I’m not impressed with this recent exercise in microsurgical technique to allow researchers to transplant the head of one rat to another rat’s body. In all honesty, I don’t see the point.
I’m going to put the discussion of this paper below the fold because it seems more an exercise in animal cruelty than anything else; I’ve included one figure illustrating the surgery, but it will be at thumbnail size and you’ll have to click on it to see it in all its gory vulgarity.
Don’t you just love it when people like @FerranSuay wrap themselves in the Prestigious Robes of Science and Evolution, and then make a series of statements that show they understand neither, and fail at logic to boot? A professor of psychobiology has written an essay in which he equates a refusal to make natural selection omnipotent with creationism. It’s a familiar and wrong tirade. I should have been keeping track of how often I get accused of being a creationist because I find evolutionary psychology poorly founded and full of sloppy research, because if I had, I’d have a really big number.
In academic environments it is very difficult to find someone who will openly and explicitly deny the principles of evolutionary theory. Professors and researchers from any scientific discipline will endorse, more or less accurately, the principles of natural selection, and everyone has a rough idea about what genes, chromosomes, and DNA are. Certainly, nobody will deny that we walk on two legs or have a hand with an opposable thumb because evolutionary pressures have shaped our anatomy in this way. And very few academics refuse to acknowledge that human brains underwent a unique frontal development, which clearly distinguishes them from those of other primates, and even those of our closest relatives, the great apes. This is accepted as an obvious consequence of the evolutionary process that has shaped life on Earth today.
But the situation is very different when we apply the same principles to the study of human behaviour. In this area, there are scientists prepared to deny any genetic influence whatsoever. Some will say instead that behaviour is wholly the product of social and environmental variables. Others will try to consistently minimize the explanatory power of genetics. But how can a species rid itself of the laws that govern the rest of life on the planet?
See the highlighted sentence? Name them. Go ahead. You should be specific in your claims if you’re in those science robes, you know. I don’t know anyone who fits that description, unless he’s thinking of some fringe New Age wackaloon like David Avocado Wolfe.
Only a few minutes of thought reveals all this to be extraordinarily unscientific.
Yes, I agree, that essay is extraordinarily unscientific. It’s not going to get better.
Are we to believe that evolutionary pressures, which have configured the anatomy of the body and the brain, cannot also be used to explain and understand the whys and wherefores of human behaviour? Everyone agrees that we have opposable thumbs because those of our ancestors born with this mutation possessed certain reproductive advantages and left more living descendants on Earth. As this trait continued to provide benefits to subsequent generations, it became so dominant it is now the norm for the vast majority of humans. The same can be applied to the standing position, and to the size and the particular anatomical configuration of the human brain. This is all uncontroversial.
We can credit all kinds of things to evolution, but this fellow has three major problems: 1) he thinks all of evolution is explained by natural selection, 2) he assumes that every single feature of the human form is adaptive, and 3) he has this overly simplistic notion that opposable thumbs are a product of a “mutation”. Every one of those points is false.
Do we need to go on after he reveals that all of his premises are wrong? Of course we do, for the spectacle of someone digging themselves a very deep hole.
Why should the same logic not apply to human behaviour? Let’s take physical aggression, for example—the tendency to impose on others through coercion. Didn’t aggressive individuals enjoy (some) reproductive advantages? Didn’t the most aggressive males climb the hierarchy of social groups thereby enhancing their ability to attract resources and mates? Didn’t that privilege the transmission of aggressive genes to the next generation? The statistics on violent crime reveal a very clear over-representation of the male sex. Without needing to study the numbers, anyone with eyes in their head can conclude that human males are generally considerably more physically aggressive than females.
That explains nothing. It’s a lazy, sloppy attempt to justify a patriarchal status quo without looking for any evidence.
The logic is wrong. If physical aggression is an advantage for men, why not also for women? Wouldn’t aggressive women enjoy some reproductive advantages? Don’t women experience hierarchical social groups? Why is this being framed as a male thing with arguments that should apply to all sexes?
