Category Archives: The scientific method

The Economics of Advertising Warfare

Picture the scene. Acme Corp’s toothpaste business AcmeDent is a profitable enterprise; and so is that of their biggest rival Ace.

One day, however, they hire a new marketing and sales manager, let’s call him Bob. He is ambitious and full of ideas – ready to shatter preconceptions, break the mold, think outside of the box, etc, etc.

After a few days in the office he realises that the market is saturated. People are just not going to start brushing at lunchtime. The only thing for it is to increase market share. He calls a team meeting.

“We either have to increase sales or increase our margins. We have already cut ourselves to the bone cost-wise, and increasing price will lose market share. If we cut prices, we lose market share – so it looks like stale-mate.” But Bob, being new, felt this was old fashioned reasoning. Surely we could do something to get market share? “Any ideas?”, he asks.

The room is quiet. No one wants to say anything risky in front of the new boss. Looking around at his team, his eyes settle on Sheila, the head of brand management. “What are you doing to get market share?”

Now Sheila wanted Bob’s job. She’s not is a good mood, but knows to be cautious. “Well Bob, as you will know from the report I prepared for you, our advertising budget is tight; your predecessor seemed to think we just needed to match Ace’s spend.”

“What? Why?!” Bob sits up. He can smell an opportunity.

“Don’t ask me, I asked for more. He was very conservative.” There’s a murmur around the table. They all know Sheila is being polite. Before being headhunted, Bob’s predecessor had a reputation for being tighter than duck’s arse.

A few weeks later, the new ad campaign cranks into life. Bob is surprised by how much it cost, but he knows 10% more market share will make it more than worth while. He starts to study his sales figures with care. Will it work?

The end of the quarter looms. What will the results show? Bob reads the business news – Ace’s chairman has made some comments. They are very critical and accuse Acme of “destroying the market”.

“Ha!” Bob exclaims out loud. Excellent, they are hurting.

The results roll in. They are good. 12% additional market share, mostly taken from Ace. No wonder they’re moaning.

That night, he sees the new TV ad from Ace. He has to admit it’s good.

“Why didn’t we think of that?” he booms to Sheila the next morning. “It’s a great idea.”

Sheila is unruffled. “We did think of it; we just thought it would be too expensive.”

“Hell!”, Bob is on a roll with the benefit of hindsight, “we’ve seen that advertising can gain us market share – of course it’s worth it. What you can do if I double your budget?”

“Well…”

Ace’s campaign works and Acme loses most of their new-found market share. The next month brings Acme’s bigger and better campaign – tying together TV, print, competitions, star endorsements, the whole shebang. Again is works like a charm. Market share is back up.

Freshly sun-tanned from two weeks on the Keys, Bob is feeling pretty pleased with himself at the AGM. The CEO will surely make a point of congratulating him on a job well done. He is getting on too, and will surely be eyeing up replacements.

The meeting starts well and soon enough they came to the the financial performance of AcmeDent toothpaste.

“Bob,” the CEO starts, “what the hell is going on here?”

Bob is taken aback by the look of displeasure on the CEO’s face. Oh, well he has a reputation for being grumpy, maybe this is him having a joke. “Well, you see, we have increased market share by 10% this year, our revenues are at an all time high…”. He searched the CEO’s still stony face.

“But what about profits? What are they?”

“Well, you see, this year we made significant investments, so it doesn’t look great, but rest assured, next year…”

“Investments?”

“Yes, we invested in major advertising campaigns…”

The CEO is shaking his head slowly.

Bob is suddenly feeling a nervous. “Well, we had to spend money to get the market share, but now we’ve got it, we will see a profit next year.” That should calm him down.

“But what about Ace’s latest trick? While you were away, they’ve started a new fad amongst teenagers for luminous teeth or something.”

“Well sir, it is a bit of an arms race…”

“A race to where exactly?”, the CEO looks very serious now.

“Well…”

“Bob, can’t you see, they have to match our advertising spend to protect their business. All you’ve done is pissed both company’s profits down the plughole.”

The CEO leans over to his assistant, “How much to get the other guy back?” he whispers.

Gravity explained in 761 words

People seem to be harbouring the impression that there is no good theory of Gravity yet. I asked a few friends – most thought Newton had explained it, but couldn’t explain it themselves. This is rather sad, 80-odd years after a darn good theory was proposed.

Of course there is still some controvery and the odd contradiction with other beloved theories, but the heart of the General Theory of Relativity really does a great job of explaining gravity and it is really wonderfully beautiful, and can be roughly explained without recourse to jargon and equations.

