It is unethical to teach evolution without confronting racism and sexism (updated, additional resources)

It's been 1.5 years since I posted this: https://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2018/11/it-is-unethical-to-teach-evolution-no.html

There were so many ugly comments under its repost at the Evolution Institute.  But what was actually worse than the white supremacist shit on social media was a not insignificant resistance among professors and teachers who teach biology/evolution and who felt strongly that confronting racism was not their job. 

"There's no room in the semester" was common, and there was also plenty of "that's not my problem." 

Maybe recent, intense anti-racist activism in response to a rapid series of horrific, racist violence on top of a racist pandemic on top of a blatantly and shamelessly racist Administration has changed some of those scientists' minds about what is and what is not their problem.  

If so, perhaps these resources I'm sharing below will help others design their approaches to tearing down racism and sexism in their evolution courses, like I try to do. 

In the 2018 post, I suggested that people bring in anthropologists, social scientists, journalists, historians, etc to deal with racism and sexism if they'd rather collaborate or punt on the problem, but I guess that working with colleagues in other departments isn't taken as a serious suggestion. No idea. But it was a serious suggestion. I'm not great at this but I'm always trying to get better and I'm more than willing to help colleagues who are less experienced than I am. I'm experienced enough to get my human evolution course designated to count for "diversity and inclusion" general education credit and so are many anthropologists, some of whom may be working at your very institution! Look around!

I teach a whole unit on race/racism and sexism in my introductory Human Origins and Evolution course (APG 201). It's at the very end. I begin the unit with our first coverage of Neanderthals and we explore how they've been othered throughout history. Students easily see how the history of the scientific treatment of Neanderthals fits with how Linnaeus and his peers and those he influenced (like Darwin) othered and categorized humans, justifying human oppression with bad evolutionary "logic," in an increasingly global political economy through to today.  Darwin's just-so story about how intelligence evolved is just horrid and so are his passages about the "lower races" and how they relate to other primates (as opposed to Europeans who are, you guessed it, the higher races). It's always a struggle to decide whether to read those passages from Descent of Man aloud or not; some semesters I have and others I haven't, but I always share Darwin's b.s. on race (and gender), even if I don't read it out loud.  After that history lesson about the foundations of evolutionary biology, we cover eugenics, Ota Benga, and how race, the system of oppression, has had negative biological consequences on human health.  It's important that students learn that "race" is not a synonym for biological variation, ancestry, or skin color. Despite many of them being so progressive, many still think "race" is just human biological variation. It's clear, for many of them who take APG 201, that there is no race without racism which is why race is not merely about how humans vary in skin color and so talking about skin color variation, for example, is not talking about the complex social-political phenomenon of race. We consider, deeply, how observed physical differences are too easily parlayed into imaginary evidence for imaginary cognitive and behavioral differences. We challenge the old, exclusive, oppressive history of the telling of our shared human origins story in order to tell a new story that can be embraced by us all. 

Not being able to lead those weeks of lecture and discussion in the classroom, and, instead, having to somehow lead 120 students through these issues remotely during the pandemic this semester wasn't ideal.  But the discussion prompts that they worked on, remotely, are prompts that I will be keeping even when we return to face-to-face learning. I'm pasted them here, and at the end of this post, I included the letter I wrote to my students at the end of the semester. 

Wednesday, April 15

Ancestry is not race is not human biological variation

TODAY’S PROMPT: Distinguish all three of the following from one another: ancestry, race, and human biological variation.

Resources for your contributions towards your group’s answer to today’s prompt: 
These are the only resources you may use. Obviously there are far more than you need in order to contribute and obviously they are not all required. 

·Human Races are not like dog breeds - Norton et al. (EEO)
https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-019-0109-y

·         Chapter 15: Ten Facts about human variation – Marks (Human Evolutionary Biology)

                https://webpages.uncc.edu/~jmarks/pubs/tenfacts.pdf (copy and paste that URL into your  browser because just clicking on it may not work)

·         There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label: It's been used to define and separate people for millennia. But the concept of race is not grounded in genetics—Kolbert (NatGeo) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/

·         Surprise! Africans are not all the same (or why we need diversity in science) – Lasisi

https://anthrograd.com/2017/10/18/surprise-africans-are-not-all-the-same-or-why-we-need-diversity-in-science/

·         Human Skin Color Variation (NMNH): http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/skin-color

·         Skin color is an illusion – Nina Jablonski (14 mins video): https://www.ted.com/talks/nina_jablonski_skin_color_is_an_illusion?language=en

·         Skin Deep. By: KOLBERT, ELIZABETH, National Geographic, 00279358, Apr2018, Vol. 233, Issue 4 (via URI library, and you may have to go in and find it yourself, but here’s the link just in case… ) http://web.a.ebscohost.com.uri.idm.oclc.org/ehost/detail/detail?vid=5&sid=a198d26e-2dc0-4a4e-90fb-5bef0a9b910c%40sdc-v-sessmgr01&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=129188416&db=a9h

Friday, April 17

There is no race without racism; Racist science

TODAY’S PROMPT: Support the fact that there is no “race” without racism.