And if you want to argue that submissive behavior is advantageous for women (somehow I suspect he would), wouldn’t it also be the case that submissive behavior would be advantageous for men? He has trapped himself in an argument that can work in any direction you want.
Let’s look at reality, too. Does this professor expect to climb the rungs of the hierarchy at the University of València with physical aggression? That would be truly remarkable. Universities are not purely intellectual meritocracies, but still — using violent crime to work your way up the ranks probably wouldn’t work. Social skills are far more important. Attempting to coerce one’s colleagues with a good punch-up or skillful use of a club will not get you far.
It’s nice of him to announce that you don’t need numbers, since he doesn’t have any.
However, unlike the shape of our hands, the standing position, or the anatomy of the brain, this trait is not a universally accepted product of evolution. Instead, it is a response to social conditioning, such as patriarchal education, the nefarious influence of the media, or the excessive availability of violent video games. In this scenario, miraculously, evolutionary pressures have no part to play, and the socio-environmental, psychosocial, or psycho-socio-environmental variables (we can keep on juxtaposing terms until we find a sufficiently abstruse formulation) are the sole determinants of behaviour.
There he goes again.
Look. This shouldn’t be so difficult to understand. You did not evolve to be well-adapted to your academic niche. Evolution gave us a plastic brain capable of learning and adapting — in an immediate, developmental sense, not an evolutionary sense — to diverse and complex circumstances. You are capable of both bashing in a competitor’s skull with a rock, or publishing papers to demonstrate your cognitive superiority (this guy ain’t doin’ so well on that front). We can simultaneously see that human minds have a genetic predisposition to process, understand, and use symbols, and a learned ability to speak Spanish, English, or Russian.
These are not hard concepts to reconcile. A genetic/biological substrate that has many predispositions and capabilities, plus a general ability to learn and modify behavior on the basis of experience is the obvious, universal, scientific understanding of the human mind. It is simply perverse to throw away the last part of that description and believe in strict genetic determinism of behavior.
But when psychologists deal with one of the most complex phenomena we know about, human behaviour, they must discard the methods that have proved useful, and the knowledge derived from them, and embrace a new faith; one that says that the cause of behaviour are to be found only in social and environmental variables. This is unscientific and intellectually dishonest—it is creationism by another name. Only it is “hidden,” because its advocates will not openly resile from evolutionist positions and, instead, drape their irrational beliefs in the prestigious robes of science.
Since genetics is relatively inflexible, it is only reasonable to assume that the cause of variation in behavior may be a product of learned experience. That there may also be some genetic biases between individuals is not off the table, but dang, guy, you’ve got to do a heck of a lot of work to show that.
Because science expects you to drop the pretentious Robes of Science and buckle down to work.
Oh, man, Alex Jones. I don’t listen to his show, but I caught his impromptu press conference outside the courtroom where he’d just lost custody of his kids. It’s nuts. He goes on and on about the injustice and how he’s not crazy and he’s sincere and he motormouths on to prove he’s the victim here. It’s horrible and boring.
So just skip ahead to about 17’30” where he starts talking about science, for some reason.
Take human-animal chimeras. They have jokes all over tv saying Jones thinks they’re crossing humans with pigs and cows. Well, 20 years ago they were crossing humans and animals and growing them in utero for body parts.That’s mainstream scientific journals, but this camera man is laughing right here. You can type in human-animal chimeras, get a hundred thousand mainstream articles. But still people are preconditioned to make a joke that it doesn’t exist. Like Harvard saying fluoride lowers your IQ after just 2 years on just 1.6 parts per million by at least 10 points, 12 points 15 points. People just make jokes, they don’t look at the Harvard studies. It’s all just funny, because people are followers, and it makes them feel powerful to just laugh.
That’s a somewhat inaccurate transcript, because I think every sentence ought to have ended with an exclamation point, but you get the gist. It’s all flaming nonsense.