This is a theory that’s just so darn elegant, it looks, smells and tastes right – once you get it. Of course, the ‘taste’ of a theory doesn’t hold much water; for a theory to survive it needs to make testable predictions (this one does) and needs to survive all manner of logical challenges (so-far-so-good for this one too).

This is not a theory that needs to remain the exclusive domain of physicists, so for my own personal development as a scientist and writer, I thought I might try an exercise in explaining what gravity is – according to the general theory of relativity.

For some reason, my wife thinks this is strange behaviour!

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The story really got started when Einstien realised that someone in an accelerating  spaceship would experience forces indistinguishable from the gravity felt back on Earth. 

He or she could drop things and they would fall to the floor (assuming the spaceship is accellerating upwards)  just as they would fall on earth.

So perhaps that’s all gravity is… some sort of accelleration? Let’s see.

In the spaceship, it’s clear to us that the objects would appear to fall to the floor, but in reality, it is the floor of the spaceship that is rushing up towards the objects – this explains why things fall at the same speed whether heavy or light, matching Galileo’s own test results when he dropped various things, supposedly from the leaning tower of Pisa. It further implies that things will ‘fall’ even if they have no mass at all… such as light beams.

The thought experiment goes thus: Consider if you had a laser-beam shining across the spaceship control room; it would curve slightly downwards, because the light hitting the opposite wall would have been emitted a little time ago, when the spaceship was a little way back, and going a bit slower (remember, its accellerating).

We know the light is not bending, it is just that the source is accellerating, resulting in a curved beam. Imagine a machine-gun spraying bullets across a field – as you swing the gun back and forth the bullets may form curved streams of bullets, but each individual bullet still goes straight.

So Einstein suggested that perhaps light beams will bend in this same way here on earth under a gravitational field. Now Newton’s theory of gravity says light beams may also bend if they have ‘mass’, but the mass of light is a dodgy concept at best (it has inertia but no rest mass, but that’s a whole different blog posting). Anyway, even it it does have mass, it would bend differently from what Einstien predicted. So the race was on to see how much gravity could bend light…

This bending of light prediction was proven by a fellow called Eddington who showed that during a solar eclipse, light from distant stars was indeed bent as it passed near the sun, and by exactly the predicted angle.

Einstein went further though, suggested that light beams on Earth are, just like on the spaceship, really travelling straight, and only appear to bend, and that this can be so if space-time itself is curved. They are going straight, but in curved space.

We know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but if that line is on a curved surface, supposedly straight lines can do strange things – like looping back on themselves. Think of the equator. This model therefore allows things like planets to travel in straight lines around the sun (yes, you read right).

The model has been tested and shown to work, and gives good predictions for planetary motion.

So what can we take home from all this?

Well mainly, if this model is right, we need to let it sink in that gravity may not be a force at all, but an illusion, like the centrifugal ‘force’ you experience when you drive around a corner.

Secondly, it is an open invitation to think about curved space and its marvellous implications!

Extrapolating your way

There is a very powerful scientific reasoning tool that I use, that, it occurs to me, I wasn’t actually taught… the simple art of extrapolation.

Most people have a pretty good idea of what extrapolating is – its where you look at a trend and predict what will happen if that trend persists. 

For example, if I said it took me 6 months to save £500, I can use extrapolation to predict how long it will take me to save £2000; its something we do all the time – yesterday I was driving down from Bristol, I could count off the the miles, and knowing the distance, I could predict if I would make it for dinner (I didn’t).

Scientists use this too. A good example is the way we can calculate the temperature of “absolute zero” by looking at the volume of a balloon as you heat it up. If you had a balloon at 25C, and you heat it to about 55C its volume would increase by about 10%. What does that tell us? It tells if we cooled it, it would eventually have no volume – and that this would happen at around -275C (-273.15C actually) – absolute zero.

Of course, the method relies upon assumptions – usually the assumption that the trend will continue in the same way (people often use the term “linear” to represent relationships that form straight lines when plotted on a graph).

What if the relationship is non-linear? For example, if little James is 5 feet tall when he is 10, how tall will he be when he is 20? Clearly he won’t be 10ft tall – that is because the relationship between height and age is “non-linear”.

Most of us are smart enough to extrapolate without knowing the jargon, but when the relationships get complicated a bit of maths and jargon can help.

