Boffoblog

Fact or Fiction

More evidence that rightwingers have no interest in science:

No doubt you have heard about Michael Crichton's latest novel, State of Fear, a pulp thriller which exposes global warming as a plot orchestrated by human-hating environmentalists.  He's been on this kick for awhile, such as in this talk two years ago at Cal Tech and then another a few months later at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.  (I won't dissect these speeches here, though they cry out for it; let's save that for the group discussion.)

He rests his credentials to speak authoritatively on matters related to environmental science on the fact that he's an MD and once lectured on anthropology at Cambridge, and provides footnotes and a bibliography to give his novel a sheen of authority in support of his belief that global warming is, well, fiction.  Of course, once he's pressed on his highly selective use of data to buttress his case and to defend his choice not to engage the scientific community directly, he retreats to say that he is not a climate scientist but a novelist, as he did in this interview on Talk of the Nation.  Apparently he can't make up his mind what he is.

The capper is that Senator James Inhofe, in a speech on the floor of the World's Greatest Deliberative Body, said that he was so taken with the arguments of the book, in which the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF) sets off natural disasters which it can blame on global warming, that he recommended all his colleagues buy a copy and take it to heart.  Showing his all-too-familiar thin grasp on reality, Inhofe says:

Dr. Crichton, a medical doctor and scientist, very cleverly weaves a compelling presentation of the scientific facts of climate change-with ample footnotes and documentation throughout-into a gripping plot. From what I can gather, Dr. Crichton's book is designed to bring some sanity to the global warming debate.
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Throughout the book, "fictional" environmental organizations are more focused on raising money, principally by scaring potential contributors with bogus scientific claims and predictions of a global apocalypse, than with "saving the environment." Here we have, as the saying goes, art imitating life.

Perhaps Sen. Inhofe, defender of torture and American patriot, would like to recommend these other Crichton novels to his colleagues as well:

• Rising Sun, which shows that evil and inscrutable Japanese industrialists are about to take over the country
• Jurassic Park, in which dinosaurs walk (and sometimes fly) on earth still
• Disclosure, in which sexual harassment is a fabrication by spurned women
• Sphere, in which an alien ship on the bottom of the ocean tells us more than we'd like to know about ourselves

Of course, all Inhofe and the rest of us need to know about Crichton's commitment to science comes from his memoir Travels, in which he equates psychics and exorcists and other paranormal hucksters with scientists.  But when you're a pulp novelist, or a rightwing senator from Oklahoma, that's all the same anyway.

Technology, Choice and Rights

The Washington Post had a story yesterday on technology to screen embryos for their sex, permitting parents to choose whether to have a daughter or a son.

The technology discussed in the story is not abortion because it is an extension of the in vitro fertilization process where the embryos are tested for genetic diseases, only here the "disease" is whether the child would have the wrong sex organs.  As such, it connects with some of the same ethical questions as with sex-selective abortion.

Let's hear from a doctor promoting the technology:

"These are grown-up people expressing their reproductive choices. We cherish that in the United States," said Jeffrey Steinberg, director of the Fertility Institutes, which offers the service at clinics in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. "These people are really happy when they get what they want. These are heartwarming stories."

Dare we ask how the parents would react if their child was of the "wrong" sex?  Oh, here's what happens:

"If you ask couples coming in what they will do if they get the wrong sex, these couples say very frankly they will terminate the pregnancy," said Mark V. Sauer, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology at Columbia University. "I don't want to be a party to that."

At this point arguments for unfettered choice with regards to abortion confront the realities in India, China and some other places where female fetuses are systematically aborted at a higher rate than male fetuses.

Newsweek ran a story on this at the start of the year, but there is research on the topic going back more than a decade.  Here is a paper published in 1994 in an edited volume by the Harvard School for Public Health.  Raw figures on birth rates by sex do not tell the whole story, however. This paper released by Singapore's Ministry of Health shows in startlingly clear detail that in China and South Korea, the more children a family has, the less likely a girl will be born by a wide margin.

