from molecules to mind

Neurophilosophy

Reconstructive memory: Confabulating the past, simulating the future

Keith R Laws

The term ‘Rashomon effect’ is often used by psychologists in situations where observers give different accounts of the same event,and describes the effect of subjective perceptions on recollection. The phenomenon is named after a 1950 film by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. It was with Rashōmon that Western cinema-goers discovered both Kurosawa and Japanese film in general – the film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, as well as the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film the following year.

Rashōmon is an adaptation of two short stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Set in the 12th century, the film depicts the trial of a notorious bandit called Tajomaru (played by Kurosawa’s frequent collaborator Toshirô Mifune), who is alleged to have raped a woman and killed her samurai husband. In flashbacks, the incident is recalled by four different witnesses – a woodcutter, a priest, the perpetrator and, via a medium, the murder victim. Each of the testimonies is equally plausible, yet all four are in mutual contradiction with each other.

The film is an examinantion of human nature and the nature of reality. It compels the viewer to seek the truth. Each testimony is influenced by the intentions, experiences and self-perceptions of the witness. They all tell their own ‘truth’, but it is distorted by their past and by their future. Under Kurosawa’s masterful direction, the characters start off happy in the knowledge that they know exactly what happened between the samaurai, his wife and the bandit. One by one, each character begins to doubt their own account of the incident. In the end, both the cast and the viewer are left in a state of confusion and bewilderment.

The idea that we do not remember things as they actually happened is usually attributed to Sir Frederick Bartlett (1886-1969), who spent much of his professional career at Cambridge University, where he became head of the psychology department. He describes the process of memory in his classic 1932 book, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology:

Remembering is not a completely independent function, entirely distinct from perceiving, imaging, or even from constructive thinking, but it has intimate relations with them all…One’s memory of an event reflects a blend of information contained in specific traces encoded at the time it occurred, plus inferences based on knowledge, expectations, beliefs, and attitudes derived from other sources.

According to Bartlett, memories are organized within the historical and cultural frameworks (which Bartlett called ‘schemata’) of the individual, and the process of remembering involves the retrieval of information which has been unknowingly altered in order that it is compatible with pre-existing knowledge.

Bartlett’s ideas about how memory works came to him during a game of Chinese whispers, in which a short story is relayed through a chain of people, each of whom makes minor retrieval errors, such that the final retelling may be completely different from the original. One of his experiments involved asking subjects to read a Native American folk story called The War of the Ghosts, and then recall it several times, sometimes up to a year later. He chose it because the cultural context in which it is set was unfamiliar to the participants in his experiments.

Bartlett found that upon recall, the subjects altered the narrative of the story to make it fit in with their existing schemata. Participants omitted information they regarded as irrelevant, changed the emphasis to points they considered to be significant, and rationalized the parts that did not make sense, to make the story more comprehensible to themselves. In other words, memory is reconstructive rather that reproductive.

Although Remembering was largely ignored upon its publication, it is today highly influential. Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and law at the University of California, Irvine, has devoted her career to studying the reconstructive nature of memory in relation to eyewitness testimony.

Loftus is concerned mainly with how the recollections of eyewitnesses can be deliberately manipulated by misinformation. In extreme cases, this can lead to completely false memories of events that did not take place. One of Loftus’s more famous studies addresses the use of ‘leading’ questions in the courtroom. In the study, students were shown film clips of a car accident, and then asked a question about the accident. Those asked “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” gave answers which averaged about 39 mph, whereas those asked “About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?” gave answers with an average speed of 32 mph.

Loftus’s research, like that of Bartlett’s, shows that our memories are quite often not as accurate as we would like to think they are. The knowledge that memory is to some extent confabulation has very serious implications for the use in the courtroom of eyewitness testimonies, because if eyewitness testimonies can be unreliable, then the validity of criminal convictions based upon them is open to question.

As well as confabulating the past, the brain also envisages events that have not yet occurred. The process of anticipating oneself attending a future event probably involves drawing on past experiences to generate a ‘simulation’ of the future event. In an essay in this week’s issue of Nature, Daniel Schacter argues that this ‘episodic-future’ thinking is entirely dependent on reconstructive memory:

…future events are not exact replicas of past events, and a memory system that simply stored rote records would not be well-suited to simulating future events. A system built according to constructive principles may be a better tool for the job: it can draw on the elements and gist of the past, and extract, recombine and reassemble them into imaginary events that never occurred in that exact form. Such a system will occasionally produce memory errors, but it also provides considerable flexibility.

Most of the evidence that reconstructive memory may be essential for envisioning future events comes from amnesic patients who also have difficulties picturing themselves in the future, and now there is also some experimental evidence. For example, in a paper published in advance on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website earlier this week, Szpunar et al describe functional neuroimaging studies which show that some of the brain regions that are activated when recalling a personal memory – the posterior cingulate gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus and left occipital lobe – are also active when thinking about a future event.

Related posts:

• The philosophy of “The Matrix”
• The psychology of Alfred Hitchcock
• Book review: “In Search of Memory” by Eric R. Kandel

References:

Hassabis, et al. (2007). Patients with hippocampal amnesia cannot imagine new experiences. PNAS DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0610561104

Szpunar, K. K., et al. (2007). Neural substrates of envisioning the future. PNAS DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0610082104.

Schacter, D. L. & Addis, D. R. (2007). Constructive memory: The ghosts of past and future. Nature 445: 27-29.

Loftus, E. F. (2003). Our chaneable memories: legal and practical implications. Nature Rev. Neurosci. 4: 231-234.

Loftus, E. F. (1975). Leading questions and the eyewitness report. Cognitive Psychology 7: 560-572.

from molecules to mind
Neurophilosophy

The dissociative fugue state: Forgetting one’s own identity

The New York Times has an interesting article about a rare and poorly-understood form of amnesia called dissociative fugue, in which some or all memories of one’s identity become temporarily inaccessible:

Last year a Westchester County lawyer – a 57-year-old husband and father of two, Boy Scout leader and churchgoer – left the garage near his office and disappeared. Six months later he was found living under a new name in a homeless shelter in Chicago, not knowing who he was or where he came from.

