What the heck is sociogenomics?

I was asked recently about “sociogenomics,” and I had to stop and think because I was unfamiliar with the word. At a guess, I thought it would about looking for correlations between genes and socioeconomic groups, ethnicities, and races using tools like genome wide association studies and polygenic scores — you know, Bell Curve shit. To me, it sounded ominous and catastrophically bad, something that would shift into plain old eugenics and evolve into Nazi shit. But what do I know? I had to go look it up. I was just guessing.

Guess what? I guessed right.

Sociogenome is the comprehensive study of the role of genes and gene-environment (GxE) interaction on reproductive behaviour. Until now, social science research has focussed on socio-environmental explanations, largely neglecting the role of genes.

Drawing from recent unprecedented advances in molecular genetics we examine whether there is a genetic component to reproductive outcomes, including age at first birth, number of children and infertility and their interaction with the social environment.

Uh-oh. They’re just going to take modern genetic techniques and apply them to sociology. But these techniques will not give them the answers they want! They’ll reveal rough correlations, but they won’t untangle genetics and environmental factors — they can’t. This is a problem that has been pointed out to behavioral genetics researchers for years, and they just go sailing on ahead.

In the past decade and a half, sociologists and demographers have sought to integrate genetic data into their empirical analyses. To do so, they have drawn on recently developed high-throughput sequencing and genotyping technologies, which allow the entire genome to be mapped. They also follow in the line of a research specialty, behavioural genetics, which rose to prominence in the 1970s. This area, which focused notably on the genetic determination of intelligence, attracted severe criticisms, including among demographers (Jacquard, 1978; Vetta and Courgeau, 2003; Courgeau, 2017). However, these criticisms do not always seem to have been heard, and the emergence of new data and techniques has given rise to new problems, as indicated by calls for caution from learned societies in human genetics (Société française de génétique humaine, 2010; Risch, 2016; Société française de génétique humaine, 2018).

Let’s look at an example of a sociogenomics study that was summarized in Wired. It does not reassure me.

The UK BioBank is the single largest public genetic repository in the world, with samples of the genetic blueprints of half a million Brits standing by for scientific study. But when David Hill, a statistical geneticist at the University of Edinburgh, went poring through that data, he wasn’t looking for a cure for cancer or deeper insights into the biology of aging. Nothing like that. He was trying to figure out why some people make more money than others.

I hadn’t thought of that. They’re going to tap into modern behavioral databases, like all that information Facebook has about you, in addition to biological databases, and they’re going to try to weave the two of them into some kind of story. I’ve never been impressed by that.

Along with a team of European collaborators, Hill sifted through the UK Biobank data to find about 286,000 participants who had answered a survey question about household income. Using that information they conducted something called a Genome Wide Association Study, where they looked at 18 million places in the genome to see which ones matched up with higher paychecks. They uncovered about 30, which account for 7.4 percent of household income variation across the United Kingdom. (For some context, another way of viewing the results is to say that 92.6 percent of a person’s income is explained by factors other than genetics.) Hill noticed that many of the genetic differences overlapped with areas known to be associated with intelligence, based on some of his prior work, and when he mapped them out they were largely expressed in the brain.

His team then used these regions to compute a polygenic score, a genetic calculation that predicts a person’s odds of reaching a certain outcome—of, say, developing diabetes or earning six figures. It didn’t perform particularly well, correctly forecasting only 2.5 percent of the differences in income in an independent sample of Scots. “Your DNA will not print you money,” says Hill. But he’s relieved to have found some small effect. “If you’re born with a predisposi­tion for certain traits or abilities, and none of them counted in any way, shape, or form towards your income, then you’d have a profoundly unfair society, in my opinion,” he says.

Thanks, I hate it. So he started with the information about a quarter of a million people, went fishing for any correlation at all, and found a tiny percentage of the genetic variation might account for a tiny fraction of the variation in income, because of course they’re zeroing in on money. It looks like noise to me; I’d want to know haw they accounted for the fact that a great deal of wealth is inherited, so you’d expect to see some common traits threaded through lines of wealth. Trust fund babies are going to share genes with mommy and daddy, even if they have nothing to do with the source of their money.

Further, even their weak correlation hasn’t found a genetic basis for wealth. Genes aren’t pure entities that can be isolated in this way and tied to phenotype — everything is polygenic and pleiotropic, and absolutely dependent on the environment for their expression. No wonder I didn’t know what sociogenomics is — if I encountered it in a science journal, I’d glance at the abstract, gag, and turn the page.

