Notorious Paedophile Reads Neuroskeptic

There's been controversy in the UK over an article published in the Guardian that's regarded as being pro-child abuse.

In particular, the newspaper has taken flak for quoting Tom O'Carroll, a self-confessed paedophile and advocate for the right of people to be one. Amongst other things he's written a book about Michael Jackson. At least this week, until the next one comes along, he is Britain's most notorious paedophile.

Now oddly enough, I recently had an encounter with O'Carroll, although I didn't know who he was at the time. Here's the tale...

A few weeks ago, I got an out-of-the-blue email from a Neuroskeptic reader (as happens often), from someone saying he'd tried to leave a comment on this post but it was rejected for being too long.

O'Carroll (for it was he) wanted to know whether I agreed with his reservations about some research on "Cerebral white matter deficiencies in pedophilic men", and specifically on this statement by the paper's author:

One must consider carefully whether the brain differences we detected [i.e. reduced white matter volume in particular areas] cause pedophilia or whether some aspect of being pedophilic caused the brain differences...

Although it is now known that certain brain structures respond to environmental stimulation, such as the motor cortex, there is no evidence that such stimulation causes any changes in the superior fronto-occipital fasciculus or right arcuate fasciculus (the brain regions in which pedophiles and nonpedophiles differ).

Moreover, the brain regions we identified are extremely large, and no previous research has ever found changes in such large regions of the brain. As an analogy, physical exercise will generally stimulate one’s muscle tissue to grow, but one would not grow an extra arm; neurological changes occur only in a very specific manner.

O'Carroll thought that this is a misleading analogy, because the brain could be plastic in ways we don't yet understand. I agreed. We just don't know enough about the brain, yet, to say that the observed white matter changes can't possibly be responses to experiences.

Several recent studies found that experience and learning can change adult human white matter structure. The changes observed were fairly small, but then these studies were fairly short, so they don't define the upper limit of what's possible over time.

These results are not without critics of their own, and I'm on the fence about whether white matter is plastic at all, but my point is, it's an open question. So comparing the idea of white matter plasticity to 'growing an extra arm' is overstatement - and it would be, whether the topic was paedophilia or anything else.

Now, as I said, I hadn't heard of Tom O'Carroll at the time, and I assumed he had a purely academic interest in the matter, as an piece of oversold neuroscience. But now, thanks to the Guardian drama, I realize that...

Britain's most notorious paedophile reads Neuroskeptic.

Hmm.

On that macabre note, I've often wondered whether James Eagan Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado Batman shooter, ever visited this blog. It's possible: he was a neuroscience undergraduate and later PhD student over the time Neuroskeptic's been going.

There have been 574 visits from Aurora, Colorado, where Holmes was doing his PhD, since 2008. I'll never know whether he was one of them, but the idea that he might have been is pretty creepy.

Mental Illness and Crime, Yet Again

As if on cue, a major study about the relationship (if any) between mental disorder and crime has appeared just when everyone's talking about that.

Although having said that, people seem to be interested in that issue most of the time nowadays, in the UK at any rate, with schizophrenia topping the list of supposedly scary syndromes.

So - should we be worried?

The new research, from Australian team Morgan et al, surveyed everyone born in the state of Western Australia between 1955 and 1969. About 1.6 million people lived there over the course of the study so this was a big project.

By linking local records of arrests over the period 1985 to 1996 to the database of psychiatric diagnosis, the researchers were able to examine disorder-crime correlations in the entire population - meaning that there was no possibility of bias.

So what happened? Here's some highlights:

• 32% of psychiatric patients had been arrested at least once. Unfortunately, it's not clear what the rate was in the general population, but that falls into the range of overall arrest rates in most countries.
• 11% of those arrested had a psychiatric diagnosis. This rose to 20% of arrests for violent offences.
• 0.8% of suspects had schizophrenia, rising to 1.7% for violent offences.
• The number of arrests in people without a disorder fell over the period 1985-1996, reflecting the well-known fact that people commit fewer crimes as they get older. However, in psychiatric patients, there was no change over time.
• For murder, 30% of suspects had a psychiatric history while 3% had a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
• Both substance abuse and personality disorders were associated with higher arrest rates than schizophrenia, but schizophrenia in turn was higher than depression, anxiety, and other miscellaneous disorders.
• Although only 1.7% of violent offenders had schizophrenia, those with the disorder were somewhat more likely to involve strangers, and to take place in public places, and less likely to target family and partners.

Overall this confirms that the great majority of crimes, including violent ones, are not committed by people with mental illness, and that your chance of getting 'murdered by a lunatic' is incredibly low. This strikes me as the only statistic that matters to most people.

There's a long-standing debate over whether people with various disorders are more likely to commit crimes than they would be if they didn't have one, the relative risk. While interesting, this is a purely academic question. What the rest of us need to know is the absolute risk, and this is low.

Morgan VA, Morgan F, Valuri G, Ferrante A, Castle D, and Jablensky A (2012). A whole-of-population study of the prevalence and patterns of criminal offending in people with schizophrenia and other mental illness. Psychological medicine, 1-12 PMID: 23234722

Are Porn Stars Happier?

