Cherry-picking DNA

It is a frequent source of perplexity for me when people read about scientific research, and because of their own biases (1) claim that it says something it clearly doesn't say, or else (2) deny it completely.  After all, as eminent astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson put it, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

I ran into a particularly good (or appalling, depending on how you look at it) example of this yesterday over at Science Online, the news outlet for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in article by Michael Price, entitled, "‘It’s a Toxic Place:’ How the Online World of White Nationalists Distorts Population Genetics."  Price interviewed Jedidiah Carlson, a graduate student in bioinformatics at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, about how the recent explosion in personal DNA analysis had been hijacked by white supremacists.

Carlson discovered the problem when he was looking online for a 2008 paper in Nature that analyzed hundreds of thousands of point mutations in people of various ethnic groups, and found that the paper had been linked in the notorious neo-Nazi site Stormfront.  Shocked but curious, he clicked the link, and found himself in a darker realm of genetic research -- using DNA evidence to support the bogus ideas that (1) races are little water-tight compartments except for cases of deliberate "race mixing," and (2) that people of western and northern European descent are superior to everyone else on the planet.

Norman Rockwell, The Golden Rule (1961)

Carlson started searching through Stormfront and other white supremacist sites, and found that this is an increasingly common phenomenon.  "People will grab figures from scientific papers and edit them in several different ways to make them look like they support the white nationalist ideology," Carlson said.  "For instance, in [the] 2008 Science paper, researchers published a figure with a plot inferring regional ancestry of dozens of different populations around the world.  Based on the genetic compositions of hundreds of individuals, the figure divided the populations into clusters that revealed patterns in their ancestral population structure.  So [people on the forums] take this plot and add some subtle text like 'The genetic reality of race,' with no context showing what the scientists were actually looking at, and ignoring the fact that there’s a continuum among the individuals.  Then they turn these images into memes and try to make them go viral."

They don't just cherry-pick data; they cherry-pick entire studies -- as long as there's some conceivable way to twist them around to support their ideology.  "They’re interested in anything that would reinforce traditional, discrete racial categories. Intelligence is probably the number one topic that they gravitate toward," Carlson said.  "And anything pertaining to history of human migrations, or things that play into traditional classifications of racial phenotypes like facial morphology or skin color.  There was a paper on lactose tolerance in Europeans and that turned into this weird viral YouTube trend where white nationalists were chugging bottles of milk, presumably to flaunt their European heritage."

I don't know about you, but that strikes me as a weird thing to be proud of.  "Look how well I digest milk" is not something you often hear people say.  I mean, my Louisiana heritage is probably why I love Cajun cuisine, wherein the Four Major Food Groups are onions, garlic, hot peppers, and grease,  but I have no desire to video myself eating a bowl of gumbo, and doing the Fists In The Air Of Victory afterwards.

Carlson himself has become something of a target, after his observations about the use of genetic research by white supremacists was the subject of an interview in The Atlantic.  It was a shock to him, however, to find how virulently they responded to his central claim, which was that the supremacists were warping the conclusions of the research to support their bigoted worldview, and ignoring any evidence to the contrary.  "When they finally saw it, the first few comments were actually rather celebratory, as they saw the article as evidence that the 'liberal, biased, Jew-controlled media' are nervous about the growth of white nationalism.  About me, there were comments like, 'He says he’s a grad student, but he’s probably never even seen a principal component analysis plot,' which is ironic because that’s about half of my dissertation.  And it was pretty alarming seeing my name on the site.  After that, I took a break from doing this work for a while for my own mental health."

His alarm is understandable.  These people are unstable, prone to violence, and usually well-armed.  It's not stopping Carlson, however, although he does acknowledge that fighting this kind of bias is an uphill battle at best.  "I don’t think engaging them directly will work," he says.  "In an argument between a logical person and illogical person, the logical person is always going to lose because the illogical person isn’t playing by the same rules.  The misappropriations and misinterpretations run so deep that you’ll just get shouted down and personally attacked, and you’re not going to change anyone’s mind.  But I think there’s growing recognition that we as scientists bear some responsibility for guiding the public interpretation of our work."

Of course, that's not easy.  You put the data out there, analyze it as rigorously as you can, state your conclusion as clearly as you can, and hope for the best.  The science deniers of the world will always find a way to get around it, either by claiming the data is faulty, the analysis is in error, the scientist(s) who did the research were paid shills and are trying to fool everyone for their own nefarious purposes, or (if none of these work) simply by ignoring the study entirely.  We've seen it over and over with climate change deniers and young-Earth creationists, both fundamentally anti-scientific views of the universe.  The same is true here; the white supremacists have their conclusion already figured out -- that they're better than everyone else based on their ancestry and skin color -- and the research needs either to fit that model, or it's rejected as "liberal, biased, [and] Jew-controlled."

