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.

Randi restored

Youtube has restored the JREF account.

I’m going to have to disagree with Randi, though. Responding to a violation by automatically yanking the whole account is not appropriate and civilized behavior, especially when it can be resolved by an amicable communication. How about communicating first, and then yanking if someone is intransigent? The problem is that not everyone has the resources or the clout of the JREF, and there have been far too many cases of individuals getting shut down on entirely bogus complaints.

ABC thinks we’re all morons

Who knows? Maybe they’re right. They’re planning a program for “Nightline” (which, I seem to recall, at least used to be a pretty good news program) which will probably get them some decent ratings.

They’re going to have a debate on the existence of Satan.

Yeah, you heard that right…on a so-called news program. But it gets worse! They have 4 people coming on to yell at each other.

On the “Satan exists!” side, they have Pastor Mark Driscoll, head of a megachurch in Seattle, and Annie Lobert, former prostitute and founder of a group called Hookers for Jesus. Sensationalism is already rearing its gaudy head, you can tell.

Even worse, the “Satan does not exist!” side is a joke. It consists of Bishop Carlton Pearson, who doesn’t accept the doctrine of hell but is a Christian, and…unbelievably…Deepak Chopra. Not an atheist or skeptic among them, just hardcore believers in woo vs. fluffy believers in woo.

Don’t tune in. It will be a complete waste of time.

The woo, it burns!

Does only Orac get to give you a Friday dose of woo? Because I have to show you this amazing and all-too-common bit of criminal quackery.

God’s Answer To Cancer:

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Just kill it by using this health machine to flood your cells with “Chi” Energy!

You should read the long, rambling testimonial on that web page — it says absolutely nothing about how this gadget is supposed to “zap disease germs”, but it does go through a laundry list of quack therapies, and heaps scorn on other quacks who sell gadgets that cure cancer.

I’m rather dazzled by the quantity of nonsense all on display there: it’s got the New Age + Traditional Chinese Medicine combo of “chi”, it’s tying it all in to God magic, and of course, it’s got the high-tech pseudoscientific dependence on a box with bits of a Radio Shack voltmeter.

An honest admission from Senator Harkin

Democratic Senator Tom Harkin is the pol who pushed a major “alternative medicine” proposal through congress that led to the formation of the NCCAM, a hotbed of government-sponsored quackery. He now regrets the effort, but for all the wrong reasons. It’s hard to imagine a more damning statement that reveals an utter ignorance of how science should work than this one:

Sen. Tom Harkin, the proud father of the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, told a Senate hearing on Thursday that NCCAM had disappointed him by disproving too many alternative therapies.

“One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short,” Harkin said.

The senator went on to lament that, since its inception in 1998, the focus of NCCAM has been “disproving things rather than seeking out and approving things.”

Skeptics have complained all along that Harkin and his allies founded this office to promote alternative therapies at public expense, not to test them scientifically. Harkin’s statement at the hearing explicitly confirms that hypothesis.

He’s unhappy because the research didn’t give him the answer he wanted. Does he think science is a magic wishing well?

Maybe we need to establish a new political party, the Rationalists, to replace both the Democrats and Republicans. It would be a wonderful idea, but I fear it would never get more than 0.001% of the American vote.