Resources for your contributions towards your group’s answer to today’s prompt: 
These are the only resources you may use. Obviously there are far more than you need in order to contribute and obviously they are not all required. 

·         'National Geographic' Reckons With Its Past: 'For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist'

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/12/592982327/national-geographic-reckons-with-its-past-for-decades-our-coverage-was-racist

·         There's no such thing as a 'pure' European—or anyone else – Gibbons (Science)

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/theres-no-such-thing-pure-european-or-anyone-else

·         Frederick Douglass’s fight against scientific racism – Herschthal (NYT)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/opinion/frederick-douglasss-scientific-racism.html

·         The unwelcome revival of race science—Evans  (The Guardian)

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/02/the-unwelcome-revival-of-race-science

·         A lot of Southern whites are a little bit black – Ingraham (Washington Post)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/12/22/a-lot-of-southern-whites-are-a-little-bit-black/?utm_term=.19a493c03ee0

·         Skin Deep. By: KOLBERT, ELIZABETH, National Geographic, 00279358, Apr2018, Vol. 233, Issue 4 (via URI library, and you may have to go in and find it yourself, but here’s the link just in case… ) http://web.a.ebscohost.com.uri.idm.oclc.org/ehost/detail/detail?vid=5&sid=a198d26e-2dc0-4a4e-90fb-5bef0a9b910c%40sdc-v-sessmgr01&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=129188416&db=a9h

·         From the Belgian Congo to the Bronx Zoo (NPR): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5787947

·         [Note! This is a fictional account based on the real history.]  A True and Faithful Account of Mr. Ota Benga the Pygmy, Written by M. Berman, Zookeeper – Mansbach  http://adammansbach.com/other/otabenga.html

·         [Note! This is very dark sarcasm and not to be taken literally.] How to write about Africa – Wainaina (Granta):  https://granta.com/how-to-write-about-africa/

·         Anthropological genetics: Inferring the history of our species through the analysis of DNA – Hodgson & Disotell (Evolution: Education and Outreach)

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12052-010-0262-9#page-1

·         Paternity Testing: Blood Types and DNA – Adams (Nature Ed)

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/paternity-testing-blood-types-and-dna-374

·         Colonialism and narratives of human origins in Asia and Africa— Athreya and Ackerman

https://osf.io/preprints/africarxiv/jtkn2/

·         #WakandanSTEM: Teaching the evolution of skin color—Lasisi

https://humanhairdiversity.com/2018/02/28/wakandanstem-teaching-the-evolution-of-skin-color/

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/from-the-editor-race-racism-history/

·         In the Name of Darwin – Kevles (PBS) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/darwin/nameof/

·         Why be against Darwin? https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ajpa.22163

·         Human Skin Color Variation (NMNH): http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/skin-color

·         On the Origin of White Power – Johnson (SciAm blogs)

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/on-the-origin-of-white-power/

·         White People Are Noticing Something New: Their Own Whiteness—Bazelon (The New York Times) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/magazine/white-people-are-noticing-something-new-their-own-whiteness.html

·         Surprise! Africans are not all the same (or why we need diversity in science) – Lasisi

https://anthrograd.com/2017/10/18/surprise-africans-are-not-all-the-same-or-why-we-need-diversity-in-science/

·         Why white supremacists are chugging milk (and why geneticists are alarmed) – Harmon (NYT)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/us/white-supremacists-science-dna.html

·         Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis - Villarosa (The New York Times) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/magazine/black-mothers-babies-death-maternal-mortality.html

·         The labor of racism –Davis (Anthrodendum) https://anthrodendum.org/2018/05/07/the-labor-of-racism/

·         Human Races are not like dog breeds - Norton et al. (EEO)
https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-019-0109-y

·         Against Human Nature—Ingold

https://www.mecon.nomadit.co.uk/pub/conference_epaper_download.php5?PaperID=23652&MIMEType=application/pdf

·         Skin color is an illusion – Nina Jablonski (14 mins video): https://www.ted.com/talks/nina_jablonski_skin_color_is_an_illusion?language=en

·         Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States (NYTimes) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/us/coronavirus-race.html

April 22

Sex, gender, sexism, and science

TODAY’S PROMPT: Consult your friends, family, or the Internet, or all and you’ll find that people associate evolution with sexism (like they also do with racism).  Explain this association with either (a) science’s history of ignoring and misinterpreting the evolution of the human female, and/or (b) the enduring, infuriating misapplication of bad science to justify the evolved “inferiority” of women.