Women who appear in porn are happier than other women, enjoy sex more - and have lots more of it.

So says a new paper with the pulls-no-punches title of Pornography Actresses: An Assessment of the Damaged Goods Hypothesis

Researchers James Griffith and colleagues sampled 177 American adult actresses, and an equal number of other women of the same age, gender and relationship status. The results were pretty clear: the actresses said they started having sex earlier; had far more partners with an average of 75 vs. 5 in their lifetime (and that's not including on camera).

They were a lot more likely to be bisexual (67% vs 7%!), enjoyed sex more, and reported slightly higher levels of sexual satisfaction, happiness and self-esteem.

On the other hand, they were more worried about STDs and took more drugs (50% had tried ecstasy, 40% cocaine and 27% methamphetamine.)

Finally - and the authors emphasize this - they were no more likely than other women to have suffered childhood sexual abuse. They're not 'damaged goods' as that horrible phrase has it.

So. Well. This study is clearly going to become a hot potato, or rather a political football in The Great Porn Debate, so let's take a calm look at it.

In any survey the fundamental question is - are the respondents representative examples? Or were the porn actresses who filled out the questionnaire atypically happy? Were the comparison women unusually miserable?

We really have no way of knowing. The controls were recruited from a university and an airport, which is pretty sensible although it might introduce some bias. The actresses came via adverts placed in an L.A. clinic specifically for the adult movie industry, the now-defunct AIMHF. That seems like a selective sample - but the clinic reportedly catered to most, if not all, stars in LA because all performers had to get monthly HIV tests there.

Ultimately, though, we don't know how representative they were.

Next up, it was all self-report. So the reports might have been wrong. However, that's a feature of all survey studies, especially those about such things as happiness. It's hard to see a way around this. It's also not clear what bias it would introduce into the results. It could be that the porn actresses were motivated to exaggerate their happiness in a bid to defend their industry, which I suspect will be a common criticism - but that assumes they're happy enough with it to want to defend it, so it's somewhat circular.

Finally, and most importantly in my view, L.A. porn stars are not your average pornstars. The American professional adult movie industry is the biggest, most regulated, and most 'mainstream' in the world. Sadly elsewhere the degree of exploitation, coercion, poverty and abuse among people who end up in porn is a lot higher.

Basically, I can't see anything obviously wrong with this study as far as it goes, but all it shows is that American porn actresses are in fairly good shape. Most women in porn, however, are not American.

Griffith JD, Mitchell S, Hart CL, Adams LT, and Gu LL (2012). Pornography Actresses: An Assessment of the Damaged Goods Hypothesis. Journal of sex research PMID: 23167939

Beware Small Positive Studies

A Letter in the prestigious American Journal of Psychiatry offers a skeptical response to a paper published there recently.

The original article claimed amazing benefits of a safe and cheap brain stimulation technique in treating schizophrenia. But Dutch letter-writers Sommer et al aren't convinced.

It's a short piece and worth quoting:

We read with interest the article by Brunelin et al. in the July issue, which described the application of transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) in the treatment of both auditory hallucinations and negative symptoms simultaneously... An effect size of 1.58 was reported for refractory hallucinations, which is remarkably large when compared with the effect sizes of antipsychotic medication (0.4–0.6).

Clinical trials involving nonconvulsive brain stimulation in schizophrenia were first introduced in 1999. Initial effect sizes were very large while samples were small. Some years later, large negative studies were published. To date, 17 placebo controlled transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies on hallucinations have been published. The mean weighted effect size is now around 0.3. Yet, the negative correlation between effect size and year of publication suggests that over time, the mean effect size may become smaller.

When selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) were introduced for depression, effect sizes greater than 1.0 were reported, which created their legacy as a wonder drug. Over the course of 20 years, the mean effect size of SSRIs decreased to around 0.3. A similar trend was demonstrated for cognitive-behavioral therapy.
 
This trend likely results from publication bias. A remarkably high effect size suggests the discovery of a new wonder treatment. Studies with such findings are therefore easily published in high-impact journals. In contrast, studies of similar sample size with marginally or nonsignificant findings are less likely to be accepted for publication. Usually, after some years, negative studies with large sample sizes become available. This is when meta-analyses start to detect a decrease in efficacy.

In this view, the Brunelin et al. study is exemplary of an initial placebo-controlled study applying a new technique: it included a small sample, found remarkably large effects, and is published in a high-impact journal.
 
We sincerely hope that tDCS is the exception to the rule— as a cheap, safe, and highly effective method to treat both refractory hallucinations and negative symptoms is most welcome. However, given the previous observations for other new treatments, it is realistic to expect that 10 years from now the mean weighted effect size of tDCS will be around 0.3.

Sommer et al are talking about the famous 'decline effect', in which the size of an effect mysteriously shrinks the more people study it, which I've written about before.

I suspect the authors are right in this case; playing science devil's advocate though, it's unfair and unscientific to assume that a new treatment that looks promising will eventually turn out to be mediocre, just because that's happened to other treatments before.

After all, some things look awesome because they are - penicillin, for example, was heralded as a new wonder drug... and it was.

