Tag Archives: CiF

Epigenetics and the Guardian, or what happens when science becomes religion?

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There was a fascinating piece in the Guardian today by Oliver Burkeman entitled “Why everything you’ve been told about evolution is wrong“.  Essentially a review of the ideas in a book by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini “What Darwin got wrong” and another “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong” by David Shenk (although the immediate riposte by Adam Rutherford said Burkeman had not been tough enough in critiquing the books), the article asked what if – 150 years after the theory of evolution was published – what we think we know about it actually inaccurate?

Burkeman stresses that while what’s being talked about in terms of epigenetics is not new, and is not a filip to creationists, but that it is likely to drive evolutionary biologists mad.   And when you read the comments below his article on the Guardian online, how right he was.  What vitriol!  What scathing nastiness – at one point a G2 subeditor intervened to point out that the article had in fact been read by two scientists with phDs prior to publication – and even this was attacked.

Rutherford attacks him for the Darwin Was Wrong type headline. 
But Burkeman’s article basically says that – Darwin knew he was starting the process of understanding the world in a new way, not delivering a complete package that would remain untouched.
Reading the article, it seems to me that the point Burkeman is making is not primarily that Darwin Was Wrong, but that a simplistic understanding of popular science means that the general public’s understanding of genetics affects means that something like learning more about epigenetics means that thinking about its implications feels revolutionary (probably doesn’t if you are a geneticist scientist, but most of us are not).  In that way, he is not, as Rutherford suggests, saying that evolutionary biological science cannot already encompass the idea that modifications to the structure of DNA changes its behaviour. He is saying that the public understanding of evolutionary biology is unlikely to be able to cope with such an idea in its simplistic understanding of genetics.

Burkeman’s carefully balanced article is quick to point out that it only the simplistic understanding that is overthrown.  He points out that we are taught to believe that genes are permanent and unalterable other than by random mutation. 
We’re further taught that natural selection is from a random selection of these potentially randomly mutated genes and cannot be affected by environmental factors.  And we’re told that it is simply not the case that certain genes are more likely to be naturally selected to give the next generation a survival advantage, but actually that those genes that are passed on to offspring may or may not confer advantage to an individual offspring, randomly, and that offspring is more likely to have a “better” set of genes for the environment in which the offspring later finds itself and from which their offspring in turn will be produced (the less well adapted for the environment offspring die out).  

He uses incredibly derisory language about pro-creationist author Ann Coulter but noted that her comment that treating survival as the only measure of fitness in “survival of the fittest” was effectively a tenet of faith in the American scientific community ”perhaps uniquely among all arguments ever made by Coulter, feels persuasive” (you’d think he’d endoresed her as a champion of evolutionary biology if you only read the comments…)
He admits that it’s possible that Fodor’s thesis (essentially that not every trait a creature possesses is necessarily adaptive, that pop-Darwinists separate traits into those that are selected randomly and those that are selected for their usefulness, but that this can’t be the case because selecting for implies some sort of consciousness in the process) might be nonsense, and even points out that natural selection  is

 probably not a bankrupt concept, as Fodor claims. But nor should laypeople assume that it’s self-evidently simple and exhaustively true.

And basically, I’m with Burkeman in not being sure that everyone understands that it’s not about “selecting for” i.e. that there is something wrong with the idea that “science proves that polar bears that have white fur because they live in a place where passing on the white fur gene is advantageous”. (NB that’s white meaning colourless, in the sense that the horrible “grey” hairs I have are not really grey but colourless and only appear grey against the lovely brown ones that remain, really weird that the commetns board went wild on that one…)
But even if I underestimate the great British public’s depth of understanding of genetics, it seems that, guess what?  It may all be a bit more complicated than that. 

How do those that believe we simply pass on our genes and that the circumstances are pitiless, blind and indifferent explain the bred-for-generations scatterbrained mice put in a stimulating environment and producing later generations of offspring with superior memory skills even though the offspring are not kept in the stimulating environment?  Surely that shows that how the grandparent mice were nurtured affects the nature of the later generations (or were those grandparent and parent mice demonstrating nurturing behaviour learned from their environment in raising the younger generations? Some how I can’t think that the experiment included giving the chance to the mice to practice their parenting skills and to encourage the baby mice to do braintraining exercises…) 

