Wanna bet on that hypothesis?

In 1980, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich took up economist Julian Simon on a bet that the market price of five metals would drop over the next decade. Simon thought that the Earth's resources are effectively infinite, while Ehrlich had been predicting imminent resource scarcity. In 1990, Simon won $567.07, a sum equal to the drop in price of metals worth $1,000 a decade earlier.Ehrlich and Simon's was hardly the first or only bet on a scientific hypothesis. In 2000, Steven Austad of the University of Idaho and Jay Olshansky, of the University of Illinois, Chicago, staked $150 each on whether someone alive that year would live to be 150 and still aware of their surroundings. Austad says yes, Olshansky no. The money has established a trust fund that will pay out an estimated $500 million to the winner's heirs in 2150. And in 2003, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory sponsored GeneSweep, a sweepstakes on the number of human genes. The Long Bets Foundation Web site http://www.longbets.org has given such bets an international forum. There, the United Kingdom's Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, is predicting that "by 2020, bioterror or bio-error will lead to 1 million casualties in a single event." Rees is one of many bettors on the site who don't seem to have learned anything from Ehrlich's loss; they wager with abandon in fields they aren't expert in. Entrepreneurial engineer Ray Kurzweil, however, sticks to his own area of expertise, pledging $10,000 that by 2029 a computer will have passed the Turing Test for machine intelligence.The stakes are also heating up the field of climate forecasting. Recently, James Annan of Japan's Frontier Research Centre for Global Change has been challenging various climate skeptics to put their money where their temperature predictions are. One of those skeptics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Richard Lindzen, has responded with wagers of his own, but no mutually acceptable terms have yet been agreed.Are such wagers anything more than harmless fun? Rees' apocalyptic prophecy sounds anything but, and he doesn't even have any money at stake. "If I did I'd of course desperately hope to lose," he says. He suggests that high-profile bets can draw attention to important issues.Annan has argued on the Web site http://www.realclimate.org that a futures market based on temperature as the commodity could help establish a scientific consensus about future global temperature trends. As long as enough experts take part – and they should, he says, because they are in the best position to profit – the market could reflect the latest research developments across all relevant disciplines.With the competing financial interests of the scientific workforce already under scrutiny, an expert gambling den might be seen as one more reason to distrust scientists. But Annan says the market should actually promote honesty because of the financial penalty that would result from exaggerating or downplaying predictions for political purposes.He suggests that whomever collects the real data that decide the payouts should be prohibited from placing bets, even though he acknowledges that "it's hard to imagine the sort of widespread international conspiracy that would be required to falsify the global temperature analysis of NASA GISS [Goddard Institute for Space Studies] and the CRU [Climatic Research Unit] in the UK."Real data will also allow scientists to compare the accuracy of the market consensus to that of current climate forecasting methodologies. Anyone tempted to put some money on it outperforming the competition should remember that consensuses are not infallible. Just look at GeneSweep. While bids averaged around 60,000 genes, it was eventually won by a prediction of 25,947 – the lowest of the hundreds of bids received.

Wanna bet on that hypothesis?

In 1980, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich took up economist Julian Simon on a bet that the market price of five metals would drop over the next decade.

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