For Halloween, I was going to find a scary picture of a cephalopod skeleton, but gosh, squid tend not to have them, and they just rot down into gooey slime that doesn’t look very spooky. So you’ll just have to settle for Trachytheuthis libaotica, a 100 million year old fossil squid.
This study comes to a happy conclusion, and then wrecks it all with EP bullshit. What the researchers did was to email requests for either a pdf of a paper or copies of the raw data to researchers, and what they found was a high degree of cooperativity: 80% were willing to send a pdf, 60% were willing to send data. They seem to think this is surprisingly prosocial, but actually, I was a little surprised the numbers were so low. I was brought up to consider this to be expected — back in my old-timey days, when you published a paper, you also ordered a great big box of reprints, because people would send you postcards asking for a copy, and you’d mail it to them. Now you just push a button on a computer, and only 80% oblige? OK, I guess that’s an alright result.
They analyzed further, though, and also found a sex difference. If you were a man requesting a paper from a man, you were 15% more likely to get a positive response. That’s troubling. I’d say that that could be interpreted as indicating a continuing sexism in science. But that’s not enough for these authors.
There is no evolutionary analysis involved in this study, but of course, the reason for their result is…evolution.
Massen and his colleagues say that one possible explanation for their results “may be that among male academics there is a network at play, in which they favor each other much like ‘Old Boy’ networks”. They also suggest that this imbalance might have evolutionary roots and point to an idea called the male-warrior hypothesis, which states that men have evolved to form strong bonds with other males in their group because in the past this enabled them to defend territory from hostile attackers.
“Men are more ready to cooperate with genetic-stranger males to form these fighting coalitions,” says Mark van Vugt, an evolutionary psychologist at the Free University of Amsterdam who first suggested the theory in 2007. Some of the evidence for this idea comes from lab-based tasks such as public-goods games (in which volunteers choose how many tokens to keep or share), but there are some real-world hints too, he says. Boys tend to play in larger groups than girls, van Vugt says, and in sports such as tennis and boxing, men make more effort to bond with their opponent after a match or fight than women do. However cultural factors are also thought to be at work.
Jebus. Can I just say the words “US Women’s Soccer Team” and see this whole bogus line of reasoning vanish in a spray of flop sweat and tears from the men’s team?
Scott Kelly served on the International Space Station for 340 days, partly as an experiment to see how the human body held up in long term weightlessness. Not well, it turns out. Kelly writes about his experience on finally returning to Earth.
I struggle to get up. Find the edge of the bed. Feet down. Sit up. Stand up. At every stage I feel like I’m fighting through quicksand. When I’m finally vertical, the pain in my legs is awful, and on top of that pain I feel a sensation that’s even more alarming: it feels as though all the blood in my body is rushing to my legs, like the sensation of the blood rushing to your head when you do a handstand, but in reverse.
I can feel the tissue in my legs swelling. I shuffle my way to the bath room, moving my weight from one foot to the other with deliberate effort. Left. Right. Left. Right. I make it to the bathroom, flip on the light, and look down at my legs. They are swollen and alien stumps, not legs at all. “Oh shit,” I say. “Amiko, come look at this.” She kneels down and squeezes one ankle, and it squishes like a water balloon. She looks up at me with worried eyes. “I can’t even feel your ankle bones,” she says.
“My skin is burning, too,” I tell her. Amiko frantically examines me. I have a strange rash all over my back, the backs of my legs, the back of my head and neck – everywhere I was in contact with the bed. I can feel her cool hands moving over my inflamed skin. “It looks like an allergic rash,” she says. “Like hives.”
I’m rather appalled that this experiment was done at all — we’ve known about the deleterious effects of shorter periods of weightlessness for a long time, so it’s bizarre that they pushed for longer and longer exposures. Were they hoping everything would just get better, that the human body would adjust to living in space? Because if they did, they’d have made returning home even more traumatic.
Face it, if we’re going to have people working in space for months or years, the hardware is going to have to provide some kind of substitute for gravity — great big spinning wheels, ala 2001, or built-in central centrifuges. I would hope that our space agencies would stop wrecking human bodies in pointless exercises in endurance.
I can think of more productive experiments. How much gravity is enough? Do we need a full 1G to be healthy, or would, for instance, .38G, as found on Mars, be enough? Of course, to do that kind of experiment they would need to build one of those rotating space stations, so we’re talking big money and a reset of the ISS.
We’re also ignoring the effects of prolonged radiation exposure. It’s not just the weightlessness. I have the feeling that there are a lot of ghoulish doctors working for NASA who are going to be ticking off symptoms and writing papers on the deterioration of human bodies in space,
which will be ignored by the administrators and politicians who will make speeches about the heroic sacrifices our brave astronauts are making.