Library searches and contact with the Chicago police did not help the man. His true identity was uncovered through an anonymous tip to “America’s Most Wanted.” But when he was contacted by his family, he had no idea who they were.

The fugue state is one of a number of dissociative memory disorders, all of which are characterized by an interruption of, or dissociation from, fundamental aspects of one’s everyday life, such as personal identity and personal history. During the fugue state – which can last several hours or a few months – an individual forgets who they are and takes leave of his or her usual physical surroundings. In a minority of cases, the individual can assume a new identity. Often, the fugue state remains undiagnosed until the individual has emerged from it and can recall their real identity. Upon emerging from the fugue state, the individual is usually surprised to find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings.

The prevalence of dissociative fugue is about 1 in 2,000, but the condition is more prevalent in war veterans or those who have experienced natural disasters or similar traumatic events. For example, the lawyer mentioned in the quote above was a veteran of the Vietnam war, and had walked in between the twin towers of the World Trade Center just minutes before the first aircraft struck the north tower on September 11, 2001.

Unlike most forms of amnesia, which are associated with damage to specific parts of the brain (such as the hippocampus), dissociative fugue has no known physical cause. Typically, the memory loss is triggered by a traumatic life event; subsequently, the individual enters the fugue state, during which the retrieval of memories associated with the event is somehow prevented. Thus, the fugue state is psychogenic: psychological factors impinge upon the neurobiological bases of memory retrieval. The memory loss is, however, reversible; once the individual emerges from the fugue state, he or she is once again capable of retrieving the “lost” memories.

Related:

• Alien abduction, reincarnation and memory errors
• Reconstructive memory: Confabulating the past, simulating the future
  

from molecules to mind

Neurophilosophy

Alien abduction, reincarnation & memory errors

Keith R Laws

We rarely remember things as they actually happened. Rather, as memories are encoded, they are altered in order to be made compatible with our existing knowledge; upon retrieval, memories are reconstructed rather than reproduced. Because the extent to which this reconstruction occurs can vary, some memories are very accurate while others are a mixture of fact and fantasy. Yet others – claims of highly implausible events such as alien abduction and reincarnation, for example - are completely fabricated.

Maarten Peters and his colleagues, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, investigated the propensity for memory errors in people who make implausible claims. In many cases of false memories, it is very difficult to determine whether or not the perceived events actually occurred – that is, the “ground truth” can not be established. The experimental group was therefore chosen on the basis of a highly implausible claim – the group consisted of 11 women and 2 men, all of whom claimed to have recollections of a previous life. The performance of this group on a memory task was compared to that of a control group. It was found that people who claim to have lived past lives were more prone than the control group to memory errors. The findings were published recently in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.

The researchers used a modified version of a well established laboratory procedure for eliciting false recall of words. Participants were first asked to read aloud a list of 40 names of non-famous people. Two hours later, they were presented with another list, containing the old non-famous names (those that had been included in the previous list), new non-famous names, and the names of well-known actors, writers and politicians. They were then asked to make “fame judgements” on the names in the second list; that is, they were asked to determine whether or not each of the people on the list was famous or not. Those in the experimental group were found to be more susceptible than the control group to the “false fame illusion” – they were about twice as likely to identify the old non-famous names as famous names more than those in the control group.

How might such false memories form? In the study by Peters et al, the misidentification of names occurs because the previous encounter with the non-famous names is mistakenly taken as an indication that those people must be famous. This is an example of what is called a source monitoring error. Recollection of an event involves using information from various sources – one’s own memory, for example, and other peoples’ accounts of the event. When source monitoring is impaired, one has difficulty attributing where and how information was acquired, but the origins of unreliable pieces of information are unquestioned nevertheless; the unreliable information is therefore easily incorporated into a memory.

Clearly, people can, to a greater or lesser extent, be influenced by the suggestions of others. If one becomes convinced that a suggested event is plausible, one may start to believe that the event has actually taken place. Reiteration of the false memory leads to what is known as the “illusion of truth”. Furthermore, such claims can seem even more realistic when corroborated by other people. Hence, a group of people who share in common claims of an implausible event – such as being abducted by aliens, for example – will be convinced that their claims are real, because they will corroborate each other. The use of leading questions can also result in the inadvertent planting of false memories in people undergoing interrogation or cross-examination. Psychopathology is another cause of false memories; it is well documented that schizophrenics are prone to source monitoring errors in memory and other cognitive processes; thus, schizophrenics believe that the auditory or visual hallucinations they experience are real.

It is now also acknowledged that false memories can be deliberately planted. Psychiatrists have been known to implant completely false memories in their patients during therapy. Most commonly, these false memories are of events such as childhood sexual abuse or participation in Satanic rituals. In some cases, psychiatrists have been sued for malpractice, and defendants have been awarded millions of dollars in damages for the traumas they have experienced as a result.

Peters and his colleagues did not deliberately implant false memories in their participants, but other researchers have shown how easy it is to distort peoples’ recollections of real events, or to coax people into “remembering” entire events that did not happen. In one experiment, led by Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Irvine, a false memory of a plausible and mildly traumatic event – getting lost in a shopping mall or a large department store as a child – was falsely implanted in experimental subjects. The subjects were asked to recall childhood events that had been recounted to them by their parents, older siblings or other close relatives. A booklet containing a paragraph about each of the recalled events, and one false memory (of being lost in a shopping mall) was then prepared for each of the participants. The participants were then asked to read each story in their booklet, and to write down what they remembered about each event. It was found that 5 out of the 24 subjects thought that they had experienced the false event; some claimed to remember it only partially, while others reported that they remembered it fully. Work by other research groups shows that memories of highly implausible events, and even impossible events, such as alien abduction and reincarnation, can be planted just as easily.

Reference:

Peters, M. J. V., et al. (2007). The false fame illusion in people with memories about a previous life. Consc. Cog. 16: 162-169. [Abstract]

Related:

Reconstructive memory: Confabulating the past, simulating the future

Keith R Laws University of Hertfordshire

Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology, research interests are Schizophrenia, Alzheimers, Multitasking, Sex differences, Meta-Analysis, Research Methods/Stats

http://herts.academia.edu/KeithLaws

The Big Picture: Getting Skeptical About Global Warming Skepticism

Skeptical Science
Getting Skeptical About Global Warming Skepticism

The Big Picture

Posted on 24 September 2010 by dana1981

Oftentimes we get bogged down discussing one of the many pieces of evidence behind man-made global warming, and in the process we can't see the forest for the trees. It's important to every so often take a step back and see how all of those trees comprise the forest as a whole. Skeptical Science provides an invaluable resource for examining each individual piece of climate evidence, so let's make use of these individual pieces to see how they form the big picture.

