This is Lawrence Krauss’s career now

He’s fallen far now, and seems to think that thrashing about in the muck will raise him up, rather than make him dirtier. He’s got an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal 🤮, titled “A Scientist’s Sexuality Shouldn’t Matter”. I agree, it shouldn’t, but we’re dealing with facts here rather than a disgruntled conservative’s feelings, and it does matter, unfortunately.

Krauss is upset because federal grant agencies ask applicants about various bits of demographic data.

The Survey of Earned Doctorates is an annual census of new postgraduate research degrees. The National Science Foundation, a federal agency, collects data on academic discipline, sex, race, ethnicity, debt burden, disability and citizenship. The results are used by government, universities and industry to track the demographics of women and minorities in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math.

Well, yes, it’s a survey. That’s what surveys do. Krauss wants them to stop because — wait for it — sexism is over! According to a notorious sex pest, that is.

The sex and race data — the latter has been collected since 1975 — was initially useful in efforts to overcome barriers to women and minorities in academia. Those barriers have largely disappeared, yet quotas and preferential hiring have persisted. After such a concerted effort, demographic disparities are less likely to point to systemic biases in academia than to underlying societal factors.

That’s especially true when it comes to disparities of sex. Women earn a majority of postbaccalaureate degrees over all STEM disciplines in the U.S. Since female undergraduates outnumber male ones by about 3 to 2, this trend is likely to continue. Further, a recent large-scale study found that previous claims about sex bias in academic science were overblown. Tenure-track women and men in STEM receive comparable grant funding, journal acceptances and recommendation letters, and women have an edge in hiring.

What quotas? What preferential hiring? I’ve been in a lot of job searches over the years, and we’re told over and over by the administration that there are questions we can’t ask, and they’re all about avoiding bias. I’d agree that there are fewer biases in academia (but not no biases) because of policies Krauss doesn’t like, and that we’re dealing with larger societal factors, but academia is part of society, if you hadn’t noticed.

A good example of those societal factors: undergraduate women outnumber men, especially at liberal arts colleges like mine. Is this a good thing? Nobody thinks so. It’s not at all because we preferentially admit women — please, high school men, do apply and come to UMM, we love you all — but because when universities stopped discriminating against women, many women saw a college education as a tool for escaping traditional roles. Liberal arts colleges also actively encourage students to explore new ideas, which is appealing if you want something more than a fast-track to a job.

Of course, to a white man the barriers are invisible, so they don’t exist.

Such personal matters are irrelevant to science and essentially invisible. In my 40 years in academia, I have worked with all sorts of colleagues and students. Many were highly eccentric, but that didn’t matter if they were good scientists. As one colleague put it: “You are teaching a chemistry or physics course. Your lectures describe concepts and present equations. ‘Suppose a magnet is moving relative to a loop of wire.’ You barely know any of your students. You give tests and grade them. You have no idea, nor care about, the ‘sexual orientation’ of any of your students. . . . What career barriers are there?”

What a blinkered ass…you might as well say, “no one is trying to rape me, therefore rape and sexual harassment are not a problem anywhere.” Which is just what a self-centered serial harasser would say.

I’m also appalled at the idea that a professor just lectures and gives tests and grades them and doesn’t need to know anything about their students. What university was this at? Krauss should have mentioned it so everyone would know to avoid it. Of course we are and should be aware of our students’ lives, to a degree. We invite deeper interactions than just talking at and grading them — I listen when students are struggling and try to help them resolve conflicts and issues.

I don’t even understand this factory-style approach to impersonal teaching.

Asking respondents if they’re “transgender,” “gender non-conforming,” “nonbinary,” “gender-fluid” or “genderqueer” is patently ridiculous. These are subjective categories, unobservable by others unless the person in question makes it a point to label himself publicly. Most scientists, like ordinary people, couldn’t even define most of these terms, let alone use them as a basis for discrimination.

You don’t need to define the terms, you just need to categorize your students and colleagues as highly eccentric.

This is peak clueless offensiveness, though. Non-heterosexual identities are patently ridiculous and mere subjective categories? They matter to the people who have them, and what also matters is professors who so callously dismiss their lived identities. You know, the ones who think people who aren’t like them are not ordinary people.