We have not been “crossing” humans with other animals. What has been done routinely is the fusion of animal cells in culture, and the insertion of human genes in the cells of other animals. There has been no man-bear-pig, sorry to say.
The fluoride stuff is classic crankery. There was a meta-analysis of some Chinese populations that showed that elevated fluoride levels was correlated with damage to neural development — but these were in regions with extraordinarily high natural fluoride levels. Steven Novella has a good analysis of that Harvard paper, and it doesn’t show what Jones thinks it does.
In other words – fluoridated water in the US has the same level of fluoride as the control or low fluoride groups in the China studies reviewed in the recent article, and the negative association with IQ was only found where fluoride levels were much higher – generally above EPA limits.
The interview goes on, and someone shouts out “spider goats!”, and he agrees but moves on. “Spider-goats” is a thing with Jones; he thinks it’s horrible that there are these goat-spider chimerae, when all it really is is that the gene for spider silk has been inserted into goats in such a way that they secrete the silk in their milk. It’s a nice way to generate bulk quantities of spider silk.
Have you ever tried to milk a spider? It’s hard, man.
Likewise, this story is inflated into absurdity.
20 years ago they had rhesus monkeys you cd buy in Hong Kong bazaars that glow in the dark that are part jellyfish. Think that’s funny? They have horrible eyes, it’s incredibly painful for them.
Uh, no, you can’t. There is a molecule called GFP (green fluorescent protein) that is derived from aequorin, a jellyfish protein. It’s commonly used as a molecular marker because, well, it glows green under the microscope when you shine light of the right wavelength on it (note: they don’t actually glow in the dark, they fluoresce, or re-emit light at a longer wavelength). Transgenic monkeys with GFP have been produced, more as a proof of concept than anything else. They don’t have horrible eyes. They actually look like normal monkeys, unless you put them in a dark room and illuminate them with only blue light, in which case they look greenish.
Just a suggestion to Alex Jones: when you’re trying to convince an audience that you’re a mature, rational, reasonable person, don’t go off on a tangent about spider-goats, pig-men, jellyfish-monkeys, or the dangers of fluoride to your essence. It also doesn’t help to wave your hands at “Harvard studies”, because some of us can actually read them and see that they don’t say what you claim they do.
This is a bit of an own goal, sent to me by the Islamic creationist, Harun Yahya.
Darwinists never realize that even though it’s impossible for them to copy out a text consisting of billions of letters without errors creeping in, enzymes combine together millions of units of information as they copy DNA, without making a single mistake. This is simply more proof of the existence of God.
Except that DNA polymerase, the enzyme that copies DNA, makes errors at a rate of about 10-8 mistakes per base pair (error correction processes bring that down to about 10-10 errors per base pair). Whoops. God makes mistakes! Also, while the DNA in the background of the image is correctly exhibiting a right-handed twist, the large orangeish fragment in the foreground seems to have a left-handed coil, in addition to being drawn with a strange and incorrect stick-and-ball arrangement. Tsk, tsk. Wrong and inconsistent. Does he really think this kind of crap will persuade a biologist? Why is he sending it to me?
Although, to be fair, I don’t think most people think chemistry has to be flawless to be compatible with gods, and obviously evolution depends on variation produced by errors, so this whole line of argument is irrelevant.
Not again. Elon Musk babbles about a half-assed idea on his twitter account, and suddenly everyone gasps and declares, “HE’S SUCH A VISIONARY.” So now, on top of SpaceX, Hyperloop, Neuralink, electric cars, and being an advisor to Donald Trump, he wants to dig tunnels for cars to alleviate traffic. This scheme is insanely stupid.
We already have these. They’re called subways. They reduce traffic by providing mass transit, which gets around the problem of surface buildings and roads by tunneling underground. The Musk Scheme does nothing to reduce traffic that wouldn’t already be done by increasing the number of lanes or adding more freeways.
Hey! I just had an idea! We could reduce traffic if we just built flying cars! Quick, someone make a flashy concept video for me so the tech press will fawn all over me and people will give me money.