Resources for your contributions towards your group’s answer to today’s prompt: 

These are the only resources you may use. Obviously there are far more than you need in order to contribute and obviously they are not all required. 

·         Sex Redefined – Ainsworth (Nature)

https://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943?fbclid=IwAR2QNl_esA0ooF5dfaq0x7_FN7kB6rpi0V0KFfqnq8rdxnMn37xYi6Vm8QU

·         The book that fights sexism with science – review of Saini’s book (Guardian)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/aug/11/women-equal-to-men-science-fact-book-angela-saini

 Darwin was sexist and so are many modern scientists – Horgan (Sci Am) https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/darwin-was-sexist-and-so-are-many-modern-scientists/

·         Bluebirds, babies, and orgasms: the women scientists who fought Darwinism’s sexist myths – Saini (Prospect) https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/bluebirds-babies-and-orgasms-the-women-scientists-who-fought-darwinisms-sexist-myths

·         How Donald Trump Got Human Evolution Wrong – Dunsworth (Washington Post – In case this is paywalled for you, I have posted the pdf under Resources on Sakai)

·         https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/13/human-evolutions-biggest-problems/

·         Sexual selection – Brennan (Nature Ed)  http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/sexual-selection-13255240

·         How the alt-right’s sexism lures men into white supremacy – Romano (Vox)
https://www.vox.com/culture/2016/12/14/13576192/alt-right-sexism-recruitment

·         The Clitoris, Uncovered: An Intimate History (scroll down to see 8 mins video) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-clitoris-uncovered-an-intimate-history/

May 14, 2020

Dear APG 201ers,

This is my last email blast to the class.

Grades are posted. Don’t panic if there is a mistake. Mistakes are possible because of these strange circumstances and because mistakes are in my genome. Just double-check your grades in the gradebook on Sakai and then let me know what’s wrong, ASAP. If you want to take the S/U option, then get cracking immediately with the URI procedures (https://web.uri.edu/coronavirus/alternative-grade-option/overview/).

Your Books of Origins were the best I’ve ever seen. The sheer volume of awesomeness was overwhelming! I wish you could all bask in this pile of art and ideas as I have—truly wonder-full.

If you plan on returning to campus when it reopens for face-to-face classes (whenever that will be), then please come by my office (Chafee 132A) and pick your book up. Pick your friends’ up too if that helps them out. It will be great to see you in person! I’d love to talk about answers to  any questions you posed directly to me in your book or that you would like to chat about, period. I will hold onto these books through summer 2021.

If you take any more courses with me, which I hope you do (APG 282G Sapiens: The changing nature of human evolution; APG 399 Sex and Reproduction in Our Species; APG 411 Paleoanthropology;  APG 412 Primatology) then you can just get your book then. I hope you do take more anthropology courses even if they’re not biologically-themed (i.e. taught by me) because we have a great program that has lots of general education offerings for people who like to dabble in anthro but don’t wish to add the anthropology major. Though, you should add the anthropology major because it complements everything wonderfully. To find out more about that and/or the minor, just reach out to me! 

If you are not planning to return to campus because you’re graduating, transferring, or for whatever reason, then please email me your address so that I can snail-mail your back to you. I am not extending this offer to those who are returning to campus because the cost will add up and we can just hand it off in person!

Congratulations on getting through this semester. Whether you think it was a success or not, it’s over. Before I wish you a good summer, I want to leave you with two important sentiments that I wish I could have shared with you in the classroom…

1. Facts are good and all, but…

While it may seem like learning facts is the point of courses like APG 201, they’re not.  You’re in college to learn how to make knowledge, that is, to learn about how knowledge gets made so that you can make knowledge your own and so that you make knowledge yourself. No one goes to culinary school to learn recipes or to learn about cooking.  They go to culinary school to learn how to cook, to learn how to make food. No one joins a sports team to learn the rules of the sport. They do it to play the sport. Going to college is no different. You are not here to learn about something, you’re here to do something.  What is that something? Making knowledge, which is, simply put learning and thinking and learning and thinking, on repeat, forever. Facts are good and all but what good are facts if you can’t think like a professional thinker about them? Thinking like a professional feels especially crucial now in this pandemic and also this time of political disinformation. Thinking is our species’ superpower but for most of us, realizing our potential requires much practice and much training, and that’s what you’re doing in college. Facts came from human thinking. That’s you. Thinking. You. Thinking is active, it’s doing. You’re here to do. There are facts and there are stories we tell about those facts, which are not the facts themselves but are the way all humans make sense of the facts! It’s up to YOU to tell better stories than your ancestors. You will because you’ll have no choice but also because you’ll be trained thinkers. It is your superpower.

