Universal Acid

American Airlines homophobia

2006-09-22T09:28:00.000+01:00

As if the terrible food and movie selection on the last American Airlines flight I took weren't enough, along comes this story to make me boycott American Airlines.

American Airlines Flight 45 ... Assigned to seats 20A and 20B were George Tsikhiseli, a television journalist, and his writer boyfriend, Stephan Varnier. “We’ve been together only four months,” Tsikhiseli said last week. “So it felt like a honeymoon.” ...

Shortly after takeoff, Varnier nodded off, leaning his head on Tsikhiseli. A stewardess came over to their row. “The purser wants you to stop that,” she said.

“I opened my eyes and was, like, ‘Stop what?’ ” Varnier recalled the other day.

“The touching and the kissing,” the stewardess said, before walking away.

Tsikhiseli and Varnier were taken aback. “He would rest his head on my shoulder or the other way around. We’d kiss—not kiss kiss, just mwah,” Tsikhiseli recalled, making a smacking sound. ...

A little later, the purser appeared at Row 20. She was, by all accounts, calm and professional; to the men’s surprise, she said that she knew nothing about the incident and had not instructed the stewardess to tell Tsikhiseli and Varnier to stop touching each other.

“Which stewardess was it?” she asked.

One of the men pointed out the stewardess—a woman with, as Jackson put it, “Texas hair, like from the nineteen-sixties.” According to Leisner, the purser rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, say no more. I know.”

The purser asked the men to describe what they’d been doing, and she acknowledged that their behavior had not been inappropriate. Tsikhiseli then asked if the stewardess would have made the request if the kissers had been a man and a woman. Suddenly, Leisner said, the purser “became very rigid.” Contradicting what she’d told them before, she stiffly said, “Kissing is inappropriate behavior on an airplane.” She then said that she was busy with the meal service and promised to come back.

Half an hour later, the purser returned, this time saying that some passengers had complained about Tsikhiseli and Varnier’s behavior earlier. The men asked more questions. ... Finally, the purser said that if they didn’t drop the matter the flight would be diverted. ...

Maybe an hour later, the purser approached Tsikhiseli and said that the captain wanted to talk to him. Tsikhiseli went up to the galley and gave the captain his business card. The captain told Tsikhiseli that if they didn’t stop arguing with the crew he would indeed divert the plane. “I want you to go back to your seat and behave the rest of the flight, and we’ll see you in New York,” he said. Tsikhiseli returned to coach.

Tim Wagner, a spokesman for American, said that the stewardess’s injunction to the men was reasonable, and would have been made whether the couple was gay or straight. “Our passengers need to recognize that they are in an environment with all ages, backgrounds, creeds, and races. We have an obligation to make as many of them feel as comfortable as possible,” he said. (He added, “Our understanding is that the level of affection was more than a quick peck on the cheek.”) But a customer-service representative named Terri, reached last week on the telephone, offered the opinion that kissing on airplanes is indeed permissible. “Oh, yeah! Sure. I’ve seen couples who are on honeymoons,” she said. “They just don’t want you to go into the bathroom together.”

Dog bites man

2006-06-08T08:10:00.000+01:00

"Ann Coulter Calls 9/11 Widows 'Witches'".

Clones are not the same

2006-06-03T19:09:00.000+01:00

Today's silly misunderstanding of cloning comes from the New York Times:

Anyone trying to select a winner at the mule races this weekend in Winnemucca, Nev., will no doubt have a hard time choosing between Idaho Gem and Idaho Star. They may have different names, but they are not necessarily different mules.

Idaho Gem and Idaho Star are clones. They are two of three mules who were born in 2003 as the result of a cloning project at the University of Idaho and Utah State University.

No, no, no! This is like saying "Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen may have different names, but they are not necessarily different people." The two mules, like the Olsen twins or any other identical twins, merely share their DNA. This doesn't mean they're the same mule. This misunderstanding pops up quite a lot (especially with journalists trying to get a nice "twist" on the story for an eye-catching lead) and it's really quite pernicious as it distorts the debate about reproductive cloning.

The Musician of State

2006-05-16T17:57:00.000+01:00

Speaking of Brahms, Condoleeza Rice has astonishingly similar taste in classical music to me. The classical pieces on her list of top ten favorite musical pieces are Mozart's D minor piano concerto, Brahms' Bb major Piano Concerto, Brahms' Piano Quintet, Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, and Mussorgsky's Boris Glazunov. I don't know the Mussorgsky opera, but the Seventh is my favorite Beethoven symphony, and as I said in my last post, the two Brahms works are my favorite pieces - probably the greatest piano concerto and chamber music piece of all time. Like Condi, I too want to learn the Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto "before I leave this earth." I might not agree with her politics, but I like her music taste!

Four reasons why Brahms is my favorite composer

2006-05-14T09:42:00.000+01:00

1. The re-entrance of the theme, played by the solo cello in F# major after the long hushed suspension, two-thirds of the way through the slow movement of the Second Piano Concerto.

2. The minor second in the piano after the long solo statement of the second theme in the first movement of the First Piano Concerto, just before the piano hands off to the winds.

3. The soaring soprano at "Die mit tränen säen, werden mit Freuden ernten" in the first movement of Ein deutsches Requiem.

4. The end of the first movement of the Piano Quintet.

Nature red in tooth and claw

2006-05-09T08:31:00.000+01:00

Yet another lovely example of horrifying savagery in the natural world:

When Douglas W. Mock of the University of Oklahoma began studying egrets in Texas three decades ago, he knew that the bigger babies in a clutch would peck the smaller ones to death. Still, Dr. Mock was caught off guard by what he saw — or failed to see. He had assumed that the murderous attacks would surely take place while Mom and Dad egret were out fishing. ...

Instead, Dr. Mock witnessed utter parental indifference. The mother or father would stand by the side of the nest, doing nothing as one chick battered its sibling bloody. "The parent would yawn or groom itself and look completely blasé," said Dr. Mock... "In the 3,000 attacks that I witnessed, I never saw a parent try to stop one. It's as though they expect it to happen."

One researcher watched a nest of African black eagles for three days as the larger eaglet alternated between tirelessly stabbing at its sibling and taking food from its solicitous mother's mouth. There was prey to spare, but the mother did not bother feeding the second, abused baby. When the eaglet's poor, tattered body was finally tossed to the ground, the researcher calculated that it had been pecked 1,569 times.

Another reason to hesitate before too eagerly making the analogy between the "positive" results generated by natural selection and by pure, unfettered market forces.

PS: It also adds yet more to the "problem of evil" flaw in "intelligent design" - why on earth would God design hatchlings to kill each other by pecking? Surely the mother could at least have been designed to slip the unwanted hatchlings a bit of painless poison.

Blame Orwell

2006-05-08T23:02:00.000+01:00

Language Log notes yet another example of the "X have no word for Y" Sapir-Whorf fallacy (in fact, they have a whole list of them, with the "Inuit have no word for robin" meme a particularly egregious example) - the idea that since a certain culture has no word for something, they must be totally incapable of conceiving of it, describing it, understanding it, etc. - a notion completely absurd on its face, given that a) people invent new words all the time, and b) you can just describe the thing with a phrase, not a word. For example, if I had never heard the word Schadenfreude, that doesn't mean I don't understand the concept of "taking pleasure in another's suffering."

I blame Orwell for the popularity of this trope. It's true that the hypothesis is named after Sapir and Whorf, but who's ever heard of them? On the other hand, almost everyone read 1984 in high school, along with its compelling - yet linguistically unrealistic - description of Newspeak as the language that would make it literally impossible to even think about concepts like "freedom" because there would be no word for it. 1984 posited that once Newspeak was fully adopted, the language itself would do the work of the thought police. But this makes no sense, since without the thought police (and crimestop, doublethink, blackwhite, etc), people could easily just talk about freedom using circumlocutions or a newly invented word. That is to say, Newspeak is functionally superfluous as a mind-control device. People have taken Newspeak too seriously as a real linguistic possibility, rather than seeing it for what it really is - just another symbol of a Party that wants power for its own sake, a linguistic analog of the "boot stamping on the human face - forever."

Displaying execution devices

2006-04-28T09:10:00.000+01:00

Mark Kleiman, writing about possible Republican presidential candidate George Allen, notes that, among other dubious actions, Allen used to display a noose in his law office early in his career.

Even if — stretching things a bit — we imagine that the noose was intended to refer to legal Western hangings rather than the more common informal variety, what kind of twisted character uses a replica of an execution device as office decoration?

One might well ask what kind of twisted character uses a replica of an execution-and-torture device as a religious symbol... Oh, wait.

Random question of the day

2006-04-11T12:44:00.000+01:00

Why does this Italian "Wanted" sign for Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano have the word WANTED printed in English, especially when the rest of the sign is in Italian?

Hanzi Smatter

2006-03-11T14:59:00.000Z

Here's a hilarious blog about one of my pet peeves, the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture: Hanzi Smatter.

Tragedy, then farce

2006-03-09T08:20:00.000Z

Marx said, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." What a fitting quotation to describe the current ideological campaign by the Chinese Communist Party:

Like a giant company concerned with organizational disarray and a sinking public image, the Chinese Communist Party is trying to remake itself into an efficient, modern machine. But to do so, it has chosen one of its oldest political tools — a Maoist-style ideological campaign, complete with required study groups.

For 14 months and counting, the party's 70 million rank-and-file members have been ordered to read speeches by Mao and Deng Xiaoping, as well as the numbing treatise of 17,000-plus words that is the party constitution. Mandatory meetings include sessions where cadres must offer self-criticisms and also criticize everyone else. ...

Campaigns of this sort are a legacy of the Chinese Communist Party. When he was president, Jiang Zemin initiated study campaigns, including one for his signature "political thought," the Three Represents. More famously, Mao introduced as many as 200 campaigns, from the angry purges that predated the Cultural Revolution era to mass mobilization efforts to exterminate rodents.

Lest we fear a return to the bad old days, here's the farce part of the story:

Bao xian has received the praise one might expect from the state media and was listed as one of the most searched phrases on the Chinese Internet last year. But much of that traffic appears to be driven by cadres downloading essays from the Internet to meet homework obligations.

In a posting last year, a prominent Chinese blogger, Keso, said Web sites and bloggers were using the ideological campaign as a money-making opportunity by offering essays customized to a person's party rank. The head of a street committee, for example, can find a fake self-criticism essay tailored to that job and then tinker with it to make it seem original.

In a posting last year, Keso wrote: "The Web sites cheat party members, the party members cheat their leaders and the leaders cheat their leaders. So in the end we all cheat the party. This is the comedy of our time." Such cynicism underscores why many experts say efforts like bao xian will have little meaningful impact. In fact, some political analysts speculate that Mr. Hu is using the movement partly as a gesture to ingratiate himself to the older generation of former leaders who remain influential behind the scenes.

Natural selection still happening in humans

2006-03-07T10:00:00.000Z

No big surprise here, but a new paper in PLOS-Biology did a search for signs of positive selection in the human genome and turned up several genes in different populations that have been selected for very recently.

Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.

Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago. ...

Three populations were studied, Africans, East Asians and Europeans. In each, a mostly different set of genes had been favored by natural selection. The selected genes, which affect skin color, hair texture and bone structure, may underlie the present-day differences in racial appearance.

Some readers may recall that a few months ago I noted a study showing that certain alleles of two genes involved in determining brain size had undergone strong positive selection in the recent past in Europeans and Asians but not Africans, leading certain people to embrace the finding as suggesting that Africans are genetically determined to have low IQs. I wonder how they will react to the finding in this study that another gene involved in determining brain size, CDK5RAP2, shows signs of selection in the Yoruba of Nigeria, but not Europeans or East Asians? (A different brain size gene, CENPJ, was selected for in Europeans and Asians.)

PS, I was amused by the picture accompanying the NYTimes article - it's as though the photographer was desperate to get the standard picture of the biologist in the white lab coat gazing thoughtfully at a test tube full of purple liquid, but had to settle for equations with a population geneticist.

Nacirema

2006-01-31T08:34:00.000Z

Here's fascinating and enlightening article about the Nacirema, a little-known New World tribe.

[Via Kieran Healy.]

Dennett on religion

2006-01-22T11:14:00.000Z

Daniel Dennett, the namesake of this blog, has a new book coming out about the natural history of religion:

For those who do not need to be persuaded, the main draw here is a sharp synthesis of a library of evolutionary, anthropological and psychological research on the origin and spread of religion. Drawing on thinkers such as Pascal Boyer (whose own book is called Religion Explained) and giving their work his own spin, Dennett speculates how a primitive belief in ghosts might have given rise to wind spirits and rain gods, wood nymphs and leprechauns. The world is a scary place. What else to blame for the unexpected than humanlike beings lurking behind the scenes?

The result would be a cacophony of superstitions — memes vying with memes — some more likely to proliferate than others. In a world where agriculture was drawing people to aggregate in larger and larger settlements, it would be beneficial to believe you had been commanded by a stern god to honor and protect your neighbors, those who share your beliefs instead of your DNA. Casting this god as a father figure also seems like a natural. Parents have a genetic stake in giving their children advice that improves their odds for survival. You’d have less reason to put your trust in a Flying Spaghetti Monster. At first this winnowing of ghost stories would be unconscious, but as language and self-awareness developed, some ideas would be groomed and domesticated.

Sounds like a modern, Darwinian twist on Hume...

No wonder, then, that mankind, being placed in such an absolute ignorance of causes, and being at the same time so anxious concerning their future fortune, should immediately acknowledge a dependence on invisible powers, possessed of sentiment and intelligence. ... Nor is it long before we ascribe to them thought and reason and passion, and sometimes even the limbs and figures of men, in order to bring them nearer to a resemblance with ourselves. ...

It may readily happen, in an idolatrous nation, that though men admit the existence of several limited deities, yet is there some one God, whom, in a particular manner, they make the object of their worship and adoration. ... his votaries will endeavour, by every art, to insinuate themselves into his favour; and supposing him to be pleased, like themselves, with praise and flattery, there is no eulogy or exaggeration, which will be spared in their addresses to him. In proportion as men’s fears or distresses become more urgent, they still invent new strains of adulation; and even he who outdoes his predecessor in swelling up the titles of his divinity, is sure to be outdone by his successor in newer and more pompous epithets of praise. Thus they proceed; till at last they arrive at infinity itself, beyond which there is no farther progress.

Brokeback Mountain

2006-01-22T10:30:00.000Z

I want to pose a question about a scene in Brokeback Mountain, but to avoid spoilers (it's not much of one, actually), I'll pose it in a comment to this post.

Fair reporting from NYTimes

2006-01-19T08:49:00.000Z

The official Vatican newspaper has published an article saying that "intelligent design" shouldn't be taught as science, and that there's no conflict between Catholicism and Darwinism-as-science. (Previous post on conflicts between evolution and religion from me here.) I just wanted to point out the NYTimes reporter's fair reporting (as opposed to the unquestioned parroting of what the two sides say, which often gives the illusion of credibility to cranks by giving them equal time). The article quotes a creationist as per journalistic practice, but also includes true facts that undermine him - which is as it should be.