For example, if we want to examine the population of bacteria in a petri dish, or the spread of a virus (or a rumour) through a population, our mental arithmetic is not always up to it. Luckily, some scientists have realised even these complex affairs have some predictability and although “non-linear”, they can still be modelled – graphs can be plotted and extrapolations made.

If this interests you, I refer you to books on epidemiology; I will move onto another sort of extrapolation – one used to check people’s theories by identifying ‘impossible’ extrapolations.

Let’s say, for example, that the want to predict  how the obesity epidemic will progress in the coming decades. If the media says obesity in a certain group increased from 14-24% between 1994 and 2004, and then goes on to predict that obesity will therefore reach 34% by 2014, does this withstand scrutiny?

Never mind that the definition of obesity may be faulty (BMI), never mind that they are extrapoliting from 2 data points – let’s rather ask if the linear trend is justifiable. This can be done by extrapolating the prediction to try to break it. 

If the model is right, obesity will go on increasing and soon enough 100% (or more!) of the population will be obese. This is clearly wrong – obesity is not likely to get everyone – vast swaths of the population are likely to be immunised to some extent against obesity due to active lifestyles and good dietary educations, or perhaps its in their genes, the lucky things. 

The truth will of course be more complex – the first group to become obese will be the most vulnerable, so an increase from 14-24% may incorporate that group, but each successively 10% will be harder fought.  All this is enough to suggest the predictions made for 2014 are doubtful, and those that go further are downright shameless. But it doesn’t stop them

I am sure you can think of other suspicious trend-based predictions, like those for peak-oil or global warming. They could do with some improvements, so get to it!

 

How to jump higher

Have you ever noticed that in order to jump your highest, you need a few preparatory steps and a preparatory hop? Have you ever wondered why?

Well, perhaps sadly, I have. I was wondering if this was mere mental preparation – because surely your ability to jump high is going to be dictated by a) the power in your legs on the one hand, and b) your weight on the other hand?

Turns out it’s not.

But why not? And what do the preparatory leg movements do?

If you think the steps are “warming you muscles up” in preparation for the jump you are, in some sense, right – right that you are preparing, but its not the muscles you are preparing but the tendons…

But what are tendons, and what do they do? Good question.

I used to think that tendons were there to help glue the muscles to the skeleton, like the ropes on sailboats glue the sail to the mast and boom. I later realised that they also help make the body more ergonomic by allowing the muscles to be positioned ‘out-of-the-way’ as is the case for your hands; if all the muscles used for your fingers were actually in your fingers they would be rather fat, and not particularly dexterous.

Likewise, if you had to carry your calf muscles in your feet, it would make your feet somewhat heavier and mean you would have to swing lots of weight back-and-forth, up-and-down when you walk and run. Although the calves and thighs still have to move a bit, tendons have allowed the movement to be reduced substantially by connecting these muscle groups to the feet from safer havens further up the leg. 

Interestingly (to me anyway), this also explains why some people can’t bend their little finger independently of the second (ring) finger – they are sharing tendons that go right up the forearm!

Ah, but none of that explains why we need to hop before we can jump.  True enough – there is another property or function of the tendon that had never occurred to me – until I read “The new science of strong materials” by J.E. Gordon (which I must recommend to scientists of all disciplines, it s a lovely book, I wish I had written it).

So what does a book on material science have to do with tendons? Well, it points out that tendon is unique among materials for its capacity to stretch and in doing so, to store energy. In other words, tendons make remarkably good springs (and explains why animal tendons have been used to make crossbows for thousands of years). 

Springs can be thought of as batteries, you put a bit of effort into stretching them now, and the effort is stored there for later use – to shoot an arrow for example.

So,  it’s simple really, your legs are like a pair of crossbows: if you pre-stretch the tendons before the jump, and then co-ordinate the energy release to coincide with the power stroke of your muscles, you will jump higher.

And finally, it turns out that a rather good way to pre-stretch the tendons is to hop before we jump. So there you are!

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You will probably have noticed that good basket-ballers and high jumpers have taken this further (whether understanding it or not). They run along horizontally at a fair speed (gaining kinetic energy), and then thump down their leg at an angle, transferring all that kinetic energy into their tendons, and then re-cooping it in a vertical jumping burst. I have not done the maths, but I am willing to bet the tendons do much more work than the muscles in the crucial powering phase of the jump.

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Something to try:

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to do 20 jumps in a row rather than 10 jumps with pauses between each one? This is because the pauses between jumps force you to dissipate the energy in your tendons, and so every jump is pure muscle work.

