Category: Science

Here is a defense of using those rat tests to judge what will cause cancer in humans:

The "junk science" they are referring to is the long-standing and
well-confirmed practice of identifying chemicals likely to cause cancer
in humans by testing them in animals. The animals (rodents) are a
standard model for biological processes of relevance to humans (which
is why drug companies and medical researchers have been using them for
a century). They are well understood and are the only sentinels for
detecting carcinogenicity of any use to public health. Since chemically
induced cancer has a latency period of decades (typically 20 years or
more), waiting for it to appear in human populations would meant that
once detected, even if exposure would cease instantly (which can never
happen), it would take another 20 or more years to eliminate the
cancers from exposure (all the cancers induced in the 20 years exposure
prior to detection). But even then, the chances of detecting any but
the most powerful carcinogens in human populations (via epidemiology)
is small. Epidemiology is a very insensitive tool. I say this with some
authority, as I am a cancer epidemiologist specializing in chemical
exposures and have authored numerous peer reviewed studies in that area
over many years.

The main rhetorical lever ACSH employs is the
use of high doses in the animal studies, doses that are much higher
than usually faced by humans. But as ACSH knows well (but didn’t
divulge) there is a technical requirement for using these doses. If one
were to use doses in animals predicted to cause cancer at a rate we
would consider a public health hazard, we would need tens of thousands
of animals to test a single dose, mode of exposure and rodent species
or strain. This makes using those doses infeasible. Thus a Maximum
Tolerated Dose is used, one that causes no other pathology except
possibly cancer and doesn’t result in more than a 10% weight loss. The
assumption here is that something that causes cancer at high doses in
these animals will also do so at low doses. This is biologically
reasonable. It is a (surprising) fact, that most chemicals, given in no
matter how high a dose, won’t cause the very unusual and specific
biological effect of turning an animal cell cancerous. Cancer cells are
not "damaged" cells in the individual sense but "super cells," capable
of out competing normal cells. It is only in the context of the whole
organism that there is a problem. It is not surprising, then, that very
few chemicals would have be ability to turn a normal cell into a
biological super cell of this type. Estimates are that is far less than
10%, perhaps only 1% of all chemicals that have this ability. Thus
western industrial civilization doesn’t have to come to a screeching
halt if we eliminate industrial chemical carcinogens from our
environment.

We know of no false negatives with this process.
Every chemical we know that causes cancer in humans also does so in
rodents (with the possible exception of inorganic trivalent arsenic,
which is equivocal).

Here is the full post.  I’m not close to having the expertise to evaluate these claims, but two points.  First, the author is highly qualified; as a blogger he is anonymous but I can vouch for his credentials.  Second, it should be the self-appointed task of bloggers to pass along arguments which either struck them or which might shake up their readers.

Clint Hallam, the man he selected for the world’s first hand
transplant, refused to keep up with the lifelong drug regimen required
to suppress immune responses, along with regular exercises to train the
new hand. After three years he had the hand removed.

And then:

Brain-dead patients in France are presumed to be organ donors unless
they have made explicit provisions to the contrary, and approval by
next of kin is not normally required.

Here is the full story.

Some relatives of people with autism also display behaviours and brain differences associated with the condition, even though they themselves do not have it. This could make it easier to spot families at risk of having an autistic child. It could also help in the quest to identify the genetic and environmental triggers for the condition, though it seems these triggers might vary from country to country.

Eric Peterson of the University of Colorado in Denver had compared an MRI study of the brains of 40 parents with autistic children to that of 40 age-matched controls. And he told the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington DC that the parents who had an autistic child shared several differences in brain structure with their offspring.

Here is the article.

Just as our technology for finding and understanding UFOs improved dramatically, the manifestations of UFOs dwindled away. Despite forty-plus years of alleged alien abductions, not one scrap of physical evidence supports the claim that mysterious visitors are conducting unholy experiments on hapless victims. The technology for sophisticated photograph analysis can be found in every PC in America, and yet, oddly, recent UFO pictures are rare. Cell phones and instant messaging could summon throngs of people to witness a paranormal event, and yet such paranormal events don’t seem to happen very often these days. For an allegedly real phenomenon, UFOs sure do a good job of acting like the imaginary friend of the true believers. How strange, that they should disappear just as we develop the ability to see them clearly. Or perhaps it isn’t so strange.

Here is more.  I doubt if people have fewer delusions, so presumably they have moved into stories which cannot so easily be refuted.  This would include delusions about the future (e.g., extreme forms of transhumanism?), delusions about politics, and delusions about religion.  The demand for verification need not outrace the ever-powerful self-deception; "stamp the weasel" is never an easy game to win.  And sometimes too much stamping is counterproductive.  For all of the associated craziness, UFO delusions have been of a relatively harmless ilk.  They made people skeptical about government, drew viewers to science fiction movies, and the policy implications of belief in aliens (appoint another ambassador?) were consistent with fiscal responsibility.

