The illusion of balance

I got an interesting email, undoubtedly prompted by one of my recent anti-Trump posts.  Here's the salient part:

People like you calling yourself skeptics make me laugh.  One look at what you write and anyone can see you're biased.  You're constantly going on about left-wing liberal crap, and calling ideas you don't like words like nonsense and stupid and ridiculous.  You don't even give the opposite side a fair hearing.  You dismiss stuff without even giving it good consideration, and call it "skepticism."  At least you could be honest enough to admit you're not fair and unbiased.

Okay, there's a lot to unpack here, so let's start with the easy stuff first.  

I'm not unbiased, and have never claimed I am, for the very good reason that everyone is biased.  No exceptions.  

Skepticism doesn't mean eliminating all biases -- that's almost certainly impossible.  As British science historian James Burke points out, in his mindblowing series The Day the Universe Changed, the whole enterprise of knowledge is biased right down to its roots, because your preconceived notions about how the world works will determine what tools you use to study it, how you will analyze the data once you've got it, and even what you consider to be reliable evidence.

So sure, as skeptics we should try to expunge all the biases we can, and for the rest, keep them well in mind.  A bias can't hurt you if it's right in front of your eyes.  As an example, my post yesterday -- about a claim that Breakthrough Listen has found incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence -- revealed my clear bias to doubt the person who made the claim.  However, the important thing is that (1) I stated it up front, and (2) at the end of the post, I admitted explicitly that I could be wrong.  (And in this case, would be thrilled if I were.)  In the end, the evidence decides the outcome.  If the aliens have been talking to us, I'll have no choice but to admit that my bias led me astray, and to change my mind.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What the guy who emailed me seems to want, though, is always to have some sort of "fair hearing" for the talking points of the other side(s).  Which in some cases is a reasonable request, I suppose, but we need to make sure we understand what "fair and balanced" means.  In the realm of science, it's not "fair and balanced" to have a geology textbook give equal time to plate tectonics and the claim of somebody who thinks the mantle of the Earth is filled with banana pudding.  There are some ideas that can be dismissed out of hand, based on the available evidence; young-Earth creationism, alchemy, homeopathy, and the geocentric model are obvious examples.

There's more to it than this, though, because he touched on the subject of politics, which for a lot of people skates out over very thin ice.  And sure, here as well I have my biases, but I'm perfectly open about them.  I do lean left; no question about it.  I hope I don't do so thoughtlessly, and with no chance of having my mind changed if I'm wrong, but I've been a liberal all my life and probably always will be.

But my attempting to be fair doesn't mean I'm any more required to give credence to absurd or dangerous ideas in politics than I am in any other realm.  "Balance" doesn't mean pretending that people promoting democracy and those promoting fascism are morally equivalent.  It doesn't mean we should give equal weight to >99.5% of climatologists and to the <0.5% who think that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening.  It doesn't mean we have to give the same respect to those campaigning for equal rights and those who think that people of other races are inferior or that queer people should be lined up and shot.

So okay, we should listen to both sides.  And then give our support to the one that is moral, just, and in line with the facts and evidence.

In summary, I'm obligated to treat all humans with equal respect, but that doesn't mean all ideas are worthy of equal respect.  You may not like it, but sometimes the fair, balanced, appropriate, and -- dare I say it -- skeptical response is to say, "That idea is wrong/immoral/dangerous/flat-out idiotic."

In any case, I'm not going to apologize for my biases, although I will try to keep my eyes on them at all times.  And if knowing that I'm (1) liberal, (2) understand and trust science, (3) support democracy and human rights, and (4) champion LGBTQ+ people ('cuz I am one) bothers you, you're not going to have much fun while visiting my blog. 

But after all this -- well, if you really do get your jollies from reading stuff that pisses you off, then knock yourself out.  

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A light on bias

A woman walks into the kitchen to find her husband on all fours, crawling around peering at the floor.

