Yet another example of why I left Indiana

A Geocentrism conference? Really?I saw this story floating around and wasn’t going to comment on it, but then I found out the conference is being held in South Bend, Indiana. Oh, Indiana. This is why I usually tell people I’m from Chicago instead (my home town is a Chicago suburb in Indiana, I swear!).

Phil Plait has an excellent summary of why Geocentrism is wrong over at Bad Astronomy, including this particularly insightful bit:

Look, I’m human: I say “The Sun rose in the east today”, and not “the rotation of the Earth relative to the rest of the Universe carried me around to a geometric vantage point where the horizon as seen from my location dropped below the Sun’s apparent position in space.” To us, sitting here on the surface of a planet, geocentrism is a perfectly valid frame of reference. Heck, astronomers use it all the time to point our telescopes. We map the sky using a projected latitude and longitude, and we talk about things rising and setting. That’s not only natural, but a very easy way to do those sorts of things. In that case, thinking geocentrically makes sense.

However, as soon as you want to send a space probe to another planet, geocentrism becomes cumbersome. In that case, it’s far easier to use the Sun as the center of the Universe and measure the rotating and revolving Earth as just another planet. The math works out better, and in fact it makes more common sense.

However, this frame of reference, called heliocentrism, still is not the best frame for everything. Astronomers who study other galaxies use a galactic coordinate system based on our Milky Way galaxy, and the Sun is just another star inside it. Call it galactocentrism, if you want, and it’s just as useful as geo– or heliocentrism in its limited way. And none of those systems work if I want to know turn-by-turn directions while driving; in that case I use a carcentric system (specifically a Volvocentric one).

You use coordinate systems depending on what you need.

So really, there is no one true center to anything. I suppose you could say the Universe is polycentric, or more realistically acentric. You picks your frame of reference and you takes your chances.

…That’s where Geocentrism trips up. Note the upper case G there; I use that to distinguish it from little-g geocentrism, which is just another frame of reference among many. Capital-G Geocentrism is the belief that geocentrism is the only frame, the real one.

I never thought about it that way! Thanks, Phil!

Exposed scientific dishonesty illustrates why science is so great

That title may sound counter intuitive, but give me a chance to explain.

You may have heard about the bit of academic scandal that’s been happening at Harvard recently. Marc Hauser is a Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, and Biological Anthropology. He was the leading researcher on the evolution of morality and moral behavior in primates and humans and an author of a number of books, including Moral Minds and (in progress) Evilicious: Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.

In a somewhat amusingly ironic twist, he was found guilty of scientific misconduct, including fabrication of data that will result in several papers being retracted.

This is a very serious situation, especially since Marc Hauser was such a big name in his field. His career is effectively over, and now reseachers in the field have to rethink everything they’ve learned from him (and cited from him). It’s even more serious for his students, whose futures are uncertain when their graduate advisor has such a black mark on his record. It’s upsetting to the field of science as a whole, which does rely on a certain level of trust for practical reasons. We peer review to the best of our abilities, but you still have to hope everyone else is being honest like you since it can take time to expose problems.

It’s also a little jarring to me personally. Not only will I have to reexamine what I read in one of his books that I greatly enjoyed, but I almost went to graduate school in one of the departments he teaches in. Academic scandals aren’t the best way to start your graduate career.

But we have to remember this is what makes science so great. Science is not dogmatic. It’s based on peer review and constant criticism. Scientists are still human and make errors, sometimes purposefully and sometimes not, so it’s important to have these checks in place. Hauser was a giant in his field, but even he was not immune to scrutiny. It was his own graduate students who brought these problems to our attention at great personal risk.

Some people are using this as a chance to pooh-pooh the whole field of evolutionary psychology. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time for creationists like Ken Ham to squeal with glee and twist the facts for their own “Never trust science!!!” agenda. But I really don’t think this is quite so tragic. Isn’t it good to know that we still expose bad science, even when we may have political reasons to not? Would we rather have evolutionary psychology trucking on without criticism, or get the fraudulent data out in the open? I’d be more concerned with the field if it was just being swept under the table. While it’s sad such dishonesty occured, I’m happy to know that we can still sniff it out, correct it, and punish those who perpetuate it.

