Science lesson: What you want to be true ain’t necessarily so

How can a criticism of evolutionary psychology come off sounding like apologetics? I found this article annoying because of its lack of awareness.

One of the more intriguing findings in the field of evolutionary psychology over the past two decades has been that ovulating women are more strongly attracted to men with faces that have pronounced masculine characteristics, such as wide jaws and heavy brows, than to men who do not have such traits. Other research suggests men with highly masculinised faces have strong immune systems, a desirable trait in children, but also tend to form weaker long-term bonds with romantic partners, and are thus more likely to desert and leave the mother, both literally and metaphorically, holding the baby. Logic therefore suggests that a woman’s ideal evolutionary strategy is to mate with such men in secrecy, while duping less masculine (but better bonded) males into believing that the resultant offspring are their own—thus garnering reliable help in raising them.

That is not intriguing. That’s actually a fundamental obsession of evolutionary psychology: there are so many tedious studies that try to map women’s sexual preferences onto some aspect of their endocrinology. There is no continuity of thought, they’re just flighty creatures who make decisions based on their menstrual cycle, and their entire life history involves cycling through hormonally dictated associations with men with chins vs. men without chins. And all of that is built on the premise that Natural Selection is so powerful that it oscillates irresistibly on a monthly basis.

There is something wrong with you if you can only think of women as bags containing varying titers of estrogen. Not intriguing, except that it does say something about the men who believe in that crap.

So this article gets into a moderately large study (584 women) that actually controlled for many of the problems that plague other EP studies. They actually measured hormone levels directly, rather than going by self-reporting. They did multiple sessions for each woman. They had a larger sample size to possibly overcome some of the statistical weakness of previous work.

Unfortunately, it still uses the same superficial sorts of criteria other studies have used. They show the subjects pairs of photos of digitally manipulated male faces, some “feminized”, others “masculinized”, and ask the subjects which they’d rather fuck, and which they’d rather marry (they missed an opportunity to include a third option, “kill”). That’s it. It’s a predictably shallow approach to complex life decisions, but hey, bags of estrogen don’t worry their pretty little heads with thoughtful interactions with other human beings.

The only surprise here is that they got a negative result — there was no correlation between the women’s choices and their menstrual cycle — and that it got published. At least that last bit surprised me. These kinds of studies are usually exercises in the file drawer effect, or p value fishing.

But the popular press summary still manages to polish up this turd in an aggravating way.

All told, Dr Jones found that women’s masculinity-preference scores were not related to their reproductive cycle. Specifically, he and his colleagues could not find any statistically significant relationship between the levels of any hormones and preferences for more masculine faces. The idea that evolution encourages women to engage in cyclical cuckoldry was certainly an intriguing one. But, as Benjamin Franklin put it, one of the greatest tragedies in life is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts.

“Intriguing”. “Beautiful”. No, the premise was a heap of garbage that was sustained by years of sloppy studies and wishful thinking, and there was nothing beautiful about it. I’d like to imagine that some bad science was literally murdered, but I just know it’s going to be resurrected over and over again by evolutionary psychologists whose research is guided more by what they want to be true than any kind of valid understanding of evolution, or psychology, or human beings.

If you have a chronic runny nose, maybe your brain is leaking out of your skull

That sounds like an unkind joke, but sometimes it happens.

Jackson was diagnosed with cerebrospinal fluid leak, as in, brain fluid had been leaking through a hole in her skull into her nose. All day, every day. For three years.

She was losing approximately half a pint per day of the fluid that is supposed to surround the brain and spinal cord, doctors told her. If left untreated, the leak could have led to serious infections, including meningitis, vision changes and hearing loss.

I don’t have a runny nose, so I guess I have no excuse.

We’re in bigger trouble than I thought

I got spammed by Big Think, which tags itself as “your daily microdose of genius”, with a link to a listicle titled 7 myths you learned in biology class that you probably still believe. It annoyed me. Sure, it’s trying to correct misconceptions, but the misconceptions given are generally rather pathetic, and I rather doubt that any of them are taught in any biology class. Or maybe they are, and I’ve got an unrealistic understanding of the quality of biology education.

Here are the 7 false things that are being taught in biology class, according to Big Think:

  1. Humans sit atop the food chain. Yeah, no. I don’t teach the ecology side of biology much, but I can’t imagine such a claim making it into any textbook.

  2. Respiration is synonymous with breathing. OK, I do teach this side of biology, and the vast majority of the organisms that respire don’t “breathe”. Easy and obvious. But then Big Think says this: “respiration is when muscles release glucose during physical activity”. Wha…? Wrong. Don’t try to correct misconceptions with more misconceptions.

  3. Cats and dogs are colorblind. Their answer is flat out wrong: they say dogs and cats aren’t colorblind, because “Shockingly, recent research finds both dogs and cats can see the colors green and blue”. That is not shocking, nor is it recent. Colorblindness is a poor choice of term because individuals with this trait typically have two kinds of cones, rather than three; it would be more accurate to call them dichromats, unlike trichromats, the individuals with full color vision. But dogs and cats are colorblind in the same way that colorblind humans are.

  4. Sugar is as addictive as cocaine. I have never, ever heard this. It turns out that the author got this claim out of a fad diet book. Those things are not synonymous with what you read in biology class, or at least, I hope not.

  5. Daughters inherit traits from their mothers and sons from their fathers. The article says, “Most people carry this misconception from when they learned how we inherit traits,” which might explain some of the test scores on the last exam in my intro course, but I certainly didn’t teach that. Worse, it then goes on: “Another common misconception is that we get half of our characteristics from each parent. The truth, all that matters is which alleles are dominant.” Holy crap, no. I don’t even know what they’re trying to say there.

