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Reason magazine / Science

09 09 2008

A 1-in-1,000 Chance of GÃ¶tterdÃ¤mmerung
03 09 2008 Will the world come to an end on September 10? That fear is motivating two lawsuits—one American, another European—that aim to stop the physicists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) from switching on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on that day. The LHC is a $10 billion 17-mile long particle accelerator lying in a circular tunnel beneath the border of France and Switzerland. Its massive superconducting magnets cooled with liquid helium accelerate two beams of protons and lead nuclei to nearly the speed of light. These particle beams will eventually be crashed into each other to produce temperatures and particles not seen since microseconds after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. One of the chief goals of the LHC experiments is to find the elusive Higgs boson, the only fundamental particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics that has not been directly observed. The Higgs boson plays a key role in explaining the origins of mass in other elementary particles. Exciting, if esoteric research, to be sure, but why oppose it? Walter Wagner, a former nuclear safety officer, and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho, have filed a civil suit in federal district court in Hawaii asking for a temporary restraining order to stop the researchers at CERN from switching on the LHC until further safety analyses are completed. In Europe, Professor Otto Rössler, a chemist at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany filed a similar suit with the European Court of Human Rights. These LHC opponents fear that the Earth could be destroyed by vacuum bubbles, magnetic monopoles, microscopic black holes, or strangelets produced by the high-energy proton-proton collisions planned by CERN physicists. Vacuum bubbles have been described as a kind of "cosmic cancer." If it turns out that there is a lower energy state into which the universe could settle, then the LHC might produce "bubbles" of such a state which would then expand, ripping apart the Earth and eventually the entire universe. If magnetic monopoles were produced they might induce protons to decay and thus destroy normal matter. Microscopic black holes might grow by gobbling up the Earth. And strangelets are combinations of quarks that theoretically interact with normal matter and transform it into strange matter. At the Global Catastrophic Risks conference at Oxford University this past July, CERN's Michelangelo Mangano described the findings of a report released in June by the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG). The bottom line: "There is no basis for any conceivable threat from the LHC." While the LHC safety report goes through a number of scenarios, its chief point is that the energies produced in the LHC are "far below those of the highest-energy cosmic-ray collisions that are observed regularly on Earth." In fact, cosmic rays produced by phenomena in the universe "conduct" more than 10 million LHC-like experiments per second. If such energies actually produced vacuum bubbles, microscopic black holes, magnetic monopoles, or strangelets that could destroy planets and stars, physicists wouldn't be here to perform experiments in the LHC now. At the Global Catastrophic Risk conference, Future of Humanity Institute research associate Toby Ord asked an interesting question: How certain should we be about safety when there could be a risk to the survival of the human species? As Ord argued, "When an expert provides a calculation of the probability of an outcome, they are really providing the probability of the outcome occurring, given that their argument is watertight. However, their argument may fail for a number of reasons such as a flaw in the underlying theory, a flaw in their modeling of the problem, or a mistake in their calculations." In other words, for the argument that the LHC poses no existential risk to humanity to be sound, the theory underlying it must be adequate. But physical theories have been upended in the past. Ord pointed out that Lord Kelvin had calculated the age of the sun. Using the best physics of his time, Lord Kelvin concluded that the sun was 100 million years old. It was not until the discovery of radioactivity that the current estimate of 4.6 billion years could be calculated. So Ord argued that it's not unreasonable to think that there is a 1-in-1,000 chance that the theories underlying the LHC are flawed in some important details. In addition, the model of the problem itself could be flawed. As an example of how flawed models can impact the real world, Ord cited the Castle Bravo 15-megaton thermonuclear bomb test in 1954, the explosive yield of which was two and half times what had been calculated by the bomb's designers at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Those experts had missed the fact that the lithium-7 isotope, when bombarded by high energy neutrons, decomposes into tritium and boosts neutron production. As a more recent example, Ord claimed that Lloyds of London's insurance models for New Orleans had failed to consider the risk that the city's levees might fail. And finally, it's possible that errors in