Letter to the Committee on Science

Dear Committee on Science, Space and Technology,

I would like to offer you my perspective as an American scientist currently working oversees. I work with scientists from all over the world, and frequently encounter the stereotype that Americans are willfully ignorant and prone to rejecting established scientific facts. Efforts to argue against this view are made nearly impossible by the frequent counter-factual statements made by America's political leaders, including those whose jobs specifically call for some understanding of science, such as those on science committees. While Rep. Akin has shown himself to be a particularly questionable choice, his membership demonstrates that no particular knowledge or understanding of science is expected of committee members. Indeed, it would appear that a significant number of committee members have repeatedly demonstrated a strong antipathy towards science.

This is an embarrassment for our great nation, and tarnishes the reputation of American science and education. I would like to suggest that our political leaders in general, but members of science-focused committees in specific, harm the USA when intentionally ignoring, misunderstanding or inventing scientific facts. This is because good policy can't be based on false knowledge, but also because our country is made to look like a bunch of fools. As such, I would suggest that some knowledge of science should be a prerequisite for membership in a science committee. The dim view that many in America and around the world currently take of your committee could perhaps be improved by removing one of your most glaringly ignorant members.

Sincerely,

Dan Levitis

little posting

I"ve been posting not at all for a while; I have carpal tunnel syndrome, and can't easily type. However, over the next several days I will be posting several thing either dictated using dictation software, or copied and pasted.

The following is from the

PLoS Biology Editorial and Publishing Policies

"PLoS Medicine, PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE do not consider for publication papers where any of the research costs or authors' salaries have been funded, in whole or in part, by a tobacco company. "

Discuss

Demographic Decline

There are no national rankings for departments of Demography in the US. If there were, UC Berkeley would certainly be near the top, and would likely rank first. Four of the five core faculty members have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and the last is relatively young. (The entire Academy has about 2100 members, out of perhaps a million PhDs who could potentially have qualified). I had the good luck to stumble into association with this department, benefited greatly, and was tremendously impressed.

This department contributes tremendously not only to Berkeley, and the field of Demography, but to our civilization's progress in understanding how populations function, how populations are likely to change in the future, and what effects these changes have on our economy, society and environment. Methods developed at Berkeley are at the core of the United Nations' understanding of population trends and their importance. Alumnae of Berkeley's rather small program in Demography can be found in almost every important institution making use of demographics, from the US Census Bureau to every major branch of the UN, to departments of Economics, Sociology, Anthropology and Epidemiology at most major universities, to think tanks, research organizations, and major corporations. The people that come out of this program are predictably smart, creative, quantitatively talented and know how to ask important questions and answer them convincingly. It is everything that graduate education should be. There are not many rooms full of people in which I feel slow, but discussing research with a bunch of Berkeley demographers required me to manufacture a fair bit of bravado. Among Berkeley's graduate programs, so many of which are at the top of their field, Demography stood out to me as a bastions of professionalism and brilliance.

Unfortunately, like so many of Berkeley's programs, Demography is in clear and present danger from the current fiscal crisis, and several of its students have hinted to me that it could easily cease to exist in a relatively few years. This happened once before. The following is an excerpt from a 1991 interview with Albert H. Bowker, Berkeley's sixth chancellor (1971-1980):

Q: I don't want to skip over some of your other activities with various departments, if you'd care to pick up on that again. Let's see, we had Department of Demography.

Bowker: Demography was a small group, and it had a lot of trouble recruiting faculty, largely because it was dominated by Judith Blake. I just decided to abolish it, largely because it was just one person, really, on permanent position. It's just something you can have or have not, not an important subject. There are some subjects that every university must have-- mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, English, philosophy, some of the languages, and others. Demography is not one of them, and criminology is not one of them. If you have it, it ought to be good and large. They kept bringing it back, and apparently that was not so much on intellectual grounds. It's a silly subject and the group there couldn't be very effective. Then Judith left, and somebody revived it, not in my day.

