Category Archives: Science

Hubris Heights

Three years ago, geneticists Drs. Stephen Friend, Eric Schadt and Jason Bobe set out to search international databases for people who were over 30 and healthy but who carried mutations that typically cause childhood diseases like Tay-Sachs or muscular dystrophy.  In other words, people whose genetic makeups should have disabled or killed them years ago, but for some reason did not.

The scientists recently reported that they found 15,597 people who seemed to fit the bill, but they had doubts about some of the data about the patients and were unsure if their genetic mutations indeed coded for the diseases they were predicted to develop.

Thirteen people, though, turned out to have verifiable mutations that definitely cause one of eight serious diseases before age 18 in all who inherit them.  Or, at least, so it had been assumed.  In those thirteen cases, no disease had occurred.

The researchers surmise that there may be some other genetic mutations in those people, and likely in many others, that somehow counteract the natural effects of the disease-causing mutations.  Further research will focus on identifying any such “protective” genetic factors.

The large majority of people carrying genetic markers for serious diseases will in fact experience those diseases.  But the recent report reminds us that things aren’t always as clear as they may have once seemed.  Medical death sentences are sometimes unexpectedly commuted.  Widely accepted treatments are sometimes found to confer no benefit – even, in some cases, to be detrimental to health.  Medical truths sometimes turn out to be fictions.

In the late 1980s, the Cardiac Antiarrhythmic Suppression Trial found that widely trusted medications for patients with a particular heart arrhythmia conferred greater mortality than a placebo.  That is to say they were worse than useless.

In 2005, a procedure known as vertebroplasty, the injection of medical cement into fractured bone, was performed more than 27,000 times in the United States.  A study in 2009 conclusively showed that the procedure was no better than a sham procedure where nothing at all was done.

Routine PSA screening, once the gold standard for identifying prostate cancer, is no longer recommended, as it turned out to have caused many unnecessary biopsies and surgeries.  Likewise for routine mammography screening for women in their 40s.

Such “well, now we know better” changes of policy are known as “medical reversal” and are nothing new. Ancient Greek medical researchers like Hippocrates and Galen contributed much to the understanding of the human body.  But the treatments that resulted from their findings and theories soon enough (well, what’s a thousand years in the larger picture?) fell victim to the Dutch anatomist Vesalius’s discoveries.  In the 17th century, William Harvey further revolutionized medical treatment.

The next century saw Edward Jenner perfect the art of inoculation, and then the medical revolution born of germ theory.  Then, the discovery of DNA opened an entirely new vista: genetics.

It is, of course, not surprising that medicine has advanced with time, and that we know more about the body and disease than ever before.  Such progress is true about science in general.  Aristotle’s understanding of physics pales beside what Newton laid out; and Newtonian physics was upended in fundamental ways by Einstein and later physicists and cosmologists.

But what’s important to realize is that much of what we know about medicine or other sciences is not so much based on what we thought we knew but rather reversed  it.

And yet much of the scientific establishment, and laymen who trust them implicitly, persist in the illogical belief that what we think we know will prove impervious to being overturned by future discoveries.  Why, though, should we imagine that our generation possesses ultimate knowledge?  Has there ever been such an animal?  Is there really any reason to doubt that a century hence some of our most cherished scientific knowns will prove to have been unknowns?

To be sure, we must utilize the medical understandings and treatments of our day.  But our minds must hold the thought, too, that changes will likely come on a future day.

As Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch wrote, Hashem granted us two revelations: nature and Torah.  Immutable knowledge of only one of them, however, has been Divinely transmitted to human beings.  We can be mechadesh ideas in Torah, but only by building upon its unchanging truths. Nature, by contrast, remains an open question, and is thus subject to (and has long evidenced) conceptual revolutions.

Ignoring history, thinking that we have some ultimate understanding of the physical world, may provide solace to some.  But, in truth, it is the height of hubris.

© 2016 Hamodia

Hear Me Out

You probably know that when a person loses some hearing, it can never be recovered.

