I was raised into and trained in reductionism: the ideology that the best way to understand something is to understand its parts. In the 90s, I got interested in systems theory (I’d guess that Jurassic Park’s complexity theory and Kevin Kelly’s writing in Wired magazine were early influences). Systems theory says that when you combine the parts of something, properties emerge that are not obvious (or even knowable) from examining the parts on their own.

One of the key beliefs of systems theory is that evolution tends toward higher complexity. Humans aren’t the end product of evolution, nor has evolution been building towards humans specifically, but something like humans is seen as inevitable.

In fact, biologists will tell you that evolution tends toward diversity. Over time, you’ll end up with organisms that are both more and less complex – both humans and prions. There are far more species of single-celled organisms than multi-celled organisms (although “species” is a fuzzy concept without sex), presumably because many more combinations of single-celled DNA are viable. Natural selection has, in some cases, resulted in lower complexity, like how simians can’t synthesize vitamin C. (This argument is based on Wikipedia’s page on evolution of complexity.)

From a postmodern perspective, systems theory is the modernist metanarrative of progress in a sciency wrapper. But even reductionist science has been infected by the progress metanarrative – scientists frequently give support to things like social Darwinism.

Systems theory is not really criticism of science itself, it’s a criticism of the paradigms governing many scientific disciplines (an overarching paradigm or a metaparadigm?). Like any scientific paradigm shift, it’s more of an evolution of the worldview than the revolution that I originally mistook systems theory for.

A lot of people I talk to don’t seem to understand sugar very well, so I’d like to take this opportunity to educate my readers. I’m going to simplify things because I don’t fully understand the biology and I don’t think you need to either.

The two most common simple sugars (monosaccharides) are glucose and fructose. Glucose is what cells input for energy. Fructose is metabolized in the liver into either glucose or fatty tissue. Transport of fructose to the liver appears to be sped up by the presence of some glucose. So it’s best to eat fructose without glucose.

The liver prioritizes metabolism into glucose, but it makes the decision based on the glucose level in the liver itself. The issue is that when a large amount of fructose is digested, the liver bottlenecks and produces fatty tissue. The liver also prioritizes metabolism of fructose over other activities. So it’s better to eat glucose than fructose. (Excess glucose is also metabolized into fatty tissue by the liver, but without the bottleneck much less dietary glucose should end up as fat.)

Simple sugars combine (polymerize) into complex sugars (polysaccharides). The most common one is sucrose = 1 glucose + 1 fructose. Sucrose is broken down into glucose and fructose in the stomach, which takes time; there’s some evidence that this digestion is regulated by blood sugar levels. So it’s better to eat sucrose than glucose and fructose unpolymerized.

Glucose is 75% as sweet and fructose is 175% as sweet as sucrose. So if you’re cooking with fructose, you don’t need to use as much.

I’ve written the above conclusions from the point of view of someone who doesn’t want to get fat. If you’ve just expended significant energy through exercise, you want to get glucose to your muscles (including your heart) as fast as possible so they can start repairing themselves. Some athletes like to chug maltodextrin = glucose + glucose + glucose + …, which has the emergent property of being not sweet at all.

I recently heard about philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend’s criticism of Galileo (and by inference all science): Galileo did not have sufficient evidence to make a logical case for heliocentrism. Instead, he used “rhetoric, propaganda, and various epistemological tricks”.

At the time, optical theory was not advanced enough to explain how telescopes worked. So Galileo had to trust on faith that his instruments were measuring what he thought they were measuring. It’s not scientific, but Galileo was supported by a consensus of astronomers, including Jesuits.

Observations of planets do not distinguish between the Tychonic system, where the sun orbits the earth and all other planets orbit the sun, and the heliocentric system. The only way to determine if the earth is moving is by stellar parallax: the triangulation of stars from opposite ends of the earth’s orbit. Galileo predicted stellar parallax but it was not observed for 115 years*, so his theory was falsified until then.

In fact, under relativity it is impossible to determine whether the universe has a centre, so it is a theological rather than scientific statement.

The proper way to consider Galileo’s work is not as a scientific result, but a shift to a new paradigm: astronomy based on telescope evidence with no reference to scripture. You might find this more elegant, it might be better at landing people on the moon, but there’s no basis for saying it’s more truthful.

* And even then it wasn’t stellar parallax, it was the unpredicted steller aberration. Parallax wasn’t observed until 228 years after Galileo’s prediction.

I have avoided writing about flu shots because, as you will see, it was not in my best interest to do so. But now that Alex has let the cat out of the bag, I might as well share my thoughts.