2. Being kind to people isn’t going to end racism, sexism, etc… It takes hard work.

Everyone experiences racism and sexism. If you are a man, then you experience it by not being a woman.  If you are white, you experience it by being arbitrarily privileged over people of color merely for being white.  If you have never had a negative racist or sexist thing directed at you, those experiences still affect you personally because someone you know has experienced them, and their lives affect yours. No one is an island; Everyone’s lives affect everyone else’s and that’s never been more palpable or salient for so many people than it is now during this pandemic.

By your writing, I glean that a good majority of you have bought the myth that racism is treating people badly because of their race and that racism is mostly a thing of the past (presumably because you don’t see people treating people badly very often).  I call that racism a “myth” not because it’s not real and harmful, but because believing that is all that racism is, is to obscure the much tougher issues that are harder for white people to know exist, to understand, and to try to help change if/when they do know they exist and understand them. Racism is built into our sociocultural, economic, and political systems which were founded in, and on the backs of, a horrific slave-labor economy that simultaneously drove away and killed indigenous peoples across this continent. Racism is built into how America runs and, in spite of the Statue of Liberty, the United States has historically been terribly anti-immigrant too. Because of history we have present-day systematic oppression that excludes people from equal opportunity, from equal protection, from full participation, and from power.  That’s not freedom!

Not knowing that racism is built into our culture is like not knowing that we’re built from ancient fishes, monkeys, apes, and our parents. Once you know history, you can’t deny how it has shaped our present.  “We are history” was an important quote from Alice Roberts’ book for so many of you.  One important difference between our evolutionary history and our sociocultural-political-economic history, is that while our biology cannot evolve into the future without our parents’, ape, monkey, fish (etc) ancestry encoded in our genomes, our culture CAN evolve into the future in such a way that eradicates the racism that is encoded in our social, political, and economic institutions. Please, do keep being kind. But, white people, we must do more than be kind to be not-racists. Being kind  and having beautiful beliefs about how we’re “all one human race” is not enough; it’s not even close to enough.

Instead of squandering their privilege, white people must disrupt and change our society’s white supremacist culture. Instead of squandering their privilege, men must disrupt and change patriarchal traditions of oppression. It should help a great deal to know, as you do as APG 201ers, that racism and sexism have no legit footing in science, human evolution, or fantasies about “human nature. ” We must continue to learn about race and racism and sex and sexism (and other forms of oppression) above and beyond what we’ve done in this course and you must carry that work forward, far beyond what you do at URI, for as long as you’re capable.  I’ll keep learning and fighting too; I promise.  

Have a great summer, and never stop evolving!

Professor Holly Dunsworth

Brains, not brawn, for college!

It has long been a secret--not!--that American football is not compatible with having any brains left to do college work.  Now there is yet another story, in the New York Times, this time about this in regard to the University of Colorado's football brain-injured.  This sport is as savage as the Roman Coliseum 'sports' were two thousand years ago, and, yes, humans may be slow learners, but that is far too long for us to get the message.

We here at Penn State have the world's third largest football stadium, a grand stage on which to observe brain damage (not to mention various other breaks and bruises) of our 'students'.  Of course, some of these players actually are students in a serious rather than technical sense of the term.  How many leave here with fewer IQ points than when they came, is not known.  At least some do major in actual college-level subjects, and many are very fine students (as I can say from direct personal experience).

But it is time to change, NFL or not.  Let those who want to gladiate for money in the NFL get their brain-damaging preparatory experience elsewhere.  We are supposed to be universities, places of classroom and lab learning, not brute brain bashing.  Football may have been safer decades ago before training methods improved to make these guys huge monsters in size and strength.  It's not their fault, of course, but ours--the adults at universities.  We brought this about, and there is one reason: we wanted money from attendees, alums, TV networks, and so on.  But  universities should not operate on the greed metric, but should stand for something higher, something better.

Indeed, we can have it both ways:  If we moved soccer 'football' to the stadiums, there would be a lot of grumbling from alumni, and maybe a few years of lower donations (mainly to the athletic department, one can surmise) and lower beer and hot dog sales, but eventually they'd all be back, cheering their lungs out for the Nittany Lion soccer team.  And they could have many more games--and for men and women--in a season.  It would eventually pay out.  Well, TV revenues might drop a lot for a while, but if other actual 'universities' followed suit, everything would recover, except the players.  They would not have to recover, since they'd have far fewer injuries (and protective headbands could be used to protect from damage during headers).  And they could take more, and more substantial, college courses while doing this.

It's worth thinking about, for those readers who still have their brains intact to do such a thing.

Science journals: Anything for a headline

Well, this week's sensational result is reported in the Oct 5 Nature in a paper about limits to the human lifespan. The unsensational nature of this paper shows yet again how Nature and the other 'science' journals will take any paper that they can use for a cheap headline.  This paper claims that the human life span cannot exceed 115 (though the cover picture in a commentary in the same issue is a woman-- mentioned in the paper itself--who lived to be substantially older than that!).  The Nature issue has all the exciting details of this novel finding, which of course have been trumpeted by the story-hungry 'news' media.

