Our Monday post raised quite a stir. It was triggered by a Science paper about a large mega-study on the genomics of educational achievement, and a subsequent blog post by geneticist Dan Graur. An issue that we suggested would come up was what we felt was an inevitable interest in using this GWAS result specifically to look for group differences (i.e., especially including 'race' differences) in intelligence. Even such super-minimal results as reported in the Science paper--trivial genetic contributions to the chosen outcome, educational attainment--can be easily used to justify such purposes.
Our 'policy' on vitriol
Sure enough, we got a few comments expounding upon exactly that point of view, some rather virulently. You won't see these here, because, for one thing, we didn't want to let that thread get started. And we don't publish comments that attack individuals in ad hominem ways, nor take blatantly racist stances. While we don't block disagreement, we do exercise what does amount to a form of censorship. Those views have plenty of other places to be aired, but not here.
It is fair enough to disagree, and the blogosphere is a place for opinions to be aired and discussed. There are few other venues with so wide and fast a reach, a wonderful thing. Indeed, we use much of our post-space to critique areas in which we feel evolutionary concepts, or genetics and related topics could be differently considered. We try to do it in the context of the science itself, pointing out issues as we see them.
Of course each study is done by people, and we criticize the 'system' for the various vested interests that drive it. But we rarely if ever knowingly aim this directly at individual authors in a personalized sense, even if we can and will say when we think someone should know better than to say what he or she said. We're all human and fallible, however, so it is the issues that are important, not the individuals in our context.
Racism and 'IQ' (here used to represent the panoply of intellectual achievement measures and concepts) have a nasty history. Polarization is deep and the issues--for those who want to take science seriously--are complex, and the science can and will be used by both those who believe that inequality is justified, and those who believe it's not.
Taking the science seriously
What about intelligence differences, for example? Are they real, or are they only social constructs by right-wingers? From a genetic and evolutionary point of view, if you do an IQ study comparing any two individuals, or two groups (say, the left and right sides of a class, two random individuals, two populations you choose to sample--even identical twins) and you find no difference between them, then there is something wrong with your study! Because of existing variation and new mutational variation, every pair of individuals, and hence every set of indigenous, geographically separate populations that you sample, will differ genetically, and differences will be found across the genome. Even identical twins are not genomically identical, because every cell division during each twin's life involves the occurrence of some new mutation.
At the moment, we're not considering the manifestly important 'environmental' effects. But a reductio ad absurdem is that if you don't go to school or can't read you can't score high on a school IQ test. So, because evolution is the process that got us where we are and is a population process of sorting through variation, you cannot expect exact identity between any two people. So a study that finds nothing is not done right, uses inaccurate methods of testing for differences, etc.
GWAS knowingly bury genome sites whose differences between cases and controls, for example, are not statistically 'significant', reporting only what passes a specified statistical test. This is essentially what must be done if one takes a sampling and statistical approach to the subject, as is current standard practice. We think it's not good science, but that's beside the point. The point is that when only a few small effects are reported, this does not mean there are no other genomic effects even in that study's data. Indeed, the idea that most of the heritability--the aggregate genetic effects we find by using trait comparisons in relatives, for example--is 'hidden', really refers to the problem of statistical testing and the intentional ignoring of effects that must be there but don't individually pass a statistical significance test.
To do the science right, or at least in a better way, is a difficult challenge. Serious issues that may not be compatible with a steady stream of hypothesis-free mega Big Data projects, studies too large and too costly to terminate so the funds can go more productively elsewhere, should be but too often aren't addressed. But the issues are known, and they are subtle. These facts are not secret, known only to science critics. Everyone who cares to think about them, can know them.
An example we mentioned in a response to a comment on Monday's post is this. In its effort not to be flooded with false positive test results, GWAS buries small, non-statistically significant effects. The larger the study (assuming properly informed design) the smaller will the undetected effects be, even if they are there in aggregate and indeed are the bulk of the causal variation. But GWAS and similar findings are widely presented as being far more definitive than they usually are. For example, not only do genomewide association types of study bury, for practical reasons, the bulk (usually the vast bulk) of genomic effects, but typically many or most or even all clear, previously documented effects are not found in even huge GWAS reports. How can that be, if the study is so huge? For example, there are, as we noted on Monday, tens or even hundreds of rather clear-cut genes that when mutated in some ways cause serious IQ impairment. Yet virtually none of them were found in the large educational achievement study. Were previous studies wrong? Are these genes not involved after all?
One answer is that causal mutations simply were not present in those genes in the specific study sample. They do exist, at low frequency, in the population, but not in the sampled 'normal' part of the population going to regular schools. The point is that even such huge studies do not represent genomic effects on a trait, nor even those in the population, in a very clear way. Other samples, in other populations, will (as we know and should expect from what we understand about evolution) typically find other 'hits'. And this without considering environment. This is poor epistemology for understanding traits, and it's poor science; or at least, we should be thinking hard about better conceptual ways to understand what genomes do.
Why it's so hard to put this subject to bed!
Well, what about environment? Reflecting the obvious, if not even perhaps rather ridiculous, state of things, the BBC posted a story yesterday on the major effects on education achievement of going to bed late. This study was a mere 11,000 strong (compare to the genome mapping study's mega design), yet it easily found substantial achievement effects--far bigger in that sense than the Big Data study. And it was also clear that they were partly reflective of socieoeconomic status.
Now since most genes--80%, according to gene expression results from the Allen Brain Atlas--are known to be expressed in the brain at some point, they all become potential candidates, and many or most are affected by various environmental conditions (including bedtime, or breast feeding as we described on Monday?). This means that in any given study only some few genes have statistically detectable effect, and that means the study only reflects its particular sub-sample of the population. It misses the effects, genuine and present, of countless other gene regions. At best, it means that such genes did not vary in relevant ways in one's sample, but that does not mean the gene isn't contributing to the trait, just not to its variation in the sample.
One of the legitimate problems, as well as keep-funding-me rationales for Big Data studies, is that after collecting the gobs of proposed data, later one inevitably learns of things that weren't measured or flaws in the measurement methods. The investigators then say they 'must' go back and re-contact, re-interview, or re-test all the subjects to add this bit of new vital information. It is not entirely unrelated that this is a justification for further funding, and this suggestion is reflected in the fact that rarely (if ever) does the investigator say they need no further work or funds.
So, if breast feeding and bedtimes weren't measured in the current study we've been discussing, and yet they've been demonstrated by other studies to have effects on educational attainment, the results are almost literally worthless. One might assume that breast feeding could be interacting with the few minor hits that were found, and taking that into account might un-hit those genome sites (and just as likely up the test score for others). The point is easy to see and is a very serious one.
Beyond the principles, of course you can't practicably recontact everyone in a mega-study (many original subjects will have died and new potential subjects born since the first data acquisition--so the routine ploy is to say we 'need' to study the next generation, etc.). And environments we live in are very rapidly changing, in literally unpredictable ways and amounts, as lifestyle and medication (and education) fads and fashions come and go faster than a video game. It's a moving target and this is one reason we think that such massive can't-be-terminated database or survey studies are often not a good way to spend huge amounts of public funds. They entrench diminishing returns. There are many such studies that are decades old, well past their proper sell-by dates.
The issues as well as the very ways they are studied, are not being given their due consideration, and in this case interpretation, even by scientists who don't think about these issues very carefully in the rush to do more and larger studies and the like. We are not working with well-posed questions. When that is the case, then our epistemology--theory, study designs, and inference--is ripe for questioning.
Science as politics
The key issues here are the epistemic ones of how to identify or even just to define causation, how causation works, and what causal effects are important. These are fundamental questions in science generally, not just with respect to the study of intelligence. These aspects of science are inherently subjective. We have to make judgments about them, no matter how causation really works. When we make judgments, and the work that leads to them, or follow-up work, or implications of the work involve public policy and the like, then the science is necessarily political.
To accuse a scientist of being just political because of his/her views on a subject--like looking for genomic effects on IQ--is to misunderstand the very nature of the enterprise. To act as if history provides no guide to understanding the nature or use of science is naive, if not downright societally dangerous. But often, the right and left wings of our political spectrum accuse science they don't like of being 'just political' and thus dismiss it. Think of 'evolution' or 'climate change'--or IQ.
The truth is that today much of science today is political in this unavoidable sense. We all pay for it, and what is studied and what is done with the results affect us. It is, and it should be political. This is not to say (as some science-studies critiques seem to) that the real world is all imagined and doesn't exist and is a plot by the intellectual elite. The point is that the real world exists, but how we respond to it, or what we choose to study, as a society are affected by considerations other than scientific study design or analytical methods and other related decisions and techniques. And we also affect what we learn by how we choose to study it. Objectivity is our stated goal but is often quite elusive and subtle to achieve. But nobody seems to want to think about this seriously. Leave us alone, trust us: we'll do the science right.
The societal decisions we make and what we fund are not just how to respond to curiosity about the world, but to decide which subjects are important enough to us to invest in, or how much to invest. These are not easy, and we freely express our views here on this blog. They are subjects that should be taken seriously. It is perfectly legitimate to say that this or that kind of investigation are not in society's interests to support, or even to allow (we don't allow torturing of prisoners for research purposes, for example, and institutional review boards are charged with making decisions about whether other less obviously egregious but potentially problematic studies should be allowed).