It is also worth noting that even the task of dissipating the energy stored in tendons is tiring for your body – the muscles actually work against the tendons to turn the energy into heat, which is similar to the work your muscles have to do when you walk down stairs.

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Final word…

The really nerdy readers (those after my own heart) will have further noted that this all goes a long way to explain why PE teachers seem to be so obsessed with stretching. You thought it was just to prevent injury? Think again – while it is essential to warm up and down carefully and stretching once warm does reduce the risk of injury, this is largely because stretching improves the condition of your tendons.

So don’t rush through the stretching next time you go to the gym; stretching and flexing your tendons may well do more to improve your athletic performance than muscle work.  Tendons deserve a part in any workout, please don’t neglect them – they are, after all, the forgotten workhorse of the body.

A house price prediction…

House prices, like the stock market, are tricky to predict. 

As with the stock market, there are two classes of parameters that affect the prices – the so-called ‘fundamentals’, like supply and demand, the price-to-earnings ratio on the one hand, and the more transient effects like the economic climate and the ever-slippery ‘confidence’.

There has been feverish speculation for years in the UK, and the prices rose for 15 consecutive years, and are at last dropping.

So why did the prices get so high? Many economists would argue it was a classic “bubble”, a self-perpetuating cycle of confidence building more confidence; in other words the fundamentals were being ignored.

Of course, the people found fundamentals they claimed justified the prices; in particular increased demand. Folks living longer, divorce, folks marrying later, immigration, and the breakdown of the family unit; all these things mean we need more houses.

But if these fundamentals were the whole reason, the prices wouldn’t be dropping as they are now. OK, so now most will admit it got out of hand and this is a correction. But how far has it got to correct?

The bubble, it seems to be agreed, was really helped by two factors:

Firstly there was a throttle on the supply – planning permission is notoriously hard to get and the government probably knew it and were happy with prices rising, it made everyone feel prosperous. On a more sinister front, housing developers may have sitting on prime real estate to deliberately keep prices high.

Secondly, there was easy credit – anyone and their dog could get the cash so people who really shouldn’t have been in the game got in and are now out of their league.

But there is a third factor I’ve not seem discussed in the media: the baby-boom generation.

Hasn’t this bubble coincided with the baby-boomer’s ‘rich’ phase – the age from 45-60 when the kids are off and 25 years of mortgage payments have built up the asset list? Surely this is the age-group that is most likely to own big houses, or multiple houses for that matter?

So what will happen now? The bubble has burst, the correction is in full swing, but what will happen in the next 10 years as the baby boomers start retiring, downsizing, and dying? Will this coincide with the next bubble-burst? Will the industry and government look at the population age profile during planning?

I personally hope this is why the market is cock-eyed – why it is that a professional engineer in his mid-thirties with a internationally comparable salary can’t afford more than a mid-terrace house with a 5×5-metre garden…

So I predict (well pray really, if that’s possible for athiests) that we will get into an oversupply situation and that house prices should correct from this ‘second-order’ bubble.

Of course, even if I am right, it may be that the prices are kept up by nasty developers identifying whole towns to ‘let go to ruin’ just to keep the prices high in the next town along…

Celebrity Dynamics

Celebrity Dynamics. 

The list of people we all ‘know’ isn’t that long, yes, it probably thousands – politicians, actors, singers, historical figures, sports stars – but in a country like the UK, it is still a remarkably small fraction of the populace.

Of course, there are ‘spheres’ – people interested in politics know more politicians, sports fans have more sporting heroes – we here in Cornwall have our local ‘Cornish’ celebrities.

However, if we remembered every celebrity, we would soon run out of space in the public ‘memory’, so we have to be selective.

The media know this – they constantly face choices of which story to follow, and the decisions will often be arbitrary; two minor celebrities did two things today, and we only have 45 seconds of time to fill in our variety news programme – which shall we choose?

This decision process is simple – the editor will pick the celebrity who has more recent ‘hits’ in the news.

Why? Because they know that the audience is more likely to recognise the name – and they know that if the audience hear that name twice it reinforces the memory.

This simple logic creates a very interesting system in which the rise to fame becomes ‘autocatalytic’ – a self-perpetuating, accelerating process. All you need to do is pass some ‘critical point’ of news coverage and you may be in for a ride!

However, we can only hold so many names in the list, so anyone who is out of the news for a time drops off the radar pretty fast, even if they did once enjoy high exposure.