An alternative strategy: let’s train tardigrades to crew space ships, if we must have biological entities aboard.
I can’t believe they went down this road…LAS VEGAS SHOOTING: WHAT CONTROVERSIAL GENETICS THEORIES SUGGEST ABOUT THE MOTIVE. What controversial “theory” do they have? That his genes made him do it.
The suspect behind the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday might have been at higher risk for criminal behavior because his father was apparently once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, according to controversial theories about links between crime and genetics.
That’s it. That’s all of their “evidence”: his father was a criminal, therefore he might have inherited genes that caused criminality. There’s no consideration of the likelihood that growing up in a family where the father was on the lam from the FBI, was robbing banks, and who was never around the kids. So you’ve got kids from a broken family, and one of them commits a criminal act in life, therefore it’s genes? Weak. They bring in an Authority to help back up their claim.
“I was really blown away by the fact that his father had this history, and it’s really hard to argue that this would have nothing to do with Stephen Paddock’s behavior,” says Deborah Denno, a professor and the founding director of the Neuroscience and Law Center at the Fordham University School of Law in New York City. “He may have inherited certain attributes from his father that would lead to greater impulsivity.”
Deborah Denno is a lawyer, not a neuroscientist, and definitely not a geneticist. Despite that handicap, I wonder what her legal training would say about trying a suspect, not on the evidence of his behavior, but on the criminal history of his father?
The article does bring in a few voices of reason, like J.C. Barnes and Art Caplan, trying to argue that you can’t defend this argument, but too late, the damage is done. Newsweek published a garbage article promoting an indefensible, fact free claim of the genetic determination of behavior. Shame.
I’m dipping my toe into the toxic vat of YouTube once again. I’m considering a weekly science story on that medium, and here is my first effort. Pardon my lack of showmanship and video skills, but maybe those will evolve over time.
Hey, if anybody is interested, I’d be willing to do a video hangout to discuss this specific topic later this week. Contact me if you want to argue!
People are still trying to simply survive in Puerto Rico, so your first efforts to help should be directed at more general causes. But in addition, universities and labs have been disrupted by the hurricane, and it’s going to take time and money to get the science flowing again. The Society for Developmental Biology is coordinating efforts to help developmental biologists on the island get back on their feet, so here’s a place where you can contribute:
In view of the extensive damage caused by Hurricanes Irma and Maria to the laboratories of our colleagues in Puerto Rico, the Society for Developmental Biology has set up a relief grant program in order to facilitate the continuation of research programs in those labs or at another temporary host location. We come to you to ask for help matching (or surpassing) SDB’s seed funds ($20,000) to the program. This will allow us to provide a higher level of assistance beyond SDB’s current capacity. You may earmark your contribution via SDB’s website on the donation page, https://www.sdbonline.org/donations by clicking Puerto Rico Relief Fund.
Investigators at institutions located in Puerto Rico who are currently conducting research projects in developmental biology may apply for a grant. Priority will be given to current SDB members. Funds may be used for replacement of organisms, reagents, supplies, travel to host lab by PI or his/her trainees, core facility usage fees at host institution, etc.
Now there’s an ambitious title: Adam Rutherford’s A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. It’s a substantial book, but I would have thought it would have had to be a bit longer to cover everyone, and really, a biography of every individual who ever lived would probably get a bit repetitious.
Fortunately, this isn’t a collection of actuarial tables and obituaries. It’s something much more useful: a description of how we know what we know about humanity, from the perspective of genetics, with a solid awareness of the limitations and capabilities of such an approach. That’s helpful — one of our big problems right now is the abuse of genetics by the ignorant to advocate for an impossibly deterministic and racist view of human history. This book counteracts that by describing the methodology accurately, and you’ll learn a lot by reading it. But don’t panic, it’s not a textbook — it does tell the stories and is a good read.
If you doubt me, a revised chapter has been made freely available, A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas, just for us provincial Americans (the full book has a far more global perspective). This one focuses on some of the historical and scientific controversies around efforts to pigeonhole American Indians into one ill-fitting racial category or another.
The idea that tribal status is encoded in DNA is both simplistic and wrong. Many tribespeople have non-native parents and still retain a sense of being bound to the tribe and the land they hold sacred. In Massachusetts, members of the Seaconke Wampanoag tribe identified European and African heritage in their DNA, due to hundreds of years of interbreeding with New World settlers. Attempting to conflate tribal status with DNA denies the cultural affinity that people have with their tribes. It suggests a kind of purity that genetics cannot support, a type of essentialism that resembles scientific racism.