So we certainly do color our own MT blog posts with considerations that we think are relevant in this respect. These considerations, such as where funds should be spent, are openly, not deceptively, political. Obviously, vested interests, cultural practices, professional needs, careerism, desire to improve society, and genuine quest for knowledge are all at work. Rather than energetic but reflexive reactions, much less vitriolic responses, what we try to urge is that we take nature more seriously in our attempt to understand how she works. That's a lot harder than just business as usual.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Forget 'Intelligent Design': what is 'intelligent' life?
The discovery of Gliese 667C and its orbiting planets that seem to be 'habitable' raises even more questions than we've dealt with already (here and here). The discovery feeds the dream that we'll discover planets in 'habitable zones' around stars, here, there, and everywhere in the universe. The idea is that these can contain water in liquid form and other necessities to support life.
This is well-known if only implicitly stated to imply life as we live it and understand it in our labs. There are many good reasons to think this way, not least being that one doesn't know how else to think, and we can't sell grants or stories to the media without conjuring up at least recognizable images. That may not be the best kind of science, but it is certainly understandable.
Going further, the real hunger is to find intelligent life out there somewhere. SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, has been scanning the skies for decades with this in mind. The underlying idea is that such life is like our (that is, human) intelligence. That means, we assume, that LifeOutThere communicates long distance by electromagnetic emanations, since that is what we currently know could best accomplish this. But that also means controlling the emanations in a language-like way. For us to detect it, the emanations must be non-random relative to space's electromagnetic background, which is very complex but presumably all due to natural physical processes; and unlike intelligent life whose signals would be 'unnatural' in being highly patterned, just as this message is: part of the physical world, but composed by directed processes and designed to contain abstract or symbol-based information.
There's nothing wrong with searching for a kind of life with which we could get in touch. After all, if it exists here on Earth (i.e., in the form of you and us), it must be physically possible elsewhere. However, since we've been on Earth as 'intelligent' beasts for only about 100,000 years (depending on what fossils you count) but only using such communication for 100 of those years, perhaps you can see a problem.
The known (and only currently knowable) universe is about 13.7 billion years old. Our existence comprises something like only a ten-millionth of the age of the universe, and our use of telecom only about a billionth. So, if we are typical and reflect how long it takes a planet to evolve to our state of smarts, then we need to ask how plausible it is that other civilizations exist in a similar state, at this very time, so we can communicate with it. Is it too much coincidence to expect? There are about a hundred billion galaxies each comprising a hundred or more billions of stars, and many of those stars would have 'habitable' planets. So the idea that They may be out there somewhere is not entirely fanciful, even taking the coincidence factor into account.
But if you look at our posts about Gliese 667C (here and here), the reported star with some juicy-looking 'habitable' planets, and our earlier set (here's the first of those posts) on life in space and the 'infinity' game, you'll see that the idea that we'll find such companions in brainpower becomes pretty far-fetched (assuming brains is what They have). Indeed, even if SETI does some day detect signals, even then it will not be the kind of coincidence that press releases will probably suggest: the signal will likely be from a source millions or billions of light-years away, meaning that the message was sent that long ago. We're only seeing intelligence as it was way back then!
Given how ephemeral the lifespans of we earthly species' are, one wouldn't hold out much hope that those They whom we detect still even exist! Perhaps even stranger, any They who do exist probably haven't been detected because their emanations just haven't reached us yet. By the time we get those signals, the senders' will again likely be gone to evolutionary oblivion. Or, by the time messages from sender cultures that exist today reach the earth, it will find only bleached skeletons on windswept plains.
But there's another aspect of the search for 'intelligent' life that we want to discuss. What, in the first place, is 'intelligent' life? It seems like a meaningful term, but is it?
Just like us?
The usual vision invoked as we noted above, is that intelligent life is like us, communicating by something we'd recognize as language, and in that sense 'thinking' in terms that are commensurate with our thinking. If we're on totally different conceptual wavelengths, so to speak, entirely different ways of 'thinking', then there won't be any recognition much less communication.
But the very definition of 'intelligent' is usually left out of the discussion, since the idea as implicitly taken doesn't really bear a close look--unless it simply means Just Like Us. We can't dictate a proper definition of 'intelligent' but we want to cite an example that shows the confused nature of the notion.
An insect robot
There were recent stories of robotic flying devices that could maneuver more or less like small flies or midges. They can flit around, change directions, explore their environment. As with other robots, there is feedback, such as from light, sound, heat, or chemical sensors, even video camera transmissions to some computational device that directed the 'flynsect' to go this way or that, and so on. They could, for example, be programmed to pollinate crops so we no longer rely on bees.
Currently, as shown in the figures (from the website of the Harvard research group that made these), the flynsect is tethered with a power wire, but surely that is only a temporary restriction. But compared to real midges (can you guess which are which?) the work is remarkably real and life-like.
This achievement is part of the general development of robotic drones these days, and clearly works quite well for such an early model. All sorts of plans are afoot for such objects that can do all sorts of checking things out (and you can be sure you'll be observed by them, whether you want to be or not!). Indeed, plans are for military robots that can even make kill decisions without a monitor back at home base pushing a 'shoot' button, as is the case with current military drones.
Now, this is hailed (properly) as quite an achievement of engineering. In that sense it is computers developing 'artificial intelligence.' Indeed, in the figures above, the damn thing, preliminary as it is, looks and moves remarkably like a real midge! And it is clearly the product of a whole range of intelligent designers and builders. It may or not may not be 'self aware', but it certainly is an extension of self-aware consciousness--that of the makers without whom it would not exist or do anything. So in every useful sense it is an 'intelligent' device.
But, so is a real fly! Why don't we consider a real fly to be intelligent life? Trees are very different from inanimate rocks, and they act as whole organisms in many ways. But they haven't much central control, nothing corresponding to neural wiring, so perhaps they don't qualify. But insects, especially ones like the above electronic midges, that do just what we think is intelligent when we do it, perhaps should qualify. If we want to insist that consiousness is a requisite for 'intelligence', we might say that the flynsects aren't conscious so what they do doesn't count, but how can we know whether they are conscious if we don't even know what consciousness is, or how to detect it? If it requires heavy-duty consciousness (humans') to design a very imperfect fly-bot, why do we deny that the real thing, tiny and made all on its own without any external engineers, has some such cognitive-aware powers, whether they resemble our experience or not?
We could put our point in another way. Were we to discover 'midges' on some planet elsewhere, of a sort we couldn't relate to our particular earth's evolutionary history, but stumbled upon them busy in their highly orderly activity, would we not have every reason to consider them 'intelligent', even if they didn't have radios or speak the way we do? Their nature and existence, could we find them, would be wondrous comparisons for what has happened here on Earth.
Of course, since they don't send out intentional emanations, don't code language into radio waves, or don't build spaceships, our radio telescopes wouldn't find them, so that, really, we are just searching the cosmos for mirror images of our noble selves. Or could they emanate? Since electromagnetic waves do (eventually, in theory) traverse all the universe, and since the motion of real midges involve energy release, and hence photon emanations, they probably do emit signals. They'd be highly organized, not just random electromagnetic noise like deep-space waves. Would we recognize them as purposive, problem-solving phenomena worth sending a spaceship to visit? Would they seem like some sort of language?
Just as interesting to contemplate is that if the highly patterned and nonrandom emanations from such beasts were detected by finely honed radiotelescopy, could SETI infer that they were the ethereal musings of minds? Would we mount expensive efforts to communicate with them?
A dreamy world
When we think about the nature of space, we sometimes wish we had become cosmologists. But reality beckons, and while we find this to be as fascinating to think about as anything can be, we find the promotion of the fanciful aspects of space to be at least as big a boondoggle as GWAS. We only wonder whether the people pushing it aren't much more aware of its fanciful nature than most human geneticists are of the GWAS bubble they're blowing. Physics has better theories than biology does in this respect, and hence perhaps fewer excuses.
This is well-known if only implicitly stated to imply life as we live it and understand it in our labs. There are many good reasons to think this way, not least being that one doesn't know how else to think, and we can't sell grants or stories to the media without conjuring up at least recognizable images. That may not be the best kind of science, but it is certainly understandable.
Going further, the real hunger is to find intelligent life out there somewhere. SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, has been scanning the skies for decades with this in mind. The underlying idea is that such life is like our (that is, human) intelligence. That means, we assume, that LifeOutThere communicates long distance by electromagnetic emanations, since that is what we currently know could best accomplish this. But that also means controlling the emanations in a language-like way. For us to detect it, the emanations must be non-random relative to space's electromagnetic background, which is very complex but presumably all due to natural physical processes; and unlike intelligent life whose signals would be 'unnatural' in being highly patterned, just as this message is: part of the physical world, but composed by directed processes and designed to contain abstract or symbol-based information.
There's nothing wrong with searching for a kind of life with which we could get in touch. After all, if it exists here on Earth (i.e., in the form of you and us), it must be physically possible elsewhere. However, since we've been on Earth as 'intelligent' beasts for only about 100,000 years (depending on what fossils you count) but only using such communication for 100 of those years, perhaps you can see a problem.
The known (and only currently knowable) universe is about 13.7 billion years old. Our existence comprises something like only a ten-millionth of the age of the universe, and our use of telecom only about a billionth. So, if we are typical and reflect how long it takes a planet to evolve to our state of smarts, then we need to ask how plausible it is that other civilizations exist in a similar state, at this very time, so we can communicate with it. Is it too much coincidence to expect? There are about a hundred billion galaxies each comprising a hundred or more billions of stars, and many of those stars would have 'habitable' planets. So the idea that They may be out there somewhere is not entirely fanciful, even taking the coincidence factor into account.
