Fishing for meaning in a dictionary of genes

I’ve constricted my anus 100 times, and it isn’t helping! I’m still feeling extremely cranky about this story from the NY Times.

Scientists intend to sequence Adam Lanza’s DNA. They’re looking for genetic markers for mass murder. Why? Because some scientists are stupid.

Some researchers, like Dr. Arthur Beaudet, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and the chairman of its department of molecular and human genetics, applaud the effort. He believes that the acts committed by men like Mr. Lanza and the gunmen in other rampages in recent years — at Columbine High School and in Aurora, Colo., in Norway, in Tucson and at Virginia Tech — are so far off the charts of normal behavior that there must be genetic changes driving them.

“We can’t afford not to do this research,” Dr. Beaudet said.

There must be genetic changes underlying this specific behavior? There is no reason at all to assume that. Furthermore, this isn’t “off the charts of normal behavior” — there have been 62 mass murder events in the US in the last 30 years. There are witch-burnings going on in Africa right now. European Americans casually exterminated the native population of the Americas, and now pens the remnant population in reservations where they are kept in poverty. We had entire nations worth of people involved in the mass murder of 6 million Jews in the last century. Hey, shall we round up a bunch of Germans and take DNA swabs so we can figure out what there is that’s unique to their genes that allows them to commit genocide? (I better be clear here: I’m being sarcastic. I really don’t think Germans have a biological predilection for racism or murder, any more than any other people.)

I would ask whether there is any reason to assume that this behavior is a heritable trait. Is there a familial history of mass murder? Are we really going to assume that the diverse individuals who have committed these horrific crimes are all related, or all carry some common marker that isn’t found in people who don’t commit murder?

I can predict exactly what will be found when they look at Adam Lanza’s DNA. It will be human. There will be tens of thousands of little nucleotide variations from reference standards scattered throughout the genome, because all of us carry these kinds of differences. The scientists will have no idea what 99% of the differences do. They will make dubious associations — for example, they might find a novel nucleotide in a gene that has other variants correlated with schizophrenia — and in the absence of any causal link at all, they’ll publish garbage papers that try to impute a signal to common genetic noise. Some idiot will make noise about screening for an obscure mutation that Lanza carried, just because it’s something different.

I wonder if there are neurologists poking around in his brain, looking for differences, too. It’s the same issue; we don’t understand the majority of the functional consequences of individual variations in connectivity in the brain, and we have a population with large amounts of random variation. So how are you going to recognize what’s special and unique and causal about Lanza’s brain (or Einstein’s brain, or my brain, or yours)?

Fortunately, there are some sensible people out there.

“It is almost inconceivable that there is a common genetic factor” to be found in mass murders, said Dr. Robert C. Green, a geneticist and neurologist at Harvard Medical School. “I think it says more about us that we wish there was something like this. We wish there was an explanation.”

I suspect the explanation is going to be more a consequence of individual experience, although of course biology is going to shape how we respond to circumstance. But to go rifling about in a genome we don’t understand to find a simple cause is ridiculous and futile. Sure, freeze some cells down and store them away; maybe some day we’ll understand more and there will be a legitimate and specific hypothesis that can be tested by examining killers’ genetics…but a fishing expedition is pointless and dumb, and at this state of our understanding, only opens the door to misconceptions and ethics abuses.

How not to be a good person

OK, kids, today I’m offering a simple lesson in basic human decency. I know most of you already know all this — I picked up on it when I was a child — but this is the internet, and a few of its resident have been raised by wolves or read too much Ayn Rand as a teenager, and they’ve lost some really basic principles.

When someone is hurting, don’t spit on them because someone else is hurting more. It’s smart and sensible to invest your time and money wisely, and if you see two people in pain, you get to choose which one you’ll help first, and that’s fine. But it’s counterproductive and destructive to dismiss efforts to help the other person, and it’s particularly repellent if you choose to kick at the people who are helping someone you consider a lesser cause to the extent that you aren’t helping anyone at all.

There’s a principle in medicine called triage—look it up. It does not mean “stick a knife in the patient you don’t want to help.”

See? This is so simple. If you see someone donating money to prostate cancer research, don’t berate them because they should donate to breast cancer research instead, because you think it’s a more serious disease. Or vice versa. Both are bad, and it’s good that we have people supporting research into both.
So you’ve decided to help someone — good for you. However, you shouldn’t then advertise your goodness and throw a tantrum if people don’t praise you enough. You especially shouldn’t then retract your offer of assistance because there wasn’t enough love given to you. You aren’t the one in trouble, and the situation isn’t about you at all.