The Earth is warming

We know the planet is warming from surface temperature stations and satellites measuring the temperature of the Earth's surface and lower atmosphere. We also have various tools which have measured the warming of the Earth's oceans. Satellites have measured an energy imbalance at the top of the Earth's atmosphere. Glaciers, sea ice, and ice sheets are all receding. Sea levels are rising. Spring is arriving sooner each year. There's simply no doubt - the planet is warming.

And yes, the warming is continuing. The 2000s were hotter than the 1990s, which were hotter than the 1980s, which were hotter than the 1970s. 2010 is on pace to be at least in the top 3 hottest calendar years on record. In fact, the 12-month running average global temperature broke the record 3 times in 2010, according to NASA GISS data. Sea levels are still rising, ice is still receding, spring is still coming earlier, there's still a planetary energy imbalance, etc. etc. Contrary to what some would like us to believe, the planet has not magically stopped warming.

Humans are causing this warming

There is overwhelming evidence that humans are the dominant cause of this warming, mainly due to our greenhouse gas emissions. Based on fundamental physics and math, we can quantify the amount of warming human activity is causing, and verify that we're responsible for essentially all of the global warming over the past 3 decades. In fact we expect human greenhouse gas emissions to cause more warming than we've thus far seen, due to the thermal inertia of the oceans (the time it takes to heat them). Human aerosol emissions are also offsetting a significant amount of the warming by causing global dimming.

There are numerous 'fingerprints' which we would expect to see from an increased greenhouse effect (i.e. more warming at night, at higher latitudes, upper atmosphere cooling) that we have indeed observed. Climate models have projected the ensuing global warming to a high level of accuracy, verifying that we have a good understanding of the fundamental physics behind climate change.

Sometimes people ask "what would it take to falsify the man-made global warming theory?". Well, basically it would require that our fundamental understanding of physics be wrong, because that's what the theory is based on. This fundamental physics has been scrutinized through scientific experiments for decades to centuries.

The warming will continue

We also know that if we continue to emit large amounts of greenhouse gases, the planet will continue to warm. We know that the climate sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ from the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to 560 ppmv (we're currently at 390 ppmv) will cause 2–4.5°C of warming. And we're headed for 560 ppmv in the mid-to-late 21st century if we continue business-as-usual emissions.

The net result will be bad

There will be some positive results of this continued warming. For example, an open Northwest Passage, enhanced growth for some plants and improved agriculture at high latitudes (though this will require use of more fertilizers), etc. However, the negatives will almost certainly outweigh the positives, by a long shot. We're talking decreased biodiversity, water shortages, increasing heat waves (both in frequency and intensity), decreased crop yields due to these impacts, damage to infrastructure, displacement of millions of people, etc.

Arguments to the contrary are superficial

One thing I've found in reading skeptic criticisms of climate science is that they're consistently superficial. For example, the criticisms of James Hansen's 1988 global warming projections never go beyond "he was wrong", when in reality it's important to evaluate what caused the discrepancy between his projections and actual climate changes, and what we can learn from this. And those who argue that "it's the Sun" fail to comprehend that we understand the major mechanisms by which the Sun influences the global climate, and that they cannot explain the current global warming trend. And those who argue "it's just a natural cycle" can never seem to identify exactly which natural cycle can explain the current warming, nor can they explain how our understanding of the fundamental climate physics is wrong.

There are legitimate unresolved questions

Much ado is made out of the expression "the science is settled." My personal opinion is that the science is settled in terms of knowing that the planet is warming dangerously rapidly, and that humans are the dominant cause.

There are certainly unresolved issues. There's a big difference between a 2°C and a 4.5°C warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO₂, and it's an important question to resolve, because we need to know how fast the planet will warm in order to know how fast we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. There are significant uncertainties in some feedbacks which play into this question. For example, will clouds act as a net positive feedback (by trapping more heat, causing more warming) or negative feedback (by reflecting more sunlight, causing a cooling effect) as the planet continues to warm?

These are the sorts of questions we should be debating, and the issues that most climate scientists are investigating. Unfortunately there is a large segment of the population which is determined to continue arguing the resolved questions for which the science has already been settled. And when climate scientists are forced to respond to the constant propagation of misinformation on these settled issues, it just detracts from our investigation of the legitimate, unresolved, important questions.

The Big Picture

The big picture is that we know the planet is warming, humans are causing it, there is a substantial risk to continuing on our current path, but we don't know exactly how large the risk is. However, uncertainty regarding the magnitude of the risk is not an excuse to ignore it. We also know that if we continue on a business-as-usual path, the risk of catastrophic consequences is very high. In fact, the larger the uncertainty, the greater the potential for the exceptionally high risk scenario to become reality. We need to continue to decrease the uncertainty, but it's also critical to acknowledge what we know and what questions have been resolved, and that taking no action is not an option.

Newcomers, Start Here

Posted on 15 August 2010 by John Cook

Skeptical Science is based on the notion that science by its very nature is skeptical. Genuine skepticism means you don't take someone's word for it but investigate for yourself. You look at all the facts before coming to a conclusion. In the case of climate science, our understanding of climate comes from considering the full body of evidence.

In contrast, climate skepticism looks at small pieces of the puzzle while neglecting the full picture. Climate skeptics vigorously attack any evidence for man-made global warming yet uncritically embrace any argument, op-ed, blog or study that refutes global warming. If you began with a position of climate skepticism then cherrypick the data that supports your view while fighting tooth and nail against any evidence that contradicts that position, I'm sorry but that's not genuine scientific skepticism.

So the approach of Skeptical Science is as follows. It looks at the many climate skeptic arguments, exposes how they focus on small pieces of the puzzle and then puts them in their proper context by presenting the full picture. The skeptic arguments are listed by popularity (eg - how often each argument appears in online articles). For the more organised mind, they're also sorted into taxonomic categories.