But did you know that 10 million Americans suffer noise-induced hearing loss?  Or that exposure to some common sounds, even for limited periods of time, can cause permanent hearing damage?

Loud sounds damage microscopic hair cells, known as stereocilia, that line the ear, leading, in time, to the need to use hearing aids.

Uninterested?  Stay with me, please.  This is going somewhere important.

According to the World Health Organization, 15 minutes of 100 decibel noise is considered unsafe.

The music of an average chasunah band registers at approximately 110 decibels – with many bands considerably, even greatly, exceeding that.

In fact, professional musicians are almost four times more likely to suffer noise-induced hearing loss than other people, according to researchers who analyzed health insurance records of 7 million people from 2004 to 2008.

The professionals were also about 57 percent more likely to suffer tinnitus – constant ringing in the ears.

Musicians have learned the hard way about the damage they cause to themselves, and that is why one sees many musicians wearing earplugs when they perform.

Baruch Hashem, multiple chasunos take place every night when halachah permits.  The community has grown, and so has the number of simchos it celebrates.  But there is a hidden cost to those celebrations: future hearing loss to the celebrants.  Especially children who are present, as a child’s ears are more sensitive than those of adults to sound.

Published research yields the fact that about 12.5 percent of American children between the ages of 6 and 19 have measurable noise-induced hearing loss in one or both ears.  And the average American child is probably not as often exposed to loud music as are siblings of chassanim and kallos.

There’s no escaping the fact: When we attend simchos that feature loud bands, we are injuring ourselves; and, if they are with us, our children.

Many people innately sense that fact, even if they are unaware of the science or statistics. They just feel discomfort or pain in their ears at celebrations.   One increasingly sees chasunah attendees who had the prudence to bring earplugs, and who quickly put them in place as soon as the band strikes up.  And others who, in pain, run out into the lobby to escape their audio-rodef.

Can anything be done about this hidden danger?  Of course.  We just need the will and foresight to do it.

My wife and I, baruch Hashem, have had the good fortune to walk most of our children to the chuppah.  At every chasunah but one (where the mechutanim’s good friend, a band leader, supplied the music), there was a one-man band, in which circumstance the volume of the music is more easily controlled – and control it the band-man did, as per the instructions he received.

I have attended many chasunos with any number of band members, and can attest to the fact that the simchah felt and expressed by the guests at our chasunos was in no way less enthusiastic than at any multi-instrumented affair.  Or any louder one.

Band leaders will tell you that their parnassah is dependent, indirectly, on the loud volume of their musical offerings.  Friends of the chasson and kallah, they claim, insist on louder music, “to get them going.”  And those friends will, b’ezras Hashem, be celebrating their own marriages one day, and will surely hire only the loudest bands.

If that is true, then the chasson and kallah in those cases are, sadly, bereft of true friends, who would not need their eardrums overstimulated to celebrate their friends’ marriages.  Music should aid the simchah; it is not what creates it.

So, when you are next planning to walk your child to the chuppah, consider doing one of two things:

Distributing earplugs to all guests as they sit down to the seudah.

Or stipulating to the band person or leader, when he is hired, that he will only be compensated for his great and appreciated efforts and talent if the music is kept to whatever decibel level you decide is safe for your guests. (Someone with the ability to download a decibel-measuring app to a phone can aid you here.)

You’ll be doing your part not only to make the simchah more enjoyable to the majority of the guests, but to help ensure that when the chosson, kallah and their friends are walking their own children to the chuppah, they won’t be wearing hearing aids.

© 2016 Hamodia

Buried Treasure in Tokyo

At a news conference last week, Satoshi Omura, a Japanese researcher and one of three scientists who had just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, made a comment that was not only modest but, properly considered, profound.

I’ll get to the comment in time.  First, though, some background:

The scientists used modern laboratory techniques to discover anti-parasitic drugs that, in the Nobel Committee’s words, “have revolutionized the treatment of some of the most devastating parasitic diseases” in the world.