Q: Do you remember the Department of Design?

Bowker: Vaguely. Yes, we abolished that for the same reason, I guess. I've forgotten now what design was.

Demography was brought back by a group of faculty who are themselves now of an age where even many dedicated academics retire. The Demography department is, as a professor in another department put it "highly age structured." Beyond this older group, they brought in a few younger faculty, shared with the Department of Sociology. One of these recently left for a better offer in Texas. The department is unable to replace her because of the budget crisis. Another scheduled faculty search was cancelled. If recruitment remains frozen for longer than the faculty's more senior members care to continue teaching, (which is quite possible) the department could easily be back to one or two professors. One of these has already said that if this were to happen he could simply join another department. The current administration, may or may not remember what Demography is, or care whether it is important, and is unlikely to make any particular effort to save the department from attrition.

This department is of course just one casualty of the budget cuts to the University, which is in turn only one portion of the destitution of California's public education system, which is in turn only one piece of the general collapse of governance in California. To me, of course it means more than that. I wasn't actually a student in the department, but I spent enough time there to know I was surrounded by the best humanity can produce finding out things that humanity desperately needs to understand. This department is one of the best pieces of the best school in what was once the most ambitious public education system in the world, and it hurts to see it left to atrophy. This abandonment of greatness symbolizes for me what ails California, and America.

Science-based do-gooding.

Last month as we drove up to her mom's house, Iris and I were talking about what sorts of non-profits we think really use their money well, in terms of achieving a lot of good with relatively little money. I said that the ones that usually impressed me were those very focused on a single type of action that did that one thing extremely well, rather than trying to save the whales and reduce teen pregnancy and sue the manufacturers and put out a great picture book of homeless homosexual redwood trees. Iris asked what kind of action I had in mind, and I said that ultimately, the step that seems to do the most good for the least expense is educating girls in poor countries where girls don't traditionally get educations. The list of things one can accomplish by educating girls is truly amazing. The level of education of the females in a country is the single best predictor of longevity increases, decrease in infant and juvenile mortality, decrease in rate of population growth, decrease in rate of infectious disease, increase in future education of both boys and girls and so on and so on. It is more important than how rich a country it is, how many doctors it has, the religious practices of the population or how well educated the men are. There are decades of studies comparing between nations, between regions, between villages and between individual families, and at every level having better educated women around translates into a healthier, more stable and less quickly increasing population. And the greatest gains in all these outcomes come from the first steps in educating the women. Whether women have a masters or a PhD doesn't affect the chance of their babies dying much. Whether they finished third grade or had no school at all has an enormous impact. Every additional year of schooling is helpful, but less so than the previous year.

When I read these studies, I feel like we shouldn't be spending development money on anything but educating girls. I feel like we've known about the development wonder drug for decades (and unlike most wonder-drugs, this one actually works) but haven't bothered to use it. Iris pointed out that in many countries, such as Niger, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer, there are cultural sensitivities that would keep a westerner from marching in and educating girls. The education of boys is considered more important, and many boys don't get educated for lack of funding. Post-colonial resentments exist, and must be treated carefully. Iris argued that if an organization wanted to educated Niger's girls, its organizers would have to have the kinds of insights and sensitivities to Niger's culture that only Nigeriens have. She lamented the fact that there was no such organization in Niger.

Imagine then our surprise and delight when (less than a week later) Iris found out that some of her Nigerien contacts were founding an organization to promote and fund the education of Nigerien girls. If we were superstitious people, we could draw all sorts of conclusions from the coincidence. Instead, we have offered to do what we can to help them get up and running. They don't yet have anything more official than a possible name and a board of directors. They aren't even taking donations yet (they still have to apply for tax-exempt status). Iris has been contacting her Peace Corps friends who have particular useful expertise, and I've been unwisely taking time away from my thesis to gather up and summarize the published research on the benefits of educating women. Perhaps it is naive, but I can't help but think that it would be useful to have a well documented statement on the benefits of educating girls to show to potential donors and government types. We expect to be helpful to them however we can. If they are able to do what they want to do, Niger (currently one of the world's poorest and worst educated nations) should be an amazing success story in a decade or two.

