Only Some of These Really Bother Me

(A version of this post has also appeared on my Tumblr)

Article header from io9.com: "10 Scientific Ideas That Scientists Wish You Would Stop Misusing"

There's an article on io9.com listing ten words/concepts from various fields of science that are commonly misused by laypeople, so I had to look at it and see if any of my pet peeves made it onto the list.

There were a few:

3. Quantum Uncertainty and Quantum Weirdness
[Astrophysicist Dave] Goldberg adds that there's another idea that's been misinterpreted even more perniciously than "theory." It's when people appropriate concepts from physics for new agey or spiritual purposes:

This misconception is an exploitation of quantum mechanics by a certain breed spiritualists and self-helpers, and epitomized by the abomination, [the movie] What the Bleep Do We Know? Quantum mechanics, famously, has measurement at its core. An observer measuring position or momentum or energy causes the "wavefunction to collapse," non-deterministically. (Indeed, I did one of my first columns on "How smart do you need to collapse a wavefunction?") But just because the universe isn't deterministic doesn't mean that you are the one controlling it. It is remarkable (and frankly, alarming) the degree to which quantum uncertainty and quantum weirdness get inextricably bound up in certain circles with the idea of a soul, or humans controlling the universe, or some other pseudoscience. In the end, we are made of quantum particles (protons, neutrons, electrons) and are part of the quantum universe. That is cool, of course, but only in the sense that all of physics is cool. 

4. Learned vs. Innate
Evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk says:

One of my favorite [misuses] is the idea of behavior being "learned vs. innate" or any of the other nature-nurture versions of this. The first question I often get when I talk about a behavior is whether it's "genetic" or not, which is a misunderstanding because ALL traits, all the time, are the result of input from the genes and input from the environment. Only a difference between traits, and not the trait itself, can be genetic or learned — like if you have identical twins reared in different environments and they do something different (like speak different languages), then that difference is learned. But speaking French or Italian or whatever isn't totally learned in and of itself, because obviously one has to have a certain genetic background to be able to speak at all.

....

6. Gene

[Synthetic biologist Terry] Johnson has an even bigger concern with how the word gene gets used, however: 

It took 25 scientists two contentious days to come up with: "a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions and/or other functional sequence regions." Meaning that a gene is a discrete bit of DNA that we can point to and say, "that makes something, or regulates the making of something". The definition has a lot of wiggle room by design; it wasn't long ago that we thought that most of our DNA didn't do anything at all. We called it "junk DNA", but we're discovering that much of that junk has purposes that weren't immediately obvious. 

Typically "gene" is misused most when followed by "for". There's two problems with this. We all have genes for hemoglobin, but we don't all have sickle cell anemia. Different people have different versions of the hemoglobin gene, called alleles. There are hemoglobin alleles which are associated with sickle cell diseases, and others that aren't. So, a gene refers to a family of alleles, and only a few members of that family, if any, are associated with diseases or disorders. The gene isn't bad - trust me, you won't live long without hemoglobin - though the particular version of hemoglobin that you have could be problematic. 

I worry most about the popularization of the idea that when a genetic variation is correlated with something, it is the "gene for" that something. The language suggests that "this gene causes heart disease", when the reality is usually, "people that have this allele seem to have a slightly higher incidence of heart disease, but we don't know why, and maybe there are compensating advantages to this allele that we didn't notice because we weren't looking for them".

Those were the ones that resonated with me the most; others were only minor peeves or didn't actually bother me at all.

Misused Word #1, "Proof," was only a minor annoyance for me in that I'm almost never talking about mathematical proofs, and even if I were the sort of person who does use them routinely, it still seems to me like most things people talking about "proving" colloquially are impossible to express in mathematical terms.

It just seems to me like there wouldn't be very many circumstances in which mixing up the technical and colloquial meanings of "proof" would be an issue that would even arise.

(I have found that the most annoying sources of confusion in scientist/layperson conversations about proof have to do with standards of evidence, or also degrees of uncertainty. You can be more unsure of one thing than you are of another, even if you're not 100% certain about the thing you are more sure of.)

Similarly, "theory" also doesn't annoy me that much because I don't usually have much trouble adjusting to different usages of words in different contexts.

I can see how it would get really old having to explain the technical meaning of "theory" over and over again, though.

It seems like those are more about the meaning of specific words than they are about whole networks of ideas, so they are easier for me to adapt to when they surprise me in conversation.

The ones discussed in the quoted text above, though? Misuse of ideas derived from quantum mechanics, misinterpretations of evolution and natural selection, or the idea that genes are "for" specific things? Those come with so many other ideas connected to them, so many wrong things tacitly accepted as premises, that I feel like I need a ball of yarn to slowly pick my way back to the start of the conceptual maze.

The Delusion Illusion

There's a very interesting discussion in the comment thread on this post at Respectful Insolence; it's about something that's definitely been on my mind a lot as a skeptic, which is the problem of Why People Believe Weird Things.

Here's how it starts:

... [T]he people who claim that the vaccine is useless, and that polio eradication is the result of sanitation, must be mentally challenged at some level. There are not many of them I don't think --- their numbers obviously are a lot less than the incidence of schizophrenics, for example, and I have to wonder about the ability of those folks to organize rational thinking.

What this commenter is doing is trying to grapple with how a person could believe something that is obviously false. (In this instance, it's not just obviously false but also dangerous, in that the belief that vaccines don't work leads people to decide not to vaccinate themselves or their children, which undermines herd immunity and puts other people at risk of disease).

