Tag: science and society

Hung out to dry

Poor Nobel laureate Timothy Hunt says he feels “hung out to dry” by UCL and the European Research Council, who decided they didn’t want to be associated with a man who makes disparaging remarks when invited as a representative of the science establishment to speak to the Korean Female Scientists and Engineers. For those who missed it, his comment was

Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry….

I’m in favour of single-sex labs.

Invited later to comment after reflection on his remarks, he offered the classic non-apology: I’m sorry you were offended.

“I’m really really sorry that I caused any offence, that’s awful. I just meant to be honest, actually.”

His wife, Mary Collins, an esteemed immunologist, also at UCL, expresses shock and dismay at the university’s rapid response — pressuring him to resign forthwith from his “honorary researcher” position — and offers a defence that itself seems remarkably old-fashioned: He likes to cook. And besides

he is not sexist. I am a feminist, and I would not have put up with him if he were sexist.

In one sense I think he’s right that it is unfair, just as it is unfair that one person is hit by a cosmic ray and develops cancer, while another is spared. It’s not fair to fire someone for a single spontaneous mistake. But it’s also unfair to hire someone as an “honorary researcher” because he did some good work 25 years ago. For all I know, he’s still doing great science, or plotting out the course that science might take over the next century. But he was speaking in South Korea in a symbolic role, as a genius, and symbols don’t have the same rights that human beings do. I’ve written before about the cult of genius in science that gave us such esteemed figures as James Watson. It’s not that I don’t think that thinking hard about one topic could yield beautiful insights about apparently unrelated topics.

He just blurted out the kind of “jocularity” that was standard bonding behaviour among male scientists of his generation, and the august institutions that no longer find it useful to have his name associated with them are rushing to separate themselves, in part to forestall criticism inspired by many years of ignoring or actively fostering sexism in science. Someone who built a brilliant scientific career in the days when “girls in the lab” were expected to put up with that sort of shit might have interesting things to say about how things have changed, and how they could continue to change, including even the increased distraction of sexual liaisons between labmates — though the way he phrased it suggests that he has the distraction of falling in love even when he’s all by himself — but he may have just destructive self-aggrandisement to offer. And in the latter case, he’s not a useful symbol anymore.

A bomb in mathematics

I’ve just been reading Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. It’s more than a century old, and I was surprised to find it such an acute analysis of the psychology of terrorism. It follows the planning and aftermath of a ridiculous and botched scheme to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. The ringleader Mr Verloc, the “secret agent” of the title, who spends his time infiltrating anarchist organisations, is put up to it by his employer, the embassy of an unnamed Central Asian nation. The crime seems almost entirely unmotivated. The new First Secretary of the embassy is irked by Verloc’s indolence and apparent uselessness, and seeks to prod him into making some exertions for his salary. The inane goal of the attack is to show up the ineptitude of the English police, and so stimulate an autocratic turn in its inconveniently soft and democratic government. Plus ça change… The target must be such as to seem senseless (hence not a tiresomely conventional target, like a crown prince or a government building), important (hence not the National Gallery — “There would be some screaming, of course, but from whom? Artists — art critics and such like — people of no account. No one minds what they say.”) and sufficiently menacing. He announces

The demonstration must be against learning—science.  But not every science will do.  The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy.  Since bombs are your means of expression, it would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics.  But that is impossible…  What do you think of having a go at astronomy?

I was also amused by the comment of the bomb engineer:

The system’s worked perfectly.  And yet you would think that a common fool in a hurry would be much more likely to forget to make the contact altogether.  I was worrying myself about that sort of failure mostly.  But there are more kinds of fools than one can guard against.  You can’t expect a detonator to be absolutely fool-proof.

Risk categories and e-cigarettes

I’ve been reading Kate Fox’s celebrated Watching the English, which is sort of a pop-sociological treatise on English customs, but somewhat hard to take for all its flattering the English in all the myths they cherish about themselves — including their supposed modesty and inability to accept compliments. (I was particularly astonished by her description of the supposedly considerate English drivers. Perhaps they treat other drivers with more respect than they can spare for pedestrians.)

Anyway, since I am intrigued by the way “e-cigarettes” — devices for inhaling an addictive drug — have managed to float free from drug regulations, not to mention the prohibition that usually gets slapped onto designer drugs, as well as from their association with increasingly illicit tobacco. Fox is a huge fan, and can’t understand how anyone could object:

These clever devices are a sort of glorified version of nicotine inhalators, which look and feel rather more like a real cigarette, and emit a totally harmless, odourless steam or vapour that looks a bit like smoke. Many people are now accustomed to seeing these electronic cigarettes, and know that they are harmless…

Some people, however, do not instantly grasp this… and I have been conducting informal cross-cultural research on their reactions. In England, there are the usual raised eyebrows, frowns, pursed lips, tuts and mutters… But in all the years that I have been using these e-cigarettes on public transport and in restaurants, pubs and other public places where smoking is banned, only one English person has ever actually ‘confronted’ me about it…

In almost all countries, this disapproval quickly turns to friendly laughter, or curiosity, once I have explained that my ‘cigarette’ is an innocuous electronic device. The only exception I have found so far is the US, where some people seem to object almost as much to completely risk-free e-cigs as they do to the real thing — an irrational reaction that brings to mind my favourite definition of Puritanism: ‘The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having fun.’