Take the issue of viruses.  Viruses seem to play a role in affecting organisms at a genetic level too, not just genes.  We may all be a bit more interconnected with other species and other organisms than we perhaps thought. 
Rutherford says that knowing this enhances evolutionary theory, rather than contradicting it.  It probably does, if you have a deep enough understanding of it. 
But this in itself raises a question about whether we are simply the product of our genes which are unconsciously fulfilling their purpose (selfishly, to be replicated) and morality is therefore something that we invent for ourselves and therefore timebound and relative.  If viruses affect our genes and their likelihood of being passed on, then restricting the likelihood of viruses that could impact negatively on future generations might be important.   
And more widely, if environmental factors affecting the genes that our offspring inherit could include the learning that we undertake as well as our diet, our stress levels and more, then the political and social case for combatting poverty, educating to the very highest standard possible and a whole range of policies need real reconsideration. 
Nurture could be affecting nature.
Or is this a case of a little knowledge being dangerously over interpreted?

So it’s the common misuse of the genetic evolutionary story to make pronouncements on moral behaviours (ach, well, men are more prone to sleeping around because you can’t overturn milennia of evolution) and, similarly, the apparent eagerness of some of the high priests of the Darwinian scientific atheistic faith group to treat each of these pronouncements as another nail in the coffin of any theist worldview that  Burkeman was criticising.

But Rutherford’s response is worth considering a bit more too. 
He seems basically to be saying that by even daring to talk about Fodor’s book as containing interesting ideas that – to the general public with a superficial understanding of genes and evolution rather than deeply knowledgable evolutionary biologists – might seem “mindblowing”, that Burkeman is boosting the case of creationists.
Utter rubbish.
I’ve heard that sort of argument before. 
Usually from fundamentalist creationists themselves, to whom the sort of stripped back New Testament matters more than Leviticus, no death penalty, gay life partnerships are a good thing Christianity that Protestants in Europe increasingly tend to believe in is anathema.
Or from believers or clergy that say that that women priests are against women’s nature and that Jesus would not have wanted them.
It’s basically saying that unless discussions on issues that you may be feel are already settled are headlined “Why the people raising about this are credulous fools and don’t understand why we’ve proved that our view is right” then they are implicitly condoning the subject of the discussion. You’re either completely with us, or you’re against us.

Well, ok. Actually a little bit of me has some sympathy. 
If you accept that for some people evolutionary biology is in fact a belief system, and that belief systems are both simple on the surface and quite complex, and that they matter to believers because they are true and the basis on which you build your life, then you can begin to understand the somewhat agressive approach that believers can sometimes take when someone misunderstands the more difficult concepts.  

As a Christian, it worries me that people profess Christianity, but don’t actually seem to understand it.  
If my faith is just about a sky god, and that if you live a good life you’ll go and live with him forever and see everyone that’s died before you again, then a huge number of people are Christian.  
But that’s a simplified version that makes no attempt to understand Jesus’s death and ressurection and why it happened, and what it means for us in terms of how we get to spend eternity with God and what being good actually means. People don’t often really know about the age of the gospels, the reality of crucifixtion on a human body,  the fulfillment of the Jewish law… and without all that stuff, you either have a weak or a bad God not worth worshipping.
It worries me, because it’s important that people know so that they have the chance to accept Jesus’s gift to us, but it doesn’t anger me as it often does really dogmatic Christians (and yes there’s a fair few out there). 

I think it is important to discuss, to debate, exegesis or midrash has long been part of the religious tradition of the Abrahamic faiths (I may have mentioned this before…).  It means engaging with believers to sort out what you believe, discussing new ways of looking at it, new ideas and evidence.
But these days it probably also means engaging with non-believers, people of other faiths, some of whom you may find common cause with on some points but accepting that on some you probably won’t. But usually you can try to end up in a place where you can have a discussion and not just hurl insults at each other – call it interfaith dialogue if you must.
Science also has a way of doing this – when a new discovery is made that challenges the old, it is examined (in journals, in the press, in debate, in books) and eventually, if robust enough the old goes, or is adapted to accept the new and so the new becomes the norm.  In that old John Maynard Keynes quote that I love you can sum it up as:

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

But Rutherford concludes:

Unfortunately though, to the knowledgeable, it is a disappointing combination of at best misleading distortion, and at worst plain wrongheadedness. Now we have to clean up the mess.

Believe me, people of other faiths know this too. It’s how most Christians feel about the God Delusion which presented not only a distortion of our beliefs but old discussions as if they were new and knock down arguments.

But then we also know that Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship with God.
And evolutionary biological atheism is in the eyes of its believers not a religion either, it’s science. 
But it’s funny how the language is so similar, don’t you think?