Also timely. The Somali community in Minnesota has had an outbreak of 24 cases of measles recently.
Even though the case count has doubled this week, health investigators say the outbreak’s development isn’t presenting them with any surprises. All of the cases involve unvaccinated Somali children from the age of 10 months to 5 years. Fifty percent of the current cases have been hospitalized.
Get those kids their MMRs!
Let’s look at a painfully naïve understanding of science.
Science. The word denotes logic. Reason. Cold, hard facts. Measurable data and observable phenomena. Objectivity.
There is a germ of truth in that: scientists use reason, we hope, to interpret data, “facts”, to arrive at a conclusion, but it’s more complicated than that. Science is a process, not the “cold, hard facts” themselves, and it is a process that is supposed to place a check on the subjectivity of scientists. It’s odd, though, to see science reified to the point that we can assign human values like “objectivity” to it.
I’ll use a couple of examples to explain why that understanding of science is wrong.
This is a fist-sized rock. It’s real. You can measure its dimensions, weigh it, break down its chemical composition, determine its location in space and time. It is a “cold, hard fact”. But as far as science is concerned, it’s not very interesting, and wouldn’t warrant a museum exhibit or a paper being written about it.
Where it gets interesting is in the context of a theory or explanation. This is a rock found in association with a recently excavated mastodon skeleton. What provokes discussion is that it is proposed to have been a hammer used by hominins to help butcher the mastodon.
Is that a “cold, hard fact”?
It’s an explanation that is in dispute. Most anthropologists are dubious. Of course, if it’s just a random, eroded rock it becomes a pointless, unsurprising “fact”, because rocks are mundane and common; if it’s confirmed as a stone tool, it becomes a career-making discovery.
Here’s another “fact”. We have some “measurable data” on the age of the mastodon.
Since 1993, the team, including lead author Steven Holen, have repeatedly tried to date the mastodon fragments, using techniques like carbon-dating. They repeatedly failed. They only succeeded when they turned to uranium-thorium dating, which looks at the decay of two radioactive elements. That gave an age of 130,700 years, give or take 9,400 in either direction.
130,700±9,400. Sure sounds measured and specific and sciencey. It’s also a radical surprise — we don’t think people were living in North America 130,000 years ago! Most anthropologists still don’t. That number is in question.
“There are a small number of uranium-thorium dating specialists who think bone can be dated,” says John Hellstrom from the University of Melbourne—who isn’t one of them. “The problem is that uranium moves around in bone, which invalidates the dating unless you can use a mathematical model of that movement to compensate. That is exactly what the authors of this study have tried to do.” Coupled with other evidence about the surrounding rock layers, the bones are “likely to be something around the age the authors claim,” he says, “but I would not give these dates hard-evidence status. More correctly, they indicate the bones are most likely at least tens of thousands of years in age.”
So what is it? A hammer, or a stone? Is it 130,000 years old, or just something over 10,000 years old?
See, this is where we disagree on the meaning of science. Some want to say it’s about absolute truths, crystal-clear facts laid out in the grand Book of Nature. Some of us think instead about complexity and context, that we’re trying to use evidence to reduce uncertainty and converge on models that best explain reality. The scientific meaning of that rock will change as we gather more evidence, develop more tools for examining it in greater detail, look at other sites of similar age, and work to confirm or disconfirm the idea that it is an ancient hammer. Science will change its interpretation, because it is a process that constantly evaluates and re-evaluates the data, and gathers new data that requires modification of our understanding.
And we’re cool with that. That’s how it’s supposed to work. We don’t deal in absolutes.
I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely that it’s an ancient hammer ten times older than any other artifacts we’ve found on the continent, and I’m OK with that. If more evidence emerges of people living in North America 100,000 years ago — which I wouldn’t bet on occurring — then I’m also OK with that. A good scientist should be a leaf on the wind.