Dr. Omura’s work was on the development of a medicine that has nearly eradicated the dreaded disease “river blindness” and radically reduced the incidence of the disfiguring disease known as elephantiasis. Dr. Omura’s work has already helped hundreds of millions of sufferers of these diseases, and has the potential of eradicating the ailments entirely.

Parasitic diseases are a threat to an estimated one-third of the world’s population, particularly among the poor in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America.

The work of Dr. Omura and the other scientists consisted of identifying and isolating a compound, which they called Avermectin, that occurs in nature – in this case soil collected by Dr. Omura from a golf course near Tokyo.

Anti-parasitic agents are not the only blessings concealed in plants and soil.  Many anti-bacterial and anti-viral compounds have also been found hidden in plain (if microscopic) sight, and successfully treat dangerous infections common in the Western world.

The most famous one is penicillin, which was discovered in 1928 when an airborne mold infected a petri dish in the lab of Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming.  But there are scores of substances in nature that have become effective treatments for myriad maladies.

The bacterium that causes clostridium difficile colitis, or “C-diff,” for instance, a serious intestinal ailment, is prevalent in hospitals and, in 2011 resulted in about half a million infections and 29,000 deaths in the United States alone.

One of the most effective treatments for C-diff is a drug called Vancomycin (which also is the treatment of choice for complicated skin and bloodstream infections and some forms of meningitis).  The drug was first isolated in 1953 from a soil sample collected from the interior jungles of Borneo.

Many scientists, upon isolating such compounds and identifying their properties and uses, proudly accept credit for their accomplishments.  How many, though, I wonder, stop to think about just what it is they did and didn’t do?

To be sure, much credit is due for the painstaking work of cultivating biological agents, experimenting with them, compiling data, and then collating and interpreting them.  But such cures for diseases, in the end, are merely discovered by the men of science, not created by them.

Do the researchers give thought to the Creator of the cures, Who secured them in unexplored places, until the arrival of the right time for their discoveries?  Have they considered how odd it is that there even are cures for dreaded diseases in soil and plants?

So much of what is heralded as astounding scientific achievement is simply accessing the miracle of nature, of Hashem’s gifts.  When a sheep was first successfully cloned a number of years ago, what was essentially accomplished was the coaxing of genetic material to do precisely what it does naturally all the time: code for traits, replicate and direct protein synthesis. Those things, not the clonings, were, and are, the miracles.

And when they were first performed, heart transplants were amazing. But, at least to thoughtful people, never remotely as amazing as hearts.

Dr. Omura seems to have the requisite sensitivity to recognize, despite the great impact of his accomplishment, the limitation of the role he played.

We don’t understand why diseases are necessary (although they point, like nothing else could, to the fragility of our bodies, and the many miracles we are beneficiaries of when we are healthy).  But it should astound us that Hashem has planted cures for ailments in the world He created for us.

Dr. Omura’s comment?  After expressing his surprise at having won the Nobel Prize (“I never imagined I would win.  If I had, I’d have worn a nicer necktie.”), he offered an assessment of what he had done.

“I merely borrowed,” he said, “the power of microbes.”

He didn’t cite the Creator of microbes (and everything else), and I have no idea of his religious beliefs.  But his words, all the same, should serve to remind every maamin of the manifold miracles we routinely, if obliviously, experience, and of the fathomless debt we owe Hakadosh Baruch Hu.

© 2015 Hamodia

 

Clear Lens, Clear Image

 I hadn’t planned to awaken at 3 a.m. on Wednesday night, even though it was the peak time for catching sight of meteors – commonly called “shooting stars” – born of the earth’s yearly passage through the trail of Comet Swift-Tuttle.

