The torture debate in the U.S. has highlighted a key paradox in American ideology: We value human rights, but we also fear outside threats, enough that we’re willing to put the rights issue aside when we want to wring truth out of a suspected Al Qaeda operative.

But what about the medical side of torture? Search magazine has a fascinating article on how doctors are specializing in torture detection, and researching how torture affects the body and mind. Specifically, writer Jina Moore profiles Rajeev Bais and Lars Beattie, two doctors at the Libertas Human Rights Clinic in Queens who provide medical affidavits for U.S. asylum-seekers who claim they were tortured in their home countries.

These affidavits hold a ton of weight with judges, and play a key role in determining whether or not asylum is granted. The reason is that Bai and Beattie can tell with relative certainty if an applicant is telling the truth about being tortured, first by interviewing and observing him, and then doing a physical exam to look for corroborating evidence—in effect, using the patient’s body to check out his story.

And there’s plenty of evidence to look for, such as scar tissue, ligament or muscle tears, popped ear drums, and poorly-healed bones. Some methods, like burning with cigarettes or brands, leave easily identifiable scars, while others are usually mark-free—falanga, a practice in which victims are beaten on the bottoms of their feet with rods, causes excrutiating pain but leaves little to no permanent damage.

The dichotomy, as Moore notes, is interesting: Rather than the methodology of torture, which is to inflict pain on the body in order to wring truth from the mouth, these investigators use the body to corroborate the victim’s already-told story. As Moore puts it:

Bodies, in other words, can expose a lie. One doctor in Manhattan interviewed a man who claimed the scars above his nipples were the result of torture he suffered in Liberia under Charles Taylor’s regime. But the scars were symmetrical and equidistant, implying a precision which raised the doctor’s suspicion. A Liberian culture organization to which he described the markings told him the scars were more likely evidence of a tribal ritual ceremony.

This mix of psychology and forensic medicine can have gray areas, and Beattie admits he makes plenty of judgment calls:

Beattie never doubted his story, but he did wonder about the moral equivalence of pain: Who’s to say, he wondered, that [a tortured patient] never inflicted brutality on someone else?

“I decided, look, I believe him as a human being. I believe he was victimized there,” Beattie says. “And I believe I’m doing the right thing by writing the affidavit. But you know, I’m sure—” He paused. “Other people might feel otherwise.”

Moral judgments aside, the increased doctor attention on torture has led to a necessary ramp-up in research—as well as investigative reporting. Dr. Steven Miles even searched through 35,000 pages of government documents outlining the role medical personnel played in military interrogations in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, resulting in the book, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror. Among his most alarming findings was this:

Miles also found more than two hundred military studies, by his count, that concluded the intelligence elicited by torture is usually faulty.

Which leads to a different conversation entirely.

The Department of Defense has apparently grown a conscience. After nearly six years of deploying troops to Iraq, many of them parents, the DOD is acknowledging that kids are spending years without a mother or father around. And, given that mental health issues are already taking a severe toll on Iraq vets, putting stress on marriages and disrupting lives, it’s only logical that children are getting caught in the crossfire, so to speak.

So, rather than oh, say, ban repeated deployments or lift stop-loss orders, the government has decided to nip the absent-parent problem in the bud by creating… computerized parents. According to a proposal solicitation (via InformationWeek) on the Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Web site, the DOD is looking for a “highly interactive PC- or Web-based application to allow family members to verbally interact with ‘virtual’ renditions of deployed Service Members.”(Insert “Hello, DAD”—”Hello, Little Dave” joke here.)

The proposal outlines the idea as follows:

The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics. For instance, a child may get a response from saying “I love you”, [sic] or “I miss you”, [sic] or “Good night mommy/daddy.” This is a technologically challenging application because it relies on the ability to have convincing voice-recognition, artificial intelligence, and the ability to easily and inexpensively develop a customized application tailored to a specific parent.

In other words, we should make computers that lie to small children by pretending to be their parents.

