An Ugly Little Fact

 
The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

attributed to Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895)A group of scientists from Italy and Switzerland have reported that neutrinos can travel a bit faster than the speed of light [Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam]. If true, it will change our understanding of general relativity.

So how do the knowledgeable scientists deal with this ugly little fact"? Are they ready to abandon general relativity? No, they aren't. The typical response is skepticism combined with a "wait and see" attitude while the result is confirmed. Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles has a nice analysis of the experiment: Faster Than a Speeding Photon: "Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam". Chad concludes with,

So, if you had money to bet on it, bet that this result is wrong. But these guys aren't complete chumps, and if something is wrong with their experiment, it's something pretty subtle, because they've checked all the obvious problem areas carefully.

Victor Stenger expresses similar skepticism in an article published on Huff Post [No Cause to Dispute Einstein].

As someone who worked in neutrino physics for thirty years before retiring from research in 2000, I should be more excited than most by the report from CERN that neutrinos have been observed moving faster than light. And I am. The experiment looks very well done and the scientists involved are saying all the right things -- that their result is very preliminary and must be independently replicated before accepting it as scientific fact. If the observation is confirmed, it may be the most important discovery in science in the last 100 years.

However, a big fly in the ointment is the supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which sits just outside our galaxy 168,000 light-years from Earth. It was first seen by the naked eye on February 24, 1987. Three hours before the visible light reached Earth, a handful of neutrinos were detected in three independent underground detectors. If the CERN result is correct, they should have arrived in 1982. So, if I were a wagering man, I would bet the effect will go away because of some systematic error no one has yet been able to think of.

These responses are typical. Instead of immediately rewriting the textbooks in light of a new discovery, scientists initially express skepticism of results that conflict with well-established models. They do this because history has convinced them that most of those discoveries will never be confirmed and the standard model remains intact. [See alos Sean Carroll: Can Neutrinos Kill Their Own Grandfathers?]

Thomas Huxley was wrong. That's not how science works.

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Scientists and Poets

 
Scientists and poets are very different. Yes, it's true that some scientists are poets but when it comes to real scientific debates poetry is a poor excuse for science.

Unless, of course, you're an evolutionary psychologist. Evolutionary psychologists seem to be quite incapable of recognizing real scientific problems with their just-so stories. Instead, they fall back on a tactic that's much more common in modern humanities departments. They attack presumed motives and misconceptions.¹

Jesse Marczyk of Pop Psychology is a defender of evolutionary psychology. He posted a poem on the thread: Boobies, Blue-footed And Otherwise. Instead of actually dealing with the science behind the study he assumes that all criticism of evolutionary psychology comes from people who don't understand the difference between "is" and "ought" and who don't understand that genes can influence behavior.

Unfortunately, this sort of response is all too typical of the mindset of evolutionary psychologists. Isn't there a single evolutionary psychologist who can behave like a scientist instead of like Rudyard Kipling?

When silly critics of evolutionary psych
Tell the world these studies are like
Excuses for misogyny
And evil behavior apology
Threatening to bring back Third Reich,

Those critics will proclaim,
“Those who rape and maim
Will turn to our field
For a convenient shield
In order to avoid any blame”

When the topic under discussion gets heated
The misunderstandings are always repeated
“Genes don’t determine behavior”
Is always their savior
Despite this point long being defeated

Their sense of self-satisfaction
Persists without any retraction,
Admission of fallibility,
Lack of civility,
Or awareness of any infraction

It would seem their moral outrage
Has left them biased and unable to gauge
Accurately the research they hope to dismiss
Leaving them only to curse and to hiss
In a manner unbefitting a sage.

These critiques are quite the bore,
and we’ve all heard this shit before.
We’re left only to shake our fist,
As they seem persist
Not unlike an academic cold sore.

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1. The term "post-modernism" is much abused but that's what I'm thinking

The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W

The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W by Stephen Jay Gould was first published as an essay in Natural History. It's reprinted in the anthology, The Lying Stones of the Marrakech. You can find it online here.

This is one of my all-time favorite Gould essays. The theme is genetic determinism and evolutionary psychology. The hook is a discussion of Charles Davenport's claim that some people have a wanderlust gene (W) that makes them undesirable as immigrants to the United States.

Of course, no one would now defend Davenport's extreme view of single genes determining nearly every complex human behavior. Most colleagues eventually rejected Davenport's theory; he lived into the 1940s, long past the early flush of Mendelian enthusiasm and well into the modern era of understanding that complex traits usually record the operation of many genes, each with a small and cumulative effect (not to mention a strong, and often predominant, influence from nongenetic environmental contexts of growth and expression). A single gene for anger, conviviality, contemplation, or wanderlust now seems as absurd as a claim that one assassin's bullet, and nothing else, caused World War I, or that Darwin discovered evolution all by himself, and we would still be creationists if he had never been born.

