Reading this will affect your brain

Baroness Susan Greenfield has been spouting off some bad neuroscience, I’m afraid. She’s on an anti-social-networking-software, anti-computer-games, anti-computer crusade that sounds a bit familiar — it’s just like the anti-TV tirades I’ve heard for 40-some years — and a little bit new — computers are bad because they are “changing the workings of the brain“. Ooooh.

But to put that in perspective, the brain is a plastic organ that is supposed to rewire itself in response to experience. It’s what they do. The alternative is to have a fixed reaction pattern that doesn’t improve itself, which would be far worse. Greenfield is throwing around neuroscientific jargon to scare people.

So yes, using computers all the time and chatting in the comments sections of weird web sites will modify the circuitry of the brain and have consequences that will affect the way you think. Maybe I should put a disclaimer on the text boxes on this site. However, there are events that will scramble your brains even more: for example, falling in love. I don’t want to imagine the frantic rewiring that has to go on inside your head in response to that, or the way it can change the way you see the entire rest of the world, for good or bad, for the whole of your life.

Or, for an even more sweeping event that had distinct evolutionary consequences, look at the effect of changing from a hunter-gatherer mode of existence, to an agrarian/urban and modern way of life. We get less exercise because of that, suffer from near-sightedness, increased the incidence of infectious disease, and warped our whole pattern of activity in radical ways. Not only do neural pathways have to develop in different ways to cope with different environments, but there was almost certainly selection for urban-compatible brains—people have died of the effects of that shift. Will Baroness Greenfield give up her book-writin’, lecturin’ ways to fire-harden a pointy stick, don a burlap bag, and dedicate her life to hunting rabbits?

SciAm, how could you?

As another sign of the ongoing decline of our traditional science media, Scientific American runs a superficial article on plastic surgery with a rather dubious source.

We spoke with osteopathic physician Lionel Bissoon to help us get to the bottom (so to speak) of some of the cellulite hoopla. Bissoon runs a clinic for mesotherapy (injections of homeopathic extracts, vitamins and/or medicine designed to reduce the appearance of cellulite) in New York City, and is the author of the book The Cellulite Cure published in 2006.

Why, SciAm, why?

Also, I had to gag on the guys analysis of cellulite as a modern problem — he look at old photo albums from the 40s-60s, and “women had perfect legs”, despite not having photoshop. Does he really think they didn’t have photo retouching in the days before personal computers? Or that women’s legs have suddenly developed a fundamental difference in the last 50 years?

50 years ago, Scientific American also had a little more rigor.

That explains a lot

The Huffington Post has been getting a lot of grief around scienceblogs lately, since they’ve been letting some astounding woo slip through under the guise of medicine and science. Now it is partly explained: their “wellness” editor is Patricia Fitzgerald. Here are her qualifications:

Patricia Fitzgerald is a licensed acupuncturist, certified clinical nutritionist, and a homeopath. She has a Master’s Degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine and a Doctorate in Homeopathic Medicine.

Words fail me. What is a doctorate in homeopathic medicine? A blank piece of paper taped to your wall?

(via Mike the Mad Biologist)

HuffPo flops again

Whenever the Huffington Post brings up a science-related issue, I just cringe. It’s Jim Carrey or Deepak Chopra or some other celebrity incompetent babbling out some nonsense — it’s like the site editors have no B.S. detectors at all. Well, now they’ve really done it: they’ve got some quack named Kim Evans piggy-backing on the recent concerns about a pandemic to offer her own remedies: Got the swine flu? Treat it with an enema. And great dog in heaven, they’ve got another quack touting chiropractic as a treatment for swine flu.

Of course, it’s not just the liberal-leaning Huffpo — every day, the frauds at the conservative website, Human Events, are dunning me with ads to buy Coenzyme Q10! And Magic Exercises to give me washboard abs in only minutes a day! Is this a golden age for quackery now?

News from the other side of the world

Or from your side of the world, if you’re down there in the southern hemisphere and in a very different time zone from us Americans.

From Australia, we have news of a powerful program on vaccination. It juxtaposes the story of young Dana McCaffrey, a 4-week-old girl who died of whooping cough, with the anti-vaccination crusader Meryl Dorey, who at one point claims that no one “is going to die from [whooping cough] today”, and who says that she treated her own unvaccinated children with homeopathic medicines. Guess which one looks like an uncaring idiot?

The news is less cheering from New Zealand: Jim Salinger, a climate scientist, was fired for speaking to the media. Salinger is a member of the IPCC, and was an early contributor to our understanding of climate change. Apparently, the New Zealand government does not want scientists speaking uncomfortable truths about the weather.

It’s a good thing Orac is surrounded by medical professionals

I know how much Orac dislikes the Huffington Post — I despise it myself as the doman of airheaded woo of the type represented by Deepak Chopra, and the only time I glance at it is to remind myself that the left can also sink into sloppy stupidity as deeply as the right. But poor Orac — his head might just explode into flames when he reads this simperingly stupid piece on vaccines from Jim Carrey.

