The physicist Stephen Hawking has been hospitalized, a serious business for a 67 year old man with ALS. We should all hope for the best, but don’t pray — we shall trust in modern medicine and science, and the stamina of a man who has demonstrated remarkable persistence in the face of daunting health problems.
Jerry Coyne carries out an amusing exercise in reasoning like an evolutionary psychologist: why does human semen taste bad? It turns out that it is really easy to invent all kinds of entirely reasonable rationalizations for it: in particular, it’s to promote ejaculation in the orifice that is more likely to result in pregnancy, since women can’t get pregnant by way of their stomach. It’s all deductively logical, but built on premises floating in thin air, with no empirical foundation at all…the usual flaw on which evolutionary psychology fails.
It does open up all kinds of angels-dancing-upon-pins sorts of questions. By the same logic, shouldn’t most women find anal sex extremely distasteful and unpleasurable (there’s another subject for Coyne to use in an informal poll — or maybe not, unless he really wants a reputation as a perv). Would the unusual anatomical arrangement in Deep Throat be evidence against evolution? And say…shouldn’t there be selection against male interest in fruitless pornography? There’s potential for a whole industry to flower around the pursuit of these questions. With illustrations.
I was sent this story about genes and IQ, and right from the beginning, my alarm bells were ringing. This is crank pseudoscience.
Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases?
Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more.
It offended Cochran’s sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?
At 3:17 one morning, after a long night searching a database of scientific journals from his disheveled home office in Albuquerque, Cochran fired off an e-mail to his collaborator Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
“I’ve figured it out, I think,” Cochran typed. “Pardon my crazed excitement.”
The “faulty” genes, Cochran concluded, make Jews smarter.
Why are European Jews prone to certain genetic diseases? My first answer would be to consider that they are a sub-group isolated by a history of bigotry from the outside, and strong cultural mores from the inside that promote inbreeding. These are variations amplified by chance and history.
I would not be offended by this. It’s logic, too. Natural selection is important, but it’s not everything — but so often, “self-taught genetics buffs” get the emphasis all wrong, and think of evolution as a machine that churns out generations that are relentlessly optimized for the best of all possible solutions, and these are the people who are also unsatisfied that evolution also churns out mistakes that are perpetuated over and over again. Errors happen, and their existence does not need an explanation; there is also no tendency by a benign nature to balance every individual’s shortcomings with a beneficial mutation.
Mr Cochran’s flaw is in his premise. There is no reason to assume that the frequency of every allele in a population must be the product of a selective advantage. The mathematics was worked out in the last century, and we know that even deleterious alleles can go to fixation in a population. His frenzied scribblings and off-the-wall database searches were driven by a need to reconcile the facts with his naïve and erroneous vision of evolution, and are not very convincing.
Here’s another explanation: this isolated subgroup of Ashkenazi Jews also had a culture with a deep historical respect for scholarship, and emphasized and supported education and learning to a greater degree than the larger culture surrounding them. Their children therefore begin life with a leg-up on intellectual pursuits. We don’t need a genetic explanation for their better performance (on average) on academic tests. Note also that this does not exclude a genetic component, but now at least we’re talking about an environmental factor that favors selection for intelligence. Again, though, I haven’t seen any convincing evidence for such a thing; personally, I think our intelligence is built on a shared genetic/development core that enables a wide range of kinds and degrees of intelligence to be expressed in response to environmental conditions.
But here’s the final confirming evidence that Cochran is a crank and a non-scientist.
It would be easy to test the theory, said Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognition researcher: “See if carriers of the Ashkenazi-typical genetic mutations score higher on IQ tests than their noncarrier siblings.”
Cochran and Harpending readily acknowledge the need for such experiments. But they have no plans to do them. They say their role as theorists is to generate hypotheses that others can test.
“One criticism about our paper is ‘It can’t mean anything because they didn’t do any new experiments,’ ” Cochran said. “OK, then I guess Einstein’s papers didn’t mean anything either.”
I don’t agree with Pinker that it would be easy — there’s going to be a lot of individual variation in performance, and I think it’s very hard to split the variables of culture and genetics apart in these kinds of tests. But at least he’s offering a positive approach to the problem, and that would be a good starting point.
But Cochran isn’t interested in doing them? He’s just a theorist? That’s where he begins to sound exactly like an intelligent design creationist.