But if you look at our posts about Gliese 667C (here and here), the reported star with some juicy-looking 'habitable' planets, and our earlier set (here's the first of those posts) on life in space and the 'infinity' game, you'll see that the idea that we'll find such companions in brainpower becomes pretty far-fetched (assuming brains is what They have). Indeed, even if SETI does some day detect signals, even then it will not be the kind of coincidence that press releases will probably suggest: the signal will likely be from a source millions or billions of light-years away, meaning that the message was sent that long ago. We're only seeing intelligence as it was way back then!
Given how ephemeral the lifespans of we earthly species' are, one wouldn't hold out much hope that those They whom we detect still even exist! Perhaps even stranger, any They who do exist probably haven't been detected because their emanations just haven't reached us yet. By the time we get those signals, the senders' will again likely be gone to evolutionary oblivion. Or, by the time messages from sender cultures that exist today reach the earth, it will find only bleached skeletons on windswept plains.
But there's another aspect of the search for 'intelligent' life that we want to discuss. What, in the first place, is 'intelligent' life? It seems like a meaningful term, but is it?
Just like us?
The usual vision invoked as we noted above, is that intelligent life is like us, communicating by something we'd recognize as language, and in that sense 'thinking' in terms that are commensurate with our thinking. If we're on totally different conceptual wavelengths, so to speak, entirely different ways of 'thinking', then there won't be any recognition much less communication.
But the very definition of 'intelligent' is usually left out of the discussion, since the idea as implicitly taken doesn't really bear a close look--unless it simply means Just Like Us. We can't dictate a proper definition of 'intelligent' but we want to cite an example that shows the confused nature of the notion.
An insect robot
There were recent stories of robotic flying devices that could maneuver more or less like small flies or midges. They can flit around, change directions, explore their environment. As with other robots, there is feedback, such as from light, sound, heat, or chemical sensors, even video camera transmissions to some computational device that directed the 'flynsect' to go this way or that, and so on. They could, for example, be programmed to pollinate crops so we no longer rely on bees.
Currently, as shown in the figures (from the website of the Harvard research group that made these), the flynsect is tethered with a power wire, but surely that is only a temporary restriction. But compared to real midges (can you guess which are which?) the work is remarkably real and life-like.
This achievement is part of the general development of robotic drones these days, and clearly works quite well for such an early model. All sorts of plans are afoot for such objects that can do all sorts of checking things out (and you can be sure you'll be observed by them, whether you want to be or not!). Indeed, plans are for military robots that can even make kill decisions without a monitor back at home base pushing a 'shoot' button, as is the case with current military drones.
Now, this is hailed (properly) as quite an achievement of engineering. In that sense it is computers developing 'artificial intelligence.' Indeed, in the figures above, the damn thing, preliminary as it is, looks and moves remarkably like a real midge! And it is clearly the product of a whole range of intelligent designers and builders. It may or not may not be 'self aware', but it certainly is an extension of self-aware consciousness--that of the makers without whom it would not exist or do anything. So in every useful sense it is an 'intelligent' device.
But, so is a real fly! Why don't we consider a real fly to be intelligent life? Trees are very different from inanimate rocks, and they act as whole organisms in many ways. But they haven't much central control, nothing corresponding to neural wiring, so perhaps they don't qualify. But insects, especially ones like the above electronic midges, that do just what we think is intelligent when we do it, perhaps should qualify. If we want to insist that consiousness is a requisite for 'intelligence', we might say that the flynsects aren't conscious so what they do doesn't count, but how can we know whether they are conscious if we don't even know what consciousness is, or how to detect it? If it requires heavy-duty consciousness (humans') to design a very imperfect fly-bot, why do we deny that the real thing, tiny and made all on its own without any external engineers, has some such cognitive-aware powers, whether they resemble our experience or not?
We could put our point in another way. Were we to discover 'midges' on some planet elsewhere, of a sort we couldn't relate to our particular earth's evolutionary history, but stumbled upon them busy in their highly orderly activity, would we not have every reason to consider them 'intelligent', even if they didn't have radios or speak the way we do? Their nature and existence, could we find them, would be wondrous comparisons for what has happened here on Earth.
Of course, since they don't send out intentional emanations, don't code language into radio waves, or don't build spaceships, our radio telescopes wouldn't find them, so that, really, we are just searching the cosmos for mirror images of our noble selves. Or could they emanate? Since electromagnetic waves do (eventually, in theory) traverse all the universe, and since the motion of real midges involve energy release, and hence photon emanations, they probably do emit signals. They'd be highly organized, not just random electromagnetic noise like deep-space waves. Would we recognize them as purposive, problem-solving phenomena worth sending a spaceship to visit? Would they seem like some sort of language?
Just as interesting to contemplate is that if the highly patterned and nonrandom emanations from such beasts were detected by finely honed radiotelescopy, could SETI infer that they were the ethereal musings of minds? Would we mount expensive efforts to communicate with them?
A dreamy world
When we think about the nature of space, we sometimes wish we had become cosmologists. But reality beckons, and while we find this to be as fascinating to think about as anything can be, we find the promotion of the fanciful aspects of space to be at least as big a boondoggle as GWAS. We only wonder whether the people pushing it aren't much more aware of its fanciful nature than most human geneticists are of the GWAS bubble they're blowing. Physics has better theories than biology does in this respect, and hence perhaps fewer excuses.
Monday, July 8, 2013
The significance of (looking for) genes for educational achievement
Genes for educational achievement? So claims a paper in the 21 June issue of Science.
We have often criticized the spending of public money on genetic studies of traits or diseases for which environmental influences are much more significant -- heart disease, asthma, some psychiatric diseases, stroke, and so on, and educational attainment is surely another such trait. Even just from a genetic point of view, the contributions of specific genes are generally environment and context dependent, and individually trivially uninformative. Taken to an extreme, imagine someone with no opportunity to attend school at all, or to go to college -- no matter his or her genetic make-up, and let's even suppose it's completely determinative, this person will not reach his or her genetically determined potential.
Other factors
At the same time that this study appeared, a paper was published in Archives of Disease in Childhood, reporting on a factor with a large effect on social mobility. Analysis of data from the 1950s and 70s in Britain suggests that infants who were breast fed were 24% more likely to have moved up the social ladder (their job in adulthood compared with their father's job when the subjects were age 10 or 11), and 20% less likely to have moved down.
The authors suggest that breast feeding is associated with improvements in neurological development, cognitive improvement and emotional stability. They controlled for selection bias influencing who chooses to breast feed, so presumably it's not confounding variables that explain their results.
Maybe. But whatever it is that increases social mobility, whether it's breast feeding itself, or something associated with it, or even something unmeasured, something does, and it's unlikely to be genes for social mobility (or educational attainment, which is highly correlated with social mobility). For whatever reason, breast fed kids are 24% more likely to move up the social ladder -- that swamps the effect of whatever alleles reported by the educational attainment GWAS. Reinforcing the idea that whatever genetic component there is to winning the social race, it's miniscule compared with social and environmental factors. But will such papers, not heralded and published in Science, have any tempering effect? Unlikely.
Breast fed or not, it is clear that social factors can have a large effect on educational attainment -- very early childhood education, small class sizes, good teachers (i.e., money), involved families and so on. We know that there are gene variants with major effect on cognitive development -- Fragile X, PKU, Down syndrome, e.g., there are perhaps gene variants associated with exceptional musical ability and there must be as yet unidentified alleles associated with exceptional intellectual ability as well. Just as there are genes associated with extreme short and tall stature, but hundreds if not thousands of genes associated with the rest of the distribution, the same will be true of cognitive ability. Your mother's nutritional level during pregnancy, and what and how much you ate as a child has a lot to do with your final height -- birth cohorts have grown taller over several generations, while genetic contributions haven't changed.
A genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment was conducted in a discovery sample of 101,069 individuals and a replication sample of 25,490. Three independent single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are genome-wide significant (rs9320913, rs11584700, rs4851266), and all three replicate. Estimated effects sizes are small (coefficient of determination R2 ≈ 0.02%), approximately 1 month of schooling per allele. A linear polygenic score from all measured SNPs accounts for ≈2% of the variance in both educational attainment and cognitive function.Dan Graur (of Encode critique fame) sums up the import of this paper very nicely, in 12 languages even, here. Here's the gist of his argument:
The German-born American Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously proclaimed that “God is in the details.” So, let us look carefully at the findings. All the 2,515,021 autosomal SNPs explain 2% of the variation. The largest estimated SNP effect size was 0.02%. Thus, the best genetic variant in the population explains 0.02% of the variation, and the addition of 2.5 million SNPs only adds 1.98%. By extrapolation, using the entire genome, would optimistically explain 3% of the variation in educational attainment.
I was positively floored with excitement.His multi-lingual critique?
In the following, I shall attempt to summarize the findings of this study in all the languages of all the authors of this article: niets, nothing, mitte midagi, nix, ei mitään, ingenting (Norwegian), ingenting (Swedish), rien, ekkert, niente, τίποτα, and لا شيء.Graur being Graur here, but he does have a point. The amount of variation explained is on the low end--even for GWAS!--so it's pretty clear that Science didn't publish this thing for its scientific impact. They published it, surely, for its splash factor. Evolutionary psychologists, behavioral geneticists and so forth will gush they're finally making headway: Now we're beginning to see the real truth about human intelligence! Finger-pointing at generations of IQ-testing naysayers. And think of the billions of dollars they'll demand to follow up these strikingly powerful results.
