You're as good as your face makes you be -- phrenology is back!

Phrenology chart from 1883

A paper just out in the Proceedings of the Royal Society says that it turns out that, yes, we can predict morality from physical traits.  The authors explain their reasoning much better than we can, so we'll let them:

Researchers spanning many scientific domains, including primatology, evolutionary biology and psychology, have sought to establish an evolutionary basis for morality. While researchers have identified social and cognitive adaptations that support ethical behaviour, a consensus has emerged that genetically determined physical traits are not reliable signals of unethical intentions or actions. Challenging this view, we show that genetically determined physical traits can serve as reliable predictors of unethical behaviour if they are also associated with positive signals in intersex and intrasex selection. Specifically, we identify a key physical attribute, the facial width-to-height ratio, which predicts unethical behaviour in men. Across two studies, we demonstrate that men with wider faces (relative to facial height) are more likely to explicitly deceive their counterparts in a negotiation, and are more willing to cheat in order to increase their financial gain. Importantly, we provide evidence that the link between facial metrics and unethical behaviour is mediated by a psychological sense of power. Our results demonstrate that static physical attributes can indeed serve as reliable cues of immoral action, and provide additional support for the view that evolutionary forces shape ethical judgement and behaviour.

The authors state that facial width to height ratios are associated with aggressive behavior in males, with those with wider faces being more aggressive than those with narrow faces, and they tend to act more in their own self-interest.  The reason for this, they say, is that men with wide faces feel more powerful and "individuals who feel powerful think and behave egocentrically, and power is often associated with aggressive behaviour."  (Be assured, they aren't just making this bit up, they actually cite  references!)

And, "In turn, we expect that the feelings of power held by men with relatively large facial WHRs will affect ethical judgement and behaviour. Individuals who feel powerful are more likely to act in their own self-interest and feel less constrained by social norms or concerns. Additionally, a general sense of power has been linked directly to unethical behaviour, such as cheating."

They tested these predictions with two studies, one involving deception and one cheating.  Here's a taste of their methodology: cheating behavior was assessed by having subjects roll a pair of computerized dice, then sum the total and report it, with the chance of getting a reward depending on that sum, the higher the better their chances.  The average number reported was 7.76, which allowed the researchers to conclude that people were cheating, as the expected average was 7.  (Why they didn't collect the actual sums and compare them with what people reported is not clear.)

They assessed their subjects' sense of power with a questionnaire, measured their WHRs from photos, and determined whether they were deceptive or had cheated during the study, and analyzed the results.  It turned out that men with higher WHRs, but not women, reported higher sums of the dice.  That is, men with wider faces were more likely to cheat.  And the authors know why.  They say that for the first time, they have identified the 'psychological  underpinnings' of this relationship; the 'psychological experience of power'.  'Men with greater facial WHRs felt more powerful, and this sense of power directly affected their ethical behaviour.'  And of course they have evolutionary explanations that account for their findings being true for men but not women.

It's hard to know where to start with this.  The conclusions of this study depend so much on the wording of the assumptions and hypotheses that it feels like a house of cards. They claim to have identified "a genetically determined physical predictor of unethical behaviour."  Meaning what?  That immorality is a genetically determined behaviour?

Of course, it's hard not to conclude that this means that Asians, who have rounder faces than Europeans or Africans, cheat like the devil, while the rest of us are as innocent as new fallen snow.  And native Americans, and Australian natives, have smaller--or was it narrower?--heads than Europeans.  Hmmm, wasn't this kind of crap, the standard justification for racism and European imperialism, disposed of  along time ago?  Or does this mean that evolution--not short-term cultural conditioning and so on--over thousands of generations and across continents, favored wide faces because this level of 'cheating' got men the girls?  If that is the case, then why aren't we all more or less similarly rotund?

If you are determined to defend this kind of reasoning, of course you can always back and fill and find rationales and excuses for why counter examples don't count, why very small differences lead you to infer natural selection strong enough and consistent enough to make a difference, and so on.  And if you accept this, perhaps you'd want to buy one of our classical eugenics books (we'll tell you the cost, but of course whether they're worth it or not can only be determined by measuring our faces, and we refuse to be so starkly exposed).