The specious belief that DNA can bestow tribal identity, as sold by companies such as Accu-Metrics, can only foment further animosity—and suspicion—toward scientists. If a tribal identity could be shown by DNA (which it can’t), then perhaps reparation rights afforded to tribes in recent years might be invalid in the territories to which they were moved during the 19th century. Many tribes are effective sovereign nations and therefore not necessarily bound by the laws of the state in which they live.
When coupled with cases such as that of the Havasupai, and centuries of racism, the relationship between Native Americans and geneticists is not healthy. After the legal battles over the remains of Kennewick Man were settled, and it was accepted that he was not of European descent, the tribes were invited to join in the subsequent studies. Out of five, only the Colville Tribes did. Their representative, James Boyd, told The New York Times in 2015, “We were hesitant. Science hasn’t been good to us.”
Data is supreme in genetics, and data is what we crave. But we are the data, and people are not there for the benefit of others, regardless of how noble one’s scientific aims are. To deepen our understanding of how we came to be and who we are, scientists must do better, and invite people whose genes provide answers to not only volunteer their data, but to participate, to own their individual stories, and to be part of that journey of discovery.
A book about human genetics with a humanist perspective? That debunks 19th century dogma about race and intelligence? Yeah, it’s good. I’ve been trying to think of ways I could fit it into my already packed-full genetics course, or whether I could offer a non-majors course that incorporated it as a text.
But at least I can tell you all that you need to read it.
There will be a test. Not that I’ll be giving it, but rather that our entire culture seems to be testing you on this subject right now. You should read the book so you can answer it correctly.
Ed Yong points out the problems with the Nobel prize: they don’t reflect how science is actually done, they tend to reinforce an archaic notion that scientists work alone and have “Eureka!” moments, they are arbitrary in picking which of the many scientists who contributed to a discovery get the award, and when they make those arbitrary choices, they tend to be biased towards male establishment scientists. It also adds an excessive luster to recipients — it’s for a single discovery, but you’re set for life if you get one, and it gives people who had a singular insight, for which their prize was justly deserved, an unwarranted authority on all too many things. That’s how we get a Watson, a Shockley, a Mullis.
He doesn’t mention another problem, though: the narrowness of the categories. You cannot win a Nobel prize for mathematics, or computer science, or evolutionary biology. Not even biology: all the great work in my field has to be warped to fit a category called “physiology and medicine”, which the Nobel committee does (after all, they’ve managed to award developmental biology a few times), but still, it forces us to look at the world of science through a specifically focused 19th century slit.
Rosbash, Young, and Hall, who won for their work on the molecular basis of circadian rhythms, did great work and should be acknowledged. But thanks to the arcane rules of the prize — no more than three people, who all must be alive — there is an army of researchers who also contributed to the work, and will be ignored. Among those contributors was the late Seymour Benzer, a real scientist’s scientist, who made amazing discoveries in the arcane fields of phage genetics and neurogenetics and of course, circadian rhythms. It’s not that Benzer was neglected — he had awards out the wazoo — but that a life of sustained effort and scientific discipline does not get the ultimate award (it’s also bothersome that there is an “ultimate award”) and won’t get the public attention he deserved.
I don’t know what to do about it, though.
The Nobel prize is the result of a wonderfully successful PR campaign that does a good job of highlighting good science…but it also contributes to the public perception of all worthy endeavors as being kind of like a horse race. It’s not what they did or how they got there or where we go to next, it’s all about who got to the finish line first and who gets to wear the shiny gold medal. You can’t exactly abolish them — they’re the outcome of a committee and an endowment, and people have every right to honor scientists — but it would sure be nice if those honors could be spread around more to everyone who deserves them, rather than being concentrated to create an artificial scientific elite.
Bottom line is that we aren’t and shouldn’t do anything about the Nobels. We should have more ways to recognize scientific accomplishment, though, and the media should be able to notice the science happening all around them instead of celebrating gold disks handed out every October.
Image courtesy of the googles.
Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back is a lengthy and winding journey. It is characterized (including by its publisher) as a general explanation of the evolution of minds and various peculiar mental functions, consciousness and language being the two most hotly discussed by philosophers, but there’s a better way to read it. As its best, the book is a tour of Dennett’s personal philosophical repertoire, illustrating how ideas from his books and papers fit together.
Dennett’s general theory of the development of genetics stems from his broad theory of memes, where a meme is any informational entity that can be transmitted and replicated. The rough idea is that minds are meme-machines in the way that organisms are gene-machines (in Dawkins’ analogy of the gene’s-eye-view). This is a fruitful analogy, in some respects, though I think it can and should draw some skepticism from readers. I’ll return to those worries later.
The basic building blocks of Dennett’s view are indicated by gestures and short explanations, which is a challenge since he’s spent so much time discussing and arguing for them elsewhere in his work. In any case, there are really two that it is important to understand.
