Off to Finland? At this time of year? Are you totally nuts??

 This weekend I was off to Helsinki, Finland. It's the pit of the year (unless you're deeply into winter sports and drinking lots and lots of ethanol): it's cold, it's icy, and there's hardly a glimmer of the sun all day long.  I've been there in midsummer when the opposite is true (and, since I'm not into winter sports, winter's absence is a blessing).

Helsinki South Harbor, summer

Helsinki South Harbor, winter

Anyway, why go there?  I'll be co-teaching a week-long minicourse called Logical Reasoning in Human Genetics.  It's an effort to suggest a different kind of view of this subject that is so central to so much research these days.  It will give a flavor consistent with what you see here on MT, but it's not a propaganda course, nor a methods course.  It is, in a sense, a philosophical course about the amount and origins of variation related to human traits--and how we should approach finding and characterizing it.

We've taught this in Finland a few times, but also in Madrid, Berlin, and Maracaibo over the past several years.  I teach this with several colleagues, including Joe Lee who is a genetic epidemiologist at Columbia University, and Markus Perola who does like service in Finland. Primarily, this was initiated with Joe Terwilliger, also from Columbia, with whom I've been collaborating for many years.

Now, Joe Lee and Markus Perola are nice, normal, ordinary humans.  But whether one can say that about Joe Terwilliger is quite another story.  Here's a guy who goes to inner Mongolia to live in a yurt and eat whatever umentionable delectables the locals eat--in the dead of winter--for vacation!  His new favorite place to vacation is North Korea.  This is the same Terwilliger who, because of appearance similarities, troops around New York City on Lincoln's birthday--wearing a Lincoln costume!  This is the guy who has walked every street in Manhattan, and plotted it for eager viewers of his web page.  Don't take my word for this....take his!.  Other than airports, his true passion is playing the tuba, which he does professionally whenever he gets the chance.

Teaching with Twig is a challenge to say the least.  Not only is Joe totally uninhibited in what he says (and he's a person of strong views!), but he's also as smart as they come and cuts through the statistical baloney like a diamond meat-slicer.

We have 60 unwitting 'students' signed up for this course, from Finland and other EU ports of call, and we had to turn down 20 or 30 others.  They are graduate students, post-docs, and professionals in genetics, epidemiology, and molecular genetics, etc.  So somebody, at least, thinks we might have some points to make.

Hopefully, the exchanges will be beneficial to the students, and to us, as we try to convey what we think, and to understand what they are learning and doing.  With luck, we all come away knowing more than we did.  Perhaps some post-worthy things will arise.

And the food in Helsinki can be terrific!

Does ultrasound cause damage to developing fetuses?

Over at "Science Over a Cuppa," an always interesting and thoughtful blog, neuroscientist Emily Williams raises well-considered concerns about the prenatal use of ultrasound.  She has long wondered about its potential teratogenic effects, particularly since at least one researcher reported changes in the brain of mice after exposure in 2006, and in her post she presents results of her extensive literature review to determine the current state of knowledge.  She does a great job explaining the biology of ultrasound and its possible effects on developing tissues, which we can't and won't repeat here, but do go take a look. What we can do is address the more general issues that the question of the dangers of ultrasound bring up.

Ultrasound is more than an imaging technique.  It has therapeutic applications, including being used to speed the healing of bone fractures and enhance the healing of soft tissue damage.  It is used to enhance nerve regeneration and to deliver drugs in a targeted way, and high energy ultrasound is used to break calculi such as kidney stones into fragments, among numerous other uses.

Ultrasound is just what the name says -- high frequency sound waves.  The sound waves penetrate tissue, and cause alternating compression and expansion, and that, says Emily, is where the problem lies.  Water pressure ebbs and flows within cells, and this can cause cells to rupture, and/or can result in abnormal ion transfer into cells, with potentially dangerous results, particularly in a developing embryo. Ultrasound also heats water, and raised temperatures in developing tissues can be dangerous as well.

When first developed, ultrasound was used late in pregnancy, whereas it is now done early and often, with unknown consequences.  Emily doesn't say this explicitly in her post, but one of the reasons people have been concerned about prenatal ultrasound is its potential association with autism.  Indeed, she has co-authored at least one paper on this possible connection and herself has a history of interest in autism.  Studies looking for an association have been done, but have not been definitive.  The 2006 study has been criticized, for example, for not representing actual exposure amounts or times.