By the way if men wear beards (an option not open to women, sadly), does this widen their heads and lead them to cheat (because it was their genes that made them decide to wear beards), or something like that?

Is someone funding this kind of science?  And what could possibly be their motive, unless it is, in fact, to return to the abuses of the eugenics era?

Sadly, there's nothing new here.  Phrenology, the determination of a man's character by measuring the bumps on his skull, was very popular in the 19th century, and widely accepted, though now considered to be bunkum.   Here's more of the same.  Once again, posing as science.

The substantial success of Nothing

Back on June 25, the New York Times ran a story by Carl Zimmer about the role that the lack of confirmation or refutation studies plays in the history, legacy, and directions of science these days.  We're late blogging about it, but we didn't want to let it slide.  The story highlights two recent papers that were much criticized, and describes what happened after the criticisms were in.  One of the papers was the one claiming that arsenic can substitute for phosphorus in bacterial DNA, suggesting that other forms of life might exist, especially extraterrestrially, and the other was the extrasensory perception paper, with its claims that experiments have proven it exists, both of which we blogged about when they were published (here and here). 

The arsenic bacteria paper was criticized heavily for its methodological lack of rigor, but, as the Times story points out, no one has the time, funding, or inclination to actually demonstrate this with new experiments; the paper has not been retracted, which means that the results still stand. And, three papers reporting a failure to reproduce the results of the clairvoyance paper, on the other hand, have since been submitted to and rejected by the journal in which the original claims were made.  The journal says it has a longstanding policy of not publishing replication studies.  So, again, those results still stand.

Indeed, the point of the Times article is that journals want to publish New Discoveries, not replication or even refutation studies.  The latter are not sexy. There are many ways a study that is true might not be confirmed by another study, and it can be hard to tease out why.  And we are not a me-too society.  Investigators, given their career (and funding) circumstances, don't want to spend time and resources on trying to replicate a result:  if they do, we'll say "why did you bother to repeat somebody else's work?".  If they don't, we'll say "so what?  That study was suspicious anyway!"

The problem of incorrect studies surviving far past their sell-by date is widespread in science, but is usually not a matter of malfeasance or even incompetence.  But it is a matter of our go-too-fast, claim-too-much, and self-promoting careerism in science.  We've posted on this many times.  John Ioniddes a few years ago made some statistical arguments about why ballyhoo'ed results in major journals usually are wrong, and various authors have shown why the strength-of-effect claims in such studies are systematically over-estimated.

When claims of this kind are trumpeted and believed, there can be major shifts in resources, as others rush to extend the findings to their own areas of expertise.  Scientists, caught in careerist traps in which funding and publication depend largely on what's trendy, cannot be faulted for acting this way.  But such lemming behavior takes funds away from other areas that might be much more informative or interesting.   The whole system needs to slow down and sober up, if we want what gets published to have stronger bases that it seems to now.

Examples like those cited in the article are the more visible ones, which is why they are known to Zimmer and referred to (also, are recognized by more readers, because the original story got so much ink).  But there is every reason to think these are the proverbial tip of the iceberg.  Every day journals publish stories on genetic effects, for example, and around 140 per week deal with the genetics of human disease alone!  What fraction of these, and what specific findings are wrong, for one (legitimate) reason or another?

Science correctly makes a big deal about actual fraud, but which it seems (we believe, quite correctly) are fortunately very rare.  But uncorrected, incorrect, hasty science does seem to be a real problem with serious consequences for science itself.

Our sneaky ancestors! Floss 'n F*** and get ahead!

Well, now we know!  It is the secret to our ancestors' evolutionary success.  Floss your teeth if you want to make a baby!  Yes, the truth is out!

Regular visits to the dentist and good oral hygiene habits such as flossing play an important role for women who are trying to become pregnant, according to a new study finding women with gum disease take an average of 2 months longer to conceive.