But using these data to make a pro-life case misses the point.  It is the fact that girls and women have such low value for families that many there make the choice to abort female fetuses.  The solution, in other words, is not to ban abortion.  Without attacking the underlying cultural, social and economic causes leading to such attitudes, even if a ban stopped abortion (unlikely) in many cases girls would still have a higher risk of infanticide as well as poor health and early death due to maltreatment.  The problem isn't abortion itself, but the cultural context in which the choice is provided.

Using in vitro fertilization to make sex choices in this country takes it out of the abortion debate (except for the most radically pro-life) but does not resolve these questions of value placed on boys and girls.  Moreover, while in this country the selection may not obviously benefit one sex over the other, as the Post story claims (though I'd like to see more systematic evidence), it does not resolve potentially uncomfortable personal and social justifications why one gender would be favored over another in any given birth.

The arguments for the kind of choice contemplated here ring hollow to me.  Perhaps there is a good argument for sex selection, but I haven't heard it.  Here are the ones put forward in the article:

• A family has had enough children of one sex and wants to have a child of the other sex
• For parents to plan "the birth order of their children" -- huh?
• Just because.

My concern isn't so much that down the road we'll turn into a Gattaca-like society.  That level of genetic planning is, oh, two or three years away at least.

Perhaps it's because I have one brother and one sister without my parents really trying (as far as I know), but I just don't get why a parent would or should care, let alone spend the thousands of dollars in wish fulfillment.

Providing the capability to select "optimal" embryos, including sex, gives us the chance to satisfy our hubris.  Such choices overestimate the extent to which genetic characteristics predict outcome, not just in underestimating the role of nurture over nature but also in the complex ways the two interact.  (For that matter, wouldn't it be interesting if a family carefully selected the sex of their new baby, only to find out later that their child is transgendered?  How exactly would they react?  How should they react?)

What's the solution, ban the technology?  I find the claim that there is a "right" to make sex selections as dubious as the justifications for doing so.  At the same time, a ban doesn't seem practical since the same techniques are used to screen for serious genetic diseases.  It would be difficult to enforce, if at all.  At a minimum, however, it ought to mean genetic counseling for the parents, and some deep reflection as a society about sex, gender and our children.

Is there a bio-ethicist in the house?

The Big Thaw

For those of us just getting used to winter again -- where I am, the low was in the single digits last night -- it might be odd to think that permafrost would be missed.  This is the soil that, in the colder climes, never thaws.

Well, almost never.  Pacific Views has an excellent post outlining the problem.  It was predicted that one of the costs of global warming would be the permafrost.  What those of us in the Lower 48 forget is that thawed permafrost becomes marshy wetlands.  The result?  Inuit villages previously built on stable ground are now sinking, destroyed.

That's not the only reason they're angry.  The always-reliable Samuel Taylor Coleridge Foundation tells us that the Inuits are framing the challenges they face, which also include threats to fishing and hunting, as a human rights issue since it threatens the very bases of their culture.  The NY Times story STCF cites indicates that it's a strategy that might have legs.

It is not really true that Eskimos (a dubious term that includes Inuits) have 60 names for snow; it turns out, modifiers like adjectives are attached as suffixes, and so the idea of a "word" is not directly analogous to English.  But one thing's for sure: Now they have at least 60 words for pissed off.

Lying Liars: A Followup

In my earlier post on the study which reports detecting lying using functional MRIs, I asserted that there is far more media coverage of it than earlier studies, even though it appears to be only an incremental improvement at best over previous ones (and for which there are still open questions about methodology).  But I had made that assertion based only on a vague notion that while I remembered reading stories in the past on the subject, I did not know when or how many.

So I decided to do a little Lexis-Nexis search.  I will not claim that it was thorough -- the search was of major newspapers over the last two years with the words "brain," "lying" and "MRI" in the full text.  Naturally, there were quite a few false positives, but only three stories on point: Financial Times, May 28 of this year; USA Today, November 5 of last year; and Boston Globe, May 1 of last year.  None seemed obviously connected to the release of a particular study.

This confirms my hasty assertion, but also raises another topic.  The first two stories emphasized the investment made by the CIA and FBI in developing a foolproof lie detection method, an angle mentioned very little in the current spate of articles.  I am curious whether such support was behind the new Temple study.