Then I figured it out: sociogenomics is nothing but the new label slapped on Kathryn Paige Harden’s behavioral genetics, which I figured out a long time ago was garbage science. Here’s a solid critique of Harden’s ideas.

In her recent sociogenomics manifesto The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden sets out to rescue behavior genetics from the spectres of racism and eugenics. Sociogenomics, like behavior genetics, studies the possible role of genes in explaining complex human social behaviors. Critics have charged this area of study with fueling biological determinist theories of human social inequality.

Harden purports to offer a refreshing take on this old debate because she claims that such critics are blind to the role that genetics play in the very thing they aim to secure: social equality. She argues that, in fact, we must use genetic information to promote truly egalitarian social policy. Styling herself after 20th century anti-racist geneticists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky, Harden offers the new sociogenomics as an explicitly anti-eugenic synthesis of genetics and equality.

Harden is right that the legacies of eugenics haunt behavior genetics. The field’s findings have been used to argue that biological differences between social groups explain social inequality and to undermine the possibility of egalitarian interventions. Human behavior genetics and its successor, sociogenomics, have thrived on controversy about the alleged biological relationship between race and IQ and the alleged futility of educational interventions in closing achievement gaps. Harden’s particular focus—the notion that biology can explain population differences in educational attainment and cognitive performance—has been a pillar of eugenic discourse and white supremacist ideology. But Harden believes that it is possible to “[reclaim] genetic science from the legacy of eugenics, realigning it with egalitarian aims.” Harden’s “new synthesis,” she argues, is not only different from eugenics, but self-consciously anti-eugenic.

Harden draws an analogy between her critics’ “genome blindness” (her term for the failure to “see” genetic causes) and color blindness (the failure to “see” race). Just as color blindness undermines antiracism because it fails to grapple with the effects of racism, Harden argues that genome-blindness threatens egalitarian aims because it fails to grapple with genetic causes of inequality. But this analogy breaks down when the entanglement of behavior genetics with eugenics is taken seriously. Resisting eugenics depends on an understanding not of how genes work, but of how eugenics works. Anti-eugenic science demands an expansive and nuanced understanding of how eugenic thought developed. In this essay, we show that Harden’s account of eugenics seriously undermines her claim to rescue behavior genetics from its clutches.

Yeah. Harden is really unconvincing. Somehow, while claiming to be an anti-eugenicist, she embraces the modern genetic determinists and spurns the people who have been showing for decades that genes and environment are inseparable.

Harden’s failure to engage with critics of behavioral genetics, often from the political left, veers between simple omissions and outright misrepresentation. This treatment is in stark contrast to how she treats biological determinists on the political right. The work of Charles Murray, the co-author of The Bell Curve, which claimed that differences in IQ scores between the rich and poor were genetic, and whose research aligns neatly with Harden’s, is described as mostly true and his political implications are lightly challenged. The most prominent critic of behavioral genetics, Richard Lewontin, gets much rougher treatment.

In one of the three cases in which Harden bothers to mention Lewontin’s decades-long engagement with behavioral genetics, she gets it wrong, claiming that Lewontin merely said that heritability is useless because it is specific to a particular population at a particular time. In reality, Lewontin showed why the statistical foundation of heritability analyses means it is unable to truly separate genetic and environmental effects. Contra Harden’s characterization of her opponents, Lewontin recognized genetic factors as a cause of phenotypes; however, he stressed their effects cannot be independent of environmental factors and the dynamics of development.

Called it. Told you this was going to be some Bell Curve shit.

What really clinches for me that this is something more than a few fringe scholars coming up with fancy titles for the junk science they are doing, though, is this surprise. Purdue is making a massive investment in creating a sociogenomics department from scratch.

Together the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Science at Purdue University seek applications for multiple scholars in Sociogenomics, including existing groups of investigators, to assemble a new world-leading cohort of approximately 15 faculty. The positions include tenure-track Assistant, Associate, and Professor ranks.