Good starting points for newbies

If you're new to the climate debate (or are of the mind that there's no evidence for man-made global warming), a good starting point is 10 Indicators of Global Warming which lays out the evidence that warming is happening and the follow-up article, 10 Human Fingerprints on Climate Change which lays out the evidence that humans are the cause. More detail is available in empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming. Contrary to what you may have heard, the case for man-made global warming doesn't hang on models or theory - it's built on direct measurements of many different parts of the climate, all pointing to a single, coherent answer.

Smart Phone Apps

For smart phone users, the rebuttals to all the skeptic arguments are also available on a number of mobile platforms. The first Skeptical Science app was an iPhone app, released in February 2010. This is updated regularly with the latest content from the website and very accessible in a beautifully designed interface by Shine Technologies. Shine Tech then went on to create a similar Android app which has some extra features missing from the iPhone version. A Nokia app was also created by Jean-François Barsoum (this was one of the 10 finalists in the Calling All Innovators competition).

As well as the list of rebuttals, Skeptical Science also has a blog where the latest research and developments are examined and discussed. Comments are welcome and the level of discussion is of a fairly high quality thanks to a fairly strict Comments Policy. You need to register a user account to post comments. One thing many regulars are not aware of is you can edit your user account details (to get to this page, click on your username in the left margin).

Keep up to date by email, RSS, Facebook or Twitter

To keep up to date on latest additions to the website, sign up to receive new blog posts by email. There's an RSS feed for blog posts and for the engaged commenter, a feed for new user comments. I recommend you follow the Skeptical Science Twitter page as I not only tweet latest blog posts but also any other interesting climate links I happen upon throughout the day. New blog posts are also added to our Facebook page.

About John Cook

Lastly, for those wondering about who runs Skeptical Science, the website is maintained by John Cook. I studied physics at the University of Queensland but currently, I'm not a professional scientist - I run this website as a layman. People sometimes wonder why I spend so much time on this site and which group backs me. No group funds me. I receive no funding other than the occasional Paypal donations. As the lack of funding limits how much time I can spend developing the site, donations are appreciated. My motivations are two-fold: as a parent, I care about the world my daughter will grow up in and as a Christian, I feel a strong obligation to the poor and vulnerable who are hardest hit by climate change. Of course these are very personal reasons - I'm sure everyone comes at this from different angles. I go more deeply into my motivations in Why I care about climate change.

The SkS Team

However, there are many more who make invaluable contributions to Skeptical Science. There are a number of authors who write blog posts and are currently in the process of writing all the rebuttals in plain English. Translators from all over the world have translated the rebuttals into 15 different languages. There have been contributors to the one-line responses to skeptic arguments, proofreaders, technical support from boffins who understand computers a lot better than myself and commenters whose feedback have helped improve and hone the website's content. Skeptical Science has evolved from a small blog into a community of intelligent, engaged people with a commitment to science and our climate.

Soft sciences are often harder than hard sciences

The University of Alabama

Soft sciences are often harder than hard sciences
Discover (1987, August) by Jared Diamond

n ''The overall correlation between frustration and instability (in 62 countries of the world) was 0.50.'' --Samuel Huntington, professor of government, Harvard

n ''This is utter nonsense. How does Huntington measure things like social frustration? Does he have a social-frustration meter? I object to the academy's certifying as science what are merely political opinions.'' -- Serge Lang, professor of mathematics, Yale

n ''What does it say about Lang's scientific standards that he would base his case on twenty-year-old gossip?'' . . . ''a bizarre vendetta'' . . . ''a madman . . .'' -- Other scholars, commenting on Lang's attack

For those who love to watch a dogfight among intellectuals supposedly above such things, it's been a fine dogfight, well publicized in Time and elsewhere. In one corner, political scientist and co-author of The Crisis of Democracy, Samuel Huntington. In the other corner, mathematician and author of Diophantine Approximation on Abelian Varieties with Complex Multiplication, Serge Lang. The issue: whether Huntington should be admitted, over Lang's opposition, to an academy of which Lang is a member. The score after two rounds: Lang 2, Huntington 0, with Huntington still out.

Lang vs. Huntington might seem like just another silly blood-letting in the back alleys of academia, hardly worth anyone's attention. But this particular dogfight is an important one. Beneath the name calling, it has to do with a central question in science: Do the so-called soft sciences, like political science and psychology, really constitute science at all, and do they deserve to stand beside ''hard sciences,'' like chemistry and physics?

The arena is the normally dignified and secretive National Academy of Sciences (NAS), an honor society of more than 1,500 leading American scientists drawn from almost every discipline. NAS's annual election of about 60 new members begins long before each year's spring meeting, with a multi- stage evaluation of every prospective candidate by members expert in the candidate's field. Challenges of candidates by the membership assembled at the annual meeting are rare, because candidates have already been so thoroughly scrutinized by the appropriate experts. In my eight years in NAS, I can recall only a couple of challenges before the Lang-Huntington episode, and not a word about those battles appeared in the press.

At first glance, Huntington's nomination in 1986 seemed a very unlikely one to be challenged. His credentials were impressive: president of the American Political Science Association; holder of a named professorship at Harvard; author of many widely read books, of which one, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, got an award from the Association of American Publishers as the best book in the social and behavioral sciences in 1981; and many other distinctions. His studies of developing countries, American politics, and civilian-military relationships received the highest marks from social and political scientists inside and outside NAS. Backers of Huntington's candidacy included NAS members whose qualifications to judge him were beyond question, like Nobel Prize winning computer scientist and psychologist Herbert Simon.

If Huntington seemed unlikely to be challenged, Lang was an even more unlikely person to do the challenging. He had been elected to the academy only a year before, and his own specialty of pure mathematics was as remote as possible from Huntington's specialty of comparative political development. However, as Science magazine described it, Lang had previously assumed for himself ''the role of a sheriff of scholarship, leading a posse of academics on a hunt for error,'' especially in the political and social sciences. Disturbed by what he saw as the use of ''pseudo mathematics'' by Huntington, Lang sent all NAS members several thick mailings attacking Huntington, enclosing photocopies of letters describing what scholar A said in response to scholar B's attack on scholar C, and asking members for money to help pay the postage and copying bills. Under NAS rules, a candidate challenged at an annual meeting is dropped unless his candidacy is sustained by two-thirds of the members present and voting. After bitter debates at both the 1986 and 1987 meetings, Huntington failed to achieve the necessary two-thirds support.