I have no great objection to the role of intelligence agencies developing the technology provided it is accurate; it is also to be hoped that it is in their interest to ensure that such technology is accurate.  However, it also ought to be available to non-intelligence agencies and it ought to be publicly vetted.

There is a great leap from saying one can predict at conventional levels of significance whether the subject in an experimental setting is lying, and saying that it is A) of sufficient reliability B) in the real world to drive decisions about witnesses in legal settings, about employees in firms, and anywhere else lie detection might be used.  In other words, when questions of civil liberties are relevant, I will not be comfortable if simply at 95 or 99% confidence we can identify differences between liars and nonliars.

Promising technology, but one fraught with potential dangers as well if used prematurely.

Lying Liars and the People Who Study Them

News reports yesterday and today tout a study that suggests one can learn whether a subject is lying by using a functional MRI to scan their brain while the person is testifying.  According to the study led by Dr. Scott Faro of Temple, seven "deception areas" of the brain were identified.

Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy quotes a news account which seemed to reveal a fundamental design flaw in the experiment.  The key passage in the Reuters story is:

Faro and colleagues tested 10 volunteers. Six of them were asked to shoot a toy gun and then lie and say they didn't do it. Three others who watched told the truth about what happened. One volunteer dropped out of the study.

As even Lindgren's high school-age daughter identified, there are two variables when there should be only one -- whether one is shooting the gun, and whether one is lying about the gun being shot.  One would expect that the activity of shooting a gun would have an effect on the activation of brain centers and not just the lying about it.

Curious, I decided to see whether the study really was this poorly designed.  What I noticed, however, is how poorly it was reported.  Some stories said there were ten volunteers, other stories said eleven.  Some, clearly cribbing off this Reuters story, described the three who watched, while others said simply that six were told to lie about firing the gun and the others were told to tell the truth, eliding what those others were doing in the experiment.

A Daily Bulletin from the RSNA conference (hey, why doesn't APSA release Daily Bulletins?) reveals a crucial level of detail:

The research group used 11 volunteers and asked six to shoot a toy gun with blank bullets. Five other participants did not shoot the gun.

In two experiments, both shooters and non-shooters were asked to alternately lie and tell the truth about their participation. Scientists then examined the individuals with fMRI, while simultaneously administering a polygraph exam.

This sets my mind more at ease, because with two rounds of experiments and switching roles presumably they were careful enough to distinguish the act of lying from the act of shooting.   I say this, of course, without having seen how they performed their tests, which were not included in the press release, naturally.

This is a line of research going back several years.  Here is a July press release from the American Psychological Association on one study which involved leaving money on a table rather than firing a gun.  A study from two years ago had identified four deception centers in the brain, though this research sounds like it had a needlessly complex research design.  I have not read any of these papers yet and I am not a specialist in this field, but it does appear to be an active line of research.

Which leads to a question: Why is this, possibly flawed, Temple study getting so much play in the media?  One possibility is that the RSNA and/or Temple Medical School have much more aggressive public relations officers than the other institutions where the research has been conducted.  Another is that it took the presence of (toy) guns in the study, rather than money on the table, to get the attention of reporters.  In any case, rather than a bold shot out of the blue as the reports imply (no pun intended), this is an incremental contribution to an ongoing line of work.  As so much of scholarship is.

Nuclear Options

The Samuel Taylor Coleridge Foundation, a very fine blog indeed, has had continuing coverage of the politics of global warming, and today has an extended treatment that is well worth a look.  In an earlier post, STCF declares support for nuclear energy as a relatively clean energy solution.  I have to say that until recently I was very skeptical that would be the case, especially given the political and legal wrangling over the Yucca Mountain waste deposit site.

What I've read recently about research in China into a much cleaner version gives me some hope.  An article in Wired gives a rundown.  It is less clear whether U.S. energy producers are willing to take this leap.  What's that you say, neoclassical economists?  A firm would make the switch as long as the profit margins were higher and the startup costs were sufficiently low?  Well, this technology is cheap, has been around for decades, is familiar to many in the U.S. nuclear industry and in fact was invented in this country, but they have chosen not to develop it to this point.  Domestic energy producers may need a kickstart, but I don't see one coming from this oil-drunk administraion.