calculation could slip into errors of analysis. Ord cited the frequency of miscalculations in medication dosages as an example of such errors. To get an estimate of argument failure, Ord cited survey evidence which found that 1-in-1,000 to 1-in-100 articles are retracted from high-impact scientific journals. For an article to be retracted something must be found to be seriously wrong with it. "If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect," argued Ord. He suggested that multiplying the probabilities that the theory, model, and/or calculations on which the operation of the LHC rests are wrong dramatically increases the probability estimates that switching it on will destroy the world. Thus Ord concluded that the LHC should not be switched on. Mangano from CERN objected furiously to Ord's presentation, arguing, "I can apply that estimate of a 1-in-1,000 chance to everything." Ord responded that his analysis should only apply to experiments that pose an existential risk to humanity, not to experiments whose outcomes can be ameliorated later. I asked Ord if he could think of another experiment or situation to which he would apply his analysis. He looked surprised for a moment and then reluctantly said, "No." Over canapés after Ord's talk, several of his colleagues expressed glee at the prospect that a philosopher's arguments might derail a $10 billion physics experiment. Personally, I estimate the probability of that happening at less than 1-in-1,000. As intriguing as Ord's argument is, I am ultimately unpersuaded by it. Why? Largely because the empirical evidence is that the universe has been running trillions of these high-energy physics "experiments" for billions of years without disastrous results. In fact, Ord's colleagues Nick Bostrom and Max Tegmark from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculate that the empirical evidence suggests a conservative estimate of the annual risk that LHC-like experiments would destroy the earth is 1-in-a-trillion. At the end of his talk, Mangano reminded the Oxford conferees, "Jeopardizing the future of scientific research would be a global catastrophe." Any theory, model, or calculation that suggests otherwise is clearly flawed. Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Show Respect for Women: Ban Contraception!
27 08 2008 Forty years ago, Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, the encyclical arguing that contraception is against God's will. In celebration of its 40th anniversary, Hoover Institution research fellow Mary Eberstadt has written a passionate and subtly misleading essay in the religious and public policy journal First Things arguing that Humanae Vitae's specific predictions of social harm arising from widespread use of contraception have been vindicated. "The encyclical warned of four resulting trends," writes Eberstadt, "a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments." But before Eberstadt launches into her polemic about the alleged prescience of Humanae Vitae, she detours to a discussion about the myth of overpopulation. She denounces the neo-Malthusians such as Paul Ehrlich, whose book The Population Bomb (1968) appeared two months after Humanae Vitae. "Less than half a century later, these preoccupations with overwhelming birth rates appear as pseudo-scientific as phrenology," writes Eberstadt. While that's more or less true, it's surpassingly odd that nowhere in Eberstadt's essay does she mention the role that wider availability of modern contraception and abortion played in reducing global total fertility rates from 6 to 2.5 children per woman over the past 40 years. With increased literacy, urbanization, and economic growth generally come declines in desired family size, but failing even to acknowledge the wider availability of contraception as a factor in lowering fertility rates reveals a telling intellectual blind spot. Moving from last to first in the alleged four prescient predictions of Humanae Vitae, isn't it true that some governments spooked by overpopulation alarmists did attempt to impose contraceptive use on their citizens? After all, alarmists like Paul Ehrlich even toyed with (but rejected as politically infeasible) the idea that governments should dump "temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size." No government tried to spike water supplies, but, as Eberstadt points out, the Chinese communists have ruthlessly enforced a one-child policy, and in the 1970s, India ordered more than 7 million involuntary sterilizations. It is worth pointing out that coerced contraception has never been adopted as a general policy in developed countries; even the suggestion that welfare benefits might be tied to willingness to use the long-lasting contraceptive Norplant was rejected. Eberstadt does not explain what the odious population control policies in Third World countries have to do with the voluntary use of contraception in developed countries. Eberstadt cites the work of economics Nobelist George Akerlof and Brookings Institution economist Janet Yellen who argue that the widespread availability of effective contraception and safe abortion produced a "reproductive technology shock" in relations between women and men that is still reverberating through our culture. Prior to effective contraception, women would only agree to have