The DOD argues that this “simulated mommy” program would work for/appeal to kids because “[o]ver 80 percent of American children between the ages of three and five regularly use computers, and 83 percent of families have a computer in their home.” Of course, that’s really the rub now, isn’t it: Kids today are remarkably computer-savvy, and are thus more able to tell the difference between an AI simulation and their dad. And we won’t even touch the potential for disaster this idea has should the actual parent never wind up coming home. 

Related:
RB: Out of a Job? Electronic Warfare Firms Are Hiring!
RB: Over a Year After YouTube Ban, Military Launches “TroopTube”

Image: iStockPhoto

What’s worse, the genocide in Darfur or the horrors of North Korean prison camps? While the question may seem a bit like comparing global warming and the financial crisis, it can be useful to evaluate and compare all the awful things humans are doing to each other around the globe.

And in order to create an effective comparison, you need a set of objective data that can be analyzed to evaluate wars and even give direction for intervention and deterrence. While throwing around numbers like “45,000 Iraqi civilians killed” can be useful for nabbing attention, it typically does little for inspiring solutions.

With this idea in mind, Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hicks of King’s College in London and Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway College in Egham, UK, have created a “Dirty War Index” that quantifies all of the various atrocities we commit—such as rape, civilian murder, or torture—and labels them as a proportion of the total number of incidents reported. For example, the DWI of civilian casualties would be “the number of civilian deaths divided by the overall number of mortalities in the conflict, both civilian and combatant, multiplied by 100.”

While turning carnage, beatings, and other horrors into data might sound callous, it can have major benefits as far as finding solutions in war-torn areas, says University of Toronto biostatistics professor Nathan Taback:

In general, gathering data on the health effects of conflict can illuminate patterns of violence that may not be apparent from anecdotal evidence, and that have not been taken seriously until quantitative evidence was available.

Of course, the danger is that, as with all statistics, DWI ratings can vastly oversimplify, or even potentially muddle complex issues (think of the old “You can prove anything with statistics” adage). Then again, sometimes numbers can reveal pretty incredible things, like this observation from Hicks:

In our analysis on casualties from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, we found that the proportion of females killed was significantly higher when Palestinian forces targeted Israelis (40%) than when they targeted Palestinians (3%), or when Israeli forces targeted Palestinians (5%).

Related:
RB: Making War with YouTube: The Technology Battle in Sri Lanka
RB: Technology Plays Key Role in Mumbai Attacks, Both for Terrorists and Civilians

In the wake of near-daily scandals involving billions of dollars, it can be easy to lose sight of the rampant unrest in the rest of the world—including Sri Lanka, the small Asian nation that has been fighting a lengthy civil war. The conflict is between the government and a group of insurgents known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and while the violence has been ongoing and tragic, the fascinating aspect is how both sides are using technology to spin their actions, gain public support, and put down the other side.

Brian Calvert at World Politics Review, who is doing an investigative series on the country’s unique technological warfare, reports that releasing YouTube videos depicting things like suicide bombers has become standard practice for both parties. The government even has a headquarters for its information campaign, called the Media Center for National Security, which was established in 2006 to “disseminate accurate defense-related news within short as possible time, to both local and international media, and then at the same time to counter the LTTE propaganda.”

The insurgents, meanwhile, have formed their own technological strategy, described as follows:

The government is battling an image of the Tigers as underdogs, led by a leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, whose message has not changed in 25 years: The Tamil people face eradication by the Sinhalese majority. There is no salvation for them but through armed struggle for Eelam. The Tamil Tigers are that struggle.

Prabhakaran has taken the conflict deep into the information environment, accessing the imaginations of supporters through satellite links and radio signals, on Web sites and in chat rooms. Each attack and every stunt builds on his message, encouraging the diaspora to send money, spurring weapons sales and keeping the Tigers armed and viable.

While the information depicted in these videos and other online sources may not be factually perfect—journalists “complain that information coming out of the Media Center is impossible to verify and often contradicts equally hard-to-confirm LTTE statement”—it certainly gets the message across, with some videos grabbing hundreds of thousands of views. And for an insurgency like the Tigers, it could mean greater public support, new recruits, and even media attention (in the form of stories like this one) for their cause.

Though whether that translates into military victories has yet to be determined.

Related:
RB: Technology Plays Key Role in Mumbai Attacks, Both for Terrorists and Civilians
RB: Could Twitter Be a Tool for Terrorists?