Much impassioned verbiage has to be stripped away from this debate to discern the underlying issue. Regrettably, a good deal of the verbiage had to do with politics. Huntington had done several things that are now anathema in U.S. academia: he received CIA support for some research; he did a study for the State Department in 1967 on political stability in South Vietnam; and he's said to have been an early supporter of the Vietnam war. None of this should have affected his candidacy. Election to NAS is supposed to be based solely on scholarly qualifications; political views are irrelevant. American academics are virtually unanimous in rushing to defend academic freedom whenever a university president or an outsider criticizes a scholar because of his politics. Lang vehemently denied that his opposition was motivated by Huntington's politics. Despite all those things, the question of Huntington's role with respect to Vietnam arose repeatedly in the NAS debates. Evidently, academic freedom means that outsiders can't raise the issue of a scholar's politics but other scholars can.

It's all the more surprising that Huntington's consulting for the CIA and other government agencies was an issue, when one recalls why NAS exists. Congress established the academy in 1863 to act as official adviser to the U.S. government on questions of science and technology. NAS in turn established the National Research Council (NRC), and NAS and NRC committees continue to provide reports about a wide range of matters, from nutrition to future army materials. As is clear from any day's newspaper, our government desperately needs professionally competent advice, particularly about unstable countries, which are one of Huntington's specialties. So Huntington's willingness to do exactly what NAS was founded to do -- advise the government -- was held against him by some NAS members. How much of a role his politics played in each member's vote will never be known, but I find it unfortunate that they played any role at all.

I accept, however, that a more decisive issue in the debates involved perceptions of the soft sciences -- e.g., Lang's perception that Huntington used pseudo mathematics. To understand the terms soft and hard science, just ask any educated person what science is. The answer you get will probably involve several stereotypes: science is something done in a laboratory, possibly by people wearing white coats and holding test tubes; it involves making measurements with instruments, accurate to several decimal places; and it involves controlled, repeatable experiments in which you keep everything fixed except for one or a few things that you allow to vary. Areas of science that often conform well to these stereotypes include much of chemistry, physics, and molecular biology. These areas are given the flattering name of hard science, because they use the firm evidence that controlled experiments and highly accurate measurements can provide.

We often view hard science as the only type of science. But science (from the Latin scientia -- knowledge) is something much more general, which isn't defined by decimal places and controlled experiments. It means the enterprise of explaining and predicting -- gaining knowledge of -- natural phenomena, by continually testing one's theories against empirical evidence. The world is full of phenomena that are intellectually challenging and important to understand, but that can't be measured to several decimal places in labs. They constitute much of ecology, evolution, and animal behavior; much of psychology and human behavior; and all the phenomena of human societies, including cultural anthropology, economics, history, and government.

These soft sciences, as they're pejoratively termed, are more difficult to study, for obvious reasons. A lion hunt or revolution in the Third World doesn't fit inside a test tube. You can't start it and stop it whenever you choose. You can't control all the variables; perhaps you can't control any variable. You may even find it hard to decide what a variable is. You can still use empirical tests to gain knowledge, but the types of tests used in the hard sciences must be modified. Such differences between the hard and soft sciences are regularly misunderstood by hard scientists, who tend to scorn soft sciences and reserve special contempt for the social sciences. Indeed, it was only in the early 1970s that NAS, confronted with the need to offer the government competent advice about social problems, began to admit social scientists at all. Huntington had the misfortune to become a touchstone of this widespread misunderstanding and contempt.

While I know neither Lang nor Huntington, the broader debate over soft versus hard science is one that has long fascinated me, because I'm among the minority of scientists who work in both areas. I began my career at the hard pole of chemistry and physics, then took my Ph.D. in membrane physiology, at the hard end of biology. Today I divide my time equally between physiology and ecology, which lies at the soft end of biology. My wife, Marie Cohen, works in yet a softer field, clinical psychology. Hence I find myself forced every day to confront the differences between hard and soft science. Although I don't agree with some of Lang's conclusions, I feel he has correctly identified a key problem in soft science when he asks, ''How does Huntington measure things like social frustration? Does he have a social-frustration meter?'' Indeed, unless one has thought seriously about research in the social sciences, the idea that anyone could measure social frustration seems completely absurd.

The issue that Lang raises is central to any science, hard or soft. It may be termed the problem of how to ''operationalize'' a concept. (Normally I hate such neologistic jargon, but it's a suitable term in this case.) To compare evidence with theory requires that you measure the ingredients of your theory. For ingredients like weight or speed it's clear what to measure, but what would you measure if you wanted to understand political instability? Somehow, you would have to design a series of actual operations that yield a suitable measurement -- i.e., you must operationalize the ingredients of theory.

Scientists do this all the time, whether or not they think about it. I shall illustrate operationalizing with four examples from my and Marie's research, progressing from hard science to softer science.

Let's start with mathematics, often described as the queen of the sciences. I'd guess that mathematics arose long ago when two cave women couldn't operationalize their intuitive concept of ''many.'' One cave woman said, ''Let's pick this tree over here, because it has many bananas.'' The other cave woman argued, ''No, let's pick that tree over there, because it has more bananas.'' Without a number system to operationalize their concept of ''many,'' the two cave women could never prove to each other which tree offered better pickings.

There are still tribes today with number systems too rudimentary to settle the argument. For example, some Gimi villagers with whom I worked in New Guinea have only two root numbers, iya = 1 and rarido = 2, which they combine to operationalize somewhat larger numbers: 4 = rarido-rarido, 7 = rarido-rarido-rarido-iya, etc. You can imagine what it would be like to hear two Gimi women arguing about whether to climb a tree with 27 bananas or one with 18 bananas.