After the Discovery Institute spokesman attempted to dismiss the Vatican article by saying it wasn't official Church policy, the reporter notes

L'Osservatore is the official newspaper of the Vatican and basically represents the Vatican's views. Not all its articles represent official church policy. At the same time, it would not be expected to present an article that dissented deeply from that policy.

And the article includes this refreshing reminder:

There is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that evolution explains the diversity of life on earth, but advocates for intelligent design posit that biological life is so complex that it must have been designed by an intelligent source.

It's not perfect, but credit where due... though I was still more impressed by this article from the Washington Post a few months ago.

Paper authorship

2006-01-17T08:22:00.000Z

One consequence of the Hwang stem cell fraud scandal has been that the journal Science is considering reforms that would require authors to list their specific contributions to the paper and to sign a statement that they agree with the conclusions of the paper. Somewhat unusually, Nick Wade at the New York Times has created a parody of what would result from this:

Extension of Human Lifespan to 969 Years Following Vector Insertion fo Bristlecone Pine Antioxidant Gene Complex

Paul Kammerer,¹ Charles Dawson,² Jean-François Pipette,³ Trofim D. Lysenko⁴

¹I supplied the midwife toad cells used in this experiment, on condition that my name was included as co-author.
²I was riding in the elevator with Dr. Lysenko one day and gave him an idea about spring wheat; he very graciously said he would add my name to his next paper.
³I performed all PCR reactions, gel analysis, bioinformatics, statistical analysis, collection of pine tree samples, and nuclear transfer procedures. I also suggested the original idea for the experiment, wrote the grant proposal and executed all experiments without the aid of a technician.
⁴As chief of the laboratory, I secured all the funds, hired all the personnel and credit for this publication.

It's an exaggeration, obviously (the do-nothings on the list are usually more towards the end), but not even so far from the truth as you might think - which is why I think the proposed reforms (already in place at Nature and JAMA) are a great idea. See also here.

Gerrymandering, state-style

2005-12-30T20:28:00.000Z

Matthew Yglesias, responding to this amusing story about a 1930s U.S. plan to invade Canada, notes that Canada was formed in 1867 partly because of fears that Republican leaders in the U.S. would invade Canada to add Republican voters to counteract Democratic votes from soon-to-be rehabilitated South. Actually, the Republicans came up with a better strategy: they divided the Western territories into lots of little states. Support for the Republican party before and during the Civil War was strongest in the Upper Midwest and New England. It would make sense to artificially inflate the number of Senators and electoral votes from Republican-leaning plains states by making more states than the sparse population would otherwise justify.

In 1860, the territories were only Kansas, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and Nebraska. In the middle of the Civil War, the Republican Congress hastily admitted Nevada to get its electoral votes 8 days before the 1864 election, meanwhile splitting Utah into Utah and Colorado, New Mexico into New Mexico and Arizona, Washington into Washington and Idaho, and Nebraska into Nebraska, Montana, and Dakota. In 1889, Dakota was split into North and South Dakota, again partly due to pressure to increase Republican control of the Senate.

Of course, this backfired on the Republicans, as many of these plains states later went Populist, but that's the way things go. So if you're looking to blame someone for why Wyoming gets one senator per 250,000 people but California gets one senator per 16 million, you can blame post-Civil-War Republicans in addition to the Founding Fathers.

More on educational equity

2005-12-30T20:13:00.000Z

Richard Chappell takes issue with my suggestion that people who favor progressive taxation and national health care should also put a premium on helping the least proficient students rather than gifted students. His main point is that there are other reasons besides egalitarianism or Rawlsian social justice to favor progressive taxation and national health care, and these reasons (e.g., utilitarianism) don't necessarily favor focusing on the least proficient students. So basically believing in the former needn't require believing in the latter. That's fair enough.

But I do want to clarify what I meant in the previous post. I was working off Rawls's Difference Principle, that inequality is justified only insofar as it benefits the least well-off. This leaves room for all sorts of qualifications on the claim that we should focus our effort on the least proficient students. For example, gifted students are likely to become scientists, engineers, intellectuals, or entrepeneurs who create innovation and therefore benefit everyone, even the least well-off. (This being analogous to a Rawlsian argument why capitalism is better than socialism, even for the poor.) Or, a focus on mediocrity rather than excellence is a kind of "soft bigotry of kind-of-low expectations" that leads to a general devaluing of education.

Richard also mentions a couple issues I should discuss. Richard brings up the idea of cost-efficiency - that it's less cost-effective to educate less-able students (ie less able students require more effort to get X improvement in education than gifted students), or that you might get more utility out of education the more educated you are (ie gifted students get more enjoyment out of X improvement in education than mediocre students). Aside from questioning the latter suggestion (it's quite plausible that increased intelligence actually makes you less happy), I must disagree even on principle - I think a decent society must, to some extent, give priority to the least well-off [with the Rawlsian qualification that inequality can also help the least well-off], even if this is cost-inefficient. Just think how much extra money we spend on special education - I'd have a hard time arguing that giving disabled students extra attention is wasted money.

I'm sympathetic to Richard's view that intellectual excellence is "an intrinsically valuable mode of human flourishing" (as opposed to material or medical "excellence"). However, I have trouble justifying it and suspect that intellectual excellence is actually instrumentally valuable, in that geniuses discover new scientific theories, create great works of art, and so on. Certainly, it is in some sense better to have a hermit genius who doesn't try to discover new things than a hermit of mediocre intelligence who also doesn't try to discover new things, but it's not clear to me that the former is so much better than the latter that we should spend any money on it.

Anyway, with all these qualifications, it might even be that the current system doesn't give enough attention to gifted students. Given how hard it is to disentangle the facts of the matter (how much do you weigh this gifted student's future discovery of cold fusion against this less-able student's inability to get a decent job?), it's not clear that this discussion has any actual policy implications. But I suppose it's worth discussion anyway, if only to sharpen the tensions between equity and excellence.

Educational equity

2005-12-27T17:27:00.000Z

Paul Glastris thinks progressives should be concerned with how the No Child Left Behind Act punishes gifted students - the idea being that if teachers are required to put the most effort into helping the least gifted students to bring them up to proficiency, gifted students who need to be pushed to excellence get short shrift.

This strikes me as backwards - if anything, progressives should be less concerned with gifted students than with the most unfortunate students. If we're willing to sacrifice the incomes of the wealthy with progressive taxation and social welfare programs to help out the most needy, if we're willing to sacrifice the most top-notch health care in order to extend coverage to the 40 million who live in fear of financial catastrophe if they get in a car accident, why can't we sacrifice a bit of educational excellence to achieve broader educational proficiency?

As Paul Glastris says, with fewer excellent students, we'd probably end up with fewer scientists, intellectuals, engineers, etc - the people who create innovation and thereby prosperity and better standards of living. But this is equally true of progressive taxation and national health care: high marginal tax rates discourage work and investment among high earners who tend to be the most productive; and national health care reduces the incentive for drug companies to develop new drugs, because they're no longer guaranteed the ability to charge outrageous prices. Equality and excellence are values in tension, and while it's not exactly either/or (clearly you can put more effort into educating both the most and least proficient), you do have to make your trade-offs at some point.

Maybe that's so much the worse for equality. But it seems to me that if you're in favor of progressive taxation and national health care, consistency requires you to favor an emphasis on educating the least-gifted. The NCLB Act has a lot of problems, but from a progressive point of view, shortchanging gifted students while focusing on the least proficient students isn't really one of them (at least in principle - obviously it's bad if it fails at this goal in practice).

Dover Intelligent Design thrown out

2005-12-20T16:36:00.000Z

To add insult to injury, a month and a half after the voters of Dover, PA kicked out the school board members who voted to impose Intelligent Design on the school district, a federal judge has now ruled that the teaching of Intelligent Design in public school science class is unconstitutional. Sometimes the good guys really do win...

South Africa legalizes gay marriage

2005-12-01T21:43:00.000Z

South Africa's Constitutional Court has ruled that banning gay marriage violates South Africa's constitution, which bars discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Parliament has one year to change the law before the ruling goes into effect automatically.

What's fascinating to my mind is that this is apparently a complete non-issue politically. According to the NY Times,

But homosexuality here is not the sort of burning social issue that it is on the American political right. ... "It's not one of our political fault lines," said Steven E. Friedman, a top political analyst at Johannesburg's Center for Political Studies, a nonprofit research center. "The major issue in this society is race. That's why people join political parties. The party of social conservatism is the African Christian Democratic Party, which wins 1 percent of the vote. And that's the group of people who feel that this justifies amending the constitution."

I know very little about South Africa - can anyone out there explain why this is so, especially given that the lack of political mobilization against gay rights is apparently not accompanied by a similar societal tolerance for gay people (at least according to the Washington Post's article)?

Uncomfortable office moments

2005-12-01T17:17:00.000Z

Um, wow.

HALF-NAKED MALE: STOP HARASSING US YOU PERVERT OR I'LL REPORT YOU!

ME: (still holding door) You'll report me for your having sex in my office?

Torture experts

2005-11-29T19:55:00.000Z

Charles Krauthammer has an article arguing that sometimes you just have to torture, so exceptions to the McCain Amendment should be encoded in law. This is, of course, wrong, but I just want to point out one especially misguided bit:

These exceptions to the no-torture rule would not be granted to just any nonmilitary interrogators, or anyone with CIA credentials. They would be reserved for highly specialized agents who are experts and experienced in interrogation, and who are known not to abuse it for the satisfaction of a kind of sick sadomasochism Lynndie England and her cohorts indulged in at Abu Ghraib.

There are two problems with this:

1. "Highly specialized" torturers are, almost by definition, people who would tend to abuse torture for the satisfaction of a kind of sick sadomasochism. Trying to pick kind and decent people who are just inflicting excruciating pain - not just occassionally, but as their major profession - because it's a necessary evil is like trying to square a circle. Not to mention that a great deal of experience in torturing human beings will inevitably coarsen and degrade a kind and decent person to the point of developing a kind of sick sadomasochism to be satisfied by abusing torture.

2. Creating an elite force of "expert professional torturers" (let's not mince words as Krauthammer does by calling them "highly specialized agents" "experienced in interrogation") will only cause professional insularity among the torturers - a feeling that "we" know best, "they" don't know what we're dealing with in here, "we" don't need to be held accountable to "them" (i.e., the American people). The existence of specialized torturers is exactly inimical to Krauthammer's call for public, clearly-defined, well-regulated torture. See, e.g. this essay about torture by a sociologist who studied Brazilian police torturers [pdf].

Crisis is NOT danger + opportunity

2005-11-28T17:30:00.000Z

For some reason it makes me very happy to learn that the cliche that the Chinese term for 'crisis' is made up of the characters for 'danger' and 'opportunity' is wrong and based on a gross misunderstanding.

The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages. ...

The third, and fatal, misapprehension is the author's definition of jī [机] as "opportunity." While it is true that wēijī [危机] does indeed mean "crisis" and that the wēi syllable of wēijī does convey the notion of "danger," the jī syllable of wēijī most definitely does not signify "opportunity." ... The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like "incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes)." Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry.

Take that, pseudo-intellectual Orientalist nonsense!

Your brain on love

2005-11-27T12:22:00.000Z

Even by the low standards of the British press's science coverage, today's gem from the Independent is appalling:

Revealed: the chemistry of love
The good news: they've discovered the love chemical inside us all. The bad news: it only lasts a year

The very source of love has been found. And is it that smouldering look exchanged across a crowded room? Those limpid eyes into which you feel you could gaze for ever? No. It's NGF, say unromantic spoilsport scientists who have made the discovery, - that's short for nerve growth factor.

And now, the really deflating news: its potent, life-enhancing, brain-scrambling effect doesn't last. It subsides within the year of first falling in love - presumably within the same period it takes lovers to notice that the object of their affections can't get the lid on the toothpaste.

First, the lame trope about scientists being "unromantic" and "spoilsport" (as if anything could be more wondrous than understanding how the profoundest emotions are created by something so relatively simple as cells and synapses). Then, the complete lack of context in explaining that nerve growth factor is required throughout development in the nervous system. Then, the implication that this finding "reveals" something about the subjective experience of love ("the bad news: it only lasts a year"), when the study is only looking at a possible biological basis for a phenomenon already well-established in psychology (that early romantic love changes to long-term attachment over time). Then, the neglect of other chemicals in the brain that have previously been tied to love, like oxytocin and vasopressin (and these actually found in the brain, not just circulating in the bloodstream as with NGF in the present study).

You could argue that getting people interested in science is worth a bit of oversimplification, but really, there comes a point when you're harming science more than you're helping it. I submit this story as yet another example under the hypothesis from The Guardian's Bad Science column I noted a few months ago:

It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science.

If you want a more serious journalistic effort about recent scientific research on the neurobiology of love, try this one.

Thanksgiving in Britain

2005-11-25T13:11:00.000Z

Filed again under "random notes from Britain," some things I find amusing about being an American in the UK this Thanksgiving holiday:

1. English muffins here are just called "muffins."

2. Bagels and (real) blueberry muffins are sold in supermarkets with a little American flag icon on the packaging.

3. Yesterday I went to a Thanksgiving lunch put on by some British people. To re-create a bit of American spirit, they had decorated the room with red, white, and blue balloons and little American flags in addition to the normal pumpkins and paper turkeys. It was funny (and weirdly inappropriate) to see such patriotic decor on a holiday that's in many ways uniquely American (though Canada has one too) and forms part of the American civil religion but isn't really "about" America the way, say, the 4th of July is.

Cloning ethics

2005-11-24T12:02:00.000Z

Finally, a real ethical issue about human cloning: the supply of human eggs.

South Korean cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-suk publicly apologized Thursday for ethics lapses, admitting two female scientists in his lab donated their own eggs for research, in a setback for the work that has raised worldwide hopes it could help find cures for untreatable diseases. ...

Under commonly observed international guidelines, scientists are advised to be cautious when using human subjects for research who are in a dependent relationship with them -- a precaution against exploitation.

All the nonsense about 3-day-old blastocysts being full human persons with a right to life has distracted from the real issue: how to prevent women from being exploited for their eggs, given that cloning at present is a highly inefficient process that requires hundreds of eggs - which can only be obtained by a painful, invasive procedure, to get a single successful cloned embryo.

Dover voters show some sense

2005-11-09T08:09:00.000Z

It's almost enough to restore your faith in democracy...

All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy. ...

The vote counts were close, but of the 16 candidates the one with the fewest votes was Mr. Bonsell, the driving force behind the intelligent design policy.

Well, maybe not.

