Category Archives: Science

Whose Freedom?

Life, Science, , , ,

I don’t often stray into the political realm, but there’s an issue here in Canada that has, well, motivated me to do so.

A quick recap: In early 2022, Ottawa—the city in which I live—was occupied by the so-called Freedom Convoy protestors. Some three weeks later, the Federal Government invoked the Emergencies Act, providing law enforcers with the tools they needed to remove the protestors.

Two courts now have ruled that the Emergencies Act was invoked unlawfully; that the criterion for invoking the act were not met. These criteria are:

  • there is an urgent, temporary and critical situation that seriously endangers the health and safety of Canadians
  • the situation is beyond the capacity or authority of a province or territory to deal with, and
  • the situation cannot be dealt with eflectively under any other federal, provincial or territorial law

The courts also maintained that the province and the City of Ottawa already had all the tools needed to evict the protesters.

As they say, that’s as may be. But there was a context in which the Emergencies Act was declared. First, while they may have had the tools they needed, the province and the city did not use them. They didn’t have the political will to take action. In short, they did nothing—absolutely nothing—and it wasn’t until the invocation of the Emergencies Act that any concrete steps were taken to evict the occupiers.

Second, given the inaction of these two levels of government, people were starting to take matters into their own hands, and it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt. Citizens began, for example, to form human chains, blocking so-called Freedom Convoy trucks from entering the downtown area.

This is the context in which the Emergencies Act was invoked. The Federal Government took a courageous political risk and did the right thing. Somebody had to act to protect the citizens of Ottawa.

But why did the people of Ottawa need protecting? Let’s examine some of the attempts to rewrite the history of that period. For example, the claim that the occupation was “peaceful.”

It was not peaceful. The noise from the continuous operation of the trucks’ horns was measured at up to 110 decibels, levels that can cause permanent hearing loss. The noise prevented urban dwellers from sleeping. Some developed tinnitus. Continuous exposure to noise, of course, is recognized as a form of torture. In addition, there was the physical intimidation and verbal abuse residents suffered. People were harassed and sometimes knocked to the ground for wearing a mask on the way to work. Businesses had to close, partly because the city advised against travel to the downtown area, partly because people couldn’t get to work safely. Urban citizens were afraid to go outdoors, even for medical appointments. City counsellors organized group walks so they could get some fresh air and exercise in safety. Some of the impact of the occupation is discussed in this video.

As for the occupiers themselves, some seemed uncertain about which country they were living in, or how the Canadian system of government actually works. The Governor General had to fend off many calls to dissolve parliament and form an interim government. A government—that somehow—included the truckers! When they later appeared in court, some cited their “first amendment rights.” For the benefit of readers outside of Canada, the Canadian constitution has no amendments. The American constitution has ammendments. Perhaps they’d been spending too much time watching Fox News.

What did the occupiers want? What brought them to Ottawa in the first place? In the beginning, they came to protest COVID vaccine mandates. This was the first clue that the protestors were a few bricks short of a load.

First off, vaccines are safe and they work. There is so much evidence in support of this that, if you doubt the effectiveness of vaccines, you might as well doubt the existence of gravity. Some 67% of people worldwide have been vaccinated against COVID. Over 13 billion doses have been delivered. It’s the most studied roll-out of a vaccine in history. It’s estimated that, over the past 50 years, vaccines have saved over 150 million lives. If you believe that a random YouTuber knows more about it than all the epidemiologists in the world, then you have a serious problem, one for which there is no vaccine.

Secondly, in Canada, health care is the responsibility of the provincial governments. The convoy protestors were protesting in the wrong city.

Third, they gathered in Ottawa to protest the requirement that truckers crossing the Canada-US border had to be vaccinated. There was, however, the slight problem that this requirement was bilateral. Even if vaccine mandates had been lifted in Canada, unvaccinated truckers would have been prohibited from entering the United States.