Here’s another example of “measurable data and observable phenomena”: digit length ratios and gender. Women are supposed to have a shorter ring finger, relatively, than men, and subtle variations in the ratio of the length of the ring finger to the index finger are supposed to be indicative of everything from sexual orientation, to sperm count, to aggressiveness, to adult hormone concentrations.
I’ve seen people present that difference as a “cold, hard fact”, too. It’s not. It’s a smear of ratios, with only a rough statistical correlation, and no predictive power at all.
That’s the danger of that quote at the top of this article. When you treat science as a collection of facts, you shut down questioning and exploring the complexity of reality — you short-circuit the process, which means you aren’t doing science any more. That doesn’t mean there are no truths in science — evolution is a fact, as is global climate change — but that those facts are more subtle and fluid than most people imagine, and all of them are provisional and subject to re-evaluation.
But there are even more errors at that link. The purpose of the article is to criticize Bill Nye’s new show, Bill Nye Saves the World, which is fine. There is much to criticize in it — I found it a bit superficial and with a style I find annoying, but the thing is…it’s a show intended to reach people other than already-confirmed science educators like me, so it’s fine that I’m not the target. It’s more than fine — I think diverse approaches are necessary, and applaud the blooming of a thousand flowers, which are not all old, white, and male.
But once again, this critic approaches it with his own flawed biases. He watched the show about “The Sexual Spectrum”, and was horrified.
The only “science” mentioned in the episode about sex comes during the first segment when we are informed about sex chromosomes and their function. If you are XX you are female, and if you are XY you are male. Most all of us learned this in school. But Nye is quick to point out that this binary way of looking at things is outdated. Some people have more than two sex chromosomes. Some have only one. Indeed, he instructs us, people don’t really fall into binary categories of male or female, but exist somewhere on a sexual spectrum with male at one end and female at the other.
That is a very revealing paragraph. What constitutes science, to him? Descriptions of chromosomes. He’s already narrowed the slit he views the world of science through to a remarkable degree, because at the very least his reductionist perspective should include endocrinology, and molecular biology, and cellular responses (I understand how many narrow scientists would exclude such things as psychology and sociology from the domain of science, but at least he’s got to understand that there’s more to sex than just chromosomes, right?).
But then he goes on to get the one allowed piece of science wrong!
If you are XX you are female, and if you are XY you are male.
Nope. Not always true. You could argue that if you’re XX, you won’t be able to produce sperm, and if you’re XY, you won’t be able to produce ova, and that if you’re aneuploid you probably won’t produce either. You can kinda sorta limit your understanding of sex to the gametic definition, but there are far too many circumstances where that is irrelevant.
Then it gets worse.
Nye mentions that there are abnormalities in the sex chromosomes in 1 in 400 pregnancies, which he calls “quite a lot.” Calling it a “spectrum” suggests that most of us would be neither XX or XY but something in between. Generally the extreme ends of the spectrum represent the minority with most people somewhere in the middle.
Yes, 1 in 400 is “quite a lot”. It means that at my university, there are probably about 4 students with a chromosomal abnormality of the sex chromosomes, and that’s probably a low estimate. You probably know people with this kind of variation, but the thing is, it usually doesn’t jump out at you as some easily visible phenotype. A surprising number of people show up at fertility clinics with problems in reproduction that only then are discovered to be due to a sex chromosome abnormality.
But here’s how that writer deals with the “cold, hard fact” that a significant number of people in our population have a variation in chromosome number: by trying to argue that the percentage is even lower, as if that matters, and trivializing the existence of the minority.
The fact that abnormalities occur does not negate the norm or render the idea of the norm meaningless. What is more telling, that 399 out of 400 children are born with typical XX or XY chromosomes or that 1 out of 400 is not?
So…what do you propose we do with that 1 out of 400? Ignore them? Pretend they don’t exist? Allow the self-righteous Norms to persecute them? They are real, they exist, they have just as much right to exist as someone with an XY chromosome pair. Their existence is also not a rebuke to the 399 out of 400. It just is. If you’re a scientist, accept that.
There’s another weird thing in his comments.