"They will always lose"

2005-10-26T13:29:00.000+01:00

In college one of my political science professors tossed off an offhand comment in his first lecture to the effect that "over time, the modern state tends to expand." He meant expand both in intensity and scope - government becomes more effective at exerting power, and starts to bring more areas of life under its control - but especially the latter. This is historically obvious, even if you look simplistically at the proliferation of government agencies, not just in the U.S. but in all industrial countries. We started with State, Treasury, Justice, and War, and look where we are now*. I asked him what that meant for people hoping for "smaller government" and he kind of shrugged and basically said it wasn't in the cards.

Tyler Cowen agrees:

I have a simple theory: in any period of time, government grows as large as it can, given available technology and a few cultural constraints. For better or worse, voters support this growth. ... Short of technological retrogression and negative economic growth, we should not expect government to ever get smaller. ...

The complainers are the libertarians. They will always lose, and they will always be intellectually important.

*added cabinet-level agencies are Interior (1849), Agriculture (1889), Labor and Commerce (1903, split into two in 1913), HHS and Education (1953, split in 1979), HUD (1966), Transportation (1967), Energy (1977), VA (1989), Homeland Security (2003).

Rosa Parks

2005-10-25T09:02:00.000+01:00

Rosa Parks, the woman who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man and sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and, more broadly, the civil rights movement, died yesterday.

The Washington Post obituary highlights something I didn't know about her:

[Rosa Parks wrote in her autobiography,] "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

When I was growing up, the "tired feet" explanation was the standard story I heard - she had been shopping and was carrying heavy bags, or she had arthritic feet, etc. She just didn't want to stand up because her feet were sore, said the story - insinuating that she almost didn't even mean to cause any trouble.

The truth is more stirring, I think. It was not the aches and pains of the body that moved her to resist, but the constant insults to her dignity, the institutional insistence that she was less than a full human being. She stayed seated with the full knowledge that she was helping to launch a frontal assault on the injustice of Jim Crow. Would that we all had her courage. She was an American hero; may she rest in peace.

Maggie Gallagher on the "natural life-cycle of marriage"

2005-10-20T18:31:00.000+01:00

Maggie Gallagher has been writing at the Volokh Conspiracy in opposition to same-sex marriage. Her arguments are full of unsubstantiated statements and logical holes (earlier today she stated in passing, as if it were common knowledge, that the Roman Empire fell because of "sexual disorganization"), but this one in particular is especially bizarre:

[Trying to rebut the argument that] well, we have some nonprocreating couples in the mix. Why would adding SS couples change anything? Two points: SS couples are being added to the mix precisely in order to assure that society views them as “no different” than other couples. This intrinsically means (if the effort is successful) downgrading if not eliminating the social significance of generativity (procreation and family structure). The second truth is that both older couples and childless couples are part of the natural life-cycle of marriage. Their presence in the mix doesn’t signal anything in particular at all.

Right. Because childless couples who are biologically incapable of having children magically develop fertility through the "natural life-cycle of marriage". And, of course, postmenopausal women can only get married if they previously had children earlier in the "natural life-cycle of marriage."

Marketing America

2005-10-11T22:42:00.000+01:00

Filed under "random notes from Britain": In the bookstore today I noticed that "What's the Matter with Kansas?" is marketed here in the UK as "What's the Matter with America?".

Though I can understand this re-titling from a marketing viewpoint, I think this conflation of "America" with "red state America" is pretty pernicious, because it plays right into the hands of conservatives who like to claim that liberals are "un-American," when, of course, (at the risk of being essentialist), it's actually the conservatives who are un-American.

Cervical cancer and the religious right

2005-10-06T22:45:00.000+01:00

So there's a new vaccine that prevents cervical cancer by immunizing you against two strains of the human papilloma virus (HPV) that cause 70% of all cases of cervical cancer. It's been in the news previously as the companies making it announced encouraging results along the way, but Merck has now announced that it was 100% effective over two years in a trial with 10,000 women and if everything pans out with peer review and so on it could go on the market by the end of next year.

Who could possibly be against a vaccine that prevents a deadly cancer? Oh, that's right, the religious right.

"Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.

"Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex," Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.

This is beyond ridiculous. Sure, maybe abstinence was the best way to prevent HPV, but now we have another way to prevent HPV that works equally well and doesn't suffer from the tiny problem that, well, most people are not abstinent. What's more, Maher is living in a fantasy world if she thinks an 18 year old is going to factor in "Hm, I could get HPV and maybe die of cervical cancer when I'm 65" when considering whether or not to have sex. The New Scientist article gets it right in adding the context that the religious right touts HPV as a trump card for why abstinence is safer than protected sex: they don't want to lose that rhetorical point. There's something very warped about thinking that saving up to 260,000 lives per year worldwide and 3,000 in the U.S. is not worth giving up this rhetorical point or the virginity of that tiny sliver of abstinent people who were so close to having sex that the HPV vaccine would push them over the limit.

One shudders to think of what would happen if we ever develop an HIV vaccine. "Giving the HIV vaccine to people could be potentially harmful, because even though it would prevent a fatal disease, people may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex."

1918 influenza was an avian flu virus

2005-10-05T18:15:00.000+01:00

Just in case you were wondering if all this talk about avian flu wasn't a bit overblown, we now find out that the virus that caused the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed 50 million people, "more humans than any other disease in a similar duration in the history of the world," was a mutated form of an avian flu virus.

Two teams of federal and university scientists announced today that they had resurrected the 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history's most deadly epidemics, and had found that unlike the viruses that caused more recent flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 virus was actually a bird flu that jumped directly to humans.

The work, being published in the journals Nature and Science, involved getting the complete genetic sequence of the 1918 virus, using techniques of molecular biology to synthesize it, and then using it to infect mice and human lung cells in a specially equipped, secure lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The findings, the scientists say, reveal a small number of genetic changes that may explain why this virus was so lethal. The work also confirms the legitimacy of worries about the bird flu viruses that are now emerging in Asia.

The new research indicates that the 1918 virus, unlike more recent flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, was actually a bird flu that jumped directly to humans. The new studies find that today's bird flu viruses share a few of the crucial genetic changes that occurred in the 1918 flu. The scientists suspect that with the 1918 flu, changes in just 25 to 30 out of about 4,400 amino acids in the viral proteins turned the virus into a killer. The bird flus, known as H5N1 viruses, have a few, but not all, of those changes.

The studies are not published yet, but I'll post links when they're up.

Update 6 Oct: The Nature article is online now: Characterization of the 1918 influenza virus polymerase genes.
Update 7 Oct: Science article now online as well: Characterization of the Reconstructed 1918 Spanish Influenza Pandemic Virus.

Gay marriage in California

2005-09-30T13:02:00.000+01:00

So Schwarzenegger vetoed the California gay marriage bill today, as expected. But I want to point out that the argument that "the voters have spoken in Prop. 22, the legislature shouldn't overturn that" just doesn't work. Public opinion is shifting toward support for gay marriage very quickly.

Two polls by the Public Policy Institute of California:

February 2000 (pdf, pg 7): Likely voters are 57% against gay marriage, 38% for gay marriage. Proposition 22 passed the following month with 61.4% of the vote, suggesting either that people underreported anti-gay bias to pollsters or that the undecideds swung decisively for the ban on gay marriage.
August 2005 (pdf, pg 17): Likely voters are evenly split 46% to 46% on gay marriage.

That's a lead of almost 20% cut down to zero! Proposition 22 would probably still pass today because of the undecideds or a tendency to underreport anti-gay bias, but the gap is rapidly narrowing. Soon the day will come when California voters decisively approve of gay marriage, either in rejecting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage (Prop. 22 was an initiative, not an amendment) or in overturning Prop. 22.

Know thy neighbor

2005-09-30T12:52:00.000+01:00

Last week I mentioned a website, KnowThyNeighbor.org, that will post the names and addresses of people who sign the anti-gay-marriage petition (that would put an initiative to ban gay marriage on the ballot in 2008) in Massachusetts when the Attorney General makes them publicly available. Now they have a blog tracking the progress of the petition. Check it out.

No discrimination against women in science?

2005-09-27T23:06:00.000+01:00

You might have thought that the Summers fiasco about "innate differences" between men and women in scientific talent was long dead and buried, but Andrew Sullivan returns to it with a statement of breathtaking obtuseness:

But Armando's view [Sullivan has been criticizing Armando at Daily Kos for criticizing Summers] that women are somehow being discriminated generally in higher education makes no sense at all. As anyone on any major campus will tell you, and as Glenn Reynolds points out today, women are now outnumbering men on most campuses.

For starters, the issue at stake here is not gender representation in undergraduate colleges in general, but rather gender representation in science, especially at the highest levels (i.e., tenured research professor). Women have approached parity in science bachelor's degrees but are still underrepresented at the doctoral level. The leaky pipeline continues as newly minted PhDs move onto postdoctoral fellowships (where the moment of highest career pressure coincides with the time when many women want to have children), assistant professorship (again, career v. family), and tenure selection. At each of these levels, bias, even unconscious or systemic bias, has a significant effect in weeding out more women than men.

I have no problem with researching whether there are innate differences between men and women in scientific ability, whether in the mean or the standard deviation, but it's just dishonest to pretend that women are not discriminated against in science; or, if one has the shame to avoid that plainly obvious lie, dishonest to distract attention from it with an irrelevant aside about the number of women in higher education in general when the issue at hand is women in science.

Exciting news from Cassini

2005-09-19T13:09:00.000+01:00

The spacecraft Cassini has found water vapor on Saturn's moon Enceladus:

From a height of 109 miles, the Cassini spacecraft trained instruments on a cloud of water vapor venting from fissures at the moon's south pole.

From that moment, tiny Enceladus, only 310 miles in diameter, joined Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa as the solar system's leading candidates for having liquid water beneath their chilly surfaces -- a likely precondition for harboring life. But why the south pole? And how does something so small have liquid water? ...

Known before the Cassini mission as the brightest object in the solar system aside from the sun because of its shroud of crystalline ice, Enceladus is now also known as the smallest body to have active volcanism.

"What we think is happening is that jets of gas are escaping at substantial velocity from fissures to form a large column of gas above the south pole," Brown said. Mass spectrographic analysis showed that the gas is composed of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane and maybe nitrogen, he added, and though temperatures at the vents are well below zero, liquid water will flash into gas when it is flushed into the vacuum of space.

Scientists were also able to confirm from these observations that Saturn's E ring, as suspected, is made of microscopic icy "smoke" from Enceladus's vents. What they have not been able to figure out is how there could be enough heat to make liquid water.

"Deep down, you have a reservoir of stuff -- liquid water mixed with carbon dioxide and light organics that is hot in a relative sense," Brown said. "Why, and why only at the south pole? Those are the big questions, and none of the explanations advanced so far is satisfactory."

Gay marriage tactics

2005-09-18T22:31:00.000+01:00

So I know I've been writing a lot about gay marriage recently, but here's a another article about it in the Boston Globe (happily, with the headline "Gay marriage foes face hurdles as they push new amendment").

Things to chew on:

The (publicly available) names and addresses of all the people who sign the petition to put the anti-gay marriage amendment on the ballot will be posted online at KnowThyNeighbor.org, here. I think this is reasonable: signing a petition is more than just voting; it's standing up and saying this is something I'm willing to go on record for. People should know when they sign it that their signatures will be a matter of public record. This could be an effective deterrant against signing if widely publicized - business owners may not want to risk a boycott, for example. Or, you could send letters to people who signed it to try to persuade them to change their minds. That being said, I do hope this doesn't turn into a nasty campaign of intimidation. So far it's been pretty good:
Westerhoff [one of the organizers of knowthyneighbor.org] already introduced himself to one of the first petition signers, Madelyn Shields of Beverly. Shields told the Herald she found the meeting "a bit odd," but described Westerhoff as gracious. She said she hopes other exchanges between gay marriage advocates and petition signers are as gracious.
There's still no consensus on whether gay marriage opponents will have enough votes in the legislature in 2006 and 2007. They say they have enough now, but that could change, especially with ~~lobbying~~ persuasion.
One line from the Globe article is "Gay rights activists also say that civil rights should never be put to a popular vote." I agree, but would add that, as driftwood pointed out, in practice a defeat for the amendment in a popular vote would be a much greater defeat for the anti-gay marriage activists, politically speaking, than a defeat in legislature. The problem is, of course, that this assumes that the people will vote against it, and you don't want risk losing when civil rights shouldn't be subject to majoritarianism in the first place.
The first line of defense against the amendment is to be a court challenge to the effect that the Massachusetts state constitution bars ballot initiatives relating to the "reversal of a judicial decision." You can read the arguments here and here (PDFs) and the Attorney General's argument against them here. Now, I'm all for opposing this amendment on all fronts, but I don't really buy the argument. Although I'm not a lawyer, it seems fairly clear to me that the Goodridge decision was an interpretation of the state constitution, and "reversal of a judicial decision" only refers to the interpretation itself - it doesn't ban amending the constitution that was interpreted. Any lawyers out there who want to comment?

Sullivan gets letters

2005-09-17T09:03:00.000+01:00

Andrew Sullivan today put up an email from a reader with a claim so batty that I can't help but wonder if Andrew put it up in order to discredit the rather frightening personality cult it represents:

You ought to give President Bush some slack. He has had to face more in his presidency than arguably any other in the last 100 years. He inherited a recession, 9/11 happened, the Iraq war and this hurricane. He is only human and I think he is doing better than most.
I don't like the big spending nor the illegal immigration crisis. But I do believe the President is a man of integrity facing outstanding and overwhelming problems in his office.

What? Have we forgotten about FDR, who, let's see, faced the Great Depression (let's compare - 6% unemployment in 2003, 25% unemployment in 1932) and the threat of two fascist powers who, rather than using suicide bombings as a tactic of weakness, actually invaded several countries and were on the verge of developing nuclear weapons? Or Truman, who had to deal with the end of WWII, rebuilding Europe, and the beginning of the Cold War? Or even the much-maligned Nixon, who inherited a war still far deadlier to U.S. soldiers than the current one, went to China, and also had a hurricane of his own (Camille, 1969)? Or.. well, I could go on, but you get the point.

Another step forward in Massachusetts

2005-09-14T23:57:00.000+01:00

As predicted, a few hours ago the Massachusetts state legislature voted down the proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. What's remarkable to me is the huge margin by which it failed: 157-39. 55 legislators switched their votes from last year from yes to no.

Alas, we can't get complacent about the next amendment, which could appear on ballots in 2008 if it gets more than 50 votes (out of 200) in two legislative sessions (one in 2006, one in 2007). The current amendment failed to get even 50 votes in its favor, but you have to remember that several legislators voted against this amendment despite opposing gay marriage because this amendment would have created civil unions, which they also oppose (the 2008 amendment doesn't create civil unions)*. On the other hand, some legislators voted for this amendment only because it's a compromise, and might vote against the 2008 amendment. So the vote-counting is quite tricky and it's still plausible that the 2008 amendment will receive the requisite 50 votes. For what it's worth, MassEquality is putting out the word that at least 115 of the "nay" votes were from genuine gay marriage supporters; the big question mark is what "at least" means and how that 35 vote gap will change over the next couple years.