But awaken I did, and so I decided to go out on the deck to scan the sky for evidence of what is called the Perseid meteor shower.  My wife had never seen a meteor, and so I woke her up, thinking she’d want to join me.  (Thankfully, I was right.)  And baruch Hashem, we spied a couple of the ephemeral streaks of light in the relatively dark Staten Island sky, and recited the brachah of oseh maaseh bereishis.

Not everyone finds such things exciting; many people find amusement parks, performances or miniature golf more to their liking.

That’s unfortunate, I think.  Firstly, because nature is really so much more of a thrill.  Watching a caterpillar weave a cocoon or the butterfly it turns into leave the structure; witnessing a spider spinning its web; planting a seed and observing it as it grows into a plant; staring at even a comet-less night sky and contemplating the unimaginable distances of the suns one is viewing – all such astounding realities are more viscerally compelling than anything man-made.

Secondly, though, and more ultimately important, the thrills that nature offers us pave a path from mindlessness toward a most important mitzvah: ahavas Hashem.

At least, that’s what the Rambam states in Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah (2:2):

“And what is the way toward love of Hashem and fear of Him?  When a person contemplates [Hashem’s] great and wondrous acts and creations, and perceives in them His indescribable and infinite wisdom, he immediately loves and praises and extols and experiences a great desire to know Hashem…”

Yet, in the Sefer Hamitzvos (Mitzvas Aseh 3), the Rambam seems to take a different tack:

“…we should think about and contemplate His mitzvos and statements and actions, until we attain [an understanding of] Him, and experience an ultimate pleasure in that attainment…”

So, is “the way toward love of Hashem” to contemplate His universe, or His mitzvos?

The two seemingly different approaches to the mitzvah of  ahavas Hashem may not be what they seem.  As Rav Mordechai Gifter, zt”l, explained it, one might be describing the lens; the other, the view.  Rav Mordechai Pogramansky, zt”l, invoked a mashal:

A visitor to a city is shown a series of beautiful works of art in a museum but reacts to each with disdain, claiming to see only messy canvases.  Finally, a member of his entourage hits upon the idea of cleaning the fellow’s eyeglasses.  The visitor is subsequently deeply impressed by the art.

Before one can perceive Hakadosh Baruch Hu’s grandeur in the astounding magnificence of His creation – which path leads to love of its Source – one must first approach Creation as something other than an accident, as something containing meaning.  And the way to attain that foundational, vital recognition is to understand the concept of… mitzvos.

Because doing so impresses on us the idea of right and wrong, forces us to confront a choice: to view our lives as meaningless or as a mandate.  And if they are a mandate, there must be a Mandator.

Then, through that clear lens, one can truly see, and appreciate, to the extent a mortal can, the unfathomable wisdom inherent in the wondrous world around us.

It’s unfortunate that “science,” as the word has come to be used, has become the perceived enemy of emunah.  In truth, though, it is Scientism – the conviction that nature is all that there is, and that the wonder it engenders has no further point – that stands in opposition to the truism that Creation has a Creator.

Genuine science, though, the Divine implication-sensitive observation of the world around us, and of the worlds light-years (both literally and figuratively) beyond our ken, is a key to the deepest, most genuine feeling a human being can attain.

When, thrice daily, we declare that Hashem satisfies “all living things” with their needs, there is no comparison between just comprehending the simple meaning of the words and pronouncing them with keen awareness of the number of distinct species on earth (10 million on land, and another estimated 20 million marine microbial organisms) and the astounding intricacy of the way they all are provided their species-specific nourishment.

Reciting Ashrei can lead one to“…immediately love and praise and extol and experience a great desire to know Hashem…”

© 2015 Hamodia

Spaced Out

“Are we alone?” asked the oversized headline of a full page ad in the New York Times last Tuesday.  “Now is the time to find out,” it answered itself.

The open letter that followed was signed by Russian-Jewish entrepreneur and venture capitalist Yuri Milner and more than a score of astronomers and other scientists.  The gist of the missive was that humanity has an obligation to launch “a large-scale international effort to find life in the Universe” – presumably life other than the sort we know here on earth.  “As a civilization,” it continued, “we owe it to ourselves to commit time, resources, and passion to this quest.”

