Articles to 2019-11-22

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First the link to this week's complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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I find Kupferschmidt’s report on Yehuda Shoenfeld quite disturbing. Shoenfeld is an established and highly respected scientist and a recognized expert in his field. Not once in the report is there any hint that anything claimed by him might be factually wrong. All we find is a refusal to repeat the politically correct party directive verbatim and an insistence on independent thinking and slightly critical conclusions. Even more disconcerting is the charge of him meeting with and talking to the wrong group of people. This kind of guilt by association is a defining characteristic of utterly totalitarian regimes and ideologies and tends to make me very afraid.

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Phillips et al. is way out of my area of interest or expertise and I have nothing to contribute about its content, only the form. Look at figures 1b and 2. Do they seem similar to you or strikingly different? Figure 2 is a classic and a textbook example of how not to draw diagrams. In a bar chart, where the width of the bars differ, you must not scale the ordinate in extrinsic values but only intrinsic ones, in this case species per degree or per area of a latitudinal ring, taking account of the spherical shape. If you don't, then lumping two bars into a double width one will also double the height and quadruple the area. Conversely many slim bars will also result in being low and look tiny, as is the case here for the span from 35 to 50 degrees north where there is in fact a very high density as shown by the yellow band in figure 1b. Using that method I can prove anything to the careless reader, i.e. journalists promulgating my results to a mass audience.

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I always include science's Working Life column here and it's always worth reading, but I rarely comment on it. This week one point struck me especially. As DeWoody & DeWoody found, when help and support are really needed, the family are the ones you can truly rely on and it's good to stay close to them. Unfortunately the academic way of life makes that as good as impossible, but our modern world imposes the same fragmentation on everyone and society clearly shows the strain.

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It has long been known, as far as I can tell accepted, and I make of point of stressing it in my introductory tutorial, that the common ancestor was far more human-like than the other contemporary apes. Unfortunately that point has yet to find its way into textbooks and introductory lectures, but with the additional force supplied by Kivell and Böhme et al. it may perhaps do so now.

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It seems that in his household study Müller makes two utterly untenable assumptions. First he equates the number of grinding stones not with grain consumption but with production and thus indirectly with associated field size. And secondly he uses house size as an estimator for the number of occupants. The latter is a much used and very reasonable first order estimate, but here disproved by his own main finding. Rich people can consume only that much grain and poor ones can subsist on only that much less, if they are not to starve but provide a work force. In fact rich people actually tend to consume less of the basic staple, supplanting it with higher value food like meat.

So what do we really see? We have normal size farms houses with a reasonable number of occupants and some large houses, into which people are packed much more densely as evidenced by the number of grinding stones needed to feed them. As the large houses are also richer according to status goods, these must be a sizeable servant class, probably engaged in the weaving that is also associated with these units. Contrary to Müller this large grain consumption is probably not associated with an equally high production but rather looks like the extraction of grain as a tax from the smaller households. The many servants will probably work and eat in the large houses but may well sleep distributed among the others. This is a different picture than the one Müller paints, but his main conclusion about the trajectory of social stratification is, if anything, strengthened not weakened by it.

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At first glance Miller and Johnson et al. tell us nothing new or surprising. The better an organism is adapted, the less the probability that a random mutation may turn out beneficial and the more value is there in lowering the mutation rate – and this is just we do find in nature. The real value in Johnson et al. is elucidating details and mechanisms, but that part is beyond me.

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Two conclusions are to be drawn from Voosen:
a) The complete melting of the Greenland ice shield is quite possible for a long drawn-out interglacial like ours, that should have ended several thousand years ago, and we have to prepare for the resulting sea level rise.
b) Such a meltdown is well inside the natural variation and does not imply a catastrophic breakdown and the crossing of a tripping point as has frequently been implied.

Yes, these prospects do not look promising for many large and densely populated coastal regions. But what is that compared to the expected onset of the next glacial cycle?

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I have finally received the article by Mittnik et al. that has been loudly touted by all the yellow press for weeks. Unsurprisingly its real content has nothing whatsoever to do with anything claimed there. The word “slaves” does occur once in the penultimate sentence, where it is dropped as an element of much later Roman familiae, that are said to display certain – not total – similarity to the situation found here. What the article really is about, is how large-scale and large-area societies managed to uphold their social connections and about the differing mobility between (some) men and (some) women. We also see structured households with a servant class – something that no large household has been able to do without at all times. All this is quite boring from the point of view of the sensationalist yellow press and nothing there has anything whatsoever to do with the incipience of slavery in any accepted meaning of the word.

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On the one hand what Pernicka says about science is just what drew me into prehistory in the first place. On the other hand, what about his own scientific rigour? Either the abscissal scale in his figure 3 is completely wrong or everything he comments about it in the text total nonsense. I presume it's the former, but the sources he cites are not easily accessible.

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All textbook descriptions and other sources about the physics of ice skating have so far resorted to a certain amount of hand waving and more or less openly admitted that the phenomenon was still not quite understood. It seems that Canale et al. have finally managed to solve the riddle.

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When modern science began in the middle of the 17^th century, it was the idealistic pursuit of a small group of independently wealthy people spending their own money and some personally selected paid helpers sharing the same ideals. This changed when science became a career and its results turned from an end into a means. For a long time this didn't matter very much, as replicability was reliably being established everywhere. Both my father's diploma thesis and doctoral dissertation were replications – and as it turned out refutations – of recently published striking results. In areas, where replication was uncommon or impossible like archaeology, fraud was already rife even then. Published science is beginning to sink in a mire of absurdity. A rather old but prominent example is just being uncovered in Cahalan’s book, here reviewed by Pols. It is also – that too nothing new – being politicized, censored, and restricted to conform to the party line. Just now a conference by non-conformist scientists had to be called off, when their venue was cancelled after terrorist threats of violence against the proprietors. This is not the end of science, but of science as we have come to know it. (See the photograph from a “ CO₂-camera” in an approving article from the main stream press.) It will survive and again become the pursuit of small groups of unsalaried practitioners spending their own wealth on it and striving for the respect of their equals.

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