sex with men who promised to marry them in the event of pregnancy. Men made such promises because they knew that other women would make the same demand. Effective contraception and safe abortion changed that age-old dynamic. "Women who were willing to get an abortion or who reliably used contraception no longer found it necessary to condition sexual relations on a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy," explains Akerlof. These women could engage in pre-marital sex without the risk of unwed motherhood. So women who wanted children or who objected to contraception or abortion were at a competitive disadvantage. "These women feared, correctly, that if they refused sexual relations, they would risk losing their partners," writes Akerlof. "Sexual activity without commitment was increasingly expected in premarital relationships." While it takes two to tango, women now get to decide the outcome of the dance regardless of the preferences of their partners. As Winthrop University economist Robert Stonebraker limns the Akerlof study, "Many men reasoned that they were not to blame for unwanted births. After all, women had access to contraceptives and to abortions. If women choose not to avail themselves of contraceptives or abortions, they should bear the consequences of that choice." For many men, women consciously choosing to have children over their objections often looks like entrapment. It this is mismatch between the desires of some women and some men that has led to the increase in out-of-wedlock births. Did this titanic shift in sexual power politics lead to "a lessening of respect for women by men?" Polling data would suggest just the opposite. For example, a poll earlier this year found that 97 percent of Americans say that equal rights for women is important and three-fourths believe it is very important. In addition, a Pew Center poll in 1999 asked whether life has gotten better or worse since around 1950 for various groups of Americans. A full 83 percent of respondents said life had gotten better for women over the past half century, while only 9 percent thought their lot had worsened. Also, 70 percent of Americans say that men and women make equally good leaders. And a 2005 Gallup poll noted that Americans no longer differentiate much on the basis of gender in the careers they would advise young men and women to pursue. Recent research suggests that women having careers outside the home actually enhances the stability of marriages. Despite the proliferation of coarse sexual images in some precincts of the popular culture, the fact is that violence between intimate partners has fallen by nearly two-thirds since 1993. Similarly, rape rates have dropped by more than 80 percent since the 1970s. Although crime trends are driven by many different factors, these data suggest that respect for women has increased rather than diminished since the advent of effective contraception. Eberstadt also takes after "the Pill's bastard child, ubiquitous pornography." She knows that the old assertion that porn leads to rape is false. Instead, Eberstadt craftily turns to no less a personage than the feminist victimologist Naomi Wolf who complains that porn "is responsible for deadening male libido to real women." Porn doesn't rev men up; instead, it saps their lust. Oddly, in the next paragraph, Eberstadt quotes Bishop Charles Chaput who asserted in 1998: "Contraception has released males—to a historically unprecedented degree—from responsibility for their sexual aggression." Aggression? Just a few lines before, Eberstadt was citing complaints that guys can't be bothered to look up from the alluring images on their computer monitors to catch a coy glance from a real woman. What about Humanae Vitae's prediction that contraception would lead to increased infidelity? Probably the best numbers available come from the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey. The survey's findings were compiled in The Social Organization of Sexuality (1994) which reported, "Over 90 percent of the women and 75 percent of the men in every cohort report fidelity within their marriage, over its entirety." Again, data are spotty, but extramarital sex appears to have declined over the past half century or so. Interestingly, the General Social Survey found that disapproval for extramarital sex has increased between 1972 and now, rising from 70 to 80 percent. In 2007, 93 percent of respondents to a Pew Center poll said that faithfulness was very important for a successful marriage. Of course, part of the explanation for this decline in extramarital sex is that easier divorce means that people are no longer have to tomcat around because they are stuck in unsatisfactory marriages. It's worth noting that more than two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women. The divorce rate tripled in the United States between 1960 and 1980, peaking at 5.3 per 1,000 people in 1981, falling to 4.2 per 1,000 in 2000, and falling again down to 3.6 per 1,000 in 2005, the lowest rate since 1970. Interestingly, a "divorce divide" between the college educated and other Americans appears to be opening up. University of Maryland researcher Steven Martin reports, "From the 1970s to the 1990s, rates of marital dissolution fell by almost half among 4-year college graduates, but remained