The conclusion he comes to --- that it must be mental illness that makes them cling to their counterfactual beliefs, despite any and all contradictory evidence you might throw at them --- is one I've seen a lot of people use to try and explain other people's mind-bogglingly irrational beliefs or bizarre or evil actions. I see it most often in this latter context, where someone commits a horrible crime, like mass murder, and in the news coverage the label "disturbed" or "troubled" or "mentally ill" or "unstable" gets attached to the perpetrator. (Even if he had never been to a psychiatrist in his life.)

It's easy to understand why a non-mentally-ill person would think that --- you see someone do something that you would never do, that you cannot even fathom doing, and you want to know what could possibly drive someone to do it. If imagining yourself in their shoes doesn't give you an answer, you're left with the possibility that this person must differ from you in some fundamental way.

You don't usually have enough information about the person to guess at how they differ from you, why they make a choice that you would not make under the same circumstances. (Just so you know, the choice I'm thinking of is the choice to become an anti-vaccine activist, not the choice to commit mass murder. Insert joke about the indistinguishability of those two things here.)

Anyway, for people with no experience of mental illness themselves, "mental illness" seems to function as a kind of conceptual black box that can be invoked to explain anything anyone does that otherwise defies explanation.

It also works to preclude introspection, to cordon off the person being labeled as mentally ill as not needing any more explanation. If someone is violent, their violence is a symptom of "mental illness," not a universal human tendency aggravated by social conditions. You don't have to ask any questions about, say, which human lives society values over others, or about whether there might not be conflicting cultural messages about violence (i.e., violence is bad but you're not a man unless you are capable of violence), or anything like that. No one need be examined or judged except the person who acted out.

Similarly, if someone is being illogical, or ignoring evidence, or deceiving hirself about something, you need not ask whether you might not be deceiving yourself about something else. The person making the illogical argument is not demonstrating the limitations and biases of human thought, to which all people are susceptible --- no, they're just crazy.

It's an easy explanation, but it's wrong and it makes life a lot harder for people who do have mental illnesses.

Here's another comment that explains how that works:

People who argue against vaccination are dangerous extremists. They are irresponsible and willfully ignorant. Their lies and manipulation are not a political issue for me, they're an intensely personal slight on who I am, and a threat to my very life.

It's clear that you can't grasp why your ableist language is problematic in this context, so I'll break it down for you.

1. Virtually the entire foundation of the anti-vax movement is the lie that vaccination causes autism and other developmental disabilities.

2. These people refer to non-neurotypical and developmentally and physically disabled people as "vaccine damaged", "broken", "stolen", "lost", and "soulless", among others.

3. Their argument is that death by vaccine preventable disease is better than life with a disability.

4. When presented with the fact that many disabled and chronically ill people are at greater risk of dying of VPDs they often claim that it's simply Darwinism in action, that the virus is cleaning up the gene pool.

5. It is not uncommon for these people to abuse, and even kill, their own disabled or non-NT children. When they do so they are often lionised by their peers, told what good parents they are, and let off by the just system because having to live with their (now dead charge) meant they'd "suffered enough."

Ergo, when you breeze in and spew back the same rhetoric as them, equating their deliberate cruelty and ignorance with developmental disability, then you're as bad as they are. You're saying "These people are bad, they're doing the wrong thing, they must be mentally disabled."

I can bring a fairly recent comparison to mind, that of the media reaction to pretty much every instance of an American gunman mowing a group of innocent people down. Do they say "He must be angry" or "He's a truly awful man"? No. They claim he must be autistic, or schizophrenic. Just like you they conflate wrongdoing with disability or mental illness, because Cthulhu knows there isn't already enough stigma around either topic, or enough fear or disgust at those of us on the receiving end.

Clear now? If the anti-vax monkeys shit in their hands and fling it, you're not going to make them stop by curling one out into your own palm, and lobbing it into their cage.

This same commenter also makes another important point, that being delusional is not at all like being a crank with a megaphone (or a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives):

The kind of fixed, delusional beliefs that go along with schizophrenic mental illness are typically just as distressing to the person with the diagnosis, if not more so. Watching someone in the grip of a florid delusion is very different to watching the majority of the anti-vax crowd's stubborn refusal to heed facts. I've seen people with various MIs, eating disorders in particular, who know that all food isn't poison, but can't make that inner dialogue relinquish the claims it makes. With my OCD I am excruciatingly aware that doing Y won't stop Z from happening, but knowing that truth, and feeling that it's safe to act on it feel like they're a million miles apart. 

So obviously, anyone who is genuinely suffering compulsions or delusions requires help and support, and an understanding that it's not deliberate. The anti-vax crowd requires a cluebat to the brain, perhaps in the form of a trip to somewhere that VPDs roam unchecked.

I've never been delusional, exactly, but I have had severe depression, and what this person says about knowing that what you're thinking is wrong but still being powerless to stop the thoughts rings very, very true.

I can't imagine a person stuck in that kind of epistemological nightmare state would be very likely to get up on a soapbox to try and convince other people to adopt the same delusions.

No, that sounds more like the behavior of someone who has never had cause to question their own grip on reality.

Anyway, I'm going to bastardize Occam's Razor and say that you don't need invoke a relatively uncommon phenomenon* to explain something that could just as easily be accounted for by something more commonplace.

