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I pulled this data from Google Trends of searches for "coronavirus". I had to set a range that excluded everything from mid-December 2019 to the present, because they dwarfed all the other searches and compressed the scale. As you can see, there's a natural die-off of coronavirus-related searches by mid-March, which is good news for those concerned with the present crisis. I've heard a lot of speculation about the current coronavirus, Covid-19, and I want to talk about a few ideas from epidemiology to get at more general principles. First, the reproduction number (R 0 ) of Covid-19 looks like it's about 2.2. Meaning each infected person is likely to infect 2.2 additional people before they clear the virus or die and are no longer infectious. That means it's likely to spread quickly - or more accurately exponentially. In fact, given an R 0 of that magnitude, it's unlikely we'll be able to stop it from spreading, no matter how good our qu

Open Questions: The Origin of Life

In a previous post , I covered the claim that science proves there is no god. This is one of the weaker arguments I hear when religion and science are discussed, because it's easy to disprove. You simply have to challenge the claim, "How does science prove there is no God? What experiments demonstrate this?" However, in my experience most people who make this weak claim are actually thinking of a stronger atheistic claim, namely: "Science takes the place of religion. It has now explained all the old gaps in our knowledge, and now we're just filling in the small gaps that remain." In my last post, I talked about how the domains of science and religion don't generally overlap. The popular conception is that science explains the how and religion explains the why of the world. However, there is one major area of overlap for science and religion and that is creation, both of life and of the universe. If science can explain the creation of the unive

Open Questions Meet Settled Science

This is a direct follow-up to my last post . In that post, I explicitly questioned Darwinian Evolution - to the extent that the first comment asked me about other articles that do the same. I want to defend Darwin here and everything he got right, because I read a lot of articles from people who read what experts say and piggy-back on that to proclaim that Darwin's work is being "overturned" or similar war-of-ideas-and-Darwin-is-losing kind of language. This is the wrong way to understand the scientific process of expanding beyond the clear limits of Darwin's theory. But I suppose part of the reason people turn to it is because they don't understand the right way to understand this process. I'm going to spend much of my time here working through that, partly by comparing Darwin's contributions to those of Newton's discovery of universal gravitation. The Universe Before Newton When I was young, I always had a problem understanding why Newton go