(Mencken’s definition was actually “that someone, somewhere, may be happy”.) There’s a fascinating number of words about risk here: odourless, harmless [twice], innocuous, completely risk-free, irrational reaction. It brings to my mind the ridicule heaped upon the killjoys who suggested in the 1980s and 1990s that something as innocuous as sidestream tobacco smoke could harm people’s health. Now everyone accepts that sidestream smoke is highly toxic, but the completely unregulated mixtures of chemicals spewed out by e-cigarettes are supposed to be harmless. On the basis of advertising copy, so far as I can see.

In contrast to the anthropologist Kate Fox, mere epidemiologists do not describe the second-hand exposure to e-cigarette vapour as “completely risk-free”. Instead, they say things like

Schober et al. measured indoor pollution from 3 people using e-cigarettes over a 2-hour period in a realistic environment modeled on a café. They found elevated nicotine, 1,2-propanediol, glycerin, aluminum, and 7 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons classified as probable carcinogens by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in the room air.[…]

on average, bystanders would be exposed to nicotine but at levels 1/10th that of cigarette smoke (e-cigarette aerosol, 3.32±2.49 μg/m3; cigarette smoke, 31.60±6.91 μg/m3; P=0.008). Both e-cigarette aerosol and cigarette smoke contained fine particles …

So e-cigarette vapour contains known carcinogens and the addictive drug nicotine. It is known that persistent low-level exposure to nicotine can provoke nicotine dependence, particularly in adolescents, or predispose them to other drug addiction.

Some people choose to take that drug recreationally, and I don’t object to them having that right. But why would a scientist disparage other people’s unwillingness to accept these risks to support her habit as “an irrational reaction”?

Of course, I know why. It’s one of the standard clichés about scientists, that they use the pose of rationality to claim an authority that they have not earned, to pretend that their private caprices are facts. It is unprofessional, and it undermines the whole enterprise of science.

The biggest genetics-investment opportunity ever!

I was just looking at this paper from 2012, that purports to discover the heritability of economic and political preferences by slightly shady statistical analysis of GWAS data. And then it hit me: We could market

An investment plan tailored to YOUR genotype

Okay, we’ll have to work on the catchphrase. Feel free to send your seed money. (The genotype-based diet is running like gangbusters.) Excuse me while I go off for a moment to write the patent application.

Impact!

The Pope’s Shluchim

I’ve just been reading Amir Alexander’s book Infinitesimal, about the intellectual struggle over the concepts of infinitesimals and the continuum in mathematics and science (and theology) in the 17th century. The early part of the book is a history of the Society of Jesus, presented as a ruthless and intellectually daring force for religious conservatism, strictly hierarchical, devoted to its holy founder, a thoroughly mystical movement that built its reputation and influence on educational outreach. And then it struck me: The Jesuits were just like Chabad-Lubavitch!

The patron saint of cranks and charlatans

I can’t remember who it was who referred to Galileo that way. Ted Cruz, the right-wing US senator, presidential candidate, and one-time Ivy League super-elitist has invoked the protection of this saint to defend his position on climate change, in opposition to the overwhelming consensus of the experts:

Today the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-earthers. You know it used to be: ‘It is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat.’ And this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier.

This is standard crank-Galileo stuff, impressive for the number of misconceptions it builds into such a small space. Of course, Galileo’s critics didn’t think the Earth is flat. It was certainly not “accepted scientific wisdom” in his day. (Beyond any theoretical or cultural understanding, it was nearly a century since Portuguese sailors had circumnavigated the globe.) Galileo was not dismissed by the scientific experts of his day. His theories and discoveries were controversial, but he was generally acclaimed by scientific authorities. He was punished for contradicting the Church’s entrenched philosophical commitments, by a panel that, while not completely devoid of expertise in astronomy and Aristotelian physics, was chosen for its institutional commitment to the Church. It’s not really the most felicitous comparison for a climate-change denier to bring up.

Logical fallacies aside — “They laughed at the Wright brothers. They also laughed at the Marx brothers.” — there aren’t many cases of new ideas being dismissed as ridiculous by the scientific community, and later proved right. There is often entrenched conservative resistance (as there should be) to radical new ideas, but almost never is a single thinker so far beyond everyone else that his ideas don’t elicit significant support. Perhaps the best exception is Alfred Wegener, with his obviously crackpot theory of continental drift. For some reason Galileo, who was very much respected and mainstream, gets called into service to defend the crazies, and not Wegener. I imagine that Cruz’s backers would be almost as uncomfortable with plate tectonics as they are with evolution, if they knew anything about it. At that point the USGS would be banned from using plate tectonics to predict earthquakes.