I very much doubt that tDCS is the new penicillin. But I do think that this kind of speculation is ultimately not very useful. Rather than bemoaning the errors of the past and wondering whether they'll be repeated, we should reform science to make sure they don't.

Sommer IE, Aleman A, Slotema CM, and Schutter DJ (2012). Transcranial stimulation for psychosis: the relationship between effect size and published findings. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 169 (11) PMID: 23128925

The Changing Face of British Suicide

Which jobs are at the highest risk of suicide?

In a fascinating new study, British researchers Roberts, Jaremin and Lloyd show dramatic changes over time. 30 years ago, the worst occupations for suicide were the medical professions. Now, it's blue-collar workers, with coal miners topping the list.

They used official records of UK suicides, comparing 1979-1983 and 2000-2005. Here's the key data (their graphs, my colours)

In the 80s, veterinarians were the most suicidal of all jobs; by 2005, they'd dropped off the Top 30 list entirely. Other healthcare professions, like pharmacists and dentists, likewise disappeared after being high on the rankings.

On the other hand, the most dramatic rise in suicide was among coal miners. They went from #29 to #1, and their rates rose about fourfold. This is not that surprising considering what happened to British coal mining during the 80s...

In general the Top 30 in the 1980s had plenty of white collar workers like engineers, chemical scientists and photographers.

Twenty years later, all of the collars had turned blue. Coal miners were joined by labourers, builders, gardeners, butchers, and others. Strikingly there are no 'professionals' on the modern list, with the interesting exception of musicians and artists (a reflection of the mental illness-creativity link?)

What's more, the correlation between socioeconomic status and suicide rates increased sharply over time. Suicide is now much more of a class issue than it was in the past.

The only constant in this sad picture was the sea: merchant sailors had the #2 spot in 1980, and they kept it in 2005, with the rates almost unchanged. However, this should be taken with a pinch of salt, because the way British suicides at sea are recorded is a bit unusual.

Roberts SE, Jaremin B, and Lloyd K (2012). High-risk occupations for suicide. Psychological medicine, 1-10 PMID: 23098158

Men and Women: From Earth, Not Mars & Venus?

Another day, another debate over how different men and women are, psychologically speaking. Bobbi Carothers and Harry Reis argue that Men and Women Are From Earth.

Their approach is rather interesting.

We sought to empirically determine whether standard gender differences are better conceived as taxonic or dimensional. Although men and women may differ on average in myriad ways, these differences may be dimensional, reflecting different amounts of a given attribute assessed along a single dimension, or qualitative, sorted into fundamentally distinct categories... this difference has considerable importance for understanding the fundamental nature of gender differences.

Using lots of previously published data (13,000 people) and subjecting it to three different methods of statistical "taxometric analysis", they claim that on most psychological measures, there's no evidence that the two sexes are qualitatively different. This is on things like sexual attitudes, personality, and interest in science according to self-report questionnaires.

They give the following hypothetical example to illustrate the idea (my picture based on theirs)

Men are taller than women and also have shorter hair. If you plot a scatterplot of height vs hair length including both genders, you find a negative correlation. However, there is no such correlation within each gender. So gender is a taxon - in this case. There is something qualitatively different between men and women here.

Their argument is that psychological differences between the genders are, in most cases, not because "male" and "female" are two distinct taxons.

So what? I previously covered a paper called The Distance Between Mars and Venus claiming that the difference between men and women on average are larger than previously thought, if you look at all the differences taken together. That's actually consistent with what Carothers and Reis are saying, I think, because it assumes that each of the differences is dimensional and quantitative.

In other words, maybe sexes differ only by a matter of degree, albeit by a larger degree than you'd think at first glance.

All of this leaves open the question of why they differ on average, though. According to yet another study just out, the size of the gap is correlated with the amount of gender inequality in different countries. Women from places where they have much lower incomes, career prospects, etc. compared to men, also endorse more 'feminine' traits.

Personally I consider the question of gender differences largely open because I'm skeptical of self-report questionnaire measures in psychology; objective measures of actual behaviour, stuff like crime statistics, seems to me more interesting.

The fact that the great majority of sex offenders are male, for example, must mean something; I'm not sure what, but I don't think questionnaires will help us find out...

Carothers, B., and Reis, H. (2012). Men and Women Are From Earth: Examining the Latent Structure of Gender. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0030437

The Two Problems With Science

There's lots of concern at the moment over mistakes, misconduct and misbehaviour in science.

This concern is a good thing. There are serious, systemic problems with modern science as I and many others have long argued.

However, I worry that much of the recent discussion has failed to distinguish between two fundamentally distinct problems. On the one hand, we have outright fraud - i.e. making up data, or otherwise lying, breaking the basic rules of science.

On the other hand we have questionable practices such as: publication bias, p-value fishing, the File Drawer, sample size peeking, post-hoc storytelling, and all of the other dark arts that can lead to false positive science. These are permissible, even encouraged, by the current rules of doing and publishing science.

These two problems are similar in some ways - they're both "bad science", they both lead to failures to replicate, etc. - but in underlying essence they're very different, so much so that I'm not sure they can be usefully discussed in the same breath.

