Just four days after his appearance was announced, Ben Stein withdrew as the prospective commencement speaker at UVM’s graduation ceremony in May.

In his place, former Vt. Governor and chair of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, will address the graduates.

University Communications announced Dean’s appearance on Friday.

(Dean to replace Stein as speaker, UVM Cynic, 02/17/09)

Jeff Segal at “The Big Money” (I’d never heard of it either… hat tip to TPM) reports on continued murmurings in California about legalizing and taxing marijuana, especially in light of their massive $15 billion budget shortfall, which may rise as high as $42 billion next year.

So what are the numbers? A national legalization effort would save nearly $13 billion annually in enforcement costs and bring in $7 billion in yearly tax revenues, according to a study by Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron. Since California represents 13 percent of the U.S. economy, those numbers suggest the state could save $1.7 billion in enforcement costs and nab up to $1 billion in revenues. That doesn’t include any indirect revenues as, for example, rural farming communities grow or marijuana tourism, which has been lucrative for the Netherlands, takes off.

Of course it also doesn’t include the cost of creating a regulatory regime. And taking one nationwide study and extrapolating savings for a state based on its overall percentage of the economy is a crude calculus at best, but its probably helpful for a broad, ballpark notion of what such a legalization and regulation regime might generate in terms of revenues.

So what if we plugged Vermont, which represents a whopping .2% of the U.S. economy into that equation? Using the above logic, that would bring us down $26 million in enforcement costs, and up $14 million in increased revenue for a total budgetary impact of $40 million. Not a magic pill, but nothing to sneeze at.

First, a simple definition, per Wikipedia:

Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning “knowledge” or “knowing”) is the effort to discover and increase human understanding of how physical reality works. Using controlled methods, scientists collect data in the form of observations, records of observable physical evidence of natural phenomena, and analyze this information to construct theoretical explanations of how things work. Knowledge in science is gained through research. The methods of scientific research include the generation of hypotheses about how natural phenomena work, and experimentation that tests these hypotheses under controlled conditions. The outcome or product of this empirical scientific process is the formulation of theory that describes human understanding of physical processes and facilitates prediction.

There is an old story about blind men and an elephant.  Wikipedia reports it as follows:

In various versions of the tale, a group of blind men (or men in the dark) touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one touches a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes on what they felt, and learn they are in complete disagreement. The story is used to indicate that reality may be viewed differently depending upon one’s perspective, suggesting that what seems an absolute truth may be relative due to the deceptive nature of half-truths.

Many of us treat science similarly, only being willing to acknowledge part of reality because of having limited information and being too blind to see beyond what we think is true.

I will tell a brief version of a long story that I have referenced multiple times in recent months: last fall, I fell ill, and my doctor was convinced of what the illness was.  He was wrong about this and consistently wrong because he failed to seek the necessary data to get it diagnosed properly.  Multiple visits led him to misdiagnose the illness in multiple ways, to the point where I would point out and explain where the pain was and he’d repeat it back to me as though I had referenced a different location.  He had, for whatever reason, lost the interest in inquiry.  Once he came to a conclusion, he blinded himself to the process of science, to investigation.   This was dangerous and, if it hadn’t been caught in time, could have cost me a kidney.  

Science is not just something abstract.  It is something that we must do in order to appropriately respond to the world around us.

I frequently hear such phrases as “science tells us that…”

A good example of this comes from an anti-abortion group in Colorado:

What Science Tells Us

The Colorado Personhood Amendment has a very simple, easy-to-understand scientific basis that has been known by medical experts for years. Notice that many of the sources below are at least 20-30 years old. Each conclusion is firmly grounded in scientific and medical fact. There is not even a hint of uncertainty…what is stated below is known as clear fact in the medical community. Today, our incredible technology-including 3D and 4D ultrasounds provides “windows into the womb” and allows you and me to see for ourselves what doctors, geneticists, and embryologists have known for so long…that every preborn child is a unique individual; a living person. And shouldn’t our laws protect everyone?

This, of course, is a perfect example of what I’m talking about: people using “science” to describe what is, at its core, philosophy.

This is similar to what proponents of “intelligent design” would have us believe: the idea that their philosophy of what’s behind the evolutionary process is somehow “science.”

I think, though, that in promoting intelligent design or anti-abortion policies as though they are science, those who would oppose science as a discipline and replace it with a religious perspective are tipping their hands.  Their insistence upon presenting their views as science is a tacit admission that science is something of value.  They understand that science is better supported and has a stronger foundation in truth than their own arbitrary belief system, so they think that they can best promote their views by pretending they are science.

That’s why it’s crucial that we understand science for what it actually is.

I’m writing about this because I so often hear people talk about science as though it is a thing, an entity, a collective knowledge.  Science is, at its core, a process of inquiry.

Science is grounded in a process.  It’s grounded in the idea that theories need to be tested and that tests don’t prove or disprove theories but instead support or fail to support a given hypothesis.

I will use, for example, a self-serving theory.  Let’s suppose that I, being a short person, want to convince you that short people have faster motor responses than tall people.  

So my theory is that because we have a shorter path from the eye to the hand (in terms of neurons), that the shorter you are, the faster your response time to a visual stimuli will be.

That’s a theory.  But in order to test this theory, I need to collect data.  I need to define my terms and explain what I mean so that other people can also test this theory.