If you are like me, you’ll be thinking of exceptions – folks who just stay famous regardless – do they buck this logic? I don’t think so.

Such people most likely still get exposure, even if its not them in the news – perhaps we see their CD on our shelf, or we talk about their ‘field’ (Thatcherism, Darwinism, Keynesian economics,), and this may be accentuated if their field gets in the news – as has recently been the case for Keynes.

So what value does this theory have?

I think it explains:

  • why so many great deeds don’t lead to fame
  • why often only one person from a high achieving team is ‘selected’ for fame
  • why there’s no such thing as bad publicity
  • local fame does not easily turn to national fame

It also suggests that if you want to be famous, you should:

  • a series of newsworthy events in succession is probably better than a single highly newsworthy achievement
  • if you are in a group/team/band, you need to be the leader or public face of the group
  • you should associate yourself with a newsworthy field, ideally become the posterboy/girl for the field, always dragged out when the field is in the news

And if you want to stay famous once you are you should keep in the public eye:

  • associate yourself with newsworthy events
  • differentiate yourself from other celebrities in your ‘space’ or
  • gang together with other celebrities to create newsworthy events
  • become the posterboy/girl for a newsworthy field/subject, the one dragged out when the field is in the news

Aside:  There seems to be another way to maintain fame:- create mystique, the image of privilege, of some higher plain of existence away from the mundanity of everyday life. People say they like down-to-earth celebrities – that’s because they are very rare – you have to be ‘proper’ famous to stay famous without this tactic! 

Of course, this all assumes you want to be famous! You can equally use the theory to keep a low profile 😉

Good luck either way!

Analogies not equations, please!

Have you ever noticed how equations look far more complicated and hard to understand than the concept they represent?

I sometimes get myself stuck having to read other people’s work (it’s the ‘peer review process’) and when I first read it, I am often utterly confused, like a person stumbling around a dark room they’ve never been in before. However, because I am expected to make intelligible commentary, I soldier on until I understand what is being said.

Once you understand something, it is hard to remember what you felt like before you understood it. How did that equation look the first time you saw it? I have been thinking about this…

Let’s consider ‘equations’ – a common part of many technical documents. I have found that I always overestimate how clever or useful the equations really are when I first see them. So what does this mean?

It means that using equations to help teach people we risk turning them off by giving them the impression that the work is harder than it is.

Let me give an example:

Maxwell’s wave equations. These are considered (rightly) to be an cornerstone of physics, as they model the behaviour of waves in the inter-related electric and magnetic fields. When I first read them, they were ‘greek’ to me, literally. Here’s a small one:

maxwell-faraday-equation

Obviously, you need to know more to understand what they are about. You need to know what each symbol represents – and you need to know what the operators (the × in this case) actually do. For anyone who has not specifically studied maths at university would then need to backtrack quite far, because in this case the ‘×’ is not the ‘×’ most folks know and love, its the ‘cross product’ which applies to vectors. That even leaves most science graduates cold, draining the joy of discovery for a few hours or days while you go away to learn (or remember) what the heck that means.

But is it all worth it? Is the complexity of partial differential equations and matrix multiplication really required in order to understand what the equation is describing?

Of course not!

So why are equations always wheeled out to ‘explain’ phenomena? This is a failure of teaching. Of science communication. Surely concepts can be explained much better by the use of anecdotes, metaphors & illustrations?

Scientists working at the bleeding edge of science have to be very precise in their logic, and when communicating with one another, equations are undoubtedly very efficient ways to describe hypotheses. And so, while they are good ways for experts to relate, they make it harder for newbies to “break in”, and are dreadful teaching tools.

The Maxwell equations really just describe how waves propagate in a medium – and really its just the full 3-d version of waves in a slinky, or ripples in a pond. The equations, while drawing on complex (and difficult) maths, are describing something the human brain already has an intuitive grip on, because we’ve seen it!

I’m not suggesting we could do away with equations – they are valuable in the predictions they make for those who already understand what they represent – I am just suggesting that equations should be de-emphasised, and only dragged out when the student starts to feel the need to describe the phenomenon mathematically.

So my message to all university lecturers and text-book writers is: describe a phenomenon with the use of analogy, please!

The speed of time

I want to talk about something very close to my heart.

It has been an obsession for some time now, and I have probably thought about it a little too much, and gone a little too far without checking with some peers. Alas, I don’t know too many physicists down here in Cornwall, and if I wrote papers, they would probably be too disconnected, and not do me any favours. Besides, I suspect the academic world would not really take a shine to someone like me sending in papers without affiliation to any university or research group.

