Affirmation!

You know that stupid story about inheriting your intelligence from your mother, that I debunked? Emily Willingham said pretty much the same thing, so now you can trust that I was right.

This is not surprising, and it didn’t require a conspiracy or telepathy or a Vulcan mind meld — it was a totally bogus claim that anyone with any significant biology training at all would have found mind-bogglingly inane.

In the same way, scientists around the world are groaning upon hearing Attenborough’s aquatic ape fannishness, and for the same reason — it’s patently false.

Say it ain’t so, Sir David

wetbaby

I’m sorry to report that Sir David Attenborough done screwed up. He is using his mellifluous voice and awesome reputation to promote the Wet Ape Theory. The show features all the usual suspects: recordings of Elaine Morgan insisting that her story is reasonable, Marc Verhaegen’s pseudoscientific hairsplitting, cartoon versions of evolution by Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris, and that incessant nonsense of ignoring the whole organism and the existing evidence to argue that, well, this one little piece of our physiology could have evolved in the ocean, therefore we should claim that the whole beast was aquatic, because that is the only way they can now imagine it evolved.

The classic example is Alister Hardy’s initial hypothesis to explain why humans are hairless and have a layer of subcutaneous fat. What other animals have such a combination? Why, whales! They live in the ocean, and have lost most of their hair for better streamlining, and built up fat for insulation, therefore…humans lost their hair to better cut through the water, and evolved subcutaneous fat for heat retention. This is a bad hypothesis, because it ignores so much.

  • We don’t have any other streamlining adaptations, and are actually rather clumsy in the water.

  • Only aquatic mammals that live full time in the water show these adaptations; mammals that live part time in the water tend to have lots of hair.

  • Our “blubber” does a poor job of protecting us from that big heat sink, the ocean. We also lack the circulatory adaptations that make it useful in that function: countercurrent exchangers, arteriovenous anastomoses, that sort of thing.

  • Marine mammals have very little visceral fat; we’ve got loads of it. OK, I’ve got lots. Most of our fat is not distributed in a way to improve insulation.

And most annoyingly, the wet ape proponents simply pretend alternative explanations don’t exist. Hairlessness or reduced body hair, for instance, has evolved independently in several groups: cetaceans, naked mole rats, domesticated pigs, elephants, hippos, etc. So there are different strategies or environmental conditions that can lead to these features, and you can’t simply say all hairless mammals had to have gone through a dolphin-like evolutionary stage, because there are no other situations that can favor hairlessness.

But of course wet ape fanatics do — I’ve seen them seriously suggest that elephants had to have also gone through an aquatic phase.

Attenborough, I’m sorry to say, also takes this blinkered attitude. He closes episode 1 (there are two, I couldn’t bear to listen to the second) of his “waterside ape” series with what he proposes to be a “test” of the aquatic ape theory, which is no such thing. He claims to have new evidence: that there is a known feature of human infants which he predicts would be found in newborn cetaceans, and if confirmed, would both demonstrate the predictive power of the wet ape theory and provide an additional point of confirmation.

That feature is vernix, which is only known in humans. Vernix is the slimy, greasy coat that covers newborn humans, which he wants to claim is an aquatic adaptation, and therefore should be also found in other aquatic mammals. He is able to triumphantly announce that something similar has recently been reported in cetaceans.

But, again, the connection to an aquatic life has not been demonstrated. I don’t even see how vernix helps a mammal thrive in the water; it’s a fetal feature that is lost with the first bath, or is shed within a few days of birth. Vernix has many hypothesized functions for humans:

Vernix caseosa is a white, creamy, naturally occurring biofilm covering the skin of the fetus during the last trimester of pregnancy. Vernix coating on the neonatal skin protects the newborn skin and facilitates extra-uterine adaptation of skin in the first postnatal week if not washed away after birth. It consists of water-containing corneocytes embedded in a lipid matrix. The strategic location of the vernix on the fetal skin surface suggests participation in multiple overlapping functions required at birth, such as barrier to water loss, temperature regulation [the paper later shows a lack of support for this function –pzm], and innate immunity. Vernix seems to perform various integral roles during transition of the fetus from intra-uterine to extra-uterine life. It has also found various interesting diagnostic and prognostic implications in this arena. Thus, it continues to be an intriguing topic of interest among the medical fraternity to understand its detailed biology and function in the fetus and also to put its naturally endowed characteristics to use in the adult population.