A relatively new field, Sociogenomics encompasses theoretical and methodological approaches across the social, behavioral, and genetic sciences including those with an emphasis on computation. It explores the roles of genetics in social and behavior outcomes, as well as how genetics interact with the environment and social forces. Purdue is strongly committed to establishing a pre-eminent center in this emerging area including hiring a substantive cohort of scholars. We are especially interested in fostering collaborative linkages across the core fields of this discipline, here at Purdue and more broadly. This search is open to leading scholars in any area relevant to the advancement of Sociogenomics, and we are especially interested in candidates who draw from and contribute to research in the social science disciplines, biological sciences, the computational and data sciences, statistics, or other related disciplines. We anticipate joint appointments across departments where appropriate, with tenure homes flexible and negotiated at the time of hire.

That is remarkable. Right now, universities everywhere are struggling, thanks to the pressures of the pandemic and political neglect, yet somehow, Purdue has magically come up with the money and the will to create 15 faculty positions in this “relatively new field.” This is not how it works. You start with a small team of qualified people in the area, see how successful they are at grants and papers, and how well the students respond to their courses. Then you build around that solid core and grow the department. Also, you typically start with some well-established discipline that you know has a good track record.

Just flash, boom, creating a substantial department out of whole cloth, hiring new people and assembling them into some kind of framework, is what you do when you’ve got some wealthy sugar daddy, a billionaire or two or some corporation that thinks there are profits to be made. And doing it with some vague discipline that is only a few years old — unthinkable. In the absence of a need, this has to be the product of someone with an agenda, probably an unsavory agenda, pushing buckets of money at a university that will happily accept it.

The thing is, ideas that promote the belief that the very rich have earned their money by virtue of their superior biology are ridiculously popular with the people who have an excess of money to donate.

No, I honestly don’t think further research is warranted

You might not want to follow Holly Dunsworth on Twitter — she might sometimes spring an ugly surprise on you. Like this paper from the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine. Here’s the entirety of the content of the paper.

Many accounts refer to insertion of finger into anus mostly for gratification from stimulation of prostate gland, but index case Mr. M. continued doing this to get rid of constipation that eventually led to feelings of guilt, stinky fingers, not able to defecate normally, and dysphoric emotions. Further research is needed to find out the phenomenology of this condition.

Key words: Depression, smelly finger, stinky finger

INTRODUCTION
Many of us might have once tried to push finger from our rear end, but experiences vary from feeling pleasurable to disgust. Well many times, habit of same can lead to shame-ridden heart with all dysphoric emotions.

CASE REPORT
Index patient Mr. M. 13 years of age, male, and belonging to middle socioeconomic status visited clinical psychologist with the complaints of sad mood, extreme guilt feelings, and anxiety. Above all, these symptoms seem to be secondary to his repeated act of inserting finger into his anus. The patient reported that he used to have constipation and that resulted in spending more time in toilet. Once he accidently put his finger inside his anus and found that it helped him easy defecating. Subsequently, it became his habit and he knew this was easy way out. However, soon this act started intruding his life. First, he started spending more time in washroom doing same. Second, his fingers would stink like shit even if he washes hands repeatedly with soap or apply mustard oil on hands. Many people including his family members commented on him that he was stinking and the patient used to cover his hands in front of others. Third, repeated insertion of finger led to bleeding heavily. He would feel sad and anxious most of the time along with the extreme feelings of guilt associated with the act. The duration of the condition was reported to be 3 months. Depression and anxiety symptoms were found to be subsyndromal rather waxing and waning around the thoughts of the act and guilt-ridden thoughts such as “why am I indulging into such act?” and “Is it that I can’t defecate normally now?.” Many times, the patient tried to stop this act, but he was not able to defecate and thus continued despite his sad mood and guilt feelings.

DISCUSSION
Index case could not be explained on obsessions and compulsions or habit and impulse disorder as no intrusion of thoughts or compulsions or impulse to action was present.[1] Neither could this be explained by olfactory reference syndrome where only patient has sense that he or she is producing a foul smell (and not necessarily smell of feces) which is not the case in objective reality here.[2,3] Discussion regarding anal expulsive character described by Sigmund Freud from fixation at anal stage might be quite possible here. Research speaks about pleasure by touching one’s prostate.[4] Apparently, the act does not seem to be the stimulation of prostate gland as patient was getting pleasure from not by inserting finger but when he defecates profusely till he would not pass any stool but only mucus and blood. He does it, so that he can defecate easily and pleasure is felt by defecation. However, still pleasurable feelings by touching prostate gland cannot be discounted and is a close differential. Searching the internet, we could not find anything related to this condition except one case that is very much like the index case.[5] That self-reported case also describes experiencing of symptoms such as shame, putting finger to defecate, sense of pleasure after defecation, smelly fingers, and disturbance in sociooccupational functioning. While history taking, index patient revealed that many times he found same foul smell from his first cousin who is just 9 years of age but he could not enquire her/him. The statement, if speaks about the same condition, increases the possibility of role of genetics in the condition. However, this would be just speculation and premature conclusion thus needs further exploration. More research is warranted to explore the phenomenology of the condition.