After monitoring a group of 3,737 pregnant women who were taking part in a Western Australian study called the SMILE study, researcher from the University of Western Australia analyzed the pregnancy planning and outcome information of 3,416 of the women.

The findings showed that women with gum disease took an average of just over 7 months to become pregnant, which was 2 months longer than the average of 5 months it took women without gum disease to conceive.

Now, those clever Ur-mammas are the ones who figured this out (undoubtedly from informal case-control studies done in their local cave complexes).  The found some grape vine or other suitably stringy material, cleaned their teeth, and then called coyly to their Alley Oop!  "C'mere, honey bunch!  I have something to tell you...."

Or, more figuratively so to speak, when Adam slid the edge of that fig leaf between his teeth.....

This explains why, today, there is so much interest in flossing.  We've all got the FlossIt gene, or at least any variation in the gene is due to recent mutations.  Those who (ugh! how gross!) let their interdental spaces collect various food detritus, simply can't find a mate.  But most of us are descendants of Flossy Eve, we hunger to floss because we know what that'll get us!

We bring this to your attention as part of our Public Interest Department, with no commercial sponsorship or other ulterior motive.  We get no money from OralB.

The bottom line is that it's the 18 inch rather than the 6 inch, factor that's most important in human evolution!

Lousy dietary advice? Don't blame the newspapers! Or, not only the newspapers.

All those dietary recommendations published in newspapers every day?  Anchovies are aphrodisiacs, sassafras tea cures the common cold, antioxidants prevent every known disease and will let you live forever, and so on ad infinitum.  Should we believe them?  A paper published in the journal Public Understanding of Science, and discussed on BBC radio's Material World, "The quality of the evidence for dietary advice given in UK national newspapers," takes on that question.

The authors looked at every article in every issue of the top 10 newspapers published in the UK in a random week, and assessed the quality of the health claims.

Articles, which could be features, news reports or comment pieces relating to nutrition, in the main body or in any additional supplements, were identified. Examples of article titles include: “Slimming news” and “Diet that fights kidney disease.” The criterion for inclusion was that: the article had to make a “health claim” about a food or drink which could be interpreted by the reader as advice. A health claim is defined as a “claim that states, suggests or implies that a relationship exists between a food category, a food or one of its constituents and health” (EC Regulation, 2006). For example, “red wine causes breast cancer” would constitute a dietary health claim (hereafter referred to as a “claim”) in the same way as “don’t drink red wine – it causes breast cancer” would. 

The authors then evaluated the claims by looking for supporting papers in PubMed, and graded the evidence by two different systems.  In 37 articles with dietary advice in the chosen week, there were 111 total claims, more than 3 per article on average.  Of these claims, the paper reports that 68 - 72% had no supporting evidence.  What are they teaching in journalism classes these days??

Given the extent of the obesity problem in the UK, the authors are unhappy to find that newspapers are so flippant about dietary advice.  They cite polls that show that the majority of the public believes that scientists are always changing their minds about what's true, so the best advice is to not listen to them and to eat what you want.  The authors blame this state of affairs on newspapers.

Indeed, one of the guests discussing this paper on Material World was Roger Highfield, journalist and editor of New Scientist magazine.  He wasn't at all surprised by the findings, but defended the press, saying that 'journalists are not there to issue truths, they are there to sell newspapers'.

So, there's an obesity epidemic because newspapers print irresponsible dietary advice?  Not likely. Let's agree that newspapers do print irresponsible dietary advice, but demonstrating this by weighing what's printed against scientific reports is based on an incorrect assumption that what's printed in scientific journals themselves about diet is 'true'.

As one of the co-authors of the study pointed out, dietary research is just not very rigorous.  In part this is because nutritionists haven't figured out how to credibly measure what people eat; in part it's because nutrition science is based on reducing complex foods down to single components in the lab, but it's the complex food that people eat, in combination with other complex foods, not single components; and in part it's the problem we talk about here on MT all the time -- our scientific methods aren't up to assessing complexity on its own terms.  As with genetic results, dietary results are often not replicable, or are overturned by the next big study.

