Science

I’ve spent the past couple of days at the latest in a series of conferences under the name Priority in Practice , which Jo Wolff has organized at UCL. I don’t think I’d be diminishing the contribution of the other speakers by saying that Michael Marmot was the real star of the show. He’s well known for the idea that status inequality is directly implicated in health outcomes, a thesis that he promotes in his most recent book Status Syndrome and which first came to the fore with his Whitehall Study which showed that more highly promoted civil servants live longer even when we control for matters like lifestyle, smoking etc. Even when people have enough, materially speaking, their position in a status hierarchy still impacts upon their longevity. One interesting other finding that he revealed was that being in control at home (as opposed to at work) was massively important in affecting women’s longevity, but didn’t really impact upon men. There’s an excellent interview of Marmot by Harry Kreisler of Berkeley in which he outlines his central claims.

From Mike “M. John.” Harrison:

bq. The difference between Berkeleyism and superstrings is that the latter will eventually test out or be chucked on the rubbish heap of ideas that looked good but weren’t good. The project of science differentiates itself from the projects of philosophy or religion, or even politics, precisely by the size of its rubbish heap.

Discuss.

It’s fifty years since the death of mathematician, code-breaker and computer pioneer Alan Turing. Turing committed suicide after being forced to take estrogen for a year to “cure” him of his homosexuality. I read Andrew Hodges’ excellent biography of Turing when I was in College. I remember Hodges noting that from about 1935 to his death he had a new and basically unprecedented idea about every five or six years. A remarkable character.

Last year, I fell off my bike, and had to have my arm in a sling for a couple of days. I don’t care, even a little bit, that Bush had a spill. It happens.

But if the White House is going to come out and blame the fall on “what the White House described as soil loosened by recent rainfall”… (Here’s the quote: “It’s been raining a lot. The topsoil was loose.”)

Well, I can check that. There hasn’t been any rain in Crawford all week. The last day with more than an inch of precipitation was May 1.

Again, not a big deal, but why would they say that? And do you share my suspicion that Caren Bohan, who wrote the Reuters report from Crawford, knows perfectly well that there wasn’t any rain?

UPDATE: Kos has a similar post, with a different data set but the same conclusion.

There’s a fascinating piece in the Economist about the 17-year cicadas that are about to emerge — in “a plague of biblical proportions” — all over the eastern United States, why they (and their 13-year cousins) have prime-numbered life-cycles, how parasites evolve strategies to match, and other cool stuff. Enjoy!

This is a more personal note although certainly related to topics discussed on CT and I’ll add some stats to give it some context. Congrats to my Mom for being elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences this week! The Academy has been around since 1825 and in all that time has had a total of eighteen women elected to its membership. The three women elected this week boosted the number up from fifteen. My Mom is only the second female chemist ever to become a member. The Academy altogether has no more than 200 members younger than 70 years old at any one time. (Members 70 or older do not count toward the 200 so there are just less than 300 current living members.)

Apparently the gender ratio is similarly abysmal in the science academies of other countries. Tabulations have shown that although in a few countries (e.g. Norway, Finland) the percentages are a bit higher around a whopping ten percent, among many other countries such as the UK, Germany, Israel, Denmark, France the figure is around four percent.[1] The state of things is especially striking given that nowadays women often make up more than fifty percent of those getting college degrees (although that’s distributed quite unevenly across fields). Sure, it takes time for people to go through the ranks, but a significant number of women have been getting degrees in science for a while yet the pipeline narrows for women at every step of the way from college degrees to graduate degrees to post-docs to assistant professorships to full professorships to membership in science academies.. all the way to the Nobel Prize.

fn1. Joan Mason: “Not much room at the top for women”, Forum, Journal of the Association for Women in Science and Engineering, No.8, Autumn/Winter, 1999/2000, p.3.

PZ Myers has a delightful short story on what scientists do when presented with a ridiculous supernatural hypothesis that has testable empirical consequences.

As a philosopher I’d have been quite happy to dispatch that one from the armchair. That’s (part of) why they don’t teach my stuff in high-school science classes, and rightly so.

Via Tyler Cowen , a rather wonderful example of the absurdities of gung-ho evolutionary psychology. Edward H. Hagen, Paul J. Watson and J. Anderson Thomson Jr. propose that severe depression is adaptive – it serves a functional purpose. It compels others to help the victim and thus redounds to his or her long term advantage. In short, depression is “an unconsciously calculated gamble to gain greater long-term benefits.”

This is a near-perfect example of what might be dubbed (with no apologies whatsoever to Cosmides and Tooby) the Standard Evolutionary Psychology Model. First, take some human trait or behaviour. Bonus points if it’s something weird like slash fiction that’s likely to attract the interest of the Sunday supplement editors. Second, construct an ad hominid argument claiming that this trait or behaviour served some functional need for hunter-gatherers on the veldt. Third, use your findings to justify some right-wing shibboleth or another, showing that hunter-gatherer societies hardwire us for perfectly competitive markets or the like (in fairness, Hagen, Watson and Thomson jr. don’t do this). Fourth, write article. Repeat as often as necessary to get tenure and/or the attention of the popular press. Of course, at no stage of the process need you deign to provide convincing empirical evidence that might sully the clarity and vigour of your argument. It’s wretched stuff, that doesn’t do any favors to Darwinian theory. That our minds are undeniably the product of evolutionary forces doesn’t and shouldn’t provide a license for half-baked functionalist explanations of the psychology of everyday life.