In essence the authors argue that maximum longevity on a population basis has been increasing only very slowly or not at all over recent decades.  It is, one might say, approaching an asymptote of strong determination. They suggest that there is, as a result of many complex contributing factors-of-decline, essentially a limit to how long we can live, at least as a natural species without all sorts of genetic engineering.  In that sense, dreams of hugely extended life, even as a maximum (that is, if not for everyone), are just that: dreams.

This analysis raises several important issues, but largely ignores others.  First, however, it is important to note that virtually nothing in this paper, except some more recent data, is novel in any way.  The same issues were discussed at very great length long ago, as I know from my own experience.  I was involved in various aspects of the demography and genetics of aging, as far back as the 1970s.  There was a very active research community looking at issues such as species-specific 'maximum lifespan potential', with causal or correlated factors ranging from the effects of basic metabolism, or body or brain size.  Here's a figure from 1978 that I used in a 1989 paper




There was experimental research on this including life-extension studies (e.g., dietary restriction) as well as comparison of data over time, much as (for its time) the new paper.  The idea that there was an effective limit to human lifespan (and likewise for any species) was completely standard at that time, and how much this could be changed by modern technologies and health care etc. was debated. In 1975, for example (and that was over 40 years ago!), Richard Cutler argued in PNAS that various factors constrained maximum lifespan in a species-related way.  The idea, and one I also wrote a lot about in the long-ago past, is that longevity is related to surviving the plethora of biological decay processes, including mutation, and that would lead to a statistical asymptote in lifespan.  That is, that lifespan was largely a statistical result rather than a deterministically specified value.  The mortality results related to lifespan were not about 'lifespan' causation per se, but were just the array of diseases (diabetes, cancer, heart disease, etc.) that arose as a result of the various decays that led to risk increasing with duration of exposure, wear and tear, and so on, and hence were correlated with age.  Survival to a given age was the probability of not succumbing to any of these causes by that age.

This paper of mine (mentioned above) was about the nature of arguments for a causally rather that statistically determined lifespan limit.  If that were so, then all the known diseases, like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and so on, were irrelevant to our supposed built-in lifespan limit!  That makes no evolutionary sense, since evolution would not be able to work on such a limit (nobody's still reproducing anywhere near that old).  It would make no other kind of sense, either.  What would determine such a limit and how could it have evolved?  On the other hand, if diseases--the real causes that end individual lives--were, together, responsible for the distribution of lifespan lengths, then a statistical rather than deterministic end is what's real.  The new paper doesn't deal with these, but by arguing that there is some sort of asymptotic limit, it implicitly invokes some sort of causal, evolutionarily determined value, and that seems implausible.

Indeed, evolutionary biologists have long argued that evolution would produce 'negative pleiotropy', in which genomes would confer greater survival at young ages, even if the result was at the expense of greater mortality later on.  That way, the species' members could live to reproduce (at least, if they survived developmentally-related infant mortality), and they were dispensable at older ages so that there was no evolutionary pressure to live longer.   But that would leave old-age longevity to statistical decay processes, not some built-in limit.

Of course, with very large data sets and mortality a multicausal statistical process, rare outliers would be seen, so that more data meant longer maximum survival 'potential' (assuming everyone in a species somehow had that potential, clearly a fiction given genetic diseases and the like that affect individuals differently).  There were many problems with these views, and many have since tried to find single-cause lifespan-determining factors (like telomere decay, in our chromosomes), an active area of research (more on that below).  We still hunger for the Fountain of Youth--the single cause or cure that will immortalize us!

The point here is that the new paper is at most a capable but modest update of what was already known long ago.  It doesn't really address the more substantive issues, like those I mention above.  It is not a major finding, and its claims are also in a sense naive, since future improvements in health and lifestyles that we don't have now but that applied to our whole population could extend life expectancy--the average age at death--and hence the maximum to which anyone would survive. After all, when we had huge infectious disease loads, hardly anybody lived to 115, and in the old days of research, to which the authors seem oblivious, something like 90-100 was assumed to be our deadline.

The new paper has been criticized by a few investigators, as seen in reports in the news media coverage.  But the paper's authors probably are right that nothing foreseeable will make a truly huge change in maximum survival, nor will many survive to such an extended age.  Nor--importantly--does this mean that those who do luck out are actually very lucky: the last few years or decades of decrepitude may not be worth it to most who last to the purported limit. To think of this as more than a statistical result is a mistake.  Not everyone can live to any particular age, obviously.

The main fault in the paper in my view is the claim in essence to portray the result as a new finding, and the publication in a purportedly major journal, with the typical media ballyhoo suggesting that.