So, yes, newspapers do do a lousy job of reporting dietary stories.  But, most often those stories are based on science that is confusing at best, and irresponsible at worst.

One lesson for the public (and scientists, too) is that changing our minds is exactly what science is about!  If not, everything would be known by now, and we'd be out of work.  Science has to work from, and hence to some extent 'believe in' a current explanation for things, because that is what gives us the framework for further understanding.  But it becomes our fault when we boast and trumpet too much, as we're encouraged to do by the system and by, yes, journalists who hunger for a simple story to headline. And, being only human, by taking  strong positions we back ourselves into corners that we then feel the need to defend.

The best dietary advice?  Moderation in all things.  Including what we say about those things.

How evolution's hope evolved away

In the incoming tide (or was it an onslaught?) of science in the 18th and, especially the 19th century a few interesting things converged, with interesting if perhaps saddening impact on western thought.

In the dawning of the age of science, leading thinkers advocated a strongly empirical way to understand the world: through observation, what we now call science.  The widely held belief in this period, known as the Enlightenment, was that empiricism would reveal knowledge of the nature of Nature that would enable humans to engineer a better more perfect society--a Utopia.  This society would rectify physical needs as well social inequities.

At the beginning of this era, Newton's and Galileo's physics had powerfully showed that if based on observation rather than received doctrine or faith, the world followed natural law.  Natural laws unchangingly governed the universe: they dictated how the stars did, do, and would forever go 'cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity'.  That phrase is in Darwin's last paragraph in the Origin of Species (1859), but Darwin had anything but a static world in mind:  instead, he was the century's icon of unremitting, mechanical change.

Darwin's insights reflected, were influenced, enabled, and inspired by the advances in geology showing that, while not static, geological processes were very slow and sometimes cyclical.  As a famous founding article in geology by Hutton (1788) ended: 'no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.'

But Darwin showed that life on earth was changing in a gradual, but very different way: it was evolving, and from a beginning!  Darwin refined and reflected thinking by many others, who were suggesting general ideas about evolution, including about the evolution of life.  Many were relating scientific ideas about laws of change to society itself:  Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, and others were suggesting that society was as much subject to laws of Nature as the earth and life were.  This thinking about society, (and to some extent Darwin's thinking about life, and that of many of his contemporary evolutionists), included a strong sense of progress.  In ways resembling Enlightenment Utopian thinking, they saw society as evolving from primitive states, to civilization, and on towards some idyllic end:  life had evolved the noble brow of humans, and society would evolve to be more equitable.

These were all about material laws, and one might think they would drive definitive nails into the coffin of changeless, religious thinking, based as it was on received word rather than observed fact.  How on earth (so to speak) could anyone speak of 'Heaven'?  In fact, however, at the time many writers suggested that the progress in earthly evolution was leading to a perfected end-state, often envisioned as being 'with God' and that this march of progress was in fact ordained by God.

Alfred Tennyson

We are stimulated to write this post by yet another installment of our favorite radio program, the wonderful BBC4's In Our Time.  This was a discussion of Alfred Tennyson's poem In Memoriam, AHH.  At Cambridge, the young Tennyson met an exceptionally brilliant student, one Arthur Hallam.  They became extremely close friends.  The program discusses their connections, and one can easily explore this on the web, including, of course, this In Our Time episode.  Hallam valued the young Tennyson's poems and the two were intellectually compatible to an unsurpassable degree.  But then, suddenly, while traveling in Europe and at age 22, and without warning, Hallam died, apparently from an aneurism.

Henry Hallam

Tennyson was totally devastated by this news--indeed he never recovered from the loss.  Seventeen years in the making, In Memoriam was his long, mournful eulogy or elegy to this closest of close friends.  The poem is wonderful to read, and famous as can be (' 'T is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.'; 'Nature, red in tooth and claw.').  Its moving and palpable pathos, and its metric magnetism, cannot be equaled.  If you have not read it, you really should (but do it patiently, to absorb the incredible, relentless, desperate mourning).