That actually got published in a real, if rather minor, journal, and indexed on PubMed.

That’s a rather impressive reach to assign a potential genetic cause to the behavior, but not worse than what’s routinely said on Quillette.

CAM and credulity

I was asked by a friend to take a look at this paper which he was surprised to see in a science journal. It’s a weird and unconvincing paper, a Case report of instantaneous resolution of juvenile macular degeneration blindness after proximal intercessory prayer. It’s actually a case of rummaging around in old medical files in order to report a “miracle” in 1972.

Here’s the story: an 18 year old girl lost her vision in 1959 over the course of a few months, with no identified cause. She was diagnosed with 7/200 vision, attended a school for the blind, and lived as a blind person for 12 years. Then, even more suddenly, her vision recovered fully after her husband prayed for her.

When the couple went to bed later than normal (after midnight), her husband performed a hurried spiritual devotional practice (reading two Bible verses) and got on his knees to pray. She describes that they both began to cry as he began to pray, with a hand on her shoulder while she laid on the bed, and with great feeling and boldness he prayed: “Oh, God! You can restore […] eyesight tonight, Lord. I know You can do it! And I pray You will do it tonight.” At the close of the prayer, his wife opened her eyes and saw her husband kneeling in front of her, which was her first clear visual perception after almost 13 years of blindness.

An examination in 2001 revealed that she had 20/40 vision, and that her retinas looked normal.

I can’t debunk this account, if that’s what you’re looking for. I could speculate about possible ways the story is misleading us, but we know nothing about the causes of the blindness or its cure, we don’t even know that there was a physical basis for the blindness, and I’m not going to diagnose an old medical condition — that’s what the authors of the paper are doing. All we’ve got are old records, and modern evidence that she can see, and no way to trace the actual history of her vision. It’s an anecdote. Maybe she was actually cured by a miracle! Unfortunately, there’s no way to analyze what actually happened.

I’m skeptical that prayer is actually effective, though. This woman was devout, came from a very religious family and community, and you’re telling me that the onset of blindness did not trigger a flurry of intense prayers from the woman, her family, and her church? Was that the first time her husband begged his god to restore her sight? It’s awfully hard to believe that something that was certainly done to no effect for years can be assigned a causal role in her abrupt recovery. But OK, I just have to shrug and say that’s some story.

How did it get published in a science journal? Well, it’s not a science journal, for one thing. It got published in Explore.

EXPLORE: The Journal of Science & Healing addresses the scientific principles behind, and applications of, evidence-based healing practices from a wide variety of sources, including conventional, alternative, and cross-cultural medicine. It is an interdisciplinary journal that explores the healing arts, consciousness, spirituality, eco-environmental issues, and basic science as all these fields relate to health.

It’s one of those alternative journals with standards so wide open the editors’ brains have fallen out. I’ll also note that the paper concludes with an empty statement.

The PIP [proximal intercessory prayer] may have been associated with a response in the ANS [autonomic nervous system] of the patient. However, research on the potential for PIP to affect the ANS and/or reverse vision loss associated with JMD is limited. Findings from this report and others like it warrant investment in future research to ascertain whether and how PIP experiences may play a role in apparent spontaneous resolution of lifelong conditions having otherwise no prognosis of recovery.

“warrant investment in future research”…how? You’ve got one poorly understood, anecdotal observation, so how do you propose to do “research”? By gathering more anecdotal self-reports from believers in this phenomenon, and looking at more half-century old medical records? I’m also concerned that the authors now want to find people with “lifelong conditions having otherwise no prognosis of recovery” and tell them to pray for a cure. Most of those people will say they’ve already been praying for years, so…pray harder? Pray to the right god? Pray with the right magic words? It’s not as if they’ve identified a repeatable treatment or specific mechanism that they can test and refine.