Jesus. Krauss is making me aware that we do discriminate. If we were interviewing a job candidate and they spewed out that stuff about how teaching is just about giving tests and grading them, calling gay and trans students eccentric and patently ridiculous, it’s true — there’s no way we’d hire them. We try not to employ assholes.

Also, we’d rather not hire stupid people. Krauss even quotes the goals of these agencies, but doesn’t understand them.

What’s the purpose of all this? Nature magazine paraphrases a statement from the NSF’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Charles Barber: “Collecting these data will help the NSF and other agencies to analyse employers’ policies and procedures for addressing unintended barriers to employment, advancement and inclusion.” The magazine then quotes Mr. Barber: “This gives us an opportunity to create more opportunities and broaden participation to yield equitable outcomes for the LGBTQIA+ community and others.”

Yes. Collecting data to detect “unintended barriers to employment, advancement and inclusion.” How would you know if an organization discriminates, unintentionally or otherwise, if you have no information about the population of a class known to be subject to bias? How would you know if an organization has successfully knocked down all barriers to advancement if you don’t look? Krauss is advocating willful blindness to abuse and harassment and bias…unsurprisingly, for a guy with his history. If those meddling kids hadn’t noticed and reported his behavior, he’d still have a job!

Does that mean quotas?

No.

If so, how would one even go about determining the “correct” proportion of “queer” or “genderqueer” scientists? The percentage of the population that espouses these labels is so small that any data the NSF gathers will be statistically useless.

The correct proportion is one that roughly matches the proportion in the general population, because that would indicate that there’s probably an absence of selective bias. That wasn’t so hard, Larry.

It’s kind of astonishing to see a physicist dismissing an event as insignificant because the frequency is too low. What happened to 5-sigma, Larry? Does the Higgs boson not matter because it’s so difficult to see that you have to spend billions of dollars to detect it? Most of the stars in the sky are not exploding, so why waste our time looking for novas? The frequency of stellar class A stars is only 0.63% — can we just ignore them, then? Heck, our sun falls into a group that makes up less than 8% of all stars. Must not be important, then.

You know we can detect all kinds of numbers if we just look. Here’s a result of the US census — over a million ‘eccentric’ people live in same-sex relationships.

We also know, because people looked at the data, that over 1.6 million ‘ordinary’ people are transgender, and that the proportion is rising as social barriers fall.

A study published on Friday estimates that nearly 1.64 million people over the age of 13 in the United States identify themselves as transgender, based on an analysis of newly expanded federal health surveys.

The study estimates that about 0.5% of all U.S. adults, some 1.3 million people, and about 1.4%, or 300,000, of youth between 13- and 17-years-old identify as transgender, having a different gender identity than the sex they were assigned at birth.

I really don’t understand this frequency based argument. Can we just ignore 1.3 million people, or worse, oppress and discriminate against them? They’re statistically useless, you know. It’s just that they are people.

Wow, Krauss has become a right-wing cartoon at this point.

A chiropractic schism?

A chiropractor who also has a master’s degree in immunology is in trouble because she posted an op-ed that favored vaccines.

The article she posted by the New York Times was titled “Underselling the Vaccine” and described how experts were being overly cautious when reporting their success rate.

With a master’s degree in immunology, Weiss thought the article was interesting and wanted to pass it along to her many Facebook friends, which include immunologists and scientists, she told CBC News.

A fellow chiropractor — whose identity remains a secret to this day — saw it and reported her to the Manitoba Chiropractors Association, the regulatory body for her profession.

Apparently, some chiropractors believe in an evidence-based approach (then why are they still chiropractors, I wonder?) and others believe in subluxation, which is garbage pseudoscience.

At the core of this divide in the profession is subluxation — a diagnosis used by some chiropractors to measure the health of someone’s spine.

If someone has a “subluxation-free spine,” there are some in the profession who believe that you don’t need vaccines or other medical interventions, explained Brian Gleberzon, a Toronto-based chiropractor and former professor at the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College.

“This would be a very traditional belief, and they would hearken back to the developers of the profession,” he said.

The subluxationists are out for Carolyn Weiss’s (the offending believer in vaccinations) blood, sending cease-and-desist letters and demanding the her op-eds be removed and threatening her license to practice chiropractic. They’re kind of nuts. They police what members say on the net.

