Do Animals Have Distinct Personalities?  

Rebecca Cudmore, 12/06/13

Editor's Note: This article was provided by Scienceline. The original is here.

Muffin is a 40-pound cat who lives in New Hyde Park, NY. His owner, Kathleen Hansen, says Muffin  --  a cat she claims is the heaviest in the world  --  gets his name from a habit of snagging and eating baked goods. And although felines have a longstanding reputation as solitary pets, Hansen calls Muffin an extrovert. “He’s almost like a person,” she says. “He’ll go on his back, reach out with his paws and if you lean towards him, he’ll hug you and give you a kiss. He’s lovable.”

Like Hansen, most pet owners use a colorful array of adjectives to describe the quirks of their animal companions. They might say, “she’s so curious,” or “he’s much braver than my last dog.” Sound familiar? Well, about half of the researchers who study animal personality use similar terms. The other half thinks this use of human vocabulary diminishes the objectivity of the science.

Animal personality is defined as the consistent behaviors specific to an individual animal. Personality researchers who use words like “brave” or “curious” are called “raters,” while those who measure personality as they would any other behavior are “coders.” For instance, when a rater uses “brave” to explain daring behavior, a coder may instead say -- “individual X enters quadrants one and four within a two-minute period.” This inconsistency in the way researchers record individuality makes it difficult to compile and compare data, a necessary step in getting a good grasp of what animal personality really is.

And although some researchers argue that coders are more empirical and scientific than those favoring the use of adjectives, the reality is not so clear-cut.

All animal personality scientists grapple with how to reduce the human bias embedded in their experiments. “Trying to eliminate research bias is what this field is devoted to,” says biologist and coder Alison Bell from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She says that even with coding, measuring a behavior as simple as two fish biting each other includes some level of judgment. What constitutes biting? Do the fish just need to bump mouths or must the researcher see teeth sinking into flesh?

Western culture is quick to attribute qualities like “shy” and “brave” to cats and dogs, says animal ethologist Kristina Horback from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. Horback says that when the same traits are observed in an experiment looking at dolphins or elephants, for example, researchers steer clear of using adjectives to describe the behaviors. “Shy” and “brave” are risky words in a scientific setting, she says, because they are reputed as subjective and only ever applied to humans.

Sam Gosling, a personality psychologist from the University of Texas at Austin, says that while many primate researchers are using rating approaches, researchers looking at fish, birds and insects tend to use coding. He says these scientists come from different traditions, calling their choice methods a “vestige of their disciplinary roots.”

“Coders are falling over themselves trying to sound scientific,” says Gosling. He stands with the raters, arguing that the approach provides a deeper, more thorough understanding of an animal’s personality. Take a chimpanzee’s charging behavior, says Gosling. To coders, this is defined as one individual running full speed toward another. But what if one day, the chimpanzee runs at three-quarter speed? What if he sprints toward two individuals instead of one? The definition of a charge must be adjusted. “Isn’t there an element of judgment here?” Gosling asks.

Instead of tallying charges to illustrate a chimpanzee’s personality, a rater might describe the animal as being “aggressive.” But to be sure each rater understands aggression in the same way, individual research teams must use multiple experimenters to compare measurements against one another. As someone who uses both techniques in her research, Horback finds that measurements involving several raters are very accurate.

In her study of San Diego Zoo elephants, Horback used both rating and coding measurements of personality. Because violent elephant behavior is generally prevented in a zoo setting, the coding method did not pick up on aggressive displays. Raters, however, were able to include those rare aggressive moments that defined an elephant’s personality. “The caretakers already knew who was aggressive,” says Horback. “They know how certain individuals react to a broom, how they react to a hose, because they’re with them nine to ten hours a day.”

Background information about an animal can also help predict future behavior. Kristin Andrews, a philosopher of science at York University in Toronto, tells the story of an orangutan from the Samboja Lestari Sanctuary in Borneo nicknamed, “The Policeman.” The Policeman got his name because he would continually sprint through the forest to break up fights between other orangutans. Based on this knowledge of his personality, caregivers at the sanctuary never worried that The Policeman’s quick movements were aggressive. He had a reputation for being helpful, not harmful.