It seems the Freedom Convoy participants wanted the freedom to get sick and to make others sick. As this CBC news report points out, freedoms in Canada are not absolute. One person’s freedom to swing their arms around ends at the tip of another person’s nose. The occupiers were allegedly engaged in a fight for freedom. But whose? They tried to deprive the citizens of Ottawa the freedom to wear masks, the freedom to walk the streets of their own city in peace, and even the freedom to sleep at night. Some of them seemed to want to deprive us of the freedom to choose our own government.

Doesn’t sound like freedom to me.

Wilfully Ignorant?

Science, ,

Some time ago, I tweeted: “Ignorance is forgivable; willful ignorance is not.”

That about sums up what I want to say here. Willful ignorance puzzles me. Why do some people choose to be ignorant?

It’s well known that how you perceive things depends on your preconceptions. A simple example: show a group of people a sequence of letters, then an ambiguous character. Most will interpret the character as a letter. Show another group of people a sequence of numbers, then the same ambiguous character, and they’ll interpret it as a number. The same character is interpreted differently depending on the context. Depending, in effect, on your preconceptions.

That’s not what I’m discussing here. I’m talking about people who, for reasons of their own, refuse to believe well established truths such as: complex life evolved from simpler organisms; human activity is affecting the climate; the Earth is older than 6,000 years. What drove it home for me was a local story in which the old childhood disease, measles was making an encore appearance due to some parents’ refusal to vaccinate their children.

To put it succinctly, there are people who refuse to believe that science works. In effect, they refuse to believe that reality is, well, real.

1969 lunar landingThe fact is, science does work. The proof is all around you. Is that a mobile phone in your pocket? Remember the antibiotics you were prescribed for that fever? The manned space station? Those robots scurrying around on the planet Mars? The space probe that has gone beyond the edge of the solar system? Those things are real. Science made them possible. And the same scientific method that led to the moon landing in 1969 tells us, irrefutably, that evolution happened, that it’s as real as gravity. You can’t cherry-pick the scientific results that are compatible your belief systems and reject the rest.

To better address this, we need to improve the way in which we teach science to our children. Science is both a method and a body of knowledge. Too often, the body of knowledge is taught but not the method. That’s unfortunate, because the method is key. What am I talking about? Things like hypotheses, pilot studies, experiments, observation, measurement error, statistical analysis, peer review, replicated studies. This stuff isn’t particularly complicated. It’s not rocket science. But it’s fundamental to evaluating scientific data. The application of the scientific method is the basis for the information in the science textbooks you’ve used. And it’s important to you in your everyday life.

Why? Here’s an example. Suppose you read a new study demonstrating that eating at least 100 red grapes per day reduces occurrences of cancer and heart disease. (Note: I made this up.) Time to head to the grocery store, right? Wrong. (Really. Don’t go.) Where was the study published? A reputable journal? Was it properly controlled? Are there alternative interpretations of the data? Has it been replicated by several labs? Are the results generally accepted by the scientific community? Until these questions are answered, the study is vaguely interesting and nothing more. A possible basis for further work. Why is it on the front page of the newspaper then? To sell newspapers, of course.

Take evolution, which lies at the other end of the spectrum. First proposed in the 19th century, the evolution of species has been confirmed by countless tests in fields such as anthropology and biochemistry, and is generally accepted as, not only a fact, but a pillar of modern science. So, why would anyone doubt it? Wait though, isn’t evolution just a theory? No. Evolution unquestionably happened. Theories of evolution attempt to explain the detailed mechanisms of how it works.

And what about vaccinations? They are considered one of the greatest boons of modern medicine, having been instrumental in reducing or eliminating diseases such as polio. Climate change? The science here is more recent, but the fact is that climate change scientists collectively assert that human activities are adversely affecting the climate, this based on countless experiments and observations.

If you’re inclined to deny science, I would invite you to spend some of your energy learning more about how it works. Afterwards, when you can better see the world for what it truly is, you might find yourself looking about with new, wide-eyed wonder.