Earlier this year, the American Psychological Association voted (at last) to ban its members from participating in interrogations at U.S. detention centers, including the notorious Guantanamo Bay. This marked a major shift from its previous stance, which permitted work with interrogation (some of which is known in certain circles as “torture”) despite the fact that both the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have banned any affiliation with the practice for years.

So what’s different about psychologists, that it took them this long to decide that participation in torture wasn’t something the field should strive for? Stanley Fish at the New York Times blog “Think Again” offers the following explanation:

One answer can be found in the A.M.A.’s explanation of its prohibition: “Physicians must not conduct, directly participate in, or monitor an interrogation with an intent to intervene, because this undermines the physician’s role as healer.” The American Psychiatric Association is even more explicit: “Psychiatrists . . . owe their primary obligation to the well being of their patients.”

Psychology, on the other hand, is not exclusively a healing profession. To be sure, there are psychologists who provide counseling, therapy and other services to patients; but there are many psychologists who think of themselves as behavioral scientists.

It is their task to figure out how the mind processes and responds to stimuli, or how the emotions color and even create reality, or how reasoning and other cognitive activities are affected by changes in the environment. Their product is not mental health, but knowledge; their skills are not diagnostic, but analytic.

Fair point, though it doesn’t really weigh the fact that ethical considerations govern all scientists, psychologists or no. From the Stanford experiment to the controversy surrounding self-experimentation, scientific discovery has never operated on a separate, removed level from human rights. Certain behaviors—such as torture—could very well provide valuable data for psychologists, and maybe even lead to breakthroughs in the field. But do the potential benefits outweigh the ethical landmines of participation (at least through silent concession) in human rights violations? Put another way: Do we really have to condone torture to learn about the human psyche?

Related:
RB: American Political System Prevents Tyranny But May Prolong Use of Torture
RB: And Now for Something Seriously Sick: Torture Game Mocks Real-Life Misery

Most people peruse blogs at the office, meaning that if you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you weren’t a victim of Bloody November, in which around 500,000 jobs were systematically purged from the U.S. workforce—many of them from the tech sector. But one industry that’s been hiring in droves, reports the Boston Globe, is defense contractors, particularly those focused on the latest in war technology.

The cluster of defense companies based in New England is expected to weather the downturn reasonably well, because of their tech focus:

[R]ather than building entire jets, ships, tanks, or ground installations, many of the region’s defense firms develop the electronics, combat, and communications systems they use…

Area contractors, for instance, work on electronic eavesdropping, signal processing for radar systems, and equipment used to integrate intelligence from different sources, technologies critical to helping the US military and allies battle terrorists in multiple countries.

Not that we’re suggesting qualified applicant shouldn’t jump at a well- (or any-) paying gig, but it’s worth asking: Is this really the place we want to be re-channeling our tech talent?

There’s also the question of stability: These firms must know their clock is ticking, and that once Obama takes office, there’s about a 99.99% chance the defense budget will be machete-slashed and the Bush waterfall of cash for military spending will be over. Which calls into question just how stable these—or any—jobs are in the long term.

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RB: Are Scientists to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
RB: Could Twitter Be a Tool for Terrorists?
RB: Forget Al-Qaeda; Apparently It’s the Aliens We Need to Worry About

It’s always interesting when technology and religion/culture collide like Mac trucks. The BBC reports that Muxlim Pal, the first virtual world aimed at the Muslim community, is now live in Beta, and will officially launch in 2009.

The site, aimed at “Muslims in Western nations,” is based on the standard virtual world model popularized by The Sims and the eponymous Second Life. Each player gets an avatar that can be fitted with a number of inventory and wardrobe options including hijabs. Avatars can earn and spend currency, though the creators haven’t set up any of the money-making systems pervasive in Second Life. Each avatar multiple “meters” governing its “happiness, fitness, knowledge and spirituality that change when the character carries out tasks in the social world.”

Mohamed El-Fatatry, the founder of the parent site, Muxlim.com, stresses that the focus of the site is not religion itself—of the 26 different content categories on the site, only one is religion. Rather, the focus is on creating a space for Muslim culture in the virtual realm:

“We are not a religious site, we are a site that is focused on the lifestyle… This is for anyone who is remotely interested in the Muslim culture and the Muslim lifestyle.”