But at Bell’s lab at the University of Illinois, animal personalities are not deduced from prior knowledge and are never described by adjectives. “Personality is just like any other trait,” she says. “I’m not necessarily measuring it with a ruler but with other sorts of instruments.” Bell codes personality in the three-spined stickleback fish. She uses a grid that divides the fish tank into sections so that each time an individual moves, its specific location can be recorded accurately. These movements help define the personality of each stickleback.

“Some individuals swim up and down in the same sections of the grid over and over,” says Bell. “Others will explore around and move into several different sections.” To describe the latter performance, Bell says she may use the term “exploratory behavior,” but won’t go as far as to call an individual curious or brave. “This is part of doing science, to be sure that we are separating data versus interpretation.”

Can a single recording method, either rating or coding, accurately measure personality in fish, elephants and apes -- all arguably vastly different creatures? Or does each animal warrant its own kind of measurements? Even within a single species, multiple approaches may be necessary, according to psychologist Stan Kuczaj from The University of Southern Mississippi. In his research with dolphins, Kuczaj uses just such a multidimensional approach to measure personality. He says that three dimensions are required for utmost accuracy: how dolphins interact with each other, with a human and with a novel object. He explains that it’s the unique reactions to these different contexts that are most indicative of dolphin individuality.

Think on it. If you had to study your own personality, which method would best characterize the unique way you interact with the world? Gosling suggests a hypothetical scenario to help answer this question. “I’m going to send you out in a space ship,” he says. “You have two envelopes. The first holds things your family and friends have said about your character. The second is a complete list of the behaviors someone’s observed you performing. Which envelope would you open?”

Presented with this question, many personality researchers would answer “both.” But studies that combine the two methods are expensive and time consuming. It’s more realistic for scientists to agree upon a common approach than to expect them to implement both methods into every study. For Horback, the solution is obvious: animal personality researchers should hold a meeting, where both raters and coders could come together to agree upon a shared method of measuring personality. “We have a common goal here,” she says. “Everyone wants to define personality correctly.” The question at the heart of the debate is this: Is it even possible for human researchers to successfully measure animal personality?

Either approach seems imperfect. Raters may bias their data by using adjectives they naturally associate with a certain behavior. And coders, who consider themselves more objective data-takers, might miss a level of complexity by purposefully avoiding the words that most suitably illustrate an animal’s behavior. Perhaps the dilemma underlying the controversy is that an animal’s personality is much too familiar for a scientist to record both free of bias and with complete depth. Because, however reluctant, scientists are humans who recognize the shy demeanors, the insatiable curiosities, and the competitive spirits within each of their study subjects.

This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.

http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2013/12/06/do_animals_have_distinct_personalities_108394.html

Science Is Not Religion

Jeff Schweitzer, 09/05/13

Author Christine Ma-Kellams recently told HuffPost Science that, "In many ways, science seems like a 21st Century religion. It's a belief system that many wholeheartedly defend and evolve their lives around, sometimes as much as the devoutest of religious folk."

Nothing could be further from the truth. Science is not a "belief system" but a process and methodology for seeking an objective reality. Of course because scientific exploration is a human endeavor it comes with all the flaws of humanity: ego, short-sightedness, corruption and greed. But unlike a "belief system" such as religion untethered to an objective truth, science is over time self-policing; competing scientists have a strong incentive to corroborate and build on the findings of others; but equally, to prove other scientists wrong by means that can be duplicated by others. Nobody is doing experiments to demonstrate how Noah could live to 600 years old, because those who believe that story are not confined to reproducible evidence to support their belief. But experiments were done to show the earth orbits the sun, not the other way around.

Here is the fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between the two: science searches for mechanisms and the answer to "how" the universe functions, with no appeal to higher purpose, without assuming the existence of such purpose. Religion seeks meaning and the answer to "why" the world is as we know it, based on the unquestioned assumption that such meaning and purpose exist. The two worldviews could not more incompatible.

Unlike scientific claims, beliefs cannot be arbitrated to determine which is valid because there is no objective basis on which to compare one set of beliefs to another. Those two world views are not closer than we think; they are as far apart as could possibly be imagined.

Religion and science are incompatible at every level. The two seek different answers to separate questions using fundamentally and inherently incompatible methods. Nothing can truly bring the two together without sacrificing intellectual honesty.

