Encephalon #79

The 79th and year-end edition of Encephalon is out at The Mouse Trap. Posts to check out: Neuronarrative on further evidence that our memories are highly fallible, and The Neurocritic on the neurobiology of internet addiction...

Lazy Linking

Some (much delayed) lazy linking...

"To Science!"

• Heartwarming piece, roughly, about "leaving science". Must be read to be appreciated.

"A slow evolution of theory" - Phillip Tobias

• The doyen of South African evolutionary science and anthropology, Phillip Tobias, on Darwin's theory of descent with modification. It's a Good Thing that scientists are reaching out to the South African public about evolution. 

"Questions Odd and Profound"

• A wonderful article in the NY Times on some fascinating history of science. It turns out early scientists ('natural philosophers') conducted some truly weird experiments. 
• By the way, I love the Royal Society's motto: nulluis in verba or "Take nobody's word for it".
  A distinguishing feature of science is the acknowledged supremacy of experimentation: the ultimate arbiter of truth is empirical demonstration, not authority or abstract ratiocination. This motto nearly sums up that ideal.
  

 "On the Origin of Religion" (subscription required)

• A News Focus piece by Elizabeth Culotta in Science on the various hypotheses about the origin of religion. Interesting, but it's clear we are a long way away from having a robust consensus account.

"Fair play: Monkeys share our sense of injustice" - Frans de Waal

• Frans de Waal on various animal studies that seem to demonstrate that a concern with fairness is not uniquely human, but is widespread among social species.
• "All of this shows that our hostility to conspicuous consumption and excess at the top is only natural. It is part of a long evolutionary history in which cooperation and equity go hand in hand, even though it is undeniable that we have also a hierarchical streak. This is equally true for other primates, not to mention for canines, but no species accepts these vertical arrangements 100 per cent of the time."

"Creating God in one's own image"

• One of the more annoying theist arguments is that it is impossible to be moral without God. This idea has remained popular despite powerful rebuttals, most notably Euthuphro's Dilemma. 
• Anyway, the most excellent Ed Yong covers a study that concludes people decide what God wants largely by inspecting their own beliefs. Not exactly surprising, but a fascinating study nonetheless.
• "People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want. The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing."
  

"Life on Mars?!"

• Remember the to-do back in the 90s about the meteorite that supposedly contained alien microbes? Well the same team that published the original study in 1996 have now released two new papers that again defend their conclusion. Very interesting stuff. I sure hope they're right, but obviously we'll have to wait and see what the experts think of the recent stuff.

"National Geographic's International Photography Contest 2009"

• Big Picture with a gorgeous set of nature photographs.
  

"Meet the Ex-Jihadis"

• Johann Hari interviews a bunch of ex-Islamists and tries to understand what attracted them to radicalism, and what made them give it up.
• "I realise how far all my interviewees – and new friends – have travelled. They have burned in this fire of certainty. They have felt it consume all doubt and incinerate all self-analysis. And they dared, at last, to let it go. Are they freakish exceptions – or the beginning of a great unclenching of the jihadi fist?"

Cyclone Roberta - FAKE

A public service announcement: the rumors and emails (example after the jump) doing the rounds that KwaZulu Natal is about to be hit by a "tempestuous cyclone" is fake, false, a hoax, bollocks, and completely made up. (There is a warning of heavy rainfall - "in excess of 50mm in 24 hours" - but there is no cyclone). Some observations: South Africa's east coast is very rarely hit by cyclones and email hoaxes are plentiful. Put these facts together, apply a bit of common sense, and you get doubt. And doubt should motivate some fact checking (Google is your friend)... If you did so, you'd find this East Coast Radio article saying it's fake, this cyclone tracking service showing no cyclones heading South Africa's way, and this blog entry by the SA Weather and Disaster Information Service saying it's a hoax.

Doubt will set you free.

Encephalon #78

The 78th edition of the mind/brain/psychology/etc. carnival Encephalon is out at Providentia. Posts to check out: Generally Thinking on the Buddhist brain, Brain Stimulant on neurorobotics, and The Neurocritic on unusual sexual changes due to various types of brain damage (including a kind of tumor-induced pedophilia).

My posts on estimating formidability from bodies and faces were featured.

Picture: Family chain-mail fun...

Yup.

(source).

Anti-vaccination and South Africa's measels outbreak

South Africa is in the grip of a measles epidemic (luckily confined primarily to the province of Gauteng), with 2000 cases and 4 deaths. The culprit? Parents not vaccinating their children (among other things) due to the fear that jabs can cause autism. Before getting into a bit more detail, I want to praise reporter Kim Hawley at the Times (of South Africa) for getting the story exactly right: her article emphasized the unscientific nature of such worries. Well done.

A press release issued by South Africa’s department of health contains the following revealing paragraph:

One striking feature of this latest outbreak is that while it has affected children of the poorer communities, it has also been concentrated among relatively well-off children, predominantly in the 15-19 year old age group. We believe that in both groups, the underlying cause has been failure by the parents or guardians to take children for immunization i.e. both the initial and follow-up doses.

It seems likely that among the well-off children (and much less so among the poorer children, where other factors were likely involved) the cause is parents’ fears over vaccines causing autism. The source of these fears is the anti-vaccination movement (and their idiotic celebrity sponsors) that has spread unscientific claims that either the MMR vaccine causes autism or that thimerosal (until recently a common vaccine ingredient) causes autism. These claims have been disproved beyond reasonable doubt. Being more influenced by Britain than America, it's probable that the MMR claim is most relevant to South Africa, so I'll focus on that. The source of the MMR-autism worry was a deeply flawed, and possibly fraudulent, 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues, that was merely a case series of 12 subjects (that is, a series of 12 anecdotes) that could not, in principle, determine whether there was a causal link. Moreover, Wakefield had undisclosed conflicts of interest (he received £50,000 in legal aid money from lawyers preparing a case against MMR – over the years he received over £434,000 from such cases). Wakefield is also currently under investigation by the UK's General Medical Council on charges of serious misconduct, and he might lose his license to practice.

