The Future of Everything: The Science of Prediction

by David Orrell

  78. Garrett 2005. The mortality rate for avian flu may be an overestimation, since less serious cases are probably not all reported.

  79. Anonymous 2005c.

  80. In October 2005, estimates of potential deaths from a bird flu epidemic, should it occur, range from 2 million to 360 million. As the World Health Organization spokesman Dick Thompson said, “One of those numbers will turn out to be right. We’re not going to know how lethal the next pandemic is going to be until the pandemic begins.” Anonymous 2005e.

  81. Watts 2003, p. 169. The track record of such models is not very good. An example was a model used to simulate the 2001 outbreak in U.K. livestock of the highly infectious foot and mouth disease. Despite being highly simplified, the model was used as the basis of a decision to cull millions of cows. The action was later judged as far too draconian—one report (Campbell and Lee 2003) called it “carnage by computer.”

  82. Eubank et al. 2004.

  83. As Antoine Danchin said, “It is impossible to predict the future of microbes and parasites.” Danchin 2002, p. 274. We can follow the evolution of viruses, and perhaps detect whether they are gaining attributes that make them more dangerous, but any kind of precise forecasting is impossible.

  84. Wichman et al. 1999.

  85. Jackson et al. 2001.

  86. See http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/media/nr-rp/2004/2004_gphin-rmispbk_e.html.

  87. Longini et al. 2004. One such drug is Tamiflu, which in 2005 was being stockpiled by both governments and individuals, sending the shares of its manufacturer, Roche, up by 40 percent in less than a year. Foley 2005. As Christina Pearson, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, pointed out: “We don’t know right now what the next pandemic strain will be. It’s uncertain if it’s going to be H5N1 (bird flu). It’s uncertain whether Tamiflu, or other things—how effective they will be against that strain. Part of our strategy will be to stockpile antivirals. To put it bluntly, you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket.” Greene 2005.

  88. Osterholm 2005; Ravensbergen 2004. See also the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) website at http://www.ecdc.eu.int/.

  89. Plender 2005.

  90. In October 2005 the U.S. government announced a pandemic prevention plan costed at $7.1 billion. See http://pandemicflu.gov/. A rough estimate from the WHO was also in the billions of dollars (Jack et al. 2005). The World Bank estimates the global cost of a pandemic to be about $800 billion a year.

  91. Anonymous 2005c.

  8 ⊳ BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

  FIGURING OUT WHERE WE WENT WRONG

  1. The United States Geological Survey website is located at http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2000/fs036–00/.

  2. Vedantam 2004.

  3. See Ridley 2003, p. 60; Ehrlich 2000, p. 111.

  4. Klin et al. 2002.

  5. Bazell 2005.

  6. Quoted in Baron-Cohen 2003, p. 169.

  7. Baron-Cohen, together with Ioan James from Oxford University, proposed Newton and Einstein (Muir 2003).

  8. A lack of interest in communication is as common in science as in people with Asperger’s. In his book Voltaire’s Bastards, John Ralston Saul wrote, “When faced by questioning from non-experts, the scientist invariably retreats behind veils of complication and specialization. Of course it is complicated. But there is no other profession in which the sense of obligation to convert the inner dialect into the language of man is so absolutely absent” (Saul 1992, p. 79). Talking directly to the media or general public is strongly discouraged. The climate scientist Stephen Schneider wrote: “The unwritten rules in science decree that recognition is supposed to be based on years of careful work backed up by scores of publications appearing in the most strictly peer-reviewed scientific articles dealing with narrowly defined topics . . . not clever phrases that capture the public’s—or worse, the media’s—attention”(Schneider 1989, p. 201). There are many excellent popular science books, including those cited in the notes, but science is still a foreign country to most people. Indeed, one of the highest-selling books on the history of science, Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, was written by a travel writer, as if science were a distant and exotic land, a kind of Patagonia of the mind.

  9. Student petition of autisme-économie. See http://www.paecon.net/.

  10. Ridley 2003, p. 141.

  11. Lewontin 1991, p. 51.

  12. Knight 1921.

  13. It is frequently aimed against environmentalists, despite their often high degree of scientific literacy. See, for example, Taverne 2005.