We are told that since science and faith are both fallible, both are equally valid approaches to understanding the world and ourselves. Here is what Jeffrey Small says about this:

"Bias, preconceived ideas, academic politics, ego and resistance to change are ever-present in scientific and academic communities and often result in institutional opposition to new theories, especially ground-breaking ones. Many scientists initially resisted Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo because they presented a new paradigm of the universe."

Well, exactly! What this proves is that over time, science is indeed self-correcting while faith is not. While we all know now, due to science, that the earth orbits the sun, the Church is still fighting the battle with Galileo. Even today in the 21st century, the Church claims that Galileo shares blame because he made unproven assertions. Unproven assertions! The best the Pope could muster was that he regretted the "tragic mutual incomprehension" that had caused Galileo to suffer. As the new millennium settles in, the Church still claims that Galileo was wrong. The dissonance between Scripture and fact is not a problem relegated to earlier centuries, but remains relevant today.

Science is indeed fallible, and scientists suffer from all the usual human foibles. But reproducibility, scrutiny from other scientists, the drive for new knowledge, the glory of overturning orthodoxy, all drive science to a better understanding of an objective truth or our best approximation of it; this method of understanding the world is inherently incompatible with faith. Faith cannot be contested: I believe, therefore it is true. All scientific claims are by nature contestable. Those differences cannot be reconciled. Ever.

In reality we need to turn this argument about fallibility on its head. Science never claims to be infallible. There would be no need for more research if scientists believed they had all the answers, and all of them right. But god by definition is infallible. And yet. The Bible's clear statement about age of the earth, off by more than 4 billion years, is one example of an important factual error. Sure, maybe this is a mistake of human interpretation of divine will. But with each new discovery proving a Biblical assertion wrong, the Church retreats to the safety of errors in interpretation or dismissing the discrepancy as unimportant. Yet the ever-accumulating factual mistakes must call into question the certainty with which the Church claims that god, or the Bible, is infallible, since their previous insistence has proven unsubstantiated with glaring factual mistakes. These doubts about infallibility apply, too, to the Church's teachings on morality. If the bible is the literal word of god, then god has clearly blown it. If the bible is a flawed interpretation of god's will, then the conclusions about morality can be equally flawed. The issue of fallibility is a problem for the faithful, not for science and reason. Never confuse the two.

Scientist and former White House Senior Policy Analyst; Ph.D. in marine biology/neurophysiology

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-schweitzer/science-is-not-religion_b_3870282.html?utm_hp_ref=science

Most Scientific Theories Are Wrong

Ethan, 05/31/13

“There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.” - Albert Einstein

Imagine: you’ve worked hard all your life, through your primary and secondary school education, where you worked hard to get into a good college, through your undergraduate degree, where you found something you were passionate enough about that you wanted to study it even further, and then through graduate school, where you spent half-a-decade or more immersing yourself, non-stop, in an area of research in a field that you love.

You become familiar with the deepest known theories about whatever it is you’ve studied, and you begin to see where our understanding in some part of the material world begins to break down. The great unsolved problems of your time look like missing puzzle pieces, while the tools, equations and current theories begin to look like misshapen pieces that don’t quite fit where they’re supposed to.

In other words, you’ve run up against the limits of our current knowledge; to make any further progress is going to take an innovation that’s not yet a part of our scientific lexicon.

Maybe you’re a biologist, trying to understand how the sensation of itch actually works. The three main types of sensory neuron in humans — pain, pressure and temperature — don’t quite seem to cover it.

Maybe you’re a geoscientist, trying to figure out how to predict when the entire mantle convects, and when only the upper mantle convects to transport heat and materials.

Maybe you’re a particle physicist, trying to decipher what accounts for neutrino mass, and why they’re so mind-bogglingly light compared to all the rest of the massive, standard model particles.

Or maybe — like me — you’re an astrophysicist, trying to solve some of the great cosmic mysteries of just how it is our Universe got here, and came to be the way it is today.

The thing is, no matter what your field is, there’s more to learn, there’s progress to be made, and there’s work to be done. If the current theories and laws can’t explain everything that’s observed — all the experimental and observational phenomena — then that theory cannot be the entire story.