Fraud and questionable practices are different in terms of their harms. Fraud is a more serious act and it causes local harm, introducing major errors into the record. But in terms of its overall effects, I believe questionable practices are worse, as they systematically distort science: ensuring that, in some cases, it is difficult to publish anything but errors.

Fraud and questionable practices call for different solutions. Broadly speaking, fraudsters break the rules, so to stop them we need to enforce those rules, via deterrence, detection, and punishment - like with any criminal act. With questionable practices, it's the opposite: here the problem is the rules (or the lack of them), and the solution is to reform the system.

It's been suggested that fraud and questionable practices share a common cause in the "pressure to publish", the "publishing environment", the "culture" of modern science etc. But while this is a good explanation for questionable practices, I don't think this can explain fraud, any more than, say, the desire for money can explain theft.

Yes, thieves desire money, and yes they steal in order to get money, but everyone else wants money as well, yet most of us don't steal, so that's not an explanation. Frauds fake data to produce publications. But all scientists are under pressure to produce good publications and they always have been - which is why fraud is not new - what's changed recently is the criteria for a 'good' publication.

Now in retrospect, I blurred these distinctions somewhat with my own 9 Circles of Scientific Hell, in which I placed 6 questionable practices and 2 forms of misconduct on the same scale of "sinfulness". In fact there are two distinct hierarchies. In my defence though, that was a cartoon.

I think finance offers a great analogy here.

In finance, you have some people who break the rules. Bernie Madoff is the current poster boy for this. Such people harm others by outright criminal acts. But then we have the people who play by the rules, and still cause harm. The global financial crisis was in essence caused by all of the major American banks going all-in on a bet, and losing. Yet no-one broke the rules: the regulations allowed banks to gamble. The problem was not rule-breaking, but the rules (or lack thereof).

Here's the curious thing: the financial crisis did more harm than Madoff's scam, even though what Madoff did - theft by fraud - was more immoral than what the bankers did - gambling unwisely.

That's confusing to our ethical sense and our emotions (who should we feel more angry at? Who's 'worse'?) but it's really no surprise: precisely because what the banks did was above board, everyone did it so the damage was huge. If it had been illegal for banks to gamble all their money at once, individual banks might still have broken that rule, locally, but it's unlikely that the system would have been threatened.

Maybe you can see where I'm going with this: everyone following bad rules is often worse than individuals breaking good rules.

Science has its share of fraud. Hauser, Smeesters, Fujii - they broke good rules against such deceit. They are the Bernie Madoffs of science. But then there's 'questionable practices' like publication bias, p-value fishing, the File Drawer, and all the rest, which are allowed, but which are universally acknowledged to be bad for science. Scientists using these dark arts (and I don't know any who never do) may be the Lehman Brothers of science.

Militarization of Neuroscience?

US military tech hothouse DARPA have an exciting announcement:

Tag Team Threat-recognition Technology Incorporates Mind, Machine
DARPA links human brainwaves, improved sensors, cognitive algorithms to improve target detection...

In what is - to my knowledge - the first example of the direct militarization of neuroscience, DARPA have developed a system in which electrical responses in a human brain are an integral step.

A soldier watches a screen on which, via various cameras, possible battlefield "threats" are shown. The cameras are fancy, and fancy image-recognition algorithms prioritize images that resemble threats - stuff that looks a bit like a tank, an IEDs, etc. But that's just the set-up.

The neuroscience core is that rather than just having a guy watching this screen and pressing a button if he spots something, they have a guy wired up with EEG to record brain activity. The system registers a threat when a picture causes a P300 response.

Now, the P300 is an electrical wave triggered by stimuli that are somehow 'meaningful' to the individual person. If you ask someone to press a button whenever they see a red light, for example, and then show them various lights, red ones will elicit a P300.

Very clever. But it may be too clever for its own good.

We already have a system that can detect the P300. It's the brain. No, most of us don't think of it as in those terms - we think of it as "Oh!" or "WTF?" or "Button press time" - but that response is the P300 (or rather something that precedes it because the P300 takes 300 milliseconds to peak, but you can respond faster than that.)

So why the EEG?

You could program a computer to detect P300s in a guy's brain and set off an alarm. DARPA apparently have. But it would be easier and cheaper to just 'program' the guy's brain to detect the P300 and push an alarm button - by asking him to do that. The human brain is a supercomputer that's been in development for hundreds of millions of years and it's primary job is to detect threats and act on them as quickly as possibly. One day technology might be able to do better but I don't think we're there yet.

DARPA say:

In testing of the full CT2WS kit, the sensor and cognitive algorithms returned 810 false alarms per hour. When a human wearing the EEG cap was introduced, the number of false alarms dropped to only five per hour, out of a total of 2,304 target events per hour, and a 91% percent successful target recognition rate.

All that tells us is that having a human check the pics via EEG is better than having no human involved at all. That's fine, but would a human just checking the pics via a button, be even better? We're not told. Maybe DARPA ran those tests and it really does offer advantages, but off the top of my head I can't think of any, and it wouldn't be the first time that the allure of high-tech neuroscience has blinded smart people to the fact that there's an easier, less sexy solution.

