I recently receive the following e-mail question:

Got a question for you: do you consider the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence to be science or pseudoscience? I recently got into an online debate and found myself in the minority because I maintained that the central thesis — that if intelligent life exists somewhere out there in the greater universe, we would be able to recognize it based upon patterns in radio waves — is not falsifiable.

It would seem to me that the only way to truly falsify SETI, we’d need to map quite literally every body in the universe and rule them out one by one and say that they don’t have anything there in terms of extraterrestrial intelligence.  Unlike other complex hypotheses that are limited by available technologies, I’m not convinced that the task of mapping the universe is even possible, even with a sufficiently advanced technology.

I have received some version of this question many times over the years, always by people who are trying to be skeptical and apply what they have learned about the differences between science and pseudoscience.  It therefore seems like an excellent opportunity to explore this important issue.

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I recently received the following question:

Why do we, and animals generally, have single or twin body parts, but not not triple or quadruple ones? Surely three eyes are better than one. (Four legged animals tend to have two front legs the same and two back legs the same) . And why is one side of the body a mirror image of the other anyway?. Why dont we just have two lungs or two eyes that look exactly the same?

This is an interesting question. First, however, I have to address the premise that animals in general display bilateral symmetry. This is mostly true for vertebrates, but not for many invertebrates. Sea stars, for example show radial symmetry, and have 5 or more radially symmetrical arms. Spiders have 8 legs and more than two eyes.

Most animals (the vast majority) do have some form of symmetry. Sponges are a notable exception.

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Each time a new genetic analysis dates the time to the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of humans, we get headlines proclaiming that the “mother,” “father,” or “ancestor” of all humanity has been discovered – commonly referred to as “Eve” or “Adam” when the analysis involved mitochondrial or Y-chromosome DNA respectively. I find the reports to usually be at least a bit misleading, which is not unexpected given that the topic is fairly complex.

This is happening again with the recent headlines, “Father of all humankind is 340,000 years old.”

What they are talking about is a new study looking at the Y-chromosome of a particular African American male whose family submitted his DNA for ancestry analysis. It turned out to be a very rare type, and in fact represents an ancient Y-chromosome ancestry. Understanding what this means, however, requires a bit of background.

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Genetically modified (GM) crops are the target of significant worldwide controversy, to the greatest extent in Europe but also in the US and elsewhere.  Are the concerns over GM crops justified by the science? What is the proper balance between the precautionary principle and making potentially improved crops available to a hungry world?

GM “golden rice” – rice genetically modified to produce beta carotene, a form of Vitamin A, is set to be introduced in the Philippines, creating another round of debate on this issue.

Crops have been genetically modified to resist pests or herbicide, to thrive in adverse environmental conditions (cold, drought), and to enhance nutrition. At present GM crops are highly regulated, with proponents arguing that the regulation is too strict while GM opponents argue that they are too lax. Still others argue for a case-by-case assessment of each GM product, which seems to me to be the most sensible approach. 

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Cloning technology has advanced to the point that we can reliably clone large mammals, like Dolly the sheep. Today you can have your pet cloned. So far no one has cloned a human as we are still sorting out the complex ethical issues. In some countries, like the UK, human reproductive cloning is illegal.

There are many wrinkles to this new technology – one is using it to bring back extinct species. There are efforts underway, for example, to clone the wooly mammoth. Recently extinct species, like the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), dodo, and passenger pigeon, also might be resurrected by cloning technology. Although, don’t expect Jurassic Park anytime soon as current evidence strongly suggests that DNA cannot survive for millions of years.

But it can survive for thousands, and even tens of thousands in the right conditions. We have mostly reconstructed, for example, the DNA of our closest evolutionary cousins, Homo neanderthalensis. Now a Harvard scientist, George Church, is proposing that it may be possible to clone a Neanderthal.

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A large fraction of the population is walking around with a powerful computer in their pocket or on their hip. Cell phones, and specifically smart phones, are gaining popularity – a Pew poll in February 2012 found that 46% of Americans own smart phones. Smart phones are becoming almost extensions of our personal identities – our digital selves. This offers new possibilities for information gathering that simply did not exist before.  Scientists are just starting to dip their toes into this pool by exploring ways to use smart phone apps to gather useful data.