A mother of a big issue…

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MOTHER clipart

Interesting, thought provoking Comment is Free piece in the Guardian today, on early years parenting. 
Why is it increasingly contraversial to suggest that the best people to raise children, especially when they are very young, might actually be their parents?

Enlightened Euroscepticism requires the enlightenment bit…

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eu with light

Henry Porter in the Observer yesterday talked about enlightened Euroscepticism.
His argument would be easier to accept if he hadn’t confused the European Court of Human Rights and its ruling on the display of crucifixes in Italian schools with the EU and standardisation.
He says “the crucifix is none of the EU’s business” and he is right.  It isn’t and wasn’t.
(Even if the EU is about the accede to ECHR).

He talks about the the appointment of a President of the Council in these terms: “the point is that the coronation will take place without the involvement of the people at the very moment when Europe marks the most significant and peaceful revolution in history”.  This makes me feel unspeakably angry for a number of reasons:
i) appointing a Council President is not a coronation – Henry Porter has either bought the lie or has not actually bothered to do more that read the UK press coverage of the role;
ii)  there’s a number of Presidents in the European context (Commission and European Parliament Presidents already exist).  Each heads an EU institution, each has a specific role in the overall EU institutional and decision-making process.  It seems unlikely that they would respond positively to a huge swing of power and influence towards the role of the Council (one of the EP’s favourite experssions is “inter-institutional balance”).  So I would expect that the postholders would go some way towards keeping a new “upstart” President in his or her place if they start seeing themselves in a more monarchistic light;
iii) Electing a President of the Council would be rather like directly electing a Nancy Pelosi type figure – charismatic, known internationally but more influential than powerful so how many people would bother to turn out.  As far as I can see, a directly elected by the EU populace President could not be simply a President of the Council.
iv) to invoke the anniversary of being 20 years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall to imbue the declaration that it is a coronation with added significance as if it is the installation of an absolutist monarchy over all EU Member States, with echoes of totalitarianism is insulting to the reader, to common sense and to the memory of that incredible event.  

Look – there was a chance, in the Constitutional Treaty and then in the Lisbon Treaty to have a directly-elected President of the EU.  But the Member State governments, who agree a text and then seek ratification in their own countries depending on the system that they use for this sort of process (parliamentary approval or public referendum), didn’t go for that.  They agreed to a lesser role, in one of the three main institutions rather than sitting above them all and hardly a symbol of superstatehood. 
The constant assertion that the role is the supreme leader role needs to be challenged whenever it is made – that is an argument that has already been overcome. 
Why can’t sceptics accept that what they’ve got is already a victory? Oh yes. Because we’ve forgotten what scepticism means!
As Julien Frisch said in his tongue-in-cheek guide to becoming a successful Euroblogger, it seems to be generally assumed that the world is divided into “Federalists” that are pro-European, and sceptics/ realists that are anti-EU. 
I would argue – as would Julien, Jon Worth, Nosemonkey and a host of other Eurobloggers that enlightened scepticism is actually the position that we all seem to hold: we support the concept of the EU but don’t believe it necessarily operates in the ideal way. 
We may not have a shared view over how and what it should do things differently, but the sooner we in the UK come to terms with the idea that being sceptical about something is not the same as being hostile to it, and that you can be broadly favouable towards something in cencept as well as sceptical about its execeution then the more measured, sensible and ulitimately effective and constructive a debate we can have.
So Henry Porter is right: “scepticism is not about being a little England Tory or any of the other nonsense spouted by French Euro-enthusiasts last week; it is sounding a note of caution, reserving judgement and not being in the interests of the common good”. 
The behaviours the French Europe Minister described would certainly not be “sceptical” behaviours if we are using the word properly.
I would add that a decent dash of scepticism is vital to get an approach to life verging on “everything in moderation”. 
Henry Porter is also right that people have to take responsibility and that the role of the people in a democracy is something that should not ignored.

But detail matters too.  And how can the people take informed decsions when they’re given distorted pictures on which to form their views?
So please – journalists, subs, editors, proprietors.  We understand that your first job is to write stories that sell papers or get ratings.  This is not always completely compatible with accuracy.  
And sometimes, as I would hope is the case with Henry Porter’s article, it may be uninformed error rather than deliberate innacuracy that leds to this sort of rant from bloggers.
But democracy itself is affected by what you say, what you publish (you’ve even boasted about this in the past e.g. “It was the Sun wot won it”).  You owe it to your readers to act responsibly. And the occasional full article correction, rather than burying corrections away near the letters page or just not bothering would really be a start.        

Update: excellent guide to the various Councils now available on Nosemonkey’s EUtopia blog. Fab stuff indeed.