It led to the association subscribing to a web scraper tool in 2021 that crawls through the professional websites and social media accounts of chiropractors and flags keywords such as “vaccines.”

The word “evidence-based,” “principled,” “honest,” and “ethical” were also flagged, as the association felt they could be used to make one chiropractor appear superior to another, according to an undated memo from the association to chiropractors obtained by CBC News.

The chiropractic association even has a rule that you can’t discuss vaccination because it is not within the scope of chiropractic practice. Well, yeah. But nothing medical is within the scope of chiropractic. I agree that chiropractors shouldn’t be dispensing any medical advice, any more than I should, but they are silencing this one thing for all the wrong reasons.

I’ve never understood why people go to chiropractors — I suspect it’s because they’re cheaper than real physical therapy, they’re desperate for relief from chronic pain (and haven’t discovered opioid abuse yet), and chiropractors make wild promises. We have a quack here in Morris who implied that his chiropractic shop would help cure cancer — he seems to have adopted a lower profile since I highlighted his sleaze.

When they said “pathetic, posturing little wimp” I thought they were talking about me

Lawrence Krauss, of all people, defended Geoff Marcy on the pages of Quillette last week.

Well, that’s a sentence that probably killed all further interest.

That Richard Dawkins then waded in to accuse people who oppose the abuses of power of being pathetic, posturing little wimps probably doesn’t help.

I went ahead and barreled right in, and even compared their defense of sexism to the revelations that emerged from the recent documentary, Secrets of Hillsong. The good ol’ boy network is often deployed in the name of god, but sometimes it’s fired up in the name of science.

Transcript coming up!

[Read more…]

High octane crazy blood!

Blood is life, you know. That’s been the lesson from science documentaries like Dracula and Mad Max: Fury Road.

Remember creepy weird Bryan Johnson, the middle-aged Silicon Valley techbro who want to live forever by gobbling down lots of supplements, slathering on the skin creams, and eating a strangely specific diet? Now he has decided that vampirism is the answer.

An anti-aging zealot who spends $2 million a year in a quest to turn back time has dragged his teenage son into being his personal “blood boy.”

Bryan Johnson, the 45-year-old tech tycoon who wants to keep his internal organs, including his penis and rectum, functioning youthfully — enlisted 17-year-old Talmage to provide blood transfusions, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

At a clinic near Dallas last month, Johnson, his 70-year-old dad, Richard, and Talmage showed up for an hours-long, tri-generational blood-swapping treatment, the outlet reported.

Johnson usually receives plasma from an anonymous donor, but this time Talmage provided a liter of his blood, which was converted into batches of piece parts — a batch of liquid plasma and another of red and white blood cells and platelets.

Ugh. This is creepy child abuse — although they did it in Texas, where they hate children, so he’ll probably get away with it. Even if this worked, I wouldn’t ask my children to ever do this for me.

I also notice the icky Elizabeth Holmes-style pose. It’s all quackery.

There’s a flaw in his argument

Ken Ham has declared that he cannot respect other people’s pronouns. The reason: that would be lying.

As believers, we cannot in good conscience use transgendered pronouns—no matter our intentions—because, in doing so, we are lying. When we use she/her (or Miss or Mrs.) for a man or he/him (or Mr.) for a female, we are participating in the lie that sex/gender is on a spectrum or that a man can be a woman and a woman a man. Or if we use “they/them” (or Mx., etc.) or the myriad of other “pronoun” options today, we are participating in the lie that humans are not innately sexed as either male or female. We’re participating in the lie that humans can choose to be or are naturally androgenous or ambiguous, when that is not true because God has created us either male or female.

One problem with his excuse is that Ken Ham has never been reluctant about lying, whether it’s to get tax breaks on his con game or his claims about science. He’s also lying here: it’s not about preserving his honesty at all, or he’d just come out and plainly state that it’s because he thinks gay and trans people should burn in hell.

Headhunters

They are a savage breed of subhumans, roaming the globe in search of victims. They dig up graves, they lurk about hospitals, all for an opportunity to snatch up a skull or two to mount in their collections, where other members of the tribe meet to admire each other’s stolen heads. One of the kings of the headhunters was Samuel George Morton, who collected vast numbers of ghoulish remains.