  14. Ingram 2005, p. 211. Patients with damage to the right hemisphere also find it harder to get jokes, which often depends on making a sudden shift in context (Coulson and Williams 2005). In general, the two hemispheres work in concert, so they are as closely entwined as nature and nurture. It is only possible to tease apart their roles in rather contrived situations. To say that a particular individual is “left-brained” or “right-brained” is only a loose statement.

  15. Keller 1985, p. 69. Pythagoras allowed women into his group, but as Guthrie points out the female was associated in the column of opposites “with evil, darkness and the unlimited.” This may have influenced Plato to describe women as originating from morally defective souls in Timaeus (Guthrie 1978, p. 307). Aristotle excluded them from the Academy, and women have been underrepresented in science ever since—which has undoubtedly affected its course. See Wertheim 1995.

  16. Wertheim 1995, p. 100.

  17. Griffiths 2004, p. 167.

  18. Nelson 1996. Male and female here refer to abstract cultural properties. This does not imply that women are no good at math.

  19. Quoted in Koestler 1968, p. 197. Even the science of dynamics seems less about motion than about stopping it so it can be studied frame by frame.

  20. Ibid., p. 397.

  21. Ibid., p. 329.

  22. These fields, including also nonlinear dynamics, fractals, and fuzzy logic, have shifted the emphasis to the right-hand “evil” column (Orrell 2006). Some scientists still dismiss the study of holistic phenomena as a complete non-starter because, it is argued, scientific deduction always has to build from first principles. As Mary Midgley put it, “During much of the twentieth century the very word ‘holistic’ has served in some scientific circles simply as a term of abuse” (Midgley 2000, p. 14). But holistic phenomena are not the product of some kind of fuzzy philosophy; they are simply a fact of life. Complex systems have emergent properties that cannot be deduced from simple laws. To ignore them is like tying your left hand behind your back: an unnecessary handicap.

  23. Midgley 1985, p. 25.

  24. For example, one group wrote, “Lack of any conceivable objective verification/falsification procedure has led some commentators to conclude that forecasts of anthropogenic climate change are fundamentally subjective. . . . Worse still, assessment of forecasts of anthropogenic climate change degenerates all too easily into a dissection of the prior beliefs and motivations of the forecasters, ‘placing climate forecasts in their sociological context.’ As die-hard old-fashioned realists, we firmly reject such New Age inclusivity. . . . To resign ourselves to any other position on an issue as contentious as climate change is to risk diverting attention from the science itself to the possible motivations of the experts or modelling communities on which current scientific opinion rests.” Allen et al. 2002. See also Schneider 2002.

  25. Koestler, 1968, p. 284.

  26. Peterson 1993, p. 41.

  27. The topic of validation, a term used very loosely by climate scientists, is discussed in Oreskes et al. 1994: “Even if a model result is consistent with the present and past observational data, there is no guarantee that the model will perform at an equal level when used to predict the future.”

  28. Keller 1985, p. 141.

  29. Ibid., p. 167.

  30. Lovelock 1979.

  31. Lovelock 1991, p. 22.

  32. Quoted in Zöllner and Nathan
2003, p. 76.

  33. Lovelock 1991, p. 3; Mann 1991.

  34. Lovelock 1991, p. 11. See also Keller 2002.

  35. Julie A. Nelson wrote: “The central model of economics views people as individuals, and each individual as self-interested, autonomous, rational, and free to choose among different actions. Logically, the converse of this would be a view of people as linked to others and concerned about their welfare—people who are dependent, emotional, and subject to decisions made by others or influences from the social or natural environment. Not just coincidentally, all the characteristics in the first list have been, in modern Western and English-speaking cultures, associated with stereotypical masculinity, while all those in the latter list are associated with stereotypical femininity.” Nelson 1996.