Maybe I’m being overly optimistic (I know, unusual for me). But I think it’s good to use this as an example of why science is the best way of exploring the world around us: Because when our findings are wrong, we’ll admit it.

Bias for male lecturers in Physics

Lately there has been a lot of discussion here and elsewhere about male privilege and sexism. I think one of the reasons this is such a touchy subject is because many of our actions that are inherently sexist are unconscious, so we can get especially defensive when people call us out on them. For example, let’s look at how Physics students react differently to male and female lecturers:

Why aren’t there more women physicists, and in senior positions? One factor may be unconscious biases that could keep women physicists from advancing—and may even prevent women from going into physics in the first place.

Amy Bug, a physicist at Swarthmore University, examined the bias question. Her research team trained four actors—two men, two women—to give a 10-minute physics lecture. Real physics classes watched the lecturers. Then the 126 students were surveyed.

When it came to questions of physics ability—whether the lecturer had a good grasp of the material, and knew how to use the equipment—male lecturers got higher ratings by both male and female students.

But when asked how well the lecturer relates to the students, each gender preferred their own. And while female students gave a slight preference to female lecturers, male students overwhelmingly rated the male lecturers as being superior. The research appears in the journal Physics World.

Bug says the results may be evidence of inherent biases that could hold women back—along with economic inequalities, such as lower wages and smaller start-up grants. Which reduce career acceleration and thus the amount of force available to crack the glass ceiling.

Note that it’s not just male students who have some sort of unconscious biases – the female students do as well. This is why it is so important to become aware of our biases. When someone points out that something you said is sexist (against women or men) or that you’re privileged, it’s not to make you feel guilty or like a bad person – it’s to make you conscious of your actions. Only once we are aware of what we’re doing can we actively try to correct it.

Back to the science aspect – I would like to see this repeated looking at scientific papers in addition to lecturing ability. Often times when names on papers are represented by initials alone, people assume those authors are male. If given the same paper, but one with a male name and one with a female, would students say they are the same quality?

I’m also curious how prevalent this is in other disciplines. Is it a science thing, or does the same trend hold in liberal arts? Would it be less pronounced in a field with a more equal sex ratio like Biology? Something I get to think about before I become a lecturer…

(Hat tip to Rugved)

Two dinosaurs, one species

A fascinating new study suggests that our beloved Triceratops may not be exactly what we think:

DINOSAURS were shape-shifters. Their skulls underwent extreme changes throughout their lives, growing larger, sprouting horns then reabsorbing them, and changing shape so radically that different stages look to us like different species.

This discovery comes from a study of the iconic dinosaur triceratops and its close relative torosaurus. Their skulls are markedly different but are actually from the very same species, argue John Scannella and Jack Horner at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana.

Triceratops had three facial horns and a short, thick neck-frill with a saw-toothed edge. Torosaurus also had three horns, though at different angles, and a much longer, thinner, smooth-edged frill with two large holes in it. So it’s not surprising that Othniel Marsh, who discovered both in the late 1800s, considered them to be separate species.

Now Scannella and Horner say that triceratops is merely the juvenile form of torosaurus. As the animal aged, its horns changed shape and orientation and its frill became longer, thinner and less jagged. Finally it became fenestrated, producing the classic torosaurus form (see diagram, right).

This extreme shape-shifting was possible because the bone tissue in the frill and horns stayed immature, spongy and riddled with blood vessels, never fully hardening into solid bone as happens in most animals during early adulthood. The only modern animal known to do anything similar is the cassowary, descended from the dinosaurs, which develops a large spongy crest when its skull is about 80 per cent fully grown.

This sort of realization is so cool to me because it seems simple and intuitive, but it took us so long to figure out. We know that our contemporary organisms can make great morphological changes as they age – why didn’t we think the same thing about dinosaurs? And when you think of the magnitude of some of these changes, it makes you wonder what other dinos we have wrong. I mean, an alien looking down at our planet probably wouldn’t think a butterfly came from a caterpillar. But that’s an extreme example. Maybe an alien would label a baby and adult chicken differently.