Most of those multiple overlapping functions have nothing to do with adaptations for swimming — they are important for a mammal with no insulating layer of hair that is basically born prematurely with relatively few defenses. It is a logical error to imply that sharing a feature with many functions, like vernix, means that two species had to have had a similar ecological history. It makes no sense at all. I am very disappointed that David Attenborough has fallen for such crank nonsense.

I am not being peculiarly fussy, either. Very few people in the evolutionary/anthropological community think the Aquatic Ape is a credible hypothesis. Jim Moore has a very thorough compendium of rebuttals to the hodge-podge of contradictory details that make up the Aquatic Ape Theory; it’s a constant struggle to combat proponents who vomit up all kinds of odd scientific factlets that they claim are supportive of their cherished, much-loved, stupid theory. John Hawks explains why the AAT is pseudoscience. The Guardian has already posted a rejection of Attenborough’s “wishful thinking”. Alice Roberts quickly wrote an excellent response to Attenborough.

The original idea, and certainly Elaine Morgan’s elaboration of it, became an umbrella hypothesis or a “Theory of Everything”; both far too extravagant and too simple an explanation. It attempts to provide a single rationale for a huge range of adaptations – which we know arose at different times in the course of human evolution. Traits such as habitual bipedalism, big brains and language didn’t all appear at once – instead, their emergence is spread over millions of years. It’s nonsense to lump them all together as if they require a single explanation.

Despite the evidence stacked up against the theory, it is strangely tenacious. It has become very elastic, and its proponents will seize hold of any mentions of water, fish or shellfish in human evolution, and any archaeological sites found near coasts, rivers and lakes as supporting evidence. But we must always build our hypotheses on, and test them against, the hard evidence: the fossils, comparative anatomy and physiology, and genetics. In that test, the aquatic ape has failed – again and again.

It is a great shame the BBC recently indulged this implausible theory as it distracts from the emerging story of human evolution that is both more complex and more interesting. Because at the end of the day science is about evidence, not wishful thinking.

Unfortunately, I’m sure this bad idea will emerge again and again. There’s something appealing to the human psyche about one simple explanation of everything, even if that explanation is completely wrong.

Sam Kriss, master of projection

Sam Kriss really doesn’t like me, or any atheists, for that matter. He name-checks me in a recent essay, Village Atheists, Village Idiots, in which he simultaneously makes the claim that the premises of atheism are obviously true, but that atheism induces dementia, which is slaughtering all prominent atheists in grisly ways.

Something has gone badly wrong with our atheists. All these self-styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter neofascism. Superstar astrophysicist and pop-science impresario Neil deGrasse Tyson is catatonic, mumbling in a packed cinema that the lasers wouldn’t make any sound in space, that a spider that big would collapse under its own weight, that everything you see is just images on a screen and none of it is real. Islam-baiting philosopher Sam Harris is paranoid, his flailing hands gesticulating murderously at the spectral Saracen hordes. Free-thinking biologist PZ Myers is psychotic, screeching death from a gently listing hot air balloon. And the late Christopher Hitchens, blinded by his fug of rhetoric, fell headlong into the Euphrates.

Well, actually…

Richard Dawkins seems to be doing quite well after his minor stroke, and is going to tour the US this Fall. “Wheeling lunatic” has never been a very good description of his behavior; he’s always calm, even as he says things I disagree with.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is also doing fine. As we’ll see, he still criticizes basic errors, which turns out to be Kriss’s real objection to him.

I rather agree with his description of Harris. He is a kind of paranoid racist Vulcan.

I don’t think I’m psychotic, but then, if I were, I probably wouldn’t think I was, would I? Again, “screeching death” is also terribly inapt, and why has he put me in a hot air balloon?