Cannabalism, entropy, economics and consumerism.

Among the millions of species of organisms out there, you can find a species that specializes in eating almost anything. There are lion-poo specialists, feather-barb specialists, lichen specialist, you-name-it specialists. There are also lots of generalist species, and many of these generalists engage in cannibalism. But no species is a cannibalism specialist. I can say this with confidence, even though we don't know what most species eat in any detail. A species of dedicated cannibals would quickly run out of energy. Everything an organism does burns energy that cannot be retrieved. Thermodynamics and all that. If a population is to withstand the ravages of entropy for any time at all, there has to be a sizable inflow of concentrated nutrients and well-ordered energy. A population of cannibals has outflows but no inflows, and quickly changes food supply or goes extinct. Engaging in cannibalism can be beneficial for short periods under specific circumstance, but you can't eat all conspecifics all the time. That way lays rapid extinction. Similarly, an ecosystem cannot persist for any period of time without massive inward fluxes of organized energy. Sunlight, geothermal chemicals or organic detritus from one of these two are necessary inputs to every ecosystem we have ever come across. Without that, organized energy in the system quickly declines until life can no longer be supported.

This same logic applies in economics. Pyramid schemes and speculative bubbles ultimately must collapse, because there is no underlying production of valuable stuff to support the outflows of capital of those involved in the speculation. Extending the analogy only slightly further, we see why a "consumer services based economy" cannot long persist. We import the carpet-cleaning machine from China, but we cannot export the carpet-cleaning service. We import the yoga mats but can't export the yoga lessons. We bring in coffee beans but can't export the latte. The consumer services part of the US economy (the biggest part) sends money out but brings effectively no money in, feeding instead on money that is already in the system.

The fact that our consumer economy lasted as long as it did/has is a testament to why economics is a social science, rather than a natural one. Humans are inherently illogical, and economics needs an understanding of that as much as it needs equations to understand the ways in which we are logical. Economic theory worked out for any other species would perform terribly for humans, meaning economics is by necessity anthropocentric, and therefore a social science. This has allowed an economy with few inflows to persist by inventing imaginary inflows, known as international borrowing. Americans may not be able to give you anything back for your stuff, but if you lend us the money to buy it from you, we will promise that at some point in the future we will borrow more money from someone else to pay you back with interest. Stated this way, it is an obvious pyramid scheme. But we have preferred to think that because our economy is large, because it has been dynamic, we soon would no longer need to borrow. Instead, I hope, we have figured out that we have to consume at a level closer to the level at which we produce. Otherwise we are just eating our children's future earnings, which is a bit too close to cannibalism for my taste.

Research website

I've put up a somewhat expanded research website: dlevitis.org
In addition to an abbreviated CV, it has:

A page on my teaching philosophy and student feedback.

A section on undergraduate mentoring which includes pages on useful resources for my students to use in finding and tracking scientific literature, and advice for students applying for research positions.
I'd particularly appreciate feedback on this advice from others who have interviewed many undergrads for research positions.

There is also, of course, the obligate links list.

Blog of Science Welcomes Stephen Howard

Our new physics and other stuff I don't get editor

A note from the editor

We have received several (two) questions recently regarding commenting and posting on Blog Of Sceince.

In order to comment, simply click on the "peer reviews" link at the bottom of the post, type your comment in the comment box and click "Publish."

For those who would like to post to BoS, there are two options.
First, one can email me a piece, and if it seems apropriate for BoS, I will post it and attribute it to you.

Second, for those who might like to post more regularly, I am open to allowing other bloggers to post here. You would need to create a Blogger account (which takes maybe two minutes and is free) and then I could add you as a contributor.

I can be contacted at danquixotedelamahopaca@gmail.com