hours and days of a supernova for the first time.

Until now, scientists could only study supernovas when visible light from dust and gas around the star reached Earth. But since that light arrives days or weeks after the actual explosion, the scientists were left in the dark concerning supernovas’ first days.

Astrophysicists have a working theoretical understanding of how a star dies and creates a supernova. When a massive star runs out of its nuclear fuel, its core collapses under the pull of gravity. The infalling material can reach a speed of a quarter of the speed of light, and a temperature of 100 billion degrees. When the core has collapsed as much as it can, into what’s known as a neutron star, it rebounds, creating an incredibly powerful shock wave. When that shock wave hits the dying star’s surface, it generates an intense blast of ultraviolet light or x-rays.

It was those long-predicted x-rays that Soderberg detected, for the first time.

Now scientists can start to check their theories against real data.

Supernova 2008 D, as Soderberg's discovery is now known, is already the most studied supernova in history. Her incredibly good luck has become astronomy’s great gain. It will let astronomers and astrophysicists fill in the gaps in their understanding of the sudden death of massive stars and the fiery birth of neutron stars and black holes.

Robert Adler

Obama or Clinton, prepare for the worst

We'd like to be hopeful about the 2008 elections, but the right-wing spin machine remains extremely powerful. Between the spin-masters in the White House and the Pentagon and their sycophantic echo chambers in the media, the current exponents of the big lie have had their way with the American people for at least the last eight years.

If they can take a total slacker and make him president--twice--
and if they can take a genuine war hero and swiftboat him,
then they can turn any truth into a lie
and any lie into the truth.

No matter who wins the nomination, it's going to be brutal campaign.

the institute
May 16, 2008

America, 14,000 BP

The Monte Verde archaeological site, in Chile near the tip of South America, continues to provoke new questions about when and how people first came to the Americas.

In a paper in this week’s Science, Tom Dillehay, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and his colleagues report that previously un-analysed soil samples from Monte Verde yielded nine kinds of algae that the prehistoric people who lived there used for food and medicine. The team radiocarbon dated these organic remains to 14,000 to 14,200 calendar years ago.

Excavating the Monte Verde site

These dates add weight to Monte Verde’s standing as the site of the oldest proven human presence in the New World. The now clearly established fact that people were living deep in South America more than 1000 years before the oldest Clovis site should, as Dillehay points out, place a tombstone on the grave of the hoary Clovis-First theory. The Clovis big-game hunters were clearly not the first people to occupy the Americas, although they did scatter their characteristic fluted spearpoints across much of North America as early as 13,000 years ago.

What’s new and more interesting is how sophisticated the residents of Monte Verde appear to have been. In their Science paper and an accompanying teleconference, Dillehay and his Chilean colleague, Mario Pino, noted that much of the algae they found came from beaches that were then some 60 miles from the inland settlement. In their press conference, they added that the Monte Verde site has also yielded medicinal plants that came from the Patagonian plains far across the Andes from Monte Verde.

Just in the area of food and medicine, says Dillehay, they found " . . . more than 72 plant species that have economic uses, not only from the coast and estuary, but also a wide range of food and medicinal plants that come from the [upstream] forests, the foothills of the Andes . . . and two plants that are medicinal that come from the other side of the Andes, from present-day Argentina.”

The implication is that the 20 or 30 people who sheltered, cooked, treated their sick, and left their footprints at Monte Verde more than 14,000 years ago, were not just an isolated band. According to Dillehay, they had an intimate knowledge of the vital resources in their own area, and may well have been exchanging goods with other established groups from as far away as the Patagonian plains across the Andes.

“That would imply,” says Dillehay, “that there were certain resource zones throughout the Americas where people settled in and perhaps built up a substantial population” 14,000 years ago or more.

If he's right, that’s an eye-opener for the Americas, which until very recently were assumed to have been devoid of humans, much less substantial populations trading with each other, until much more recently.

Robert Adler
May 8, 2008

Fifty thousand Earth scientists call for climate action, but is anyone listening?

The American Geophysical Union, representing some 50,000 scientists and students in 137 countries, has staked out significant new ground on the issue of climate change. The question is, have they gone far enough?

At a press conference in Washington, DC on 24 January, they released a terse statement saying that “Earth’s climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming,” that many facets of the climate system “are now changing at rates and in patterns that are not natural,” and that these changes are best explained by increased levels of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity.

They were equally clear about probable impacts—reduced agricultural productivity worldwide, widespread loss of biodiversity, and, if warming greater than two degrees Celsius continues over centuries, melting ice sheets leading to a sea level rise of several meters.

“The scale of change we’re seeing is something modern society has never seen,” said Michael Prather, who chaired the AGU committee and was also lead author of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

Nor did the group rule out the possibility of “surprises that may cause more dramatic disruptions than anticipated.”