I do note one admission that they authors make.

Prayer is one of the most common complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies.

That’s a confession that most of CAM is useless.

Always tell Steve Kirsch “NO”

What an interesting dilemma: if I were seated next to this smug asshole, would I take the money? How about you?

On the one hand, that would be a nice sum for my retirement, and the odds of getting COVID from one exposure are low…and the odds of dying from the disease are even lower. On the other hand, gambling my health and life against what this guy considers chump change is a fool’s game.

The deciding factor for me is that Mr Kirsch is an obnoxious jerk who’d use my acceptance as propaganda to do greater harm to other people. His seatmate turned him down, as did several other people he offered $10,000 to. So yeah, I’d tell him no, and probably tell him to fuck off.

As it turns out, Steve Kirsch is a notable liar and quack with a lot of money.

Kirsch is a serial entrepreneur who has spent decades pitching the next big thing, whether optical mice (Mouse Systems), document processing (FrameMaker), search engines (Infoseek), digital security (OneID), or e-commerce (Propel Software). His latest startup, M10, is a spin-off of a spin-off that sells a blockchain for banks. He has made millions from these projects, even if they have not turned him into a household name.

“You see this with people who have a lot of money, who think that reflects their intelligence,” Richman told me. “He considers himself an expert in something that he doesn’t have training or experience in, and he’s not following scientific methods to assess data.”

Man, we sure have a lot of examples of that phenomenon.

His current obsession is with promoting crank COVID cures like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. He’s funding clinical trials, which is good, but then he tends to ignore or even contradict the results when they don’t go in the direction he wants, which is antithetical to doing good science.

His peers and the beneficiaries of his wealth are beginning to realize that.

Peter Meinke, another former board member, spent nearly three decades in drug discovery at Merck.

“It’s really, really common for a small effect, something that looks exciting, to be a statistical fluke when you look at a larger population. It’s sad, but it’s true,” he told me. “With covid, 80% of your patient population does just peachy with no treatment at all, just a little bed rest and fluid. It’s actually much harder to parse out a signal than if you’re treating diabetes or cancer.”

In addition to the issues with fluvoxamine, advisors grew increasingly uncomfortable with Kirsch’s posts about ivermectin, which he has repeatedly claimed in blog posts and appearances in alternative media can be used together with fluvoxamine to prevent 100% of covid-19 deaths. (“The ivermectin data are trash,” Feinberg told me. “There’s nothing there.”)

Things took a final and dramatic turn once Kirsch started claiming the government was covering up vaccine deaths.

An obnoxious crank with money. That’s all he is.

What do others think of Evolutionary Psychology?

Over there on Reddit, there is a subreddit called r/evolution for the discussion of evolutionary questions and issues. There is now consideration of a rule to clarify their stance on evolutionary psychology. It’s a good one.

As you know, the moderator team has been considering the possibility of new rules to help improve things around here. And of course, we wanted to get the community’s feedback on the matter before we pulled the trigger. Please, just remember to voice your disagreements peacefully.

  • Rule #X: Evolutionary Psychology. The moderation team takes the stance that evolutionary psychology is pseudoscience. Like any pseudoscience, it starts with a conclusion rather than drawing that conclusion from data; it also tends to ignore or even demonize other fields of science that already provide information about the topics it addresses; and tends to boil personal behaviors and preferences (as well as complicated sociocultural and developmental phenomena) down to a handful of terms it uses as buzzwords to craft adaptationist/bioessentialist just-so stories that are often untested, untestable, or even wildly incorrect. It’s also frequently used to justify everything from preexisting biases all the way to dehumanizing rhetoric. These posts also tend to attract a lot of baseless speculation and experts on these topics are often drowned out by negativity and downvotes, all of which is antithetical to the climate we’re trying to cultivate.
  • Please note that while we discourage evolutionary psychology and pseudoscience in general, simply asking questions about the evolutionary basis for certain human behaviors or cognitive traits isn’t necessarily an issue: there are legitimate scientists in various fields (eg, anthropology, especially evolutionary anthropology, ethnography, behavioral genetics, etc), who study these topics with proper, physical data, and so there is information out there. However, if we feel that a question is better suited for other academics (eg, regular psychologists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, etc), if things start getting pseudoscientific, or if certain lines are crossed, we may choose to intervene.