All along the hippies said “vaccinations are dangerous” and the doctors said “nonsense, you don’t understand science”. Then in 1976 they noted that Guillain-Barré syndrome is a possible side-effect. And in 1999 they removed (mercury-based) thiomersal “just in case” it causes autism. Next up, dystonia. This irony should be humbling to epidemiologists.

We think of modern medicine as being evidence-based, but this is a new, unevenly applied paradigm. Pure evidence-based medicine eliminates theories. For example, influenza virii might cause the flu and be prevented by inactivated vaccinations, but all that science says is that people injected with this stuff don’t get sick. Evidence-based doctors do not infer treatments from their clinical experience: evidence-based medical students don’t do internships.

We can only say that public health is evidence-based, not evidence-bound. Studies have uneven burdens of proof and many results don’t hold up under rigorous review. Doctors need to stop labelling their critics as “unscientific” and start appealing to the inform reasoning they secretly use themselves.

Yes, it is worse to die from Guillain-Barré syndrome than the flu. But your chance of dying from the flu is so much higher that most people should choose a vaccination. And please be a good citizen and forget the fact that if everyone else is immune to the flu then you don’t need to be.

Demographically, I am highly likely to enjoy CBC radio. But for reasons I’ll go into in another post, I don’t often listen to podcasts. When I am looking for spoken-word content, I often check the meager archives of Ideas.

I’ve got CBC radio’s acclaimed (but feature-poor) iPhone application. I just used it to listen to the first half of The Biology of Mind. It starts out by setting up dualism as the dominant paradigm of contemporary psychology and philosophy. Are Ideas listeners really that uneducated?

The bulk of the show is an aging mollusk researcher with a hobby in psychoanalysis speculating on reductionist philosophy of mind: that every mind thing can be explained in terms of a brain thing. There were a few points where he jumps to conclusions that make me think either the editing was really bad or the guest simply doesn’t care about scientific standards. Is Ideas usually that anti-science? (I know it’s not Quirks and Quarks but still…)

It makes me worry about the Ideas programs on history that I’ve enjoyed but am unable to critically evaluate…

Let’s say you want to change something in the world. Scientists will tell you to do it like this:

That assumes that figuring how what to do separately from doign it with a reasonable amount of effort in a reasonable amount of time. But the things we tend to care about are not like that (if it were that easy, it’d already be fixed). Another way to change things is adaptive management, an environmental science technique that takes place entirely in the real world:

You cannot run tests in a laboratory, because labs are hard to do properly and you don’t have time. At worst, you’re trying to change your life: you’ve only got one and you can’t spend it all theorizing.

For example, everyone trying to be more fit is doing adaptive management: you implement a diet and exercise regime, then measure weight, clothing size, appearance naked, energy levels, hunger feelings, etc.

The hardest thing about adaptive management is measurement (“what you can’t measure, you can’t manage”). A lot of things in the world are not directly measurable, so you have to find proxy measures. But proxy measures only obliquely get at your goal, for example: nobody is ever actually trying to “lose weight”, it’s a proxy measure for fitness. But using weight as a measure leads to perverse management plans like ketosis, which sheds muscle as well as fat.

Science is notoriously hard to read. When I feel like defending this, I say that scientists are not writing for you and me, they’re writing for their colleagues. The job of scientists is not to explain science, it’s to do science. It’d be nice if our society had someone whose job it was to explain science, but there’s no one who does that job adequately (especially people with journalism degrees).

Philosophy is also notoriously hard to read. The defence I usually give is that philosophy is hard to write about because the concepts are not intuitive, otherwise the reader would have already figured it out on their own. Most philosophy is actually written in the style of saying the same relatively-simple idea over and over again in different complicated ways, because philosophers can’t figure out how state it simply.

But unlike science, philosophy studies things that are important to everyone.* So it’s not just unfortunate if everyone can’t read it, it may not be useful to do philosophy if it can’t be widely communicated. I recently found a great statement of this argument in a review of an influential cultural studies book titled The Practice of Everyday Life:

De Certeau’s text claims to address the roles [of] “average people” yet his style creates a virtually impenetrable barrier to any “average people” ever benefiting from his ideas. His writing style consistently maintains this elitist and arrogant attitude in which he postures as the high priest: only those willing to pass the “trial by reading” which he poses are admitted into the sacred circle of his wisdom.

* Even metaphysics: if I need to follow certain rules or face eternal damnation, I’d like to know that sooner rather than later.