Of British intellectuals, Tennyson was among the most interested in, and aware of, contemporary science.  In Memoriam was published in 1850, some years before Origin.  But evolution in life and geology were in the air, and others had been writing about evolution (in particular a book by Robert Chambers called Vestiges of Creation, 1844), and in the kinds of progressive terms we mentioned above.  The earth and its life were working out God's plan so that its perfecting creature--humans--would eventually be worthy of, and end up with, God.  The progress in society and in the more complex organisms on earth than had been here before, suggested that change was heading to a goal that the evidence made obvious.

This view--or hope--provided the only solace of Tennyson's mourning, and he could look to the science we've just mentioned to support that hope.  The earth was mechanical, cruel, relentlessly dishing out sorrow.  All here was temporary, all would disappear as streams 'Draw down aeonian hills/The dust of continents to be,' and those who once lived 'seal'd within the iron hills.'  As for species 'a thousand types are gone....all shall go.'  into the bowels of history!  If there was no way to really recover from the death of close friends, the relentless earth meant there was no way to escape from it, either.  Tennyson would never again shake Hallam's hand or hear his voice, at least not in this world.  But he consoled himself by writing that Hallam was a creature ahead of his time, 'a noble type, Appearing ere the times were ripe', and his disappearance may have been because he was too good for his time.  But if Hallam had been taken from him for the time being, Tennyson yearned and dreamt, hopefully, for the day they would be reunited in a perfected world.  There will come a 'crowning race....No longer half-akin to brute....to which the whole creation moves.'

The Rapture redux, in the raiment of science
For a while, especially before Darwin, one could do as Tennyson did, and absorb the factual realities of earthly change into the teachings of some aspects of  religion.  But as science progressed, and the implications of biological evolution were realized, it became less and less possible to see either real progress in how life worked, or to find any evidence of a march to a specifiable, much less seeable, end on the evolutionary horizon.  Eventually, the earth would burn up or burn out, and return to the unrelenting cold womb of space, and life would go with it.

How could someone who had absorbed the idea of change--even progressive change--have ever got the idea that there would be a end-point?  Well, if the 2nd law of thermodynamics says the universe is moving towards maximum disorder (called 'entropy'), or randomness of matter and energy, then why can't there be some biological or societal end-point?   The comparable point to entropy might be when there was no social inequality, or when the mind had reached the maximum perfection (that was called 'God').  It's a stretch, because in a sense it implies there's a maximum IQ for God's perfecting creatures to reach (maybe that's God's IQ?).  In any case, define it how you want, one can imagine, or invent, such states.  Still, there was no evidence for them--in life, or in society.

Darwin may have grudgingly agreed that there might be a God who started it all, but the clockwork mechanism of evolution provided no goal or endpoint for life, nor so far as we know did Darwin ever make any such suggestion.  And as science has worked it out over the subsequent 150 years, our understanding of life as the product of evolution has largely closed the coffin lid on such goal-headed views of life.  If one wants to believe in a theistic religion, an Omega state, an after-life, or a benevolent deity, we know that one must seek it in some non-material rationale: the scientific study of the material earth simply doesn't provide any empirical support for such views.  Except perhaps that 'intelligence' will lead to rapid human-induced extinction of our own and all other life....

Religion does, however, calm and solace people from seeing the world in its stark, remorseless reality.  In Memoriam expresses the value of such a view.   Tennyson's grief was so deep that he needed at least that hope to hold onto, even if tentatively and with doubt--'Believing where we cannot prove'.  Even today it is a poem to be read, and as discussed in In Our Time, one that has given solace to many persons weeping in the long, dark night for a lost loved-one:

 Tears of the widower, when he sees
  A late-lost form that sleep reveals, 
  And moves his doubtful arms, and feels
Her place is empty, fall like these.

Perhaps the often-strident and prideful Darwinian atheists should take some pause.  They too, and you, and we, will someday experience Tennyson's grief.  Illusion?  Maybe.  But there is more to life than science.

A warmth within the breast would melt
  The freezing reason's older part,
  And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd "I have felt."