Anyway, my present subject of study (call it a do-it-yourself dissertation) is “the speed of time”. What controls it? How do we measure and sense it? Is there an absolute? That sort of thing.

My thoughts have gone to some interesting places, and some propositions I would like to test provide some interesting implications.

But let me start with my first problem. It relates to how people seem to constantly ignore the implications of special relativity. Take for example, the age of the universe…

Have you ever noticed how people will, one moment, make declarations about the age of the universe, and then in the next agree that time is relative? Isn’t this a contradiction?

Bicycles in BeijingI mean, on the one hand, Katie Melua was informed that her estimate was too low (12 Billion years). She actually recorded a gag version of her song after a respected academic (Simon Singh) chided her for getting it ‘wrong’, and also for calling it a guess, which, he said was an insult to a century of astronomical progress.

Then, if you read a bit about special relativity, it explains that time is relative and can ‘dilate’. For my readers who don’t know what that means, it means that how much time passes depends on how fast you are moving. This theory has some well known implications, such as the “twin paradox” in which a space travelling twin returns from his travels younger than his brother.

Now how are we supposed to square these two well-accepted bricks in the foundations of modern physics? The universe is ‘strictly 13.7 billion years old by current estimates’, but never mind, because time is relative, so if you happened to be travelling at 99% of the speed of light during that time, your clock will only have ticked away ~0.3 billion years (according to the Lorentz Transformation). To make matters worse, light waves (/particles) that set off at the start, travelling at the speed of light of course would have yet to see their watch tick at all, making the universe brand-new as far as they are concerned.

Doesn’t this make a nonsense of the whole concept of age? Or should we say: “for objects in our inertial frame, the universe appears to be 13.7 billions years old”?

That’s pretty wishy-washy – and besides, who is to say that our inertial frame is superior to any other? 

Please someone help me sort this out, as I can think of some pretty serious implications if we can’t.

If you would also do me a favour, pass on this challenge to your nerdiest friends.

 

PS. This one is just the start. I have others, and perhaps like this one, all they need is a reality check!

Marvellous… homeopathy

Homeopaths are definitely on to something.

If you visit one, you will find a caring & honest person. They will look at your problem holistically, and explain how western medicine has been corrupted by money & big pharma, and has been blinkered so successfully it cannot see the big picture. They may explain perhaps that “just like the universe, the body acts as a living open self-organizing system susceptible to entropy yes, but also chaos and new order,” (I quote the tenacious Marty from a homeopathy blog). So hence modern science, which is really about pigeon-holing everything, is not really up to the job of working with the real system.

Now, there are many critics. What exactly is their issue? What on earth do they have against this clearly beneficent endeavour?

Anti-homeopathy rants are two-a-penny on the blogs, and they are very interesting to analyse. They argue that science cannot quantify/comprehend/explain the effect of homeopathy, and therefore, clearly, homeopathy is all poppycock. Fine, no point in engaging with them, they are ‘stuck in their own paradigm’.

But much more interesting is the question: what motivates of these nay-sayers?

Well, the blogosphere has its theories. One that crops up often is the suggestion that significant opponents must be aiming to hold back the good news from the public so they stay trapped in the western way, taking expensive drugs that never clear up their problems completely and therefore leave them financially trapped, but ignorantly grateful. Good for the capitalist systems that run our world, no?

Does this add up? Could all those who denigrate homeopathy really have something to gain from its demise? Another suggestion is that these folks have invested too much in the western system of understanding the universe, which has gone down a blind alley, and they are desperately holding on…

What a lot of bollocks.

The reason people keep popping up who despair at homeopathy is because a certain fraction of the population just happen to grow up with the ability (and desire) to only ever believe things that they fully understand.

Some of those people go on to study science, and they go on to see the marvellous wonder of nature, all the more wondrous because it make sense. It adds up. It is logical.

Science can predict solar eclipses, it can make your satnav work, it can even allow you to talk to someone in New Zealand (they are nice folks, after all).

Even the stuff that sounds like hocus pocus – such as Quantum tunnelling, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, quarks, photonic crystals or wave/particle duality – is quite understandable. Yes it may take years of nerdy concentration, but these theories, while complex, are consummately understandable.