What’s neater is that we can imply some things about the purpose of the frill just from knowing how it changes over time:

The finding has implications for the supposed defensive function of the triceratops’ frill. “If I was a triceratops I wouldn’t want anything too damaging to happen to my frill, as it had numerous large blood vessels running over the surface,” says Scannella. “I don’t imagine holding up a thin bony shield that can gush blood would be a very effective means of defence.”

Instead it is likely that the headgear was a display to signal an individual’s maturity to other members of the species. Differences between the sexes is another possibility but less likely, says Scannella.

But rest assured, Triceratops fans. Torosaurus is the species that is being abolished – our childhood memories are still in tact. Though I’m sure the Blue Ranger will be a little upset knowing he was riding a baby dinosaur this whole time.*

*Yes, I really am that geeky.

This is post 2 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Phil Plait’s Bad Universe

How badass does that sound? Well, the trailer lives up to the badassery:

Geekgasm! So glad Discovery is adding another scientific/skeptical show to its lineup – something other than logging, fishing, or ghosts. Especially since astronomy was my first scientific love, so I have a soft spot for it in my heart. And even better that it features Phil Plait, who after meeting at TAM, I know I could definitely sit down and watch for hours.

…Because he’s entertaining. Man, why does everything I say sound so creepy? Anyway, yay for his top secret project being revealed!

(Via Skepchick)

I like to harp on Indiana, but…

…it’s one of five states where human evolution is mentioned directly in the state curriculum for school. I want to be proud that Hoosiers didn’t manage to mess this up, but I’m too overwhelmed by the fact that thirty-two states don’t mention human evolution in their curriculum at all. How can the US expect to produce competent biologists and doctors when children aren’t learning the most fundamental and important biological principle?

It’s even more depressing when I think about what my evolution education was like. Pretty much one or two days out of a whole year of AP Biology. I don’t remember discussing it at all in freshman biology, which is the class everyone is required to take. That’s enough to make us green? No wonder Americans don’t accept evolution.

(Via Why Evolution is True)

I have my first scientific publication!

My first scientific paper has been published! “Allelic recharge in populations recovering from bottleneck events” by Joseph D Busch, Jennifer McCreight, and Peter M Waser. It’s included in the new book developed by the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University, Molecular Approaches in Natural Resource Conservation and Management:The book was actually released in June, but somehow I missed it. Just found out today because my professor gave me a copy as a going away present.

I guess I’m officially a scientist now. Woohoo!

On “fixing the gays” and science used for evil

This is old news by now – it broke while I was out of town at a conference – but enough people have emailed me asking for my opinion that I still wanted to comment. tld;dr: A researcher is giving pregnant women experimental hormones to prevent lesbianism and “abnormal” female behaviors such as aggressiveness, a disinterest in girls toys or becoming mothers, or wanting masculine jobs. Here’s the full story for those of you who haven’t heard of this yet; the rest of you can feel free to scroll past this quote to read my comments:

The majority of researchers and clinicians interested in the use of prenatal “dex” focus on preventing development of ambiguous genitalia in girls with CAH. CAH results in an excess of androgens prenatally, and this can lead to a “masculinizing” of a female fetus’s genitals. One group of researchers, however, seems to be suggesting that prenatal dex also might prevent affected girls from turning out to be homosexual or bisexual.

Pediatric endocrinologist Maria New, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Florida International University, and her long-time collaborator, psychologist Heino F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg, of Columbia University, have been tracing evidence for the influence of prenatal androgens in sexual orientation…. They specifically point to reasons to believe that it is prenatal androgens that have an impact on the development of sexual orientation. The authors write, “Most women were heterosexual, but the rates of bisexual and homosexual orientation were increased above controls . . . and correlated with the degree of prenatal androgenization.” They go on to suggest that the work might offer some insight into the influence of prenatal hormones on the development of sexual orientation in general. “That this may apply also to sexual orientation in at least a subgroup of women is suggested by the fact that earlier research has repeatedly shown that about one-third of homosexual women have (modestly) increased levels of androgens.” They “conclude that the findings support a sexual-differentiation perspective involving prenatal androgens on the development of sexual orientation.”