The English-only virtual world is equipped with a beach bar, arena, and shopping areas, and each user is given a private room to decorate. As for content, it’s no bacchanalian Second Life: Any content portraying violence, drugs, sexual references or profanity can be flagged by users and quickly removed.

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RB: People Are Racist in the Virtual World, Too

• Just in time for winter: A complete history of the flu through the ages.

• The military fought the whales… and won.

• What, “Global Warming Poobah” was already taken? Gore offered (but turned down) job as White House “Climate Czar.”

• We can’t decide if this is heartening (drivers are being safe!) or mortally depressing: California air pollution kills more people per year than car crashes.

• A soldier-blogger gets his moment in the spotlight—though the real question is, what does he think of Trooptube?

Humans have been historically eager to kill each other. Throughout history, we’ve thought up all sorts of nutty reasons to slaughter our fellow man that had nothing to do with immediate survival of the fittest. We tend to chalk all these wars up to cultural differences fed by a species-wide need to be ideologically right (and impose that right-ness on others), along with a knack for weapons discovery culminating in a technology boom that’s constantly supplying bigger and better ways to off each other. Add governments to the mix, and you’ve got a big steaming pile of questionably necessary interspecies violence.

So it’s a little—but not a lot—surprising that the growing scientific consensus is that war not only dates back to the origins of humankind, but has also played “an integral role” in or species’ evolution. According to this theory, which emerged during a recent conference at the University of Oregon, the war “instinct” was present in our common ancestor with chimps, and has been a “significant selection pressure on the human species,” as evolutionary psychologist Mark Van Vugt put it.

His and his colleagues’ reasoning goes something like this: Evidence exists to show that war and humans have been friends since the beginning (fossils of early humans show wounds consistent with combat injuries). As such, we would have evolved “psychological adaptations to a warlike lifestyle.” To this end, researchers have presented “the strongest evidence yet that males—whose larger and more muscular bodies make them better suited for fighting—have evolved a tendency towards aggression outside the group but cooperation within it.”

In other words, men have evolved to be team players within their own clans, and be warriors with everyone else—much like the behavior observed in chimpanzees, who regularly engage in short bursts of intergroup violence to weaken neighboring groups of males.

So should we resign ourselves to a future of ever-escalating violence due to our Darwinist predisposition for war? Not necessarily, says John Tooby, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who insists on looking at the bright side:

“The interesting thing about war is we’re focused on the harm it does… But it requires a super-high level of cooperation [within military organizations].”

Fair enough. Now if we could just figure out how to apply that trait to government.

Related:
RB: Over a Year After YouTube Ban, Military Launches “TroopTube”
RB: How Green Is My Army?

Remember when the military announced it was cutting off troops’ access to YouTube, MySpace, and other video-uploading sites because of bandwidth and “security” problems—i.e. they were worried about videos like this getting uploaded and watched around the world? Well, now it seems they’ve reconsidered that decision—sort of.

Now, the military is launching its own user-generated site, called “TroopTube” (insert joke here). While registration is required, it allows members of the armed forces, along with their families, to gain a password and start uploading content. The site can also be accessed by civilian Defense Department employees and “supporters,” whatever that means.

So given the restricted access to the site, will troops be free to upload anything they like?

Hardly. According to the AP, “a Pentagon employee screens each [upload] for taste, copyright violations and national security issues.” Which takes care of any questions about whether or not any of those cell phone videos from combat zones will ever make it onto the site.

On the technology end, TroopTube might even have something to teach its juggernaut predecessor:

[T]he [creator]’s real forte is making sure searches on the site turn up the best video results. Delve’s system turns a video’s sound into a text transcript. It pares unimportant words like “this” and “that,” then compares what’s left against a massive database of words commonly uttered in proximity to each other, collected from crawling hundreds of millions of Web pages.

The result: Even if speech recognition software trips on the one word someone is searching for, there’s a good chance [the site] can still deliver relevant results.