Unlike the Bush administration, which has steadfastly resisted international efforts to set specific targets for greenhouse gas emissions, the AGU was not afraid to lay out numbers. “If this two degrees Celsius warming is to be avoided,” they write, “then our net annual emissions of carbon dioxide must be reduced by more than 50 percent within this century.”

When I asked the AGU panel to explain the statement that Earth’s climate is out of balance, Prather said it meant that the climate is no longer cycling slowly within a fixed range. “It’s not a balanced system,” he said. “We’re starting to slide.”

Does that mean that we’re sliding toward an irreversible tipping point? Prather would only say, “We’re moving.” He would not say if that meant “crossing a single critical threshold” or “death by 1000 knives.”

In either case, the panel agreed, concerted, coordinated, and targeted international action is needed.

“If you don’t start on a trajectory downward [for greenhouse gas emissions], you won’t be able to stabilize climate change,” said Prather. “We have to turn it over and bring it down. What we’re really looking for are much larger reductions, greater than 50 percent, by the end of the century.”

Given the clarity and urgency with which the AGU presented the case for urgent action, I was disappointed by their lack of a specific action plan, even for their own organization. “It’s our responsibility to go out and talk,” said Prather, and of course to provide society with the best science possible. But individual members need to decide just what they want to do.

AGU president Tim Killeen also emphasized education, outreach and greater interaction with policy makers, but cautioned that the AGU is determined to stay within its scientific role and not be drawn into “debilitating political controversies”.

Clearly, the AGU deserves kudos for stating the science clearly and for issuing yet another strong wake-up call to citizens and policy makers worldwide.

Still, given the powerful economic and political interests who are fighting any caps or cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, much less 50 percent reductions, I suspect that the AGU is overestimating the impact of good science, education, and outreach alone. After all, energy producers, smokestack industries, automakers and other great producers of greenhouse gasses are not shy about exerting all the political influence they can muster or buy.

To the extent that the AGU and its members take their own work and warnings seriously, and want those warnings to lead to real change, they are going to have to venture out of their comfort zone and into that unfamiliar and risky political arena both farther and faster than they might like.

Robert Adler

for the institute

Stand up to Bush

According to NASA researchers, the arctic is melting faster than even the most outspoken scientists predicted just a year ago. Climate researchers warn that the Earth is on the cusp of a tipping point, beyond which a vast release of greenhouse gasses from melting permafrost and warming seabeds could irreversibly multiply the impact of human greenhouse gas emissions. Likely impacts include rapidly rising sea levels, coastal flooding, more frequent and powerful hurricanes striking heavily populated regions, more frequent and intense droughts and floods, devastation of the Amazonian rainforest, the extinction of corals and many other species, the dislocation of hundreds of millions of people, and increased threats to the stability and security of many nations, including the U.S.

With this catastrophe fast approaching, the continued intransigence of the United States with respect to negotiating meaningful international emissions goals has become not just an embarrassment but a clear and present danger.

The Bush administration has shown a remarkable indifference to any restraints, whether from scientific research, the U.S. Constitution, the American public, or world opinion. Their behavior in a variety of areas from climate change to war can best be characterized as, “We’ll do exactly what we want, and push our agenda as far as we can, as long as we can get away with it.”

Someone, somewhere, needs to set limits, call Bush’s bluff, point out that this would-be emperor has no clothes.

How remarkable, then, to find that courageous stance coming not from the cowed and cowardly U.S. Congress, nor even from other great nations, but from Papua, New Guinea, a nation of just six million people, most of whom make their living by subsistence farming.

At the just-ended climate talks in Bali, Indonesia, it was Kevin Conrad, the representative of New Guinea, who stood up to the recalcitrant U.S. delegation in a tumultuous public session and demanded, “If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way.”

Bravo for New Guinea. Perhaps, as small and poor as they are, they have little to lose by standing up to the U.S. Certainly, as an island nation in the tropics, they have a great deal to fear from global warming. Whatever their reasons, they did the right thing.

It’s time for the rest of the world to stand with them.

And it’s long past time for the U.S. to take their advice and get the hell out of the way.

Robert Adler

for the institute

Even weirder quantum weirdness

It’s not often that one gets the chance to learn, or say, something new about reality itself. So when I came across an article entitled “An experimental test of non-local realism” (Nature, 19 April 2007, p 871), I couldn’t resist looking into it.

I don’t like giving away the conclusion before telling the whole story, but when talking about such basic matters, it’s best to be clear. What the authors, seven quantum physicists in Austria and Poland led by Anton Zeilinger, conclude from theory and experiment is that “any non-local extension of quantum theory has to be highly counterintuitive.”