We have often criticized the spending of public money on genetic studies of traits or diseases for which environmental influences are much more significant -- heart disease, asthma, some psychiatric diseases, stroke, and so on, and educational attainment is surely another such trait. Even just from a genetic point of view, the contributions of specific genes are generally environment and context dependent, and individually trivially uninformative. Taken to an extreme, imagine someone with no opportunity to attend school at all, or to go to college -- no matter his or her genetic make-up, and let's even suppose it's completely determinative, this person will not reach his or her genetically determined potential.
Other factors
At the same time that this study appeared, a paper was published in Archives of Disease in Childhood, reporting on a factor with a large effect on social mobility. Analysis of data from the 1950s and 70s in Britain suggests that infants who were breast fed were 24% more likely to have moved up the social ladder (their job in adulthood compared with their father's job when the subjects were age 10 or 11), and 20% less likely to have moved down.
The authors suggest that breast feeding is associated with improvements in neurological development, cognitive improvement and emotional stability. They controlled for selection bias influencing who chooses to breast feed, so presumably it's not confounding variables that explain their results.
Maybe. But whatever it is that increases social mobility, whether it's breast feeding itself, or something associated with it, or even something unmeasured, something does, and it's unlikely to be genes for social mobility (or educational attainment, which is highly correlated with social mobility). For whatever reason, breast fed kids are 24% more likely to move up the social ladder -- that swamps the effect of whatever alleles reported by the educational attainment GWAS. Reinforcing the idea that whatever genetic component there is to winning the social race, it's miniscule compared with social and environmental factors. But will such papers, not heralded and published in Science, have any tempering effect? Unlikely.
 |
| Elementary school classroom, USA; Wikimedia |
The morality of such studies
There are a number of issues that acceptance of such a study, much less acting on it or hyping it as important, raises. Such studies have societal impact of all sorts. They can affect how funds are spent and how people are viewed in terms of their inherent worth. Many scientists, especially those benefiting from the grant largesse (and this is not too harsh a way to put it) take the standard amoral position and say that these are issues for society to decide, and of course we must do more and bigger studies of this subject. Science is about finding the facts. You can't outlaw what you don't like about the real world, and the facts are what they are. Science's job is to find the facts. Leave us alone and go make your own social judgments in the political arena.
We'd like to suggest that studies of the genetics of intelligence are not just convenient abstract amorality. They are dangerously immoral. Just as GWAS of diseases like cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes, that take the focus off lifestyle which clearly has a large effect on risk of disease, emphasis on the genetics of intelligence takes the responsibility from society to ensure that each child meets his or her intellectual potential.
It is hard to imagine that this study isn't going to be just one of many more. While we don't think they will ever find much of significance, others believe otherwise, and one can't dismiss the likelihood that they will, or are eager to, interpret them differently. Indeed, GWAS believers have declared victory with studies of many other traits where we see pretty trivial results. But studies of the genetics of intelligence are almost certainly to be used to evaluate people's inherent intellectual worth -- the most fundamental worth, criteria that have widespread formal and informal use in our society
We aren't the only people to worry about a new era of intolerance. Voting rights are being challenged in the US. How long will it be before we see a new era of using such data for group characterizations whether formally or not--that is, racial judgment based on 'scientific' documentation of different average inherent mental abilities? And similar conclusions are always waiting in the wings to be used between as well as within nations. Have we not learned the disastrous lessons of the eugenic era in the last century? If you think this time it's different, then you haven't read enough of what was written a century ago.
This kind of non-sensical study should not have been funded, and should not be published in a major journal as if it were more than a non-result gussied up to seem profound. We may not be able to censor research formally, but we don't, as a society, have to pay for it.
One might say that this is a heavy duty over-reaction on our part, to a rather bland (if hyped) study that found hardly anything at all. Why get all heated up and panicky about a return to biological rationales for segregation (and worse)? Our response is that, as the Germans learned in the 1930s and later wrote widely about, the time to keep the horse in the barn is before it has inched its way out, one un-noticed step at a time. But lessons have been forgotten, and distant amorality is again offered, often with pious expressions of benign intent (again, as they were a century ago).
There are a number of issues that acceptance of such a study, much less acting on it or hyping it as important, raises. Such studies have societal impact of all sorts. They can affect how funds are spent and how people are viewed in terms of their inherent worth. Many scientists, especially those benefiting from the grant largesse (and this is not too harsh a way to put it) take the standard amoral position and say that these are issues for society to decide, and of course we must do more and bigger studies of this subject. Science is about finding the facts. You can't outlaw what you don't like about the real world, and the facts are what they are. Science's job is to find the facts. Leave us alone and go make your own social judgments in the political arena.
We'd like to suggest that studies of the genetics of intelligence are not just convenient abstract amorality. They are dangerously immoral. Just as GWAS of diseases like cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes, that take the focus off lifestyle which clearly has a large effect on risk of disease, emphasis on the genetics of intelligence takes the responsibility from society to ensure that each child meets his or her intellectual potential.
It is hard to imagine that this study isn't going to be just one of many more. While we don't think they will ever find much of significance, others believe otherwise, and one can't dismiss the likelihood that they will, or are eager to, interpret them differently. Indeed, GWAS believers have declared victory with studies of many other traits where we see pretty trivial results. But studies of the genetics of intelligence are almost certainly to be used to evaluate people's inherent intellectual worth -- the most fundamental worth, criteria that have widespread formal and informal use in our society
We aren't the only people to worry about a new era of intolerance. Voting rights are being challenged in the US. How long will it be before we see a new era of using such data for group characterizations whether formally or not--that is, racial judgment based on 'scientific' documentation of different average inherent mental abilities? And similar conclusions are always waiting in the wings to be used between as well as within nations. Have we not learned the disastrous lessons of the eugenic era in the last century? If you think this time it's different, then you haven't read enough of what was written a century ago.
This kind of non-sensical study should not have been funded, and should not be published in a major journal as if it were more than a non-result gussied up to seem profound. We may not be able to censor research formally, but we don't, as a society, have to pay for it.
One might say that this is a heavy duty over-reaction on our part, to a rather bland (if hyped) study that found hardly anything at all. Why get all heated up and panicky about a return to biological rationales for segregation (and worse)? Our response is that, as the Germans learned in the 1930s and later wrote widely about, the time to keep the horse in the barn is before it has inched its way out, one un-noticed step at a time. But lessons have been forgotten, and distant amorality is again offered, often with pious expressions of benign intent (again, as they were a century ago).
Friday, July 5, 2013
What cloning is and what it isn't
There is a new story about cloning, which we saw on the BBC (but which is published in the journal Biology of Reproduction). Mice have been cloned from blood cells, rather than any sort of stem cells. The procedure was the same one used to clone Dolly the sheep and has been used in other instances more recently.
According to the BBC, this technique can be used to improve methods for producing "high-quality" animals for farming or conservation. And, according to the authors of the paper, " This strategy will be applied to the rescue of infertile founder animals or a "last-of-line" animal possessing invaluable genetic resources." They specifically have in mind inbred mouse lines that would be difficult to impossible to reproduce.
This may be valuable scientific progress but it raises (again) the ethical issues about what and when cloning is permissible, especially if it comes to humans. But let's again be clear: the nucleus of the blood cell was inserted into a recipient egg cell, that then developed into a whole, new mouse. But this is not a clone of the donor mouse in several ways.
First, the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which is vital to life and involved in many processes that integrate with the nDNA, or nuclear DNA (which is what most people mean by "DNA"). So the new mice are hybrids between the donor and the recipient.
Second, each cell is somewhat different. The new mice have adult-mouse DNA, which means that it has been affected by mutation during the donor mouse's own embryologic development and subsequent mouse, and different donor cells even from the same mouse would be genetically somewhat different. It may, among other things, age more rapidly and so on, depending on what mutations had arisen before the nucleus was obtained from the blood cell.
These caveats don't mean the method doesn't 'work' but they simply raise, and raise again, the importance of a better understanding of what 'cloning' actually means. The ethical issues are not affected one way or another by this work. It may lead to great biomedical advances, if your own DNA (well, except for the mtDNA) could be used to grow cloned tissues that could be used in therapy for you. The idea is that these are your own cells, so you won't reject them, one of the major problems in organ and tissue transplants. But because of mutations and the issues we raise, some recipients might in fact have an immunological rejection problem.
So, this may become a routine practice and may have terrific benefit if properly monitored. But beware of misleading enthusiasm.
According to the BBC, this technique can be used to improve methods for producing "high-quality" animals for farming or conservation. And, according to the authors of the paper, " This strategy will be applied to the rescue of infertile founder animals or a "last-of-line" animal possessing invaluable genetic resources." They specifically have in mind inbred mouse lines that would be difficult to impossible to reproduce.
This may be valuable scientific progress but it raises (again) the ethical issues about what and when cloning is permissible, especially if it comes to humans. But let's again be clear: the nucleus of the blood cell was inserted into a recipient egg cell, that then developed into a whole, new mouse. But this is not a clone of the donor mouse in several ways.