Among the resources, as a news story in the same paper and many others that very day explained, will be $100 million dollars of Mr. Milner’s fortune over the next decade.

Parochial a person as I am, I couldn’t help but think about what greater good – at least in my scheme of things –  so large a bag of dollars could do, how many yeshivos, Bais Yaakovs and kollelim it could pull back from fiscal cliffs, how many chessed groups it could fund, how many impoverished Jews it could rescue from hardship.

But even from the perspective of a less sectarian observer, wouldn’t a hundred million (yes, yes, I know, $100 million isn’t what it used to be, but still) be better put to terrestrial use?

After all, another Jewish boy who did well for himself, social network creator and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, has bankrolled schools and hospitals in the U.S. and technological advances in the developing world. And Tesla founder and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk (whose maternal ancestry is not clear) created a foundation dedicated to providing solar-power energy systems in disaster areas.

And Bill Gates (Jewish only in the eyes of some anti-Semites, but he looks Jewish) has had astonishing success battling river blindness and other infectious diseases that afflict the world’s poor.

And George Soros… – well, okay, scratch that one.

One has to acknowledge the good in some billionaires’ dedication to the alleviation of poverty, illiteracy and disease. Seeking to decrease human suffering is a noble goal.  Casting about in the cosmos in the hope of finding other species, though… not so much.

Don’t get me wrong.  I have nothing against making the effort, as SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been doing (fruitlessly, it must be added) for decades.  But to the tune of $100 million dollars that could do so much actual good on this planet?  Mr. Milner shouldn’t expect a check from me.

What interests me here, though, isn’t the quest itself to seek intelligent life out there but rather just what it is that motivates accomplished men and women like Mr. Milner and those who signed on to his letter to pursue that quest.

On one level, I suspect that they, or at least some of them, may be whistling intellectually past the beis olam, so to speak, seeking reassurance that we humans are really not so special, and thus that we have no higher purpose than to serve ourselves (and, of course, explore the cosmos).

As Professor Stephen Hawking – one of the letter’s signatories and who in a 2011 interview asserted that the idea of an afterlife is a “fairy story for people afraid of the dark” – confidently proclaimed: “We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth, so in an infinite universe there must be other occurrences of life.”

(A number of which civilizations, it might be presumed, have developed technologically well beyond where we are today and have been searching for us too, although we haven’t gotten the call.  Oh, never mind.)

But something else occurs, too, a more generous thought.  Maybe the compulsion to find intelligence outside our world is an expression – well disguised but present all the same – of a desire to find ultimate meaning to life.

Maybe, in other words, some of the alien-searchers have done what they could to paint over the innate human sense of the Divine, but have found that even the several coats of paint haven’t entirely obscured the sense that there is something more than this world. So they pursue extraterrestrials they imagine to reside in some faraway galaxy.

If enough of the paint chips away, they may yet come to realize that they were wrong but they were right.  Wrong about the little green men, but right that we are not alone.

We have a Creator and a purpose.

© 2015 Hamodia

Anybody Out There?

A mere week after NASA scientists announced their certainty of finding life on other planets within the next 20 years, a team of other scientists announced that, after searching 100,000 galaxies, they have found no signs of at least intelligent extraterrestrial life

The researchers used information from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer orbiting observatory (WISE) to look for energy radiating away as heat. “The idea behind our research is that if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced… civilization, the energy produced… would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths,” explained Jason T. Wright, a Penn State University professor who initiated the survey. “These galaxies are billions of years old,” he continued, “which should have been plenty of time for them to have been filled with alien civilizations.