Tennyson's is a view not to be frivolously dishonored, even if the evolution of the science of evolution has unremittingly evolved away from any such notions of progress towards an idyllic endpoint. Or, even, from wishful thinking.

July CoE

The July Carnival of Evolution post is up.  Carnival blogs are rumored to be an endangered species so read 'em while you can.  Or even promote 'em.  This one's compiled by William, a 13 year old who hopes to become an evolutionary biologist someday.

If your genes are what you are, why don't you need them?

In a superficial way we can spoof the gene-for, genetic and evolutionary determinism that is so rife in and out of science these days.  If genes evolved by the eagle-eye of selection, fine-tuning your every move, then you should need your genes!

But study after study has begun to show that many or perhaps even most genes are not necessary. At least, they are not necessary in themselves.  The first kind of evidence that came to light more than 10 years ago was that transgenic gene-deletion ('knockout') mice could, about 30% of the time, live essentially normal lives without the gene that had been knocked out, often chosen because it had been identified as supposedly causing a human disease.  Then, in 2004 a paper in Nature reported the deletion of a huge section of a mouse chromosome -- it was a 'gene desert', no coding regions, but the region was large enough that it presumably included many regulatory sites, DNA stretches that control gene expression -- and found little if any difference, that is, no obvious impairment, in the mouse.  Similar results have been found in yeast and in bacteria (and probably other systems that we don't know about).

As human whole genome sequences began to become available, it was found that a person typically carries thousands of amino-acid changing variants.  If natural selection was such a fine-tuner, then we should not fare well with altered proteins.  Perhaps the sequenced individuals were normal because only one copy of the genes in questions was modified, while they retained a functional copy (though there were, as we recall, individuals with what normally were viewed as dominant modifications, where a single copy is enough to do the damage).  Perhaps one grudgingly could acknowledge that genes could be altered in ways that were not 'strong' enough to cause notably impaired function--of course, like biblical interpretation, such 'non-Darwnian' back-peddling opened all sorts of forbidden doors to the selectionist ideologue.

We can dismiss ideologues as benighted, despite their prevalence in and out of science.  After all, every one of us is probably ignorant in important areas.  But the dysfunction plot thickens:  We just learned of a recent study of 20 whole genome sequences in normal people that has found that an average person has about 165 doubly-killed (homozygous deleted) genes (some of these people were affected with a blood disorder that is known to typically involve a given gene, but this gene was not included in the figure cited here) (Pelak et al., PLoS Genetics, September 2010).  These genes were normally functional participants in different biological systems, and each of the 20 people had a different set. This implies that many more genes are dispensable in this sense, or dispensable in the environments or other genomic contexts of the individuals: the same gene might be lethal, even to the embryo, depending on its circumstances or the variants it carries at other gneies.

Nonetheless, these findings alone, unless there is a sequencing error problem, shows why genetic determinism, insufficiently tempered, is simply mis-understanding of biological causation.  The likely reason is that the pathways involved are redundant in various ways, with many ways to achieve the same trait.  Mapping (GWAS) studies have confirmed this idea par excellence.  So have experimental data, consistently.  And studies of humans and flies (as we recall) show that around 10% of variants that are seriously pathological in humans are normal in other species.

The results also show the problems with insufficiently tempered selectionism is simply bad evolutionary biology.  Natural selection, whatever it does, is typically not that fine a tuner.

Many if not most genes are, on their own, only partial determinants of an organism's traits, and this is  one reason why species can survive: otherwise mutations would have killed every individual off!  Whether redundancy evolved 'for' such a reason is debatable, but it is a fact of life as we see it today, after 4 billion years of survival challenges.

You and your genes are co-travelers in life.  But the relationships between you and your genes are subtle and to a great extent neither predicts the other.  Interestingly, each predicts the other very well in aggregate: what species you belong to, even what part of the world you or your ancestors come from.  But the kind of variation we talk about both in disease/GWAS, behavior, and evolutionary terms is less determinative.

Still, you and your genes certainly need each other overall.