Why is it proving to be difficult to rule ultrasound in or out as a cause of autism?  Or any other developmental disorder?  For many of the same reasons that it is difficult to understand any complex trait.  In part, it is because there are so many variables that are difficult to control or account for, from frequency of the sound waves (one study found that 40% of ultrasound transducers in hospitals were malfunctioning, meaning that it's impossible to know dose exposure in many cases), to definitions of autism.  Indeed, consensus is still out as to whether incidence of autism has increased as dramatically as it seems to have in recent decades, or whether increased incidence is primarily a function of increased diagnosis.  Experiments can't be done on humans and animal models may or may not be representative.

And in part, if ultrasound is causal, not every child exposed in utero develops autism, so the effect must be either fairly small, or there is a small window of 'opportunity' during which exposure is more damaging than at other times, depending on whatever is happening developmentally in the brain.

The individual at risk, but risk is a population phenomenon
Whatever the truth about this candidate risk factor -- or many others, for that matter, the problem we face is not just that there are many ways to end up with similar traits, and that these can, may, or even must include at least some genetic factors. But they can interact with each other in ways we can't specify in advance, and there can, may -- or even must? include others that we have not identified.

This is such a common problem, that sooner or later perhaps we will, as the science collective, find better ways to ask the causal question.  Meanwhile, every time we can actually identify a cause with notable effect, it is worth addressing it rather than just amassing a list of everything somebody thought might be a cause.

Because each case is different, and the risk to any individual may also be small, one must infer factors like the risk of prenatal ultrasound on a population basis.  But the greater the sample you take or need, the more variation in all sorts of variables you will also be including.  This makes the evaluation very challenging......and it's the same story with so many multi-causal traits and one of the major problems with genomic studies where most genetic risk factors have individually small effects.

Unfortunately, a cause (if it is one) like ultrasound can, once discovered and clearly documented, present us with a dilemma:  the cause of one problem may be a benefit in regard to some other problem.  This is likely to be a common fact.  Ultrasound has some quite beneficial value.  Similarly with diet: eating, say, dietary sugar or fat provides value to the body but in some instances puts it at risk.

What are we supposed to do?

Man....or Superman?

For no particular reason, I was reading about the philosopher Friedrick Nitschze.  Nitschze had various views that have been interpreted (or misinterpreted) as advocating that everything in society be given to the best, the ubermensch--the 'superman' or 'overman'.  The best naturally lords it over the rest, but that is good for society, that is in the very nature of things.

The idea that society should favor the Superman is not at all new.  Plato and perhaps others in the era of classical Greek and Roman philosophers, explicitly worried that a careless society frivolously sent its premier members off to fight, take risk, and die in combat for everyone else.  In his Republic, Plato advocated special breeding of the elite to help avoid the loss of societal vigor and quality that the elite's valorous role in combat entailed.

Justification of maintenance of privilege for the upper crust had many manifestations in western culture since them (nobles 'by divine will').  The privilege of leadership, secular and otherwise, led to warrior kings and crusaders for this or the other Faith.  Yet, the frail and sickly, the less educated and so on, remained safely at home--and, if you can believe it, perhaps even able to inseminate the damsels who otherwise might bear the flower of the next generation.

Things got serious when Darwin's time came along in the age of Natural law and materialist science in the 19th century.  It was obvious that the superior members of society were the ones sent off to war, the elite nobility bearing the brunt of risk.  Darwin noticed that civilizations had developed many means by which to keep the lesser-quality members of society alive and, as a result, give them a chance to breed.  As the inferior were numerous, the masses thus dragged down society.  As technology improved, the effect, the watering down of quality, would only be systematically greater.

One of the roots of eugenics in the 19th century had to do with the lower reproductivity of the elite, and Darwin's distant cousin Francis Galton coined the term 'eugenics' in thinking about remedies for this, based on selectively encouraging increased breeding by the Best.  This was, like Plato's Republic, designed as a positive and proactive encouragement of upper-crust increased reprocuction.  But things easily, one may say naturally, turned negative as well: why pay taxes to support the diseased, insane, incorrigible, criminal, low-lifing members of society?  From a Darwinian point of view, this would be the way that society could reverse its trend of protecting the weak, and systematically implementing the society driven by increased fractions of the capable Elite.

One of the many issues in Europe, particularly Germany, during WWI and thereafter, was the idea that (as had been said before), the weak had stayed at home while the hale and capable were being slaughtered like lambs at the front.  Not only that, the society had to pay the cost of caretaking of the weak, and thus lost those resources for nurturing what would make society better.  Among the excuses used by Hitler and the Nazis for picking on Jews and Gypsies was that the former had disproportinately stayed safely at home, while the latter--inherently inferior as everybody 'knew'--were parasitic low-lifers.