Normal, baseline human thought is prone to a whole bunch of biases, errors, shortcuts and unconscious distortions that make each person a sort of Unreliable Narrator** of their own life.

Here are a few that I could see making someone think vaccines cause autism:

1. People prefer stories to lists of things that happened. (Thus, if one thing happens after another thing, you might see a connection between the two, even if there is none. Also, one person telling a very personal, emotional story is going to move you more, and stick in your mind longer, than someone throwing a bunch of statistics at you.)

2. People tend to idealize the past. If you didn't notice that your child was different right away, but only once they started to miss developmental milestones, you might start remembering them as more ideally "normal" than they really were as infants.

3. People like to think they are more or less in control of what happens in their lives. So thinking that their child is autistic because they chose to vaccinate hir might, weirdly, be less scary than thinking their child just is autistic and there was no way they could've prevented it***.

4. People's experiences color their view of the world. Along with #1 and #2, this one could make a person who had seen their "normal" baby suddenly develop autism in toddlerhood blame vaccines, and also greatly overestimate how drastically the prevalence of autism has risen. (At the same time, this explains why so many people feel like they can just opt out of vaccination; unless they're a lot older than most new parents are, they don't know what a lot of the vaccine-preventable diseases were like.)

5. People also tend to believe what the people around them believe. If your friends tend to mistrust doctors and medicine, and prefer "alternative" medicine, you might find it easier to believe that modern medicine's great accomplishments, including mass vaccination, aren't really that great and doctors just took credit for something that was already happening (e.g., the first comment I quoted, where the commenter mentioned having heard people say that improvements in sanitation, not Jonas Salk's vaccine, were responsible for eradicating polio in the U.S.), or even that modern medicine is making us sicker than we were in the idyllic past. (See also #2).

Finally, I don't have data on this (will look for some, but that's another post), but I strongly suspect that believing something made your child autistic correlates with seeing autism as The Worst Thing Ever.

*Mental illness is actually not super-uncommon, but it is still definitely a minority experience

**Everyone else is even less reliable at describing your life, though. So you still win.

***This probably won't matter to people who've managed to accept their child's autism; they tend to care less about why their child is autistic and more about how to help them live a full, independent life.

In Which a Newspaper Article Makes Me Angry

I know, it happens all the time, to everyone. 

I'm still going to write about it, though.

The article that bothered me was this one in today's Kansas City Star, about the controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon joining the University of Missouri's anthropology department as Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor's Chair for Excellence in Anthropology.

Napoleon Chagnon, if you didn't know, is famous (or infamous) for his research on a group of Amazonian indigenous people called Yanomami. He called them "the fierce people" (which he says is a translation of what they call themselves) and said that their way of life was especially violent, characterized by constant warfare and abduction of women from other villages. 

A Yanomami shaman and spokesman, Davi Kopenawa, says that Chagnon's depictions of his people are false, and that he has harmed the Yanomami by making everyone think of them this way [PDF]:

For us, we Yanomami who live in the forest, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon is not our friend. He does not say good things, he doesn't transmit good words. He talks about the Yanomami but his words are only hostile. He is angry and says, 'The Yanomami are bad, the Yanomami fire arrows at one another because of women. The Yanomami beat one another.' He has always thought that. 

Young American men and women think, 'Napoleon knows a lot and transmits true words --- the Yanomami are very bad.' I am not happy about this.

But that wasn't the thing that bothered me about this article; the article actually does address the arguments that Chagnon's research was shoddy, that he mischaracterized the Yanomami, making them out to be far more vicious than they are, and that his activities in the Yanomami villages may have harmed the people he set out to study*.

No, what bothered me was the reductive way they framed the story, as another battle in the ongoing war between partisans of Nature and Nurture.

You often see that in articles about evolutionary psychology, especially when the person or idea being discussed is the subject of controversy.

Here are a couple of examples from the article:

Chagnon ... has been a lightning rod at the center of an academic tempest over evolutionary anthropology. In Darwin's world (and Chagnon's), where the fastest, fiercest, smartest, and perhaps cruelest, survive to pass on their genes, what does that mean to human nature today? 

Those arguing against this sociobiology fiercely contend our behavior and culture are rooted in our environment --- or, at least, one cannot credibly discern the effects of a "mean gene" from a war-ax-wielding ancestor in the family tree. 

... 

[Quoting MU Anthropology Department Chairman R. Lee Lyman] "... The Darwinian perspective might give us unique insight. Chagnon was one of the founders of that approach. Unfortunately, it became a political issue as opposed to a scholastic issue. It was heresy."

(That's a rhetorical trick that particularly annoys me: if someone has a problem with your research or your ideas, don't engage the substance of their critique, just dismiss it as politics. You see this in discussions of gender differences, too. A feminist points out that gender might be more complicated, and more malleable, than the hard-wired "pink brain, blue brain" model popular today, and people roll their eyes at her for letting her politics get in the way of Serious Science**. That maneuver also makes the person whose ideas are being discussed into a heroic figure who is being unfairly silenced, rather than an ordinary researcher whose methods, data, and interpretations of said data are being criticized by other researchers.)

More:

The article [that Chagnon published in Science in 1988 (PDF)], summed up as "killers have more kids" by some, rattled or outraged many in his discipline. Suggesting that brutality might be embroidered into our genes by evolution seemed a slippery slope toward racism or a step backward toward eugenics that saw the forced sterilization of thousands. 