"What are you doing?" she asks.

"Looking for my contact lens."

"Oh, I'll help."  So the woman gets down on the floor, too, and they spend the next fifteen minutes fruitlessly searching for the missing lens.  Finally, she says, "I just don't see it.  Are you sure you dropped it in here?"

The husband responds, "Oh, no, I dropped it in the living room."

"Then why the hell are you looking for it in the kitchen?" she yells at him.

"Because the lighting is better in here."

While this is an old and much-retold joke, there's an object lesson here for scientists -- which was highlighted by a paper this week out of George Washington University that appeared in Nature Ecology & Evolution.  In it, paleobiologists Andrew Barr and Bernard Wood considered a systematic sampling bias in our study of fossils of ancestral hominid species -- and by extension, every other group of fossils out there.

A large share of what we know of our own early family tree comes from just three sites in Africa, most notably the East African Rift Valley and adjacent regions in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania.  Clearly that's not the only place early hominids lived; it's just the place that (1) has late Cenozoic-age fossil-bearing strata exposed near the surface, and (2) isn't underneath a city or airport or swamp or rain forest or something.  In fact, the Rift Valley makes up only one percent of Africa's surface area, so searching only there is significantly biasing what we might find.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michal Huniewicz, Great Rift Valley - panoramio, CC BY 3.0]

"Because the evidence of early human evolution comes from a small range of sites, it's important to acknowledge that we don't have a complete picture of what happened across the entire continent," said study co-author Andrew Barr.  "If we can point to the ways in which the fossil record is systematically biased and not a perfect representation of everything, then we can adjust our interpretations by taking this into account."

You can only base your understanding on what evidence you actually have in your hands, of course; besides the areas that might bear fossils but are inaccessible to study for one reason or another, there are parts of Africa where the strata are from a different geological era, or simply don't contain fossils at all (for example, igneous rock).  But you still need to maintain an awareness that what you're seeing is an incomplete picture.

"We must avoid falling into the trap of coming up with what looks like a comprehensive reconstruction of the human story, when we know we don't have all of the relevant evidence," said study co-author Bernard Wood.  "Imagine trying to capture the social and economic complexity of Washington D.C. if you only had access to information from one neighborhood.  It helps if you can get a sense of how much information is missing."

Now, don't misunderstand me (or them); no one is saying what we have to date is likely to be all wrong.  I absolutely hate when some new fossil is discovered, and the headlines say, "New Find Rewrites Everything We Knew" or "The Textbooks Are Wrong Again" or, worst of all, "Scientists Are Forced Back To The Drawing Board."  For one thing, our models are now solid enough that it's unlikely that anything will force a complete undoing of the known science.  I suppose something like that could occur in newer fields like cosmology and quantum physics, but even there we have tons of evidence and excellent predictive models -- so while there might well be additions or revisions, a complete overturning is almost certainly not gonna happen.  

Second, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "As scientists, we're always at the drawing board.  If you're not at the drawing board, you're not doing science."  We are always exploring what he calls "the perimeter of our ignorance," testing and probing into the realms we have yet to explain fully.  What Barr and Wood are doing for the field of human paleobiology is to define that perimeter more clearly -- to identify where our inevitable sampling biases are, so that we can determine what direction to look next.  Not, like our hapless contact-lens-searchers, to continue to look in the same place just because the lighting happens to be better there.

Biases are unavoidable; everyone's got 'em.  The important thing is to be aware of them; they can't bite you on the ass if you keep your eye on them.  In science -- well, in everything, really -- it's good to remember the iconic line from physicist Richard Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself; and you are the easiest person to fool."

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The myth of the Golden Age

You hear it all the time, don't you?  There's no such thing as common decency any more.  Moral values are in freefall.  Simple politeness is a thing of the past.  Kids today don't understand the value of (choose all that apply): hard work, honesty, compassion, loyalty, friendship, culture, intellectual pursuits.  The whole world has gone seriously downhill.