And in that sense, given that even the best scientific theory only has a limited range of validity, all scientific theories are wrong. (And before you quote me out-of-context on that, keep reading.)

But that’s not really fair. Scientific theories are only meant to have a certain range of validity! We know that the Big Bang doesn’t explain what came prior to the Big Bang; we know that evolution doesn’t explain the origin of life; we know that Airy’s theory of isostatic compensation doesn’t explain the motion of the Earth’s crust over geologic timescales; we know that General Relativity doesn’t explain the existence of antimatter.

But we want to know the answer to all of those questions. And that requires new ideas; it requires new scientific theories.

To explain what happens prior to the Big Bang, we have the theory of cosmic inflation. To explain the origin of life, we have the theory of abiogenesis. To explain the motion of Earth’s crust, we have plate tectonics. And to explain the existence of antimatter, we have quantum field theory. All of these theories are very likely valid, as far as we understand them, but none are necessarily the final, complete and fully comprehensive answer to these questions.

And moreover, these are just the most successful ones; along the way, there were plethoras of alternative scientific theories that didn’t quite pan out. Here are some of the more interesting ones from my field: astrophysics.

We know that black holes come in a couple of different varieties, ranging from a handful of solar masses (from collapsed supermassive stars) all the way up to millions or billions of times the mass of our Sun: the supermassive black holes found mostly at the center of galaxies. But could the Universe have been filled with lower-mass black holes from the early stages of the Universe? That’s the theory of primordial black holes, or PBHs!

Now these have been of interest for a number of reasons — as a dark matter candidate, for example — for some time. But we’ve looked for them, we’ve investigated their physics, we’ve tested the theory for compatibility with our current knowledge of large-scale structure of the Universe, and it just doesn’t seem to fit with what we know. It’s still a possibility, but a remote-looking one, and it doesn’t solve the problems it was designed to solve. So, no PBHs; that’s a scientific theory that’s wrong (so far), but it’s still interesting to think about.

We know that structure, on the largest scales, forms into giant superclusters with a certain large-scale distribution. Clumps beyond a certain size don’t seem to exist; and the large-scale features we do see tell us what the Universe is (and isn’t) made out of. But one of the great ideas that came along was that large-scale structure could have been seeded by a network of cosmic strings, or giant one-dimensional defects in the fabric of spacetime!

But despite a reasonable theoretical motive behind them, we’ve performed exhaustive surveys of our Universe, and the evidence against cosmic strings is overwhelming. The nail-in-the-coffin that our Universe’s structure doesn’t follow from cosmic strings came with the measurement of the low-multipoles from the COBE satellite; the disagreement is too much. But cosmic strings are still interesting to thing about for a variety of reasons, and could rear their head in the future in some other form.

One of the most important parts of relativity is the idea that experimental results are independent of what direction your experiment is oriented in, and also is independent of what your linear velocity happens to be. This, generally, is known as Lorentz invariance, and is a symmetry that — as far as we know — is always respected by nature.

But if you break this invariance, a whole slew of interesting phenomena could happen. And so we look, and we build theories based on breaking it. So far, the only results are null, within our statistical limits. But that doesn’t mean, at some level, this couldn’t potentially be interesting.

I don’t bring any of these ideas up to try and convince you that they’re right; I don’t think any of them are!

But I bring this up so that the next time you hear about some theory, it’s totally reasonable to ask, “What overwhelming evidence do we have that this is correct?” But rather than simply dismiss it, if it sets off your internal BS-detector, I want to assure you of a number of things:

• Your BS-detector is probably right (and honestly, it’s probably not sensitive enough), and this isn’t likely to be the next great revolution in our understanding of the Universe,

• This research is still important, as it’s exploring a hitherto unexplored possibility, which could teach us something about the Universe,

• and if there’s even a germ of a good idea in there, scientific inquiry is what will grow that into a full-fledged theory that means something.

Most scientists go through their entire career without coming up with even one original idea, and most of the ideas that they do come up with aren’t worth the weight of the paper they’re printed on. But you’ve got to try, or you’ll never move forward. The danger of putting yourself out there and finding out that you might not be right is far worse than not putting yourself out there at all.