Randomness seems to confound us. For example, we have a tendency to infer non-randomness from apparent patterns in random events (witness the incorrigible optimists who spot trends in the spins of a roulette wheel or the ups and downs of the FT Share Index); at the same time, the history of statistics suggests that, when random samples are required, we often mistake the merely haphazard – or whatever happens to be near at hand – for the truly random. As I will show, the Doomsday Argument’s fundamental mistake is to rely on the intuitive but misguided notion that we can in general take ourselves to be typical humans, and thus, in effect, random samples of the species.

Here is the paper.  If you are familiar with the core argument, scroll down to p.9 "We are necessarily alive…" for the beginning of the bottom line.  I have never been persuaded by the Doomsday Argument, if only because it does not specify the appropriate reference class of self-observing agents.  I now see further reason to be skeptical.  Comments are open, and thanks again to the what-would-I-do-without-it www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.

Truth be told, physicists are terrified of quantum mechanics. Really.  The rules of quantum calculation seem so strange that anyone afraid of losing his or her mind should be scared.  (Those who love to lose their minds, on the other hand, adore it.) 

Struggling to make the quantum rules square with a reality "out there," many physicist’s position is "shut up and calculate."  Others have abandoned standard logic, probability, or decision theory for "quantum" versions of these things, or have decided that consciousness must play a fundamental role. (There is even a quantum game theory.)

In eleven days I give my first talk at a physics department, on my conservative research program that tries to have it all: the quantum rules, a reality out there with no special role for consciousness, and keeping standard logic, probability, and decision theory.  I’m not quite there yet, and I may be too close to my work to be objective, but I feel I’m very close. 

Of course we can’t make all the quantum strangeness go away.  For example, reality seems to be intrinsically non-local, and it seems to be far larger than we ever imagined.  But the universe we are all familiar with now is far larger than our ancestors ever imagined, and even Newton gave up on locality. 

Fear not the quantum night – it really will all make sense someday. 

The author is Will Wilkinson, of The Fly Bottle, and his new endeavor is http://happinesspolicy.com.  The mission of the blog is to study the policy implications of "happiness research."  Here is one of my previous posts on the topic.  Here is my (slightly different) more recent opinion.  If you are into the validity of introspection, here is one happy girl.  Here is one happy guy. 

We do not have final answers, but I learned something from this paper.  Thanks to Michael Vassar for the pointer.

The common denominator of all jokes is a path of expectation that is diverted by an unexpected twist necessitating a complete reinterpretation of all the previous facts — the punch-line…Reinterpretation alone is insufficient.  The new model must be inconsequential.  For example, a portly gentleman walking toward his car slips on a banana peel and falls.  If he breaks his head and blood spills out, obviously you are not going to laugh.  You are going to rush to the telephone and call an ambulance.  But if he simply wipes off the goo from his face, looks around him, and then gets up, you start laughing.  The reason is, I suggest, because now you know it’s inconsequential, no real harm has been done.  I would argue that laughter is nature’s way of signaling that "it’s a false alarm."  Why is this useful from an evolutionary standpoint?  I suggest that the rhythmic staccato sound of laughter evolved to inform our kin who share our genes; don’t waste your precious resources on this situation; it’s a false alarm.  Laughter is nature’s OK signal.

That is from V.S. Ramachandran’s A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness.

Matt Yglesias quotes Franz de Waal’s new book:

They [people conversing] settle on a single hum, and it is always the lower status person who does the adjusting. This was first demonstrated in an analysis of the Larry King Live television show. The host, Larry King, would adjust his timbre to that of high-ranking guests, like Mike Wallace or Elizabeth Taylor. Low-ranking guests, on the other hand, would adjust their timbre to that of King. The clearest adjustment to King’s voice, indicating lack of confidence, came from former Vice President Dan Quayle.

The same spectral analysis has been applied to televised debates between U.S. presidential candidates. In all eight elections between 1960 and 2000 the popular vote matched the voice analysis: the majority of people voted for the candidate who held his own timbre rather than the one who adjusted.

On another note, Matt wonders whether he has a new worry.

Randall Parker has the scoop.  Here is one excerpt, quoted by Randall:

…when confronted with thoughts of death, people tend to act in ways that will boost their self-esteem. They also have fewer cognitive resources to resist behaviors that are not central to their self-image. People for whom being slim or fit is important to their self-image, for instance, will not be as likely to overeat, but if physical appearance isn’t as important, the willpower to resist that fudge sundae will plummet.

Here is my previous post, with an assist from Robin Hanson, on the same topic.  Let me note in passing, this is one reason why I would expect a bimodal response to a major crisis such as avian flu.  Most people will behave quite heroically; those who take pride in being social rebels/misfits will act like scoundrels.

Virtually all 500,000 of the world’s thoroughbred racehorses are descended from 28 ancestors, born in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, according to a new genetic study. And up to 95% of male thoroughbreds can be traced back to just one stallion.

Read more here.  Here is another account.