Unless...

OK. This is going to make me sound like a conspiracy nut. But there's one scenario in which the P300 has a decided advantage: unlike a button press, it's involuntary. It would work even if the guy doesn't want to co-operate.

So suppose you've captured a terrorist and you want to know who his terrorist friends are or where they've put the bomb. But he's not talking and Samuel L Jackson is off sick. So you wire him up to this system and show him a bunch of pictures of all the possible suspects or targets on your database. His brain will respond with a P300 to the ones he recognizes.

That would probably work - sometimes - and the P300 is already being trialled in some legal contexts for just that purpose although it's not clear how reliable it is.

So it's just possible that this whole soldier-scanning-the-battlefield story is merely an elaborate front (and perhaps a useful source of crucial calibration data) for a device to allow the CIA to read minds. I warned you it would make me sound crazy. Quick! Pass the tinfoil hat...!

Naomi Wolf's "Vagina"

Naomi Wolf's "Vagina" is full of bad science about the brain - is an article I wrote for the New Statesman. It's about a new book which is... not very good.

I didn't come up with the title by the way, but I do rather like it.

See also the Neurocritic's take.

Is Poker A Game of Skill or Luck?

Success in poker is all about luck, according to researchers at the University of Bremen, Germany: Is Poker a Game of Skill or Chance? A Quasi-Experimental Study.

I'm not a gambling man, but I'll bet this is going to be a controversial study.

The authors recruited 300 poker players - half were defined as 'experts' and the rest were  'average'. Players sat at tables of 6, with 3 experts and 3 average per table, and played 60 hands of Texas Hold 'em. On some tables, there was a fixed limit, on others, no limit. The stakes were fairly small, with each player having just 10 euros to start with, but there were also prizes of up to 500 euros (over $600) for the overall winner.

The trick was that the deals were fixed, with some players getting better cards than others. This was to allow the researchers to measure the effects of luck; the players didn't know this was happening. There were 3 levels of luck, and each table had 2 players of each level: 1 expert and 1 average. Like this:

So what happened? Here's the key finding: the graph is for Fixed Limit but No Limit was much the same -

Luck, rather than skill, was key in determining final balance, with experts taking no more, on average, than novices. Experts did play differently, on various measures, and seemed better able to cope with bad luck, losing less; but they also won less when given good cards.

The authors conclude:

It can be concluded that chance clearly dominates skill; thus, poker should be classified as gambling

But how expert were these 'experts'? Players were defined as 'experts' if they scored above the median on a questionnaire which asked things like, "How often did you play poker on average per month within the past year?" and "How successful do you regard yourself in terms of poker?" That's obviously a pretty weak measure of expertise. It's entirely self-report, and measures subjective enthusiasm and confidence, rather than skill.

On the other hand though... if you're reading this and thinking "That's BS - but I really am an expert, I really am good at poker" - then you're the kind of person who'd have scored highly on that questionnaire.

Previous work on this question has given mixed results; Dedonno and Detterman argued that "Poker Is A Skill" and found that teaching students some basic strategies made them perform better. Fiedler and Wilcke, however, analyzed a large database of online poker games and found that, while playing about 1000 hands of poker did seem to lead to the development of skill, the majority of online players had much less experience than that, so were at the mercy of chance.

Maybe the 'experts' in this study had played less than 1000 hands?

Meyer G, von Meduna M, Brosowski T, and Hayer T (2012). Is Poker a Game of Skill or Chance? A Quasi-Experimental Study J Gambling Studies DOI: 10.1007/s10899-012-9327-8

Social Science and Language, Again

On Sunday I asked, Why Don't Social Scientists Want To Be Read? I accused much of social science of using unnecessarily complex jargon.

This post prompted many excellent comments - including responses on other blogs e.g. Andy Balmer and Graham Davey.

The most common argument against my post was, in essence: Every science has a specialized, technical vocabulary. You wouldn't criticize a neuroscience abstract for being inaccessible to a layperson, so it's unfair to expect that from sociology.

This is a good and convincing point. Yet I think that, on closer inspection, it relies on some rather major assumptions.

The natural sciences do have a 'specialized' vocabulary, but only because they deal with things that are of special interest. What is 'special' or 'technical' about the word forebrain (to borrow an example from Andy Balmer) is merely that only neuroscientists are interested in the object, forebrains. It's not part of the everyday English language, because it's not part of everyday life.

There's nothing inherently 'academic' about forebrain, in other words. Plenty of similar terms like 'forearm' and 'foreskin' are part of everyday English, not because they're somehow less precise or less formal, but just because they crop up more often.

Everyday English is inadequate for natural science because scientists study things outside everyday experience. But the major object of the social sciences is everyday human life. Social scientists are interested in things that everyone is interested in - why people think, feel and behave the way they do.

So if the social sciences have need of a technical vocabulary, in the same way as the natural sciences, this would imply is that our everyday language is fundamentally inadequate to understanding the everyday world - in other words, that it is just inadequate, period.

Everyday English has developed to allow people to talk to one another. And the main thing people talk about, is one another, i.e. about society. Like any other branch of science, the social sciences need a rich vocabulary to describe all of the things they study: but don't they already have one - English?