And it isn’t just that many women with CAH have a lower interest, compared to other women, in having sex with men. In another paper entitled “What Causes Low Rates of Child-Bearing in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia?” Meyer-Bahlburg writes that “CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”

In the same article, Meyer-Bahlburg suggests that treatments with prenatal dexamethasone might cause these girls’ behavior to be closer to the expectation of heterosexual norms: “Long term follow-up studies of the behavioral outcome will show whether dexamethasone treatment also prevents the effects of prenatal androgens on brain and behavior.”

In a paper published just this year in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, New and her colleague, pediatric endocrinologist Saroj Nimkarn of Weill Cornell Medical College, go further, constructing low interest in babies and men—and even interest in what they consider to be men’s occupations and games—as “abnormal,” and potentially preventable with prenatal dex:

“Gender-related behaviors, namely childhood play, peer association, career and leisure time preferences in adolescence and adulthood, maternalism, aggression, and sexual orientation become masculinized in 46,XX girls and women with 21OHD deficiency [CAH]. These abnormalities have been attributed to the effects of excessive prenatal androgen levels on the sexual differentiation of the brain and later on behavior.” Nimkarn and New continue: “We anticipate that prenatal dexamethasone therapy will reduce the well-documented behavioral masculinization…”

It seems more than a little ironic to have New, one of the first women pediatric endocrinologists and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, constructing women who go into “men’s” fields as “abnormal.” And yet it appears that New is suggesting that the “prevention” of “behavioral masculinization” is a benefit of treatment to parents with whom she speaks about prenatal dex. In a 2001 presentation to the CARES Foundation (a videotape of which we have), New seemed to suggest to parents that one of the goals of treatment of girls with CAH is to turn them into wives and mothers. Showing a slide of the ambiguous genitals of a girl with CAH, New told the assembled parents:

“The challenge here is… to see what could be done to restore this baby to the normal female appearance which would be compatible with her parents presenting her as a girl, with her eventually becoming somebody’s wife, and having normal sexual development, and becoming a mother. And she has all the machinery for motherhood, and therefore nothing should stop that, if we can repair her surgically and help her psychologically to continue to grow and develop as a girl.”

In the Q&A period, during a discussion of prenatal dex treatments, an audience member asked New, “Isn’t there a benefit to the female babies in terms of reducing the androgen effects on the brain?” New answered, “You know, when the babies who have been treated with dex prenatally get to an age in which they are sexually active, I’ll be able to answer that question.” At that point, she’ll know if they are interested in taking men and making babies.

In a previous Bioethics Forum post, Alice Dreger noted an instance of a prospective father using knowledge of the fraternal birth order effect to try to avoid having a gay son by a surrogate pregnancy. There may be other individualized instances of parents trying to ensure heterosexual children before birth. But the use of prenatal dexamethasone treatments for CAH represents, to our knowledge, the first systematic medical effort attached to a “paradigm” of attempting in utero to reduce rates of homosexuality, bisexuality, and “low maternal interest.”

Women like me are doomed if this process A) works and B) becomes widespread. It’s hard not to take it personally when I have every attribute they say is “abnormal” for a female:

  • Masculine career choice: Check. Science has been and is a male dominated field. I guess these drugs are to keep it that way.
  • Aggressiveness: Check. You don’t need to know me that well to figure that out.
  • Bisexuality: Sort of check. Let’s just say while I’m significantly more attracted to men, I’m still probably not straight enough for the people doing this research.
  • Abnormal peer association: Check. As a kid I had almost exclusively male friends. I did not relate to girls at all, and of the female friends I have now, most have the attributes of this list.
  • Low interest in playing with dolls: Check. I hated girly toys as a kid. Screw Barbie, give me some Legoes!
  • Low interest in caring for infants: Check. As cute as my nephews are, when they were babies I feared breakin
    g them and had no interest in feeding them or changing their poopy diapers.
  • Less frequent daydreams about pregnancy & marriage: Check. I’m supposed to daydream about these things? If anything I have nightmares about getting pregnant.
  • Less interest in having children: Check. I want a kid, but not desperately or any time soon. Maybe in my thirties, or maybe not.
  • Less interest in traditional housewife role: Check. Uh, fuck no.

