Genetics can reach way, way back

A few years ago — in 2016? Yikes, time passes quickly when you’re miserable — Jennifer Raff gave a talk at Skepticon on The Misuse of Genetics in Pseudoscience. It was good stuff, right in my battery of interests. She debunked popular nonsense, like ancient astronauts, abuses of archaeology, ‘scientific’ racism, garbage notions about IQ, etc. It was recorded, so you can watch it now!

Dr Raff is even more famous today, and I’m sure it would be difficult to book her for a small convention anywhere, if we had them anymore, because she has just published a book, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas, to a phenomenal reception. It’s deserved, too. The book touches lightly on the subjects in her talk — you can tell that the blatant foolishness of popular ideas about prehistory rankles — but mainly the book is about her work in the anthropology of the Americas, viewing the history of this part of the world through a genetic lens…but also from a humanist perspective. She respects indigenous culture, and it shows.

There’s a fair bit of technical information here, but it’s a pleasant read. I tore through it in two evenings of bedtime reading, and probably would have finished it in one if that obnoxious habit of sleeping when tired hadn’t interrupted me. Here I am teaching at a university with a mission to serve the American Indian community, and it ought to be required reading in these parts. In your parts, I don’t know, but I think you’d enjoy it and learn a lot.

My Valentine’s Day lecture was nothing about romance

I’m still plugging away at my genetics course, and will be until May — so get used to me plopping in these long academic tutorials 3 times a week. You can ignore them, my students can’t.

I’m trusting that the students now have solid foundation in basic Mendelian genetics, so now it’s time to start cutting the mooring ropes so we can drift off into more complex and difficult waters.

What happens when you put an incompetent engineer in charge of brain surgery?

I worked through my last two years of undergraduate college working as an assistant in an experimental animal surgery. Much of what we were doing was training medical students in basic surgical skills, and installing chronic implants for a neurophysiology department. What this involved was shaving animals, anesthetizing them, locking their heads into a stereotaxic device, and then handing them off to the experimenters. They’d cut open the scalp, drill holes into the skull, and then precisely and accurately lower electrodes into specific locations in the brain. Then either they or I would close up, which involved slathering dental acrylic over the apparatus and stitch the scalp closed. Finally, it was my job to take the animal away to a recovery room and take care of it post-op.

I’m just saying that this was over 40 years ago, but I do have some experience in this area. I assisted in these surgeries on hundreds of animals, cats, rabbits, monkeys, dogs, even goats a few times, and I can remember precisely three rabbits that died on the operating table (rabbits are what we called “friable”, fragile and easily killed by stress) and two cats who died of post-op distress and/or infections. Those were memorable to me because, as the post-op animal care guy, when there were problems I’d spend all night in the recovery room trying to nurse them back to health.

So this story about Musk’s Neuralink tells me that there is something seriously wrong. I’ll put it below the fold because it gets ugly. Seriously, my experience working with small animals was disturbing enough that I spent the rest of my career working on fish embryos and invertebrates, and I swore off doing research on mammals.

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OK, grandchildren, what have you done for me lately?

Rotten kids. They haven’t been rejuvenating me. That’s the message I get from one silly study.

Grandparents planning hefty amounts of childcare this half-term might want to think again after research claimed to disprove previous findings of a “rejuvenating effect” from looking after grandchildren.

Many studies have appeared to show mental and physical health advantages for those who care for their grandchildren. But none involved researchers talking to the same grandparents before and after their caregiving responsibilities began.

When the authors of Is There a Rejuvenating Effect of (Grand)Childcare? A Longitudinal Study, published this week in The Journals of Gerontology, did that, they found that caring for grandchildren failed to make grandparents feel any younger than their actual age.

Sorry, Iliana and Knut, you know I only visited you to leech youth-giving properties from you, like a vampire or Peter Thiel. Now I know it was all a sham, so I can stay home in the future.

The one interesting thing from the work is that it exposed selection bias in previous studies. Those studies compared how subjectively younger grandparents who took care of grandchildren felt, compared to those who didn’t. Aside from just the subjective evaluation of the effects, wouldn’t there be obvious bias in that you had to feel fairly healthy and vigorous to volunteer for child care in the first place? That’s hard work, yo. When they compared the same individuals before and after, the Fountain of Youth effect disappeared.

Surprise. I don’t even understand why this was considered a valid hypothesis in the first place, but then I’m not at all familiar with that literature.

You know, in all the times we’ve made the long trip to visit the grandkids, and all the times my wife has had extended stays to help with childcare, we’ve never once contemplated the peculiar notion that it might shave a few years of senescence off of us. Every trip back home we’re mainly dealing with tiredness, because the little ragamuffins can run us ragged.

We go because it makes us happy. Isn’t that enough?

The bit about Mivart

I did that hour-long livestream yesterday, so as I’ll try to continue to do, I yanked out a much shorter segment for those who don’t have any patience for chit-chat. Also, the whole thing got instantly demonetized, I think because I talked about mammary gland development and evolution (YouTube is capricious and stupid — there was nothing prurient or explicit in what I said). Let’s see what they think of just the historical bit, where I talk about that unfortunate 19th century weirdo, St George Jackson Mivart, who got blocked by Charles Darwin and canceled by both the scientific community and the Catholic Church. See? There’s nothing new about cancel culture.