Penelope Trunk unpacks a difficult issue

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Penelope Trunk didn’t mean to do us a favour.
She may be a famous social network expert (over 20,000 follow her Twitter feed, me included), known for the combination of business and personal tweets she makes, but it’s one tweet combining the two that has caused controvery both in the USA and here in the UK too.
Last week she tweeted: “I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.”

There’s been a rush to judge her, and she’s now written a “Comment is Free” article for the Guardian explaining that she’s not a monster.  She already has children, hadn’t intended to be pregnant, was at great risk of having an unhealthy baby, her partner doesn’t believe in abortion and frankly pregnancy and miscarriage screws with your emotions.  She didn’t mean to trivialise miscarriage or indeed abortion.
I’m witholding my judgement on all that.  I think the wording of the tweet came across as callous, but miscarriage messes you up a bit – I guess she deserves the benefit of the doubt.  She certainly doesn’t deserve the death threats.

What she’s managed to do, without really intending to, is to bring the intensely personal grief of miscarriage into the public domain.

Because a miscarriage is intensely personal.  And because it’s personal and tragic, you’re not “meant” to talk about it.
And most of the time you just have to get on with it.  One Evening Standard columnist talks about the choice between passing it off as flu or strapping yourself into a giant pad and heading off for that meeting anyway – as if having to ignore the little tragedy is a price women just have to pay for the chance of being in the workplace.  I tried it – you are not necesarily going to be able to do this and act normally!

And all the while the extent of your loss is obvious to you – the dull stomach ache, the parody of a normal period, stuff that I barely want to recall let alone write about.
Your body responds to being pregnant- for anyone that hasn’t had it it’s rather unpleasantly like the worst PMT you’ve ever had: heightened sense of smell, weight gain, really uncomfortable breasts.
And you can get all that even if you miscarry, continue to have all that even when losing what could have been your baby.
Actually the weight gain is a complete pig of a reminder.  You can’t help but think about Catherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII who is known to have had a number of miscarriages.  And she became bloated and unhappy and Ann Boleyn managed to tempt her husband away from her. I hate the way miscarriage can make your mind work.

And the grief.
It’s the grief that’s hard to explain. What are you actually grieving for?
And that’s where the abortion point comes back into play.  It would be quite hard to explain to people who only really think of a six or seven week old embryo as just a ball of cells that your mourning a life that didn’t get to happen.
You’re grieving for what might have been, upset that all the excitement, the future planning that you’ve done explicitly or subconsciously has just come to an end.
I’m not sure whether medical staff still refer to miscarriage as spontanteous abortion, but some of the older literature does and it seems to assume that comfort can be draw from the fact that it occurs usually because there was something wrong with the developing embryo.  For what it’s worth, no it doesn’t make you feel much better.
Your hormones have also got all geared up for pregnancy and the shock of their readjustment leaves you on the verge of tears a lot of the time.

Then there’s the guilt.
It feels like everyday there’s a new new story about something terrible that you could do to your unborn child that would result in loss or permanent disability.  And when the miscarriage starts you wonder – what if I hadn’t carried that box? What if I hadn’t had that glass of wine/ piece of blue cheese/ dodgy prawn/ slightly undercooked bacon?  What if I’d managed to lose the weight? What if I’d taken the exercise a bit easier, or done a bit more?
What if I’d managed to be less stressed?
So again that conspires against anyone talking about it.

I’ve not really experienced the relief that Penelope Trunk describes, but then she’s over 40 which brings greater medical risk, and already has the number of children she wants.  And although the language she used to express her private thoughts was what really shocked (convention has it that every child should be wanted, miscarriage a tragic loss not something to be celebrated) it is legitimate to feel like that.

Family planning is still a modern phenomemon – in our want-get society of instant gratification we forget that this stuff is not easy.
Even in my grandparents’ generation not every child was expected to live to adulthood, and having ten children was not just about a lack of contraception but an acknowledgement that not every pregnancy  would result in a child and not every child would make it through childhood.  The whole process of conception, pregnancy and raising small children is a real reminder that while we might try to live ordered lives there’s a wild, uncontrollably biological side to our lives and we have to accept and live with the consequences of what happens to us.

At my age and when you have a child of toddler age, you and the other mums you know are likely to be trying for a second child (possibly third if real gluttons for punishment – the quantity of work per child is not simply twice as much but apparently much more even though you know more what you are doing). And, if you get talking about it, you discover just how many people you know that have had a miscarriage.

Penelope Trunk says “it’s part of being a woman”.  I think I know what she means.