Maybe not. It may be that ordinary English can't express the truth about society. But if you take that seriously, that's a pretty radical claim, akin to saying that the great majority of people are in the dark about how the world works. It's much more radical than saying that chemistry or neuroscience needs special words.

To be clear, I'm not making the populist argument that "Social science is all rubbish - the average man in the street knows better than these eggheads!" The average person is wrong about all kinds of important things, but I suspect that they're sometimes in the right ballpark, as it were, and that their errors are not a matter of lacking the proper words.

The Coming Age of Fetal Genomics

It's 2020. A young woman and her partner have just found out that she's pregnant with her first child. and they're going to be parents.

They're overjoyed, of course. But they're also worried. They've seen the adverts warning parents-to-be about the risk of de novo mutations - genetic mistakes that occur inside sperm or egg cells, and affect the child. These mutations, the ads say, are much more common than previously believed and they can cause all kinds of problems: intellectual disabilities, autism, infertility, mental illness, heart malformations - pretty much anything.

The scariest part? Because these are new mutations, out of the blue, they can affect any family. A clear family history is no protection. They don't discriminate by race or lifestyle. It's just the luck of the draw - except that older parents are at much higher risk, especially older fathers. In the case of our couple, she's 28 and he's 32. Perfectly normal for this day and age - but very old in biological terms. Humans evolved to be grandparents by 32, not parents. "The stakes couldn't be higher. Why leave it to chance?"

So they don't. Instead, they buy a $100 test kit, they each provide a small blood sample and send it off to one of the companies offering fetal genome testing. At the testing lab, they can separate out the mother's DNA from that of the fetus, both of which are present in the mother's blood. By comparing the fetal genome to the mother's and father's, it's easy to spot de novo mutations. If a certain gene doesn't match either the mother or the father's sequence, it's mutated.

A few days later the results are back. There are several mismatches detected. Most are benign - they're not predicted to have any biological effects. But there's one, a deletion of a few thousand bases in a gene involved in brain development. This deletion is predicted to raise the risk of epilepsy and autism from 1% to 10% apiece.

The parents now have a decision to make. The mutation is a one off, it's not inherited. If they conceive again... roll the dice again... and it'll be gone. Do they terminate?

Like the adverts say, "Some people disagree with this, but we say there's only one person who really matters: your baby."

*

This is likely to become possible in the next few years.

A paper just published in Nature reports on the Non-invasive prenatal measurement of the fetal genome. The technique relies on the fact that the blood of a pregnant woman contains DNA: hers, obviously, but also that of the unborn child. This cell-free DNA can be extracted and genotyped.

This has been possible for a few years, but until now, only fairly crude genetic information could be detected. An extra chromosome, such as in Down syndrome, is pretty easy to spot. This technique is already used to diagnose Down's syndrome and a few other disorders prenatally.

But those diseases are just the low-hanging fruit at the tip of the iceberg, if you see what I mean. To gather the kind of detailed genomic information that could diagnose thousands of disorders is harder: the fetal and maternal genomes are mixed up, and the challenge is to tease them apart. But according to the Stanford geneticists behind the Nature paper, and other teams, it's now possible as early as the first trimester.

What makes the new method so revolutionary is that it is, as the title of the paper says, non-invasive. It's already possible to sequence a fetal genome, but it takes a surgical procedure involving inserting a needle into the womb, and a degree of risk. It's not something you can just sit down and do - but blood samples are. So cell-free DNA will make fetal genomics a personal choice, a commercial product.

The resolution's still not 100%, but inevitably, it will become cheaper, faster and more accurate as technology advances. This year we're expected to see the cost of reading a whole human genome falling below $1000. Fetal genomes will be more expensive, but not enormously so. In 5 or 10 years, it's likely to be affordable.

*

What will happen? I think there'll be demand for such services. Most parents won't do it, but enough people will that it will be a major issue. Just look at countries where boys are more valued than girls: a lot of sex-selective abortion happens. Today, it's limited to gender, because it's easier to determine a fetus's sex than its genome. In 5 or 10 years, they'll both be easy.

With demand will come companies to supply these services and, inevitably, advertizing. I doubt these adverts will be on TV, because there will be opposition to the whole idea and boycotts of broadcasters who run them. But we'll be getting spam emails about it. People will worry even over the harmless mutations: a variant won't need to be really associated with a disease, just believed to be, to make people panic.

Socially, it's likely to be divisive. The anti-abortion types will obviously not approve. But it will drive a wedge between those who support abortion but oppose "discriminatory" abortion against the disabled, and those who support the right to terminations 'for any reason, or none'.

Politically, there will be pressure to regulate this, but legally, it'll be tricky. I can't see how you'd prove that any given abortion is motivated by genetic concerns, so unless you ban abortion outright, that won't work. Banning fetal (or all) genomics except under medical supervision might be possible, but people could always go (or send a few drops of blood) abroad to get around that.

I'm not sure where I'll stand on this, but it looks very likely that we'll each have to make a decision in the coming years.