The funny postscript to all of this is that when I did 23 & Me a few months ago, purely out of curiosity, I was honestly disappointed that my DNA didn't have any particular surprises.  My ancestry is primarily French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English, and my DNA said that my ancestry is... French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English.  I'd have been delighted if there'd been a random West African or Southeast Asian in there somewhere, as unlikely as that seems given my appearance.  Race is primarily a social, not a genetic, construct, as research by groundbreaking population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza showed decades ago.  We're all mixtures, and if you go back far enough, we're all related.

So if you like to see races as neat little compartments with hard-and-fast boundaries, that's up to you.  But the bottom line is that you're wrong.  The view supported by science -- that the boundaries between ethnic groups are fluid, and almost all of us have diverse ancestry -- is true, as Tyson said, whether or not you believe it.

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This week's book recommendation is a brilliant overview of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly.  If you're interested in critical thinking, it's a must-read; and even folks well-versed in the ins and outs of skepticism will learn something from Dobelli's crystal-clear prose.

Willful ignorance and Irish slavery

Prompted by yesterday's post regarding the tendency of some people to amplify their feelings into facts (and in the process, ignore the actual facts), a loyal reader of Skeptophilia put me on the trail of a fine, if disturbing, example of this phenomenon: the claim that there were Irish slaves, and they had it worse than the African ones did.

I had seen a version of the claim before, posted on Facebook.  This is the one I ran into:

My impression was that it was just one more in the long line of claims intended to make white people feel like they have no reason to address the sordid history of North America with respect to their treatment of minorities and indigenous peoples.  "Hey, y'all," it seems to say, "we had it bad too, you know."

What I didn't realize until today was that there's a far uglier implication here, made plain in some of the websites where you see the above posted; that not only were the Irish oppressed (a point no one with any knowledge of history would argue), but that Irish immigrants to North America were oppressed by the African Americans.  If you look at those websites -- which I would not recommend to anyone who has a weak stomach or slim tolerance for racist garbage -- you find claims that Africans and Mulattos enslaved, raped, tortured, and killed Irish slaves, especially Irish women, all through the 18th and first half of the 19th century.

The claim is thoroughly debunked by history scholar Liam Hogan, who addresses each piece of the claim, uncovering the bogus nature of the supporting evidence.  Some of the "evidence" is outright falsification; for example, one website uses gruesome photos from Andersonville Prison and the Holocaust and claims that they were pictures of Irish slaves; another shows a drawing of 18th century psychopathic murderer Elizabeth Brownrigg flogging a servant, and claims instead that it is a drawing of a poor Irish slave in the early United States being whipped.  In fact, the claim that the Irish were enslaved at all is mixing up indentured servitude with chattel slavery, a distinction that none of the slave owners back then were confused about in the least.

All of this would be another exercise in believe-what-you-want-to-believe if the whole idea hadn't been taken up by the white supremacists and neo-Nazis.  The "Irish slave" trope figures into the whole mythology you see on websites like Stormfront, revolving around the idea that the whites are in constant danger of being attacked and destroyed by people of color.  And as strategies for convincing followers go, it's pretty powerful.  If you can persuade yourself that white privilege is nonexistent, that the whites all along have had it as bad as the minorities, it is only a short step to the attitude that any demands made by minorities that the whites address institutional racism are ill-founded and unfair.

Frighteningly, that's exactly what's happening.  Donald Trump's running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, has gone on record that institutional racism only exists if we talk about it:

Donald Trump and I both believe that there’s been far too much of this talk of institutional bias or racism in law enforcement. We ought to set aside this talk, this talk about institutional racism and institutional bias, the rhetoric of division.

The Trump campaign chair in Ohio, Kathy Miller (who has since resigned), went even further, blaming President Obama for racism, and claiming that it didn't exist before he became president:

If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last fifty years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you. You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it.  It’s not our fault, certainly... Growing up as a kid, there was no racism, believe me.  We were just all kids going to school. 

I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected.  We never had problems like this...  Now, with the people with the guns, and shooting up neighborhoods, and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America.