Now let's move to chemistry, less queenly and more difficult to operationalize than mathematics but still a hard science. Ancient philosophers speculated about the ingredients of matter, but not until the eighteenth century did the first modern chemists figure out how to measure these ingredients. Analytical chemistry now proceeds by identifying some property of a substance of interest, or of a related substance into which the first can be converted. The property must be one that can be measured, like weight, or the light the substance absorbs, or the amount of neutralizing agent it consumes.

For example, when my colleagues and I were studying the physiology of hummingbirds, we knew that the little guys liked to drink sweet nectar, but we would have argued indefinitely about how sweet sweet was if we hadn't operationalized the concept by measuring sugar concentrations. The method we used was to treat a glucose solution with an enzyme that liberates hydrogen peroxide, which reacts (with the help of another enzyme) with another substance called dianisidine to make it turn brown, whereupon we measured the brown color's intensity with an instrument called a spectrophotometer. A pointer's deflection on the spectrophotometer dial let us read off a number that provided an operational definition of sweet. Chemists use that sort of indirect reasoning all the time, without anyone considering it absurd.

My next-to-last example is from ecology, one of the softer of the biological sciences, and certainly more difficult to operationalize than chemistry. As a bird watcher, I'm accustomed to finding more species of birds in a rain forest than in a marsh. I suspect intuitively that this has something to do with a marsh being a simply structured habitat, while a rain forest has a complex structure that includes shrubs, lianas, trees of all heights, and crowns of big trees. More complexity means more niches for different types of birds. But how do I operationalize the idea of habitat complexity, so that I can measure it and test my intuition?

Obviously, nothing I do will yield as exact an answer as in the case where I read sugar concentrations off a spectrophotometer dial. However, a pretty good approximation was devised by one of my teachers, the ecologist Robert MacArthur, who measured how far a board at a certain height above the ground had to be moved in a random direction away from an observer standing in the forest (or marsh) before it became half obscured by the foliage. That distance is inversely proportional to the density of the foliage at that height. By repeating the measurement at different heights, MacArthur could calculate how the foliage was distributed over various heights.

In a marsh all the foliage is concentrated within a few feet of the ground, whereas in a rain forest it's spread fairly equally from the ground to the canopy. Thus the intuitive idea of habitat complexity is operationalized as what's called a foliage height diversity index, a single number. MacArthur's simple operationalization of these foliage differences among habitats, which at first seemed to resist having a number put on them, proved to explain a big part of the habitats' differences in numbers of bird species. It was a significant advance in ecology.

For the last example let's take one of the softest sciences, one that physicists love to deride: clinical psychology. Marie works with cancer patients and their families. Anyone with personal experience of cancer knows the terror that a diagnosis of cancer brings. Some doctors are more frank with their patients than others, and doctors appear to withhold more information from some patients than from others. Why?

Marie guessed that these differences might be related to differences in doctors' attitudes toward things like death, cancer, and medical treatment. But how on earth was she to operationalize and measure such attitudes, convert them to numbers, and test her guesses? I can imagine Lang sneering ''Does she have a cancer-attitude meter?''

Part of Marie's solution was to use a questionnaire that other scientists had developed by extracting statements from sources like tape-recorded doctors' meetings and then asking other doctors to express their degree of agreement with each statement. It turned out that each doctor's responses tended to cluster in several groups, in such a way that his responses to one statement in a cluster were correlated with his responses to other statements in the same cluster. One cluster proved to consist of expressions of attitudes toward death, a second cluster consisted of expressions of attitudes toward treatment and diagnosis, and a third cluster consisted of statements about patients' ability to cope with cancer. The responses were then employed to define attitude scales, which were further validated in other ways, like testing the scales on doctors at different stages in their careers (hence likely to have different attitudes). By thus operationalizing doctors' attitudes, Marie discovered (among other things) that doctors most convinced about the value of early diagnosis and aggressive treatment of cancer are the ones most likely to be frank with their patients.

In short, all scientists, from mathematicians to social scientists, have to solve the task of operationalizing their intuitive concepts. The book by Huntington that provoked Lang's wrath discussed such operationalized concepts as economic well-being, political instability, and social and economic modernization. Physicists have to resort to very indirect (albeit accurate) operationalizing in order to ''measure'' electrons. But the task of operationalizing is inevitably more difficult and less exact in the soft sciences, because there are so many uncontrolled variables. In the four examples I've given, number of bananas and concentration of sugar can be measured to more decimal places than can habitat complexity and attitudes toward cancer.

Unfortunately, operationalizing lends itself to ridicule in the social sciences, because the concepts being studied tend to be familiar ones that all of us fancy we're experts on. Anybody, scientist or no, feels entitled to spout forth on politics or psychology, and to heap scorn on what scholars in those fields write. In contrast, consider the opening sentences of Lang's paper Diophantine Approximation on Abelian Varieties with Complex Multiplication: ''Let A be an abelian variety defined over a number field K. We suppose that A is embedded in projective space. Let AK be the group of points on A rational over K.'' How many people feel entitled to ridicule these statements while touting their own opinions about abelian varieties?

No political scientist at NAS has challenged a mathematical candidate by asking ''How does he measure things like 'many'? Does he have a many-meter?'' Such questions would bring gales of laughter over the questioner's utter ignorance of mathematics. It seems to me that Lang's question ''How does Huntington measure things like social frustration?'' betrays an equal ignorance of how the social sciences make measurements.

The ingrained labels ''soft science'' and ''hard science'' could be replaced by hard (i.e., difficult) science and easy science, respectively. Ecology and psychology and the social sciences are much more difficult and, to some of us, intellectually more challenging than mathematics and chemistry. Even if NAS were just an honorary society, the intellectual challenge of the soft sciences would by itself make them central to NAS.

But NAS is more than an honorary society; it's a conduit for advice to our government. As to the relative importance of soft and hard science for humanity's future, there can be no comparison. It matters little whether we progress with understanding the diophantine approximation. Our survival depends on whether we progress with understanding how people behave, why some societies become frustrated, whether their governments tend to become unstable, and how political leaders make decisions like whether to press a red button. Our National Academy of Sciences will cut itself out of intellectually challenging areas of science, and out of the areas where NAS can provide the most needed scientific advice, if it continues to judge social scientists from a posture of ignorance.

