Category: Science

Why did avian flu in Turkey become more dangerous to human beings?  How does avian flu mutate more generally?  Revere of Effect Measure offers four excellent posts on this critical topic.

Toxoplasma gondii is a favorite parasite of evolutionary biologists because it has an incredible property.  The parasite lives in the guts of cats where it sheds eggs in cat feces that are often eaten by rats.  Now how to get back from the rat to the cat?  Amazingly, Toxoplasma gondii infects the brains of rats making them
change their behavior in a subtle way that increases the genetic
fitness of the parasite.  Toxoplasma makes the infected rats less scared of cats and so more likely to be eaten! 

Now here is the kicker.  Toxoplasma gondii also infects a lot of humans.

[With] open-source reviewing…the journal posts a submitted paper online and allows not just assigned reviewers but anyone to critique it. After a few weeks, the author revises, the editors accept or reject and the journal posts all, including the editors’ rationale…

Open, collaborative review may seem a scary departure. But scientists might find it salutary. It stands to maintain rigor, turn review processes into productive forums and make publication less a proprietary claim to knowledge than the spark of a fruitful exchange. And if collaborative review can’t prevent fraud, it seems certain to discourage it, since shady scientists would have to tell their stretchers in public. Hwang’s fabrications, as it happens, were first uncovered in Web exchanges among scientists who found his data suspicious. Might that have happened faster if such examination were built into the publishing process? "Never underestimate competitors," Delamothe says, for they are motivated. Science – and science – might have dodged quite a headache by opening Hwang’s work to wider prepublication scrutiny.

Here is a bit more.  What might be some arguments against this practice?

1. It is too easily manipulated by your friends, or perhaps by your enemies.

2. The resulting morass of comments must be interpreted.  We are back to editorial  discretion, but it is better to have some referees rather than none.

3. The purpose of journals is not to always make the right decision, but rather to certify the quality of outstanding work to more general audiences.  By blurring the evaluation process, open source reviewing would make journals as a whole less reliable.

4. Don’t we already have this option?  I could post a paper on this blog, open up the comments, and receive a call from the AER, asking for a submission.  I guess my answering machine isn’t working.

5. The current system allows for editorial manipulation through the choice of referees.  This is good.  An innovator needs only to convince a single editor, not a jackal-like pack of seething commentators [hey guys, that’s you!].

What is the goal of publishing anyway?  To assign "just outcomes"?  To make sure that the one percent of worthwhile papers find a prestigious outlet?  To provide incentives for those papers to be written in the first place?  To increase the prestige of science as a whole?  Since I don’t understand why on-line publishing hasn’t already taken over, this scheme is hard to evaluate.  Comments are open….

There is some evidence that this helps you solve the problem; the study was done on five-year-olds.

On this topic I am strictly a funnel.  Derek Lowe has written a response to Revere at Effect Measure, and his defense of "rat tests."  Here is the link to the entire exchange.  The authors have an instructive back-and-forth in the comments section.

The story goes like this: Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was talking about the possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence with some other physicists. They were impressed that our galaxy holds 100 billion stars, that life evolved quickly and progressively on earth, and that an intelligent, exponentially-reproducing species could colonize the galaxy in just a few million years. They reasoned that extra-terrestrial intelligence should be common by now. Fermi listened patiently, then asked simply, "So, where is everybody?". That is, if extra-terrestrial intelligence is common, why haven’t we met any bright aliens yet? This conundrum became known as Fermi’s Paradox.

The paradox has become more ever more baffling. Over 150 extrasolar planets have been identified in the last few years, suggesting that life-hospitable planets orbit most stars. Paleontology shows that organic life evolved very quickly after earth’s surface cooled and became life-hospitable. Given simple life, evolution shows progressive trends towards larger bodies, brains, and social complexity. Evolutionary psychology reveals several credible paths from simpler social minds to human-level creative intelligence. Yet 40 years of intensive searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing. No radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind.

So, it looks as if there are two possibilities. Perhaps our science over-estimates the likelihood of extra-terrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make colonizing space-ships would be bright enough to make thermonuclear bombs, and would use them on each other sooner or later. Perhaps extra-terrestrial intelligence always blows itself up. Fermi’s Paradox became, for a while, a cautionary tale about Cold War geopolitics.

I suggest a different, even darker solution to Fermi’s Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.

The fundamental problem is that any evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. We don’t seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that tended to promote survival and luscious mates who tended to produce bright, healthy babies. Modern results: fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote our real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness — subjective cues of survival and reproduction, without the real-world effects. Fresh organic fruit juice costs so much more than nutrition-free soda. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends on TV. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity.

Fitness-faking technology tends to evolve much faster than our psychological resistance to it. The printing press is invented; people read more novels and have fewer kids; only a few curmudgeons lament this. The Xbox 360 is invented; people would rather play a high-resolution virtual ape in Peter Jackson’s King Kong than be a perfect-resolution real human. Teens today must find their way through a carnival of addictively fitness-faking entertainment products: MP3, DVD, TiVo, XM radio, Verizon cellphones, Spice cable, EverQuest online, instant messaging, Ecstasy, BC Bud. The traditional staples of physical, mental, and social development (athletics, homework, dating) are neglected. The few young people with the self-control to pursue the meritocratic path often get distracted at the last minute — the MIT graduates apply to do computer game design for Electronics Arts, rather than rocket science for NASA.