Energy is an interesting example. It’s hard to pin down, even scientists can’t give a good account for what it is. A few hundred years back there were plenty of theories, but the application of logic has sorted the wheat from the chaff, and now, although science struggles to define it, they know where it is, how to measure it, how it flows, and even how to use it. But people confuse these proper energy flows (electricity, nerves) with things like acupuncture meridians and leylines and the like. People who think for themselves can quickly spot when things like energy are being used logically, and when it is being used nonsensically.

Now these people, these thinkers, will, if unlucky enough, come across homeopathy. Attractive at first: lots of proponents, lots of jargon, and above all hugely promising. At first things go well. Any really smart student of a new subject will experience the frisson of the unknown, the new, and with good intention will go with the flow, like a foreigner trying to a pick up a new language.

However, as time passes, while usually, with other subjects like language, or quantum physics, it all slowly starts moving into place, homeopathy simply stays at arm’s length. It still ‘sounds’ good, as do other ‘sensible’ subjects, but it never reduces to complete sense – the complete sense where every cause is linked to every effect via an unbroken chain of explainable steps.

So these people, these thinkers-for-themselves, these take-nobody’s-word-for-nothing types, eventually realise it is all a sham.

But sadly, they can also see exactly how others, more trusting, may take it in, hook, line and sinker, so much so they really believe it, feel it & trust it.

They do so because it works.

Yes, that’s what I said. The proof is in the pudding. Those who try it, report that it works.

So what does that smug group of logical smarti-pants have to say about that? Well, they will happily explain that the benefits are real, but are rather due to:

  1. The placebo effect
  2. Regression to the norm
  3. The simple attention of another person
  4. And others you can read about if you are one of those nerds, who wants to be convinced, like me.

The speed of evolution

The theory of evolution is greater than it looks. It is not just clever. It is not just useful. Its biggest value is as a nail in the coffin of some very destructive ideas. Not just the idea that Europeans are superior to Africans, or the idea that humans are superior to animals, but the idea that we all have some divine purpose – and therewith, the whole idea of good and evil.

The fascinating story of how the the tide of evidence has led to the unravelling of religious explanations for the world is, however, not what I wish to ponder here. No, I would like to ponder an area of evolutionary theory that still holds some uncertainty, some mystery.

Relax, I am not trying to ‘break’ or disprove evolution. I am fairly confident it it largely right, but I still think there are questions about it speed.

The problem…

Anyone who has read on the subject understands the pure cunning of natural selection. Basically put, any replicating ‘creature’, that produces slight mutations in its offspring, will produce some offspring that are better than itself – better at competing for resource, better at surviving. Of course many mutations (indeed perhaps most mutations) may produce ‘worse’ offspring, but if the better offspring survive proportionally more, there will be a generational improvement.

This is the same phenomena that allows us to breed better race-horses, beef-cattle or strawberries.

Now, we can see the effects of selection very quickly in a petri dish of bugs, or perhaps in viruses in the human population, but the evolution of large mammals is a slow affair, not easily observed, and it took the discovery of ‘missing links’ to confirm the theory that we had indeed evolved from primate stock.

I personally have not read widely on evolution, I have simply spent lots of time thinking about it, and also spent some brain cells on pedantic calculations and computer simulations.

What comes up, again and again in the simulations is the question of speed.

Speed?

Yes, speed. How fast do we evolve, and have we had enough time to do it?

Aside…

There are two ways to tackle the question of evolutionary speed. One the one hand, you could say: we have only had, say, 5 billion years, to evolve from the basic elements, so we must have evolved fast enough. The calculations must simply be made to fit the data.

Some (not me) have however said, hang on, calculations show that we haven’t had the time to evolve, so the theory must have some massive fault.

The latter argument betrays a misunderstanding of evolution. They assume that as evolutionists claim evolution is ‘true’ and ‘right’, that their models must be right. But if their models suggest we needed 100 billion years to evolve that will prove that evolution is too slow and some other agency is required to square the circle.

However, just because evolution is fairly certain to be right, that doesn’t mean the models are simple, and I hope to give some insight into the challenge that I came across in my own amatuer attempts at the challenge.

Factors that throttle evolutionary change… 

Let’s look at the things that effect the speed of evolution.

  1. the generation gap (time between generations)
  2. the strength of the mutation.
  3. the selection pressures (multiple)
  4. the male/female requirement (and its surprising turbo function)

The first one is obvious – the more generations you get through each year/millennium, the greater potential for evolutionary change.

Mutation strength is more interesting. You could have multiple errors in a DNA sequence, the more errors the stronger the mutation. However, some errors in the DNA may have no particular effect, while other errors could be catastrophic, so that matters too. To keep things simple, lets just focus on the ‘strength’ of the inter-generational change.