  36. Hillman 1975, p. 132; Shamas 2003.

  37. For example, what is the point in fighting for more equal distribution of wealth if you believe what James Watson did? “Maybe one of the reasons for this growing inequality of income may in some sense be a reflection of some people being more strong and healthy than others. Some people, no matter how much schooling you give them, will never really be up to what is now considered a necessary degree of effective intelligence” (Duncan 2003). There is a strong political element to these myths and metaphors. The idea that we exist only to further the aims of our selfish genes helped rationalize economic theories based on self-maximizing behaviour and the “no such thing as society” ethos of the Reagan/Thatcher years. Priests used to justify the world order by invoking the word of God; now it is written in our genes. The Czech poet/president Václav Havel prematurely hoped in 1992 that the collapse of the Soviet Union would help end the “cult of objectivity,” which was “dominated by the culminating belief, expressed in different forms, that the world—and Being as such—is a wholly knowable system governed by a finite system of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct for his own benefit.” Quoted in Horgan 1996, p. 23.

  38. Wertheim 1995, p. 29. See also Lerner 1987.

  39. Why are we so much more concerned with the rather airy and abstract problem of climate change than with more immediate and equally serious issues such as deforestation, overpopulation, and soil degradation? In November 2000, for example, flooding in the U.K. was blamed by politicians on global warming, rather than the fact that overdevelop-ment and changes in farm practices had reduced the available area for drainage (Anonymous 2000a). Perhaps it is because it is easier to talk about climate change than fix problems on the ground.

  40. Part of the resistance to Gaia theory is that it adopts a holistic perspective, which has traditionally been resisted by scientists. The self-regulating properties of Daisyworld, for example, can be understood only by viewing the system as a whole, rather than from the perspective of either species of daisy in isolation. As the authors of a report from the British think-tank Demos wrote, “That we need a new mental model for our place in the world is increasingly apparent. . . . Gaian thinking can help us to develop a more holistic understanding of ourselves, our organisations, and the needs of our habitat.” From John Holden’s introduction to Midgley 2000, p. 7.

  41. Evolution here refers to a process of growth and change. The planet itself has not been through a process of Darwinian selection, rather it is the end product of the evolution of the species that inhabit it.

  42. The metaphor of humanity as a disease has been used often. See, for example, Ehrlich 1968; Worldwatch Institute 1998.

  43. Kirby 2004.

  44. See the report “Americans Still Not Highly Concerned About Global Warming” at http://poll.gallup.com. About a third of Americans think climate change will be a serious threat during their lifetimes. There are a number of factors that might lead to a sense of detachment about the environment; one is that responsibility is shared by us all and cannot be pinned on a small group. However, science has played a major role in shaping our culture and therefore our attitude towards nature.

  45. Meadows et al. 1992, pp. 109–10.

  46. The linguist Noam Chomsky wrote: “It is quite possible—overwhelmingly probable, one might guess—that we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology. The science-forming capacity is only one facet of our mental endowment. We use it where we can but are not restricted to it, fortunately.” The same may apply to finding our place in the living biosphere. Chomsky 1988, p. 159. Quoted in Horgan 1996, p. 152.

  47. D. T. Suzuki, in the introduction to Herrigel 1953, p. vii.

  9 ⊳ CONSULTING THE CRYSTAL BALL

  OUR WORLD IN 2100

  1. According to the IPCC’s “Third Assessment Report,” the ice sheet will begin to melt if local temperatures increase by 3°C, which is equivalent to global warming of about 1.5°C.

  2. Oppenheimer and Alley 2004.

  3. ACIA 2004.

  4. Ni 2001.

  5. See the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005 for a study of desertification.

  6. According to H. R. Kaufmann, general manager of Swiss Re, “Failure to act [on global warming] would leave the insurance industry and its policyholders vulnerable to truly disastrous consequences.” World Watch 7, Nov./Dec. 1994.

  7. Meehl and Tebaldi 2004.

  8. The thermohaline circulation is a kind of massive oceanic conveyor belt powered by differences in ocean temperature and salinity. It has the effect of bathing Europe in warm water from the equator. In the 1980s, Suki Manabe and Ron Stouffer showed that the circulation pattern could be cut off by adding fresh water to the Arctic and North Atlantic— which could happen if global warming brings increased precipitation and melting Arctic ice. This would plunge countries such as the United Kingdom into Canadian-style winters. Again, it is not possible to predict exactly what will happen: estimates range from no significant change to a weakening of around 50 percent. IPCC 2001a.