It must be stressed that in the century of eugenics, that this was not a secret evil plot by some mentally insane weirdos, like those who go shooting up schools.  To the contrary, eugenic theory and policies were advocated and implemented by the leading scientists and medical clinicians of their day, the science advisers to politicians, the leading authors of research, and the ideas and policies proposed with expressly beneficent ideas about the golden age for society that their actions would lead to.  

A new eugenics era?
These things were done with explicit invocations of Darwin's name.  For eons, natural selection had done its job in the past, weeding out the unfit in human society, as it had done since the birth of life on earth, and favoring the best people and the best societies, and justifying imperialism and war waged against the inferior.  Darwin was used to justify inequality from economic to colonial.

In 1926, when formal eugenics was in its flourishing state as a mainline theoretical part of Darwinian science, one of the reasons for Willliam Jennings Bryan's opposition to the teaching of evolution in schools--in the famous Scopes trial--was just that: Darwinism justified immoral inequality, racism, imperialism, and so on (he of course offered Biblical Christianity as the proper view).

After the overthrow of Naziism, the revulsion against biological inherentism, rationalized on a view of Darwinian evolution, led to science's shift to more of a focus on environment and experience in the making of people's traits and talents.

But a new generation has now taken over, with a short memory and made giddy by technology and a system that industrializes research 'productivity' the way General Motors produces cars (and one can debate who does a higher quality job of it).  Bioethics, a recently coined field for universities to hire faculty in, occasionally comments on the relevant issues, but most often is used as a way to smooth the road for genomics scientists to do what they want--to humans, to animals, for profit, etc.

Will this lead to genome manipulation on a purely salubrious way, to better health care, healthier babies, and so on?  Will genetically based therapy be more effective and less costly?  Or will it justify preventive negative measures against those with inherently inferior (that is, genomic) makeup?  This can take many forms, from societal pigeon-holing and discrimination, to selective fetal destruction, to labeling of potential addicts or criminals.  The picture will undoubtedly be mixed.  Certainly, one can hope that unlike the last time around, Darwinian inherency will have a better track record.  But you have to be rather blind to human history to be too optimistic.

But was it even right scientifically in the first place?
The 'obvious' fact is that society should be driven by its best if the Darwinian notion of 'survival of the fittest' is a law of nature.  If the most intelligent, wealthiest, and highest-status people were under-performing between the sheets, then clearly the Darwinian mandate was being over-ridden by modern societies.

It is obvious that society has always until recently favored its top strata.....isn't it?  The fact that the lesser masses reproduce better is an aberration.....isn't it?   Well, if that were so, why is there still so much genetic riff-raff around in societies?  Have we misunderstood?

Maybe it never has been, even in scattered tribal societies, that the most intelligent had the most wives and children.  Maybe modern societies are the way things have always been.  Maybe societies made up only of those with IQ's way over 100 would be better.

Or, maybe, just maybe, we've misunderstood both the strength of selection in the past and the fact that human societies as they are, made up mostly of the ordinary, have been spectacularly successful (there are, after all, 7 billion of us).  There is absolutely no evolutionary evidence that we are anything but very, very 'fit' as we currently are, even after thousands of years of medical and social care for the frail and elderly.

Maybe our idea of what makes for higher fitness doesn't match up with what the artists, intellectuals, musicians, scientists and other professors tell us.  Maybe, just like other justifications for inequality, it is those 'experts' who are mainly manipulating things to fit their particular interests and their world, as they see it from their tower of privilege, and doing so in the name of their particular theory (in this case, science, not religion).

Eugenics was not centrally based on the good intention of eliminating or reducing disease.  Instead, at its core, it was based not only on piously justified ideas of the good of society, that is, about social engineering, but based on a particular view of what Darwin's ideas about fitness and adaptation were all about.  In other words, even if one accepts Darwin's penetrating insights about diversity from common ancestry and the proliferation of what is suited to its circumstances, perhaps the filter of intellectual elitism distorted things from the beginning.  Passing off scientist's judgments about what was inherently best, as if they were Nature's judgments.  Even if one accepted that in our knowledgeable age we the scientists should take over our own evolution: will scientists' ideas about what's best, what makes the best society, turn out to be better than things already are? 

What do you think?