Legislators in Louisiana are considering a bill to prohibit human-animal hybrids. We’ve been all over this subject before — it’s ridiculous and founded on complete incomprehension of what the research is all about. How ridiculous is it? SB 115 bans the “mixing of human and animal cells in a petri dish”!
Guess who is pushing this ban? The Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, a collection of professional ignoramuses, like this guy, Archbishop Alfred Hughes: old, white celibates with clerical collars and heads stuffed full of decaying dogma.
Look, Hughes, let’s face up to reality. You aren’t promoting this ban because you have any knowledge of the science; if you knew anything about the subject, you’d know that culturing cells of different species is common. Those cell lines to which George W Bush limited government-funded research? Many of them are grown on beds of mouse feeder cells. We could grow specific human cell lines on human feeder cells, but you’d freak out over that, too. There are gene mapping procedures that use fused rodent/human cells to produce cell lines with partial chromosomal losses. Monoclonal antibodies are made by combining immune system cells with immortalized cancer cell lines. And then there’s the ultimate miscegenation: bacterial cells made with copies of human genes, to make human gene products, like insulin. You look old enough that if you aren’t diabetic yourself, you probably have friends who are…and they’re shooting up the product of a human-non-human hybrid. Are you going to ban those next?
Let’s not pretend this is a decision based on morality, either. People are not harmed in the production of these hybrid cell lines, the work is biomedical in intent and produces knowledge and treatments that help people. The decrees of the Catholic church seem to have little to do with human values any more; they’re all about enforcing a rigid dogma and regimenting people, not in mutual cooperation to help one another, but instead to perpetuate your authoritarian hierarchy.
You aren’t promoting this silly because it’s good science or good morality: it’s simpler than that. You’re doing this because biology disgusts you. This isn’t unusual at all — many people are squeamish about the oozy, squishy, squirty, gooey, slimy, sloppy, messy wet business of what goes on beneath their skins. That it makes you feel icky is not grounds for demanding that others unburdened by that bias must follow your taboos. Your personal sense of revulsion is not an argument for your position.
Worse, this is a topic all tied up in your, umm, issues with sex. Your priesthood is just plain weird in its denial of a basic and healthy human urge and its obsession with regulating the private behavior of others. You are not normal. You are the wrong people to be taking on the responsibility of dictating anything about human sexuality — you’re just too far out on the fringe of perversity. There are a lot of weird sexual practices out there, but I’m afraid denial and repression and the kind of self-loathing that characterizes the professional celibates of the Catholic church are among the weirdest. That doesn’t mean you have to stop, of course — your kinks are your kinks, and I will defend your right to not do whatever you want in the privacy of your bedroom — but you have to realize that in the face of the riotous diversity of human sexual behavior, no one gets to use their personal preferences to instruct others on what they may do in private and between mutually consenting adults.
And that includes using a little polyethylene glycol on an assortment of cells in a dish to encourage a bit of fusion. As long as no aware, autonomous individuals are slithering out of the dish, you don’t get to argue that it is wicked and hurting people.
You’re being a sour old prude trying to impose your quaint morality on situations in which you are probably among the least qualified people on the planet to judge, and I have no sympathy with your position at all. But I’ll make you a deal. If you grim old white male virgins leave sex and science alone, I won’t suggest that your sexual pathologies could be treated with regular exposure to the soft and slippery bits of living, squirming human women (or, if you prefer, the flesh and fluids of human men)…you know, all that biology you deny. Even if it would be good for you.
Humanists, humanists, humanists. Sunday’s Atheists Talk radio is all about secular humanism and the big AHA meeting in June. Tune in at 9am Central time.
That ridiculously serious National Organization for Marriage video — which was mocked mercilessly on Colbert — now has some competition. This is an anti-gay video put out by an Illinois church that claims Christians are being oppressed by the Homosexual Agenda right now.
So this is where the Religious Right has sunk to, deep in the land of WTF?
Perhaps you remember the PCR song from Bio-Rad…or perhaps you tried hard to purge that from your memory. Then Eppendorf upped the ante with a pipettor love song. Now Greg Laden finds another pop tribute to PCR from Bio-Rad. The genre? Disco. By all that’s good and rational, not disco.
Two can fight this war against good taste. How about a big hair rock ballad to a tissue culture cell monitoring system?
That one needs an encore.
Little known fact: most molecular biologists dress exactly like that in the lab.