On the other hand....
On the other hand, investigators who were interviewed about this study (to give it 'balance'!) denigrated it, saying that novel medical or other (genetic?) interventions could make major changes in human longevity.  This has of course happened in the past century or two.  More medical intervention, antibiotics and vaccines and so on have greatly increased average lifespan and, in so doing in large populations, increased the maximum survival that we observe.  This latter is a statistical result of the probabilistic nature of degenerative processes like accumulating wear and tear or mutations, as I mentioned earlier.  There is no automatic reason that major changes in life-extending technologies are in the offing, but of course it can't be denied as a possibility either. Similarly, if, say, antibiotic resistance becomes so widespread that infectious diseases are once again a major cause of death in rich countries, our 'maximum lifespan' will start to look younger.

Those who argue against this paper's assertions of a limit must be viewed just as critically as they judged the new paper.  The US National Institute on Aging, among other agencies, spends quite a lot of your money on aging, including decades (I know because I had some of it) on lifespan determination.  If someone quoted as dissing the new 'finding' is heavily engaged in the funding from NIA and elsewhere, one must ask whether s/he is defending a funding trough: if it's hopeless to think we'll make major longevity differences, why not close down their labs and instead spend the funding on something that's actually useful for society?

There are still many curious aspects of lifespan distributions, such as why rodents have small bodies that should be less vulnerable per-year to cancer or telomere degradation etc. that relate to the number of at-risk cells, yet only live a few years.  Why hasn't evolution led us to be in prime health for decades longer than we are?  There are potential answers to such questions, but mechanisms are not well understood, and the whole concept of a fixed lifespan (rather than a statistical one) is poorly constructed.

Still, everything suggests that, without major new interventions that probably will, at best, be for the rich only, there are rough limits to how long anyone can statistically avoid the range of independent risk our various organ systems face, not to  mention surviving in a sea of decrepitude.

One thing that does seem to be getting rather old, is the relentless hyperbole of the media including pop-culture journals like Nature and Science, selling non-stories as revolutionary new findings.  If we want to make life better for everyone, not just researchers and journals, we could spend our resources more equitably on quality of life, and our research resources on devastating diseases that strike early in the lives we already are fortunate to have.

Medical research ethics

In today's NYTimes, there is an OpEd column by bioethicist Carl Elliott about biomedical ethics (or its lack) at the University of Minnesota.  It outlines many what sound like very serious ethical violations and a lack of ethics-approval (Institutional Review Board, or IRB) scrutiny for research.    IRBs don't oversee the actual research, they just review proposals.  So, their job is to identify unethical aspects, such as lack of adequate informed consent, unnecessary pain or stress to animals, control of confidential information, and so on, so that the proposal can be adjusted before it can go forward.

As Elliott writes, the current iteration of IRBs, that each institution set up a self-based review system to approve or disapprove any research proposal that some faculty or staff member wishes to do, was established in the 1970's. The problem, he writes, is that this is basically just a self-monitored, institution-specific honor system, and honor systems are voluntary, subjective, and can be subverted.  More ongoing monitoring, with teeth, would be called for if abuses are to be spotted and prevented.  The commentary names many in the psychiatry department at Minnesota alone that seem to have been rather horrific.

But there are generalizable problems.  Over the years we have seen all sorts of projects approved, especially those involving animals (usually, lab mice).  We're not in our medical school, which has a distant campus, so we can't say anything about human subjects there or generally, beyond that occasionally one gets the impression that approval is pretty lax.  We were once told by a high-placed university administrator at a major medical campus (not ours), an IRB committee member there, that s/he regularly tried to persuade the IRB to approve things they were hesitant about....because the university wanted the overhead funds from the grant, which they'd not get if the project were not approved.

There are community members on these boards, not just the institution's insiders, but how often or effective they are (given that they are not specialists and for the other usual social-pressure reasons) at stopping questionable projects is something we cannot comment on--but should be studied carefully (perhaps it has been).

What's right to do to them?  From Wikimedia Commons

The things that are permitted to be done to animals are often of a kind that the animal-rights people have every reason to object to.  Not only is much done that does cause serious distress (e.g., making animals genetically transformed to develop abnormally or get disease, or surgeries of all sorts, or monitoring function intrusively in live animals), but much is done that is essentially trivial relative to the life and death of a sentient organism.  Should we personally have been allowed to study countless embryos to see how genes were used in patterning their teeth and tooth-cusps?  Our work was to understand basic genetic processes that led to complexly, nested patterning of many traits of which teeth were an accessible example.  Should students be allowed to practice procedures such as euthanizing mice who otherwise would not be killed?