First, the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which is vital to life and involved in many processes that integrate with the nDNA, or nuclear DNA (which is what most people mean by "DNA"). So the new mice are hybrids between the donor and the recipient.
Second, each cell is somewhat different. The new mice have adult-mouse DNA, which means that it has been affected by mutation during the donor mouse's own embryologic development and subsequent mouse, and different donor cells even from the same mouse would be genetically somewhat different. It may, among other things, age more rapidly and so on, depending on what mutations had arisen before the nucleus was obtained from the blood cell.
These caveats don't mean the method doesn't 'work' but they simply raise, and raise again, the importance of a better understanding of what 'cloning' actually means. The ethical issues are not affected one way or another by this work. It may lead to great biomedical advances, if your own DNA (well, except for the mtDNA) could be used to grow cloned tissues that could be used in therapy for you. The idea is that these are your own cells, so you won't reject them, one of the major problems in organ and tissue transplants. But because of mutations and the issues we raise, some recipients might in fact have an immunological rejection problem.
So, this may become a routine practice and may have terrific benefit if properly monitored. But beware of misleading enthusiasm.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
A question of the Campagna? The poignant side of 'Intelligent design'
This post is triggered by the exchanges on Holly's recent and typically excellent and clear post on evolution and how we know it. One commenter was pushing his Intelligent Design (ID) book, and s/he generated some very effective replies with links to extensive analysis that showed quite strongly how far off the factual mark was the book--and ID generally. Unfortunately, the exchange revealed the deep cleft in our society, which for nearly a century has played havoc with the idea of teaching and accepting what science tells us about the nature of the world, and our life in it.
It is so easy to criticize the blatant errors, falsities, and essentially willful ignorance of proper science repeatedly proffered by proponents of views like Intelligent Design (ID). But while real scientists easily have a field day showing the superficialities, errors, and calumnies of ID advocates, perhaps one should pause a moment and try to understand the latters' presumed motivation.
In Bertolt Brecht's play Galileo, a monk questions the great scientist on why he insists on advocating his views. "My parents are peasants in the Campagna [countryside]," the monk notes. Life is unrelentingly hard for them. There is no relief from living on the margins. "How could they take it, were I to tell them that they are on a lump of stone ceaselessly spinning in empty space, circling around a second-rate star? What then would be the use of their patience, their acceptance of misery?" The monk goes on to elaborate that for so many in this world, there is so little that if it were not for the belief that their suffering is for something, they would have nothing. If "there is no eye watching over us, after all...no meaning in our misery. Hunger is just not having eaten."
Galileo, a well-fed man of ease himself (indeed, a professor!), replies "Hm, well at least you have found out that it is not a question of the satellites of Jupiter, but of the peasants of the Campagna!" The cold truths are enough for him. Let others worry about morality and human well-being.
Room for poignancy?
Indeed, for many IDers today, life is lived on a cushion of middle-class privilege, and it is hard for us as scientists to find any sympathy for their deceptions and dissembling. But at their root, IDism and other struggles to rescue a loving, purposeful, rewarding personal God should evoke at least some empathy. It is all too easy for us as scientists, privileged to muse (with tenure, over a nice meal) about the nature of the world, to denigrate the often intentional ignorance of advocates of religious fundamentalism.
Somehow, many or most of us have been able to get over, or avoid, or ignore, the fear of death and oblivion, even if we know from the world we study that that is what awaits us. Our comfortable lives, and the industrial approach to science provide technical (rather than spiritual) cures or fixes for whatever we want, with the associated therapists and pharmaceutical aids in the process. But, obviously life is not like that for a great many people, even in our comfortable 'developed' world.
Isaac Newton, himself a religious fundamentalist, used science to try to understand the laws by which God had created the universe. God had clearly created a lawful cosmos (though He may have to intervene from time to time when complexities arose), and the job of scientists was to divine, so to speak, the orderliness of His work.
But despite his religion Newton was a scientist, and he believed in accepting the realities he found, and tried to understand, in the world. In his Principia Mathematica, he wrote "Certainly idle fancies ought not to be fabricated recklessly against the evidence of experiments, nor should we depart from analogy of nature, since nature is always simple and ever consonant with itself." We have to believe what we see in the world. Just because some facts are close at hand, and others elusive or missing, does not entitle us to dismiss the latter by inventing theological interpretations: No, nature is law-like, and what we can see reflects what we don't see. Gravity makes things drop on earth, so we must assume that's why planets orbit stars.
Not condescention
The endless debate with IDers is somewhat poignantly sad. There is no sympathy for the intentional or even exploitative advocates of unsupportable religious arguments for the nature of the world. They know--or should know--better than to say the things they say, unless they are playing a very un-Godlike selfish game, exploiting for sales or ego the very fear that drives so many to ache for religious solace.
This is not a matter of being condescending to benighted believers by those of us who see from a higher mountaintop. It's a matter of understanding the way the world looks from the Campagna. Of course, scientists might be so blinded by our own faith in materialism that we simply can't see otherwise. But basically every material boundary where IDers et al have said this is where God enters the picture, has been addressed successfully by science.
Indeed, any scientist would be exceedingly thrilled to be the one who proved the existence and nature of a benign comforting God who would look after all our griefs. Think of the accolades and rewards that would be heaped upon him or her! No, the reason that this isn't the main Grail of our work is that there is no trail to follow. (Of course, such a discovery might ironically be heavily punished as interference, as when the Grand Inquisitor condemned the returning Jesus, in The Brother's Karamazov).
If there is some religious theological and non-material truth, it is not to be found in science as we know it, and from a science point of view it is difficult to see where or how it could be found, if it exists. That is perhaps a struggle for anyone who is unsure about how or whether science's purely materialistic approach to existence might be misleading us.
But for those who sincerely don't know or for reasons of their circumstances can't know what the truth is telling us, one should try to understand with a bit of sympathy why they find it so difficult to accept that they are just "on a lump of stone ceaselessly spinning in empty space, circling around a second-rate star."
It is so easy to criticize the blatant errors, falsities, and essentially willful ignorance of proper science repeatedly proffered by proponents of views like Intelligent Design (ID). But while real scientists easily have a field day showing the superficialities, errors, and calumnies of ID advocates, perhaps one should pause a moment and try to understand the latters' presumed motivation.
In Bertolt Brecht's play Galileo, a monk questions the great scientist on why he insists on advocating his views. "My parents are peasants in the Campagna [countryside]," the monk notes. Life is unrelentingly hard for them. There is no relief from living on the margins. "How could they take it, were I to tell them that they are on a lump of stone ceaselessly spinning in empty space, circling around a second-rate star? What then would be the use of their patience, their acceptance of misery?" The monk goes on to elaborate that for so many in this world, there is so little that if it were not for the belief that their suffering is for something, they would have nothing. If "there is no eye watching over us, after all...no meaning in our misery. Hunger is just not having eaten."
Galileo, a well-fed man of ease himself (indeed, a professor!), replies "Hm, well at least you have found out that it is not a question of the satellites of Jupiter, but of the peasants of the Campagna!" The cold truths are enough for him. Let others worry about morality and human well-being.
Room for poignancy?
Indeed, for many IDers today, life is lived on a cushion of middle-class privilege, and it is hard for us as scientists to find any sympathy for their deceptions and dissembling. But at their root, IDism and other struggles to rescue a loving, purposeful, rewarding personal God should evoke at least some empathy. It is all too easy for us as scientists, privileged to muse (with tenure, over a nice meal) about the nature of the world, to denigrate the often intentional ignorance of advocates of religious fundamentalism.
Somehow, many or most of us have been able to get over, or avoid, or ignore, the fear of death and oblivion, even if we know from the world we study that that is what awaits us. Our comfortable lives, and the industrial approach to science provide technical (rather than spiritual) cures or fixes for whatever we want, with the associated therapists and pharmaceutical aids in the process. But, obviously life is not like that for a great many people, even in our comfortable 'developed' world.
Isaac Newton, himself a religious fundamentalist, used science to try to understand the laws by which God had created the universe. God had clearly created a lawful cosmos (though He may have to intervene from time to time when complexities arose), and the job of scientists was to divine, so to speak, the orderliness of His work.
But despite his religion Newton was a scientist, and he believed in accepting the realities he found, and tried to understand, in the world. In his Principia Mathematica, he wrote "Certainly idle fancies ought not to be fabricated recklessly against the evidence of experiments, nor should we depart from analogy of nature, since nature is always simple and ever consonant with itself." We have to believe what we see in the world. Just because some facts are close at hand, and others elusive or missing, does not entitle us to dismiss the latter by inventing theological interpretations: No, nature is law-like, and what we can see reflects what we don't see. Gravity makes things drop on earth, so we must assume that's why planets orbit stars.
Not condescention
The endless debate with IDers is somewhat poignantly sad. There is no sympathy for the intentional or even exploitative advocates of unsupportable religious arguments for the nature of the world. They know--or should know--better than to say the things they say, unless they are playing a very un-Godlike selfish game, exploiting for sales or ego the very fear that drives so many to ache for religious solace.
This is not a matter of being condescending to benighted believers by those of us who see from a higher mountaintop. It's a matter of understanding the way the world looks from the Campagna. Of course, scientists might be so blinded by our own faith in materialism that we simply can't see otherwise. But basically every material boundary where IDers et al have said this is where God enters the picture, has been addressed successfully by science.