Christopher Hitchens is still dead. It wasn’t a fug that killed him, or even his own rhetoric, but cancer.

Speaking of rhetoric, though, isn’t it bad form to begin an essay that’s going to accuse people you don’t like of being hysterical and excessive with such excessive histrionics of your own? Not to mention howling about how they’re all diseased and dying.

It isn’t just the beginning, either. He’s just getting warmed up. The whole dang essay is Sam Kriss doing a war dance and screaming about those awful atheists.

Critics have pointed out this clutch of appalling polemic and intellectual failings on a case-by-case basis, as if they all sprang from a randomized array of personal idiosyncrasies. But while one eccentric atheist might be explicable, for all of the world’s self-appointed smartest people to be so utterly deranged suggests some kind of pattern. We need, urgently, a complete theory of what it is about atheism that drives its most prominent high priests mad.

But wait, Sam: you’ve just shrieked that all those atheists are insane and mad and deranged, but you haven’t actually made the case that we are. Applying extravagant adjectives and adverbs to people doesn’t make them more true. Fortunately, he’s going to give us his “complete theory” of what drives atheists mad, and it’s going to explain a lot. A lot about Sam Kriss, that is, but not really anything about those atheists.

His theory, which is his, is that atheists are saying things which are true and obvious too often. No, really, that’s the entirety of his complaint.

Whatever it is, it has something to do with a litany of grievances against the believoisie so rote that it might well (or ironically) be styled a catechism. These New Atheists and their many fellow travelers all share an unpleasant obsessive tic: they mouth some obvious banality—there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beings—and then act as if it is some kind of profound insight. This repetition-compulsion seems to be baked right into their dogma.

Weird, huh? And to make his case, he goes on and on about Neil deGrasse Tyson and his mockery of the rapper BoB, who claimed that the Earth was flat, and then Tyson pedantically explained multiple times that we can show that it is actually round, which Kriss found so annoying because isn’t it so obvious the Earth is round? And shut up Neil deGrasse Tyson, you think you’re so smart and that question is so easy and I know how to use a thesaurus so how come you’re so famous, and I’m not? And Bill Nye sucks, too.

There, you’ve got the gist of the whole thing, and unless you’re really into seeing people name-drop Kierkegaard 11 times, you can skip the rest.

It’s an odd performance. You know, I think creationism is obviously false, but that doesn’t mean everyone can or should shut up about it — it’s still an active political and theological force, even if all (and I mean all — even the latest bluster from the Discovery Institute is rehashing ancient arguments) of its arguments were demolished almost 200 years ago. We have to keep plugging away against ignorance, even if it is obviously wrong. To the person promoting it, it isn’t.

I’m currently teaching cell biology, as I have been since 1993. I wouldn’t be a very good teacher if I started yelling at a class of 19 year olds that “Jesus, the chemiosmotic hypothesis is so obvious! You never heard of proton gradients before? I’m not going to waste time teaching you about them, but they will be on the exam, because you should already know it!”

This seems to be how Kriss would run my class (he clearly knows everything there is to know about proton gradients and all the details of electron transport, because it’s all obvious, so I’m sure he could step right in to the job), because apparently calm repetitive didacticism that addresses the ignorance of different individuals is a sure sign that you’re dying of some fatal form of obsessive dementia.

It’s also strange that he would hate on Neil deGrasse Tyson for publicly refuting a flat-earther, when Kriss himself has written, I’ve always been mildly obsessed with the flat-earth truth movement. Is this just professional jealousy, that the criticisms of an astronomer against flat-earthers get more attention than the criticisms of…whatever the hell Sam Kriss is?

It’s curious, too, that Kriss would say that it’s obvious that “there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beings”, but not notice that there’s a substantial majority of people in the United States, and elsewhere, who would vigorously dispute those claims. And if repetitively addressing ignorant claims is a hallmark of insanity, what are we to make of Sam Kriss? This isn’t the first time he’s raged at Neil deGrasse Tyson for explaining something obvious, which makes him guilty of exactly the same thing, only with more hyperbole.