#overlyhonestmethods or, Telling the Truth in Science

Y'all have seen the #overlyhonestmethods thread on Twitter, no?  The hashtag tells the story -- scientists, and surely some ex-scientists, revealing how and why they do what they do.  E,g.:

Dr. Twittenheimer ‏@DrTwittenheimerThe instrument was fully calibrated prior to use in this study. Several decades prior to use in this study. #overlyhonestmethods

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Claire Turner ‏@claz0rTHIS. RT @benosaka Blood samples were spun at 1500rpm because the centrifuge made a scary noise at higher speeds.#overlyhonestmethodsExpand

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If you haven't seen it yet, and you have any interest in science -- which you do because you're here -- you really should go check it out.  The tweets just keep on rolling, and they are hilarious.  In a very edgy way.  We're tempted to say they are getting even more edgy, but that's unfair because they were edgy to start with.  (If you don't want to hop all the way over to Twitter, here's a sample.)

We've read enough of these now to be able to detect some recurring themes.  Of course, the major theme is that science is rarely done the way it oughta be (see above re. the centrifuge speed, and others like "we used an n of 19 because one Eppendorf tube rolled under the freezer," "incubation time was 3 hours because that's how long I took for lunch," etc.).

But additionally:

• a lot of students and post-docs really don't like their supervisors, or at least distrust their knowledge of lab work since they've spent years or decades writing grants instead of working at the bench.  
• a lot of experiments are very sloppily done.  
• and/or a lot of people have no clue why they use the methods they do,  
• or, maybe it's that a lot of methods don't need to be strictly adhered to,
• or that we often have no clue whether they need to be or not.
• a lot of papers are cynically written.
• much (most?) of science is done with both eyes on the next grant.
• people cite a lot of papers they haven't read, not only when they are behind a paywall.
• a lot of kissing ass is going on in science. 
• very cynically. 
• undergrads get blamed for everything.  Probably correctly.  When it's not the post-doc's fault.
• no one likes reviewer #2.  
• a lot of scientists are very funny.  

But beyond all this, this thread is a beautiful example of the anthropological concept of emics and etics, emics being the way 'natives' explain a behavior or idea and etics being the way an outside observer explains the same thing.  Except that here the scientists are playing both roles.  They can readily say the right thing -- those tens of thousands of papers that get published every year -- but they can also step outside the culture of science and deconstruct why they said or did what they did.

What is truth?  What can be reasonably expected?
The truth is often unclear, and no complex operation like a science experiment or study worthy of the name is entirely straightforward.  Generally, if it were so easy, we'd know the answer and wouldn't need to do the study.

Yes, and we're all fallible.  We can forget various steps of a procedure, misremember what we did, make errors in our notes, inadvertently or even subconsciously color what we say or how we interpret data. We can even yield to temptation to make various short-cuts and alterations to data, like throwing out 'outlier' observations that just don't seem to be right (relative to our preconceptions, or reporting only the segment of our results (the one transgenic mouse out of many) that 'best' represents the results as we present them (that is, that best fits our theoretical expectations) -- and #overlyhonestmethods has a lot of that.

These are sins, because brutal objective honesty with precision is the goal.  But given human failings, if we're really right about the problem at hand, the results of these kinds of distortions from purity won't change that--the truth will out, so to speak.

But what the twitterati here are discussing is something very different indeed!

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!"  (Walter Scott)
What this set of tweets so accurately reflects is the current culture in science, which is explicitly expressed (though often not said publicly except between colleagues or faculty and their graduate students).  We're aware of it, it is systematic if not systemic, and it is driven, clearly, by the rush to publish, the strongly felt need to hype our work to build our careers, and the desperate and relentless struggle for grants, jobs, and the like.

Grantsmanship, or how to strategize your ideas to get funded, is often at its core, and sometimes openly, about deception of reviewers and funders.  A very common, if not typical, example is the smug grins with which investigators say that the thing they do is propose funding for work that is outlined in the proposal as to be done, but in fact has already been done.  Or to present work selectively, or to cite reviewers' work to butter them up, and so on.  This is all driven by the 'business model', and the rush, rush, rush to publish and spend.

Well, you might say, this is just the game we play.  We all know we're doing it.  Human society is always laden with this sort of organized dishonesty. It's what you have to do to compete for resources and after all, what is life about if not that?  If we all do it, the system internally adjusts accordingly.

This may be the hard truth, but it's a worse offense is to acquiesce to it.  Because then we end up in Scottsville: we weave tangled webs of dissembling and disinformation, of untruths known and unknown, of habits of deception that become essentially routine.  And here the idea of science as self-correcting and hence immune to such tangled webs becomes a myth.