So I may decide to conduct an experiment, or do a survey or some other specific process that will collect the data I need to support or fail to support (*not* prove or disprove) my theory.  But you can’t collect data to support or reject a theory.  Theories are just ideas: vague concepts about the way the world works.  

What you need to support or reject is a hypothesis.  A hypothesis is a fairly simple thing that a lot of people have trouble grasping at first.  A hypothesis is simply a statement that:

1. is a prediction of what will happen in a given circumstance;
2. is either true or false;
3. can be tested through observation

So if my hypothesis were “short people have slower reflexes than tall people,” that would fail requirement #1 above.  If, instead, I said that “when tested for response time, there will be a strong positive correlation between height and response time,” I have a workable hypothesis.

It is a prediction, because it suggests what will happen in the future.  It is true or false: either the event will occur as I’ve described it or not.  It is testable (I will explain this in a moment).

If, on the other hand, my theory is that “an intelligent being is behind the theory of evolution,” there is no hypothesis I can use to test this.  I can create a hypothesis that fits the first two criteria (“when the intelligent being chooses to change the nature of a creature, the creature experiences a process of evolution”) but there is no observable test that we can use which verifies the existence of this intelligent being.

Remember, as well, that science doesn’t tell us whether or not God, or any other entity, exists.  Science is merely the process via which we determine what does and does not happen under a given circumstance.  We understand the process of gravity extremely well.  But we can’t say that gravity is not the finger of God holding us onto our home planet.  We can merely say that, whatever gravity is, all the evidence we’ve observed gives us a fairly strong and consistent understanding of what gravity does.  I.e., you pick up a chair.  You let go of the chair.  In most circumstances, it will fall down.  You drop a penny from on top of a building.  Not only do we understand what that penny will do.  We understand, given enough data, the exact velocity of that penny at any given second along its travels.  This is important because gravity induces not only speed, but acceleration.  The further something falls, the faster it gets.

So back to my hypothesis.  I can test my motor response hypothesis in a variety of ways, but I will pick an extremely low-tech approach: I do not use gadgets, gizmos, bells, whistles or any other such thing.  

In fact, I can test this theory with a yardstick and a blackboard, pencils and paper, and a group of students.  (I have, in fact, tested this very theory with my students many times).

I tell them to pair up.  Each pair gets a yardstick.  The rules are simple:

Each one writes down their height five times, each on a separate line.

Then they do as follows:

One student holds the yardstick up so it’s dangling down, with the “0” pointing down.

The other places a hand at the bottom of the yardstick, with fingers and thumb apart.  The subject then looks at the top of the yardstick and waits for his or her classmate to let go.  As soon as the drop takes place, the student tries to grasp the yardstick.  Then, you check to see what number on the centimeter marker the student’s thumb has hit, and write it down next to the student’s height.

You do this with twenty students and pretty soon you have enough to either support or fail to support the hypothesis: the faster the student’s response time, the lower that student’s numbers on this score will be.  You put this on a scatterplot (that’s where the chalkboard comes in) and you see whether or not you have any sort of real correlation between height and reflex time.

This is some of the simplest science there is, and still I have trouble explaining to people why this is science.

Too often, we mistake science for its products.  People, when they think of science, think technology.  But Mendel’s work on genetics is science, even though there was no electricity, no blinking lights, nothing that most of us would recognize as science today.  If, on the other hand, you have a high tech clock that looks very sci-fi-ish people think that it’s science.  It’s technology, and it’s pretty neat, but it’s not science:

Science is experimentation, exploration, and inquiry.  There is nothing wrong with religion, beliefs or philosophical questions.  But they are not science.

If, for example, you want to spend time inquiring and discussing when, if you continually add grains of sand to the same location, it is no longer a loose collection of grains of sand and, instead, a pile of sand, well that’s a neat question.  It is, however, not a scientific question.  It is a question of philosophy.  It is about how we conceptualize piles, and sand, and grains.  

The question over whether light is a wave or a particle, is something that does, to an extent, belong in the realm of science, but it’s still a philosophical question.  What’s important to scientists is not what we call the behavior of light, but what that behavior is.

There are people out there who will diminish what science is and what it means by trying to present non-science as science.  They want to diminish the meaning of it, by expanding it beyond the realm of reason.  

I believe in science because it is true.  It has meaning.  It has power.

I believe in science because it is our best possible means via which to find a way to survive the coming energy crisis.  

I believe in science because even if we are not always wise enough to understand what we learn from it, ignorance is worse.  

I believe in science because I would rather live in a world of honest inquiry than one of fear and hatred of the unknown.  

When I was a child, I had a dream that still terrifies me to this day.  I dreamed that I was in a bubble, blissfully happy, stupid and ignorant of all around me.  I dreamed that I was safe, secure, and brainless.  I awoke from that dream in a sweat, horrified by the thought of it.

I believe in science because, if it comes to it, I’d rather live a short life with my eyes wide open than a long life afraid to look, so sure of what I know because I’ve only felt the elephant’s trunk.  I’d rather live a life of inquiry, even if mixed with frustration and anger, than one of blissful ignorance and safe security.

I believe in science, and I believe that people who refuse to do so are a bigger threat than we acknowledge and more dangerous than we care to admit.

I believe in science, and I believe that those among us who don’t are waging a war against those among us who do.

So I guess I believe that science needs a battle cry, too.  

And hey, because to believe in science as much as I do, you have to be at least a little bit of a geek, I’m ready to pick my cry and shout it loud.

HYPOTHESIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIZE.

Amen.