By that understatement they mean that some of the most fundamental assumptions scientists and lay people make about reality are almost certainly wrong. At risk are such fundamentals as Aristotelian logic, including for example the idea that a proposition cannot be simultaneously true and false; or that the universe is deterministic; or that the present cannot change the past.

“We believe,” the authors write, “that our results lend strong support to the view that any future extension of quantum theory that is agreement with experiments must abandon certain features of realistic descriptions.”

It might be helpful to define some terms. By “realism” the authors mean a point of view that assumes that something exists, that events occur even if not observed, and that the outcomes of observations depend on pre-existing properties of objects, properties that themselves are independent of the observation.

“Local realism” is where Einstein famously dug in his heels. It assumes that events in “space-like separated regions” cannot influence each other instantaneously—what he disparaged as “spooky” action at a distance. The current authors point out that a long series of increasingly refined experiments dating back to 1972 have definitively proven Einstein wrong on this. Local realism now rests alongside other quaint and outdated scientific ideas such as phlogiston and the aether. Physicists do believe in spooks, at least of this sort.

Still, some aspects of realism might be salvaged through a set of theories based on “non-local hidden variables.” Those theories (which, to give the game away again, the current authors have now tested and found to be wrong) make three assumptions:

--Realism: measurement outcomes are determined by pre-existing properties of particles.

--Hidden variables: the physical states of particles are statistical mixtures of sub-ensembles which themselves have definite properties (for example, polarization).

--Averaging: taken together, the sub-ensembles obey physical laws (in the case of polarization, Malus’ law, which states that the intensity of a polarized beam that has passed through a polarized filter depends on the cosine of the angle between the polarization of the beam and the filter).

The core idea here is that particles such as a pair of entangled photons speeding away from each other are composed of hidden parts which, taken together, carry properties, such as polarization, that show up if and when they are measured at a particular point in space and time.

The authors point out that theories based on these assumptions have been proposed to explain those “spooky” correlations between spatially separated but entangled, particles. These theories have been successful in that predictions based on them have matched the results of all relevant entanglement experiments prior to those the authors undertook.

So what did these authors do? They tested the class of non-local hidden variable theories by measuring the polarization of entangled photons. However, unlike previous experiments, their detectors did not lie in the same plane with respect to the photon source. This novel geometry was needed to test an inequality first derived by Anthony Leggett in 2003. The inequality is based on a very simple property of integers, that, when applied to the quantized properties of entangled particles, allows a thumbs-up, thumbs-down test of non-local realism.

It took some careful tweaking to minimize the noise in their measurements, but the researchers were able to generate entangled photon pairs and compare their polarizations within the correct geometry.

The result wasn't even a close call. They found that Leggett’s inequality was violated by nine standard deviations. If extraordinary conclusions demand extraordinary proof, there it is.

This result does not say as much about what reality is as what it is not. At the very least, particles can not be said to carry hidden information that could do away with that pesky action-at-a-distance spook. The properties of particles really are random until they are observed, and measuring one member of an entangled pair really does determine the corresponding properties of the other, no matter where or when they are measured.

More strongly, the authors suggest that the universe in which we live may not oblige our prejudices by, for example, following Aristotelian logic. The statement, “Their properties really are random until they are observed,” may be both true and false. Present events may be able to influence the past. And—yet another blow to Einstein—the universe may simply not be deterministic.

Although Zeilinger suggests that any or all of these implications of quantum weirdness may be the case, he advocates caution. Writing about Einstein and Schrödinger, both of whom had deep reservations about what quantum theory said about reality, Zeilinger writes, “Yet it is very much to their credit that they both clearly understood which radical changes in our view of the world (Weltanschauung) quantum mechanics in the end necessitates. Changes which might be so radical that it is certainly reasonable and understandable to thoroughly investigate all other possibilities before taking the leap.”

As to what those other possibilities might be, Zeilinger remains agnostic. He quotes the Nobel prizewinning physicist, Isidor Rabi, who said, “"The problem is that the [quantum] theory is too strong, too compelling. I feel we are missing a basic point. The next generation, as soon as they will have found that point, will knock on their heads and say: How could they have missed that?".

Whatever that head-banging enlightenment may be, it's still very much missing.

Robert Adler

For the institute

Baby bookies

Robert Adler

“Every child is born a genius,” my mother liked to say, usually with the rueful implication that it’s life’s hard knocks that dim that initial promise. A recent study reminded me of her firm belief in the innate brilliance of babies.

Here’s the core of the study:

A one-year-old baby sits on its caretaker’s lap in front of a computer screen. A movie runs for a few seconds showing four objects—three identical and one different--bouncing around inside a circle with an opening at the bottom. Most adults would recognize this as depicting a very simple lottery, but an infant, one assumes, knows nothing about such things.