Fan HC, Gu W, Wang J, Blumenfeld YJ, El-Sayed YY, and Quake SR (2012). Non-invasive prenatal measurement of the fetal genome. Nature PMID: 22763444

The Racist Brain?

Is the human brain... a racist?

There are some worrying indications that it could be. After all, the cerebrum is largely composed of so-called "white" matter, and the only black area is a little 'ghetto' at the bottom called, shockingly, the substantia nigra...!

Seriously though. There's a paper just out in Nature Neuroscience from Kubota et al that looks at The Neuroscience Of Race. It's a fine review as far as it goes, but to me at least, it really shows up the limits of contemporary neuroscience.

We are told that

A network of interacting brain regions is important in the unintentional, implicit expression of racial attitudes and its control. On the basis of the overlap in the neural circuitry of race, emotion and decision-making, we speculate as to how this emerging research might inform how we recognize and respond to variations in race and its influence on unintended race-based attitudes and decisions.

So there have been studies investigating which bits of American's brains activate in response to looking at photos of black people vs. white people. It emerges that "a network of interacting brain regions" light up. But so what?

Sure, the brain reacts differently to seeing people of different races. Of course it does - it reacts differently to everything, so long as we can perceive a difference; that's how we perceive a difference. And of course race, a deeply emotive issue in American politics and culture, activates 'emotional' parts of the brain - that's how it's emotive.

The included studies all scanned Americans and (presumably) mostly college students. Now most American college students are not active racists, and indeed I'd imagine that their emotional brains are more likely to be worrying self-referentially about racism than about the actual race of the stimuli. No-one seems to have scanned card-carrying members of the KKK. Furthermore, "race" in these studies almost always means "blackness". What about Latinos, Asians?

So what have we learned?

I don't think we've learned much about race. "Race" after all is a confused mixture of emotions, attitudes and beliefs. These differ greatly from person to person, and even the same individual may experience conflicting feelings in different contexts. Kubota et al note this and say that it may explain the mixed findings (black faces activate the amygdala more than white in some studies, not in others) but I'd have said that in this case, only inconsistent results are credible.

What does it tell us about the brain? I'd say not much. The authors weave a neat little narrative - in response to seeing black faces, the amygdala and other emotional areas activate as a negative emotional response; the ACC then detects this racist response and sees that it's unacceptable, and the DLPFC then suppresses it like a parent hurriedly interrupting a young child who's making a faux pas.

But all the elements of this story - the automatic, emotional amygdala, the supervisory DLPFC - are borrowed from other neuroscience studies so at best the race literature confirms these theories but it doesn't even really do that, because there are many other possible interpretations.

I'd say that we need to know much more in terms of the 'basic' neuroscience of emotion, attitudes and beliefs because we can tackle the hornet's nest of race in the brain.

Kubota JT, Banaji MR, and Phelps EA (2012). The neuroscience of race. Nature neuroscience, 15 (7), 940-8 PMID: 22735516

Starkey vs. Penny - Transcript

The British Twittersphere has been enlivened today by the release of a video showing the 'heated' debate between historian David Starkey and journalist Laurie Penny during a discussion on the English national identity.

Some clips are available on YouTube, but the full video is behind a paywall, so I thought I'd write up the transcript for anyone who's interested.

Personally I think any attempt to define a national (or other) 'identity' can only undermine that identity, just as analyzing a joke renders it unfunny. Identities, like humour, stop making sense when you try to make sense of them; there is nothing rational about them, and to debate them rationally is impossible - this exchange is English in a way that no amount of sensible arguments could be.

Laurie Penny at podium.

LP: “But what’s interesting about the question what is Britishness, is precisely the fact that nobody seems to know. It’s gold for a columnist, it’s gold for any hack, and, you’ve seen 4 people on this panel are probably going to give completely different answers, anybody you ask in this audience is going to give a different answer.

If you ask David Cameron, it’s about tolerance and fairness and inviting French people to take advantage of our lenient tax system; if you ask a pupil at Wellington college, growing up in these lovely surroundings, they’ll tell you, probably about the excellent teaching here, but they’ll also tell you about grime and dubstep and whatever it is they’re listening to; if you ask me, and I’ve been recently been living in America for a while, so, I get asked this question quite a lot, and I bring up things like, the taste of fish and chips on Brighton Beach, and Dr Who, and drinking tea. That’s what it is for me.

If you ask somebody like my colleague Prof. Starkey, it’s playing xenophobia and racial prejudice for laughs, and if you ask people who organize conferences like this, it’s sitting by politely while people play racial prejudice and xenophobia for laughs and pretending that this is an acceptable part of contemporary debate…”

Video cuts – panel discussion

A Man: “We’re setting up a false dichotomy here between Britishness and Englishness; they’re not, at all…”

David Starkey: “There’s an absolute dichotomy. The two are completely different, there’s a historic English identity which goes way back before the concept of Britain. Also this notion that England or Britain as uniquely a nation of immigrants is preposterous - every European country is a blend, of course it is, but the great, there are two great differences. The first…”

Laurie Penny: “I believe you have a house in America, Mr Starkey?”

DS: “I have a house in America.”

LP: “I was wondering, where are you domiciled for tax purposes?”