But my previous post still stands, I think: public opinion in Massachusetts is trending toward greater support for gay marriage, so even if the 2008 amendment makes it to the ballot, it will be rejected by the voters.

*It still puzzles me why this is seen as a desirable strategy. Even if the 2008 amendment passes, it doesn't ban civil unions - it just doesn't create them. The legislature will then just turn right around and create civil unions through ordinary legislation, as Connecticut did last year. So the religious right doesn't really gain anything by this strategy, as far as I can tell.

Update, 15 Sept: According to today's Boston Globe story, gay marriage opponents have 60 legislators who are prepared to vote for the 2008 amendment. There's no election between now and May 10, 2006 (which is when the first vote is scheduled for) so we can probably expect it to pass the first vote. (Hopefully some will change their minds, but I have a feeling these 60 are mostly the "hard core.") After that, if the 2006 election follows the pattern of the 2004 election, some anti-gay marriage legislators could be tossed out of office for the 2007 vote, so the amendment might be stopped there. If not, I still think the voters will vote against the amendment in 2008. But we can't rest easy - there's still a long fight ahead.

Incompetence

2005-09-14T01:38:00.000+01:00

Amazingly, FEMA's incompetence extended all the way to initially declaring a federal state of emergency in Louisiana in the wrong parishes. Really. Inland parishes were on the list whereas coastal parishes (including Orleans and Jefferson parishes) were not until someone noticed the mistake on the day the hurricane struck.

My best guess of what happened is this: FEMA decided that Gov. Blanco's request, which covered all of Louisiana to some degree, was excessive, and they decided not to give her all of the aid that she had requested. They drew up a list of the counties to include and the counties to exclude and, possibly in a rush to get done for the presidential press event covering the declaration, got the lists crossed. And then nobody noticed the mistake until the storm hit.... The worst part of all of this is that the only way for something like this to happen is if a lot of people didn't care enough about the situation to double check their decisions.

Computational bioinformatics

2005-09-12T18:42:00.000+01:00

Continuing on my previous musing about why "neuroscience" sounds so much sexier than "biology" even though both describe what I do, Spitshine offers alternative definitions of two words that at first glance might seem to be synonyms:

Bioinformatician - A scientist with a background in biology or biochemistry who stopped generating data himself
Computational biologist - A computer scientist or physicist who happens to use biological data

This certainly rings true; I once attempted to take class called "Computational Neuroscience" which turned out to be populated entirely by physics graduate students. Not being a physics graduate student myself, I found the math a bit beyond me. Imagine if the course had been called "Neurobioinformatics."

Gay marriage is here to stay in Massachusetts

2005-09-12T18:00:00.000+01:00

A survey by the Associated Press reveals that at least 104 (out of 200) state lawmakers in Massachusetts plan to vote against the proposed constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage but create civil unions. This amendment was passed in the legislature last year, but it needed to be passed in two separate legislative sessions before it could be sent to the voters for a referendum. So it now looks like the amendment will fail in legislature on its second vote on Wednesday.

This was basically the last chance for gay marriage opponents in Massachusetts. Public opinion in Massachusetts has swung within only one year from 53% opposition to gay marriage to 56% support. The next chance for a ban on gay marriage will be another amendment that could go on the ballot in 2008 that would ban gay marriage and not create civil unions. But public support for gay marriage will only increase in the next three years, as more and more people get used to the idea. The amendment won't even give all the couples who will have married over 4 years the consolation prize of civil union - their hard-won rights would stripped away entirely. With 56% approval of gay marriage and more, the 2008 amendment will be defeated. Time is on the side of the angels here.

Three parents?

2005-09-10T13:27:00.000+01:00

I've been annoyed with the press coverage of the recent decision by the UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to allow scientists to research a technique that treats inherited mitochondrial disorders.

For those who don't know, mitochondria are the organelles that power the cell by burning glucose with oxygen to release energy. They are separate from the nucleus (which contains the vast majority of DNA) and have their own DNA, which codes for various proteins used only in the mitochondria. They're inherited from the mother because the sperm cell's mitochondria are excluded from the fertilized egg.

Sometimes these mitochondria will have defects in their DNA. If that's the case, usually in a fertilized egg you'll have some normal and some defective mitochondria. As the fertilized egg divides and divides again, the mitochondria divide independently and the normal and defective mitochondria end up randomly distributed throughout the embryo. Depending on which organs the defective mitochondria end up in, the mitochondrial disease causes a variety of problems (the problems are more severe if the defective mitochondria are in energy-intensive tissues like muscle, brain, or liver). So it's possible that if you're a woman with a fairly mild mitochondrial disease, your child could have a much more severe form.

The proposed treatment works as follows: a woman with mitochondrial disease and her partner use in vitro fertilization to make a fertilized egg, as normal, but then the nuclei (which contain the vast majority of DNA) are taken out and put into a healthy donor egg whose nucleus has been removed. The resulting zygote has genetic material from two parents plus a contribution of mitochondria from a third person.

Doesn't sound so bad, does it? But everywhere I look on the newsstand, it gets the sensationalistic headline of "Embryos with three parents" and "Embryo with two mothers" and so on, even though the third person contributes only 13-14 protein-coding genes (the rest of the mitochondrial genes are for ribosomal RNA and transfer RNA, which allow the mitochondria's own protein synthesis machinery to function independently of the cell's protein synthesis), compared to the estimated 20,000-25,000 genes that each parent contributes. The headline "three parents" is, I think, deeply misleading because it suggests that the three parents make similar genetic contributions to the child, along the lines of the aliens in the middle section of Asimov's The Gods Themselves.

In fact, I don't see that this is so different from surrogate pregnancy, where a fertilized egg is implanted in another woman's uterus - the womb has a huge influence on the growing embryo, so this "two mothers" idea applies just as much, if not more, to surrogate pregnancy as to this potential (emphasis on potential) treatment for mitochondrial disease. The disproportionate focus on mitochondrial donation seems to me to reflect an unhealthy fixation on genetic determinism and the continuing perception of nature and nurture as opposites.

But the top prize in misleading headlines must go to The Daily Telegraph, with the breathless headline, "Designer babies to wipe out diseases approved" - as if mitochondrial diseases were an infection that can be "wiped out." "Wiped out" also carries the connotation of eugenics, as if these babies were part of a plot to liquidate anyone with a mitochondrial disorder, or to prevent people with mitochondrial disorders from reproducing. Lest one think this was just a fault on the headline writer's part, the term "wipe out" is also used twice in the text.

We have enough trouble having a rational debate about reproductive technologies without misleading press coverage. Let's try to keep the public informed, not misled by scary headlines darkly hinting at eugenics.

PS: Via Flags and Lollipops, a column lambasting UK media's coverage of science in general with the following dead-on quote:

It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science.

Read the rest for a simultaneously entertaining yet thoroughly depressing analysis of how the press misrepresents science. The irony is that they then wonder why public mistrust of science has increased so much in recent years.

Damning by faint praise

2005-09-09T09:07:00.000+01:00

You know those joke recommendation letters where the employer has nothing good to say about the employee and when pressed for praise says things like "His handwriting is excellent," "He is always punctual" or "His wife is very charming"? Here's one previous employer's take on Michael Brown:

"Yes. Mike Brown worked for me. He was my administrative assistant. He was a student at Central State University," recalls former city manager Bill Dashner. "Mike used to handle a lot of details. Every now and again I'd ask him to write me a speech. He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt."

Human brain still evolving

2005-09-08T23:24:00.000+01:00

Here's some science news that's sure to cause some controversy: a research group led by Bruce Lahn at the University of Chicago is reporting here and here that they've found evidence for strong positive selection in very recent human history for certain genetic variants of two genes involved in determining brain size (one, microcephalin, is said to have been selected for within the last 37,000 years, and the other, ASPM, within the last 5,800). On its own, this is neither surprising nor controversial: natural selection never stops and still acts on human populations today. But here's the kicker:

They report that with microcephalin, a new allele arose about 37,000 years ago, although it could have appeared as early as 60,000 or as late as 14,000 years ago. Some 70 percent or more of people in most European and East Asian populations carry this allele of the gene, as do 100 percent of those in three South American Indian populations, but the allele is much rarer in most sub-Saharan Africans.

With the other gene, ASPM, a new allele emerged some time between 14,100 and 500 years ago, the researchers favoring a mid-way date of 5,800 years. The allele has attained a frequency of about 50 percent in populations of the Middle East and Europe, is less common in East Asia, and found at low frequency in some sub-Saharan Africa peoples.

I'm bracing myself for racist misinterpretation of these results: people will grab on to this to claim that this is scientific proof that black people are genetically determined to be less intelligent than whites, Asians, and others.

The key thing to notice is that these are only two genes out of several that control brain size (and many, many others that control how the brain is wired up and how it changes with learning and memory):

[Lead author] Dr. Lahn said there may be a dozen or so genes that affect the size of the brain, each making a small difference yet one that can be acted on by natural selection. "It's likely that different populations would have a different make-up of these genes, so it may all come out in the wash," he said. In other words, East Asians and Africans probably have other brain enhancing alleles, not yet discovered, that have spread to high frequency in their populations.

And obviously, brain size is not the whole story when it comes to intelligence - so the set of interesting brain genes isn't just the "dozen or so" regulating brain size, but includes those with more subtle effects on the wiring of neural circuits.

What's more, we don't even know if the selected-for allele actually affects brain size compared to the other alleles - it could have some completely different effect that was selected for. (After all, genes don't encode brain size; they encode proteins that regulate, for example, how long neural stem cells keep dividing. These mechanisms happen at the molecular level, and so could have other effects beyond just cell proliferation.) To look at this, you'd have to examine people's actual brain size and compare that to which alleles of ASPM and/or microcephalin they have.

Fortunately, Dr. Lahn appears to be appropriately cautious about interpreting his group's results. Meanwhile, get ready for people to read too much into these results and then start claiming that it's "just political correctness" that makes this controversial and praising Lahn for his "courage in standing up against the liberal academic orthodoxy" or some other such nonsense.

Democracy and the religious right

2005-09-07T18:39:00.000+01:00

I noted in my last post that in response to the passage of a bill to allow same-sex marriage by the elected California legislature, the Governator adopts the curious tactic of saying that the matter is for the courts to decide, not the legislature, neatly reversing the usual rhetoric about "activist judges." This isn't completely stupid, in that the constitutionality of Proposition 22 is still working its way through the courts and it's not clear that the legislature can constitutionally overturn a voter-approved proposition.

But this is:

"Engaging in social experimentation with our children is not the role of the legislature," said Assemblyman Ray Haynes, a Republican from Southern California.

It's clear what the religious right is moving toward: one day when gay marriage is approved by a majority of voters in a referendum, they'll have worked through the progressive defenses of "activist judges" and "activist legislators," and will eventually have to denounce the "activist voters." Because what they really mean is that "engaging in social experimentation with our children" is not the role of anyone. This nice little slip into denouncing democratically elected legislatures reveals what the religious right really thinks: that no power on earth has the legitimacy to legalize same-sex marriage, not even "the people." Remember that the next time they say "we should let the voters decide."

Update, 8 September: Scott Lemieux has more, specifically the idea that conservative ressentiment is very flexible and can be targeted at anyone. One more point - if California ever approves gay marriage through a voter-approved proposition, you can also bet the national religious right will blast "the voters of California" for "imposing their radical social agenda on the rest of the country."

I heart California

2005-09-07T08:29:00.000+01:00

The California legislature has just passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage, making it the first time an elected body has legalized same-sex marriage (not just civil unions, as in Connecticut) of its own accord in the United States. Go California!!!

Unfortunately, this will probably lead nowhere, as Schwarzenegger is almost certain to veto it (due to pressure from his own party, since he personally almost certainly has no problem with gay marriage). But because the old "activist judge" saw is no longer available - the democratically elected and accountable legislature having passed the bill - he now flips the argument on its head and uses as an excuse - wait for it -

Signaling a likely veto if it does pass, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's spokeswoman said he preferred to let judges sort out the legality of gay marriage; such a case is moving toward the state Supreme Court.

Huh?

GOP welfare state

2005-09-07T01:03:00.000+01:00

While I'm linking to Washington Monthly articles, here's a fascinating one about the use of Alaskan native-owned corporations to funnel federal money to big (white-owned) corporations in non-competitive federal contracts. Read the whole thing to understand how it works, but here's a quote that sums up what it represents:

It is ... an illustration of how government now works under GOP control. Once upon a time, when Democrats ran Washington, federal tax dollars for the poor and other constituencies flowed largely through federal agencies and projects. The system was often inefficient, didn't always do much for its intended beneficiaries, and over the years became unpopular with voters. Now, a new system is arising, one more in tune with the zeitgeist. The new system funnels tax dollars not through wasteful federal bureaucracies but through crony capitalist enterprises. It is as inefficient and ineffective as the old system, maybe more so. But while the old system bolstered Democratic control of Washington, this one supports Republican rule. Welcome, then, to the new conservative welfare state.

...While some in Washington are uneasy about its costs and corrupting effects, many in the GOP leadership view it as a model for the kind of federal government they would like to see more of. It is a privatized system that circumvents the civil service, enriches politically-connected corporations, provides a trickle of money to the poor, and secures Republican power. For some conservatives, in other words, the Eskimo loophole is not a failed experiment in social engineering. It is the future.

Romney's evangelical problem

2005-09-07T00:37:00.000+01:00

Last week I wrote about how Mitt Romney's Mormonism will pose problems for his presidential aspirations in 2008. In this month's Washington Monthly, Amy Sullivan agrees, and explores in some detail just how much evangelicals despise Mormonism and how this will play out in a potential 2008 campaign.

Sometimes amid evangelicals' social agenda, I forget that in the end they really are motivated by religion. It's not just the fuzzy "religion" embodied by "family values," but a real theology with very particular doctrines that are taken with a seriousness completely out of proportion to reality.

Bizarre parasite manipulation

2005-09-06T22:08:00.000+01:00

Via the NYTimes comes news of a parasitic worm that grows inside grasshoppers and manipulates its host's behavior: when it comes time for the worm to move to fresh water, it actually induces the grasshopper to jump into water (a lethal activity for the grasshopper, which cannot swim). (Paper here.)

Biologists have discovered and hope to decipher a deadly cross talk between the genomes of a grasshopper and a parasitic worm that infects it. The interaction occurs as the worm induces the grasshopper to seek out a large body of water and then leap into it.

The parasite, known as a hairworm, lives and breeds in fresh water. But it spends the early part of its life cycle eating away the innards of the grasshoppers and crickets it infects.

When it is fully grown, it faces a difficult problem, that of returning to water. So it has evolved a clever way of influencing its host to deliver just one further service - the stricken grasshopper looks for water and dives in. ...

"We found the parasite produces and injects proteins into the brain of its host," Dr. Thomas said.