Though if it really wants to surpass YouTube, all TroopTube needs to do is make a profit.

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RB: Could Twitter Be a Tool for Terrorists?
RB: Whales Battle U.S. Military…and (Probably) Lose
RB: How Green Is My Army?

Image: iStockPhoto

The Army has always been clever at thinking up all the vast and strange ways our enemies might use to kill us (or vice versa). Now Wired writes that an intelligence report is circulating containing warnings that terrorists might plan an attack using that deadliest of all technological terrors: Twitter.

The 11-page paper in question [pdf] is not solely devoted to Twitter—in total, it includes the following topics:

Pro Terrorist Propaganda Mobile Interfaces
Mobile Phone GPS for Movements, Ops, Targeting, and Exploitation
The Mobile Phone as a Surveillance Tool
Voice Changers for Terrorist Phone Calls
A Red Teaming Perspective on the Potential Terrorist Use of Twitter

In assessing Twitter’s danger to the free world, the authors note that the micro-blogging site was used as a “countersurveillance” tool by activists at the Republican National Convention, who used it to Tweet the location of local police. (What they fail to mention is that said local police could have pretty easily monitored the Tweets in question and adjusted their plans accordingly). The paper then goes on to lay out three possible “Twitter Attack!” scenarios:

Scenario 1: Terrorist operative “A” uses Twitter with… a cell phone camera/video function to send back messages, and to receive messages, from the rest of his [group]… Other members of his [group] receive near real time updates (similar to the movement updates that were sent by activists at the RNC) on how, where, and the number of troops that are moving in order to conduct an ambush.

Scenario 2: Terrorist operative “A” has a mobile phone for Tweet messaging and for taking images. Operative “A” also has a separate mobile phone that is actually an explosive device and/or a suicide vest for remote detonation. Terrorist operative “B” has the detonator and a mobile to view “A’s” Tweets and images. This may allow “B” to select the precise moment of remote detonation based on near real time movement and imagery that is being sent by “A.”

Scenario 3: Cyber Terrorist operative “A” finds U.S. [soldier] Smith’s Twitter account. Operative “A” joins Smith’s Tweets and begins to elicit information from Smith. This information is then used for… identity theft, hacking, and/or physical [attacks]. This scenario… has already been discussed for other social networking sites, such as My Space [sic] and/or Face Book [also sic].

Granted, we’re no intelligence experts, but it seems to us that if government officials can map every jihadist Web page on the Internet, they can monitor a few suspicious looking Twitter feeds.

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RB: Caught in a National Disaster? Twitter May Save Your Life.
RB: As Obama Makes History, the Internet Records It
RB: Want to Send Your Representative a Message? Use Twitter!

If you’ve picked up a newspaper, watched a TV, or checked your 401K in the past few months, there’s a near-perfect chance that you’ve experienced the full miasma of fear, anxiety, and helplessness that accompany loss of control. We hate that feeling—it’s a trait embedded in the human condition. And we’ll go to any lengths—including “developing” the ability to talk with the dead, see invisible patterns, and read the stars—in order to avoid it.

Sharon Begley at Newsweek writes that a whopping 90 percent of Americans either think they’ve experienced a paranormal event, or believe that they can happen. And when occurrences—like oh, say, worldwide financial crises—remind us just how futile our desire for order and control really are, our “ability” to see the future in tea leaves by no coincidence begins to rise. As Begley puts it:

Historically, such times have been marked by a surge in belief in astrology, ESP and other paranormal phenomena, spurred in part by a desperate yearning to feel a sense of control in a world spinning out of control.

There’s also the study in this month’s issue of Science finding that lack of control directly increases our “invisible pattern-seeing” ability (or perception of one). People primed with a sense of powerlessness saw more images in static, found more conspiracies in written stories, and imagined more patterns in financial markets than those who were left alone.

Granted, all of this is great fodder for scientists looking to study how the brain responds to the unknown. The truth, of course, is that the mind creates “supernatural abilities” and patterns to cope with the fear of random events, and the brain “fills in blanks” when things happen that don’t gel with our desire for a controlled order. This gap-filling might even have a beneficial purpose, providing answers (who cares if they’re wrong?) in times of crisis so the mind can focus on the tasks of survival.