It’s a great big Universe out there, and there’s still so much to be understood. I’m one of the least inclined to be credulous about a new idea in my field, but even I recognize why it’s important. Trying new things, learning why they fail, and trying again is the only way progress has ever been made; let’s continue to encourage people to do just that. Be daring, be bold, and dare to be a success. If you fail, it shouldn’t cost you your career; if you succeed, all of humanity wins!

請至原網頁瀏覽相關圖片。

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/31/most-scientific-theories-are-wrong/

Ethan大作中，下面這三段話值得我們再三玩味：

It isn’t enough to get the right answer in physics, or in science in general. You need to get the right answer for the right reasons, otherwise you are doomed to lead yourself astray.

What will separate those of us who are good scientists about it will be our willingness to let go of ideas that no longer agree with the data, admit we were wrong, and embrace the theoretical ideas that are in accord with what we observe.

This is science, where every day we come a little closer to getting it right.

自然科學並不保證被大多數科學家所接受的(自然)「科學理論」一定正確。但被大多數科學家所接受的(自然)「科學理論」，可能是到目前為止，對特定自然現象具有最大解釋能力的說法。

同樣的，民主政治並不保證「民主制度」是完美的。但「民主制度」是到目前為止，對一般老百姓來說，最有利的政治運作機制。和科學相似，「民主制度」要依賴證據和面對現實。這是為什麼在民主社會中，我們必須堅持「依法意治理」以及捍衛「言論自由」。

“Einstein’s Greatest Blunder” was REALLY a blunder!

Ethan, 05/17/13

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” - Albert Einstein

Back when Einstein first proposed his theory of General Relativity, his revolutionary picture of the Universe was met with a mix of curiosity, awe, and intense skepticism. It isn’t every day that your most cherished of all physical theories -- the theory of Newtonian Gravity that had ruled the cosmos for nearly two-and-a-half centuries -- gets challenged by a newcomer.

And yet, that’s exactly what Einstein did when he proposed General Relativity at the end of 1915, nearly a century ago. Newtonian gravity, according to Einstein, was just an illusion. Objects didn’t really exert gravitational forces on one another, which in turn caused accelerations/changes in momentum, but rather the entire Universe existed in a framework known as spacetime, and the presence of matter-and-energy curved the fabric of that spacetime, causing objects to move as they do.

Einstein’s theory not only reduced to Newtonian gravity when gravitational fields were weak, it also predicted the orbital anomaly of Mercury, something that had puzzled astronomers and physicists alike for nearly 50 years. When the 1919 eclipse was observed, and distant starlight was observed to have bent in agreement with General Relativity (and not in agreement with any interpretation of Newton’s laws), our picture of the Universe was revolutionized.

Before any of this happened, however, Einstein was very much bothered by an aspect of his theory. You see, it was assumed at the time that the Universe was made up of stars, whose distribution was relatively uniform throughout space. This was furthermore assumed to be stable, and not something that had either changed much with time or that was likely to change into the far future. The stars were assumed to be long-lived, and evenly distributed around us in all directions.

In general, this type of solution presented a grave problem for Einstein: it is an unstable solution! If you have a roughly (but not perfectly) uniform distribution of matter, then spacetime is going to curve due to the presence of that matter. And once spacetime is curved, those regions with slightly more matter than others are going to preferentially attract more and more matter, and will grow over time!

What’s even worse is that the fate of all such configurations of mass like this, regardless of what shape they start off in, wind up creating a black hole!

This clearly isn’t the case for our Universe! And Einstein knew this wasn’t the case for our Universe, so what was actually happening?

The laws of gravity weren’t lying, but there must’ve been something that wasn’t properly accounted for. As far as Einstein could tell, stars pretty much stayed where they were over time, and extended out maybe on the order of thousands of light-years in all directions. Because they weren’t all collapsing towards a point or region, Einstein reasoned that there had to be something fighting gravity on these large, interstellar scales.

He proposed that there was an intrinsic energy to space itself, a cosmological constant, responsible for this. This cosmological constant would push back with exactly the force needed to counteract gravity on these large scales, and would lead to the Universe being static.

Now, we can fast-forward almost 100 years, to our modern picture of the Universe.