The trafficking of remains belonging to other people’s ancestors dominated Morton’s correspondence. On February 3, 1837, Bostonian Dr. John Collins Warren, an early leader in surgical education in the United States and the first dean of Harvard’s Medical School, wrote to his Philadelphia colleague, Morton, asking, “Have you the Guanche? If not, I can let you have a head.” A couple months later, Warren sent Morton the “head,” along with a brief anecdote about how his friend found and stole it for him.

Today that skull of an Indigenous person from the Canary Islands, Dr. Warren’s gift to Dr. Morton, sits on a wooden shelf in an old cabinet in the basement of the Penn Museum. On those same shelves, in those same cabinets, sit crania of people from other parts of the world.

To be fair, this wasn’t just about frivolously turning a museum into a Hallowe’en haunted house. They had a higher purpose.

Warren and Morton are just two examples of the depraved history of trafficking in the skulls of our ancestors as part of the larger racial science project of the European Enlightenment to “prove” the superiority of the white race. This laid the groundwork for the way that race operates in the present.

Hmmm. Somehow, introducing “science” into the phenomenon just makes it worse.

This wasn’t just an archaic 19th century hobby, either. More recent remains have been collected.

The presence of Black Philadelphians in the Morton Cranial Collection—the same individuals who Penn now seeks to bury—was surfaced by a report written by a Penn graduate student in February 2021. In late April 2021, one of the authors reported that the remains of Black children who were their neighbors, who were murdered in the 1985 MOVE bombing, were sitting in a box in the same museum basement. These remains were used as teaching material for an online course.

I wonder what they learned from those bones? Morton’s own science has been thoroughly discredited — he believed that the different races of humans had all been created independently by god, no dark-skinned progenitors in his ancestry, for sure! — and I don’t know what anyone learned by throwing the bones of children killed in a crime into a box.

I’m fine with and see the utility of research and training on cadavers, but they have to be willingly donated, not looted from a grave site. They also have to be treated with respect. The University of Pennsylvania is currently trying to get rid of the skeletons in their closets by rushing to bury them, without doing the appropriate research to identify the bodies they snatched.

I’m left with one question, though. I know where Morton’s grave is — it’s in Laurel Hill cemetery in Philadelphia.

Has anyone got a shovel or pickaxe I can borrow?

What the heck is sociogenomics?

I was asked recently about “sociogenomics,” and I had to stop and think because I was unfamiliar with the word. At a guess, I thought it would about looking for correlations between genes and socioeconomic groups, ethnicities, and races using tools like genome wide association studies and polygenic scores — you know, Bell Curve shit. To me, it sounded ominous and catastrophically bad, something that would shift into plain old eugenics and evolve into Nazi shit. But what do I know? I had to go look it up. I was just guessing.

Guess what? I guessed right.

Sociogenome is the comprehensive study of the role of genes and gene-environment (GxE) interaction on reproductive behaviour. Until now, social science research has focussed on socio-environmental explanations, largely neglecting the role of genes.

Drawing from recent unprecedented advances in molecular genetics we examine whether there is a genetic component to reproductive outcomes, including age at first birth, number of children and infertility and their interaction with the social environment.

Uh-oh. They’re just going to take modern genetic techniques and apply them to sociology. But these techniques will not give them the answers they want! They’ll reveal rough correlations, but they won’t untangle genetics and environmental factors — they can’t. This is a problem that has been pointed out to behavioral genetics researchers for years, and they just go sailing on ahead.

In the past decade and a half, sociologists and demographers have sought to integrate genetic data into their empirical analyses. To do so, they have drawn on recently developed high-throughput sequencing and genotyping technologies, which allow the entire genome to be mapped. They also follow in the line of a research specialty, behavioural genetics, which rose to prominence in the 1970s. This area, which focused notably on the genetic determination of intelligence, attracted severe criticisms, including among demographers (Jacquard, 1978; Vetta and Courgeau, 2003; Courgeau, 2017). However, these criticisms do not always seem to have been heard, and the emergence of new data and techniques has given rise to new problems, as indicated by calls for caution from learned societies in human genetics (Société française de génétique humaine, 2010; Risch, 2016; Société française de génétique humaine, 2018).