That's because untangling this kind of web is often impossible.  Studies are too large and too expensive for them to be replicated.  Or the sample or working material is unique: if I mis-report a study of a particular disease in, say, Bongabonga, you can't go to Bongabonga and repeat it.  Samples from elsewhere are only partly relevant.  Likewise with intricate experimental systems involving high technology, and very particular setup.  The costs of the kinds of knowingly huge studies we do these days prohibits such checking-up even if it were technically possible.  And the many intricate details, often only sloppily reported in reams of 'Supplemental Information' on the journal's web page, are often challenging to understand if not intentionally obscure.

And more than just checking up, we have to build on others' work because we simply can't do everything over.  So what we build on needs to be reliable.  That's why human fallibility and vanity is no matter to be joking about, despite #overlyhontestmethods, given how true it actually is.  Huge investments are made, and we have a very unclear understanding of the degree to which this sort of cheating is meaningful and felonious, rather than simply the misdemeanors of imperfect beings.  Cheating is, in a sense, rewarded if we just smile and look the other way.  Even if we might just say it's not worth worrying about because most science, like most anything else, is rather pedestrian and headed for obscurity even if it were as pure as Ivory soap.

But when this is how we train our students, we sow seeds of a problematic future.  Especially in an era when funds are limited, any avoidable dishonor in the system should be avoided, and we have to hope that the result of systematic misdemeanors we smile about will not become so accepted that we cannot untangle our weaving.  That could lead to science becoming just another shaky belief system, on which much of our lives rely.  Hasn't human history had enough of those already?

Piltdown--and modern evolutionary frauds?

We are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the famous Piltdown fraud in biological anthropology.  One might think some other term, like 'commemorating, might be more apt for a fraud. But in a sense the lesson-learned from this event at least should be celebrated.  Or has the lesson been learnt after all?

Piltdown, England: 1912
In 1912, a lawyer and amateur antuquarian named Charles Dawson reported finding some fossil bones that resembled something like what people thought the famous 'missing link' that would connect humans evolutionarily to other apes should look like.  Dawson found this material in a gravel pit, near the town of Piltdown in the south of England, when he saw the material eroding out of the soil of a construction site (top image, Dawson seated; below, the crew of specialists examining the finds).  He reported this excitedly, because the search had long been on to find the missing link and demonstrate that, indeed, Darwin's idea that all life, including humans, descended from a common origin on Earth.  The story and  relevant details are in Wikipedia: Piltdown man.

Piltdown gang (Wikipedia)

Digging systematically in the site quickly occurred, to see what else might be there, and much was found that in a sense 'completed' a picture of the past.  Britain's leading anatomist, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, was called in to examine the findings. The French paleontologist (and Jesuit priest) Teilhard de Chardin came to see the site.  The findings were sensationalized because not only did they provide the anticipated evidence, but they showed that England was the site of the oldest human fossil--a matter of national pride, even though Darwin had quite correctly reasoned that ultimately we originated in Africa, where our closest living relatives were to be found.

'Anticipated' is an appropriate word here, because our narcissistic pride had convinced anthropologists that our brain had led the adaptive way out of the mediocrity of other apes.

The findings
The Piltdown findings included bones of other animals (prey, probably), and stone tools of various sorts, all colored similarly to the mineral soil, were quickly found.  But the 'human' bones took center (or, rather, centre) stage: they included a piece of a chimp-like jaw, with some teeth whose cusps had been worn rather flat as might be found in humans, and some fragments of cranial plates--the parts encasing the brain. 

Reconstructions seemed to be able to make the jaw and head parts fit together.  In the above image the darker bits were what were found, the rest a reconstruction made of the likely bearer of those bits.The stunning fact was that this individual had a chimp-like jaw but a large brain, and used tools.  What this showed, or proved to those who analyzed the material, was that humans had evolved first by adapting a large brain and intelligence, and this was followed by humanizing the lower, less important body structures.

Now, this was satisfying, but also very curious, because while it suited our preferred story of our adaptive Darwinian origins, it didn't gibe with any of the other fossils that had yet been found. So they were in a sense suspect, at least in the sense that other representatives of the missing link surely would be found sometime.  But they weren't.  Other fossils that seemed to show that in fact our body 'humanized' by becoming upright and attaining some of our dental characteristics before our brain enlarged, such as a famous skull found in Africa, were dismissed or ignored.

It took over 40 years before careful examination of the Fossil that Changed the World showed that it was, indeed, a total fraud.  The bones were recent, not fossil.  The material had been intentionally, but only superficially stained to resemble the gravel in the site.  The jaw was a recent ape jaw, and the skull parts from a not very old human. Teeth had been filed and altered.

