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As I mentioned in the last post, after our discussion at the University of Amsterdam was canceled on grounds of Maarten Boudry’s and my sympathies for Israel, the sponsors who brought us to Amsterdam kindly had the discussion restaged in an empty room and professionally filmed.  I haven’t listened to the whole 80-minute discussion as I can’t stand to see and hear myself, but as I recall it went smoothly, even without an audience.

The filming and appended notes on the screen are due to videographer David Stam, who did a great and professional job, clarifying any references that aren’t spelled out.

To reiterate, the subject of the discussion was a paper by myself and Luana Maroja published in the Skeptical Inquirer, “The ideological subversion of biology.” If you watch the video, you’ll see that the topic of the war and Israel wasn’t even raised.  We did range beyond the ambit of the paper, for we talked about biology, philosophy, and other topics, but you’ll see that we were deplatformed for something we didn’t even intend to mention.

Here are David’s notes on the video:.

Welcome to an eye-opening discussion on “The Ideological Subversion of Science” featuring evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, philosopher of science Maarten Boudry, and embryologist Michael Richardson. In this thought-provoking video, our distinguished panel delves into the growing influence of ideology on scientific research and education. They explore how societal pressures and cultural trends can distort scientific integrity, the implications for scientific progress, and the importance of safeguarding objectivity in the pursuit of knowledge. Join us for a conversation that champions the true spirit of scientific inquiry.

Em. Prof. Dr. Jerry Coyne, Evolutionary Biology at University of Chicago
Dr. Maarten Boudry, Philosopher of Science at University of Ghent
Prof Dr. Michael Richardson, Evolutionary Developmental Zoology at University of Leiden

The moderator, who did an superb job of keeping the discussion going, is Gert Jan van ‘t Land.

As I recounted on May 14, philosopher Maarten Boudry from Ghent, developmental biologist Michael Richardson from Leiden and I were “deplatformed” by a student-run group, “BetaBreak”, at the University of Amsterdam. We were recruited to discuss a paper that I wrote with Luana Maroja, “The ideological subversion of biology,” in which we discussed several areas (sex, race, evolutionary psych0logy, etc.) in which “progressive” ideology had crept into biology, distorting the science.

A few days before our event, we got a note that BetaBreak was canceling our discussion because Maarten and I had “unacceptable” sympathies towards Israel in the Gaza War. This had nothing to do with our discussion, as you’ll see when I put the video in the next post. But it didn’t matter, if you’re more on the side of the Jews, you’re tainted—at least in Amsterdam. (Maarten had in fact been deplatformed a few days before that when he was scheduled to give a talk on climate change, which he eventually gave remotely.)

At any rate, BetaBreak then came up with a second explanation for our deplatforming, which was that the event “could get violent” and they couldn’t guarantee our safety. Well, that sounds bogus to me (a scientific descussion?), and of course none of us were worried about our safety.  The fact that the “safety” trope came only in a subsequent explanation of course makes us think it was confected, for, as the group explained in its first message to us: “Another fear is how [the deplaforming] would reflect on us as a committee and that we might be blackballed at UvA/AUC.” Oh, dearie me. They might have been blackballed! They canceled others so they wouldn’t get canceled themselves. . . And the advantage of raising the “safety” issue, of course, is that it can’t be refuted: if you cancel an event on those grounds, you’ll never know if your worries were justified.

The details of the deplatforming are in the first link above, but Maarten and I collaborated on a new article in Quillette, which you can see below (click the headline) for free, BUT READ IT WITHIN A DAY OR SO, AS IT’S GOING TO BE PAYWALLED. (I did find an archived link here.) But the point of our article was not to play the victim, for within a few days we staged the discussion without an audience, and it was recorded professionally and put on YouTube. (More people can hear it now!)

The point of our Quillette piece, as you see, is that deplatforming invited speakers is a disservice not just to the speakers, but, more important, to the audience. In the article I added an apposite quote from John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” to show why, whether or not you disagree with speakers whose views offend you, you should still listen to them. I’ll put it here:

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

That is, if you listen carefully to such a speaker, you might not only change your mind on some issues, but, even if you don’t, it gives you the chance to hear the best arguments of your opponents, and thus a chance to hone your ideas.  (Further, the person speaking is “outed” in that you finally can learn what they really believe.)

But I see I’m summarizing the piece for you. Please read it yourself (and before the weekend!) by clicking below. It’s not very long.

Also, if you’re a regular reader of Quillette, remember that it has no ads and is sponsored by reader support alone. You can subscribe by going here.

I’ll give the first paragraph and then the last two:

Like being struck by lightning, getting deplatformed—first invited to speak and then disinvited for your political views—is something you assume happens only to other people. But, unlike a lightning strike, it’s not a rare occurrence. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)’s “campus deplatforming database” of US universities lists 626 successful deplatforming attempts since 1998. This year alone, there have already been 110 attempts to cancel talks, most involving speakers sympathetic to Israel. Neither of us, however, had ever personally experienced this kind of cancellation before.

And the ending:

The problem with this approach [deplatforming or canceling people] is that plenty of unsavoury people have produced wonderful work in music, art, literature, and science, and that work should be judged on its own merits. In any case, who is to judge which beliefs and behaviours should render you untouchable? As Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four shows, “approved” opinions have a way of changing, and it’s impossible to predict which widely held opinions of today will be considered grounds for damnation tomorrow. Who could have predicted the current “orthodox” view on the war in Gaza several decades ago, when most Western progressives were staunchly pro-Israel? A hundred years ago, vegetarians were seen as cranks. A century hence, will killing and eating animals for food be seen as beyond the pale?