Read Kip, at Long Story; Short Pier on what gay people, feminists and creationists _don’t_ have in common.

Kieran suggests ” that people who subscribe to Intelligent Design theory need to have the perverse mechanics of childbirth explained to them.” Carl Zimmer goes one step further, and asks why the intelligent design crowd doesn’t embrace “one of the most successful, intricate examples of complexity in nature” – the cancer tumour.

bq. Cancer cells grow at astonishing speeds, defying the many safeguards that are supposed to keep cells obedient to the needs of the body. And in order to grow so fast, they have to get lots of fuel, which they do by diverting blood vessels towards themselves and nurturing new vessels to sprout from old ones. They fight off a hostile immune system with all manner of camouflage and manipulation, and many cancer cells have strategies for fending off toxic chemotherapy drugs. When tumors get mature, they can send off colonizers to invade new tissues. These pioneers can release enzymes that dissolve collagen blocking their path; when they reach a new organ, they can secrete other proteins that let them anchor themselves to neighboring cells. While oncologists are a long way from fully understanding how cancer cells manage all this, it’s now clear that the answer can be found in their genes. Their genes differ from those of normal cells in many big and little ways, working together to produce a unique network of proteins exquisitely suited for the tumor’s success. All in all, it sounds like a splendid example of complexity produced by design. The chances that random natural processes could have altered all the genes required for a cell function as a cancer cell must be tiny–too tiny, some might argue, to be believed.

Interesting, but also a bit demoralizing, to see the bloggers of the Harvard Law Federalist Society on the side of Intelligent Design Theory. (See Cosma Shalizi and Brian Leiter for context.) Maybe it’s only a short hop from originalism about the Founding Fathers to creationism about God the Father. They’d probably describe themselves as being on the side of free speech and free thought rather than pseudo-science and sophistry, though their hysterical description of Leiter's criticisms as “thuggish,” “vicious,” “naked threats” leads me to think that Harvard Law students are a lot more thin-skinned than they ought to be. My own view is that people who subscribe to Intelligent Design theory need to have the perverse mechanics of childbirth explained to them.

*Update*: For somewhat more in-depth and professional commentary on ID and evolution, check out the newly-formed Panda's Thumb group blog.

People inclined to make sweeping judgments about the nature of the natural and social sciences based on a glancing acquaintance with the idea of falsification and a collection of popular books about quantum mechanics should read 'Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass'. (Via Electrolite.)

While we’re on the subject of anniversaries, I just got an invitation to a conference on the 300th anniversary of the death of John Locke (Southern Hemisphere readers can email j.jones@griffith.edu.au, there are also events at Yale and Oxford.

I was first introduced to Locke through his demolition of Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarchia in which the divine right of kings is derived from the supposed natural rights of fathers, beginning with Adam. Locke has great fun with this, pointing out that if Filmer is right, there is a single rightful monarch for the entire planet, namely the man most directly descended from Adam under the rules of primogeniture – by implication, all existing monarchs (except perhaps one) are usurpers who can justly be overthrown.

I was very disappointed then, to discover that Locke’s own analysis of property rights was no better than Filmer’s theory of divine right; in fact worse. Rights to property are supposed to be obtained by the first productive user and then passed on by inheritance and voluntary transfer. So, if we could locate the Garden of Eden, where Adam delved, his lineal descendent, if not king of the world, would be the rightful owner of Eden. To determine a rightful allocation of property, we would need to repeat the same exercise for every hectare on the planet. The Domesday Book wouldn’t even get you started on this task.

That was thirty years ago or so, and science has advanced a lot since then, to the point where we can award victory to (a modified version of) Filmer. By careful analysis of DNA, we can now postulate a mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam from whom we are all descended (of course, there’s no reason to suppose the two were contemporaneous). Suppose, following the practice of various hereditary monarchies, we identify the rightful heir of Y-chromosomal Adam as the man with the smallest number of accumulated mutations (defects from the point of view of a strongly hereditary principle). In principle, this man could be identified uniquely. In practice, I imagine it would be possible to identify the ethnic group to which this man belongs, probably somewhere in Africa, and crown some prominent member of that group. A feminist version, with descent on matriarchal lines, is equally reasonable and, on the current state of scientific knowledge, a litte more practical.

Of course, for those of us who don’t buy patriarchal/matriarchal arguments in the first place, this isn’t at all compelling. But I don’t find Locke’s theory of property any more compelling and, unlike Filmer, his theory is no closer to implementability than it was 300 years ago.
[Posted with ecto]

Has either Flack Central Station or Junkscience.com thought about commissioning a few articles from David Icke and friends? It sounds to me as though there might be a real meeting of minds (although they might have to get the Icke crowd to soft-pedal the shapeshifting reptilians from outer space angle).