The issues are daunting, because at present many things we would want to know (generally for selfish human-oriented reasons) can't really be studied except in lab animals. Humans may be irrelevant if the work is not about disease, and even for disease-related problems cell culture is, so far, only a partial substitute.  So how do you draw the line? Don't we have good reason to want to 'practice' on animals before, say, costly and rare transgenic animals are used for some procedure that may take skill and experience (even if just to minimize the animal's distress)?  With faculty careers depending on research productivity and, one must be frank, that means universities' interest in getting the grants with their overhead as well as consequent publication productivity their office can spin about, how much or how often is research on humans or animals done in ways that, really, are almost wholly about our careers, not theirs?

We raise animals, often under miserable conditions, to slaughter and eat them.  Lab animals often have protected, safe conditions until we decide to end their lives, and then we do that mostly without pain or terror to them.  They would have no life at all, no awareness experience, without our breeding them.  Where is the line to be drawn?

Similar issues apply to human subjects, even those involved in social or psychological surveys that really involve no risk except, perhaps, possible breach of confidentiality about sensitive issues related to them. And medical procedures really do need to be tested to see if they work, and working on animals can only take this so far. We may have to 'experiment' on humans in disease-related settings by exploring things we really can't promise will work, or that the test subjects will not be worse off.

More disturbing to us is that the idea that subjects are really 'informed' when they sign informed consent is inevitably far off the mark.  Subjects may be desperate, dependent on the investigator, or volunteer because they are good-willed and socially responsible, but they rarely understand the small print of their informedness, no matter how educated they are or how sincere the investigators are. More profoundly, if the investigators actually knew all the benefits and risks, they wouldn't need to do the research.  So even they themselves aren't fully 'informed'.  That's not the same as serious or draconian malpractice, and the situation is far from clear-cut, which is in a sense why some sort of review board is needed.  But how do we make sure that it works effectively, if honor is not sufficient?

What are this chimp's proper civil 'rights'?  From the linked BBC story.

Then there are questions about the more human-like animals.  Chimps have received some protections.  They are so human-like that they have been preferred or even required model systems for human problems.  We personally don't know about restrictions that may apply to other great apes. But monkeys are now being brought into the where-are-the-limits question.  A good journalistic treatment of the issue of animal 'human' rights is on today's BBC website. In some ways, this seems silly, but in many ways it is absolutely something serious to think about.  And what about cloning Neanderthals (or even mammoths)?  Where is the ethical line to be drawn?

These are serious moral issues, but morals have a tendency to be rationalized, and cruelty to be euphemized.  When and where are we being too loose, and how can we decide what is right, or at least acceptable, to do as we work through our careers, hoping to leave the world, or at least humankind, better off as a result?

Germline DNA changes and bioethics

The BBC reports that Francis Collins, Director of the NIH, will not allow that agency to sponsor research on germline gene transfer.  Various new technologies seem promising in terms of being able to select a specific part of the genome that contains a clearly defective sequence, and replace that with a normal or healthy sequence.  Much of biotechnology is actually borrowed from what bacteria do naturally, as is the case for a recent approach, called CRISPR.

Genetic engineering has long been seen as the obvious thing to do when a clearly defective gene or genome segment is identified.  We are among the most skeptical when it comes to claims about high predictive power of genotypes relative to many human conditions, but there are clearly hundreds of known genetic variants that seem to have high 'penetrance', that is, are likely to cause disease or a disorder when present, and thus have high predictive power for serious, often pediatric diseases.  These disorders can devastate the person's entire life, so that prevention would be better than therapy once they've occurred. The idea of germline genetic engineering is to prevent the problem--and, indeed, do so permanently even in that individual's descendants.  It is the direct way to treat a defective gene by preventing its consequences in the first place, while other therapeutic approaches only work on the defect once it has been inherited.

Dr Collins notes that these current methods are by no means yet foolproof. Germline engineering also seems to cross an ethical or even religious line in terms of meddling with Mother Nature.  In the BBC story, he notes that embryo screening already can identify those embryos not carrying the harmful genetic material, those that are healthy to begin with (with respect to tested variants, at least), and can then be used without the risk of trying to engineer a change artificially, where mistakes can arise.  The problems with the CRISPR method at present include unwanted or undocumented changes elsewhere in the genome, and these could have serious consequences for the individual (and, again, his/her future offspring).

This seems to be a somewhat ironic, but sound, decision at least for the moment.  The idea of preventing harmful genetic conditions by removing them from our human patrimony is a noble one and has been seen as just around the corner ever since the modern era of molecular genetic technologies.  But genomes are complex, and one tinkers at one's peril, based on what is currently known.

Selective embryo choice has its own ethical issues, of course, as does abortion, cloning, or any tinkering with our nature.  Ethics are not always shared, however, and people vary in their ideas of right and wrong.  Indeed, ethical restraints don't always fare well in competition with selfish interests, which is why institutions and governments impose ethical considerations on research. Even if the NIH prevents germline genetic engineering, we probably cannot stop other countries and private companies from doing it.  Profits are to be made and, to be fair, parents' dreams of normal children will be catered to, hopefully in a positive way.  Generally, it is hard to believe that self-interests will not over-ride ethical interests, as they so often do when money is to be made.  Which is not to say that profit is the only motive--there is good to be done, and lives to improve as well.