For example, I recently interviewed Richard Wiseman on my podcast, the SGU, and he discussed his dream research using an iPhone app, Dream:On. The app detect when you are dreaming by monitoring your movements. During REM sleep your body is paralyzed, and the accelerometer in the iPhone can detect this lack of movement. The app will then play a sound chosen by you with the intent on influencing the content of your dream. After the dream is over the app will wake you so you can record your dream in the app. Richard has gathered millions of recorded dreams this way. There are, of course, issues with gathering data in this way. Richard acknowledges that this is just an experiment – a “let’s see what happens” kind of exploratory experiment.  Anything, however, that can allow a scientist to gather millions of data points is intriguing.

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“I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!”
- Daily Affirmations With Stuart Smalley.

Self-help books are full of advice for thinking positively, and using affirmations to tell ourselves that the reality we wish to be true is in fact true. This is interesting because psychologists have discovered that people in general have a large positive cognitive bias – a wishful thinking bias. All other things being equal, we will tend to assume that what we wish to be true is actually true. Sometimes we can maintain this belief despite significant contradictory evidence.

It may be that this bias exists because it relieves cognitive dissonance. Essentially, it makes us feel better, and that may be sufficient. However, there is also a theory that such wishful or positive thinking is, to an extent, self-fulfilling. People who think they will be successful will take advantage of opportunities and work harder to make that success a reality. Expectations can even affect other people, the so-called Pygmalian effect. If teachers believe that a student will perform better, that expectation may improve the student’s performance.

Richard Wiseman points out, however, that visualizing the goal (“I am a success in my business”) does not work (so much for positive affirmations). What is helpful is visualizing the process by which a goal can be achieved.

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In short, we don’t know. But let’s explore the problem a bit deeper.

What is meant by a “simulated universe” is that our universe, the one that we experience as our reality, is actually a simulation being run on a fantastically powerful computer, presumably designed and built by a race profoundly more technologically advanced than ourselves. In the movie, The Matrix, most humans were plugged into and experiencing a simulation of the entire Earth. This movie is often brought up as an example of a simulated universe, but it’s not quite what we mean. In the Matrix, humans still had a physical existence. Their brains were just plugged into a simulation. In a simulated universe, however, we would be entirely simulated ourselves, not really floating in a bubble of liquid while information is being fed into our non-simulated brains.

There are several basic approaches to this question – philosophical, theoretical, and empirical. The Rationally Speaking blog recently tackled the philosophical approach to this question. In that series of posts David Kyle Johnson writes:

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There almost certainly is life elsewhere in the universe. There is no reason to think that conditions and events that led to life on earth are unique, and the universe is a ridiculously vast place. So the odds strongly favor that there must be many occurrences of life out there. There are interesting sub-questions, however – how common is life, how common is complex life, and how common are technological civilizations? Is the universe teaming with bacteria and fungus and little else, or are the stars buzzing with spacefaring races of every description?

The problem with trying to answer this question is that we have an N of 1 – Earth is the only example of life in the universe that we have. We may find examples of life elsewhere in our own solar system (Mars, Europa, Titan, and Enceladus are the current prime candidates), but that will only give us a tiny bit more data. Life elsewhere in our own solar system (especially Mars) may have been seeded from Earth or vice versa, and so we may find life on Mars but still only have evidence for a single life origin in our solar system.

We may also find multiple independent life origins in our solar system, and that would be extremely cool, but would still only answer one of the three questions above. That would tell us that the origin of some kind of life is likely common, and can occur under a variety of conditions, but would not tell us how common complex life or civilizations are.

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This news is plastered over every general and science news outlet I can find – Italian scientists have been found guilty of manslaughter for failure to properly warn about the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake. They have been sentenced to 6 years in prison and ordered to pay $12 million in damages.  They have two appeals left, and can remain out of prison until they exhaust their appeals.

It is easy to be outraged at a decision that seems so ridiculous on its face. I always try to find the most charitable interpretation of each side of an argument, and so I searched through the news reports for a cogent explanation of this decision. First, it seems the scientists were not convicted for failure to predict the quake, but for how they communicated to the public about the risk of the quake occurring. I could not find a full exact quote of what they did say. The two partial quotes I could find indicate that they said the small tremors that preceded the 6.3 magnitude quake that killed 309 people were “unlikely” to be followed by a large quake. Further, they indicated that small tremors may actually decrease the risk of a larger quake by dissipating energy.

The guilty decision seems to hinge on the fact that many residents were afraid that a large quake was coming and would have evacuated, but were reassured by the risk commission’s statements and decided to stay, leading to their death.

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