COPYRIGHT 1987 Discover
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

Hard Science vs. Soft Science

Hard Science vs. Soft Science

It is customary to divide sciences into two categories, hard and soft sciences - examples of hard sciences are physics and astronomy, while ecology and psychology are often classified as soft sciences.

One group of sciences is also distinguished by strict and rigorous scientific standards, and close attention to formal standards for hypothesis formulation and testing. The other sciences take a much more informal approach, basically taking the view that if it works, use it.

The strict school is of course the one corresponding to, and responsible for, the soft sciences. Physicists and their ilk tend to be guided by the observation of Albert Einstein that Nature is subtle but not malicious ("Raffiniert is der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht"), so they feel justified in using anything they can come up with to unravel the subtleties and ferret out Nature's secrets (Stephen Hawking on the other hand said that "Not only does God play dice with the universe, but sometimes he throws them where they cannot be seen," which justifies even more devious methods of scientific investigation). The strict school will have none of this - what matters is being scientific, not doing science. That is how they keep the soft sciences soft. By setting absurd standards that discourage creative thinking they inhibit our ability to understand the natural world, and thus maintain a sterile respectability.

Speculation is part of science. Research that is not guided by hypothesis testing is the only way to make serendipitous discoveries. For example, who would have dared to hypothesize the existence of deep-sea vent communities fuelled by sulpher-eating bacteria, or funded the research to test such a radical and speculative hypothesis?

Fortunately many scientists pay only lip service to the formal approach, and focus on knowledge, which is the real meaning of "science" (from the Latin root for knowing - in other languages the usage is the same, as with the German "Wissenschaft"). I once attended a lecture by a very severe Professor who had his students analyse 400 papers in the scientific literature, finding that only two of them followed "correct" scientific procedure. This is good news, since it means that 99.5% of scientists (398/400) disagree with him.

Even so, the followers of Karl Popper have an impact and their ability to impede the progress of science should not be underestimated. Whenever a potentially useful principle raises its head in the soft sciences there will be those ready to smack it into the ground, as criticisms of the Competitive Exclusion Principle show.

Developed and maintained by William Silvert.

A Common Sense Way to Protect Public Health and the Environment

THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE

A Common Sense Way to Protect Public Health and the Environment

Prepared by The Science and Environmental Health Network Jan2000

What is the precautionary principle?

A comprehensive definition of the precautionary principle was spelled out in a January 1998 meeting of scientists, lawyers, policy makers and environmentalists at Wingspread, headquarters of the Johnson Foundation in Racine, Wisconsin. The Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle, which is included in full at the end of this fact sheet, summarizes the principle this way:

"When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically."

Key elements of the principle include taking precaution in the face of scientific uncertainty; exploring alternatives to possibly harmful actions; placing the burden of proof on proponents of an activity rather than on victims or potential victims of the activity; and using democratic processes to carry out and enforce the principle-including the public right to informed consent.

Is there some special meaning for "precaution"?

It's the common sense idea behind many adages: "Be careful." "Better safe than sorry." "Look before you leap." "First do no harm."

What about "scientific uncertainty"? Why should we take action before science tells us what is harmful or what is causing harm?

Sometimes if we wait for proof it is too late. Scientific standards for demonstrating cause and effect are very high. For example, smoking was strongly suspected of causing lung cancer long before the link was demonstrated conclusively that is, to the satisfaction of scientific standards of cause and effect. By then, many smokers had died of lung cancer. But many other people had already quit smoking because of the growing evidence that smoking was linked to lung cancer. These people were wisely exercising precaution despite some scientific uncertainty.

Often a problem-such as a cluster of cancer cases or global warming-is too large, its causes too diverse, or the effects too long term to be sorted out with scientific experiments that would prove cause and effect. It's hard to take these problems into the laboratory. Instead, we have to rely on observations, case studies or predictions based on current knowledge.

According to the precautionary principle, when reasonable scientific evidence of any kind gives us good reason to believe that an activity, technology or substance may be harmful, we should act to prevent harm. If we always wait for scientific certainty, people may suffer and die, and damage to the natural world may be irreversible.

Why do we need the precautionary principle now?

Those who issued the Wingspread Statement and many others believe that the effects of careless and harmful activities have accumulated over the years. They believe that humans and the rest of the natural world have a limited capacity to absorb and overcome this harm and that we must be much more careful than we have been in the past.

There are plenty of warning signs that suggest we should proceed with caution. Some are in human beings themselves-such as increased rates of learning disabilities, asthma and certain types of cancer. Other warning signs are the dying off of plant and animal species, the depletion of stratospheric ozone, and the likelihood of global warming. It is hard to pin these effects to clear or simple causes-just as it is difficult to predict exactly what many effects will be. But good sense and plenty of scientific evidence tell us we must take care, and that all our actions have consequences.

We have lots of environmental regulations. Aren't we already exercising precaution?

In some cases, to some extent, yes. When federal money is to be used in a major project, such as building a road on forested land or developing federal waste programs, the planners must produce an "environmental impact statement" to show how it will affect the surroundings. Then the public has a right to help determine whether the study has been thorough and all the alternatives considered. That is a precautionary action.

But most environmental regulations, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Superfund Law, are aimed at cleaning up pollution and controlling the amount of it released into the environment. They regulate toxic substances as they are emitted rather than limiting their use or production in the first place.

These laws have served an important purpose they have given us cleaner air, water and land.

But they are based on the assumption that humans and ecosystems can absorb a certain amount of contamination without being harmed. We are now learning how difficult it is to now what levels of contamination, if any, are safe.

Many of our food and drug laws and practices are more precautionary. Before a drug is introduced into the marketplace, the manufacturer must demonstrate that it is safe and effective. Then people must be told about risks and side effects before they use it .

But there are some major loopholes in our regulations and the way they are applied. If the precautionary principle were universally applied, many toxic substances, contaminants, and unsafe practices would not be produced or used in the first place. The precautionary principle concentrates on prevention rather than cure.

What are the loopholes in current regulations?

One is the use of "scientific certainty" as a standard, as discussed above. Often we assume that if something can't be proved scientifically, it isn't true. The lack of certainty is used to justify continuing to use a potentially harmful substance or technology.

