Who needs books when we already have a dictionary?

In a recent online discussion, which began with a post about Darwin Day, and soon turned into an argument about evolution, one opponent wrote the following:

"The theory of evolution, if it were removed from the consideration of science wholly, would not register a blip if it weren't for its role as a guiding materialist philosophy for atheists and agnostics in academia."

He wrote rather more, but this was the bit I thought worthy of response. Which I did...

By this line of reasoning, because we understand electricity and magnetism then we have no need of Maxwell's Equations showing us that electricity and magnetism are same thing. We could easily do away with a lot of that complicated stuff in physics textbooks, because there is no need for it. By this line of reasoning, because we have dictionaries to tell us the meaning of words, then we may as well discard all of our books, because the ordering of those words can't tell us anything we don't already know. Stupid books! [/sarc]
Evolution is a theory that ties together everything we know from biological and medical science. Like the electromagnetic force describes what we once thought of as different forces, evolution explains why we see so much similarity among life, and guides our studies of of how life works. In the same way that books are more than just collections of random words, evolution is a meaningful collection of knowledge and the connections within it. Nothing in biology, or in medicine, make sense except in light of evolution.
As for the bit about guiding philosophy, Methodological Naturalism is not atheism. 

There were no further replies on the thread, so the person I was responding to either never saw it, or was so awed by my witty reply that they gave up in despair. I'm gonna go with the latter, and make a blog post out of it.


Here is a link to the original discussion on G+. Not that anyone needs to see it, this is for my own future reference.

This was going to be longer

This was going to be a longer post, but then I got in a fight with the new Blogger editor, ending in my switching back to the old Blogger editor. Therefore, this post is shorter. This post was going to have a stronger theme, but I used up all my time on the aforementioned editor. Therefore, this post is a loosely themed collection of links. Take it for what it is worth.

Class M: Support Honesty in the Climate Wars

Neurologica: Terrible Anti-Vaccine Study, Terrible Reporting

The Sensuous Curmudgeon: Another Creationist Assault on Einstein

Greg Laden: Religion has a major conflict with science, but does this conflict also exist within the sciences?

I really liked Greg's opening paragraph. There is no conflict between science and religion unless you choose for there to be one. Consider who may benefit from such conflict.

Richard Simmons PE Crudade Victorious!

A year ago I wrote about Richard Simmons PE Crusade , and there is recent news of considerable progress. MetaDeb tells me that the legislation is now included in this years No Child Left Behind package. This news come from a recent Today Show interview with RS, but I haven't been able to confirm this thru any other source in a casual search. I'm hopeful that it is true.

Richard Simmons' appearance on the Today Show also included this surprising appearance together with William Shatner:



I say that is surprising, because with simmons and Shattner together, I did not know it was possible to fit that much HAM into a single television studio. ;-)

Hula-Hoops, Confidence Intervals, and Invisible Men

In addition to doing statistical analysis, a big part of my job is explaining the meaning of the results. I am privileged to work with a lot of really smart people on all manner of biomedical and translational research. However, "really smart" does not always mean that everyone is highly numerate; some people just are not good at expressing themselves that way. That's OK too, not everyone can be expected to be good at everything, but it does present a special challenge sometimes when I need to explain something statistical to someone who has difficulty understanding. Somewhat surprisingly, the toughest questions are not about the most complex mathematics. Instead, the hardest questions to answer are often on the most basic concepts.

Case in point, a few days ago I was asked to define a confidence interval for a client who needed to be able it explain the concept to yet another colleague who was asking her. Here I have someone not-too-numerate needing to explain it to someone else likely not-too-numerate, and it's important, so I needed to give a clear and simple definition for her to understand and pass on.

A bit of background before I give my definition; this was relating to an observational study on clinical data, and we have a large number of means, standard errors, and confidence intervals to report. All intervals presented at at a 95% confidence level.