"This is no longer thought to be true. There are, of course, a few holdouts," explained Bill Irons, Northwestern University professor emeritus and a Chagnon ally. "Many anthropologists and many on the political left as well preferred to believe that human behavior was shaped completely by culture."

The article makes it sound like there are only two choices for what to believe about human nature and evolution: that human nature is innate, heritable, unchanging and inherently violent, selfish and sexist, or that there is no such thing as human nature, and that people will be whatever the culture around them shapes them to be.

This leaves out a growing body of research within anthropology, primatology, evolutionary  biology and related fields that deals with other factors besides male-on-male conflict that have shaped human evolution.

Examples of people doing this kind of research include: 

1) Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who has studied mating behavior, female reproductive strategies and social organization in langur monkeys, and has developed a theory that kinship networks and shared child-rearing ("alloparenting" or "allomothering," she calls it) were necessary for early humans' survival.

Here is a snippet from an interview she did with Scientific American blogger Eric Michael Johnson, in which she briefly addresses the notion that killers and rapists have more kids, and why she thinks that's not true:

[A]mong hunter-gatherers, the way to breed successfully is to have alloparental help and provisioning help from others. Anybody who goes around killing off his wife's relatives and stealing women is going to have a lower chance of rearing offspring. These warring bands of brothers didn't emerge until fairly recently, after people started to become more sedentary. 

Part two of that interview is here.

2) Frans de  Waal, who studies cooperation, communication, empathy, conflict resolution, reciprocal altruism (i.e., trading favors) and sharing in chimpanzees, bonobos and capuchin monkeys.

3) Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist whose research has mostly dealt with the physiological effects of stress, but who has also studied social hierarchies and aggression in two troops of savanna baboons in Kenya, where he saw the level of violence in one of those troops drop off dramatically when the biggest, meanest dominant males were all killed in an outbreak of tuberculosis. The troop has kept up this more peaceful way of life even now, over 20 years since the dominant-male die-off, when probably every single (current) member of the troop was born after it happened, and every adult male has come from another troop. 

4) Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist who has studied reciprocal altruism, sexual selection, and parental investment in offspring. He wrote an article in 1971 called The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism (PDF), in which he argued that animals who repay other animals' helpful acts were more likely to keep getting help throughout their lives, and thus were more likely to survive longer, have more offspring survive to adulthood, etc.

That's not an exhaustive list, just the names that I, a non-anthropologist who has never taken an anthropology class, know.

*The name they gave him, Shaki, which the article's author translates as "annoying bee," does not suggest that they thought very highly of him, or found him very pleasant company.

**See Simon Baron-Cohen's review of Cordelia Fine's book Delusions of Gender, in which he uses words and phrases like "polemic," "barely veiled agenda," "blurring science and politics," and "extreme social determinism" to describe Fine and her book, when she's really more like a gender agnostic than a proselytizer.

Autistic People Are Human

So I'm a day late but I still want to participate in this campaign to change the Google search results for "autistic people are."

Here is what they are now:

If you can't see the image, it's a screengrab of a Google search box with the phrase "autistic people are" and a list of four choices to complete the phrase. The four words are, in order, "annoying," "smart," "evil," and "retarded." 

Annoying. Evil. Retarded.

Evil? Evil?!

I'll tell you, that one still surprises me. I've seen it before --- seen "autistic" used as shorthand for some moral failing, usually selfishness or a lack of empathy --- but it still astonishes me to see that people apparently see us that way. I'm used to the "empty fortress" stereotypes, where people think we have no inner lives, no thoughts, no feelings, that our words and acts are just random spewage that we cannot possibly have intended, that cannot possibly be directed at any goal, anything we want. We can't want, remember?

That's the stereotype I grew up with. It's a depressing one, and still very much alive. You can see it underlying mainstream America's indifference to the abuse, neglect, and even murder of autistic children by their parents (or other caregivers). "Kids like that are hard to take care of," people will say, "it's no wonder she snapped," or "it's no wonder they weren't up to the job," or "What else were they supposed to do?" And the kids themselves, their deaths don't seem as tragic as the death of a normal child would be. Their lives were cut short, but what kind of a life would it have been, really? These people never grow up, they just get older. Forty years old, sitting in your parents' living room? That's no kind of a life at all. Isn't it almost for the best, to have spared them that?

(No, it's not for the best. In case you were wondering.)

But apparently there's a new stereotype coexisting with this one, that of the stone-cold killer. It cropped up in the coverage of the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, and also of the one in Aurora, Colorado. People were asking, like they always do, who had done this, and how could they have done it? And one of the answers was, "It was a disturbed young man who may have been on the autism spectrum."

I don't know exactly when that autism stereotype started to take root in the public mind; it seems to have come up as people have started to be more aware that some autistic people can speak, go to school, attend mainstream classes, and do very well academically. When I was a child, this was not generally known, and people often expressed surprise that a child as articulate and precocious as I was could have autism.

Like Landon Bryce, I blame Simon Baron-Cohen's increasingly popular conception of autism for this development. I know that Professor Baron-Cohen does not think autistic people are evil, or even that we don't have feelings for other people, but the terminology he chose to use --- calling us poor "empathizers" --- conjures exactly that image in a reader's mind. 

All head and no heart. 