Two of the proteins belonged to a well-known family of signaling agents known as the Wnt family that are deployed in developing the cells of the nervous system.

Though produced by the worm, the two proteins seemed similar to insect-type proteins and perhaps developed so as to mimic them.

Lest you think that only lowly creatures such as grasshoppers are subject to such behavior manipulation, human behavior seems to be manipulated by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, a relative of the malarial parasite Plasmodium. Humans are not the target host of Toxoplasma (it reproduces in cats but infects many other hosts indiscriminately) but it's estimated that up to one billion people are infected. Toxoplasma grows inside cells but usually lies dormant inside cysts, anywhere in the body but most notably in the brain. It usually has no effects unless the immune system is compromised (toxoplasmosis is a common cause of death from AIDS, and is dangerous to unborn fetuses, whose immune systems are not yet active). However, as Chris of Mixing Memory summarizes here (with references), Toxoplasma infection seems to change the personality of the host: "Men become dirty, dogmatic recluses, and women become naive, outgoing, and promiscuous." It also slows reaction times and makes the host 2.65 times more likely to get into car accidents. It may even increase the risk of schizophrenia.

Why would Toxoplasma do this? In its natural life cycle, it reproduces in cats, releases oocysts in the cat's feces, which may be eaten by a prey animal, where it grow; if this prey is then eaten by a cat, it's back to the cat. The behavior manipulation comes in at the stage where the prey is eaten by the cat: rodents infected with Toxoplasma lose their fear of cat odor, have defective learning and memory, and show (like humans) slow reaction times: all things that would help them get eaten by a cat.

Since rodent and human nervous systems have a great deal of homology, it seems likely that the "strategy" that Toxoplasma uses on rodents also goes to work on humans. The going hypothesis is that Toxoplasma infection changes neurotransmitter levels, for example increasing dopamine levels. This could explain the increased risk of schizophrenia (which is thought to be related to increased dopamine levels) and the personality changes (increased background dopamine levels are correlated to reduced novelty seeking in humans). Dopamine is also involved in motor coordination (Parkinson's disease is caused by the degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in the basal ganglia), so slow reaction times could also be related to dopamine levels. It could be that the infection induces an inflammatory response by the immune system (this response is what holds the infection in check in cysts), and some of the inflammatory chemicals (called interleukins) could influence levels of neurotransmitters, including dopamine.

All this just goes to show how effective parasites can be in sneakily manipulating the behavior of their hosts. We saw earlier that malaria parasites make their human hosts smell more attractive to mosquitoes: I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that malaria also makes people want to spend more time outside or hang around stagnant pools of water.

Random thought

2005-09-02T00:48:00.000+01:00

In the course of reading Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, I found this interesting quote by Veblen:

It was the fortune of the American people to have taken their point of departure from the European situation when the system of Natural Liberty was still 'obvious and simple,' [while other colonial enterprises] have had their institutional point of departure blurred with a scattering of the holdovers that were brought in again by the return wave of reaction in Europe, as well as by these later-come stirrings of radical discontent that have questioned the eternal fitness of the sytem of Natural Liberty itself.

In other words, that U.S. was settled and founded in a particular historical age when Europeans were naively impressed enough with liberalism to make it the founding principle of a new nation. (Hartz's thesis is that America basically left behind feudalism and thus missed out on conservatism, socialism, fascism, and all the rest of the European nightmare by maintaining the hegemony of is founding liberalism.)

This made me think about the (admittedly fanciful) possibility of the same phenomenon in the science fiction future: if we humans eventually send out colonies into space (whether to other planets or even just orbiting settlements), what founding ideologies will they take with them? A lot of the analysis of why America turned out the way it did centers on its first colonists - settlers of disproportionately middle classes, particular religious beliefs ("city upon a hill," etc.) - who were not representative of the home population. Would the same thing happen in the future? What ideologies will settlers take and leave behind?

Things to consider:

The putative "end of history", or nonexistence thereof
Will space colonization be dominated by the West?
Genetic engineering
Expense of space travel (i.e., will emigrants be middle-class or super-rich?)

The complete breakdown of civil society

2005-09-02T00:37:00.000+01:00

I just heard someone on the ground in New Orleans on the radio describe the situation there as "the complete breakdown of civil society."

Words fail me.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- The mayor of New Orleans issued a "desperate SOS" Thursday as violence disrupted efforts to rescue people still trapped in the flooded city and evacuate thousands of displaced residents living amid corpses and human waste. ...

The evacuation of patients from Charity Hospital was halted after the facility came under sniper fire, while groups of armed men wandered the streets, buildings smoldered and people picked through stores for what they could find. ...

[CNN correspondent Chris Lawrence reports,] "There are multiple people dying at the convention center," Lawrence said. "There was an old woman, dead in a wheelchair with a blanket draped over her, pushed up against a wall. Horrible, horrible conditions.

"We saw a man who went into a seizure, literally dying right in front of us."

Looting and finding

2005-09-01T23:49:00.000+01:00

Several people have noted the racism underlying the Yahoo news captions that describe black looters as "looting" goods but white looters as "finding" goods.

Here's a handy reference in case anyone's confused.

Yahoo's apology: "Yahoo! News regrets that these photos and captions, viewed together, may suggest a racial bias on our part. We remain committed to bringing our readers the full collection of photos as transmitted by our wire service partners." (Apparently the "looting" captions were from AP and "finding" captions from Getty and Yahoo doesn't edit photo captions.)

So maybe it's not a racial bias on Yahoo's part - it's a racial bias that permeates all of society and subtly influences journalists who send wire reports.

I feel much better now.

Survey says...

2005-08-31T22:30:00.000+01:00

Amid all the depressing news about scientific ignorance contained in this survey (notably that two-thirds of the population supports the teaching of "intelligent design" in public school), here's some good news:

On gay men and lesbians in the military, 58 percent of those polled said they should be allowed to serve openly, a modest increase from 1994, when 52 percent agreed. Strong opposition has fallen in that time, to 15 percent from 26 percent in 1994.

Slowly but surely, the good guys are winning the fight for gay rights and it's only a matter of time before "don't ask, don't tell" is rescinded.

Essentially

2005-08-31T15:32:00.000+01:00

The approach many high school students take to learning French:

Franche est essentialement englaishe ouithe les endinges funnies et lottes de vowelles et les adjectifs en alle les places ronges.

[From this list of sentences of the form "Language X is essentially Language Y under condition Z"; via Language Log.]

A world of fantasy

2005-08-31T13:22:00.000+01:00

I recently started reading Louis Hartz's seminal The Liberal Tradition in America, which argues that liberalism (not left-liberalism, Lockean liberalism) has always been the hegenomic political ideology in America, explaining why European conservatism, socialism, fascism, or communism never made any headway. (Among other paradoxes, what American "conservatives" are conserving is liberalism.) I came across this essay about the book in the NYTimes book review with the following delightful passage:

Not all contemporary conservatives are followers of Locke. Adherents of the Christian right, among others, are not likely to be avid readers of Locke's letter on religious toleration (even if Locke justified toleration, not on secular grounds, but on Christian principle). But the fate of today's religious right may well have been foreshadowed by what Hartz called ''the reactionary Enlightenment,'' the effort by Southern thinkers before the Civil War to find a justification for slavery. Because of the lack of a conservative tradition, the opposite of liberalism was fantasy, and so Southern thinkers invented a feudal past of honor and chivalry that never existed.

Similarly, despite the deism of Jefferson and Madison, today's religious right claims that the United States was founded as a Christian republic. Separation of church and state, they contend, is contrary to American ideals -- when it is in fact the perfect expression of them. Like a Southern slaveholder captivated by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, America's Christian conservatives live in a world of their own imagining. Hartz would have understood them perfectly.

"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"

2005-08-31T02:18:00.000+01:00

From the same guy who brought us a study showing that one-third of clinical studies are later contradicted by larger studies (excellent summary by Orac here), we now have a rather alarmingly titled paper arguing that more than 50% of all scientific published papers are wrong. New Scientist summarizes:

Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.

John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings.

"We should accept that most research findings will be refuted. Some will be replicated and validated. The replication process is more important than the first discovery," Ioannidis says.

Ironically, the award system in science means that the first person gets all the credit, while there's no glory in repeating the result, and only a little more in refuting it. Inevitably, this means that "hot" fields with many competing labs are particularly susceptible to false published results, as there is both intense pressure to publish first (no one wants to be scooped!) and a strong bias for pursuing (and publishing) only positive results. This has been true, most notably, of recent research in stem cells.

Eventually, things do get sorted out; results must be repeated at some point (if for no other reason than that you often need to build on previous protocols to get to the next step in a research program). But all of this means that one should take new results with a healthy dose of skepticism.

This news will be a two-edged sword in terms of psychological effects on practicing scientists: on the one hand, obviously it's depressing that if you discover something, odds are it will turn out to be false. On the other hand, you can probably still get a paper out of it even so.

[Via Crumb Trail.]

Update, 2 September: Alex Tabarrok has a nice clear explanation of why, statistically speaking, one would expect most research findings to be false.

A Christian wedge?

2005-08-31T00:57:00.000+01:00

One of the most remarkable aspects of the modern American religious right is that it has brought together conservatives of religions and denominations previously thought to be enemies - notably Protestants and Catholics (and to a lesser extent, Jews, hence the historically strange term Judeo-Christian tradition) - on the basis of shared policy goals (on abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, etc).

Mitt Romney's presidential ambitions have highlighted another potential crack in the religious right: evangelical Protestant distaste for Mormonism.

As Governor Mitt Romney mulls a race for president in 2008, his strategists expect their ''family values" candidate -- who opposes gay marriage, abortion, and some forms of embryonic stem cell research -- to find a natural base of support among religious conservatives. ...

But an examination of the views of powerful Christian right groups suggests that, even as some of these voters might appreciate Romney's lifelong commitment to his church, the governor's Mormon faith could become an obstacle for others among this same group, who make up a large and vocal segment of Republican primary voters.

Consider:

The Southern Baptist Convention website categorizes the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a ''cult" that is ''radically" different from historic, biblical Christianity.

A faith guide issued by the influential Christian right group Focus on the Family declares that ''God cannot be identified ... with the Mormon religion's notion of god." And each year, evangelical organizers behind the National Day of Prayer bar Mormons from speaking at their proceedings.

...Scholars say Protestant evangelicals who form the base of the Republican Party have more profound theological conflicts with the Mormon Church [than those between Protestants and Catholics]. (Despite his efforts to improve the dialogue between Mormons and Protestant evangelicals, Johnson said he doesn't believe Mormon beliefs are a ''Christian doctrine.") [**] ...

Even Joseph Smith Jr., the self-proclaimed prophet who founded the church in 1830, made a bid for the Oval Office. His campaign in 1844, the year James K. Polk beat Henry Clay, ended with his murder in June at the hands of an anti-Mormon mob.

Unfortunately, I don't see this conflict having any actual practical effect on the strength of the religious right. Romney probably won't be nominated (gay marriage ban or not), but conservative Mormons won't abandon the religious right because of that. This marriage of convenience is too strong for anything as trivial as, you know, religion, to break it up.

**For example, Google "mormons not christians".

Explaining v. justifying rape

2005-08-27T04:42:00.000+01:00

There's been some blogospheric discussion lately about the explaining vs. justifying distinction (Brad DeLong, Abiola Lapite, Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings), mostly with respect to whether explanations of terrorism that incorporate American foreign policy as a cause actually justify terrorism. But of course the distinction does not only apply to terrorism. One example that has just occurred to me is the blame-the-victim mentality about rape. A lot of people (usually men) react to rape - especially date rape - by saying things like, "That sucks, but she should have known better than to dress provocatively / drink so much / walk alone in a dark alley."

This attitude has been roundly and rightly criticized by feminists and other right-thinking people. It's part of a larger cultural framework that casts women as either virgins or sluts, that views women as sexual objects, that views sexual exploitation of women as the default state, that holds double standards for women and men ("boys will be boys"), and so on.

But then the blame-the-victim crowd comes out with the protest, "I'm just explaining the rapist's actions, not justifying them... responsibility isn't zero-sum, you can blame the criminal but also assign some responsibility to the victim... don't assume that I hate women, I just want to help prevent future rapes... etc." This usually sounds disingenuous (to me, anyway). I don't want to make a direct analogy to explaining/justifying terrorism, but it does seem like a useful exercise to apply the explain/justify distinction, which I am inclined to accept in the case of terrorism, to a case where I am inclined not to accept it.

It seems clear to me that one can "explain" a rape in a sensitive and non-misogynistic (and non-justifying) way - this kind of explanation motivates authorities to encourage women to watch their drinks in parties, learn self-defense, and not walk alone at night. But then there are "explanations" that do shade into justification, or at least excuse-making: "how else do you expect a hot-blooded young male to react," "she should have seen it coming," etc. (Then there are outright justifications like "Look how she dressed - she was asking for it.") This is similar to the comment Jeff Weintraub made to Brad DeLong: just because some (or most) explanations do not justify doesn't meant there aren't other explanations that do justify (or excuse, whitewash, trivialize, defend, etc.).

This example doesn't prove anything about the application of the explain/justify distinction to terrorism (e.g., "Bush should have expected post-war chaos in Iraq" is not equivalent to "that woman should have expected her date to rape her after she dressed provocatively" -- for one thing, the latter is untrue statistically even if for no other reason). But it does show that, conceptually, one can see that the explain/justify distinction is not always clear-cut, but can be blurred, so let's not be too absolutist about insisting that "to explain is not to justify."

Regulation of maggots and leeches

2005-08-25T09:57:00.000+01:00

Noted in this interesting article about medical uses for flesh-eating maggots (healing festering wounds) and bloodsucking leeches (draining excess blood in hand reattachment surgery):

But neither leeches nor maggots have ever been subject to thorough regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. So the medical advisers are being asked to create general guidelines about how they should be safely grown, transported and sold.

In addressing it, officials first had to decide which part of the agency had oversight: its biological or device division.

"The primary mode of action for maggots is chewing," said Mark Melkerson, acting director of the Division of General, Restorative and Neurological Devices. "For leeches, it's the eating of blood. Those are mechanical processes." Thus, the agency decided that maggots and leeches were devices, Mr. Melkerson said.

Iraqi Articles of Confederation

2005-08-24T22:26:00.000+01:00

Matthew Yglesias notes that Bush compares Iraq's current constitutional predicament to the constitutional predicament of the newborn United States in the 1780's, apparently to reassure us that things will work out in the end: "As Americans watch the constitutional process unfold, as we watch people work to achieve compromise and unity, we've got to remember our own history. We had trouble at our own conventions writing a constitution."

But Matt goes on to make the excellent point that American constitutional history isn't all peaches and cream after 1789:

But let's take this analogy seriously. Iraq is maybe going through something like its Articles of Confederation stage -- you've got your Whiskey Rebellion, your disorder, your confusion, etc. But in a few years, they sort things out and the elite members of the nation's dominant ethno-sectarian group will work out an agreement establishing order throughout the country. The Sunnis, naturally, will be held as chattel slaves. Kurdish land and natural resources will be slowly expropriated via a series of genocidal military campaigns.