It’s one thing to have society pressuring you into heteronormative roles…but now people want to alter our biology to ensure it? What is this, Brave New World? If anything we need more aggressive women who are willing to speak up instead of feeling condemned to a life as a baby making machine. If you want to have children or be a housewife, that’s fine – but it should be your choice, not forced upon you by society or hormones you did not consent to.

Knowing the views of my typical blog reader, I’m going to assume we can all agree that wanting a masculine job or not wanting kids aren’t life threatening traits that need to be corrected. I’m also going to hope that we can agree that bisexuality and lesbianism don’t need to be fixed either, as they are not a disease or harmful to anyone.

But why are we trying to fix CAH? When PZ covered this topic, he mentioned that CAH is “a real and serious disease.” The only major symptoms other than behavioral and physical masculinization are vomiting and hypertension, both which are regularly treated with supplements. Researchers and doctors are going out of their way to fix behaviors through hormones and restructure genitalia through surgery simply to make them fit into society’s stereotypical gender roles.

If anything, conditions like CAH show that nature does not always create perfectly binary males and females. Why are we altering and mutilating baby girls without their consent to make them conform to our ideal of the female figure? It’s not limited to this study – not long ago we also heard about people at Cornell who were surgically decreasing the size of young girls’ clitorises to make them more “natural.” Nothing is biologically or functionally wrong with their genitals – we decided to label them as “wrong” because of our own cultural biases.

Now, I don’t blame science for this. As a scientist, I do find it interesting that an excess of prenatal androgens can apparently alter life long behaviors. But I do have a problem when people abuse scientific findings to fit their own political or ideological agenda. Just because science finds out we can do something doesn’t mean we should do it. But humans are humans, and it seems like these abuses are somewhat inevitable.

That honestly worries me. For example, I’ve always been interested if there’s some genetic component to homosexuality, since we have overwhelming evidence that it’s biological in some way. Are there certain genes? Certain epigenetic differences? Copy number variation? Or is it all hormonal, like this study may suggest? I’m interested out of pure scientific curiosity. It’s an interesting human behavior to me, and I want to learn more about it.

But what if I did find something? As a huge gay rights activist, it would absolutely kill me to see my research findings abused in any way. I don’t want to see companies producing genetic tests for certain “gay gene”s so people can selectively abort gays. I don’t want it used to out people. I don’t want little kids screened so they can have their behaviors forcibly altered early on. There are so many horrible things that could come out of it. I personally don’t think the cause(s) of homosexuality change how we should treat it (with acceptance), but not everyone thinks like I do.

So do we avoid this research altogether? I’d argue no. We can figure out the genes that contribute to skin color without it automatically leading to more racism. We can engineer bacteria to synthesize useful materials without it automatically leading to biological weapons. What we do need to do is make sure ethics and laws keep up with the advancement of science so findings can’t be abused. But even ethics boards are made up of humans, and humans have their biases. Too many people would find nothing wrong with the studies in this post, including some people on review boards. We need to hold these people to higher standards.

It’s bad enough that these studies are harming children with no real idea of what effects it’ll have on them when they’re adults. But it’s also a shame that these studies give science a bad name – the image of a manipulative, powerful overlord found too often in SciFi novels. We must remember that science itself is neither good nor evil; the blame lies with people who abuse it.

Scientists discover bike riding is incredibly hard

To all the people who’ve made fun of me for never learning how to ride a bike*: Suck it.

Hmmm, why do I have a feeling this will just bring me more mockery?

*Yes, really. Yes, I tried. I have no sense of balance and was never interested enough to put forth the extra effort. My family gave up trying to teach me when I outgrew my bike. My dad would taunt me that I would be the first person to get their driver’s license before learning to ride a bike, in hopes that it would guilt me into learning. I thought this was amusing, so that’s what I did.