relatively high and steady among women with less than a 4-year college degree." He further suggests that college graduates might be the vanguard of a cultural shift away from divorce. Contraceptive use is highest among college educated women. Pre-marital sex has definitely increased since the advent of modern contraception. According to survey data, 48 percent of people who turned 15 between 1954 and 1963 had premarital sex before age 20. That rose as contraception became more prevalent, such that 72 percent of people who turned 15 between 1974 and 1983 had engaged in premarital sex before age 20, a figure that has remained essentially flat. Does this mean that contraception has led to a general lowering of moral standards? That depends on whether or not one thinks that it is immoral to enjoy premarital sex when it is possible to avoid the risk of having an unwanted child. It turns out that most Americans no longer regard premarital sex as particularly sinful. In 1972, General Social Survey polling found that 49 percent of adults regarded premarital sex as always or almost always wrong. By 2000, 63 percent of Americans thought premarital sex is not wrong or only sometimes wrong. Perhaps the most salient evidence for a lowering of moral standards is the effect that divorce and single-parenthood has on children. The pursuit of marital satisfaction sacrifices the interests of children. While nearly 70 percent of children are growing up with two parents, some research suggests that kids who grow up with two parents tend to do better in school and in life than those who don't. Other research suggests that divorce doesn't necessarily produce emotional and psychological basket cases. In a review of recent research, California clinical psychologist Joan Berlin Kelly found the emotional, social, and academic differences between children whose parents divorce and those from intact families are "quite small." In 2000, Kelly told the San Francisco Chronicle, "The long-term outcome of divorce for the majority of children is resiliency rather than dysfunction." In For Better or Worse: Divorce Reconsidered (2002), University of Virginia psychologist Mavis Hetherington reported, "Twenty-five percent of youths from divorced families in comparison to ten percent from non-divorced families did have serious social, emotional, and psychological problems." This is certainly not good, but it does mean that the vast majority of children from divorced families do about as well as children from intact families. So on balance, is Eberstadt right? Have Humanae Vitae's dire predictions really been vindicated? For the most part, clearly not. On the plus side, the majority of women who have taken advantage of the availability of contraception have been big winners. By being able to choose when—and if—to have children, they have been freer to pursue life projects in wider social, commercial, creative, and intellectual realms. In addition, many men cherish the experience of sharing their lives with intellectual and emotional co-equals. However, Eberstadt is right that the biggest losers have been women who, in earlier times, would have secured financial and, one hopes, emotional support for herself and her children from a man by the simple act of becoming pregnant. Another hopeful sign that fewer women are pursuing this outmoded strategy is that teen pregnancy rates declined between 1991 and 2006 (with an uptick last year). The chief reason was the increased use of contraception among teens. Perhaps the next generation is adapting to the changed sexual dynamics engendered by the reproductive technological shock of the last half century. Infidelity is not rife. Human beings learn morality, like everything else, by means of trial-and-error. Sexual moral standards are not lower, they are different. Men and women are still figuring out what the proper balance in sexual relations should be in light of effective contraception. And by most indicia, respect for women by men has never been higher. Women enjoy the same political, economic, and social rights as men for the first time in history. Although some women pine nostalgically for the halcyon era in which all men were Fred Astaire or Cary Grant, the most telling fact is that few American women would turn back the clock to the circumstances of women prior to 1970, much less earlier. So Eberstadt has it wrong. Humanae Vitae has not been vindicated in most respects. There has not been a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; nor the coercive use of reproductive technologies by our government. Toward the end of her essay, Eberstadt cites the moral authority of Martin Luther who in "a commentary on Genesis declared contraception to be worse than incest or adultery." This is the same Martin Luther who declared, "Girls begin to talk and stand on their own sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops." Luther's thinking on the proper relation between men and women is complex, but it should be remembered that he also brutally said, "God formed her body to belong to a man...Let them bear children till they die of it. That is what they are here for...." Yes indeed, proscribing contraception is really the way to respect women.
Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

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