This search is nothing new.  Over the 1960s and 1970s, there was SETI, or the “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence”; META, the “Megachannel Extra-Terrestrial Assay”; and META II. In 1972 and 1973, plaques depicting information about Earth were launched aboard the Pioneer and Voyager probes. In 1974, the “Arecibo message,” which carried coded information about chemistry and terrestrial life, was beamed into space. And in the 1990s, the “Billion-channel ExtraTerrestrial Assay” (BETA) was created, as well as a project harnessing the computing power of five million volunteers’ computers to crunch numbers that might reveal patterns indicative of intelligent life beyond our planet. Tens of billions of hours of processing time were consumed by the project.

So far, though, nothing.  No little green men.  Not even any green slime.

True, for 17 years, astrophysicists monitoring Australia’s Parkes telescope detected strange radio bursts signals, which were believed to come from another galaxy.  Recently, though, Emily Petroff, a PhD student working at the facility, showed that the signals were being generated by a microwave oven in its kitchen.

The prime candidate for rudimentary life in our own solar system, of course, is Mars.  Thus far, though, the four rovers that have been sent to the red planet haven’t discovered any of the molecules considered by scientists to be the “building blocks of life,” much less life itself.

Still, many scientists say there must be life out there.  Science doesn’t usually embrace beliefs unsupported by observations.  So, whence their conviction that there must be life elsewhere in the universe?  The answer is that it derives from a creed: that chance governs the universe – that randomness lies at the root of reality.

If probability, not design, is the loom on which the universe’s fabric is stretched, that creed’s canon proclaims, why should there be only a single, unremarkable planet in a single, unremarkable solar system in a single, unremarkable galaxy where there is life?

The high priests of Scientism even believe in miracles, as in their contention that life on Earth arose by chance from inanimate matter, something that, of course, has never been accomplished despite valiant efforts, in the lab. And that the astounding diversity of life emerged randomly.  And so, the creed reasons, why shouldn’t countless other worlds have done any less?

We, of course, know that Creation, including life, was an act of Divine will, not the yield of randomness.  To be sure, were life to be discovered on some other planet, it wouldn’t challenge us any more than the fact that life was discovered here on earth in hot springs and deep-sea vents, long assumed to be devoid of living creatures.

But intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos?  Unlikely. One thing is certain: all efforts to detect it have come up empty.

The Torah (Devarim, 17:3) speaks of a false prophet who will “prostrate himself… to the sun or the moon or to any host of heaven, which I have not commanded.” Rashi explains that last phrase as meaning “which I have not commanded you to worship.”

Reb Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev had a profound interpretation of that Rashi.

The reason one may not bow down to a heavenly body, he explained, is because they have not “been commanded” – they lack the free will necessary to accept or reject a Divine commandment.  One may, however, bow down in respect to a human being – because humans are singular, sublime creatures, beings who have been commanded, who uniquely possess the free will to accept and execute Hashem’s will.

So far, at least, such choosing beings are only known here on Earth.  Might there be intelligent extraterrestrials who have received their own Divine commandments?

I imagine some may “hear” such a possibility.

Personally, though, I think the silence out there speaks much more loudly.

© 2015 Hamodia

Handwriting Analysis Analyzed

The notion that one’s handwriting can evidence aspects of one’s character and predict likely behavior (“graphoanalysis”) is prevalent in some circles, including some Orthodox Jewish ones.

While I have no desire to interfere with the livelihoods of those who offers handwriting analysis services, I do feel a responsibility to offer accurate information to the public.

To that end, I feel it is worthwhile to share an article on the topic of “graphoanalysis” that I wrote for Ami Magazine back in 2011.  You can read it here.  Feel free to share the link with anyone you feel might find it thought-provoking.

Muddy Study

Have you heard the story of the scientist whose area of research was insects’ hearing?  He trained a flea to jump on command.  In the interest of his research, he pulled off one of the flea’s legs and ordered it to jump.  The insect complied, if a bit clumsily because of its handicap.  The scientist recorded the data – the delay in the jump, the distance covered, etc., on a chart. After a second amputation, the flea’s response to the command was even less impressive, and the new results were duly entered on the chart.  After a third leg was removed, the flea’s jump was greatly compromised, and the chart became host to the new data.  Finally, after being deprived of all of its legs, all the flea could do when ordered to jump was buzz about hopelessly on the table.