Debate raged for many years about who had perpetrated this hoax.  Smith Woodward, Chardin, and Dawson were the leading suspects.  Eventually, it was shown that many other remarkable finds that Dawson had made were fakes; Dawson wanted to be included in the august British science community, and was doing what he thought it took to get there (he died shortly after the original 'finds,' and no further finds were made after his death).  We now know with extensive evidence from many parts of the world that, in contrast to Piltdown, we evolved body first and then our brains expanded.

The lesson
So why had the hoax had held sway for so long a time? The answer is at least in part, that the find fit our expectations, the model that anthropologists had in their heads about how we 'must' have evolved. It was a kind of egocentric view of what makes us human, what distinguishes us and hence what we must, in a sense, have evolved 'for':  thinking advanced thoughts (such as science!).

Only when other evidence began accumulating was the diligence invested in seeing if Piltdown's strange configuration really was true.  Then, the fraud was quickly explored.  The lesson was that science, like religion or other areas of human endeavor, is a social system with the kinds of layered beliefs, commitments, and agreed-on lore that any social system has.  It is not just about objective fact.  In this case, something that was too good to be true wasn't true, but the fact that the leaders of the field had for a half-century been duped showed something serious about the depth to which preconceptions control even science.

Has the lesson been learnt?  Genetics and evolutionary biology today
Have we--evolutionary biologists and anthropologists alike--as a group actually learned the Piltdown lesson, a century on?  Certainly technologies make it much more difficult to perpetrate a blatant fraud of this sort.  But from time to time we do see prominent frauds of comparable seriousness being accepted until being discovered, often by luck (recently, for example, the Korean geneticist's faked cloning of a human).  There are others in the literature, and of course these include only the ones that have been outed. How much remains undiscovered is unknowable, and especially in this era when so much detailed technology (such as whole genome sequencing on lots of individuals, or exotic transgenic experiments) is involved, it is very hard to confirm a study. Likewise, the proliferation of journals worldwide stresses the review process and inundates us with things not checkable in any practical sense.  Unless it is very fundamental, we tend to accept a finding and build our work around the results.  So in evolutionary, genetic, and developmental biology, even today we may be at least a bit too ready to accept, or unwilling or unable to test, claims that are made--if they fit our expectations or, one should say, preconceptions and assumptions.

In this there's a more subtle, but perhaps much more important sense in which the Piltdown lesson has not been learned.  So committed are we to Darwinism, that we indulge ourselves very deeply in a commitment to a particular view of evolution and genetics, in which causation is quite deterministic and, especially, in which everything that can't be nailed down is assumed to have an explanation that involves adaptive natural selection--almost as if it were directed, force-like, toward an end.  The media--popular as well as scientific--are riddled daily with uncritical, glib, Just-So stories about how and why things evolved for a particular reason, and these are swallowed by scientists and public alike more readily than the whale swallowed Jonah.

Everywhere you turn you can find such tales, and the web only makes them more numerous and more likely to go viral, and become a sort of accepted truth.  The drug of popularity and credit that the web provides encourages this.  Skeptics of such tales are usually ignored, but even junk stories that are widely rejected don't slow down the same people from inventing more of them.  Since we can look at what we see today and invent multiple possible stories that would be consistent with the data, even a total adaptationist should be skeptical and circumspect about any one of them.  But such skepticism is rare, and disagreement is itself often not sufficiently circumspect, but instead consists of the skeptic's alternative Just-So story.  In a subtle and perhaps less blatant way, one Piltdown is replaced with another.

What is fraud?
A fraud is an intentional or knowing misrepresentation.  Whether such stories as are told today are harmful in a practical sense is debatable.  Are they 'frauds'?  Does the occasional brief caveat, such as saying the [trait] 'might' have been evolved for such-and-such, exculpate the author if buried amidst overstatement?  Well, such stories reflect what must be judged as culpable credulousness if they're  based on assumptions extended far beyond what we know very well that we can actually test or verify--and are thus told with a sense of certainty comparably far from what we actually know is justified.  They are misleading because they are glibly told and the proof is how easily they are often accepted.  They are stories told, often knowingly, in a way that (as with Dawson) may generate a lot of attention for those who propose them.

Such stories harm the search for truth.  Science needs working frameworks, but they should not be cages.  In medical, societal, political, and other arenas, pat stories like the genes 'for' or adapted 'for' stories--affect policy in ways that can't be guaranteed to be good.  A century of eugenics based on essentially the same kinds and quality of reasoning shows that clearly.

