You British and your fondness for understatement

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, has announced his retirement at the age of 95. I don’t quite see the point of retiring from a job as a figurehead, but I guess even Walmart greeters can expect to see some time off, so good for him. The BBC did report on it, and made this statement that made me laugh:

He is famed for off-the-cuff remarks he has made at royal engagements around the world over the years.

Yes, I suppose you could say that.

One down. So when are y’all getting rid of the rest of the royal family?

Today is the last day of teaching until August for me

I ought to sit back, laugh, and drink champagne, except, unfortunately, that tomorrow the deluge of term papers and lab reports washes up to my door and inundates my office with work. Then there’s the small matter of a final exam next week.

I’m thinking I may actually be done done next Wednesday.

But I’ll still find time to see the new Guardians of the Galaxy movie tomorrow!

The horrible two-headed rat

I’m not impressed with this recent exercise in microsurgical technique to allow researchers to transplant the head of one rat to another rat’s body. In all honesty, I don’t see the point.

I’m going to put the discussion of this paper below the fold because it seems more an exercise in animal cruelty than anything else; I’ve included one figure illustrating the surgery, but it will be at thumbnail size and you’ll have to click on it to see it in all its gory vulgarity.

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The Prestigious Robes of Science!

Don’t you just love it when people like @FerranSuay wrap themselves in the Prestigious Robes of Science and Evolution, and then make a series of statements that show they understand neither, and fail at logic to boot? A professor of psychobiology has written an essay in which he equates a refusal to make natural selection omnipotent with creationism. It’s a familiar and wrong tirade. I should have been keeping track of how often I get accused of being a creationist because I find evolutionary psychology poorly founded and full of sloppy research, because if I had, I’d have a really big number.

In academic environments it is very difficult to find someone who will openly and explicitly deny the principles of evolutionary theory. Professors and researchers from any scientific discipline will endorse, more or less accurately, the principles of natural selection, and everyone has a rough idea about what genes, chromosomes, and DNA are. Certainly, nobody will deny that we walk on two legs or have a hand with an opposable thumb because evolutionary pressures have shaped our anatomy in this way. And very few academics refuse to acknowledge that human brains underwent a unique frontal development, which clearly distinguishes them from those of other primates, and even those of our closest relatives, the great apes. This is accepted as an obvious consequence of the evolutionary process that has shaped life on Earth today.

But the situation is very different when we apply the same principles to the study of human behaviour. In this area, there are scientists prepared to deny any genetic influence whatsoever. Some will say instead that behaviour is wholly the product of social and environmental variables. Others will try to consistently minimize the explanatory power of genetics. But how can a species rid itself of the laws that govern the rest of life on the planet?

See the highlighted sentence? Name them. Go ahead. You should be specific in your claims if you’re in those science robes, you know. I don’t know anyone who fits that description, unless he’s thinking of some fringe New Age wackaloon like David Avocado Wolfe.

Only a few minutes of thought reveals all this to be extraordinarily unscientific.

Yes, I agree, that essay is extraordinarily unscientific. It’s not going to get better.

Are we to believe that evolutionary pressures, which have configured the anatomy of the body and the brain, cannot also be used to explain and understand the whys and wherefores of human behaviour? Everyone agrees that we have opposable thumbs because those of our ancestors born with this mutation possessed certain reproductive advantages and left more living descendants on Earth. As this trait continued to provide benefits to subsequent generations, it became so dominant it is now the norm for the vast majority of humans. The same can be applied to the standing position, and to the size and the particular anatomical configuration of the human brain. This is all uncontroversial.

We can credit all kinds of things to evolution, but this fellow has three major problems: 1) he thinks all of evolution is explained by natural selection, 2) he assumes that every single feature of the human form is adaptive, and 3) he has this overly simplistic notion that opposable thumbs are a product of a “mutation”. Every one of those points is false.

Do we need to go on after he reveals that all of his premises are wrong? Of course we do, for the spectacle of someone digging themselves a very deep hole.

Why should the same logic not apply to human behaviour? Let’s take physical aggression, for example—the tendency to impose on others through coercion. Didn’t aggressive individuals enjoy (some) reproductive advantages? Didn’t the most aggressive males climb the hierarchy of social groups thereby enhancing their ability to attract resources and mates? Didn’t that privilege the transmission of aggressive genes to the next generation? The statistics on violent crime reveal a very clear over-representation of the male sex. Without needing to study the numbers, anyone with eyes in their head can conclude that human males are generally considerably more physically aggressive than females.