Solemnly, the scientist consulted his chart, created a formula to reflect his findings, and recorded his conclusion: “Fleas hear with their legs.”

The myopic researcher was brought to mind by a recent article about the work of two French economists, Ruben Durante and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya.  The piece, which appeared at MarketWatch, published by Dow Jones & Co., relates the pair’s investigation of the timing of Israeli military attacks against its enemies over an 11-year period.  The economists’ methodology was simple (and rather simple-minded).  They catalogued Israel’s military interventions from 2000 to 2011, and then compared them to what was going on in the news at the time – noting whether that news was “scheduled,” like a major sporting event, or “unscheduled,” like an earthquake or plane crash.

The scientists’ conclusion, in the synopsis of the MarketWatch article’s author, Brett Arends: “Israel habitually launches its most unpopular and, sometimes, deadly attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to coincide with big news events here in the U.S., so that they don’t get too much public attention.”

In Mr. Durante’s and Ms. Zhuravskaya’s own words: “Israeli attacks are more likely to occur prior to days with very high news pressure driven by clearly predictable events.”  There were statistically significant upticks, they assert, in Israeli military action in the West Bank and Gaza Strip before sporting events, but not before things that the Israeli military could not anticipate.

So here, presumably, is the picture: Israel’s Prime Minister and top generals are huddled in the war room, analyzing a current threat against the citizenry.  They pick apart intelligence data about enemy plans, track militants’ movements by aircraft and satellites, consult weather forecasts and, for nighttime operations, moon phases.  And they decide that a strike is necessary.  “No! Wait!” shouts the Prime Minster. “The Super Bowl’s not until next Sunday!”

A few minor problems here.  First of all, did the researchers factor in the Final Four?  And what about avoiding the attention of the rest of the world, which really doesn’t care much about American sports?  Did the economists take soccer’s World Cup into account?  Hockey’s Stanley Cup?

And if the Israeli military/political complex is in fact guilty of the nefarious machinations imagined by the economists, well, the plot doesn’t seem to have worked very well.  When was the last time Israel launched an attack on her enemies and the world’s residents, glued to their sports event of choice, uh, didn’t notice?

Besides, don’t the Elders of Zion control earthquakes and plane crashes too?

Okay, that last argument was facetious. But no less so than the economists’ study, which proffered a wealth of charts and formulae to try to demonstrate a “statistically significant” correlation between attention-getting events and Israeli military action.  How much of a correlation, though, and how much of it may just reflect chance or statistical static isn’t entirely clear. What is clear, though, is that cynicism, born of the stylish if smelly anti-Israel atmosphere these days, informed the study.

A mistaken conclusion about how a flea hears is a rather minor matter.  An accusation of underhanded tactics hurled at a country trying to protect its citizens from murderous attacks, quite another.

The noted British psychologist H. J. Eyesenck famously observed that scientists can be “just as ordinary, pig-headed and unreasonable as anybody else, and their unusually high intelligence only makes their prejudices all the more dangerous.”  It’s a truism that, in our understandable and usually merited respect for science, we can sometimes forget.

Scientists are people too; and if they harbor personal biases, their prejudices can inform their “science.”  That’s not just unfortunate but, particularly today, downright dangerous.

© 2015 Hamodia

 

 

 

Musing: Ebola and Metzitza Bipeh

Part of a message from the Medical Society of the State of New York to local physicians reads as follows:

“Strategies to limit the potential for [Ebola] transmission… should be based on the best available medical, scientific and epidemiological evidence; be proportional to the risk; balance the rights of individuals and the community…”

One has to wonder whether strategies to limit the potential of the transmission of other viruses, like New York City’s strategy of regulating ritual circumcision, are  similarly “proportional to the risk.”

Or do religious practices for some reason enjoy less protection than secular ones?