Indeed, any scientist would be exceedingly thrilled to be the one who proved the existence and nature of a benign comforting God who would look after all our griefs. Think of the accolades and rewards that would be heaped upon him or her! No, the reason that this isn't the main Grail of our work is that there is no trail to follow. (Of course, such a discovery might ironically be heavily punished as interference, as when the Grand Inquisitor condemned the returning Jesus, in The Brother's Karamazov).
If there is some religious theological and non-material truth, it is not to be found in science as we know it, and from a science point of view it is difficult to see where or how it could be found, if it exists. That is perhaps a struggle for anyone who is unsure about how or whether science's purely materialistic approach to existence might be misleading us.
But for those who sincerely don't know or for reasons of their circumstances can't know what the truth is telling us, one should try to understand with a bit of sympathy why they find it so difficult to accept that they are just "on a lump of stone ceaselessly spinning in empty space, circling around a second-rate star."
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
To market, to market to buy a fat grant (and how it corrupts science)
Science is a human endeavor and, these days, a thoroughly middle class, professional one. Rare is the basement tinkerer who can transform the world's understanding. It's still possible and the greatest insights may still come that way. But by far more common is that we work in institutions, need lots of costly and often rarely available equipment, and technicians to maintain it. And, above all, we need our salaries and retirement plans to live by!
Given all that, and our natural egotisms and vanities as humans, perhaps especially in large impersonal cultures like modern societies, it is not surprising that we want attention for our ideas. More to the point, perhaps, we have established--explicitly or even proudly--the idea that, though life is short, forcing us into a bazaar-like competition for limited resources is how the lives of scientists should be lived. A strange philosophy when we know we're mortal and life is short....
We can't comment usefully on these social and ethical facets of science, but we did want to say a few things about views we regularly express here on our blog having to do with our frequent (incessant?) critiquing of various aspects of science as marketing, hype, and the like. We have raised this with regard to genomics, evolutionary medicine, behavior genetics, evolutionary psychology, biomedical and public health research, and even astronomy. And we will surely continue to raise it in future posts.
Our point is that these fields, if not every field of science these days is pervasively affected by stories that exaggerate the importance of findings and of the investigator. And because it's so important, 'further research' is always needed. That means more money, of course. The stories are hawked by scientists, but they're pressed and reinforced by the system of careerism, grant needs, job advancement and the like by public media that thrive on Big Stories, themselves in a competitive environment (and usually, as reporters, journalists, filmmakers, and so on, not very critical or knowledgeable about the science). Everyone knows this is going on. It is deliberately done, at least by the leaders in science and science administration and reporting.
Not only would it be hard to be knowledgeable and make a deadline as a journalist, but the pressure is to make up a deadline: exaggeration and simplification sells. Only sometimes is it openly acknowledged that the public needs to be treated patronizingly rather than told the sober truth. And administrators' climb up the bureaucratic career ladder depends on ever-enlarging their portfolio of scientist-clients. The reward system guarantees what we see.
Well, what's wrong with marketing?
So what? If everybody knows this is the game, who cares? Well, we think there are differences between advertising for products and advertising for science. It's one thing to add useless features and fine exteriors to stoves and refrigerators, or to have scantly clothed babes leaning against pickup trucks as if you'll get them when you buy the truck. It's just business, and any wary person knows the truck comes stripped (so to speak) of the babe. And nobody forces you to pay for a phone that does things you'll never use or understand.
Customers can at least try to judge products for themselves and the implications of consumer choice are less than ominous as a rule. Other systems of merchandise distribution and choice may not work any better. But if some useless features of fridges or cell phones affect which companies stay in business and so on, there is no real consequence (except, perhaps, the way consumerism devastates environments).
But we're talking about science. There, it does matter.
Marketing is done explicitly to divert funding from one topic to some other topic. It is now ever more frequently done to scale up (Big Data, Big Science) in ways that the investigators know will later on be politically hard to terminate (one could name many such boondoggles in biomedical research alone). Big Science is, these days, always based on generality rather than focus, because that is a long-lifespan guarantee and a religious-like promise of salvation.
False or exaggerated or irresponsibly simplistic claims that move large amounts of funds in a directed way deprive other topics that are more focused and could be studied with higher likelihood of useful new knowledge or practical success of funding. Society paying the bill is in a sense defrauded relative to what they're being promised by the media, the universities, the scientists, and so on. The decision makers often cannot really judge swarms of technical legerdemain.
Worse, if people believe the hype--and our training system means that even many scientists actually do--then not only is bad science replicated end-on-end well beyond diminishing returns (like go-nowhere GWAS and many other examples), but good creative science is less likely to be done. Simplistic promises lead to incremental, safe, but low-yield work that delays if not prevents more focused, cogent, and often cheaper work from being done. It discourages real attempts at creative innovation or even training students that way (they're trained, instead, too often in grantsmanship).
People yearning for simplicity, which makes it easier to write papers and promises, and needing to please deans with steady 'productivity', hungrily eat up the false promises and jump on bandwagons. Huge amounts of funds pour into areas that the best lobbyists press for (e.g., recently, even in times of funding shortage, the 'brain map', life elsewhere in the universe, men going to Mars, .....).
The system is well-documented to lead to widespread dissembling, exaggeration, selective reporting, publication bias, missing negative results, biased estimates of causal effect strengths, impenetrable technical details hiding potential weaknesses, statistical jiggery-pokery, and even outright fraud (though that seems to be rare, fortunately). Even taking human fallibilities into account, these traits are not good for science.
Even without being naively utopian, this is not the best science or science environment that could be maintained, and that's why we write about it critically. While science is run by specific individuals, we try very hard not to make our critiques personal. And we don't claim to have utopian solutions. But if a problem is not openly recognized, and there is not grass-roots demand for change, then we'll be destined to stay with what we have.
When it comes to science, there is something wrong with marketing!
Given all that, and our natural egotisms and vanities as humans, perhaps especially in large impersonal cultures like modern societies, it is not surprising that we want attention for our ideas. More to the point, perhaps, we have established--explicitly or even proudly--the idea that, though life is short, forcing us into a bazaar-like competition for limited resources is how the lives of scientists should be lived. A strange philosophy when we know we're mortal and life is short....
We can't comment usefully on these social and ethical facets of science, but we did want to say a few things about views we regularly express here on our blog having to do with our frequent (incessant?) critiquing of various aspects of science as marketing, hype, and the like. We have raised this with regard to genomics, evolutionary medicine, behavior genetics, evolutionary psychology, biomedical and public health research, and even astronomy. And we will surely continue to raise it in future posts.
Our point is that these fields, if not every field of science these days is pervasively affected by stories that exaggerate the importance of findings and of the investigator. And because it's so important, 'further research' is always needed. That means more money, of course. The stories are hawked by scientists, but they're pressed and reinforced by the system of careerism, grant needs, job advancement and the like by public media that thrive on Big Stories, themselves in a competitive environment (and usually, as reporters, journalists, filmmakers, and so on, not very critical or knowledgeable about the science). Everyone knows this is going on. It is deliberately done, at least by the leaders in science and science administration and reporting.
Not only would it be hard to be knowledgeable and make a deadline as a journalist, but the pressure is to make up a deadline: exaggeration and simplification sells. Only sometimes is it openly acknowledged that the public needs to be treated patronizingly rather than told the sober truth. And administrators' climb up the bureaucratic career ladder depends on ever-enlarging their portfolio of scientist-clients. The reward system guarantees what we see.
Well, what's wrong with marketing?
So what? If everybody knows this is the game, who cares? Well, we think there are differences between advertising for products and advertising for science. It's one thing to add useless features and fine exteriors to stoves and refrigerators, or to have scantly clothed babes leaning against pickup trucks as if you'll get them when you buy the truck. It's just business, and any wary person knows the truck comes stripped (so to speak) of the babe. And nobody forces you to pay for a phone that does things you'll never use or understand.
Customers can at least try to judge products for themselves and the implications of consumer choice are less than ominous as a rule. Other systems of merchandise distribution and choice may not work any better. But if some useless features of fridges or cell phones affect which companies stay in business and so on, there is no real consequence (except, perhaps, the way consumerism devastates environments).
But we're talking about science. There, it does matter.
Marketing is done explicitly to divert funding from one topic to some other topic. It is now ever more frequently done to scale up (Big Data, Big Science) in ways that the investigators know will later on be politically hard to terminate (one could name many such boondoggles in biomedical research alone). Big Science is, these days, always based on generality rather than focus, because that is a long-lifespan guarantee and a religious-like promise of salvation.
False or exaggerated or irresponsibly simplistic claims that move large amounts of funds in a directed way deprive other topics that are more focused and could be studied with higher likelihood of useful new knowledge or practical success of funding. Society paying the bill is in a sense defrauded relative to what they're being promised by the media, the universities, the scientists, and so on. The decision makers often cannot really judge swarms of technical legerdemain.
Worse, if people believe the hype--and our training system means that even many scientists actually do--then not only is bad science replicated end-on-end well beyond diminishing returns (like go-nowhere GWAS and many other examples), but good creative science is less likely to be done. Simplistic promises lead to incremental, safe, but low-yield work that delays if not prevents more focused, cogent, and often cheaper work from being done. It discourages real attempts at creative innovation or even training students that way (they're trained, instead, too often in grantsmanship).