This, of course, is one of the reasons why I'm not mollified by seeing "smart" on the list as well: because I know that the Autistic Genius trope can blend seamlessly into the stone-cold killer. Both are unhindered by emotion or personal attachment, both can act with equal ruthlessness. The only difference is in what they do, how they direct their dispassionate efforts.

(The other reason is that smartness is often seen as a consolation prize: oh, you're autistic? You must be GREAT at math! What's that? You're not? Well, what good are you then?!)

So, what would I like people to know that autistic people are? 

Human.

That's all.

Autism Congressional Hearing Transcripts: Dan Burton

Still image of Rep. Dan Burton saved from this video

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Let me start off by saying, contrary to what has been stated in the media over the years, I am not against vaccination. I believe that vaccinations have a very important place in our society and have given us one of the best health regimens in the history of mankind. People live longer, and live better, and have less disease because we have vaccinations. 

What we have always opposed is putting toxic chemicals, or mineral --- metals --- in the vaccinations. 

Thimerosal contains mercury. When I was a boy, we used to have mercury in thermometers, and they said if you break that thermometer and the mercury gets on your hands, as years went by, that was toxic. 

In Indianapolis, we had a school where, in the chemical laboratory, in the health science room, they broke a vial that had some thimerosal in it, they evacuated the school, they burned the clothes of kids that came into contact with it, and the fire department came in with all kinds of equipment to make sure they weren’t exposed to it. 

Women who are pregnant, they say don’t eat fish that has mercury in it, and they caution them that there’s certain kinds of fish you don’t eat. You don’t drink water that has any mercury in it. There’s all kinds of reasons not to be exposed to mercury, and yet we continue to put it in vaccinations as a preservative. 

In 1929, they came up with thimerosal. They tested it on 29 people that had meningitis. They all died of meningitis, but they said the mercury in the vaccinations, or the thimerosal, didn’t cause any problems, it was not a contributing factor. So ever since 1929, it has never been completely tested, and they continue to put it in vaccinations! 

It wasn’t so bad when a child got one vaccination, or two or three. But when they get as many as 28 or 29 before they go into the first grade, it really hurts them. It causes a cumulative effect. The brain tissues do not chelate it, and it stays in there and causes severe, severe problems. 

Now I had, during the chairmanship which I had in this committee, when I was chair, for six years, we had about four years of hearings. We had people from all over the world: scientists from every part of the world, doctors from every part of the United States, who testified. And people from CDC and FDA said, “There’s no evidence that the thimerosal causes any neurological problems in people who are vaccinated.” And then we kept on, kept on, and finally we had some people from FDA and CDC who came and testified and said --- get this word --- there is no conclusive evidence that the mercury in the vaccinations causes neurological disorders. 

No conclusive evidence. 

Now, that word “conclusive” ought to stick in everybody’s mind, because what it means is there’s a possibility. Now my question has always been --- and I’m convinced that the mercury in vaccinations is a contributing factor to neurological diseases such as autism and Alzheimer’s, I’m convinced of it after all those years we had hearings --- but that word “conclusive,” “there’s no conclusive evidence,” creates a doubt. 

And my question to the presidents and CEOs of pharmaceutical companies has always been, if there’s any doubt, if there’s any doubt that the mercury in vaccinations can cause a neurological problem, then get it out. 

You shouldn’t put mercury in any form in the human body, especially in children in vaccinations. Or adults, in my opinion. 

When we get a vaccination for flu --- every year we get a flu vaccination --- we have thimerosal, fellas. I don’t know if you know that. They’re injecting a certain amount of mercury in your body. And over time, I believe it does have an adverse impact on the neurological system. Of adults. I think it’s a contributing factor to other diseases such as Alzheimer’s. 

Let me just say that the thing we need to do is always err on the side of safety. If the pharmaceutical industry were to go to single-shot vials, then you would eliminate the possibility of neurological problems because there wouldn’t be any mercury in them. 

The last thing I want to say real quickly --- I’ve got 20 seconds --- we passed a vaccine injury compensation fund to compensate those people who were injured by vaccinations. And it was supposed to be something that people could work with the government to get that money --- the pharmaceutical companies were putting money into that fund --- but it’s so hard for a person who’s had a damaged child or a damaged adult to get any money out of that fund, it’s unbelievable. We need to reevaluate that fund to make sure that people who are damaged by mercury in vaccinations need to have access to that so they can at least have some compensation to help with the rest of their lives. These people are going to live sixty, seventy years and they’re going to be a burden. Not only on the families, but on society itself.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
(end transcript)

You know you're not going to hear anything good when the speaker feels compelled to preface it with, "Now, I'm not against vaccines, but ..."

That's another five minutes of this hearing wasted on the completely fictitious vaccine hypothesis, and it really does not make me feel good about this hearing at all, or about Congress in general and their likelihood of doing anything helpful for autistic people, that this guy, with his thimerosal obsession, was apparently the driving force behind this committee's decision to look into autism. 

On a lighter note, this is the first I've heard anyone suggest that vaccines might be causing Alzheimer's disease, too! 

All Science Is Microbiology

As with any major news story, there has been a wave of editorial cartoons referencing the discovery of the Higgs boson. But I noticed something funny about the way some of these cartoonists have chosen to depict this event: the kinds of lab settings that they draw, from the equipment being used to depictions of (what is apparently supposed to be) the particle itself, suggest to me that the field of science in which this discovery occurred is not theoretical physics but microbiology.