The way to celebrate Dawson's fraud, is to recognize the role of belief even in science, and to stop committing new instances of our own.

Who gains when art/literature/science is hyped?

What is art worth? And who decides?
An interesting exchange of letters appeared yesterday in the New York Times Sunday Review.  "Sunday Dialogue: What is That Art Worth?"  Why is art selling at such high prices today?  Is it 'good' art, or is it hype?  And, who benefits?

William Cole, whose byline says he is writing a book on art connoisseurship, begins the debate:

Financiers know the value of hype. They understand that if artworks sell at exorbitant prices, those works — and the artists who created them — become newsworthy, regardless of whether they’re actually any good. And the media play right along, almost never questioning the quality of the works or the abilities of the artists.

Historically, time has been very cruel to the reputations of all but the very best artists. But today enormous sums of money are devoted to propping up the star power of a small group of wildly overrated cult figures. Have the masters of the universe created the unpoppable bubble? Or will the child’s voice somehow manage to rise above the buzz and proclaim that the emperor is, as many have suspected all along, buck naked?

The first reply takes Cole to task for misunderstanding why art has become so expensive.  It's that it's no longer single masters sitting alone in their drafty lofts creating their masterpieces.  Instead, art has become a huge industry, each stage, from artist's workshop to the gallery, demanding huge amounts of money, thus ratcheting up the cost.  Thus, the cost is understandable, and justified.

The next reply takes Cole to task for ignoring the 2% theory -- only 2% of artists of any age are actually any good, and today is no different from any other time.  If bad artists are being promoted, it's nothing new.

Several correspondents take issue with Cole's choice of bad artists, who deserves idolatry and who does not.  Caveat emptor and all that.

Donald Waits, a former public school teacher of art-history, writes:

It is obvious to me, as a subscriber to several art blogs and arts in education Web sites, that a new specialty in promoting and influencing the sales of minimally valuable “art” is being developed as a serious career in the business of art. The courses being touted by universities and art schools describe, in clear language, how to advocate for mediocrity in the art market. A whole new language is being taught to critics and art “scholars” for the sole purpose of pushing higher and higher prices for art that ultimately has little value.

Next, Michelle Marder Kamhi, art reviewer, writes:

Mr. Cole is absolutely right. Today’s art market has nothing to do with art and everything to do with hype, and the media are deplorably complicit in the game.

Another correspondent points out that the art market is not an academic enterprise, it's a business, and the idea of who deservers to be "in" at any given time changes, not according to any objective truth, but in response to market forces.

Cole replies that the argument that big projects require big price tags, regardless of the quality of the results, should be used by Congress next time they want to vote themselves a raise.  He also notes:

With strategic donations, rich collectors and dealers gain influence in major art museums. Whose works do you suppose they encourage those museums to purchase and exhibit? Whose works do they donate, sometimes retaining a life interest, for huge tax deductions calculated according to market prices, however ridiculous those prices might be? 

So while only the few can afford to actually hang such pictures on their walls, the rest of us taxpayers get to help pay for them. Who said the art market wasn’t democratic?

It's not just art
By now it's surely clear to you why this exchange interested us.  "Wildly overrated cult figures," "the rest of us taxpayers get to help pay," "a new speciality in promoting and influencing the sales of minimally valuable "art", "not an academic exercise but a business," and so on.  Take just a step back and it's clear that what's happening in the art world -- huge prices for art of questionable, or at the very least debatable, value -- is happening in many sectors of society, particularly those in which quality is a subjective judgement, and where megabucks are there for the taking, including banking, publishing, industrial agriculture, and of course, science.

Substituting, say, GWAS or Mars-life, or Higgs Boson, etc. for "art" in this exchange of letters is not too much of a stretch.  And, as with art, there are arguments over who the bad guys are, and whether there even are bad guys, whether it's hype or truth, but there can be no argument over the amount of money the taxpayer is putting up to make some people well-off and famous, scientists and providers of the technology both.  On the promise that this is all an investment in the future.

A common argument, especially by those doing well in such a system, is that it is the incentive that drives success, that success is rare but it's just costly if you want to nurture that 2%, and that's our way of doing business.  From this point of view, there's nothing to complain about, unless perhaps it's how your taxes are used if you don't happen to be a beneficiary, or whether that 2% really is that valuable compared to what else might be achieved at more modest cost.