That explains nothing. It’s a lazy, sloppy attempt to justify a patriarchal status quo without looking for any evidence.

The logic is wrong. If physical aggression is an advantage for men, why not also for women? Wouldn’t aggressive women enjoy some reproductive advantages? Don’t women experience hierarchical social groups? Why is this being framed as a male thing with arguments that should apply to all sexes?

And if you want to argue that submissive behavior is advantageous for women (somehow I suspect he would), wouldn’t it also be the case that submissive behavior would be advantageous for men? He has trapped himself in an argument that can work in any direction you want.

Let’s look at reality, too. Does this professor expect to climb the rungs of the hierarchy at the University of València with physical aggression? That would be truly remarkable. Universities are not purely intellectual meritocracies, but still — using violent crime to work your way up the ranks probably wouldn’t work. Social skills are far more important. Attempting to coerce one’s colleagues with a good punch-up or skillful use of a club will not get you far.

It’s nice of him to announce that you don’t need numbers, since he doesn’t have any.

However, unlike the shape of our hands, the standing position, or the anatomy of the brain, this trait is not a universally accepted product of evolution. Instead, it is a response to social conditioning, such as patriarchal education, the nefarious influence of the media, or the excessive availability of violent video games. In this scenario, miraculously, evolutionary pressures have no part to play, and the socio-environmental, psychosocial, or psycho-socio-environmental variables (we can keep on juxtaposing terms until we find a sufficiently abstruse formulation) are the sole determinants of behaviour.

There he goes again.

Look. This shouldn’t be so difficult to understand. You did not evolve to be well-adapted to your academic niche. Evolution gave us a plastic brain capable of learning and adapting — in an immediate, developmental sense, not an evolutionary sense — to diverse and complex circumstances. You are capable of both bashing in a competitor’s skull with a rock, or publishing papers to demonstrate your cognitive superiority (this guy ain’t doin’ so well on that front). We can simultaneously see that human minds have a genetic predisposition to process, understand, and use symbols, and a learned ability to speak Spanish, English, or Russian.

These are not hard concepts to reconcile. A genetic/biological substrate that has many predispositions and capabilities, plus a general ability to learn and modify behavior on the basis of experience is the obvious, universal, scientific understanding of the human mind. It is simply perverse to throw away the last part of that description and believe in strict genetic determinism of behavior.

But when psychologists deal with one of the most complex phenomena we know about, human behaviour, they must discard the methods that have proved useful, and the knowledge derived from them, and embrace a new faith; one that says that the cause of behaviour are to be found only in social and environmental variables. This is unscientific and intellectually dishonest—it is creationism by another name. Only it is “hidden,” because its advocates will not openly resile from evolutionist positions and, instead, drape their irrational beliefs in the prestigious robes of science.

Since genetics is relatively inflexible, it is only reasonable to assume that the cause of variation in behavior may be a product of learned experience. That there may also be some genetic biases between individuals is not off the table, but dang, guy, you’ve got to do a heck of a lot of work to show that.

Because science expects you to drop the pretentious Robes of Science and buckle down to work.

Speaking of place…

I grew up in Kent, Washington (so did my wife). That was long after this photo, though:

It was named for the region in England where hops were grown because, again before I was born, hops were the primary agricultural product around there. What I find fascinating, though, are the vestiges. The article names some of the early pioneers in that area — Ezra Meeker, Everett Titus — and I lived on Titus street, and the central business district was on Meeker. And that practice left a mark on the economy of the town.

The legacy of hops continues today, even though the Kent Valley is no longer farmland. When produce and dairy farming went away, existing railroad networks and flat farmland helped Kent scale up as a center of manufacturing and warehousing.

“We really built an infrastructure that even after hops left has become fertile ground for industry, for manufacturing, for warehousing,” Garfield said.

Yeah. I detested Kent when I was growing up. Warehouses. I lived through a transition, when the city was taking everything that was lovely and green and pleasant about the place, covering it with asphalt, and putting up warehouses all along the river, with the bonus of tearing down businesses to build more gas stations for the commuter population. Kent was a desert for human beings for a long, long time. I hear it has improved since then, but it couldn’t help bet get better.