Nonetheless, in our modern age of renewed propensity for genetic explanations (a valid and genuine enthusiasm when properly pursued), Davenport's general style of error resurfaces on an almost daily basis, albeit in much more subtle form, but with all the vigor of his putative old gene - yes, he did propose one - for stubbornly persistent behavior.

We are not questioning whether genes influence behavior; of course they do. We are not arguing that genetic explanations should be resisted because they have negative political, social, or ethical connotations - a charge that must be rejected for two primary reasons. First, nature's facts stand neutral before our ethical usages. We have, to be sure, often made dubious, even tragic, decisions based on false genetic claims. But, in other contexts, valid arguments about the innate and hereditary basis of human attributes can be profoundly liberating.

Consider only the burden lifted from loving parents who raise beautiful and promising children for twenty years and then "lose" them to the growing ravages of schizophrenia - almost surely a genetically based disease of the mind, just as many congenital diseases of bodily organs also appear in the third decade of life, or even later. Generations of psychologists had subtly blamed parents for unintentionally inducing such a condition, then viewed as entirely environmental in origin. What could be more cruel than a false weight of blame added to such an ultimate tragedy? Second, we will never get very far, either in our moral deliberations or our scientific inquiries, if we disregard genuine facts because we dislike their implications. In the most obvious case, I cannot think of a more unpleasant fact than the inevitable physical death of each human body, but a society built on the premise that King Prospero will reign in his personal flesh forever will not flourish for long.

Take this lesson to heart. You should never oppose a valid evolutionary argument just because you don't like the ethical implications.

On the other hand, you should rigorously oppose silly evolutionary arguments no matter what the ethical implications.

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Boobies and Evolutionary Psychologists

 

Robert Kurzban is a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes for a blog called Evolutionary Psychology. It is associated with an "open-access peer-reviewed journal" of the same name. Kurzban's article is about me: Boobies, Blue-footed And Otherwise.

As you might imagine, Robert Kurzban is heavily into evolutionary psychology. Here's what he says on his website.

Research, Philosophy, and Motto. Evolution gave rise to mechanisms designed to solve the bewildering array of problems that humans faced, from problems of survival to navigating the intricate strategic dynamics of the social world. Was there an adaptive problem faced by our ancestors for a substantial period of human history? If so, then, yeah, there's an adaptation for that.

Research in the lab is currently being conducted on morality, cooperation, friendship, mate choice, supernatural beliefs, modularity, self-control, and other topics.

Robert Kurzban was upset by my critique of science journalism and evolutionary psychology [Evolutionary Psychology Crap in New Scientist]. You might recall that my criticism is based on many common features of evolutionary psychology but the most important are the unwarranted assumptions that: (1) a particular specific behavior has a strong genetic component. (2) that the behavior is adaptive, and (3) that we know how our ancestors behaved.

The particular example I discussed is domestic violence and whether there has been selection in the past for alleles promoting violent behavior of men toward their wives. I discussed this in terms of the possible genetics of violence-toward-women in order to make the point that even if there was such an allele, it's adaptive value is highly questionable.

Robert Kurzban got a real bee in his bonnet over this comparison. He claims that the violence-toward-women that was adaptive was restricted to special circumstances. According to him, it's not just general violence toward women that was being selected it was violence only under special circumstances. In other words, the specific allele that Kurzban is proposing is one that cause males to only attack their mates some of the time—like when they suspect infidelity. That's correct, that's what the paper discusses even though the distinction isn't clear in the article in New Scientist.

Like it makes a difference. All that Kurzban is doing is making the genetics and the evolution more difficult by restricting the behavior to special circumstances. What he is saying is that there is an allele (or a combination of alleles) that makes men respect women most of the time but, under special circumstances, they attack their mates violently. Since these special circumstances are, presumably, rare, it becomes even more difficult to imagine what kinds of genes/alleles might be involved and how such alleles could become fixed in the population. (Especially if most males never encountered those special circumstances.)¹

This is supposed to make evolutionary psychology much more acceptable?

Here's what Kurzban says,

Now suppose our hypothetical author said that because this trait, predicted to occur only in certain circumstances was not, in fact, seen all the time, then,well, there is something “seriously wrong” with the field from which the paper is drawn.