Another is the use of "risk assessment" to determine whether a substance or practice should be regulated. One problem is that the range of risks considered is very narrow-usually death, and usually from cancer. Another is that those who will assume the risk are not informed or consulted. For example, people who live near a factory that emits a toxic substance are rarely told about the risks or asked whether they accept them.

A related, third loophole is "cost-benefit analysis" -determining whether the costs of a regulation are worth the benefits it will bring. Usually the short-term costs of regulation receive more consideration than the long-term costs of possible harm-and the public is left to deal with the damages. Also, many believe it is virtually impossible to quantify the costs of harm to a population or the benefits of a healthy environment. The effect of these loopholes is to give the benefit of the doubt to new and existing products and technologies and to all economic activities, even those that eventually prove harmful. Enterprises, projects, technologies and substances are, in effect, "innocent until proven guilty." Meanwhile, people and the environment assume the risks and often become the victims.

How would the precautionary principle change all that without bringing the economy to a halt?

It would encourage the exploration of alternatives --better, safer, cheaper ways to do things -- and the development of "cleaner' products and technologies. Sometimes simply slowing down in order to learn more about potential harm -- or doing nothing -- is the best alternative. The principle would serve as a "speed bump" in the development of technologies and enterprises.

It would shift the burden of proof from the public to proponents of a technology. The principle would ensure that the public knows about and has a say in the deployment of technologies that may be hazardous. Proponents would have to demonstrate through an open process that a technology was safe or necessary and that no better alternatives were available. The public would have a say in this determination.

Is this a new idea?

The precautionary principle was introduced in Europe in the 1980s and became the basis for the 1987 treaty that bans dumping of persistent toxic substances in the North Sea. It figures in the Convention on Biodiversity. A growing number of Swedish and German environmental laws are based on the precautionary principle. International conferences on persistent toxic substances and ozone depletion have been forums for the promotion and discussion of the precautionary principle.

Interpretations of the principle vary, but the Wingspread Statement is the first to define its major components and explain the rationale behind it.

Will the countries that adopt the precautionary principle become less competitive on the world marketplace?

The idea is to progress more carefully than we have done before. Some technologies may be brought onto the marketplace more slowly. Others may be stopped or phased out. On the other hand, there will be many incentives to create new technologies that will make it unnecessary to produce and use harmful substances and processes. These new technologies will bring economic benefits in the long run.

Countries on the forefront of stronger, more comprehensive environmental laws, such as Germany and Sweden, have developed new, cleaner technologies despite temporary higher costs. They are now able to export these technologies. Other countries risk being left behind, with outdated facilities and technologies that pollute to an extent that the people will soon recognize as intolerable. There are signs that this is already happening.

How can we possibly prevent all bad side effects from technological progress?

Hazards are a part of life. But it is important for people to press for less harmful alternatives, to exercise their rights to a clean, life-sustaining environment and, when they could be exposed to hazards, to know what those hazards are and to have a part in deciding whether to accept them.

How will the precautionary principle be implemented?

The precautionary principle should become the basis for reforming environmental laws and regulations and for creating new regulations. It is essentially an approach, a way of thinking. In coming years, precaution should be exercised, argued and promoted on many levels-in regulations, industrial practices, science, consumer choices, education, communities, and schools.

Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle

The release and use of toxic substances, the exploitation of resources, and physical alterations of the environment have had substantial unintended consequences affecting human health and the environment. Some of these concerns are high rates of learning deficiencies, asthma, cancer, birth defects and species extinctions; along with global climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion and worldwide contamination with toxic substances and nuclear materials.

We believe existing environmental regulations and other decisions, particularly those based on risk assessment, have failed to protect adequately human health and the environment the larger system of which humans are but a part.

We believe there is compelling evidence that damage to humans and the worldwide environment is of such magnitude and seriousness that new-principles for conducting human activities are necessary.

While we realize that human activities may involve hazards, people must proceed more carefully than has been the case in recent history. Corporations, government entities, organizations, communities, scientists and other individuals must adopt a precautionary approach to all human endeavors.

Therefore, it is necessary to implement the Precautionary Principle: When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.

In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.

The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.

Wingspread Participants:

(Affiliations are noted for identification purposes only.)

• Dr. Nicholas Ashford' Massachusetts Inst. Of Technology,

• Katherine Barrett, Univ. of British Columbia

• Anita Bernstein, Chicago-Kent College of Law

• Dr. Robert Costanza, University of Maryland

• Pat Costner, Greenpeace

• Dr. Carl Cranor, Univ. of California, Riverside

• Dr. Peter deFur, Virginia Commonwealth Univ.

• Gordon Durnil, attorney

• Dr. Kenneth Geiser, Toxics Use Reduction Inst., Univ. of Mass., Lowell

• Dr. Andrew Jordan, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, Univ. Of East

• Anglia, United Kingdom

• Andrew King, United Steelworkers of America,

• Canadian Office, Toronto, Canada

• Dr. Frederick Kirschenmann, farmer

• Stephen Lester, Center for Health, Environment and Justice

• Sue Maret, Union Inst.

• Dr. Michael M'Gonigle, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

• Dr. Peter Montague, Environmental Research Foundation

• Dr. John Peterson Myers, W. Alton Jones Foundation

• Dr. Mary O'Brien, environmental consultant

• Dr. David Ozonoff, Boston Univ.

• Carolyn Raffensperger, Science and Environmental Health Network

• Dr. Philip Regal, Univ. of Minnesota

• Hon. Pamela Resor, Massachusetts House of Rep.

• Florence Robinson, Louisiana Environmental Network

• Dr. Ted Schettler, Physicians for Social Responsibility

• Ted Smith, Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition

• Dr. Klaus-Richard Sperling, Alfred-Wegener- Institut, Hamburg, Germany

• Dr. Sandra Steingraber, author

• Diane Takvorian, Environmental Health Coalition

• Joel Tickner, University of Mass., Lowell

• Dr. Konrad von Moltke, Dartmouth College

• Dr. Bo Wahlstrom, KEMI (National Chemical Inspectorate), Sweden

• Jackie Warledo, Indigenous Environmental Network

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