Let’s look at an example of a sociogenomics study that was summarized in Wired. It does not reassure me.

The UK BioBank is the single largest public genetic repository in the world, with samples of the genetic blueprints of half a million Brits standing by for scientific study. But when David Hill, a statistical geneticist at the University of Edinburgh, went poring through that data, he wasn’t looking for a cure for cancer or deeper insights into the biology of aging. Nothing like that. He was trying to figure out why some people make more money than others.

I hadn’t thought of that. They’re going to tap into modern behavioral databases, like all that information Facebook has about you, in addition to biological databases, and they’re going to try to weave the two of them into some kind of story. I’ve never been impressed by that.

Along with a team of European collaborators, Hill sifted through the UK Biobank data to find about 286,000 participants who had answered a survey question about household income. Using that information they conducted something called a Genome Wide Association Study, where they looked at 18 million places in the genome to see which ones matched up with higher paychecks. They uncovered about 30, which account for 7.4 percent of household income variation across the United Kingdom. (For some context, another way of viewing the results is to say that 92.6 percent of a person’s income is explained by factors other than genetics.) Hill noticed that many of the genetic differences overlapped with areas known to be associated with intelligence, based on some of his prior work, and when he mapped them out they were largely expressed in the brain.

His team then used these regions to compute a polygenic score, a genetic calculation that predicts a person’s odds of reaching a certain outcome—of, say, developing diabetes or earning six figures. It didn’t perform particularly well, correctly forecasting only 2.5 percent of the differences in income in an independent sample of Scots. “Your DNA will not print you money,” says Hill. But he’s relieved to have found some small effect. “If you’re born with a predisposi­tion for certain traits or abilities, and none of them counted in any way, shape, or form towards your income, then you’d have a profoundly unfair society, in my opinion,” he says.

Thanks, I hate it. So he started with the information about a quarter of a million people, went fishing for any correlation at all, and found a tiny percentage of the genetic variation might account for a tiny fraction of the variation in income, because of course they’re zeroing in on money. It looks like noise to me; I’d want to know haw they accounted for the fact that a great deal of wealth is inherited, so you’d expect to see some common traits threaded through lines of wealth. Trust fund babies are going to share genes with mommy and daddy, even if they have nothing to do with the source of their money.

Further, even their weak correlation hasn’t found a genetic basis for wealth. Genes aren’t pure entities that can be isolated in this way and tied to phenotype — everything is polygenic and pleiotropic, and absolutely dependent on the environment for their expression. No wonder I didn’t know what sociogenomics is — if I encountered it in a science journal, I’d glance at the abstract, gag, and turn the page.

Then I figured it out: sociogenomics is nothing but the new label slapped on Kathryn Paige Harden’s behavioral genetics, which I figured out a long time ago was garbage science. Here’s a solid critique of Harden’s ideas.

In her recent sociogenomics manifesto The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden sets out to rescue behavior genetics from the spectres of racism and eugenics. Sociogenomics, like behavior genetics, studies the possible role of genes in explaining complex human social behaviors. Critics have charged this area of study with fueling biological determinist theories of human social inequality.

Harden purports to offer a refreshing take on this old debate because she claims that such critics are blind to the role that genetics play in the very thing they aim to secure: social equality. She argues that, in fact, we must use genetic information to promote truly egalitarian social policy. Styling herself after 20th century anti-racist geneticists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky, Harden offers the new sociogenomics as an explicitly anti-eugenic synthesis of genetics and equality.

Harden is right that the legacies of eugenics haunt behavior genetics. The field’s findings have been used to argue that biological differences between social groups explain social inequality and to undermine the possibility of egalitarian interventions. Human behavior genetics and its successor, sociogenomics, have thrived on controversy about the alleged biological relationship between race and IQ and the alleged futility of educational interventions in closing achievement gaps. Harden’s particular focus—the notion that biology can explain population differences in educational attainment and cognitive performance—has been a pillar of eugenic discourse and white supremacist ideology. But Harden believes that it is possible to “[reclaim] genetic science from the legacy of eugenics, realigning it with egalitarian aims.” Harden’s “new synthesis,” she argues, is not only different from eugenics, but self-consciously anti-eugenic.