Of course, germline engineering of various sorts is taking place in plants and animals for agricultural purposes.  The original level of controversy in terms of feasibility has seemingly waned and cloned animals and plants are routinely being made.  GMO plants are still controversial for many reasons both including potential health issues and, perhaps even more so, the economics of industrialized, highly profitable agriculture, especially as it impacts the developing world and distracts attention from more sustainable, soil-preserving practices.  At present it is hard to sort out the issues there, given the strength and diversity of feelings, and the hard-core economic and vested-interest issues involved. But it is always risky to bet against the power of technology to solve problems, and even to do that in an ethical way.

There are many who advocate genetic engineering for entirely good, moral reasons, related to human improvement.  But there are many also who are not willing to wait until things are shown to be safe.  In any case, at present, Dr Collins seems to be doing what he can to keep the Dr Frankensteins under control.  Whether it's a losing battle, and whether indeed far more good than evil will come from human germline manipulation, remain to be seen.  One can hope that the best will triumph.

Genetics -- fiddling while Rome burns

Stories about the growing threat of antibiotic resistance generally include alarming predictions about the coming post-antibiotic era, about how even simple medical procedures that are now safe will become dangerous once we lose the ability to fight infections, and indeed simple infections will once again become life-threatening, as they might have been for most of human history.  We in the rich world can still imagine that this future might be avoidable, as we've still got useful drugs for many of our microbial illnesses -- plus, we're pretty good at being delusional (see climate change).

But that ominous future is already here for much of the world.  A reader sent us a link to a heart-wrenching story in the Dec 3 New York Times; "'Superbugs'" Kill India's Babies and Pose an Overseas Threat", Gardiner Harris.  Lack of widespread public health measures including sanitation are largely responsible for high infant mortality rates in poor nations.  Infectious diseases that would be avoidable or easily treated in rich countries are lethal in countries where the health care infrastructure is weak.  Antibiotic resistance is more widespread in these same countries, exacerbating the health care challenge.

The infant mortality rate (IMR) in India was 41/1000 live births in 2013, or 4%! -- by contrast, the lowest rates in the world in 2013, in Israel and Ireland and several other nations, were 3/1000, or 0.3%.  The IMR hasn't been as high in the United States as it is now in India since the beginning of the antibiotic age.  But India may never see the kind of decrease in infant mortality that the US experienced beginning in the 1940's, and it looks as though growing antibiotic resistance will be a major reason.

Infant, post-neonatal and neonatal morality rates, United States, 1940-2006; deaths per 1000 live births; CDC

In India, Harris reports, many infants are already dying of infections that are resistant to multiple antibiotics.  And, "a significant share of the bacteria present in India— in its water, sewage, animals, soil and even its mothers — are immune to nearly all antibiotics."  And those bacteria are quickly traveling around the world.

For many reasons, bacterial infections spread quickly in India; people defecate outdoors, sewage is untreated, drinking water can be contaminated, hospitals can be a source, even as they are in the West, and so on.  The most frequent bacterial infections in infants are from bacteria found in human waste.  And to compound the problem, antibiotics are available over-the-counter, in recent years women have been encouraged to give birth in hospitals, often in unsanitary conditions, and, Harris reports, infants have often been given antibiotic injections preventatively, all of which adds to growing resistance.

“Reducing newborn deaths in India is one of the most important public health priorities in the world, and this will require treating an increasing number of neonates who have sepsis and pneumonia,” said Dr. Vinod Paul, chief of pediatrics at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and the leader of the study. “But if resistant infections keep growing, that progress could slow, stop or even reverse itself. And that would be a disaster for not only India but the entire world.”

In addition, antibiotic resistance is linked to widespread use in animal husbandry; the increased industrialization of meat production in India, with accompanying antibiotic use, may be adding to the problem there.

None of this is a surprise.  Just as the increase in 'super weeds' as a result of the widespread use of plants genetically modified to resist herbicides, which are then liberally sprayed on fields, was completely predictable.  Like the herbicide Round-Up, antibiotics are a strong selective force that encourage resistance.

But this is much more than a science problem.  It's a social, and an economic and a moral problem. Antibiotic resistance is developing much more quickly in poor countries, because of lack of public health infrastructure, and more infectious disease in general.  Preventing it takes resources, and it hasn't been a very glamorous claim on resources for high-flying research investigators who are driven by our society's worship of high technology.  But as we've written before, spending billions of dollars on things like genetics -- or, say, flights to Mars -- may well turn out to be fiddling while Rome burns.