  6. Sharks can smell one drop of blood in the water from a mile away. Not true, but I find it disturbing that anyone thinks biology class is where you drop anecdotes that can be used in your cheesy thriller novel.

  7. Humans evolved from chimps. This falsehood I know has wide currency — creationists keep making this mistake. But again, it is not taught in biology class, except maybe if your biology class is a homeschooled abomination taught out of books from Answers in Genesis. If the class is teaching any kind of general systematics at all, it’s going to be emphasizing evolutionary trees, not linearity.

I am not at all impressed. The article reads like something written by someone who has virtually no knowledge of biology at all, got a few shreds of factlets off the internet, and then cobbled together some mangled explanations just to make up some clickbait (he succeeded at that!).

I guess the emphasis in “microdose of genius” really belongs on the “micro”. Or maybe they should change it to “homeopathic dose of genius”.

The laziest professor in the world!

That’s me! Today was our last day of classes, and rather than me doing the work of teaching, I invited Ken Miller to do it for me over Google.

I should have thought of this months ago — let’s see, 15 weeks, 3 classes a week, I could probably find 45 friends willing to cover for me for a day each.

Has anyone ever seen a good science stock photo?

I was once drafted to be an extra in a commercial for the University of Oregon. First thing they did was hand me a white lab coat. Second thing was to complain that they’d looked around the lab they were filming in, and couldn’t find any colored solutions in the refrigerator — could I get them some? I at least managed to stop them before they started mixing up random reagents from the shelves.

Public misconceptions about how science is done are terrible. How terrible? Here’s a whole collection of terrible stock photos. This one was my favorite.

There are a lot of botanists in my department. I should ask them if they have a stethoscope.

David Berlinski crawls out of his spider hole to sneer at science

David Berlinski! Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. He appeared on Fox News last night, with his standard air of disaffected ennui to explain science to Mark Levin. It was a series of own goals.

He has little regard for science — they’re all shallow thinkers. That’s why they’re all atheists, who regard 5,000 year old religious traditions with contempt. He explains what he knows about the academy, which isn’t much, and portrays us all as people who go around sneering at religion. Well, I do…but I’m not at all representative. If I were to interrupt a committee meeting with complaints about the pervasive religiosity of the community I live in, that would be discouraged — we’re supposed to be reality-based, so the question would be about how we can adapt to the reality of our situation, how can we get along with our neighbors, and generally getting specific about our opinions on religion while carrying on our academic business is considered a faux pas. That goes for someone promoting a religion as well as for someone promoting no religion.

Berlinski then accuses scientists, and especially atheist scientists, of being shallow thinkers. That, I think, is generally true of everyone: we work in our little niche, and sometimes some of us poke our heads out and try to explore other ideas more broadly, but we each have our domains of expertise and tend to focus on those. But Berlinski goes further, and wants to proclaim the facts of science as inadequate because they aren’t wrapped up in enough philosophical baggage. For example, he says that the hypothesis that we are nothing but cosmic accidents has been widely accepted by the scientific community, and that is true — people have been looking for a teleological cause for centuries, and failing, while stochastic explanations for physics, chemistry, and biology have been succeeding wonderfully. In the absence of a cosmic plan, we have to accept that we are cosmic accidents.

I think that has significant social and moral and psychological explanations that ought to be explored further. Most scientists don’t worry about it; their job is to accurately describe reality, now let others figure out what it means. That’s not shallowness — science requires a great depth of knowledge — but only specialization. The thing is, if you’re going to claim scientists haven’t done a great job of fitting their answers to the greater puzzle of culture, neither have those advocates for 5,000 year old religious traditions. And the religious advocates have a more challenging job of propping up ideas that are demonstrably wrong and fly in the face of the observed facts.

Berlinski also can’t avoid elitism and lying about the science. Levin makes a mind-bogglingly stupid comment about climate change: they can’t tell us the temperature next week within ten degrees but they can tell us within a degree what it will be in a century, which is a goofy way of confusing local weather with global climate. Berlinski has a unique way of addressing the evidence of climate change: well, the “top physicists” aren’t studying climate change. Berlinski dismisses studies of the climate with I’m talking about top physicists, to get to climate change we all have to go down that ladder all the way down to the bottom. Then he claims that all those petty little substandard physicists who call themselves climatologists are all squabbling with one another with inconsistent results.

Then he gets to what Levin calls “Darwinianism”.

Here’s Berlinski’s arguments: he invents a series of just-so stories. Why did the giraffe develop a long neck? Because he wanted to reach leaves at the top of the trees. (That, by the way, is no element of any modern evolutionary explanation — he seems to be reaching back to vague memories from grade school of 18th century explanations). Why aren’t women born with tails like cats? Women don’t seem to need them, even though it would make them more alluring. He expresses every bit of biological diversity as a matter of whim and personal preference. He explains the problem: the anecdotes pile on interminably, and there’s no fundamental leading principle. Oh, nonsense. Berlinski invents anecdotes, and then uses his ignorance of the mathematical principles underlying, for example, population genetics to claim that population geneticists are just sitting around inventing myths.

He’s an annoying and pretentious kind of fool. He needs to fly back to France and disappear again, because he’s too out of touch to be able to contribute anything to any discussion except for his cultivated air of superciliousness. Which, I will admit, he has honed to razor sharpness. Too bad there’s no substance at all behind it, and that he is such a shallow thinker.