In any case, Wegener wasn’t sitting in a Senate office reading Heritage Foundation talking points; he learned everything that was known about geophysics (which wasn’t much at the time) conducting expeditions to Greenland to collect evidence.

Do all babies look alike?

And if not, why don’t they have any privacy rights with regard to their photographs?

Here is the illustration provided by the BBC on its home page for a report on the decision to approve fertility procedures that take genetic material from three different people:

Not a three-parent baby, but they are expected to look similar to this one.
Not a three-person baby, but manufacturers promise they will look similar to this model.

One wonders what purpose this photograph serves. Are there readers who see the headline and think, “Wait, babies, I’ve heard of them. Can’t quite remember what they look like…” In what sense is this an illustration of the article? It’s not even a newborn infant. They might as well have shown a 90-year-old lady, because making three-person babies inevitably leads to the eventual creation of three-person 90-year-olds. It might be even more relevant to show an elderly person, because that’s the goal: the purpose of the procedure is to improve the health and longevity of the humans so conceived.

They could have used their stock photograph of weirdly lighted lab technicians pipetting something into a test tube instead.

I’m wondering, who is this baby who is standing in for a “three-person baby”? I’m used to seeing children have their features blurred out in news photos. But, of course, this one was presumably a “volunteer” model. One baby can stand in for all babies. (As long as it’s white, of course.)

In the still of the night

I just read a popular book on chemical elements, The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. It was very entertaining, and seemed quite credible and clear, even if slightly fuzzy on the quantum mechanics. There was one claim that I took exception to, though:

The length of a day is slowly increasing because of the sloshing of ocean tides, which drag and slow earth’s rotation. To correct for this, metrologists slip in a “leap second” about every third year, usually when no one’s paying attention, at midnight on December 31.

Is there any time in the year when people are paying more attention to the time exact to a second than precisely at midnight on December 31? Does he think people would notice an extra second if it were interpolated at noon on July 7? I always assumed they did it at the one time of year when people would notice an extra second precisely because they want to be noticed. “Never fear, humble citizens. While you sleep, we are looking after your time.”

What does an anti-vaccine activist want?

With the swelling of interest in the anti-vaccine movement, inspired by the recent California measles outbreak, I’ve seen a number of opinions published similar to this one from Ian Steadman in the New Statesman

Then there’s also this to think about: if somebody’s distrust of scientific and/or political authority is so great, for whatever reason – maybe they’ve been scared by sensationalist stories in the media, or maybe they sincerely believe the government has no moral right to dictate health choices to citizens – that they’re willing to significantly increase their child’s risk of catching a (possibly fatal) illness, then calling them names and telling them scientists and politicians disagree with them is probably futile. Arguing that “the science is settled” with someone whose stance is predicated on the belief that the standards of proof used by scientists are flawed is definitely futile.

The article is excellent, but I don’t entirely agree with this sentiment. Living in Berkeley and Oxford, I have encountered some vaccine refuseniks, and it’s not clear to me that they have anything as definable as a belief about “the standards of proof used by scientists”. Rather, I think that they have a desperate need to feel special, protected not by mass vaccination — and definitely not by anything as infra dig as “herd immunity” — but by their special virtue, which may be Christian purity or organic health-food purity. Continue reading “What does an anti-vaccine activist want?”

Old-time Darwinism

I’ve just been reading Adam Tooze’s book on WWI and its aftermath. I see Tooze as the great Marxist historian that never was — I don’t know anything about him other than his two books, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t like the comparison — since the grandest human affairs, in his accounts, end up in orbit around the black hole of capital. Anyway, I came upon an interesting quote there that reminded me of why some people of good will found themselves repulsed by Darwinism, particularly by Darwinian hangers-on who try to cite the “lessons” of Darwinism for human affairs.

The Japanese delegation to the founding conference of the League of Nations sought to have a ban on racial discrimination written in to the League covenant. (Not that they opposed racial discrimination in general, but they often enough found themselves on the unpleasant end of it.) Colonel House, a senior American diplomat and advisor to President Wilson, suggested to British foreign minister Arthur Balfour splicing the line from the US Declaration of Independence “All men are created equal” into the Covenant preamble. Balfour rejected this out of hand.

The claim that all men were created equal, Balfour objected, “was an eighteenth-century proposition which he did not believe was true.” The Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth century had taught other lessons. It might be asserted that “in a certain sense… all men of a particular nation were created equal”. Bot to assert that “a man in Central Africa was created equal to a European” was, to Balfour, patent nonsense.

Of course, one needn’t look far to find scientifically-interested chatterers — and occasionally scientists themselves — citing Darwin-themed research to prove that all the prejudices they ever had (these days they tend to emphasise difference between sexes rather than between races) are not only true, but indisputable because they have been proved by science.

I suppose it’s also worth reminding oneself what kind of racist colonialist swamp early Zionism got its start in.