More pithily, they say the “problem is that evolutionary psychology is science in the same way that Taco Bell is authentic Mexican food.” There is some polite agreement with the statement (I’m not saying anything, because I’d only provide loud impolite agreement) and some polite disagreement. The disagreeable all seem to be quoting Tooby & Cosmides, which to me is just another sign that it’s a cult. EP has existed for decades, and all you’ve got to show for it is a pair of aging, founding authorities and a swarm of lunatics and bad publications? Cut your losses. Treat EP as crackpottery.

As far as I’m concerned, the statement is fair and judicious.

FREEEEEDOOOOMMM! For a few days, anyway

Today is my last day of classes before Spring break, and it’s going to be a busy one. After I finish up lab today, I’m free! Except for grading an exam and lab reports, and having to tend the students’ flies until they get back, and feeding my own monstrous swarm of arachnids every day. Other than that, I get to sit back and take it easy.

So let’s do a live stream tomorrow! I’ve got some rage bottled up in me about idiots denying evolution and climate change, plus maybe I’ll reveal some spider breeding tricks. Live! On air!

I do have to get through the rest of this day, though.

Naomi Wolf thinks my penis is going to rot and fall off. Should I be concerned?

It’s looking diseased.

I hadn’t heard of the “Daily Clout” before, it’s just another far right histrionic pseudo-journalistic platform for particularly ignorant pundits. This morning I learned that they’re claiming the COVID vaccine will make your penis rot and fall off. I’ve had four shots, I guess I need to worry.

Or not worry. This woman is reading through Pfizer’s internal documentation of their trials, and jumping on every chance occurrence as a causal indictment of the treatment. One person got an epithelial cancer, another had a blood clot, etc., etc., etc. — but that’s to be expected in an large sample of the population in a clinical trial. Some of the participants might have died in a car accident, but you don’t leap to the assumption that the vaccine caused the accident. You have to compare the frequency in the test group to the frequency in the general population.

Then I learn the “Daily Clout” was founded by Naomi Wolf. OK. I’m done. My penis is relieved.

Wow, Florida…

I’m sorry, Florida is a joke.

If the Lee County Republican Party has their way, the state of Florida will be banning the use of Covid-19 vaccines. Yes, you heard that correctly. Based on a majority vote, the Party has passed a so-called “Ban the jab” resolution that will now go to the desk of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) for his consideration. And why does the Party want such a ban? Well, an article for WINK News by Michael Hudak and Taylor Wirtz quoted Joe Sansone, the guy who drafted the resolution, as saying, “The Lee County Republican Party is going to be on the vanguard of this campaign to stop the genocide because we have foreign non-governmental entities that are unleashing biological weapons on the American people.”

This Sansone clown is a “psychotherapist” who clearly knows nothing about biology. He claims the vaccine is a “bioweapon”, and he has the ear of the governor. Do you think DeSantis will refuse to sign his insane declaration?

Sansone is pretty far out there.

The WINK article also included another quote from Sansone that really seemed to embrace some conspiracy theory claims: “If you got this shot, you go home and hug your pregnant wife—she can have a miscarriage through skin contact.” Wait, so now, you’ve got to start worrying about hugging people who have gotten Covid-19 vaccines? How exactly is that supposed to work scientifically? Did Sansone provide any peer-reviewed scientific studies to support his assertion? Most likely not, because good luck trying to find any peer-reviewed scientific studies to support such an assertion.

Don’t worry, though, he has been verified by Psychology Today, so you can trust him. PT would never publish a wackaloon, right? (Actually, I feel like Psychology Today is the Florida of pop-sci magazines.)

Joseph Sansone, M.S., PhD, LMHC, CCMHC, is the author of Bioplasticity: Hypnosis Mind Body Healing. A psychotherapist specializing in clinical hypnosis, Joseph was trained in advanced clinical hypnosis at the Academy of Professional Hypnosis in 1997. Dr. Sansone has a B.A. in psychology, a M.S. in clinical mental health counseling, and a PhD in psychology. Joseph has spent much of his life as an entrepreneur and enjoys facilitating self-actualization. Joseph Sansone is a licensed mental health counselor as well as a board certified clinical mental health counselor. Dr. Sansone is also a member of the National Guild of Hypnotists.