The Huffpo is a little island of pampered fluff, where celebrities are asked to ‘blog’ (it really isn’t, though—they tend to drop these little turds of pseudo-wisdom, and then never hang around to interact with their readers) simply because they are celebrities, and we are expected to pay attention despite their lack of substantive authority. It’s the People magazine of the lefty blogosphere, and I’m really ashamed to see that as one of the showpieces of my political affiliation.

Crank science is as crank science does

I was sent this story about genes and IQ, and right from the beginning, my alarm bells were ringing. This is crank pseudoscience.

Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases?

Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more.

It offended Cochran’s sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?

At 3:17 one morning, after a long night searching a database of scientific journals from his disheveled home office in Albuquerque, Cochran fired off an e-mail to his collaborator Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I’ve figured it out, I think,” Cochran typed. “Pardon my crazed excitement.”

The “faulty” genes, Cochran concluded, make Jews smarter.

Why are European Jews prone to certain genetic diseases? My first answer would be to consider that they are a sub-group isolated by a history of bigotry from the outside, and strong cultural mores from the inside that promote inbreeding. These are variations amplified by chance and history.

I would not be offended by this. It’s logic, too. Natural selection is important, but it’s not everything — but so often, “self-taught genetics buffs” get the emphasis all wrong, and think of evolution as a machine that churns out generations that are relentlessly optimized for the best of all possible solutions, and these are the people who are also unsatisfied that evolution also churns out mistakes that are perpetuated over and over again. Errors happen, and their existence does not need an explanation; there is also no tendency by a benign nature to balance every individual’s shortcomings with a beneficial mutation.

Mr Cochran’s flaw is in his premise. There is no reason to assume that the frequency of every allele in a population must be the product of a selective advantage. The mathematics was worked out in the last century, and we know that even deleterious alleles can go to fixation in a population. His frenzied scribblings and off-the-wall database searches were driven by a need to reconcile the facts with his naïve and erroneous vision of evolution, and are not very convincing.

Here’s another explanation: this isolated subgroup of Ashkenazi Jews also had a culture with a deep historical respect for scholarship, and emphasized and supported education and learning to a greater degree than the larger culture surrounding them. Their children therefore begin life with a leg-up on intellectual pursuits. We don’t need a genetic explanation for their better performance (on average) on academic tests. Note also that this does not exclude a genetic component, but now at least we’re talking about an environmental factor that favors selection for intelligence. Again, though, I haven’t seen any convincing evidence for such a thing; personally, I think our intelligence is built on a shared genetic/development core that enables a wide range of kinds and degrees of intelligence to be expressed in response to environmental conditions.

But here’s the final confirming evidence that Cochran is a crank and a non-scientist.

It would be easy to test the theory, said Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognition researcher: “See if carriers of the Ashkenazi-typical genetic mutations score higher on IQ tests than their noncarrier siblings.”

Cochran and Harpending readily acknowledge the need for such experiments. But they have no plans to do them. They say their role as theorists is to generate hypotheses that others can test.

“One criticism about our paper is ‘It can’t mean anything because they didn’t do any new experiments,’ ” Cochran said. “OK, then I guess Einstein’s papers didn’t mean anything either.”

I don’t agree with Pinker that it would be easy — there’s going to be a lot of individual variation in performance, and I think it’s very hard to split the variables of culture and genetics apart in these kinds of tests. But at least he’s offering a positive approach to the problem, and that would be a good starting point.

But Cochran isn’t interested in doing them? He’s just a theorist? That’s where he begins to sound exactly like an intelligent design creationist.

John Maddox dead at 84

I’m sad to report that John Maddox, former editor of Nature, has died. He was one of those fellows who shaped the direction of science for quite a long period of time with the power of one of the most influential science journals in the world.

I suspect every scientist of my generation read his editorials in our weekly perusal of the journal. The one I remember most vividly, and probably the one that got the most attention in general, was his ferocious denunciation of Rupert Sheldrake’s work — he went so far as to say that if ever there was a book suitable for burning, it was that one. So of course, I had to read it (that’s one of the pitfalls of calling for the destruction of books). And then, also of course, I discovered that Maddox was right on the money — that book was an astonishing pile of B.S. masquerading as science, and it’s true that Sheldrake is still peddling his nonsense.

We’ve lost a vigorous skeptic and humanist.

Bad Science: the missing chapter

While Ben Goldacre was writing his book, Bad Science, he was also being sued by the crank, Matthias Rath…which meant he was under a lawyer-mandated gag order and couldn’t include his debunking of Rath in the book. Now that the suit is ended (Goldacre won), he is making the chapter on mega-vitamin charlatan Matthias Rath freely available on the web. It’s a disgusting story of exploitation of the sick: Rath’s main contribution to the world was the undermining of efforts to treat HIV-infected people in Africa.