You see, that makes it obvious to everyone that you weren’t offering to help because you’re a good person: the offer was patently a bribe to win good will for yourself, and when you announce your refusal to help you’re really just trying to extort some flattery out of others. This is not good behavior.

I hear a version of this all the time: don’t annoy the Christians with that atheism stuff or they might retract their support for science and science education. Well then, they weren’t really good supporters of science in the first place, were they?

I know, you’re all saying that was really obvious to the point of being stupid, but there are people on the internet who don’t understand these basic concepts. Sad, I know, but don’t get cranky if I occasionally reach out to help the ethically benighted in addition to bashing creationists and that sort of thing. There are many good causes we can all fight for.

The Amazing Atheist reveals his lack of humanity again

I’m sure you’ve all heard the tragic story of Amanda Todd, the teenage girl who killed herself after prolonged bullying. Normal human beings will read about her and be near tears; she was broken by callous sexual predators, her life made miserable, and she finally gave up on it.

The Amazing Atheist is not a normal human being.

Instead, The Amazing Atheist raged at the fact that this young woman was getting attention when other people have died, too. She was a well-off Western girl with plenty of privileges, so how dare we consider her story particularly tragic? There are so many other people who are worse off than she was!

Well, you know, we have a couple of choices in our lives.

We could, for instance, search the world for that one person who is in the worst circumstances of anyone; the person who is suffering the very most right now. We can do this while turning up our nose at each other afflicted individual who isn’t hurting enough for our standards; why, you’re a quadriplegic dying in a ditch? But you don’t have shingles! And both your eyes are intact! I’m sure we can find someone worse off than you. And then when we find that ultimate person in pain, we can promise to do everything we can to help them.

But I’ve noticed that people who make that kind of argument aren’t actually offering to help anyone. Their perversely inverted, demanding standards are really an excuse to turn away from the miserable they consider undeserving, to justify refusing to help…because that ultimate sufferer will never be found.

But you do have a choice. The other thing you could do is recognize deep pain in others and do what you can to help them. If one person had sincerely and honestly turned to Todd when she was being abused, and offered to help, maybe she’d still be here, and the world would be a slightly better place.

She wasn’t asking for much.

The Amazing Atheist begrudges her that much.

I don’t see any difference between him and the bullies who beat her up and mocked her on facebook and poured scorn on her in school.

And some people wonder why there is a growing rift in the atheist movement. All you have to do is look at people like the Amazing Atheist to see that some atheists, people who are convinced that there is nothing beyond ourselves, that we are dependent entirely on our fellow human beings and nothing more, lack that humanity that is our only source of unity and our only true reason for living.

Don’t be surprised that some of us want nothing to do with such sociopaths.

Summary of Thunderf00t/Phil Mason’s disgrace

The story so far: Thunderf00t/Phil Mason was invited to join our blog network last month. All he wrote during the short week he was here was incoherent, unprofessional rages against feminism and the whole network he was on; we could not understand why he even accepted the offer to join us if he hated us so much, and his inane rants certainly weren’t going to persuade us that we were wrong, so we kicked him off. And ever since he has been obsessed with howling about our perfidy.

The latest development is that it turns out that almost as soon as he’d been evicted, he snuck back onto our mailing list and has been reading all the confidential discussions we’ve been having. He has leaked these to third parties as well. When we shut down the security hole last week, he then tried to hack back in, to no avail. We have logs of all of this computer activity on his part.

He doesn’t have anything of actionable substance — we really haven’t been planning the overthrow of the government or any bank heists or anything nefarious — but he does have personal information about some of the contributors to FtB who want their privacy respected. That is his threat, and it’s not something we can trust him on, given that he’s already sent some emails to other people. And there was no legitimate reason for him to even need to be browsing our private email.

I’ll be compiling the responses to Thunderf00t’s lack of basic decency and ethics here, but first I have to highlight this, from Ed Brayton:

I really do find this outraged declaration that he does not “doc drop” to be almost laughably deluded. It’s like someone who breaks into your house because you forgot to latch a window. He comes into your house and steals your china and jewelry, then reacts in mock outrage when you suggest that he might steal your TV too. In fact, he screams “I do not steal TVs!” at the top of his lungs to the neighbors while he’s handing your other possessions out the door to someone else. And then he expects that declaration to be credible and to provide some assurance of his character.

Phil Mason also doesn’t seem to realize that his declaration that he broke in is in fact a confession. It’s not just that he’s violated our confidence, but that he’s so goddamn stupid that he’s announced it to the world.

Here’s the current list of blog posts protesting Thunderf00t’s inexcusable behavior. I’ll add to it as more come in, but I’m also going to be traveling a bit today, so my access may be spotty.