The Universe is not, in fact, static, but has been expanding for billions of years. What Einstein missed is that our Universe extends far beyond our own galaxy, and in fact contains many hundreds of billions of galaxies comparable to our own. This wasn’t discovered observationally until years after General Relativity was proposed, so Einstein could hardly be faulted, and yet he was frustrated at himself for not finding the solution in General Relativity that admits an expanding Universe. Perhaps apocryphally, he’s credited with calling his introduction of the cosmological constant his “greatest blunder.”

Had he found the solutions later found by Friedmann, Lemaitre, Robertson and Walker, he might have proposed that the Universe was expanding, and never suggested the ad hoc cosmological constant at all.

And yet, since the late 1990s, we’ve realized that the Universe does in fact have a non-zero cosmological constant: that’s what we call dark energy, and use to explain the accelerated expansion of the Universe!

You might think that, because the cosmological constant does turn out to exist, and be non-zero, and because there is an intrinsic energy to space itself, that perhaps Einstein didn’t make a mistake after all.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In physics, we propose novel theoretical mechanisms to both explain observed phenomena and to predict new, hitherto unobserved phenomena. That’s what theoretical physics is all about.

And I hate to break it to you, but Einstein’s cosmological constant utterly failed on both of those counts.

Not only did he not successfully explain why the stars in our galaxy remain in a roughly stable configuration -- because they’re in quasi-stable orbits around the galaxy -- but he also failed to predict the phenomena of the expanding Universe.

Had he gone with the expanding Universe solution instead of the cosmological constant solution to the problem of a Universe that hadn’t yet collapsed into a black hole, that would’ve been correct.

Einstein, to his great credit, was smart enough to admit to himself, and to the world, that his solution was not the right one.

Even today, looking back and recognizing that there is, in fact, a cosmological constant / dark energy component to the Universe, Einstein was still wrong!

It isn’t enough to get the right answer in physics, or in science in general. You need to get the right answer for the right reasons, otherwise you are doomed to lead yourself astray.

The cosmological constant may have come back, but it has nothing to do with the reasons Einstein proposed for its existence, nor is it of anywhere near the same magnitude that Einstein suggested. Sometimes old ideas come back in new forms to solve new puzzles.

Why do I tell you this? Because it’s tempting to revise history, to make our heroes even more heroic and to give them credit for discoveries that they themselves did not make. It’s also all too easy to fool ourselves, and to discount our own actual mistakes because there was a somewhat-related success down the road.

It’s okay to be wrong; being wrong is evidence that you were trying, and also evidence that you were honest with yourself. The important thing is to get it right in the end. We’re going to be wrong about an awful lot of things going forward; of that I’m certain.

What will separate those of us who are good scientists about it will be our willingness to let go of ideas that no longer agree with the data, admit we were wrong, and embrace the theoretical ideas that are in accord with what we observe. We may even wind up reviving old ideas and finding new ways that they apply to our Universe as we learn more about it. (It doesn’t mean the old ideas were right all along, though!)

This is science, where every day we come a little closer to getting it right. Thanks for coming along on the journey with me.

請至原網頁瀏覽相關圖片。

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/17/einsteins-greatest-blunder-was-really-a-blunder/

There is No Scientific Method 

Lee Smolin, Big Think, 05/01/13

I was very influenced when I was in graduate school by Paul Feyerabend who was a great philosopher of science who argued that there is no scientific method, that we scientists are opportunists, that we do whatever it takes to succeed at any time and to succeed means to deepen our knowledge, to have better knowledge, a better understanding of nature.

But there’s no magic bullet.  There’s no magic formula that gets us there.  There’s no set of rules. There’s no methodology that gets us there.  So why does science work? Paul Feyerabend believed - and he’s often misunderstood – that science worked, and he deeply loved science.  I met him and talked with him a number of times.  

Feyerabend thought it was very important to underline that we didn’t know why science works. And so I gave a lot of thought to this problem over the years and my point of view, my proposal, is that science works because scientists form communities and traditions based not on a common set of methods, but a common set of ethical principles.  And there are two ethical principles that I think underlie the success of science and I call these the Principles of the Open Future.  The first one is that we agree to tell the truth and we agree to be governed by rational argument from public evidence.  So when there is a disagreement it can be resolved by referring to a rational deduction from public evidence.  We agree to be so swayed.