Science apologizes

We all knew William Shockley was a disgusting racist, using bad biology to argue for bad goals, but he was the co-inventor of the transistor! He won a Nobel prize for his work in a field unrelated to biology! So while my friends and I were willingly calling him out as a fraud, a liar, and a racist while we were out for beers, all the major scientific publications were more mealy-mouthed and ingratiating, which was annoying. It was partly out of misplaced politeness, but also that a lot of the white male old guard were probably sympathetic to his ideas.

Maybe that’s changing. Science has published an editorial apologizing for their past indifference/support for Shockley, and promising to do better. They’re calling out the racists and phonies.

Shockley was part of a cadre of physicists who advanced ideas outside of their area of expertise to promote a right-wing agenda. He was a close friend of Frederick Seitz—president of both the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University—who, following a career in physics, became a purveyor of misinformation on tobacco, nuclear weapons, and climate change. Like Shockley, Seitz carried out his nonphysics work through op-eds and conservative think tanks, not through the accepted mechanism of peer review that he used in doing physics. Seitz was not, at least publicly, as overtly in favor of eugenics as was Shockley, but he was a strong advocate for genetic determinism, even claiming at the behest of the cigarette industry that tobacco itself was not harmful because genetics determined whether smokers would ultimately contract lung cancer.

Sound familiar? There are many ‘scientists’ getting checks from right-wing think tanks right now, although most of them are now busy with careers in vaccine and climate change denialism. The words have changed but the song is much the same. Let’s see Science start calling out more of the living hucksters and propagandists for the far right. But for now, I’m reasonably happy with their apology for propping up a dead one.

Following Shockley’s death in 1989, Nature correctly called out his racism in an obituary, but then published a letter from Seitz defending Shockley and claiming that the reason Shockley became a eugenicist was because of physical trauma he experienced in a near-fatal car accident. When Science wrote about this dustup, it referred to Shockley’s ideas as merely “unpopular” and “extremely controversial.” It then ran a letter from an even more notorious eugenicist, J. Philippe Rushton, who argued that by merely covering the disagreement at Nature, Science was delivering an “ad hominem attack.” In addition to an ill-advised decision to publish Rushton’s letter, Science posted a response saying, “no criticism of Shockley was intended.” Yikes.
Looking back, it’s clear that what was intended as an attempt to make room for dissent and discussion only served to abet Shockley and his cohorts in their effort to build support for eugenics. Science gave them a platform and inadequate scorn. The lesson is that we at Science need to make more effort to think about everything that we do, not only from the standpoint of communicating science to the public, but also as an organization that above all, supports all of humanity. The process of science is one of continual revision, but it’s also one that must have a conscience.
It was only a few months ago, in a commentary on racism in science by Ebony Omotola McGee, that Shockley was described in our pages in the terms he deserved. But as recently as 2001, Science described him simply as a “transistor inventor and race theorist.” That won’t cut it anymore. As of today, a link to this editorial will appear along with any mention of Shockley in this journal.
Make no mistake. Shockley was a racist. Shockley was a eugenicist. That’s all.

That’s a pretty good apology: admitting the mistake, taking the blame for it, and planning an action to correct their error. Not that it will stop all the modern ‘race realists’ from relying on old boobs like Shockley and Rushton in their arguments.

Is there a Silicon Valley philosophy that isn’t just ego and vanity and selfishness?

Does this man look 18 to you? How about 30?

I would have guessed he was in his 40s, and would have won a kewpie doll. He’s 45. His name is Bryan Johnson. He has, however, set himself the goal of reversing aging and getting his ‘epigenetic age’ down to something absurd, by making his body the subject of an “experiment” — although it is an experiment with no controls, no comparisons of the effectiveness of various treatments, and a subjective criterion of “perfection,” which he alone defines.

As of now, Johnson claims that the experiment, which he’s dubbed Project Blueprint, is more concerned with understanding the possibilities of one body—his own—than in creating a replicable system. The journey has led to improved physical health, but the most inarguable effect thus far has been on his physical appearance. He has dropped 60 pounds, and a recent MRI scan found that Johnson was in the 99th percentile for both body fat and muscle concentration—proof, he said, of his achieving “the perfect body ratio.” The muscles everywhere from his shins up to his neck appear to almost protrude out of him, and his skin wraps tightly around his face, which is the point: Johnson puts his skin through regular and painful skin rejuvenation processes, on top of the obligatory application of numerous daily creams. After two years, he claims, his skin is that of a twenty-something and his fitness level is that of an 18-year-old; his body also now runs three degrees cooler than it used to. More than 50 of his biomarkers are also now “perfect,” he has said. He even claims he has been able to stop dying his hair as of three months ago, after making “significant progress reversing gray hair.”