Sometimes I get requests for assistance with creationists. Usually, it’s because some unwarrantedly confident ignoramus has been lying his butt off. Here’s a perfect example:
I have a quick question concerning an encounter I had with a man last night who claimed he was a scientist (although, foolishly, I didn’t ask him what field).
He made the claim that the majority of biologist do not “believe” in evolution. (He also pulled out the standard canards of “no macro biology” and “evolution requires faith”; I’m not wasting my time or your with this.) He claimed he has a “list” of all the biologist who “disbelieve” in evolution. and the many books he has read show this to be true.
I know this false. I told him so, but really didn’t want to get into this. He claimed the media made it seem as if biologists accepted evolution.
I cannot for the life me understand exactly where he is coming from. Do you know anything about some “list” circulating apologists of biologist who supposedly don’t accept the theory of evolution. I know a few do, but isn’t the scientific consensus something on the lines of 95%?
I’m curious if you’ve heard similar claims before and what you make of them. Next time I see this made I would like to be able to simply, flatly explain to him that he is wrong. (When a “scientist” tells me that evolution is random chance, my BS meter goes off like you wouldn’t believe. But since I’m not a scientist, he can try to claim some sort of argument from authority over me, and I don’t want to be hypocrite and claim my own argument from authority.)
Of course I’ve heard of this list: it’s the infamous Discovery Institute list of “scientists who dissent from Darwinism”, parodied by the Project Steve list, and which contains a few hundred names, many of whom are not scientists — the list leans towards dentists and engineers and such. It is a tiny number of people…if the majority of scientists rejected evolution, it would be rather easy to get tremendous numbers of names signed on, don’t you think?
Even easier, though, pick a biology department, any department anywhere. Go in and ask the faculty what they think of evolution. You’ll discover impressive unanimity — virtually 100% of every department will tell you that evolution is true and useful. You will find an occasional exception, though: the Lehigh University biology department comes to mind, and even there, they post a disclaimer stating that Michael Behe is the sole dissenter who rejects their unequivocal support of evolutionary theory.
My correspondent’s mysterious “scientist” was that extremely common phenomenon among creationists, the guy who has no evidence and relies on blustering falsehoods, a complete fraud.
Speaking of creationist liars…how about Casey Luskin? The primary reason so many biologists accept evolution is that it simply works: it’s a useful theoretical tool that guides research successfully, and helps scientists get work done and published. If the ID crowd actually had a model that helped us understand the world better, we’d be flocking to it. In an email debate, a fellow named Rhiggs engaged Luskin on just this topic, asking for sources to positive evidence and experiments backing design. Luskin tosses out the usual creationist handwaving, and attempts to hijack the work of legitimate, non-creationist scientists as supporting ID…but completely fails to produce any of that primary research literature that Rhiggs is asking for.
There are quite lengthy exchanges going on there, with Luskin always evading the main point (I could have said this was a futile effort: Luskin is no scientist, and his ignorance is legendary). Finally, though, he gives an excuse:
I assure you that I don’t ignore arguments. You don’t know me and I am not that kind of person. In fact, I’ve been traveling a lot for work lately, but in the last week over the course of 2 long plane flights I’ve managed to find time to work on replying to you. I’m nearly done with the reply and I hope to finish it on another flight I have later this week. FYI, my reply is already over 5000 words, and it begins by saying, “Greetings after an undesired delay on my part. I appreciate the time you took in your extensive reply. Because you put in so much time, you deserve a reply. I apologize that it took a while to reply–I’ve been busy a lot over the past couple weeks, including much traveling, and in fact I’m finally getting some free time now that I’m on a flight.” Thanks again–I hope you will hear from me soon.
“Soon” is 13 months ago. Maybe I’ll have to post reminders to him on Paul Nelson Day — this is becoming expected behavior from that gang of propagandists.
The horror…if you’re at all squeamish, you may not want to read this article by an editor at a textbook publisher on how public school textbooks are made. If you’re curious about why Texas has such an absurd weight in the world of textbooks, though, it will explain all.
It’s a system that needs to be fixed. The article has some interesting suggestions, too, although the plan — more modularity and flexibility in curriculum materials, and a move away from reliance the massive all-in-one tome — also has potential for abuse. (I’m picturing the creationists producing little, slim ‘supplemental’ pamphlets for the schoolroom, and getting them approved by school boards. We also need some standards on what is not acceptable in the class.)
(via Nic)