Some decades down the road, the conflicts papered-over in the initial constitutional compromise will break out into the open leading to a horribly destructive Civil War.

The Sunnis emerge, no longer enslaved, but systematically denied basic civil, social, and economic equality. A couple decades after that, the Kurdish Wars draw to an end, with the small bands of survivors herded into undesirable bits of waste land. A hundred years or so after the conclusion of the Civil War, they begin to grant equal rights to the Sunni population and get serious about trying to address conditions on the Kurdish reservations. We can expect, in other words, that Iraq will emerge as a liberal democracy sometime around the year 2170.

Reassured now?

Update on polio: Saudi vaccine push

2005-08-21T00:02:00.000+01:00

Saudi Arabia is going to vaccinate all visitors under age 15 against polio.

Saudi Arabia, which gets millions of visitors each year making their pilgrimage to Mecca, has ordered all young visitors from countries with polio cases to bring proof of vaccination and will vaccinate them again when they arrive, the World Health Organization announced yesterday.

In issuing the order, which applies to everyone under age 15 from 19 countries, the kingdom is moving to stem the global spread of the polio virus, which now affects mainly Muslim countries and regions. Although the next pilgrimage, or hajj, will not reach its peak until early January, the order will take effect as soon as possible. ...

Global health experts expressed confidence that the Saudis could stop any spread of the virus in their country, even though at times up to two million pilgrims may be pressed closely together in crowds around the holy sites and in the tent cities and hostels where they will be staying.

You may recall that due to false rumors about the safety of the polio vaccine in northern Nigeria, a new polio epidemic arose there and spread to Mecca through pilgrims and to Yemen (more here) and Indonesia.

Because the pilgrimage to Mecca was perhaps the principal means by which polio was being spread through Muslim countries, this will be a big help. But the damage may already have been done:

Because many people in Indonesia travel back and forth to China, the Philippines and Malaysia, the risk of the disease spreading to those countries is very high, Dr. Aylward said.

Hopefully people keep this in mind the next time anti-vaccine activists spread unfounded rumors about the supposed inefficacy and harmfulness of vaccines.

Unpatriotic right-wingers

2005-08-18T23:06:00.000+01:00

Mark Kleiman may have the best take so far on the question of whether left-leaning types want America to lose in Iraq:

I noted earlier that Eugene Volokh's attempt to find important American liberals who support the Iraqi insurgency had yielded a result within measurement error of nothing whatever. But Henry Farrell's search for right-wingers who falsely assert the opposite -- who claim that large segments of the American left support our enemies -- has been much more productive.

The conclusion is inescapable: Large segments of the American right are making demonstrably false charges of disloyalty, thus weakening national unity in wartime. How unpatriotic of them!

What if the English Civil War happened ten years earlier?

2005-08-18T18:32:00.000+01:00

A while back, Mark Kleiman posed this interesting question, on the assumption that additional Protestant troops might have made a difference in the Thirty Years' War, perhaps resulting in a decisive Protestant victory rather than the Peace of Westphalia which was basically a draw. But expert opinion, it seems, is that it probably wouldn't have made any difference.

De Menezes didn't run from police

2005-08-17T19:02:00.000+01:00

According to leaked documents from the official investigation into the shooting death of Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July. The Guardian also reports here. It's outrageous: de Menezes calmly walked through the turnstiles, picked up a free newspaper, and only ran once he heard the train approaching. The officers weren't sure he was really a suspect because one of them was "relieving" himself when de Menezes left his flat. He wasn't even wearing a heavy coat. And so on.

I hope the outcome of the inquiry is not limited to punishing the police officers responsible. Errors like this reveal systemic problems with the whole system that have to be - and can be - fixed.

I've just been reading about wrongful police shootings in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink. He suggests that when you chase someone and your heartrate goes above 175, your cognitive capacities are sharply diminished, and you become "temporarily autistic" as he puts it - unable to read someone's intentions. The mind just doesn't work as it should. Police departments have started to realize this, in banning high speed chases, having patrol officers work alone (so you don't feel the need to be brave in front of your partner), and following strict procedures when approaching a car, like standing slightly behind the driver and shining a flashlight onto the driver's lap (so there's no possibility for wrongly thinking the driver's about to shoot you). You cannot rely on human agency in these situations - you need to set up circumstances to reduce the chances of human error to as low as reasonably possible.

It's the same story with medical errors. Doctors try their hardest, but there is a limit to human ability, and at that limit, tiny modifications in the environment can make a difference. Following systematic study of fatal errors in anesthesiology, doctors cut the death rate from general anesthesia from 1 in 10,000 to less than 1 in 200,000 by seemingly trivial things like making all dials turn in the same direction and making it impossible to turn oxygen delivery down to zero.

We'll know more when the full report on the wrongful shooting of de Menezes comes out. The police officers are surely guilty of incompetence, but that isn't the whole story - I don't doubt that the "system" is guilty of incompetence too.

Statism is not creationism, part 2

2005-08-17T00:58:00.000+01:00

Don Boudreaux once again makes a facile and fallacious comparison between creationism/Darwinism and statism/libertarianism.

Pinker says, defending the theory of natural selection against the idea of "intelligent design," that "Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings."... I don’t here write to enter my two-cents in the debate between Darwinians and creationists (although, for the record, I am solidly in the Darwinian camp). I write to record that Pinker’s insight applies to society no less than to biological beings. ...

A social deist assumes that sovereign power is necessary to design and maintain the foundation, but not the superstructure, of society. That is, a social deist regards conscious design and maintenance of the ‘constitutional’ level as necessary. Upon this foundation, social order grows unplanned.

Social deists are contrasted, on one hand, with "social creationists." Social creationists are members of that species of juvenile thinkers who regard conscious, central direction by a wise and caring higher human authority as necessary for all social order – not only for the foundation, but for all, or much, of what the foundation supports.

I am fine with the Hayek-ian idea that spontaneous social order is superior to social order planned by human governments. But Boudreaux is wrong to frame this idea in terms of Darwinism v. creationism.

As I wrote before, Darwinism v. creationism is a debate about what, in fact, happened to cause the evolution of complex living things, not about which way would be better. As it happens, creationism is false, but one could easily argue that it would be nicer if it were true. Natural selection is cruel and wasteful; it works by relying on prodigious over-reproduction and death (or reproductive failure) of the less fit. To get to a well-adapted life form, you must go through (i.e., kill) millions upon millions of less-well-adapted life forms. By any human moral standards, it's not a "nice" way to go about making life. How much kinder and gentler if a benevolent old man with a beard really did just say "Let there be tigers" on October 28, 4004 BC and lo, there were tigers!

The point of Darwinism isn't to say that natural selection is a better way to generate complex life than God - but to say that natural selection is a plausible way, and God is not necessary to explain the current state of the biosphere. In contrast, the point of libertarianism or anarchism is to say that catallaxy is a better way to generate social order than central planning. It's one thing to argue that central planning isn't necessary for social order, and quite another to argue that centrally planned order is inferior to spontaneous order. It might or might not be, but the analogy to the evolution/creationism debate fallaciously tries to imply that the anarchism/statism argument has already been won by the biologists. The analogy is incorrect and merely confuses matters.

Pox parties

2005-08-14T17:17:00.000+01:00

Tyler Cowen reports that it's becoming popular in New Zealand to take your kids to "pox parties," in order to infect them with measles, chickenpox, etc. so they don't need the supposedly "dangerous" vaccines. Needless to say, this is incredibly stupid:

[I]ntentional exposure to diseases through pox parties is risky. Measles can lead to pneumonia and, in one in 1000 cases, an inflammation that can lead to permanent brain damage. During a 1991 epidemic, seven unimmunised people died.

By comparison, there has never been a death associated with the measles vaccine, and the chance of brain damage is one in a million.

Even chickenpox is not benign. Between 1980 and 1993, nine New Zealanders – including six children - – died of the disease. Up to 200 chickenpox cases a year result in hospitalisation and one to two in long-term disability or death. [Note that New Zealand's population is about 4 million --ed.]

As far as we know, the MMR vaccine is perfectly safe. There's also a safe and pretty effective (85%) chickenpox vaccine. Just to supplement the measles statistics from the New Zealand article:

Risk of serious adverse event following chickenpox vaccination (not even necessarily caused by the vaccination): 1 in 50,000

Risk of hospitalization from chickenpox*: 1 in 500 for children, 1 in 125 for adults

Risk of pain and suffering from chickenpox: 100%

Risk of death from chickenpox vaccination: no one has ever died from chickenpox vaccination

Risk of death from chickenpox*: 1 in 100,000 for children, 1 in 4,000 for adults (most victims were immunologically normal and healthy)

*Source: Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases

Evolution v. religion: the problem of evil and the problem of design

2005-08-12T19:18:00.000+01:00

Abiola Lapite argues that evolution cannot be compatible with an omnipotent, benevolent, activist God, due to the problem of evil:

Simply put, there is no room in the universe of Darwinian struggle and pitiless death for a benevolent, omnipotent, activist deity of the kind put forward by Judaism and its more popular offspring.

This is manifestly true, but it's not the point of conflict between evolution and religion that I would focus on. After all, the problem of evil isn't just true for evolution - it's true for, well, all of reality. Even if God did create the world 6,000 years ago, it would still be true that all sorts of horrible suffering goes on in the animal world, not to mention famines, natural disasters, and man's inhumanity to man in the human world. Some solutions are at least plausible for Deist gods, but not for the kind of interventionist God postulated by the great monotheistic religions. In any case, it doesn't take Darwin to raise the problem of evil.

The real Darwinian threat to religion is "Darwin's dangerous idea," the one that this blog is named after. It's the idea that all the fantastic complexity of life, humanity and consciousness was never designed, but happened on its own through a mindless, stupid, blind algorithmic process: natural selection. Cranes, not skyhooks. Complexity from the bottom up, not the top down. The watchmaker is not only blind - he's not even a real person.

This is the point on which evolution cannot be reconciled with most forms of religion. Insofar as religion is about ascribing meaning and intent to the natural world, a meaningless and intentless natural selection fundamentally contradicts the whole religious outlook. I wasn't surprised when the Catholic Church clarified its position on evolution as being that evolution-as-common-descent might be true, but evolution-as-unplanned-mindless-algorithm is definitely false - because the latter leaves no room for the Catholic God.

This common descent v. mindless natural selection distinction means that whether or not evolution and religion are compatible depends on what you mean by evolution. If you mean Darwinian evolution in its full glory, then they are not compatible (excepting Deist non-interventionist gods). If you mean evolution as common descent and gradual modification, then - they might be compatible. I think it's possible (and not logically inconsistent) to be a practicing biologist, understanding how random mutations spread through a population through natural selection and how protein domains are conserved across species and so on, while retaining some belief in the back of one's head that the mutations just appear random, and God is working in mysterious ways in the background. It's still a failure to take Darwinian evolution to its final philosophical conclusion, but doesn't conflict with the scientific theory of evolution itself, in that science just ignores "mysterious ways" that can't be observed, inferred, or falsified.

Manipulative malaria

2005-08-09T13:31:00.000+01:00

Via Foreign Dispatches, Carl Zimmer reports a finding published in PLoS Biology that the P. falciparum malaria parasite actually makes infected humans smell more attractive to mosquitoes, thus increasing its chances of propagation.

They set up three tents, each large enough for a person to sleep in. A fan pumped air from the tents into a central chamber swarming with about 100 mosquitoes. Mosquitoes that were attracted to one of the tents would fly toward it, only to become stuck in a trap.

The researchers asked parents in western Kenya to allow them to test their children for malaria. For each round of the experiment, they chose one uninfected child in an early stage of infection and a child who was carrying gametocytes. The children slept for a few hours in the tents, and the scientists checked the traps to measure how many mosquitoes had been attracted to each child.

After studying 12 sets of children, the scientists discovered a striking pattern. "Gametocyte-infected children attracted about twice as many mosquitoes as either uninfected ones or ones infected with nontransmissible stages," Dr. Koella said. "The results really jump out."

Disturbing, yet fascinating. Of course, as a general strategy of infectious agents, this is no aberration - even the common cold virus has a "strategy" of increasing its transmission, by inducing coughing in its victims. Similarly for tuberculosis (coughing), cholera (diarrhea), rabies (aggression), etc.

To counter the optimistic note at the end of Zimmer's article, I have doubts about the practicality of blocking the mosquito-attracting effect. Obviously, the science is fascinating and we should learn all we can about how the plasmodium parasite functions - but even if we discover the mechanism by which the parasite makes people smell attractive to mosquitoes and can interfere with it, this will only stop the transmission to the next victim, not help or cure the presently infected person. Stopping transmission is great, of course, but depending on how risky/invasive the medical intervention would be, you might be hard-pressed to convince someone to undergo medical treatment that would bring zero benefit to them (other than fewer mosquito bites) and only a diffuse benefit to those around them. (This is a problem associated with transmission blocking vaccines in general.) Rather like the reason so many people these days are reluctant to get vaccines when they can just ride off the herd immunity of those around them.

Update, 12 August: In comments, Sennoma points out that there would be a direct benefit to the infected person, because fewer mosquito bites would translate into a lower risk of being reinfected during/after treatment.

(Re)claiming essentialism

2005-08-07T18:13:00.000+01:00

It's common to see arguments resting on the idea that there exists some pure, "real" version of something (an ideology, religion, organization, institution, person, etc) which has been corrupted or perverted by some more recent manifestation of that thing. I've been thinking recently about two examples of this form of essentialist thinking: the idea that "real" Islam is peaceful and radical Islamists have "perverted" Islam, and the idea that the "real" America is a place of freedom, democracy, equality, etc. and the modern GOP betrays everything that America stands for even as it invokes America to justify its policies. These are arguments that I'm quite fond of (in one post about extraordinary rendition, I echoed the poignant question, "What has happened to our country?" as if there were some Golden Age of America where torture did not happen), but they are certainly problematic.

After all, what can "real" Islam and "real" America possibly refer to? I trust no one seriously believes in Platonic Forms anymore, and certainly not for ideologies/movements/polities as amorphous and vehemently contested as "Islam" and "America." Empirically, no one can deny that aspects of Islam have been violent, or that America hasn't always been on the side of the angels. Is the "real" thing to which the essentialist appeals a mere figment of the imagination?

In a word, yes, but the story doesn't end there. Essentialism has a powerful intuitive appeal - hence the enduring popularity of Rousseau's idea that we all have an "authentic" self that can be obscured by the personas we act out, which mutated into Freud's unconscious ("Oh, that's not what you really think"). This power can be harnessed for rhetorical ends even though it is empirically unfounded and even conceptually incoherent.