Here is the cartoon (from my own local paper, the Kansas City Star) that made this obvious to me:

I don't know where that speech bubble is supposed to be coming from, but the things inside the circle (which looks a lot like the view through a microscope to me) are obviously cells of some kind. Except for the one on the right, which seems to be a grossly outsized mitochrondrion ...

Once I saw that, I remembered this earlier cartoon, where the visual non sequitur had gone right by me the first time, but after seeing the above cartoon, with the amoeba-looking thing labeled "God particle," it finally clicked for me.

I hope he's using the highest possible magnification on that thing ...

The microscope. The guy in this cartoon is looking through a light microscope. Light microscopes use visible light passed through a series of glass lenses to magnify whatever's on the slide; the greatest degree of magnification possible with this technology is an image 1,000 times the actual size of the object.


According to this webpage, the smallest thing you can see with just your eyes is 0.1 mm (100 micrometers, or 100,000 nanometers) long; that would mean, I think, that the smallest thing you could see at 100x magnification would be 0.001 mm (one micrometer, 1,000 nanometers) long. That same webpage lists the size of the smallest thing visible by light microscopy as 500 nanometers; another website gives the theoretical limit as 200 nanometers, which is approximately equal to the wavelength of visible light.


The webpage I cited first in the above paragraph, the "Cell Size and Scale" page, further states that the most powerful electron microscopes (microscopes that don't rely on visible light, but which use a beam of electrons to illuminate whatever they're pointed at) can resolve individual molecules, even individual atoms.


Here is a page on CERN's website that does a decent job of conveying just how small the particles they're trying to learn about are:

The infinitesimal scale of particle physics is mind-blowing, and rather abstract to imagine. If we enlarge an atom to the size of the Earth, then the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus of the atom would each measure the length of an Olympic stadium. Smaller still are the quarks. If we consider our hypothetical atom blown up to the size of the Earth, then a quark would be smaller than a tennis ball. 

However, this does not give us a very good idea of the size of the atom itself. So staying with the same analogy, but scaling things in the opposite direction, if an atom was the size of the Earth, then an amoeba would be as big as our solar system. Going even further, the distance from the centre of Geneva to CERN (about 10 km) would stretch across the entire Milky Way galaxy.  

So if, as mentioned above, a single atom represents the smallest thing that can be seen by any microscope, these subatomic particles are smaller than that by many orders of magnitude. So the possibility of seeing even one of the larger subatomic particles through a light microscope makes the idea of me taking off my glasses, peering into a cup of coffee and watching individual molecules of sugar dissolve sound plausible by comparison.

More examples of cartoons showing people looking through light microscopes at the "God particle:

Whatever you do, don't blink!

 Here's one showing the "God particle" in what appears to be a petri dish:

This one is from England, so at least it's not just Americans who don't know how big the Higgs is!

... and, finally, here's one showing it in a test tube:

This one is visible to the naked eye!

(People might associate the test tube more with chemistry than with microbiology, but you can indeed grow cultures in a test tube. Bacteria cultured in a test tube are going to be suspended in a liquid growth medium, rather than spread across a solid one, but they can live there just as well.)


Anyway, I got a huge kick out of these cartoons, seeing as how they unconsciously nudge you toward the conclusion I named in my post title: All Science Is Microbiology. Even when it's theoretical physics. 


I have no idea if anyone besides me finds this funny; of anyone who reads, or might read, here I'd be most confident of thevenerablecorvex sharing my appreciation of it. Hopefully if I name her, she will see this post and laugh, too.

Two Quick Links about Why the Fight over Evolution Matters

So, apparently Kevin Drum, a political commentator I don't read but who is apparently somewhat well-known, has written an article for Mother Jones declaring the fight over how whether biology is taught in public schools an irrelevant sideshow. 


I was nonplussed by this. Obviously, it's not the most important issue in the world --- it doesn't pose an existential threat the way climate change, peak oil/peak everything, overpopulation and hunger do, and it doesn't have the dire social consequences (or moral urgency) of, say, restricting access to contraception, the mass incarceration of people of color and poor people, increasing economic inequality or the deliberate demolition of the welfare state --- but I still felt like it had some importance that went beyond mere cultural border-policing*.


Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon and PZ Myers at Pharyngula both responded to Drum's article, and each of them made points that rang true for me, and helped explain why his statement bothered me.


Amanda:

I have to admit, I'm boggled at Kevin Drum's reaction to the news that nearly half of Americans are young Earth creationists ... . He completely misreads the situation and frankly does so in a way that I personally felt thrown under the bus.

... 

Kevin takes it as a given that fights over what's taught in high school are strictly about symbolism and have no real importance. I suspect that's a much easier view to take if you're the beneficiary of a good public school in a blue area or lucky enough to have gone through or been able to put your own kids through private school. For someone who went to a rural high school in Texas, the notion that high school doesn't matter strikes me as ridiculous in the extreme. 

The reason conservatives target high schools (and junior high schools and elementary schools) isn't because they're playing for peanuts. On the contrary, conservatives understand something liberals don't, which is that if you get people while they're young, you usually have them for life. This is also, incidentally, why conservatives pay more attention to pop culture than liberals. Liberals are great people --- I'm one of them! --- but  we have a tendency towards preening individualism and therefore discount the importance of things like what's in the classroom and what's on TV because we personally feel we're iconoclasts who aren't affected by it. Which can, in this case, cause us to neglect to remember that in fact this is the air that most people breathe, and the quality of that air matters. 