I watched American Gods, and I liked it!

But then, I also liked the novel, which is not to everyone’s taste. It was refreshingly pagan, with a plethora of gods, and not much difference between a leprechaun and the king of the gods — they’re all manifestations of human belief, and since they merely reflect humanity, they tend not to be very nice. The show has an element of the surreal to it, too.

If you’ve read the book, you know that one of its featured elements is the Upper Midwest. In an interview with Neil Gaiman, the author makes that explicit.

“I couldn’t have written it without living in Wisconsin, and Minneapolis and St. Paul being the nearest big cities,” said Gaiman, chatting last week from a Los Angeles hotel where he was preparing for the world premiere of Starz’s TV adaptation of the book. “It just wouldn’t have worked.”

Gaiman, so thoughtful in responding to questions that you sometimes worry the phone line has gone dead, wasn’t referring so much to specific landmarks, such as the House on the Rock or the wintry landscape, both of which play pivotal roles in his 2001 book. He’s talking about the region’s general weirdness.

“There’s that tiny off-kilter nature in the Midwest that’s in the details,” said Gaiman, 56, who moved from England to Menomonie, Wis., in 1992. “I would enjoy stopping at a little restaurant somewhere and half the place would be selling peculiar stuff like … warrior princess dolls. That’s weird.”

As someone who has lived in the Pacific Northwest, the Desert Southwest, the East Coast, and now, Minnesota, I can confidently say that everywhere is a tiny bit off-kilter from everywhere else. The Midwest is not weirder than any other part of the country, but it does have a different flavor, and as someone who grew up in a place with mountains and evergreen trees and the ocean and temperate weather, long-term residence makes it feel like home-but-not-home, if you know what I mean. You live in it, but you’re not of it, and that small element of disconnectedness makes it uncomfortably interesting.

And now for something truly controversial

I’m not as open-minded as I thought. I was fine with everything on this chart, but my mind rebelled at “A Pop-Tart is a sandwich”.

My working definition is that a sandwich is some kind of filling wrapped in a bread so that you can hold it in your hand, which should accommodate a Pop-Tart…but it is making me question my understanding.

Persuade me, yes or no.

7th District Republicans, making our choices clear again

I live in Minnesota’s 7th congressional district. Our representative is a Blue Dog Democrat, Collin Peterson.

I do not like Peterson.

I never voted for the guy until the last election, when I held my nose and punched his name in the voting booth because the Republicans have become the party of intransigent ignorance and bigotry, so even Peterson looks good in comparison. Unfortunately, I think he relies too much on the odious nature of the opposition to skate by.

And then I looked at the Facebook page for the Minnesota 7th Congressional District Republican Party. They really hate Collin Peterson. They think he’s a liberal, dont’cha know. By comparison with the poison they spew, I guess he might be.

What brought me to look at their page was that I learned that the 7th district Republicans, my neighbors, had posted this:

Wow. My neighbors suck.

Head Muslim Goat Humper? Seriously, dudes? Can you get any more racist?

Worst thing about it: now I’m going to have to vote for Collin Peterson, or whatever Blue Dog substitute comes along, again, and it left a foul taste in my mouth last time.

Racists love to cooperate: Sam Harris and Charles Murray

No. I just couldn’t do it. Sam Harris interviews Charles Murray in his podcast (but of course it is a friendly, chummy interview, because two white guys are not going to criticize each other when it comes to talking about the inferiority of other races), but I was unable to listen to it. I tried. I got a few minutes in, but listening to that calm, soothing, rational monotone setting up a conversation in which the capabilities of the majority of the human race were going to be dismissed with cold, clinical detachment was just too infuriating. I just shut that fucker down.

And waited.

I knew someone would have the ability to listen to it all and distill it down to the key points, so I wouldn’t have to suffer through the insufferable for two and a quarter hours. Thank you, Angry White Men blog, for taking the bullet for the rest of us.