Still, even knowing all this, it’s hard to resist the instinct to heed the occasional omen.

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Bad Astronomy: A brilliant debunking of psychic powers

The doctor shortage is looming in our future, and the exodus of top scientific talent out of the U.S. may be just a few years away. But imagine the scenario if you added a domestic war, ethnic violence, and an unstable (relatively speaking) government to the equation. Cue the current situation in Iraq, in which legions of educated workers—including doctors and other health professionals—are high-tailing it to safer pastures, as Newsweek reports. And who can blame them: Since the U.S. invasion began, doctors have been prime targets for violence, including assassination, ransom kidnapping, and torture.

Unsurprisingly, around 30,000 doctors, plus some dentists and pharmacists, have fled the country as a result, and despite the fact that things have calmed down since the near-chaos of 2006, only about 800 have returned. To put that number into perspective, the total population of Iraq is around 28 million, compared to over 300 million in the U.S. The expected American doctor shortage, which could be enough to throw our health care system into crisis, is projected to be 50,000 to 100,000 doctors—not that much more than what Iraq has already lost.

Then there’s the other urgent dilemma: With all the experienced doctors fleeing the country, who’s left to train the med students?

One physician is quoted as saying that younger residents and interns are literally “studying the textbooks and searching the Net.” Just imagine your orthopedic surgeon Googling “knee replacement” as a nurse puts you under.

Efforts to lure the expat doctors back to their home include tripled salaries, back pay for time spent outside the country, free land, and even newly-renovated “doctor living communities” that would be guarded for safety. Still, as our own financial meltdown has shown, all the money and property in the world can’t buy security.

What are the three most important things the next U.S. president needs to do for science? The DISCOVER Science Policy Project gave a group of the country’s most celebrated scientists and thinkers the chance to state their views. Today, renowned theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss offers an essay outlining his advice for the coming administration. All past responses can be found here.

LAWRENCE KRAUSS
Theoretical physicist

Memo to the Next President:

“Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
—Richard P. Feynman

Eighteen years ago, the former President of the United States, George H. W. Bush, addressed the National Academy of Sciences, stating:

“Science, like any field of endeavor, relies on freedom of inquiry; and one of the hallmarks of that freedom is objectivity. Now more than ever, on issues ranging from climate change to AIDS research to genetic engineering to food additives, government relies on the impartial perspective of science for guidance.”

It is hard to find a better statement of what the relationship between science and public policy should be. Science should be a tool to help policymakers understand the world as it is, and as it might be. Science itself doesn’t tell us to how to best organize our society to maximize opportunity and happiness, but it can help inform our decision-making.

The results of scientific inquiry are themselves neither good, nor bad, though science does have an ethos. That ethos involves honesty, integrity, and full disclosure. As the Nobel prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman said,

“The only way to have real success in science…is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good about it, and what’s bad about it equally. In science you learn a sort of standard integrity and honesty.”

That characteristic, the fact that one must be willing to examine all the data, both good and bad, before developing conclusions is something that should carry over directly to public policy, however. Too often those in government are tempted to seek out those data that support their policies. But when this is done as justification for enacting legislation, the results are bound to be similar to the results of an experiment based on a bad theory. Democracy flourishes when there are informed legislators and an informed electorate. This means that our government will function best when the results of scientific inquiry are made freely and openly available to both the voters and those they entrust with their governance.

There is another facet of science that lends itself well to democracy, and perhaps that is one reason why it has tended to flourish in democratic societies. That is anti-authoritarianism. There are no scientific authorities. There are scientific experts, but there should be no authority figures whose statements are not subject to question by anyone. For government to function well, the same sense of openness needs to pervade all public activity. People must not be castigated for asking “why”, even if they may appear to be questioning one of our most cherished notions.

That brings up another of the great values of science. Science generally functions by unambiguously determining what is wrong, not what is right. Nature tells us what is wrong by explicitly singling out those ideas that do not agree with the results of repeated experimentation. Ultimately the correct ideas are harder to pin down. Even those models that appear to pass the test of experiment need to continually be checked against data to see if they need to be refined. But by keeping those things that work and discarding those that don’t, we eventually get closer to truth.