I also had strong feelings of no you're wrong when I read the paragraph in Drum's article where he dismisses "a 10th grade understanding of evolution" as something so piddling as to be dispensed with entirely, so much does it pale in comparison to the understanding of evolution one gets (presumably) in college, or in books on evolutionary biology. PZ, along with a slew of other biology professors in his comments and at Mother Jones, takes him to task for this; they write that, no, actually, they have noticed a change in how readily their students grasp what they have to teach. Almost as if high school curricula were geared toward preparing the students for college ... 


Anyway, what felt unfair to me was his assumption that, if people needed the knowledge, they could always pick it up elsewhere. This made me angry, because for many people there is no "elsewhere," or at least not one that is immediately accessible without guidance. 


(Who has tried to teach themselves a completely novel subject by checking out books on it from the library? Isn't it hard to figure out which books will be the ones you need? Technical books are often overly specific and assume you've already got a grounding in the subject, and are interested in exploring a particular question within it, and books for laypeople might not be thorough enough, and also might not be trustworthy). 


As for college, well, not everyone goes there, most of the people who go there will never encounter evolution in the classroom --- I didn't, and I majored in a biological science! --- and, again, college professors have enough to do without having to burn up lecture time with remedial material and correcting misinformation. Plus, not all colleges are created equal; some 


To top it off, what you know before college helps determine where you go, whether you go at all, and what you study! College is expensive, and for many prospective students (I know I felt this way when I was applying to colleges) the size of the scholarship you can get makes the decision for you. Scholarships for merit, as opposed to need (and there will always be more people who can't really afford college than there are people officially deemed too poor to afford college on their own), depend on how one performs on standardized tests. And what does standardized test performance depend on? What you learned in high school.


There's more: as Amanda also points out, what you're exposed to in high school shapes your interests and aspirations:

[M]y high school biology course didn't teach evolution. Without evolution, biology actually doesn't make sense, and instead it's just an anatomy class. ... I had no idea how fascinating biology actually was until I was an adult, and long past any chance of starting on that as a career path. Not that I think I would, but you can easily see someone like me making that choice as a young woman, but not really being able to because I was never offered that option in a realistic sense to begin with. 

(As someone who did study biology, and who loves Amanda's writing about science- and skepticism-related topics as much as I do her feminist writing, I can see it. Her interest in the subject is obvious, as is her commitment to find out what's true and how we know it's true. While she won't --- can't --- go into the kind of technical details I sometimes do here, her grasp of general, foundational principles is firm enough that I can easily forget she does not possess a biology degree herself.)


To shift to another aspect of why Drum's assessment is so horribly, horribly wrong, I quote PZ:

[T]his is going to be the century of dependence on the sciences. Climate change is going to hit us all; environmental crises are going to rise up all over the place; we're going to face shortages of energy and fresh water; emerging diseases will be a major concern; new biomedical technologies will cause cultural shocks; the whole world is going to change. Most people, I agree, will not be doing the research that leads to changes, and most of these problems will require political and social changes to correct, but how are you going to convince people to, for instance, change their fuel consumption habits when they're in complete denial of basic facts? How can you expect people to appreciate the importance of ecology and global interactions when you tell them that evolution doesn't matter? How will you get them to make rational decisions to control pandemics when they can't comprehend probability, epidemiology, and viral/bacterial evolution on even the most basic level? 

Most importantly, though, this utilitarian attitude that all that matters is what people can directly use in their day-to-day life is a denial of the Enlightenment and principles on which our country was founded. It's a rejection of the liberal idea that human beings should be well-rounded and informed individuals --- the informed citizenry that should be the foundation of a democracy. We can't expect everyone to be biologists or poets or political scientists, but we should expect that one outcome of a public education is an appreciation of the breadth of human endeavor, and at least a smattering of the fundamentals of a wide range of subjects, sufficient that, to make it practical again, students can make informed career decisions and understand a basic argument from evidence from an expert. We lack that now. And to wave away a simple but essential starting fact about our existence as unimportant is deeply offensive.     

I would add to his first paragraph that you don't have to wait for some futuristic nightmare scenario for these things to affect people's lives. Disease-causing bacteria are already becoming resistant to a whole lot of the antibiotics we use to fight them; lots and lots of species have disappeared or are disappearing; sensitive ecosystems are already being stressed, some to the breaking point by human activity, and humans are already failing to see why they should care***.

The picture he paints in that first paragraph has already come to pass, in the way that the proverbial camel is already in the tent, he just needs to take a few steps forward before it becomes obvious to everyone.

I would also add something else that I think denying evolution does: it makes it easier to think of humans as separate from, and above, the natural world and all those other animals. It allows us to think that what we do to it, to them, will never get back to us. 

(You don't have to deny evolution to get to that mindset, though: I see it arising just as readily from the erroneous view of evolution as a teleological process of development from simple to complex organisms, with humans sitting triumphantly at the apex. I've posted before about my annoyance with this picture of evolution.)