Do twenty-somethings look that shiny and moist? I see a lot of them running around here, and they really don’t look like middle-aged somethings who just got back from the spa with a miracle gel filling their pores. Is running 3 degrees cooler actually a good thing, or has he just decided that it must be?

Let’s assume, charitably, that he has improved his personal health, since he does look fit. How does he do it? By throwing ridiculous amounts of money at it, of course. He’s a silicon valley dudebro!

Johnson says that he spends more money on his body than LeBron James. With this sizable budget (more than $2 million a year), he pays for the food he eats (a precise 1,977 calories a day, made up of the world’s most nutritious elements), as well as the 112 to 130 supplemental pills he takes on a daily basis, and the ultrasound machine and other medical-grade machinery he keeps on the second floor of his discrete compound in Venice, Los Angeles, where he and his team of more than 30 doctors, clinicians, and researchers analyze how the 78 organs that make up his body have responded to the latest tweaks to his diet, sleep, and movement.

Oooh, precisely 1977 calories a day…sounds specific and sciencey. Until you learn that he picked that number because that’s the year he was born, not because there’s some evidence that that’s an optimal number. It’s simply another example of the whims of the privileged rich nincompoops who infest tech culture.

Extreme as the specifics of his approach might be—this is a man who has a device that tracks his nightly erections—Johnson falls squarely in line with many of his Silicon Valley peers. In recent years, people throughout the technology sector have taken increasingly innovative—and often eccentric—approaches to their personal health and wellness in a pursuit of a longer, happier life. The industry is chock-full of people who, for example, eat five cans of sardines a day or consume nothing but coffee, water, and tea for over a week straight. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made headlines in 2019, when he announced that he fasted for 22 hours a day and often went days with nothing but water, sparking concerns that the tech sector was “rebranding eating disorders” as wellness. But it was not entirely outside of the norms of an industry that has become taken with “biohacking,” in which one approaches the body as a computer program, to be forever tweaked and optimized.

He doesn’t really care about the science. None of them do.

Existing in a state of perpetual and extreme caloric restriction makes it difficult to fit all the nutrients he needs into his diet. He believes a constant caloric deficit to be “the number one evidence-based health protocol,” though when I later asked specifically what research convinced Johnson to remain in a state of extreme caloric restriction, the only answer I got was “scientific evidence.” Levine, the Altos researcher, said that studies on caloric restriction have led to mixed results and mostly focused on animals. Experiments on mice, for example, have found that while some benefit from restriction, others do not or even experience negative effects. A new study on flatworms out just this month found “no benefits to lifespan” outside of “perfect” environments, as Levine put it.

This is an exercise in supernatural thinking. They want to live forever in youthful vigor — I don’t blame them for that, I would kinda like that myself — but in the absence of real evidence, and with the fact that they’re asking to defy the physical nature of their existence, they just have to make stuff up, or clutch at feeble signs of improvement and imagine that they can amplify that indefinitely. Here goes Bryan Johnson, dreaming that all of his obsessive hypochondria will help him reach his goal of immortality. It won’t.

He claims to have the altruistic goal of helping humanity live decades longer, of increasing the time they have to accomplish great things, which is noble of him. I wonder, though, if people would be able to achieve great things if they have to focus so intensely and with such effort and expense on their personal vanity. Is extending life span (which Johnson has not done) really worth it?

Consider the male spider. He’s small relative to the female, who is a ruthless predator with no qualms against cannibalism. Should he expend most of his effort in growth, bulking up and building his strength, trying to match the physical advantages of the female? Or should he be content with being small, fast, and agile, quickly scampering to females at the earliest possible age to take his shot?

I can tell you that my spiders have chosen the scamper strategy. If they tried to focus on body building before daring to mate, they’d find that a scamperer had been there before them. And that the female might eat them anyway.

If you prefer human analogies, imagine that Alexander the Great had stayed home in Pella, abstaining from wine, living on a spare diet of pulses, slathering his face with the richest cosmetics. He’d probably have lived to be as old as Bryan Johnson! He wouldn’t have had “the Great” slapped on his name, though.

Maybe Alexander the Vain?