The scene blanks out for a second. When the circle re-appears, one object tumbles out, leaving three behind.

The question is, can a one-year-old differentiate between outcomes that are more or less probable, that is between trials in which one of the three identical objects exits the circle versus less likely sequences when it’s the unique object that falls out?

If you predicted that one-year-olds can perform this remarkable probabilistic assessment, congratulations. Your high expectations for the cognitive abilities of infants have just been confirmed by an elegant series of experiments carried out by Ernõ Téglás and Luca Bonatti, cognitive scientists at the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy, and their colleagues, detailed in a recent paper (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 27, 2007).

The researchers found that one-year-olds looked at improbable outcomes significantly longer than at probable ones—for 12.5 versus 9.3 seconds on average. The length of time infants pay attention to an event or scene is a well-established way of determining what gets and keeps their attention, for example things that are unexpected or surprising.

In other words, if one-year-olds could wager, they would be able to bet on the more likely outcome of this lottery based on an apparently innate sense of probability.

The team used carefully designed control sequences to see if the infants might be responding to non-probabilistic aspects of the scenes such as the objects’ shapes or colors. These tests confirmed that the babies looked longer at the unlikely outcomes simply because they violated their intuitive expectations.

“We found that infants can form these expectations, without any need to experience the outcomes of the lottery before,” says Bonatti. “Thus, they can reason about the future independently of their knowledge of the past.”

The researchers went on to show that similar intuitions about probability shape the responses of children at least through the age of five. At three, in fact, the children’s intuitive expectations—in this case anticipating whether a ball will escape from a box through the side with one hole or three holes--trumped what they actually experienced. Three-year-olds continued to favor the intuitively more probable outcomes even when the experimenters made them happen infrequently.

It was not until age five that children’s intuitive sense of probability could be modified over time by the actual frequency of the events they experienced.

So, not only are intuitions about probability in place by the age of one, independently of experience, but they turn out to be both strong and long-lasting.

These new findings add a surprisingly high-level skill to a long list of what Bonatti characterizes as the “stunning cognitive abilities” of babies and young children, revealed by research over the past few decades [New Scientist, 17 May 2003, p 42].

Bonatti notes that by four months of age, babies can differentiate between small numbers of objects, and even respond to addition or subtraction. Infants respond differently to “possible” and “impossible” events. They can categorize objects based on multiple characteristics simultaneously. They know that animate objects can do things that inanimate ones can’t, and that what they do is driven by goals. Most recently, researchers found that six-month old babies can infer character from behavior (New Scientist, 22 November, 2007).

Bonatti is convinced that we humans come into the world with vastly greater and more structured cognitive capabilities than suggested by John Locke’s blank slate or William James’ “buzzing, booming confusion.”

Still, many current developmental theories come down strongly on the “blank slate” side of the necessary interaction between innate capabilities and experience. For example, a widely accepted theory argues that the ability to assess probability necessarily requires previous experience with similar events. “This theory basically says that our ability to predict the future is entirely shaped by our knowledge of the past,” says Bonatti.”

Bonatti does not deny the importance of experience, but his findings emphasize what even very young babies bring to their encounter with the world. “Over and above our abilities to learn from experience, we also have logical and conceptual abilities that do not seem to derive from the world,” Bonatti says. “But, after all, why should this be surprising? We have ears, noses, eyes; why not also cognitive structures for reasoning about the future?”

Why not indeed?

If, as it seems, Bonatti’s findings show that there’s a lot more going on in the mind of a baby than meets the eye, or that modern-day “blank slate” theorists think possible, then it behooves us to look for even more high-level skills, and at even earlier ages. Like astronomers hunting for extra-solar planets, once our instruments allow us to find one, far more are sure to follow.

Ever since Copernicus dethroned the Earth from the center of the universe and Darwin showed that we are more closely related to apes than angels, science has dealt one blow after another to the human ego. In the face of this, I, for one, am thrilled to learn that human infants, at least, have much to crow about.

Not to mention that sometimes mothers get it right.


Robert Adler is a psychologist and science writer currently in Oaxaca, Mexico


Babies can spot the good, the bad, and the ugly
New Scientist, 22 November 2007
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn12948-babies-can-spot-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly.html

Bonatti and Téglás’ contact information
http://www.sissa.it/cns/lcd/members.htm

International School for Advanced Studies
http://www.sissa.it/cns/

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, November 27 2007:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0700271104v1?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Bonatti&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT

The movies seen by the one, three and five year old children:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0700271104/DC1#F5

What every baby knows
New Scientist, 17 May 2003, p v2
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17823955.400-what-every-baby-knows.html