A confidence interval (CI) is a range of values that is likely to contain the actual value we want to know. For the purposes of this paper we have made a lot of single value estimates, or point estimates, of the means and slopes in which we are interested. Although this is not a random sample, we hope that this patient sample is an unbiased representation of a larger group of similar patients. If we were to repeat the study with another group, we would hope to get similar results, as opposed to very different findings. Confidence intervals represent a reasonable range of values that might be the true value that represents the entire population, and not just the single sample we happen to have. The confidence level is the probability, here 95%, that the true value we are trying to determine is actually within the interval.

To make sure I got the full meaning across, I added a bit about how to interpret confidence intervals.

Confidence intervals are very useful for interpreting the clinical importance of a finding. If the low and low ends of the interval are both clinically meaningful and not too far apart, then we can be fairly certain of a sound result even though we have some uncertainty due to sampling error. If the CI is “wide” there might be a lot of room for interpretation of what the result really means. The width of a confidence interval is directly related to the statistical significance. There is also a matter of “clinical significance” – not everything that is statistically significant is clinically meaningful, and vice-versa.

I wrote that up and fired it off in an email, but I felt like I still hadn't gotten it simple enough. I needed an easy non-technical example, and a moment of inspiration hit me; the Hula-Hoop as an analogy to a confidence interval, and an invisible man as the population the interval is trying to capture:

A simpler/sillier definition: You are throwing a hula-hoop at an invisible man. You can be pretty sure that you have actually caught the invisible man inside the hoop (95%), but you can’t be certain. If it is a big hula-hoop, you still don’t know exactly where he is. If the hula-hoop is small enough then you know almost exactly where he is, or close enough that you don’t care.


Now think about throwing “statistical hula-hoops” at the values you want to know about the general population to report in your study. You have captured most of them inside the hoops (95%), but you still don’t know precisely where they are.

Perhaps not the finest hour of statistical science, but if it gets the point across I'll still be happy with it.

[image - 100 hula hoops] 

Education is Not a Placebo (My 15 Seconds of Fame)

I'm going to be FAMOUS for all of about 15 seconds. On my drive home Thursday evening I heard the following commentary on NPR's Marketplace program

Education works as a placebo effect

TYLER COWEN: There's lots of evidence that placebos work in medicine; people get well simply because they think they're supposed to.

But we're learning that placebos apply to a lot of other areas and that includes higher education. Schooling works in large part because it makes people feel they've been transformed. Think about it: college graduates earn a lot more than non-graduates, but studying Walt Whitman rarely gets people a job. In reality, the students are jumping through lots of hoops and acquiring a new self-identity.

The educators and the administrators stage a kind of "theater" to convince students that they now belong to an elite group of higher earners. If students believe this story, many of them will then live it.

Dr. Cohen goes about the cost of prestige and status, but I pretty knew how I wanted to respond at this point. After dinner I found the Marketplace site, checked the commenting guidelines and left this comment:

I acknowledge what Dr. Cowen says about the value of confidence and self identity, but higher education is anything but a placebo. Learning itself is a critical skill which is gained through study, and that study might be biology, business, physics, physiology, zoology, or any number of other areas, including Walt Whitman. In a pinch, maybe even economics will do.
A college degree does not mean a student has mastered a subject, rather it is an indication that the student is teachable, and capable of jumping through the higher hoops of their profession.

I figured there was a good chance of this getting selected to be read on the air - because my comment was about the only one under the 150 word limit. I was right too, because I got an email from Alison Gilbert asking if I would record an edited version for broadcast on the letters segment:

Higher Education is anything but a placebo. Learning itself is a critical skill which is gained through study. That study might be biology, business, physics, physiology, zoology – even Walt Whitman. A college degree does not mean a student has mastered a subject, rather it is an indication that the student is teachable and capable of jumping through the higher hoops of their profession.

So there you have, my 15 seconds of fame broadcast for all to hear on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 9th. Tune in your radio or listen in online.

And for the record, I agree with Dr. Cohen that confidence and self image are an important part of education, and that the costs of education are getting out-of-hand. However, education is not a placebo; you just can't fake that.

[UPDATE] Here is a link to the September 8th Letter segment and text.