Mark Kleiman had a post a while back noting that emphasizing good aspects and de-emphasizing bad aspects of American history when teaching schoolchildren is a good way to get them to believe later on that doing bad things is "un-American." I think this is true - it's certainly how I was brought up and why I believe that torture is un-American even though plenty of Americans have tortured prisoners in the past. The power of this rhetorical schema lies in the power of American national identity - if we liberals can reclaim (or claim) American patriotism onto our side, we harness all the emotional attachment of "America" for good rather than evil.

So it is, in a way, with "real" Islam. I wrote the following in a comment to this post by Abiola Lapite:

The claim that genuine Islam is peaceful (or whatever) seems to me at least partly a rhetorical ploy aimed to reclaim (or claim) Islam away from the Islamists. There is a conflict within Islam between liberal and reactionary strains and it seems like a sensible move for each side to say they are the "real" Islam. For Western politicians to say that the liberal strains are the real Islam is to signal support for that side within the intra-religious conflict, as opposed to blanket opposition to all forms of Islam. As for those liberals who silently acquiesce in Islamism, the schema that Islamists have "betrayed" Islam can be a useful tool to spur them to opose Islamism more openly.

Rather than assault the faithful full-on with an attack on "Islam," one makes the rhetorical move that the liberal strains are more true to the "real" spirit of Islam, thus harnessing the emotional attachment to "Islam" for good rather than for evil.

In a way, I've suggested that though essentialism may not be analytically helpful (or correct, or even coherent), it can be a powerful tool rhetorically and politically. I suppose one could say this is a cynical or disingenous form of argument if used in full recognition of its analytical inadequacy. Maybe it is; maybe it should appear with an asterisk at the end ("*statement meant rhetorically, not factually"). But as political speech - a genre full of analytically empty but rhetorically powerful schemas - it seems par for the course. Thoughts, anyone?

Away

2005-08-07T13:50:00.000+01:00

I'm going on vacation for a couple weeks, so posting will be sporadic after today. If you have any biology or neuroscience related topics that you'd like me to post about when I get back, leave a suggestion in comments!

Avian flu vaccine developed

2005-08-07T13:06:00.000+01:00

Amidst all the worrying developments on the avian flu front (Tyler Cowen points out that you are more likely to die of avian flu than a terrorist attack), now comes some good news:

Government scientists say they have successfully tested in people a vaccine that they believe can protect against the strain of avian influenza that is spreading in birds through Asia and Russia. ...

In interviews over recent days, Dr. Fauci has said that tests so far had shown that the new vaccine produced a strong immune response among the small group of healthy adults under age 65 who volunteered to receive it, although the doses needed were higher than in the standard influenza vaccine offered each year.

There's still more tests to be done, though, so in some ways it's a race against time to see if we can finish vaccine development before avian flu spreads to humans:

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, said that although the vaccine that had undergone preliminary tests could be used on an emergency basis if a pandemic developed, it would still be several months before that vaccine was tested further and, if licensed, offered to the public. ...

The additional tests are needed in part to determine the optimal dose of vaccine; how many shots people will need for protection; and whether adding another ingredient called an adjuvant to the vaccine could raise the potency of lower doses, stretching the number of people that could be protected. Even when these tests are completed, more time will be needed before the Food and Drug Administration can license the human vaccine and before policy makers determine when and how it should be administered.

And then there's the problem of actually making enough vaccine - again, quickly enough that people can get vaccinated before the avian flu becomes widespread:

"We don't have all the vaccine we need to meet the possible demand. The critical issue now is, can we make enough vaccine, given the well-known inability of the vaccine industry to make enough vaccine?"

Because the vaccine is made in chicken eggs, "a potential major stumbling block" to successful mass production is the number of eggs farmers can supply manufacturers, Dr. Fauci said.

If manufacturers can overcome such hurdles, the new vaccine could go far in averting a possible pandemic of human influenza, Dr. Fauci said.

Keep your fingers crossed, everyone.

Update, 8 August: Better keep them double-crossed.

Censoring controversial movies

2005-08-03T21:52:00.000+01:00

I shouldn't be surprised by the news that the film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code may play down or even eliminate the central premise of the book - namely, that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene intended to be his heir, and the Catholic Church went to extreme lengths to suppress the truth and the "sacred feminine." The same thing is apparently happening with the film adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, in which religion is portrayed as evil, a force that represses humanity and all that is good and free in life.

Still, I can't help but gape incredulously. It's as though someone were to do a film adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ but took out all the stuff about the last temptation. Or tried to make Harry Potter palatable to the religious right by taking out all the magic. Really, what's the point?

Bush and "intelligent design"

2005-08-03T00:32:00.000+01:00

So Bush has endorsed the teaching of "intelligent design" in American schools, using the patently disingenuous justification, "so people can know what the debate is about." Look, if you want kids to know what the debate is about, then have a lesson about it in social studies, "current events," religion, or philosophy. The scientific arguments for evolution (and, implicitly, against creationism) are already well-covered in standard science textbooks. In science class, we teach science, and intelligent design is not science - it's a non-explanation explanation that relies simply on the God of the Gaps to claim that we will never know that which we do not currently know.

Actually, what's ironic is that even if "intelligent design" were true, this wouldn't technically prove Darwinism wrong. Daniel Dennett has pointed out that even if life on Earth actually does turn out to be "irreducibly complex" (a very dubious proposition), we might very well have been created by some alien life forms who themselves evolved by Darwinian natural selection. After all, "intelligent design" doesn't have the hubris to claim that it is theoretically impossible for life to evolved ever - it claims that it is impossible for life as it exists on Earth to have evolved. Who's to say the "intelligent designer" didn't itself evolve? The idea of Darwinian natural selection - blind, unintelligent, algorithmic natural selection - is not ultimately dependent on evolution-as-we-know-it-on-Earth being true (though, obviously, all available empirical evidence indicates that evolution as we know it on Earth is, in fact, true). That this conclusion is unacceptable to IDers only goes to show that "intelligent design" is merely a code word for "life was created by the eternal, omnipotent God of the Bible."

Update, 4 Aug: Post updated to get Google to link intelligent design here, as per Sean Carroll's suggestion.

Anosognosia and the mind-body problem (literally)

2005-08-02T22:07:00.000+01:00

Via the NYTimes comes news of this study (Pubmed link) showing that damage to the supplementary motor cortex (see simplified diagram at bottom of post) causes a fascinating syndrome called "anosognosia" in which patients are paralyzed but persistently deny the paralysis, often coming up with elaborate confabulations to explain away why they cannot move their arm:

Dr. Anna Berti sits facing a patient whose paralyzed left arm rests in her lap next to her good right arm. "Can you raise your left arm?" Dr. Berti asks.

"Yes," the patient says. The arm remains motionless. Dr. Berti tries again. "Are you raising your left arm?" she asks.

"Yes," the patient says. But the arm still does not move. ... If prodded for hours, patients will make up stories to explain their lack of action, Dr. Berti said.

One man said his motionless arm did not belong to him. When it was placed in his right visual field, he insisted it was not his. "Whose arm is it?" Dr. Berti asked.

"Yours," he said. "Are you sure?" Dr. Berti persisted. "Look here, I only have two hands."

The patient replied: "What can I say? You have three wrists. You should have three hands."

The NYTimes does a fairly good job of explaining the theory behind why damage to the premotor cortex would create this strange perception in anosognosic patients, so I won't rehash it. (It's very interesting, so do read the article!) What I want to address is this bit:

This denial, Dr. Berti said, was long thought to be purely a psychological problem. "It was a reaction to a stroke: I am paralyzed, it is so horrible, I will deny it," she said.

But in a new study, Dr. Berti and her colleagues have shown that denial is not a problem of the mind. Rather, it is a neurological condition that occurs when specific brain regions are knocked out by a stroke.

This is a false distinction. All psychological phenomena are rooted in neurology, because the mind is the product of the brain. Now, it is meaningful to talk of some phenomena as being "higher-order" and others as "lower-order" in terms of how easily they can be explained by the biology. In this case, we could distinguish the kind of denial caused by crude brain damage (anosognosia) and the kind of denial caused by, say, a traumatic childhood (or whatever; I'm not up on my psychoanalysis). But it is not meaningful to talk of mental phenomena as if they existed in a separate plane from biological phenomena. Even denial caused by a trauamtic childhood (or whatever) would still be implemented as a neurobiological level by neurons, synapses, and so on. It is nonsensical to talk about something as being "purely" a psychological problem.

The Scientist

2005-08-02T20:25:00.000+01:00

Check it out: This blog has been linked to by The Scientist* (free registration required) as an example of a "science blog," along with several others. So this is cool, actual journalists read Universal Acid (or, um, know how to use Google...).

Anyway, for those of you coming from The Scientist, click here to find out what this blog is all about, and check "Favorite Posts" on the sidebar for some samples.

*In a typical example of biologists' self-importance (myself included), The Scientist actually just covers life sciences, and mostly biomedical sciences at that. Because, you know, if you're not a biologist, you're not a scientist...

Oedipus Rex retold using personalized license plates

2005-08-01T01:30:00.000+01:00

I rediscovered this link today. A sample:

ONCEPON ATIME LONG AGO IN THEBES IMKING. OEDIPUS DAKING. LVMYMRS. LVMYKIDS. THEBENS THINK OEDDY ISCOOL. NOPROBS.

OKAY MAYBE THEREZZ 1LITL1. MOTHER WHERERU? WHEREAT MYDAD? NOCALLZ NEVER. HAVENOT ACLUE. INMYMIND IWNDER WHOAMI? IMUST FINDEM.

Read the rest!

Frist and stem cells

2005-07-30T12:43:00.000+01:00

I have to say I'm a bit puzzled by Senator Frist's recent decision to back expanded federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research*. I mean, obviously, it's great, but I have to wonder why he's had a change of heart. I'd reject out of hand the idea that he's generally more sensible than the rest of the religious right because he's a doctor, given his disgraceful behavior during the Terri Schiavo fiasco.

The consensus interpretation on Frist's behavior over the last year or so has been that he is positioning himself for a 2008 presidential nomination, for which he needs the crucial support of the religious right. This decision will kill (or has already killed) that support, and he can't win the nomination on the votes of moderate Republicans (McCain taught us that in 2000). So, it could be that he's decided he doesn't want to run for president, after all, so he no longer needs to grovel before the religious right. That's the only plausible interpretation I can come up with - does anyone else have thoughts?

*Just to be clear, because this topic generates a lot of confusion: Human embryonic stem cell research is currently legal and is funded at by the federal government, states, and privates sources. However, federal funding is limited to research on human embryonic stem cell lines that were created after August 9, 2001, the idea being that federal money isn't being spent on the actual destruction of embryos. The new bill would loosen this restriction by allowing federal money to be spent on creating new human ESC lines from leftover embryos from IVF (thus destroying those embryos) that are already scheduled for destruction by the parents anyway.

Solar system has ten planets

2005-07-30T12:34:00.000+01:00

Or maybe eight? There's been a new object discovered that's bigger than Pluto, about three times as far away. So if Pluto counts as a planet, for consistency this one should too; or perhaps Pluto doesn't count as a planet anyway so we've got eight planets and a whole bunch of "miscellaneous" objects of varying size past Neptune.

Blink

2005-07-27T02:20:00.000+01:00

Fascinating study on what happens in your brain when you blink:

BBC: Parts of the brain are temporarily "switched off" when we blink, scientists have found. The team from University College London found the brain shut down parts of the visual system for each blink.

Writing in Current Biology, they said this was the case even if light was still entering the eyes. The researchers said this could explain why people do not notice their own blinking, as it gave us an "uninterrupted view of the world". ...

They found that blinking suppressed brain activity in the visual cortex and other areas of the brain - known as parietal and prefrontal - which are usually activated when people become conscious of visual events or objects in the outside world.*

Something phenomologically similar happens during saccades**: when you dart your eyes around the visual field, you don't perceive the blurred image that you would see if a video camera did the same thing, because your brain just ignores visual input during saccades. In fact, there have been experiments where an eye tracker tells a computer when a subject is making a saccade while looking at an image on the computer screen, and the computer changes a major aspect of the image during the saccade. Invariably, the subjects don't notice the change.

The changes can be quite dramatic and can even occur with objects that a subject has just fixated upon. Still they remain unnoticed. For example, a prominent building in a city skyline became 25% larger and 100% of the subjects failed to detect any change. One hundred percent also failed to notice that two men exchanged hats of different colors and styles.

This is a special case of change blindness, where people fail to notice extremely obvious changes in the visual scene that occur across a visual discontinuity (e.g., by a blank screen, a blink, or a saccade) or they are paying attention to something else. Hence the usual failure to notice continuity errors in movies.

Daniel Dennett has elaborated on the implications of these related phenomena for visual consciousness: we never take in a visual scene all at once, because we can only really clearly see the focus of our vision. Instead, our brains build up a coherent image of the world as a composite of all the tiny snapshots taken by our eyes constantly darting around. Visual consciousness is a fictional narrative constructed by the brain to make sense of visual input. Perturbing the narrative by switching the visual scene in the middle of a saccade or a blink reveals just how much it is constructed out of bits and pieces.

Actually, Dennett takes this further and argues against the common intuition that after the brain puts together this narrative, it goes "on display" in a sort of "Cartesian theater" where the "real you" sits there watching the processed movie of what's coming in through your eyes. But this is just dualism - in fact, this pieced-together narrative is consciousness. Pretty cool.

*Footnote for those interested in how the study was done. The way they designed the study was ingenious: in order to get around the problem that when you close your eyes, your visual input and hence brain activity changes drastically, they designed a special light that subjects put in their mouths that shone light through the bone into the retina, while they wore goggles to block light coming in through the pupil (see slightly creepy picture). Meanwhile, to get around the problem that a blink lasts a fraction of a second while fMRI has a temporal resolution on the order of 2 seconds, they had subjects blink "at a fast regular rate" during "blink" periods, and just blink at a spontaneous resting rate during "no blinking" periods.

**Interestingly, though, while blinking suppresses activity in the parietal and prefrontal cortex, the neural effect of saccades apparently reaches only as far up as the visual cortex. This is somewhat odd as blinks and saccades seem quite similar qualitatively, but these fMRI studies are both quite new, so hopefully more studies will be forthcoming.

Worse than the Holocaust, famine, AIDS, and the gulags

2005-07-25T22:32:00.000+01:00

Brad Plumer points out that anti-abortion activists are actually quite tame given the oft-stated view that legalized abortion is worse than the Holocaust:

Obviously there are a few clinic-bombers here and there, but we never see social disobedience on a very broad scale. Judging by their actions, the Civil Rights protesters in the 1950s and 1960s seem to have felt far more strongly about their cause than pro-lifers do about theirs. Again, whatever, people can do what they want, but you'd think something worse than the Holocaust would incite a bit more in the way of drastic action. [Emphasis original]

The "revealed preferences" of anti-abortion activists come out in other ways too. Consider: if human life begins at conception and a one-cell zygote has all the moral value of an adult human being, then we are currently facing a natural disaster of massive proportions. Why? A very large proportion of fertilized eggs die very early - most before the woman even knows she's pregnant - often due to chromosomal abnormalities due to meiotic nondisjunction (chromosomes fail to separate properly during meiosis and the egg or sperm ends up with an extra copy of a chromosome, or none at all). Many never even make it past a few cell divisions.