Around 1900, most inventions concerned physical reality: cars, airplanes, zeppelins, electric lights, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, bras, zippers. In 2005, most inventions concern virtual entertainment — the top 10 patent-recipients are usually IBM, Matsushita, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Micron Technology, Samsung, Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba, and Sony — not Boeing, Toyota, or Wonderbra. We have already shifted from a reality economy to a virtual economy, from physics to psychology as the value-driver and resource-allocator. We are already disappearing up our own brainstems. Freud’s pleasure principle triumphs over the reality principle. We narrow-cast human-interest stories to each other, rather than broad-casting messages of universal peace and progress to other star systems.

Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves. This is the Great Temptation for any technological species — to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children.

Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Those who persist will evolve more self-control, conscientiousness, and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratification, child-rearing, and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the Religious Right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace Left.

My dangerous idea-within-an-idea is that this, too, is already happening. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, and anti-consumerism activists, already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it. They insulate themselves from our Creative-Class dream-worlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for our fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the earth, as like-minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve Contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox. They will toast each other not in a soft-porn Holodeck, but in a sacred nursery.

More and more of you read us through an RSS feed, so I will direct your attention to a new item on our blogroll, the British Psychological Society Research Digest.  Every two weeks they post a series of articles on new psychology results, typically with relevance to social science.  Scroll through the site, or here is a recent piece on depression and sensitivity to the emotions of others.

Timothy Wilson writes:

In one study, mildly depressed college students were asked to spend eight minutes thinking about themselves or to spend the same amount of time thinking about mundane topics like "clouds forming in the sky."

People in the first group focused on the negative things in their lives and sunk into a worse mood. People in the other group actually felt better afterward, possibly because their negative self-focus was "turned off" by the distraction task…

What can we do to improve ourselves and feel happier? Numerous social psychological studies have confirmed Aristotle’s observation that "We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage." If we are dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives, one of the best approaches is to act more like the person we want to be, rather than sitting around analyzing ourselves.

Social psychologist Daniel Batson and colleagues at the University of Kansas found that participants who were given an opportunity to do a favor for another person ended up viewing themselves as kind, considerate people – unless, that is, they were asked to reflect on why they had done the favor. People in that group tended in the end to not view themselves as being especially kind.

Here is the full story, and no I don´t have New Year´s resolutions.

No, this is not Klaus Barbie:

Barbie, that plastic icon of girlhood fantasy play, is routinely tortured by children, research has found.

The methods of mutilation are varied and creative, ranging from
scalping to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving,
according to academics from the University of Bath.

The
findings were revealed as part of an in-depth look by psychologists and
management academics into the role of brands among 7 to 11-year-old
schoolchildren.

The researchers had not intended to focus on Barbie, but they
were taken aback by the rejection, hatred and violence she provoked
when they asked the children about their feelings for the doll.

Violence and torture against Barbie were repeatedly reported
across age, school and gender. No other toy or brand name provoked such
a negative response…

She and her colleagues Christine Griffin and
Patricia Gaya Wicks concluded that, while adults may find a child’s
delight in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls to be
disturbing, from the child’s point of view they were simply being
imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity, in the same way as
one might crush cans for recycling.

Here is the story.

For some reason (psychoanalyze me if you wish), I find this one especially awful:

For her 17th wedding anniversay Jeanette Yarborough wanted to do something special for her husband.  In addition to planning a hotel getaway for the weekend, Ms. Yarborough paid a surgeon $5,000 to reattach her hymen, making her appear to be a virgin again.

"It’s the ultimate gift for the man who has everything," says Ms. Yarborough…

This is reported to be one of the plastic surgery industry’s fastest-growing segments, and yes that is in the United States.

The article is from the 15 December Wall Street Journal, p.A1.

Next thing you know, there will even be a market in Ron Artest.

…there is no clear evidence that schools are contributing to the growth in obesity.  The obesity-related complaints about school lunches, vending machines, and physical education are based largely on the assumption that these factors are causing our kids to get fat.  Yet, I find little evidence to support this claim.  For example, in looking at survey data on the health behavior of middle and high school students, the factor I found that best predicted whether or not a kid was obese was tooth brushing [emphasis added].  More important than how much junk food they ate, soda they drank, or physical education they received was whether or not they brushed their teeth.  Among fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds, only 16 percent of kids who brushed their teeth more than once a day were overweight compared to 24 percent who brushed less than once a day.  Of course, other factors were important as well — teenagers who play more computer games, eat more fast-food, and drink less whole milk were also more likely to be obese — but these factors were tiny in comparison with tooth brushing.  Meanwhile school policies, such as whether the kid was in physical education or ate school lunches, had no predictive power for whether or not a child was obese.

Now obviously the act of brushing one’s teeth plays little direct role in a child’s weight, but it is a good indicator of something else — in what type of household the child lives.  Children who brush their teeth more often are more likely to come from homes where health and hygiene are a priority…In other words, outside of genetics, the biggest factor predicting a child’s weight is what type of parenting they receive [emphasis added].

That is from J. Eric Oliver’s Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic.  Here is my previous post on the book; the comments are open.