*This is what Andrew Sullivan, another famous political commentator whom I know to be obtuse, thanks to driftglass, an obscure political blogger who is quite acute**, has called belief in creationism a "cultural signifier" that describes the group membership of the believer rather than what that person actually believes about reality. That whole line of reasoning makes me queasy, but even if he is right that no one actually believes the Earth is six thousand years old and every animal species living on it was molded from clay and animated with the breath of a god, if that is what they decide shall be taught to children as fact, in place of the full history of life on Earth (as much of it as we know, anyway) and an explanation of how life on Earth has changed as Earth itself has changed, then those children grow up with a much poorer understanding of the world around them. An idea can have consequences in the real world whether people truly believe it or not; all they need to is act as if they believe it. Also, Andrew Sullivan is dumb.

**Hee. I made a geometry pun.

***This is not, at all, meant to be an exhaustive list, or even a primer on any of those subjects. I just put a recent news/research story in every link to make the point that, yes, this stuff is happening, and it's not just one or two isolated incidents. 

Magical Thinking about Food

This appeared in an ad insert for Hy-Vee (a grocery-store chain, if you didn't know) bundled in with the Kansas City Star on Wednesday; the text says "Kiwi fruit is a 'good sweeper' that assists to sweep off the unwanted substances and toxins out of your body. Kiwi also has a perfect NuVal score."

What I thought was weird about the ad copy was this idea that some foods have this incredible power to remove "toxins" from your body. It's not that I'd never seen that before, but previously I'd only ever seen it in contexts much fringier than an advertisement for a supermarket chain.

I have other thoughts about this odd and superstitious notion --- for one, I suspect that the fear it speaks to, the fear of things getting into one's body without one's knowledge and doing horrible things once they're in there, is very old --- but they're not in order and I haven't done any research yet, so I will wait and deal with them in another post. For now, I'm just going to point out this apparent crossover of an idea common in New Age circles into the mainstream.

Rhetorical Uses of the Budget Deficit

This might seem like small potatoes compared with everything else that's going on in Kansas now (which Shakesville has been chronicling), but it's a local story rather than statewide, and thus not going to get the same amount of coverage on the Internet as the Planned Parenthood defunding and the attempt to impose new regulations on abortion clinics, and I also think it's illustrative of a few things, so I'm going to write about it anyway.

The county commission of Johnson County, Kansas (where I live) has just accepted a $500,000 federal grant paying for abstinence-only sex education classes, but has refused the part of the grant subsidizing a more comprehensive sex-ed program (a series of videos) that emphasizes abstinence, contraception, condom use and basic sexual health, and is targeted at "at-risk" teenagers.

The comprehensive program was opposed by the anti-abortion activist group Kansans for Life, which says on its website that it suspects Planned Parenthood of being in some way involved in creating the videos:

One of the two programs --- the curriculum based on for 11-13 year olds, "Making a Difference," seems to be abstinence-based only ... . The one for "at risk" kids aged 13 to 19 revolves around a video named "What Could You Do?" (have a look HERE), which critics believe is inappropriate on its face because it includes a video that includes a couple in bed, has a heavy emphasis on condoms, and a segment with kids putting condoms on cucumbers.

... The point is that 'condom on cucumber' sex ed programs have long been the staple of Planned Parenthood. And, while the program for younger kids appears OK, and does show some effectiveness, is it possible for citizens to be assured that the Jo. Co. Department of Health, using our federal and perhaps state tax dollars, could or would be able to insure that those teaching the program don't use the opportunity to push Planned Parenthood or something similar?
...
... [W]e will be left with two alternatives. Either use all the grant money for the PREP program aimed at younger kids, with some kind of assurance that it will remain pure of Planned Parenthood or abortion influences or references, or ask that our commissioners once again reject this grant altogether.

(I always find it weird, the extent to which Planned Parenthood is seen as a boogeyman, a sort of Pied Piper of abortion, herding unwary girls and women by the score into its clinics. It's like a less overtly misogynistic version of that other widespread myth about abortion, the cartoonishly selfish woman who terminates pregnancies on a whim; only in this version it's the cartoonishly evil and predatory doctor who performs abortions on everyone who comes into his office, whether they want one or not. There also seems to be this idea that everything Planned Parenthood does, or oversees, is going to involve abortion. Which is not true --- most of what Planned Parenthood does has nothing to do with abortion; it's gynecological exams, testing and treatment for STDs, distributing contraception, help managing painful periods, or even giving prenatal care to pregnant women who want to have the baby!)

Kansans for Life's Executive Director, Mary Kay Culp, also brought up the national debt:

Culp and a few others cited the government's huge debt among the reasons for turning down the grant.

"We're borrowing money from China to put condoms on cucumbers," she said.

This is the part I mentioned at the beginning of the post, that I thought was "illustrative" of something. I've been noticing lately (and I haven't been the only one to notice) that concern about the nation's (or sometimes the state's) fiscal health seems to operate as a sort of rhetorical camouflage: when you couch your calls for all sorts of government programs and services to be eliminated in language of scarcity, or of a dire need for any and all cost-cutting measures, you make it harder to argue against them because the usual defense, "But [x] does a lot of good, and people need it!" doesn't refute "There is no money for [x]." If you want to refute that, you have to go a step further, and find a y that could be cut in x's place, yielding equal or greater savings. But usually the x's in this discussion are things that the people pulling the Deficit Gambit want to get rid of just because they don't agree with them philosophically, not because they constitute a serious drain on the budget.

(In this case, I think the Deficit Gambit is functioning a little differently since it is being used in addition to, rather than instead of, philosophical arguments. So I think its purpose is less to disguise the philosophical argument than it is to buttress it, especially to persuade people who might not accept any of the premises on which the philosophical argument is based).