To be consistent, an extreme pro-lifer should view this as a horrendous unnoticed natural disaster, as tragic as babies born with lethal birth defects, and on the scale of the high rates of infant mortality that exist in areas without sufficient health care. In fact, one would have a moral obligation to stop this immense loss of life.

Pro-life activists should be agitating to increase funding for medical research that would either prevent chromosomal abnormalities or allow such embryos to survive for longer. Even if such a therapy did not allow the fetus to survive to birth or even to viability outside the womb, it would still be desirable to help it survive perhaps to week 20 rather than week 1 of pregnancy.

Then again, if all they're willing to do to fight something worse than the Holocaust is write letters to the editor, vote for Republicans, and give money to "pregnancy crisis" centers, then I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that they're keeping silent on a humanitarian tragedy worse than all the famines and AIDS deaths the world over.

A crappy airplane experience

2005-07-25T22:17:00.000+01:00

Literally.

(Be sure to check out the diagrams.)

Offer does not apply

2005-07-21T09:46:00.000+01:00

Hilarious, and yet so depressing:

Via Mark Kleiman.

RU-486, not so risky

2005-07-20T23:34:00.000+01:00

This story about how 2 women have died from infections after taking the abortion pill RU-486 brings out the latest bit of dishonesty from the religious right (I was going to say idiocy, but let's not kid ourselves):

Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Concerned Women of America, a conservative women's group, said news of the latest death proved that label changes would not make the drug safe.

"Changing the label the last time clearly didn't help the latest woman who died," Ms. Wright said. "Sadly, people who support RU-486 apparently believe the risk of death is preferable to having a child."

Luckily for us, the article states elsewhere that

Still, the risks of death from infection for users of the pill is roughly one in 100,000 uses - similar to the risks of death from infection after surgical abortions or childbirth. [Emphasis added.]

So the question is, did Ms. Wright actually forget that women can still die from childbirth, or is she purposefully misusing the image of the "miracle of life" to draw a false dichotomy between childbirth and death and hide the fact that you are more likely to die from continuing on with the pregnancy than from taking RU-486? Three guesses, and the first two don't count.

New template

2005-07-20T21:23:00.000+01:00

Any objections?

London

2005-07-10T10:16:00.000+01:00

I haven't much to say about the London attacks, except with everyone else to express my horror and condemnation, and sympathy for all those caught up in the bombings. And to feel a tiny shiver that I've often been on the Tube at the very locations bombed. At times like these, you wonder how much you can say without descending into the tastelessness satirized here. So, a few days delayed, just consider my British flag to be flying at half-mast.

Phoebe Buffay, wise woman?

2005-07-05T00:36:00.000+01:00

Phoebe Buffay:

Sometimes men love women,
Sometimes men love men.
And then there are bisexuals,
Though some just say they're kidding themselves...

A new study suggests [NYTimes article] at least some bisexual men really are kidding themselves...

PS: good critique of the NYTimes article by Majikthise here.

PPS: Even better critique by Chris of Mixing Memory here. Sounds like the spin on the study given in the NYTimes article is pretty bogus!

Betsy Bush

2005-07-05T00:29:00.000+01:00

My first thought when I saw this picture was, "My God, that is a huge skirt that George W. Bush is wearing!"

(Picture from this article.)

Happy 4th of July

2005-07-04T23:20:00.000+01:00

Today was the first 4th of July that I've spent outside the U.S. I've taken to listening to NPR online, at least partly because I've missed hearing American accents. This morning during 'Morning Edition' they did a reading of the Declaration of Independence, with patriotic music in the background. Even though I was aware of the staged cheesiness of it, and even though I bristled at the bit about Indian savages, and even though the document was written by a slaveowner - I felt a patriotic tingle down my spine during the reading, and a rush of excitement with the last words, "we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." I sometimes still get that feeling listening to the Star-Spangled Banner. One of my clearest memories from high school is the band playing the Star-Spangled Banner at the end of an end-of-year concert in the school gym, and at "and the home of the brave," a sudden unfurling of a huge American flag on the wall.

Which goes to show that American patriotism is not the exclusive domain of rightwingers.

Random observation

2005-07-02T23:36:00.000+01:00

I've noticed that when people ask what I do while making small talk, and I say I'm studying biology, they just nod their heads politely and say, "Oh, right." But if I say I'm studying neuroscience, they say, "Oh, wow! That's so cool!" or "That must be really hard!" or some combination of the two. (Sometimes people have even confused neuroscience and neurosurgery and thought that I'm a brain surgeon.) It seems strange to me that neuroscience should sound so much sexier than biology, since to they both describe what I do (neurobiology) equally accurately. Does anyone out there have (or get) the same reaction?

Fungus kills mosquitoes

2005-06-10T09:14:00.001+01:00

This is pretty exciting:

In a finding that may open promising new ways to attack malaria, scientists are reporting today that two fungi that are harmless to humans and the environment can be used to kill mosquitoes.

The fungi are already licensed in Western countries to control aphids, termites and other pests, according to two studies in the journal Science. One of the researchers, Dr. Matt B. Thomas, a biologist at Imperial College in London, estimated that a "deliverable product" could be ready in three to five years, if he could get money for further research.

Malaria kills more than one million people a year, mostly children under 5 and pregnant women, especially in Africa. Despite the advent of new drugs and better mosquito nets, some specialists say deaths may be increasing, largely because of bureaucratic delays among donors and breakdowns in African public health systems.

Moreover, mosquitoes eventually develop resistance to every chemical pesticide used on them, including DDT. No resistance to fatal fungi has been reported among agricultural pests, Dr. Thomas said.

The fungus wouldn't be sprayed indiscriminately, but rather on bednets and indoor walls. This works because, in Africa at least, mosquitoes typically bite people inside while they're sleeping, and they have to rest for at least 6 hours indoors after a blood meal before they go outside to lay eggs - so while they're resting, they get exposed to this toxic fungus and get weakened, and eventually die after a couple weeks. So even if this fungus turns out to have some unexpected bad effects (which I'm sure it will), they will be limited by the limited spraying. (No vast spraying of farms with DDT here!)

And even if there were some toxic effects on either humans or some ecologically important insect - I think that price is worth paying (to a certain extent, of course, but a significantly non-zero extent) if we can significantly reduce the burden of malaria. Remember, it's not just that poverty causes disease - it's also that disease causes poverty.

What?!?

2005-06-07T00:11:00.000+01:00

This is the most offensive thing I've seen in a long time:

Zoo organizers in the southern German city of Augsburg have come up with the idea of putting Africans on display at their zoo as an uncoventional way to attract more visitors. That's right. They want to create a living "African Village" featuring African basket weavers, woodworkers and storytellers posed among huts located near other African inhabitants, like elephants and rhinos. The idea is to let visitors gawk at -- or as their brochure says -- "discover the Dark Continent." Plans for the show -- scheduled to open July 9 -- have engendered outrage from Africans and civil rights advocates across Europe, but particularly those in Germany. Historian Norbert Finzsch, provost of the University of Cologne, too, has lambasted the project, insisting it underscores that in Germany "people of color are still seen as exotic objects (of desire), as basically dehumanized entities within the realm of animals." Finzsch insists the idea to hold such a display is "the direct result of 40 years of German colonialism and 12 years of National Socialism.

Zoo organizers seem to be painfully oblivious to their insensitivity and claim to be at a loss to understand the commotion. For instance, in a written reply to a Swiss African protestor, zoo director Barbara Jantschke, insisted that the idea was not to offend people. Instead, she said, the zoo is "exactly the right place to convey an exotic atmosphere." Nor could she understand the brouhaha, after all, one of the organizers is himself "a native African with black skin." Ever heard of sensitivity training?

I cannot believe that the quote-unquote "show" is still scheduled to go ahead. I don't know whether to be more offended if Barbara Jantschke is sincerely puzzled or if she's being disingenuous.

[Via Foreign Dispatches.]

Update, 9 June: I tried to find information about this event on the Augsburg Zoo's webpage, but since I don't read German, that didn't work. Thanks to American Amnesia, I see that this is the page. So, in fact, the "African Village" exhibition is going on as we speak! (I guess the Spiegel story might have mixed up June with July...) By the way, if you feel like complaining to Barbara Jantschke, her e-mail is barbara.jantschke@zoo-augsburg.de.

Insane Ravel

2005-06-06T23:56:00.000+01:00

I've been trying to learn Ravel's Miroirs, a suite of pieces for the piano. I've started working on the third piece in the set, "Une barque sur l'ocean" (A boat on the ocean). It's absolutely beautiful, but very difficult. Now, the technically difficult bits I can handle, though it will take some suffering and a lot of work - but to add insult to injury (literally - there's a painful glissando over black keys and an awkward figure in the right hand that threatens to give me tendinitis), Ravel actually writes in a note that doesn't exist on the piano! (The G# below the lowest A.) What is he, crazy?

Road pricing and slippery slopes

2005-06-06T20:21:00.000+01:00

So I heard on the radio this morning that the British government is going to start trials of road pricing, where car drivers will be taxed for every mile they drive, at a rate that varies with how busy the road is. So a busy street in central London during rush hour could be taxed at up to £1.34/mile, while a deserted rural road would be taxed at only 2p/mile. The idea is to give people incentives to avoid using the most congested roads, to avoid total gridlock in years to come. (This is in contrast to gas taxes, which gives people incentives to drive less and use more energy-efficient cars, but still allows them to drive in congestion-producing patterns.)

It seems like a good idea, at least in theory, though I think it shouldn't replace the gas tax. But I'm very concerned about the so-called Big Brother objection - the government will know where your car is at all times, because without that knowledge, there's no way to tax you accurately on road usage. (You might have to install a GPS bos on your dashboard, to be read by satellites, or video cameras could snap pictures of your license plate as you drive by.) That's really quite creepy. And not only could a government abuse such knowledge, but criminals could hack into the road usage databases and track down people's cars (e.g., if a mobster wanted to assassinate someone). Now, I'm sure we could design ways to prevent abuse of the database, but once the enforcement infrastructure is set up, it will become much easier for the government to use the information for civil-liberties-destroying purposes. This is what Eugene Volokh calls a cost-lowering slippery slope.

All in all, I think road pricing is too intrusive. Better to use more traditional methods like tollbooths and London's congestion charge.

Genetics and sexual orientation in fruit flies

2005-06-03T23:00:00.000+01:00

So neuroscientists have made lesbian flies. Well, sort of. NYTimes story here, actual articles here and here (back-to-back articles in the prestigious journal Cell - you probably need a subscription to access the full text). Quick summary:

[One gene], the researchers are announcing today in the journal Cell, is apparently by itself enough to create patterns of sexual behavior - a kind of master sexual gene that normally exists in two distinct male and female variants.

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that females given the male variant of the gene acted exactly like males in courtship, madly pursuing other females. Males that were artificially given the female version of the gene became more passive and turned their sexual attention to other males.

As always, the NYTimes write-up makes a little bit too much of the study. In particular, it says that "The finding supports scientific evidence accumulating over the past decade that sexual orientation may be innately programmed into the brains of men and women." Um, these studies were done in fruit flies. It hardly seems that it should be necessary to point out that fruit flies have much simpler nervous systems than humans and are much less capable of complex behaviors and learning. I don't want to put up humans on a separate plane from animals - we are animals, still, and human sexual orientation does have an innate component - but it is really stretching the absurd to infer the genetics of sexual orientation in humans from fruit flies. (David Velleman makes a similar point.)

The significance of this study has nothing to do with whether homosexuality is innate in humans or not, but lies rather in the novel demonstration that a single gene switch can control a stereotyped behavior through the development of a neural circuit, in the same way that a single gene switch can control the development of body parts (the analogy is to the fly gene eyeless, which is necessary and sufficient for eye formation).

One of the funny things about the NYTimes article is that it depicts the scientists as shocked and disbelieving, e.g. "The observing scientist looked with disbelief at the show, for the suitor in this case was not a male, but a female that researchers had artificially endowed with a single male-type gene." In fact, this result is pretty well expected, and I imagine that the experimentor was looking on not with disbelief, but rather a sigh of relief that the experiment worked and the hypothesis was confirmed.

The "fruitless" hypothesis of male courtship in the fruit fly was proposed almost 10 years ago. See here (under "Biological Overview") for a nice, if technical, summary of how the gene fruitless was thought to control male courtship behavior. Basically, the gene fruitless can encode several different protein products depending on how the message is processed (alternative mRNA splicing), and males and females produce different protein products. These fruitless protein products are transcription factors that then go on to control the expression of other genes, ultimately leading to differences in neural circuitry and hence behavior. So this latest result is not that surprising in its essence - what's surprising is how clean the result was and how completely fruitless controls courtship behavior.

Even so, the results weren't quite as clean as the NYTimes made them out to be. Females expressing the male variant of fruitless carried out most of the male courtship ritual, but spent less time licking tthe court-ee than wild-type males did. They also spent less time courting than wild-type males did during the 8 minute assay (40% v. 90% - though this difference could be due to the fact that the assay ended when males succeeded in copulating, which was obviously impossible for the mutant females). But this is just details - overall, the result is really remarkably clean.

One final point: one interesting facet of the second study is that males and females don't have many obvious anatomical differences in the neural circuitry that is controlled by fruitless. I'll quote the article:

We do not think it is their gross anatomy. With the trivial exception of neurons innervating the reproductive organs, we detect only subtle differences in the numbers of these neurons and no differences at all in their morphologies or projections. Pending further studies at higher resolution, we tentatively conclude that sex differences in courtship behavior do not rest on differences in the production, survival, or connectivity of the neurons involved.

This conclusion offers a rather sobering perspective on the considerable effort that continues to be devoted to identifying and characterizing sexual dimorphisms in the mammalian brain. In Drosophila, the sexual behaviors of males and females are dramatically different and highly stereotyped; we can attribute this difference to a single splicing event in a single gene, and we can examine the neurons that express this gene at single-cell resolution. Yet even under these ideal circumstances, we still cannot find any anatomical differences that might account for the dramatically different sexual behaviors of males and females. This suggests that differences in neural chemistry, rather than gross neuroanatomy, might underlie the profound differences in behavior between males and females in Drosophila, and surely in many other species as well.

In a way, I'd have been disappointed if it was the gross neuroanatomy instead of subtle molecular and cellular differences. The fantastic complexity of the brain at every level of analysis from anatomy to molecules - even in the simple fly - is maddening at times, but it's what makes neuroscience such an interesting field to be in at the moment.

Vaccines aren't just for children

2005-06-01T23:23:00.000+01:00

An effective shingles vaccine has been developed. Hooray!