DS: “I am domiciled here, and I pay full taxes, and can I just say…” (stands up to face audience) “as you have chosen to be personal and invidious, let me share a little story with you. One of the great things that is essential to Britishness is the sense of public duty, that you do things for nothing with organizations that can’t pay. Ms Penny, who has been advertising these great left-wing virtues, and I, were to due to debate for a very impoverished little society called the Thomas Paine Society, on the virtues of a republic on the one hand and a monarchy on the other. I…”

LP: (inaudible)

DS: “I was prepared to do it for free, she insisted on trying to charge such a large fee that the event had to be cancelled. Now I think that that is as mean and grasping as some runt comedian (audience applause), and I will not be lectured to by a jumped-up public schoolgirl like you; I came from the bottom, and I will not have it.”

(applause, laughter, jeers etc.)

(LP takes podium)

LP: “Excuse me, may I respond to that, I think I deserve a right of reply to that. I personally feel that asking to be paid…”

DS: “Did you or did you not do what I just said?”

LP: “I was going to respond to that, but if you…”

DS: “Why not do it straight away. Did you or did you not claim such a large fee that the event had to be cancelled?”

LP: “No, I didn’t, Mr Starkey.”

DS: “Well then, every member of the committee is lying and you, clearly, as usual, are telling the truth.”

LP: “No, this is not what was said to me. I…”

DS: “I have emails. That wonderful… method of tracking…”

Chairman: “Alright, alright, respond to it Laurie…”

LP: “No, actually I don’t think I’m gonna respond to it, one of the… the event was cancelled partly because they couldn’t find a speaker in time, because they were trying to fly me out and part of the reason that… the cost for that on top of my being asked to be paid for two days work, because I actually don’t earn very much…”

DS: “Pffffffffff!”

Chairman: “They had two pretty good speakers there already…”

DS: “No, she backed out because she wasn’t being paid.”

Chairman: “Anyway, we’re running out of time, but I wanna come back to Britishness vs. Englishness…”

LP: “I’m sorry, excuse me - I really don’t appreciate being stood on stage to be personally attacked and having a finger jabbed in my face.”

Video cuts

Chairman: “Laurie?”

LP: “I think I’d like to say something about Britishness in terms of what’s just gone on here, which I feel we’ve moved on from very quickly, I attempted to make a point, and had a person on this panel shouting and pointing in my face, and in fact the point that Professor Starkey raised, about me dropping out of a panel when we were due to speak together, my main reason for doing so was that I didn’t want something like that to happen. I felt like I was being set up to be attacked, and part of the reason I decided to – this is a difficult thing to say and it’s easier to say to event organizers that you’re going to charge a ridiculous sum of money - and be asked to… well not necessarily ridiculous but… and be asked to go.” (cheers / jeers?)

Chairman: “Alright…”

LP: “On the other hand, excuse me, I haven’t finished my point. My point is that this is what debates like this come down to. There’s a civil way of putting… racial prejudice… there’s also…”

(Someone walks in front of camera and makes a ‘cut’ gesture to Chairman)

Chairman: “OK Laurie, I want a final word from…”

LP: “I also want to say that there’s a violence inherent in this discussion and it comes out very, very easily.”

Audience woman: “You started it, that’s the problem, you called him a racist, you know you did…”

LP: “He is a racist.”

Organizer: “OK ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to call a halt at this point…”

The PR Crisis of Democracy

What will "democracy" mean, for the next generation?

At the moment, Western democracy has a pretty good image. It’s associated with things like: freedom, prosperity, wealth, justice, progress. I'm not saying that democracy actually causes those things; I'm not saying it doesn't. What I mean is that when most people think of democracy, those are what springs to mind, I think. Democracy today has a pretty good image.

Many people assume that democracy will always be attractive, although only a few have been bold enough to say it. But this wasn't always true, and maybe it won't be. 10 years from now, what will people think of when they hear the word “democracy”?

That all depends what happens. Suppose things get worse in:

 

Egypt, Libya: Democracy (at least in theory)… violence, extremists, civil war.

Europe: Democracy… riots, poverty, panic.

America: Democracy… deadlock, paralysis, decline.

I'm not saying democracy really caused those problems or would be responsible if they get worse. Correlation isn't really causation, but psychologically, it feels like it is (that's why we need reminding so often that it isn't.) I'm just summarizing the news headlines from the past couple of years and assuming they continue.

I'm not saying those headlines are justified, either; the media exaggerate, but this is all about perception, and like it or not, people see headlines. And of course there are other old and new democracies around the world that are doing fine - but good news doesn't make the front page.

Put it all together and it doesn’t look so attractive.

This matters. The USSR ended because the people of the USSR looked West and saw a better life. Now there's an assumption that something similar is bound to happen eventually in those countries that are 'still' not democratic. We assume that they will look at democracy and think: me too! For that matter, we assume that most people in a democracy would not vote to end democracy.

But what if democracy loses face?

This hasn't happened yet. It has only just begun, and hopefully can be prevented. Europe today, even Greece today, is surely more attractive than the USSR 1989... but things could get worse, and then where will democracy be?