If the mutations were very small and subtle, this, I would predict, would slow evolution down. However, if the mutations are too large (remember they are random), they are less likely ‘to be compatible with life’. However, I suspect because they are random, they will come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from untraceably small – to very fatal (resulting in early miscarriage).

However, we have seen in the fossil record evidence that evolution speeds up and slows down. The statistics of mutation ought not to change like that, so there must be more to it.

Selection pressure is the next, and even more interesting, factor.

People have questioned why the world doesn’t have living examples of ‘the missing link’. They must have been ‘viable’ in their own right, so why didn’t they survive?

Some thought on the subject (as well as my own simulations) show that this is not surprising. The speciation event (when one species splits into two) is usually the result of a population becoming subjected to a varying selection pressure (usually geographical). If the population is well mixed, its keeps together, but a mountain range or body or water can reduce the interaction enough to allow the different ‘random walks’ to optimise the two populations for their environments. Allowed to proceed for any length of time, you land up with two separate species, with nothing between. Once separated, they cannot ‘rejoin’ even if they mix once more, so the divergence will continue. Some have argued that ‘spurts’ in evolution augment this speciation process.

So why do these spurts happen? This is most likely selection pressure, but how does it work? Well, putting it simply, the more the environment changes, the more the creatures will need to change to survive. In a static environment, creatures will evolve to suit, but following the law of diminishing returns, once happy, would have no driving force to change any more.

However, you could well argue, that while a quickly changing environment allows faster evolution, it is simply taking its foot off the brake, something else is really controlling the maximum speed of evolution.

What do I mean by maximum speed? Well ask how fast would an environment need to change, such that evolution could not keep up – then you have reached its maximum speed.

There is an example that some folks think is an example of an environment that promoted fast evolution. Theorists have suggested that early man was often the victim of famine, and often needed to move around, which resulted in accelerated evolution. The stronger penalty on the weak, the higher reward for strength and wisdom, meant that potentially positive mutations, that may be lost in stable ‘easy’ environments, were more effective in this environment, thus accelerating change.

There is much written about selection, by people much smarter than myself, so I will not elaborate any more on it. I would simply summarise, that in the course of billions of years, some environments would allow fast evolution, while others would stagnate, and the average speed, while hard to quantify, would not be consistently high enough to be the key to the sort of evolutionary speed we need to gain so many evolved features is so few generations.

So at this stage, I would like to point out the most marvellous thing about evolution, which I think can multiply the effects of natural selection.

The two-sex system and its accelerating effect…

As I grew up, I sometimes wondered why we needed two sexes. Why not just allow all creatures to have offspring, add in a little mutation, and hey presto, it should work. 

This was the form of my very first simulations (some 17 years ago now!). It showed me fairly rapid evolution and increasing fitness, so all looked good. If you set the bifurcation ratio to 2, give each child a random ‘fitness’ and then set the chance of reproduction be proportional to fitness (a very simple algorithm), the population did get fitter. However, when I compared it with the standard model, where you have two sexes, two differences in macro behaviour showed up.

Firstly, you have to add an extra ‘selection’ criteria. It is not just about surviving to reproductive age, it is now about surviving AND finding a mate. And you can forget about monogamy, so a very fit (for sexual selection) male could fertilise several females, at the expense of less fit males. This effect can (in my model) greatly accelerate change. All you need to do to get fast change, is ensure that partners can identify fitness accurately. 

The second interesting effect from having two sexes (and what I found out from my model), is that good genes can spread through the population, which does not happen in the one-sex model. This spread of good genes means that one part of a population could be learning how to deal with sunburn, while another is learning to deal with sickle-cell anemia, and their solutions can be shared by all.

Now we are talking. This, if I have my thinking right, would be a serious turbo-boost for evolution, allowing it to evolve lots of traits in parallel, whereas the single sex model would have to work on one feature at a time – first build an eye, then build a digestion tract, then build a good sense of humour… This buys evolution a lot of time. This makes it far more likely that 5 billion years is enough time to make all the amazing variety we see today.

So I would therefore argue that this makes it more likely we had time to go from the first two-sex replicator to the world of wasps, earwigs and herpes.

That begs my next question: how did the first two-sex replicator come about? I think the computer modelling may be beyond me, but I hold out hope for my children! 

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UPDATE: I have added a follow-up post which addresses the question of ‘epigenetics’, the possibility that the DNA sequence is not the sole databank in our genes.