Science Reporting in the Mass Media; Harari on the Discovery of Ignorance; The Republicans’ Need to Game the System

• Two stories about how science stories are reported in the mass media: One about how humans nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago; another about that “crisis in cosmology”;
• Yuval Noah Harari about the discovery of ignorance;
• And three items that suggest Republicans need to game the system because they know their policies are unpopular.

This story has been making the rounds.

Scientific American, Anna Ikarashi and Nature Magazine, 6 Sep 2023: Human Ancestors Nearly Went Extinct 900,000 Years Ago, subtitled “A new technique for analyzing modern genetic data suggests that prehumans survived in a group of only 1,280 individuals”

Human ancestors in Africa were pushed to the brink of extinction around 900,000 years ago, a study shows. The work, published in Science, suggests a drastic reduction in the population of our ancestors well before our species, Homo sapiens, emerged. The population of breeding individuals was reduced to just 1,280 and didn’t expand again for another 117,000 years.

“About 98.7% of human ancestors were lost,” says Haipeng Li, a population geneticist at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who co-led the study. He says that the fossil record in Africa and Eurasia between 950,000 and 650,000 years ago is patchy and that “the discovery of this bottleneck may explain the chronological gap”.

Nick Ashton, an archaeologist at the British Museum in London, who wrote a related perspective, says he was intrigued by the tiny size of the population. “This would imply that it occupied a very localized area with good social cohesion for it to survive,” he says. “Of greater surprise is the estimated length of time that this small group survived. If this is correct, then one imagines that it would require a stable environment with sufficient resources and few stresses to the system.”

I’m noting in part because I’m sure I’ve heard of such a discovery before, some years ago — that at one time some tens of thousands of years ago the human population was reduced to only a few thousand, or some such numbers — so I’m not sure why this story, as it’s being reported in various venues, is such news.

But I’m noting this because, as the article outlines, a lot can be deduced by analysis of DNA from various populations. And of course, such an analysis has never, ever, found it the least bit plausible that the entire human race, with all its present-day diversity, descended from two people in the Garden of Eden a mere 6000 years ago. Yet more people believe in that, than in evolution.

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Here’s a quote by Yuval Noah Harari that I saw in my Facebook feed, and then found on this site, that struck a philosophical nerve.

From Goodreads:

“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.”

It’s from Harari’s book Homo Deus, which I reviewed here, without quoting that particular passage. Though I quoted lots of others; it’s a great book.

Anyway, this comment about ignorance is more profound than it might seem at first glance. Up until some point, the Middle Ages perhaps, before the Scientific Revolution, there must have been no general awareness of knowledge that had to be taught and learned. Were there such things as public schools? A glance at Google suggests that public schools, in America at least, does go back to 1600 something. But the middle ages? Education “centered around religious studies, reading and writing Latin, and studying scripture” (from this site). At what point in human history did people become generally aware that there were things, outside their holy books, that people ought to know, via education to their children? This is the “discovery” Harari is talking about. And as he says, that discovery changed the world.

And that reminds me of that book I heard about earlier this year: Ignorance: A Global History, by Peter Burke. I think I’ll order it and give it a read.

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As I anticipated, there was a response today in the NY Times to that article I posted about a few days ago about a supposed “crisis in cosmology.”

NY Times, Letters, 6 Sep 2023: A Nobel Physicist, on the Nature of the Universe

I’m inclined to quote the whole thing.

To the Editor:

“The Crisis in Cosmology,” by Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 3), gives a good picture of exciting issues we are pursuing in cosmology, the study of the large-scale nature of our expanding universe.

But Dr. Frank and Dr. Gleiser do not mention that the standard theory passes a broad variety of demanding tests. You can read about them in my 2022 book, “The Whole Truth.”

These tests make a good case that our cosmology is a good approximation to what happened. But it is important to understand that the standard models of dark matter and dark energy seem too simple to be the full story. I should know: I introduced these ideas to cosmology a quarter of a century ago to make the theory we had then better fit the evidence.

I meant it to be at best a rough working picture. I am surprised at how well it has done, but I expect that it will be replaced by a better theory found with the guidance of problems such as the 10 percent difference between two measures of the rate of expansion of the universe, and our poor understanding of how the galaxies formed.

Adjust the theories of dark matter and dark energy and you adjust the picture of how galaxies formed and the method of measuring the rate of expansion of the universe. This can be done without seriously affecting the successful cosmological tests of what happened on larger scales.

The community hope is for more problems that might guide us to an even better theory. It is good to question authority, but I do not see evidence of a crisis in cosmology.

P. James E. Peebles
Princeton, N.J.
The writer, an emeritus professor at Princeton, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019.

The point here is that even the best-intentioned news sources work at different frequencies than does the scientific world. This is why I seldom rely on any news media, even magazines, for understanding genuine scientific breakthroughs, which are very rare. News about those eventually comes in books. It’s not the news media is dishonest; it’s just that their modus operandi is to emphasize the new and different and exciting, while most scientific advances are subtle and incremental.

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Finally, a couple political notes. If conservatives have the best ideas, why do they resort to shenanigans like these? Because they know their ideas are regressive and unpopular. I’ll just do the headlines.

Vox, 7 Sep 2023: The Republican Party’s plan to rule the state of Wisconsin forever, explained, subtitled “Wisconsin’s legislature is gerrymandered to ensure that Democrats will never win it. Republicans have a plan to keep it that way.”

NY Times, 6 Sep 2023: Why Republicans Could Impeach a Liberal Judge Before She’s Heard a Case, subtitled “Republicans in Wisconsin have floated impeaching a newly seated liberal State Supreme Court justice who is threatening conservatives’ grip on state politics.”

Right Wing Watch, 7 Sep 2023: Mike Huckabee and Other Right-Wing Leaders Escalate Threats of Electoral Violence