It’s also not the case that he reserves his squawking for atheists; you should see what he has to say about Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton, a blinding-white astral demon made of chicken gristle and wax-paper, doesn’t even pretend that she’s running for any reason beside her own personal hunger for power. She wants to rule the world; it’d be hers by birth, only she wasn’t born, she emerged like a lizard out its egg from the cold undeath of money, fully formed.

Even his word salad is grossly unappetizing.

Were you anxiously awaiting Dr Oz’s assessment of Trump’s health?

I wasn’t. Don’t really care. Knew it was going to be a couple of frauds slapping each others’ backs. Didn’t watch it, and am not going to. Fortunately, Orac suffered for us, and delivers a surprising review: it was exactly as I expected, but in addition, it was boring.

But yeah, it was nothing but a Trump commercial.

Basically, Dr. Oz is every bit as much of a carnival barker as Donald Trump is, and in this instance he helped Trump not only brag about his own health but to insinuate that Clinton is not healthy enough to be President while also allowing Ivanka Trump to air what was basically a campaign commercial for Trump’s childcare proposal. The two were clearly made for each other. It was placebo transparency, making a mockery of transparency norms.

Shouldn’t a creative genre naturally gravitate towards greater diversity?

I like this essay about science fiction’s woman problem — it really hammers home the distorted demographics of the SF community, and on the surface, it seems very odd. This is a genre of literature that emphasizes strange, new, weird perspectives, and we’re supposed to be fans of mind-bending cosmic novelty that the Mundanes and Muggles just don’t get; we tell ourselves that the whole point is to turn the lens of “what if…?” back upon ourselves, and see how people and cultures would change if one little thing were different, if the future were a tiny bit different from the present. And what do we get? Lots of repetition of White Imperialist Men in Space. That’s fine, I enjoy a good heroic space opera myself, but can we also leaven it all with some variety?

I’ve been consciously selecting my light reading lately to avoid the familiar white authors — again, nothing wrong with them — and what started out as something requiring intentional effort quickly turned into a genuinely fun and stimulating pastime. There’s a place for comfort food, but once you’ve been on a diet of mac-and-cheese for a long time, and you start trying new stuff, pretty soon you’re unsatisfied if you aren’t getting sushi or bibimbap or falafel for dinner, and they stop being “exotic” foods and become that really tasty goodness that you crave all the time.

So the latest two books I read: Everfair by Nisi Shawl and Engraved on the Eye by Saladin Ahmed. Fabulous! You like steampunk, Victorian fantasy and SF? Everfair has all that, but in addition, it’s set in the Congo of King Leopold II of Belgium (he’s the villain, obviously, but actually, the whole dang colonial system is the bad guy). Just moving the story out of the usual London setting is great, but having a nightmarishly wicked villain who was actually real, and even worse than the novel portrays him, makes the story seem just a bit more fierce. You like sword and sorcery? Who needs burly grunting Aryan barbarians when you can have aging, overweight Doctor Adoulla Makhslood to admire. I found it gratifying to finally have a hero I can actually physically identify with.

But here’s the deal: if you’re really into imaginative SF, shouldn’t you be avidly seeking out different authors and different ideas all the time? You don’t have to like it all, but jeez, shouldn’t it be a natural phenomenon that all SF readers would be exploring strange new worlds on their bookshelves?

Where junk science comes from

Did you know that intelligence is produced by genes that are located on the X chromosome? I didn’t. In fact, I know of a lot of evidence that directly contradicts that absurd idea. So where did that strange claim come from?

Start here. A local television news station in Sacramento reports on Study: Children get their intelligence from their mom. They make a remarkable claim.

Since women carry two X chromosomes — that’s where intelligence genes are located — several studies have found kids are twice as likely to inherit their intelligence from their mom.

Yes, your dad may give you some intelligence genes, but the study says they won’t have an affect on your brain. The genes will only work if they come from your mom because they will go directly to the cerebral cortex. Genes from the father’s side go to the limbic system.