It is in this way, by distinguishing incorrect ideas and discarding them, that science has produced the progress it has over the past 400 years. And the process produces a truly open mind. One of the greatest experiences scientists, indeed anyone, can have, is to have some truly and deeply cherished idea proved wrong by the evidence of reality, for only in this way can we learn to look beyond our a priori prejudices and be willing to judge the world for the way it is, not the way one would have liked it to be.

Rational public policy should also be based in this way upon empirical evidence. Those ideas that fail the test of experiment should be abandoned, even if they conform to our personal moral inclinations. For example, we currently spend over $200 million dollars/year in this country on abstinence-only sex education for our children, in spite of the fact that scientific studies have demonstrated (the most recent 10 year study appeared in April of 2007) that this is not the most effective form of sex education. If we are truly interested in reducing unwanted pregnancies and the abortions that often accompany them, as well as the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, all of which are on the rise in this country, we need to focus on programs that work, not programs that we wish would work.

No one would argue with the need for a moral public policy. But moral choices should be grounded in the real world. Every one of us has a priori beliefs of what is right and what is wrong. But as President you must be willing to learn from experience, including the experience of the scientific community. When you find out your prejudices do not conform to reality, you must be prepared to do what is politically so difficult to do: to admit you were wrong and act accordingly.

Next, one of the most important and at the same time one of the most misunderstood aspects of science that is particularly relevant for its impact upon policy is this: Science does not provide just merely another story about the world. It is a story with logical consequences. Choosing to accept some aspects of the story but not others is logically inconsistent, and policies that result from such inconsistency will be flawed. For example, as much as you may not wish to alienate those who feel that their religious beliefs require them claim that the world is 6000 years old, it is vitally important to realize that a 6000 year-old earth is in conflict with everything we know about physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. Such a belief is inconsistent with boarding Air Force One and expecting it to fly. The same laws apply in one case as in the other.

You as President must support tolerance for individual sensibilities, religious or otherwise. But when people’s beliefs are inconsistent with what science has told us about the world, you must have the courage to lead rationally, and the communication skills to help carry the nation along with you.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the greatest challenge to peace that science has created for any President: a world full of nuclear weapons. While science created these threats to civilization, rational thinking based on empirical realities can perhaps lead us to a world that is not held hostage to them.

Whatever your views on nuclear weapons, I urge you to consider courageous unilateral actions that can alter the present course toward greater proliferation of these awful weapons.

Sixty years ago, after nuclear weapons were first used in war, Albert Einstein said, “everything has changed, save our way of thinking.” You have the opportunity, as President, to finally lead such a change. It may be the most important thing you can accomplish for peace and security throughout the world.

I wish you the best success and the wisdom to once again restore the relationship between science and public policy to its rightful place in government.

Sincerely,

Lawrence M. Krauss

As they so often do, things got litigious when both the California Coastal Commission and the Natural Resources Defense Council sued the Navy in separate lawsuits to stop its use of sonar during 14 training exercises off the Southern California coast. Lucky for the whale-savers, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (which is known for siding on the path of the less mighty) agreed with them, and smacked the Navy with restrictions on its sub exercises.

Now enter the Supreme Court, which this week heard the case on appeal. As with just about every human endeavor that harms the environment, the sonar use necessitates a balancing act between our needs—in this case, for a military that’s sharp and ready for, say, a second Pearl Harbor—and the needs of everything else.

Unfortunately for the NRDC (and the whales), it looks like the scales are leaning towards us: At least three justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, have said they’ll overturn the limits in the interests of national security.

The problem is that while we know sonar causes harm to whales, we really have no clue how much. And without clear evidence that Navy missions are causing each and every whale in the sea to throw itself on the beach in a ritual mass suicide, the Court won’t be inclined to put the kibosh on training missions that could strengthen our coastal defenses.

Still, Justice Breyer may be teetering on the brink of scary hyperbole with statements like this:

“The whole point of the armed forces is to hurt the environment,” he said. “You go on a bombing mission — do they have to prepare an environmental impact statement first?”

Just wait ’til Greenpeace hears about that one.

Image: iStockphoto