People yearning for simplicity, which makes it easier to write papers and promises, and needing to please deans with steady 'productivity', hungrily eat up the false promises and jump on bandwagons. Huge amounts of funds pour into areas that the best lobbyists press for (e.g., recently, even in times of funding shortage, the 'brain map', life elsewhere in the universe, men going to Mars, .....).
The system is well-documented to lead to widespread dissembling, exaggeration, selective reporting, publication bias, missing negative results, biased estimates of causal effect strengths, impenetrable technical details hiding potential weaknesses, statistical jiggery-pokery, and even outright fraud (though that seems to be rare, fortunately). Even taking human fallibilities into account, these traits are not good for science.
Even without being naively utopian, this is not the best science or science environment that could be maintained, and that's why we write about it critically. While science is run by specific individuals, we try very hard not to make our critiques personal. And we don't claim to have utopian solutions. But if a problem is not openly recognized, and there is not grass-roots demand for change, then we'll be destined to stay with what we have.
When it comes to science, there is something wrong with marketing!
Monday, July 1, 2013
Exo-sex and Exo-texts! Faster (even) than a speeding bullet
We posted last week about the new planet-bearing star Gliese 667C, and speculation that there might be life on its planets. We mused about life on the planets that orbit their star in 2 earth-months or less, but also about the implications of Gliese 667C being 'only' 22 light years away. A commenter on our post noted that we were incorrect to talk of how long it would take to communicate with (much less actually go to) these potentially life-bearing planets. Since light goes 300,000 Km per second, our printer doesn't have enough ink to print all the zeroes in the distance in kilometers that the star and its planets are away from us. So we cast a somewhat skeptical eye on the life-is-possible, or even nearly inevitable, arguments from the space agencies and the media, and whether it makes sense to discuss such things in any kind of scientific way.
Our commenter said that NASA had a scheme to build a vehicle that could travel at about 3% of the speed of light (10,000 Km/second). Wow! If that's true, it beats a Maserati by a long shot, and as a space shot, gives one much to think about. That's because as the commenter noted, it would take only a mere 730 years to get to the planets of interest. So we thought we'd do a bit of musing on the subject of such a voyage. But the prototype space vehicle is motivated by a series of aft-detonated nuclear explosions, a kind of explosive hyper-mega-flatulence that will need modification. David's original recollection was that the estimated speed was 1/10th the speed of light (c), a trip that would require a mere 220 years, and we thought we could go with that speed, since by the time such a vehicle is actually implemented NASA's design (or one by, say, the EU or China) will surely be faster than current estimates.
Of course, such a voyage to the out beyond couldn't be a manned space shot to Gliese for several reasons. First, all the communications issues we discussed in our previous Gliese-O-gram would be ten times slower from Earth to the vehicle than just trying to get in touch with Gliesers by electronic missals (rather than missiles!). And, having a spaceship part-way there wouldn't add much to what we know about extraterrestrial life. Of course, to get funding for this venture, NASA will promise that these planets have more on them than, say, Mars. All sorts of conjuring will be done to convince us that we need to invest in first-hand visiting these new (perhaps) life-bearing orbs.
Going with a 220-year trip, makes it easier to relate this thrilling adventure to something familiar to us, America's Lewis and Clark expedition. That trip into the then-unknown West took place in 1804, just about 220 years ago, and gives us a kind of human-scale comparison that's easy to think about. For example, compare our current culture with that of Lewis and Clark's, because by the time NASA gets to Gliese planets the cultural gap between then and now will be, if anything, hugely greater. Of course, during the intervening 220 years we'll surely have gone on to all sorts of other discoveries (real and claimed) -- and perhaps even received communication from intelligent life in some other, unexpected corner of the cosmos.
Now, far be it for us to be cynical, but it can't just be some sort of long-lived trekking robot shot into space, making its way to the planets orbiting Gliese 667C. No, only a manned space shot makes sense, because we will need face to face interactions with Gliesers (if they have faces), so we can visit, chat, and dine with them, really understanding their civilization and how they manage with 28-day years, as we tried to describe last week. BUT, there are problems.
This cannot be a 'manned' space shot. No, women will be required, or rather, men and women, to ensure that the space ship continues to be peopled. 220 years is about ten human generations, so the astronauts will have to reproduce in cycles until they've got enough boys and girls each generation to in turn reproduce; if they don't, what will arrive will be a tin casket with dried out corpses for the Gliesers to bury (they probably won't be able to cremate it, because it will have to be too fire-resistant to have survived the rigors of such a breathlessly rapid space voyage).
Exo-sex: Lewis the Xth and Clark the Xth, and the need for exo birth control
We'll have to hope the astronauts will want to procreate, but the survival of the lineage and the success of their mission will depend on the successful flow, one might say, of their relevant substances. That there may be 10 generations of inbreeding required, well, raises certain genetic health issues. The inbreeding will have to be very close because the limited size of the capsule will require that the astronaut contingent keep within their Malthusian limits--that is, so there is enough food, water, and toilet paper for each generation for the whole 220 years. There will have to be some restraint on hanky-panky. Exo-condoms will do the trick, perhaps, along with proper population management. Whether they're sensitive enough to be used rigorously is a technological question beyond our scope.
On GlieserTrek, the crew size will be limited of course, so there will be no question of extended maternity or paternity leave in the enroute generations. Presumably, because this fact will be known in advance (at least to the initial generation), clear policies for shared parenting will need to be implemented. It was easier for Lewis and Clark, both being men and in a time before same-sex adoptions were accepted practice. And while their trip only lasted less than a generation and required no re-generation, they did meet many Indians on their trip west, but as far as we know there were no paternity issues.
But there are more serious problems than mere bedroom management. Each generation will start life as mental blank slates. They will have to be trained in the ways of life and space.
And daily life....
It's all well and good to speak of a fusion engine in our nearly sestercentennial vehicle, and its nuclear fuel may last forever. But think of the food demands! Think of the size of the refrigerator the crew will need: no just keeping fresh by dragging a barrel in the cool waters behind the canoe.
Lewis and Clark were able to provision themselves along the way, til they could entirely restock with Columbia river salmon. Our NASA-canoe will not be able to obtain sustenance along its 220-year path. No casually dropping fishing lines over the side. Perhaps they can figure out how to provision themselves with an on-board garden, which seems possible but tricky--220 years worth of soil? How to keep it from getting exhausted? Or how to carry enough water for hydroponic gardening? And to keep nasty insects from eating the vital crops. No, they'll have to eat some version of the delicacies that campers use (figure grabbed from the web). Nor, unlike those pristine times out West, will our voyagers be just tossing trash out the window. Surely even a Republican President would insist that recycling be de rigueuer on our voyage!
The clear practical need will be to obtain food for the return voyage from the Gliesers themelves. One can only hope our intrepid descendant crew will not land with guns blazing but will arrive peacefully, in a bartering frame of mind, and that they'll have the kind of luck that the original Lewis and Clark enjoyed (for the most part, a few skirmishes aside). Hopefully, the natives will be happy to provide food, that just as hopefully will be palatable, with the required vitamins and other nutrients, not too heavily salted (no MSG), and with appropriate serving sizes. And hopefully, like native Americans, the Gliesers will eagerly accept colored beads.
Exo-texts: Massively distant learning with a bang!
Assuming that each generation's parents' brains haven't been jellied by cosmic rays, they will certainly play a part in educating their offspring. But surely NASA will be streaming updated materials like technical directions, that each new generation will have to absorb. One has to recognize that educating 10 generations of Astrokids will be a challenge. It might be worth bringing versions of lasting things like Shakespeare and calculus in book (well, e-book) form on this trek, but it will really demand distant learning for the new Lewises and Clarks to keep up with technology through the generations of their family voyages.
At the actual speed of light, Barnes and Noble can send out updated text and other educational material (not to mention porn, if the current adult generation requires it to be inspired to do what it takes even to make the next generation under their cramped, rather non-private conditions). Each new exo-text can stream 10 times faster than the spacecraft itself. What a boon for the new online course industry that is soon going to put universities out of business!
Of course, there will be problems. Test-taking, to ensure that each generation's youngsters actually do their work and learn the requisite material (unlike current college students who are preoccupied with football and other serious matters), will be somewhat delayed. Approximating, so we don't have to use higher math, the average exo-test will take about 10 years to arrive, and the answers 10 years to return to the professors (well, they'll be under-paid instructors) to grade, and another 10 years for the results to be communicated to the spacecraft. By this time, the youngsters will have reached their own rutting age and their minds may no longer be on the fine points of astrophysics and control-panel management.
Of course, the closer they get to their landing time, the longer each such exo-text and exo-test cycle will be, even though they'll need more rapid turnaround to be properly prepared for the landing and First Encounter with the ETs. Strangely, NASA will have been able to communicate by radio and TV with the Gliesers for many years while the craft is on its cruise, so it is not clear just what will be waiting for them. But one must hope that 220 year-old computer landing algorithms work with the venerably mature vehicle's systems. This is not like abacuses which can, in fact, survive for centuries in working order. No, it's a more daunting thought--I have enough trouble getting my own programs to run (not to mention floppy disks with no available disk drive), and they're not even ten years old, much less ten generations!
Meanwhile, of course, back on Earth the culture will have had 220 years of change. The home front will be much more different from what it was at launch time, than you and I are from the day Lewis and Clark shook President Jefferson's hand and hopped hopefully on horseback, heading for St Looie. The countries that organized the Gliese expedition may have been nuked or no longer exist, or polluted into penury by Landing Day. The Supreme Court may even have outlawed contact with heretical non-Christian aliens, as being even more likely to lead to sin than stem-cell cloning.