But none of that is true! “Intelligence genes”, whatever they are, are not discrete entities located on just the X chromosome, and it doesn’t make much sense to claim that kids are twice as likely to inherit intelligence from their mothers. Every boy has one X chromosome that they inherited from Mom, and every girl has one X from Mom, and one X from Dad. And what are these “several studies” that did this work? They don’t say.

That second paragraph is pure gibberish. Maternal genes “go” to the cortex, while paternal genes “go” to the limbic system? This makes no sense. You have to watch the report to believe it, though: to evaluate this claim, the reporter calls up his mom to ask her if he got his brains from her, and then goes to a toddler tumbling class to ask random moms if they agree. Science!

You might be wondering, what study actually makes that original claim? They actually have a link to that, but more about that in a moment.

Let’s look in on that hive of blithering mendacity, gossip, and side-boob shots, the Huffington Post. They report on the same “study”, saying Intelligence Gene: Science Proves Moms Are Responsible For Kids’ Smarts. Don’t you just love that phrase, “science proves”, especially when it’s immediately followed by some bogus nonsense?

The genes that carry intelligence are located on the X chromosomes. And since women carry two, it’s more likely that children get their brain power from their mom as opposed to pops.

But while some dads may brush this off, it’s actually extremely unlikely that their intellect has any impact on their kiddos.

“If that same gene is inherited from the father, it is deactivated,” the study reported.

There’s that mysterious the study again. What study? I’ve never seen a study that shows that intelligence is confined to the X chromosome, and such a claim would be bizarre and unlikely anyway. They also give a link, though, and it’s the same source used in the television news story.

Here it is: Did you know that intelligence is inherited from mothers? It’s not a study. It’s a blog post. It contains quite a few references to the scientific literature, but it seems to have muddled up their contents quite a bit. None of them say what the author claims.

For instance, the blog post says “Mother’s genes go directly to the cerebral cortex, those of the father to the limbic system” (so that’s where the news got it…), and cites a couple of imprinting studies done in mice. One of them is even titled “Completion of mouse embryogenesis requires both the maternal and paternal genomes.” If you aren’t up on imprinting, it’s the observation that normal development sometimes requires complementary patterns of gene expression on maternal and paternal chromosomes — that is, on the chromosome you got from Dad, gene A might be turned on while gene B is turned off, while on the chromosome you got from Mom, gene A is off and gene B is on, and that complementation means you’ve still got one active copy of each of A and B.

What about the claim that intelligence genes are on the X chromosome? The author cites a 1972 paper that isn’t a study of any kind, but instead merely proposes the hypothesis that “major genes relating to intelligence are located on the X-chromosome”, largely based on the observation that males have a greater frequency of mental retardation and learning disorders than females. The author also cites another paper that was a review of the database of genetic disorders in OMIM that found that 10% of the genes associated with mental disabilities are linked to the X chromosome.

Both of those facts are true: boys are more likely to suffer mental disabilities, and known genes correlated with those problems are found on the X chromosome. This does not, however, imply the existence of “intelligence genes”, nor does it map intelligence to the X chromosome. What it tells you is that boys are hemizygous for the X chromosome, and that recessive alleles that can cause developmental disorders are more likely to be exposed and phenotypically expressed if a) they’re on the X, and b) they are inherited by a boy. Brains are also particularly sensitive to developmental problems, so generic deficiencies are often going to have cognitive consequences.

Another problem is that the OMIM database is not a complete account of every possible gene and its effect. Some genes are easier to isolate phenotypically…like, if you’ve got a lot of individuals running around who are reliably known to be expressing a deleterious allele in the absence of a complementary wild type allele. Like, you know, some boys. The reason the “intelligence genes” are underrepresented in autosomal chromosomes (that is, non-sex-chromosomes) isn’t because they’re not there, but because they aren’t as obviously expressed or as easily detected. What they’re actually reporting is a bias in the literature: the X chromosome, because of its unusual genetic properties, is more brightly “lit up” than the somewhat more difficult autosomes.

So, basically, the article is all wrong, but coming to a simple, sweeping, fallacious conclusion is more attractive to mass media than a complex, multifactorial, correct conclusion. Who knew?