I did have a pretty good idea of what was to come, just from the title of the podcast: Forbidden Knowledge: A Conversation with Charles Murray. There was the assumption right there that what the ol’ bigot was dispensing was “knowledge”, rather than racist junk science. And, as usual, they’re going to set themselves up as martyrs, holding “knowledge” they’re “forbidden” to share, despite the fact that these scum have elected a president, have police forces that functionally act to enforce discriminatory oppression, that the internet is crawling with slimy advocates for their ideas, and that this crap is routinely published. Murray’s The Bell Curve was actually published and promoted by major media sources like the New York Times, you know, and it’s not as if Nicholas Wade was unable to get his trash fire of a book published recently. It’s not as if you have to obtain this stuff as bootleg samizdat, in the form of smeared photocopies distributed by a clandestine network of shadowy men in trenchcoats.

AWM recommends you read Lane’s article on the tainted sources of The Bell Curve — it’s poisonous garbage through and through. It’s bad science, something Harris should have brought up. He doesn’t. Instead, he just assumes that all of his biases are true, and that, once again, he and Chuck are the brave souls who are willing to accept the Forbidden Knowledge you peons are too cowardly to believe.

People don’t wanna hear that intelligence is a real thing, and that some people have more of it than others. They don’t wanna hear that IQ tests really measure it. They don’t wanna hear that differences in IQ matter, because they’re highly predictive of differential success in life. And not just for things like educational attainment and wealth, but for things like out-of-wedlock birth and mortality.

People don’t wanna hear that a person’s intelligence is in large measure due to his or her genes, and there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person’s intelligence — even in childhood. It’s not that the environment doesn’t matter, but genes appear to be 50 to 80 percent of the story. People don’t want to hear this. And they certainly don’t want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups.

That was a revealing phrase: there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person’s intelligence — even in childhood, Sam. Sam. Sam, I want to introduce you to a word that seems to be unfamiliar to you. It’s kind of amazing that a neuroscientist hasn’t run across it before.

That word is education.

Boom. Mic drop. Done.

Now of course Harris does actually know that common English word, but what it reveals is that he has a different understanding of intelligence than most of us do. He want’s to believe that children are born with different capacities for learning, that education is something that just fills that capacity with knowledge. This is, obviously, not true — any educator should be able to tell you that brains grow in ability with use, and that the key to expanding its ability is practice.

He and his ilk like to use the phrase “blank slaters” to address a favorite straw man, the idea that we are born with no inherent patterns of behavior at all (which no one holds, unfortunately for their rhetoric), while they are confident that we’re born with a certain degree of hard wiring for the abilities of the brain.

I have a different phrase for them. They hold to an “empty bucket” theory of human intelligence. They discount education because, you see, it’s a different propery. People are born with an empty bucket for knowledge, which varies in capacity by race and ethnicity and sex, limited in its volume by genetic factors. IQ is a magically objective number for the size of your bucket, fixed by your history and ancestry, while education and knowledge are more variable products of your environment.

What Sam and Chuck want to argue (no, sorry, there was no argument between them) is that black people are born with a 9 gallon bucket, while white people are born with 10 gallon buckets. They have no evidence for this. They only have the assumption that IQ is a measure of maximum potential, and that the statistical average of a deeply flawed metric that doesn’t measure what they think it does is sufficient to allow them to condescend to the poor, intellectually-constrained brains trapped in black bodies.

What makes it even more appalling is that these are two conventional, conservative white men slapping each other on the back while telling each other how superior they are. You would think Harris would have learned by now that the perception that he is racist, which he decries, is only fanned to a white-hot heat when he engages in this kind of self-congratulatory behavior.

He doesn’t. He can’t. I guess his social awareness bucket is very, very tiny.

AWM concludes with a comment about Murray’s flaws that should have been brought up in a competent interview.

And all of these points — unwillingness to engage with critics, connections to white supremacists, consequences for poor and non-white Americans — would have been worth bringing up in Harris’ conversation with Murray. As an interviewer, he should have done more than toss softballs and whitewash Murray’s record. As a skeptic, he should have been more willing to examine Murray’s beliefs. His unwillingness to do so will only bolster racist pseudoscience and toss more red meat to Murray’s white nationalist fans.

Oddly, though, those criticisms of Murray — “unwillingness to engage with critics, connections to white supremacists, consequences for poor and non-white Americans” — also apply perfectly to Sam Harris, so I’m not at all surprised that he wouldn’t bring them up. I knew that about him well ahead of time.

And that’s why I wasn’t going to listen to him.