  9. Canada’s East Coast ecosystem has been so altered by overfishing that cod may never recover. Frank et al. 2005.

  10. Hoegh-Guldberg 1999.

  11. Leemans and Eickhout 2004.

  12. Harvell et al. 2002.

  13. Garrett 1994.

  14. Preston 2002.

  15. This assumes an average annual return of about 6.8 percent, which is not far off the historical rate of return for the U.S. stock market. Baker et al. 2005; Watson 2005.

  16. In 1995, the vice-president of the World Bank, Ismail Seageldin, predicted, “If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.” Quoted in Shiva 2002, p. 1.

  17. Odds here are about 50 percent for an impact sometime in the century, though it probably won’t hit a city. Rees 2003, p. 92.

  18. Nanotechnologists stay up at night worrying about this. See Drexler 1986.

  19. Sagan and Turco 1990.

  20. James Lovelock, for example, supports the use of nuclear power. Lovelock 2006.

  21. Michael Crichton predicts that people in 2100 will “have a smaller global population, and enjoy more wilderness than we have today” (Crichton 2004, p. 570). Unless the human race goes off sex, the only way this can happen in one hundred years is if death rates go through the ceiling, as from a war or a pandemic. Perhaps the subject of his next novel . . .

  22. Ralph Abraham describes these revolutions in terms of the different types of attractors for a dynamical system. The agricultural revolution corresponds to a shift towards a stable attractor, the Industrial Revolution to a periodic attractor, and the current revolution to a chaotic attractor. Abraham 1994.

  23. “If she finds her system getting out of kilter because one element in it is insatiably greedy, she simply ditches that element as she has done so many others before. She is not in the least anthropocentric and has no special interest in intelligence. She is in fact impersonal, impartial Nature—not especially red in tooth and claw, but resolute to remain in general green and alive, and therefore liable to cross the projects of those who are acting so as to turn the green
, thriving world into a desert. And if this resistance fails, she herself can no doubt be killed with all her children. No universal fail-safe mechanism protects either her or us.” From Midgley 1985, p. 64.

  24. From IPCC 2001, table SPM-1.

  25. I exaggerate about economists, though a group of them did rank climate change at the bottom of a list of pressing global problems. See Anonymous 2005d, and http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com.

  26. Kahn and Wiener 1967; Albright 2002.

  27. As one New Orleans blogger wrote, just hours before Hurricane Katrina struck land and flooded his city: “If you stop and think about it for a moment, there’s something incredibly humbling about the situation we’re in right now, watching and waiting to see where Katrina goes. A week from now, the city of New Orleans—a great, industrialized city in the most powerful nation in the history of the world—might be annihilated, or it might be devastated but not destroyed, or it might be mildly damaged, or it might be perfectly fine. We have absolutely no control over, and a very limited ability to predict, which of these scenarios will occur. We are utterly at nature’s mercy.” “Humbled by Katrina,” posted by Brendan Loy on 26 Aug. 2005 at http://www.brendanloy.com.

  28. Abraham 1994, p. 215.

  APPENDICES

  1. The reason that the average distance between two random points is is that two points divide the line segment into three smaller segments; if the points are chosen at random, then the length of each segment will on average be the same. The lengths must add to 1, so the average length of each segment, and therefore the average distance between the points, is .

  2. Just as numbers in the decimal system are represented as their unique decimal expansion in powers of 10, so we can write a unique binary expansion in powers of 2. For example, 142 can be written as 142 = 1 × 102 + 4 × 101 + 2 × 100 (a number raised to the power 0 is 1), or equivalently as 142 = 1 × 27 + 0 × 26 + 0 × 25 + 0 × 24 + 1 × 23 + 1 × 22 + 1 × 21 + 0 × 20, which leads to the binary representation 10001110. Fractions are similarly represented using negative exponents.