Communication by klunky electronic means may have become decades or more out of date, as people come to entertain themselves by holographic real-time 3D vicarious living (think of the possibilities!), and earthlings may find radio communication with an ancient spacecraft as boring as we'd find it to try to communicate with someone trekking the Rockies by sending a message by smoke signals or runner!
Well, it's time we abandoned this interesting exploration of space science and its exciting adventures, for which we may nonetheless be expected to pick up the bill in the form of taxpayer funding for the expedition. Instead, we should start to think about something real, like, say feeding people here with adequate vitamins and portion sizes (and not too over-salted).
And as we said last time, perhaps we should leave all of this to Hollywood. They have the money, and plenty of leftover grade B space suits. Let them build the hyperspeed rocket, and leave the rest of us to our fantasies.
Our commenter said that NASA had a scheme to build a vehicle that could travel at about 3% of the speed of light (10,000 Km/second). Wow! If that's true, it beats a Maserati by a long shot, and as a space shot, gives one much to think about. That's because as the commenter noted, it would take only a mere 730 years to get to the planets of interest. So we thought we'd do a bit of musing on the subject of such a voyage. But the prototype space vehicle is motivated by a series of aft-detonated nuclear explosions, a kind of explosive hyper-mega-flatulence that will need modification. David's original recollection was that the estimated speed was 1/10th the speed of light (c), a trip that would require a mere 220 years, and we thought we could go with that speed, since by the time such a vehicle is actually implemented NASA's design (or one by, say, the EU or China) will surely be faster than current estimates.
Of course, such a voyage to the out beyond couldn't be a manned space shot to Gliese for several reasons. First, all the communications issues we discussed in our previous Gliese-O-gram would be ten times slower from Earth to the vehicle than just trying to get in touch with Gliesers by electronic missals (rather than missiles!). And, having a spaceship part-way there wouldn't add much to what we know about extraterrestrial life. Of course, to get funding for this venture, NASA will promise that these planets have more on them than, say, Mars. All sorts of conjuring will be done to convince us that we need to invest in first-hand visiting these new (perhaps) life-bearing orbs.
Going with a 220-year trip, makes it easier to relate this thrilling adventure to something familiar to us, America's Lewis and Clark expedition. That trip into the then-unknown West took place in 1804, just about 220 years ago, and gives us a kind of human-scale comparison that's easy to think about. For example, compare our current culture with that of Lewis and Clark's, because by the time NASA gets to Gliese planets the cultural gap between then and now will be, if anything, hugely greater. Of course, during the intervening 220 years we'll surely have gone on to all sorts of other discoveries (real and claimed) -- and perhaps even received communication from intelligent life in some other, unexpected corner of the cosmos.
 |
| Lewis and Clark and their party carried almost two tons of supplies—enough to see them through a 28-month journey across 7,500 miles. But that's nothing... |
This cannot be a 'manned' space shot. No, women will be required, or rather, men and women, to ensure that the space ship continues to be peopled. 220 years is about ten human generations, so the astronauts will have to reproduce in cycles until they've got enough boys and girls each generation to in turn reproduce; if they don't, what will arrive will be a tin casket with dried out corpses for the Gliesers to bury (they probably won't be able to cremate it, because it will have to be too fire-resistant to have survived the rigors of such a breathlessly rapid space voyage).
Exo-sex: Lewis the Xth and Clark the Xth, and the need for exo birth control
We'll have to hope the astronauts will want to procreate, but the survival of the lineage and the success of their mission will depend on the successful flow, one might say, of their relevant substances. That there may be 10 generations of inbreeding required, well, raises certain genetic health issues. The inbreeding will have to be very close because the limited size of the capsule will require that the astronaut contingent keep within their Malthusian limits--that is, so there is enough food, water, and toilet paper for each generation for the whole 220 years. There will have to be some restraint on hanky-panky. Exo-condoms will do the trick, perhaps, along with proper population management. Whether they're sensitive enough to be used rigorously is a technological question beyond our scope.
On GlieserTrek, the crew size will be limited of course, so there will be no question of extended maternity or paternity leave in the enroute generations. Presumably, because this fact will be known in advance (at least to the initial generation), clear policies for shared parenting will need to be implemented. It was easier for Lewis and Clark, both being men and in a time before same-sex adoptions were accepted practice. And while their trip only lasted less than a generation and required no re-generation, they did meet many Indians on their trip west, but as far as we know there were no paternity issues.
But there are more serious problems than mere bedroom management. Each generation will start life as mental blank slates. They will have to be trained in the ways of life and space.
And daily life....
It's all well and good to speak of a fusion engine in our nearly sestercentennial vehicle, and its nuclear fuel may last forever. But think of the food demands! Think of the size of the refrigerator the crew will need: no just keeping fresh by dragging a barrel in the cool waters behind the canoe.
Lewis and Clark were able to provision themselves along the way, til they could entirely restock with Columbia river salmon. Our NASA-canoe will not be able to obtain sustenance along its 220-year path. No casually dropping fishing lines over the side. Perhaps they can figure out how to provision themselves with an on-board garden, which seems possible but tricky--220 years worth of soil? How to keep it from getting exhausted? Or how to carry enough water for hydroponic gardening? And to keep nasty insects from eating the vital crops. No, they'll have to eat some version of the delicacies that campers use (figure grabbed from the web). Nor, unlike those pristine times out West, will our voyagers be just tossing trash out the window. Surely even a Republican President would insist that recycling be de rigueuer on our voyage!
The clear practical need will be to obtain food for the return voyage from the Gliesers themelves. One can only hope our intrepid descendant crew will not land with guns blazing but will arrive peacefully, in a bartering frame of mind, and that they'll have the kind of luck that the original Lewis and Clark enjoyed (for the most part, a few skirmishes aside). Hopefully, the natives will be happy to provide food, that just as hopefully will be palatable, with the required vitamins and other nutrients, not too heavily salted (no MSG), and with appropriate serving sizes. And hopefully, like native Americans, the Gliesers will eagerly accept colored beads.
Exo-texts: Massively distant learning with a bang!
Assuming that each generation's parents' brains haven't been jellied by cosmic rays, they will certainly play a part in educating their offspring. But surely NASA will be streaming updated materials like technical directions, that each new generation will have to absorb. One has to recognize that educating 10 generations of Astrokids will be a challenge. It might be worth bringing versions of lasting things like Shakespeare and calculus in book (well, e-book) form on this trek, but it will really demand distant learning for the new Lewises and Clarks to keep up with technology through the generations of their family voyages.
At the actual speed of light, Barnes and Noble can send out updated text and other educational material (not to mention porn, if the current adult generation requires it to be inspired to do what it takes even to make the next generation under their cramped, rather non-private conditions). Each new exo-text can stream 10 times faster than the spacecraft itself. What a boon for the new online course industry that is soon going to put universities out of business!
Of course, there will be problems. Test-taking, to ensure that each generation's youngsters actually do their work and learn the requisite material (unlike current college students who are preoccupied with football and other serious matters), will be somewhat delayed. Approximating, so we don't have to use higher math, the average exo-test will take about 10 years to arrive, and the answers 10 years to return to the professors (well, they'll be under-paid instructors) to grade, and another 10 years for the results to be communicated to the spacecraft. By this time, the youngsters will have reached their own rutting age and their minds may no longer be on the fine points of astrophysics and control-panel management.
Of course, the closer they get to their landing time, the longer each such exo-text and exo-test cycle will be, even though they'll need more rapid turnaround to be properly prepared for the landing and First Encounter with the ETs. Strangely, NASA will have been able to communicate by radio and TV with the Gliesers for many years while the craft is on its cruise, so it is not clear just what will be waiting for them. But one must hope that 220 year-old computer landing algorithms work with the venerably mature vehicle's systems. This is not like abacuses which can, in fact, survive for centuries in working order. No, it's a more daunting thought--I have enough trouble getting my own programs to run (not to mention floppy disks with no available disk drive), and they're not even ten years old, much less ten generations!
 |
| Lewis and Clark meet Chinooks on the Lower Columbia, 1805 |
Meanwhile, of course, back on Earth the culture will have had 220 years of change. The home front will be much more different from what it was at launch time, than you and I are from the day Lewis and Clark shook President Jefferson's hand and hopped hopefully on horseback, heading for St Looie. The countries that organized the Gliese expedition may have been nuked or no longer exist, or polluted into penury by Landing Day. The Supreme Court may even have outlawed contact with heretical non-Christian aliens, as being even more likely to lead to sin than stem-cell cloning.
Communication by klunky electronic means may have become decades or more out of date, as people come to entertain themselves by holographic real-time 3D vicarious living (think of the possibilities!), and earthlings may find radio communication with an ancient spacecraft as boring as we'd find it to try to communicate with someone trekking the Rockies by sending a message by smoke signals or runner!
Well, it's time we abandoned this interesting exploration of space science and its exciting adventures, for which we may nonetheless be expected to pick up the bill in the form of taxpayer funding for the expedition. Instead, we should start to think about something real, like, say feeding people here with adequate vitamins and portion sizes (and not too over-salted).
And as we said last time, perhaps we should leave all of this to Hollywood. They have the money, and plenty of leftover grade B space suits. Let them build the hyperspeed rocket, and leave the rest of us to our fantasies.
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