Let me try and be clear about what I said using Kurzban's terminology. What he is saying is that violent behavior toward women under certain circumstances was adaptive in our ancient ancestors. Therefore the alleles (or combination of alleles) for this behavior became fixed in the population. Therefore all modern men have this genetic tendency to act violently toward women under particular circumstances.

Most modern men do not act violently toward women under those particular circumstances even though they presumably carry the adaptive allele (or combination of alleles). It's reasonable to ask how such a behavior could be possibly adaptive enough to have been fixed in the population. It hard enough to believe this just-so story but it becomes even harder if the penetrance of the genotype is low.

Robert Kurzban seems to think that my simplified version was a serious mistake that calls into question the critique of evolutionary psychology. I think that his scenario does not rescue the field—in fact it makes it look even more ridiculous.

Kurzan also tries another defense of evolutionary psychology.

Now, finally, because the topic at hand is something with moral overtones, let’s say the author punctuated the critique with a pious remark about how siblicide is bad, bad, bad, and that the boobies who engage in it are “assholes,” and added that, hey, we can all overcome our bad, bad traits.

What kind of person would thoroughly botch an argument about a paper, condemn an entire discipline on the basis of the incorrect analysis, and then brandish their moralistic piety by condemning the behavior in question? I don’t know…some kind of Moran?

I know damn well that there's a difference between genetics/evolution and ethical behavior and anyone who reads my blog knows this. We've discussed the naturalistic fallacy and the is-ought problem many times on this blog and I've said repeatedly that I'm a big fan of Gould's position on those issues. [See The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W.]

What pisses me off is the way evolutionary psychologists turn those arguments upside down. They postulate—often without any scientific evidence—that bad behavior has a strong genetic component and that such behavior was beneficial in our ancestors. According to them, we are stuck with these alleles today even though we don't like the consequences. We all understand that possibility.

Just because it's a possibility doesn't mean it's correct. According to many evolutionary psychologists, anyone who criticizes the science must be doing so because they don't like the behavior and not because the science is bad.

It's a convenient way to avoid dealing with the real problems in evolutionary psychology.

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1. Wouldn't it be nice if evolutionary psychologists could actually do some research to establish the existence of these amazing alleles and show where they map in the human genome? Heck, I'd settle for just a decent speculation on what kinds of alleles could possibly be involved.

Take this particular case as an example. There must have been a combination of alleles in our ancestors that caused men to be nice to their wives all the time. Then, 50,000 years ago, a mutation (or several mutations) arose that caused men to start beating their wives under special circumstances but to be nice to them most of the time. We have 20,000 genes. Which ones control that kind of behavior?

And if all those subtle behaviors were so strongly adaptive then how come evolution didn't fix some more serious problems like impacted wisdom teeth, hernias, susceptibility to breast cancer, and stupidity?

Steve Watson on the Sandwalk

 

Larry Moran
PZ Myers
John Wilkins
Ryan Gregory
The God Delusion
Cody
John Hawks
Michael Barton
Seanna Watson

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Seanna Watson on the Sandwalk

 

Larry Moran
PZ Myers
John Wilkins
Ryan Gregory
The God Delusion
Cody
John Hawks
Michael Barton

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«Studi di Egittologia e di Papirologia» 8 (2011)

Nuova Pubblicazione del Centro di Studi Papirologici dell’Università del Salento, Lecce.

«Studi di Egittologia e di Papirologia» 8 (2011), Fabrizio Serra Editore, Pisa-Roma 2011, pp. 118.

Direttore: Mario Capasso.

SOMMARIO

FRANCESCA ANGIÒ, Il Nuovo Posidippo (2010)

FRANCESCO CASTELLANI, I papiri e gli ostraka meroitici: un survey.

TRISTANO GARGIULO, Papiri e lirici Greci

SIMONE MUSSO-SIMONE PETACCHI, Alcuni ushabti della collezione egizia dell’Accademia dei Concordi di Rovigo

ENZO PUGLIA, Potamone nell’antologia gnomologica di PSI xv 1476. Chi era costui?

PAOLO RADICIOTTI, Il particolarismo grafico nelle testimonianze papiracee: una nuova riflessione.

PAOLO RADICIOTTI, Interpretatio del Codice teodosiano in un papiro di Ginevra.

WOLFGANG WEGNER, Ein bislang unerkannter Beleg für eine Personalunion der Prophetenstellen der Tempel von Tebtynis und Akoris 

ISSN 1724-6156

ISSN ELETTRONICO 1824-7326

Distribuzione: Fabrizio Serra Editore