Just because the original study was flawed does not mean, of course, that the there cannot be a link between vaccines and autism. But, as I said above, numerous subsequent studies have found no such link. In other words, there is no good reason at all to think vaccines cause autism. Note to parents: VACCINATE YOUR CHILDREN. Dammit.

(via The Lay Scientist)

Lazy linking...

Your semi- quasi- pseudo- weekly dose of Lazy Linking...

"Grandma Plays Favorites"

• A report by ScienceNOW on fascinating research on grandparent kin-altruism. According to the grandmother hypothesis, older women survive well past menopause (or have it in the first place) because over evolutionary time the marginal benefits of taking care of grandchildren were larger than the marginal benefits of additional children (possibly because the chance of having a healthy baby decreases dramatically with age).
• Various studies have been done to test this hypothesis, but the results have been mixed. Now Fox et. al. have a proposal that could account for these mixed findings: that altruism varies by sex-linked chromosomes. In terms of the sex-chromosomes, paternal grandmothers are on average 50% related to their granddaughters, but not related to their grandsons at all. (Since a male is  XY and a female XX, a boy must get his Y chromosome from his father and his X chromosome from his mother). Maternal grandmothers, on the other hand, will on average share 25% of their sex-chromosomes with both grandsons and granddaughters.    
• In other words, if you are a paternal grandmother it makes sense to dote on granddaughters (again, at least when it comes to sex-chromosomes) and if you are a maternal grandmother, it makes sense to dote equally. And, apparently, controlling for these different genetic interests makes sense of the previously-inconsistent data.
  

"Who's the Scientist?"

• Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab. Not surprisingly, meeting an actual scientist changes children's perceptions dramatically, and for the better.
  

"Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart"

• Excellent New Scientist piece on how IQ does a pretty bad job of measuring intellectual competence. The problem with people like George Bush, I have long thought (and the article basically agrees), isn't that they are stupid, it's that they subscribe to an unjustified epistemology in which they elevate intuition, ideology, and "gut feelings" over critical thinking and science. As I have said time and again, the human mind is prone to innumerable biases and rigorous thinking, humility, open mindedness and a reliance on reason are the only antidotes.
  

"Creationism Taught as Science in South African State Schools"

• The title says it all. Depressing, annoying, unacceptable.  

"A Language of Smiles"

• It has been known for a long time that the simple act of smiling can lift your mood and frowning can sour it. The most excellent Olivia Judson puts these findings together with the fact that different languages require different frequencies of mouth movements, some of which resemble smiling and others frowning. So if language A has a lot of sounds requiring speakers to pull a smile-like face, and language B lots of sounds requiring a frown-like face, we might have an interesting (but subtle and partial) explanation for different national cultures. German, for example, contains a lot of vowels that make you frown... 
  

 "Reforming libel law: A city named sue" (registration required).

• The Economist argues, entirely convincingly, that England's libel laws are archaic and damaging to free speech. Some American media organizations are now actually threatening to stop publishing in England and blocking access to their websites there. 
• Good ideas for reform include shifting the burden of proof to the claimant and capping damages. Dear House of Commons: do something, dammit. 

"Probably guilty: Bad mathematics means rough justice"

• Innumeracy - the inability to deal competently with basic mathematics and statistics - is a Bad Thing. (As John Allen Paulos has argued). As this article explains, innumeracy in the legal system leads to miscarriages of justice.

"Next-gen PhDs fail to find Web 2.0's 'on-switch'"

• The Times Higher Education Supplement reports on a survey that suggests 'Generation Y' graduate students have not embraced Web 2.0. C'mon guys... RSS and blogs are particularly valuable tools: use them. (I have my doubts about social bookmarking).
• A weakness: the study (at least as reported here) did not compare patterns of use among the Ph.Ds to the wider population of Generation Y.
  

"Face the Facts - and End the War on Drugs" - Johann Hari

• It so obvious I find it embarrassing to have to point it out: governance ought to be evidence-based. Alas, policymakers are notoriously immune to the facts, especially so on issues people are prone to go into moral panic about. The evidence with regards to drugs is overwhelming and clear: prohibition causes far more harm than good. Deal with it like alcoholism: decriminalize and treat it like a public health issue.
• See also: a piece in this week's Economist on how drugs are becoming 'virtually legal' due to laws not being enforced.

"How did I get Here?"

• Wonderful post over at Science, Reason and Critical Thinking tracing various contingent links between events, books and so on that led him to where he is now. Cue a cliche about the butterfly effect.
  

"Cell Size and Scale"

• Awesome little interactive on the Learn.Genetics site showing the size of various biological parts and organisma, ranging in scale from a rice grain to a carbon atom. It reminds me of that awesome video I posted a while back on the size of the planets compared to the Sun, and the Sun compared to other stars.
  

Adaptations for the visual assessment of formadibility: Part II

In Part I of this series, I summarized the experiments and findings of Aaron Sell and colleagues' paper "Human adaptations for the visual assessment of strength and fighting ability from the body and face". In Part II, I evaluate their claims.

The evidence Sell et. al. present seems compelling with regards to proposition (i): adults appear to be able to make remarkably accurate estimates of upper-body strength from even degraded cues such as static images of faces. As I noted in Part I, however, the truth of propositions (ii) (that this ability is an adaptation) and (iii) (that upper-body strength determines formidability) are more doubtful. I will assess the evidence for each of these claims, starting with the latter.