Well, of course you didn't experience racism, you nitwit.  You're not a minority.  As for the rest of it, this surpasses willful ignorance.  I'm not even sure what you'd call it.  Especially since the interviewer said to Miller that some people would take exception to what she'd said, and she responded, "I don't care.  It's the truth."

So here's a particularly awful example of what I was talking about yesterday; people elevating their own feelings, biases, and prejudices to the level of facts.  Taking the fact that for a white person, talking about racism can be uncomfortable, and using that discomfort as an excuse for believing that racism itself doesn't exist.

Well, I'm sorry, but the world doesn't work that way.  The truth doesn't change because thinking about it makes you feel wonky.  And neither can you substitute your mythology for actual history as a way of whitewashing the role your ancestors (and mine) had in oppressing other cultures.  All that does is perpetuate the very attitudes that created the problem in the first place -- and makes it less likely that our children and our children's children will live in a world where everyone is treated fairly and equitably.

The future according to Adam Sandler

It's not often that you get to witness the birth of a conspiracy theory.

Most of the time, I suspect, they start out with someone speculating about something, finding circumstantial evidence that seems to support the conjecture, and then telling a few friends.  Who tell a few friends, who tell a few friends, and there you are.  Hard to pinpoint, and (therefore) hard to squelch.

But today I'm going to tell you about a conspiracy theory whose provenance we can identify with near exactitude.  And since it involves not only conspiracy theorists, but The Onion, Princess Diana, neo-Nazis, and Adam Sandler, you know it's gonna be a good story.

The whole thing started with a story run in August by Clickhole, a satirical website that is an offshoot of The Onion.  Entitled, "Five Tragedies Weirdly Predicted by Adam Sandler," the article tells about five instances when Sandler gave hints (or outright statements) in his movies or comedy acts about upcoming world events, to wit:

• The Waco Siege.  Sandler, supposedly, would intersperse his standup act with repeating "for several minutes" the phrase, "Something's coming to Waco.  Something dark."
• Princess Diana's death.  In the movie Happy Gilmore, Sandler looks directly into the camera and says, "The Queen's eldest, our beautiful flower, will wilt under a Parisian bridge."
• The 2010 BP Gulf oil spill.  In an interview in 2005 on Conan O'Brien, Sandler was wearing a t-shirt that said, "BP OIL SPILL IN FIVE YEARS."
• The Haitian earthquake.  Sandler predicted that one on Funny People, but underestimated the death toll at 220,000.  (Guess even a "modern-day Nostradamus" can't get every detail right.)
• The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.  All the way back in 1993, Sandler was in a skit on Saturday Night Live in which he sang, "A missing plane-ah / It’s from Malaysia / Make me insane-ah / This will all make sense in due time."

So there you are, then.  Pretty amazing, yes?

Well, no, and for the very good reason that Sandler didn't say (or do) any of the things that the Clickhole article said.  In other words, the whole thing was made up from top to bottom.  Not surprising; it's satire, remember?

[image courtesy of photographer Franz Richter and the Wikimedia Commons]

But that didn't stop people from falling for it.  Lots of people.  Not only did they miss the "satire" piece, they also never bothered to fact check, even to the extent of watching the damn movies and television shows where all of these shenanigans allegedly happened.  It started popping up all over the online media, making appearances on blogs, Twitter, and conspiracy theory websites like Godlike Productions and Literally Unbelievable.  Then, the neo-Nazis got a hold of it, and it ended up on their site Stormfront, where the link was posted with the following wonderful message: "If any of this is true, it just shows how Jews do make shit happen and probably communicate via movies."

You'd think that communicating via communicating would be easier, wouldn't you?  I mean, why go to all of the trouble of making a movie, including all of the lengthy and costly post-production stuff, marketing, and so on, when you could just pick up a phone and tell your Evil Illuminati Henchmen your future predictions?  After all, in the movies, anyone could be watching.  Even a neo-Nazi could be watching.  And then the secret's out, you know?

I mean, I have some first-hand experience in this regard.  My wife is Jewish, and when she wants to tell me something, she doesn't make a movie about it and wait for me to go to the theater and watch it, she just tells me.  She's kind of direct that way.

But the whole thing blew up so fast that it ended up having its own page on Snopes, wherein we are told in no uncertain terms that Adam Sandler can not actually foretell the future.

I'm not expecting people to believe this, though.  Any time Snopes posts anything, they get accused of being shills or of participating in a coverup.  Which means that I probably will be accused of the same thing, especially now that I've revealed that my wife is Jewish.

As I've observed so many times, with conspiracy theorists, you can't win.  And that goes double for the neo-Nazis.