Harden draws an analogy between her critics’ “genome blindness” (her term for the failure to “see” genetic causes) and color blindness (the failure to “see” race). Just as color blindness undermines antiracism because it fails to grapple with the effects of racism, Harden argues that genome-blindness threatens egalitarian aims because it fails to grapple with genetic causes of inequality. But this analogy breaks down when the entanglement of behavior genetics with eugenics is taken seriously. Resisting eugenics depends on an understanding not of how genes work, but of how eugenics works. Anti-eugenic science demands an expansive and nuanced understanding of how eugenic thought developed. In this essay, we show that Harden’s account of eugenics seriously undermines her claim to rescue behavior genetics from its clutches.

Yeah. Harden is really unconvincing. Somehow, while claiming to be an anti-eugenicist, she embraces the modern genetic determinists and spurns the people who have been showing for decades that genes and environment are inseparable.

Harden’s failure to engage with critics of behavioral genetics, often from the political left, veers between simple omissions and outright misrepresentation. This treatment is in stark contrast to how she treats biological determinists on the political right. The work of Charles Murray, the co-author of The Bell Curve, which claimed that differences in IQ scores between the rich and poor were genetic, and whose research aligns neatly with Harden’s, is described as mostly true and his political implications are lightly challenged. The most prominent critic of behavioral genetics, Richard Lewontin, gets much rougher treatment.

In one of the three cases in which Harden bothers to mention Lewontin’s decades-long engagement with behavioral genetics, she gets it wrong, claiming that Lewontin merely said that heritability is useless because it is specific to a particular population at a particular time. In reality, Lewontin showed why the statistical foundation of heritability analyses means it is unable to truly separate genetic and environmental effects. Contra Harden’s characterization of her opponents, Lewontin recognized genetic factors as a cause of phenotypes; however, he stressed their effects cannot be independent of environmental factors and the dynamics of development.

Called it. Told you this was going to be some Bell Curve shit.

What really clinches for me that this is something more than a few fringe scholars coming up with fancy titles for the junk science they are doing, though, is this surprise. Purdue is making a massive investment in creating a sociogenomics department from scratch.

Together the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Science at Purdue University seek applications for multiple scholars in Sociogenomics, including existing groups of investigators, to assemble a new world-leading cohort of approximately 15 faculty. The positions include tenure-track Assistant, Associate, and Professor ranks.

A relatively new field, Sociogenomics encompasses theoretical and methodological approaches across the social, behavioral, and genetic sciences including those with an emphasis on computation. It explores the roles of genetics in social and behavior outcomes, as well as how genetics interact with the environment and social forces. Purdue is strongly committed to establishing a pre-eminent center in this emerging area including hiring a substantive cohort of scholars. We are especially interested in fostering collaborative linkages across the core fields of this discipline, here at Purdue and more broadly. This search is open to leading scholars in any area relevant to the advancement of Sociogenomics, and we are especially interested in candidates who draw from and contribute to research in the social science disciplines, biological sciences, the computational and data sciences, statistics, or other related disciplines. We anticipate joint appointments across departments where appropriate, with tenure homes flexible and negotiated at the time of hire.

That is remarkable. Right now, universities everywhere are struggling, thanks to the pressures of the pandemic and political neglect, yet somehow, Purdue has magically come up with the money and the will to create 15 faculty positions in this “relatively new field.” This is not how it works. You start with a small team of qualified people in the area, see how successful they are at grants and papers, and how well the students respond to their courses. Then you build around that solid core and grow the department. Also, you typically start with some well-established discipline that you know has a good track record.

Just flash, boom, creating a substantial department out of whole cloth, hiring new people and assembling them into some kind of framework, is what you do when you’ve got some wealthy sugar daddy, a billionaire or two or some corporation that thinks there are profits to be made. And doing it with some vague discipline that is only a few years old — unthinkable. In the absence of a need, this has to be the product of someone with an agenda, probably an unsavory agenda, pushing buckets of money at a university that will happily accept it.

The thing is, ideas that promote the belief that the very rich have earned their money by virtue of their superior biology are ridiculously popular with the people who have an excess of money to donate.