One more thing. You know how they say you shouldn’t read the comments? I read the comments.

They’re a mess. There are lengthy digressions where people pick over the grammar and spelling of the author, who is not a native English speaker, and people who defend it because the content is so interesting (it isn’t. It’s wrong). But it’s still silly, because it’s written in competent if slightly flawed English, and is perfectly clear. It’s just perfectly wrong.

There are lots of anecdotes about smart moms and dumb moms. These are totally irrelevant to the facts, but that actually is kind of interesting, to see how people are really interested in relating science to their personal lives, even when the science is wrong.

But the worst comments, the very worst, are the ones that take issue with the science. Why? Because those commenters don’t understand the science either, and they take an article that has already mangled the information and mutilate it further. The usual suspects, MRA-types, are outraged, because it has a whiff of feminism.

Highly unlikely. IQ is a product of genetic diversity and since XY is by definition more diverse than XX, intelligence is inherited from the contributor of the Y gene. Men outnumber women by a factor of 6:1 at IQs of 140 and above for this reason. Men, on average, are smarter than women because they have a greater diversity of genetic material to draw upon (fewer redundant systems).

If the original article was merely wrong, that comment is stupidity squared. None of that is true. It is factually false and it is built on a collection of presuppositions and theories that are false.

And then there’s this, which starts off well, pointing out that intelligence is complex and not simply reducible to genes, but then it goes off weirdly into Christian gender roles.

IQ is influenced by many factors – perhaps only half of those actually even being genetic. Clearly our Creator designed males and females to inherit particular types of intelligence. Therefore, the X chromosomes provide the feminine aspects and the Y the male characteristics of mental acuity. We are biologically intended to be balanced and complimentary to each other. There is no disputing this obvious fact.

None of that is true, either!

Let us review.

  • Intelligence is not a product of single genes. A gene does not produce intelligence, an array of genes directly affect brain development, even more genes play necessary supporting roles in brain function, and all gene effects are filtered through and regulated by the environment.

  • Intelligence is not a trait localized to the X chromosome. It is a distributed property of many genes on many chromosomes, and of the environment.

  • Masculinity and femininity are cultural properties. They are not genetic. It is a category error to try to find a genetic basis for skirts vs pants, or manly acuity vs feminine submissiveness.

  • Having a Y chromosome does not increase the genetic diversity of your genome (it’s a desert with a paucity of genes!), nor does “genetic diversity” automatically increase your intelligence.

  • Some humans are idiots.

  • Don’t trust TV news or the Huffington Post or random blogs. You should also be critical of papers published in scientific journals.

I despair of humanity sometimes.

This same “study” is also cited in Good Housekeeping. The disease is spreading.

It’s also in the Wall Street Journal, but cites different sources.

Also, AOL.

And Cosmopolitan.

<curls up, dies>

That explains why I get so irritated by people who complain about trigger warnings

It’s because they’re blatantly misinterpreting them, and incorrectly telling me how I’m using them. Miri explains it all.

What’s gaslighting is when we say, “We need trigger warnings in order to be able to engage with content rather than automatically shut down,” and you respond, “You’re just trying to avoid engaging with difficult content.”

If people are telling you that they are trying to engage with trauma-related material and you insist that they’re actually saying that they want to avoid it–or literally ban it from being taught–you are gaslighting them. You are insisting that you know better than they do what’s inside their own heads. You are pretending that they said something other than what they actually said, making them doubt their own thoughts and words.

Exactly! When I’m going to talk about icky stuff, I warn people “We’re about to talk about icky stuff,” and then…we talk about icky stuff. It’s incredibly annoying when obnoxious people try to tell me that we use trigger warnings to avoid talking about the icky stuff, when it’s exactly the opposite.

I can’t say that I’m being successfully gaslit, though, because I’m confident that I know what my own intent is, and I mainly come away feeling that the complainer is full of shit. It does seem to be effectively persuading a lot of bystanders who just want to despise anyone who has respect for the experiences of the people they are teaching, though.