Then, of course, one can argue anthropologically, that this kind of resource hierarchy-building is how our society works, so that any alternative approach to art or science that one might dream up, even if it could be applied against resistance from those currently 'in', would quickly lead to much the same as we see across such a wide spectrum of societies today.

Weighing in on a Weighty subject

Finally, definitive proof!
So, the latest (hottest, and certainly this time just must be true) report is that obesity (that is, Body Mass Index, or weight-for-height) isn't so clearly damaging to health and disease as billions of dollars and millions of pages of punditry and scientific hyperbole have suggested over a mere fifty years.  Whoopie!  We can eat again!  What a relief! 

Or is it?

The study we posted on yesterday seemed to say that.  But even forgetting our usual (of course always cogent and well-placed) reservations about science news bulletins, perhaps there is something else to note, that might cause at least a few milliseconds of thoughtful contemplation.

If this is a causal, material world, then as the argument goes, everything must be understandable  and predictable strictly in terms of molecules and energy--because that's all there is!  And since, the argument continues, evolution has molded life around DNA as the primary causal molecule, we simply must be the product of, and hence predictable from, our genes.

The BMI study was not a genetic report, and only concerned the predictive power of the net measure, BMI.  It was about the long-assumed health risks, or not, of obesity.  But there is a bit of slippage here:  BMI is easy to measure (your weight related to how tall you are), and so many different studies can collect comparable data, etc.  It is thus a convenient measure of choice for obesity.

Taking the current dogma of our time that everything simply must, obviously, necessarily be 'genetic', many studies you've paid for with your taxes have naturally done their best to find the genes 'for' this important health-risk trait.

No, not at all
Thus a major and very large GWAS on the genetics of BMI was published a couple of years ago (Nature Genetics, Nov. 2010).  This study of a mere 250,000 individuals found a small number of modest (statistically 'significant') locations in the genome, including one confirmatory gene (called FTO) that a blind person could find without using his hands.  Other 'known' obesity risk-factor genes weren't in this list, and of course there is the plethora of excuses--er, that is, alternative explanations--for why these genes didn't show up in the hit-list.

Now that is mysterious enough (unless you've been thinking critically about genetic causation, its evolutionary history, and the nature of such studies), but at least it's a large study that should illuminate at least the nub of the causal truth.

However, also in Nature Genetics in Nov. 2010 was another obesity GWAS.  This time the measure used was not BMI, but the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR).  This is another convenient, non-invasive, and cheaply measured index of obesity.  The study was the pooling of 61 studies of a total of a mere 114,000 participants.  Now this study essentially found no overlap in genome region 'hits' with the BMI study!  It also failed to show several genes well known to relate to obesity and related dieases, from many actually focused studies including mouse experimental work.

One can rationalize all one wants about this 'discrepancy' (to use a kind word for it).  But if 'obesity' is a meaningful trait with any sort of unitary causal nature, then measuring it in two ways should generate essentially the same result, after accounting for statistical vagaries.  Just as using a metric (Celsius) thermometer won't tell you anything more about water, ice, and steam than using a Fahrenheit scale.

237 traits linked to genomic loci by 1449 GWAS studies
(Source: www.genome.gov/GWAStudies); 2012

Clear and devastating indictment of the state-of-the-art
This issues seems not at all to have been noticed (openly, at least) by anybody. Instead, it should be seen as a clear and devastating indictment of the GWAS and related 'omics' grand-sample, meta-analysis, quick-and-dirty enterprise that we are investing so heavily and mechanically in.  It should be the miner's canary, telling us clearly that we are not going about this in a right way.

We can't blithely accept the current BMI and health finding as related to obesity in an interpretable way and are rather forced to recognize, as we said in our prior post, that BMI is a stand-in for some confounding factor(s) that may or may not have been measured.  That's because if different genes predict one measure of 'obesity' compared to another measure, there must be some seriously complex or heterogeneous causal variation in our data that we are not measuring, may not know about, but are not highly correlated with each other or, at least, are not consistently correlated with different ways we choose to define something as a trait, or risk factor.

'Obesity' is in some ways an obvious trait in its extremes (from skinny to very over-weight), and body weight is clearly related to health measures of various kinds.  But the Omics Way that is being taken is falling short, and this also means that the Epidemiological Way, of parsing a large plateful of variables into this or that correlation coefficient with various statistical significance levels, is also badly wanting.

We don't have the answers.  Indeed, the problem is not just that nobody has the answers, it's that the only reaction is to claim we need more and more, larger and larger, studies of essentially the same sort to get the answers!  But, bigger isn't always better!