Generally the extreme ends of the spectrum represent the minority with most people somewhere in the middle.
He seems to have confused a bell curve with a spectrum. No, that is not true. If it were, since the middle of the visible light spectrum is about 570 nm, rainbows would be mostly yellow-green. That the human sex chromosome distribution is strongly bimodal with large peaks at XX and XY does not mean there cannot be a spectrum of intermediates. But then, his approach to refuting the idea of a spectrum of sexuality is to a) minimize the existence of known intermediates, and b) then pretend that they don’t count as a “spectrum”, because they don’t fit his predefined and incorrect understanding of what a spectrum is.
He ends similarly with his biased interpretation of the purpose of sex.
Surprisingly, for someone who supposedly champions reason, not once in this episode did Nye even raise the question What is sex for? Why are human beings sexual? There is no mention of children; no mention of marriage; no mention of love. No mention, in fact, of any sort of consequences for our sexual behavior. Bill Nye speaks in this episode of how things are “in the real world” but one gets the impression that he hasn’t lived there in quite some time.
Well, gosh. If he’s going to reduce sex to his narrow “scientific” interpretation of “cold, hard facts”, why is he bringing up love and marriage? Yeast have sex, you know, but they tend not to bother with religious rituals, and I rather doubt that love is involved.
If Nye had brought up the topic of the purpose of human sex, I’m sure it would have been even more offensive to a Catholic minister.
Sex is for reproduction.
Sex is for pair-bonding.
Sex is for fun.
Sex is for sale.
Sex is for political alliances.
Sex is for entertainment.
Sex is for demonstrating submission.
Sex is for conformity.
Sex is for psychological release.
Sex is for trading for favors.
Sex is for religious celebrations.
Sex is for dominance displays.
Sex is for consolation.
Sex is for whatever you feel like.
I’ve noticed that the “real world” seems to have a lot of people and behaviors who aren’t exactly like me and mine. That doesn’t offend me at all. I think I’d rather encourage everyone to be themselves and be happy, than to arbitrarily decide to be like me and be miserable (I’m happy as I am, but wouldn’t expect others to be).
Likewise, you don’t have to like Bill Nye’s new show. I’m neither into gay sex or Bill Nye Saves the World, and that’s just fine. If it opens up a better perspective on science than too many self-identified “science” advocates have, then more power to it.
I’d never even considered the possibility of faking peer review, but it turns out that it’s possible, if you have a sufficiently sloppy journal.
It’s possible to fake peer review because authors are often asked to suggest potential reviewers for their own papers. This is done because research subjects are often blindingly niche; a researcher working in a sub-sub-field may be more aware than the journal editor of who is best-placed to assess the work.
But some journals go further and request, or allow, authors to submit the contact details of these potential reviewers. If the editor isn’t aware of the potential for a scam, they then merrily send the requests for review out to fake e-mail addresses, often using the names of actual researchers. And at the other end of the fake e-mail address is someone who’s in on the game and happy to send in a friendly review.
But this makes no sense! At least with real peer review, you’re kinda sorta somewhat guaranteed that two people will read your paper — the reviewers. If you’re using fake peer review, sending your paper to the kind of crappy journal that can allow it, it may mean no one will ever read it. It’s a notch on your CV, I guess.
I do appreciate the error made that allows them to be caught, though.
Fake peer reviewers often “know what a review looks like and know enough to make it look plausible,” said Elizabeth Wager, editor of the journal Research Integrity & Peer Review. But they aren’t always good at faking less obvious quirks of academia: “When a lot of the fake peer reviews first came up, one of the reasons the editors spotted them was that the reviewers responded on time,” Wager told Ars. Reviewers almost always have to be chased, so “this was the red flag. And in a few cases, both the reviews would pop up within a few minutes of each other.”
So now all the fake scientists with the fake reviewer email addresses will know to wait a week or two before sending in their two thumbs up reviews. Or, for added verisimilitude, they’ll hold the reply for six months or more. Now we’ll never catch them!