It’s been 155 years since Mill published his famous essay and, sadly, we have still not taken its lessons to heart. If BetaBreak had allowed our discussion to proceed, the students would not only have been able to engage in a lively discussion, but might also have learned something or—heaven forbid—even changed their minds about the relationship between science and ideology.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “kaput”, came with the one-word comment, “nearly”.  Once again, faced with the truth about individual extinction, the Divine Duo simply deny it. And they always accuse others (the barmaid in this case) of their own sins; here it’s having appealing fantasies. 

 

At a conference like LHCP12, covering all of Large Hadron Collider [LHC] physics and beyond, there’s far too much to summarize: hundreds of talks, with thousands of incremental experimental results and theoretical insights. So instead, today I’ll draw attention to one of the longest-running puzzles of the LHC era, and to a significant step that’s been made toward resolving it. The puzzle in question involves a rare decay of bottom quarks.

[All figures in this post are taken from LHCP12 talks by Zhangqier Wang and Eluned Smith.]

The Decay of a Bottom Quark to a Lepton-Antilepton Pair

In the Standard Model of particle physics, bottom quarks most often decay to charm quarks. They do so via a “virtual W boson” — a general disturbance in the W field — which subsequently is converted either

• to a quark-antiquark pair, or
• to a “lepton” (an electron, muon or tau) and an anti-neutrino.

[See for instance Figure 1 of this post.]

But rarely, a bottom quark can decay to a strange quark and to a lepton-antilepton pair (an electron and a positron, or a muon and an anti-muon, or a tau and an anti-tau.) The example of a muon-antimuon pair is shown below.

Figure 1: The general form of a rare process in which a bottom quark b decays to a strange quark s, a muon μ– and an anti-muon μ+.

Within the Standard Model such a process can occur through quantum physics, involving subtle interactions of the known elementary fields. It is very rare; less than one in a million bottom quarks decays this way. But it can be measured in detail.

Figure 2: In the Standard Model, the decay shown in Fig. 1 occurs through a quantum effect, involving the up, charm or top quark field (u,c,t), the W field, and the electromagnetic (γ) or Z fields. The rate is small but measurable. The details depend on the invariant mass-squared, called q2 here, of the muon and anti-muon.

Because it is rare, the rate for this process is easily altered by new particles and fields that aren’t included in the Standard Model, making it an interesting target for theorists to explore. And since the process is relatively easy to measure, it has been a key target for experimentalists at the LHC experiments, expecially LHCb and CMS, and to some degree ATLAS.

The Discrepancy at the LHCb Experiment

For a decade, theorists’ predictions for this decay have been in conflict with the measurements made by the LHCb experiment. This is quantified in the plot below, which shows a certain aspect of the process as a function of the invariant mass-squared (q2) of the muon/anti-muon pair. (More precisely, as shown at the bottom of Figure 1 of this post from 2013, the measurement involves a B meson decaying to a K meson plus a muon/anti-muon pair)

Figure 3: Older data from the LHCb experiment (black crosses), showing a certain measure of the process in the previous figure as a function of q2. It shows significant disagreement with a theoretical prediction (orange bars). Light gray bars are regions where predictions are not possible and are excluded from the comparison.

What are we to make of this disagreement? Well, as always in such situations, there are three possibilities:

• The experimental measurements have a mistake somewhere,
• The theoretical calculations behind the prediction have a mistake somewhere, or
• The Standard Model of particle physics is missing something

The third case would be of enormous importance in particle physics: a discovery of something fundamentally new, and a cause for celebration. The first two options would be far less exciting, and we must rule both of them out convincingly before celebrating.

If there is an error in the measurements or calculations, it is unlikely to be something simple. The people involved are experienced professionals, and their work has by now been checked by many other experts. Still, subtle mistakes — an underestimate of a complex quantum effect, or a feature of the experimental detector that hasn’t been properly modeled — do happen, and are more common than true discoveries.

The Contribution of the CMS Experiment

Importantly, we can now rule out the first possibility: there’s no mistake in the LHCb measurement. The CMS experiment has now repeated the measurement, with much improved precision compared to their previous efforts. As shown in Fig. 4, the LHCb and CMS measurements match. (CMS and LHCb are so different in their design that there’s no reasonable possibility that they have correlated detector issues.)

Figure 4: New data from CMS (black) compared to LHCb’s data (orange) and CMS’s older, less precise data (maroon). (The right-hand panel is the update of Fig. 3.) Agreement of the new higher-precision data from CMS with that of LHCb is now clear and compelling.

Since the experiments agree, focus now moves squarely to the theorists. Are their predictions correct? We have at least two sets of predictions; they appear as blue and orange bars in Fig. 5, which shows they agree with each other but disagree, in the center and right panels, with CMS data (and therefore, from Fig. 4, with LHCb data.)

Figure 5: The new data from CMS (black) compared to two theoretical predictions in blue and orange. The two theoretical predictions agree, but disagree with the CMS data, which (as seen in Fig. 4) agrees with LHCb.

Even though the two theoretical calculations agree, they are based on similar assumptions. Perhaps those assumptions are flawed?

There are certainly things to worry about. Anything involving the strong nuclear force, when it acts at distances comparable to the size of a proton, has to be subjected to heavy scrutiny. Far too often, discrepancies between theory and experiment have dissolved when potential theoretical uncertainties from the strong nuclear force were reconsidered. (For a recent example, see this one.) We will have to let the theory experts hash this out… which could take some time. I would not plan to order champagne any time soon. Nevertheless, this bears watching over the next few years.

The multi-billion dollar “snake oil” industry is nothing if not good at marketing. This is probably because this is not one or even a small number of companies, but likely thousands of companies and millions of individuals crowdsourcing many different marketing strategies. Those that work tend to prosper and proliferate, spawning variations. The rhetoric has been evolving in this way for at […]

The post What are “Adaptogens”? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

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