Oh, and we mustn't forget "Make America Great Again."  Implying that there was a time in the past -- usually unspecified -- when America was great, but it's kind of gone down the tubes since then.  But it's not just the Republicans; a 2015 study found that 76% of respondents in the United States believed that "addressing the moral breakdown of the country should be a high priority for their government."

This whole deeply pessimistic attitude is widespread -- that compared to the past, we're a hopeless mess.  The first clue that this might not be accurate, though, comes from history, and not just the fact that the past -- regardless which part of it you choose -- had some seriously bad parts.  Consider in addition that just about every era has felt the same way about its own past.  Nineteenth century Europe, for example, had a nearly religious reverence for the societies of classical Rome and Greece -- which is ironic, because the Greeks and Romans at the height of their civilizations both looked back to their ancestors as living in a "Golden Age of Heroes" that had, sadly, devolved into chaos and highly unheroic ugliness.

The Golden Age by Pietro de Cortona (17th century) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So psychologists Adam Mastroianni (of Columbia University) and Daniel Gilbert (of Harvard University) decided to see if there was any truth to the claim that we really are in moral decline.

Their findings, which were published last week in Nature, drew on sixty years of surveys about moral values, with respondents from 59 different countries.  These surveys not only asked questions regarding whether morality had declined over the respondents' lifetimes (84% said it had), they asked them to rate their own values and their peers'.

Interestingly, although most people said things were worse now than they had been in the past, there was no decline over time in how people rated the values and morality of the people around them in the present.  The percentage of people respondents knew and described as kind, decent, honest, or hard-working has remained completely flat over the past sixty years.

So what's going on?

Mastroianni and Gilbert say it's simple.

People idealize the past because they have bad memories.

It's the same phenomenon as when we recall vacations where there have been mishaps.  After a couple of years have passed, we remember the positive parts -- the walks on the beach, the excellent food, the beautiful weather -- and the sunburn, mosquito bites, delayed flights, and uncomfortable hotel room beds have all faded from memory.  It has to be really bad before the unpleasant memories come to mind first, such as the trip I took with my wife to Belize where the guests and staff of the lodge where we were staying all simultaneously came down with the worst food poisoning I've ever experienced.

Okay, that I remember pretty vividly.  But most vacation mishaps?  Barely remembered -- or only recalled with a smile, a laugh, a "can you believe that happened?"

What Mastroianni and Gilbert found was that we put that same undeserved gloss on the past in general.  It's an encouraging finding, really; people aren't getting worse, morality isn't going downhill, the world isn't going to hell in a handbasket.  In reality, most people now -- just like in the past -- are honest and decent and kind.

The problem, of course, is that given how widespread this belief is, and how resistant it is to changing, how to get folks to stop looking at the past as some kind of Golden Age.  Because the fact is, we have made some significant strides in a great many areas; equality for women and minorities, LGBTQ rights and treatment, concern for the environment are all far ahead of where they were even forty years ago.  There are a lot of ways the past wasn't all that great.

Believe me, as a closeted queer kid who grew up in the Deep South of the 1960s and 1970s, I wouldn't want to go back there for any money.

So maybe we need to turn our focus away from the past and look instead toward the future -- instead of lamenting some mythical and almost certainly false lost paradise, working toward making what's to come even better for everyone. 

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Psychic genomics

Before I start today's post, allow me to begin with a disclaimer: I am not claiming psychic abilities are impossible.  I am not hostile to any attempts to demonstrate their existence scientifically.  In fact, I would love it if all of the claims were true, because it would be wonderful fun to telekinetically control Tucker Carlson while he's on the air and make him unable to do anything but sing the theme song to SpongeBob SquarePants over and over, or put a deadly and horrific curse on Mitch McConnell so that he suddenly develops a soul or something.

But as my grandma was fond of saying, wishin' don't make it so.  In science the usual progression of things is (1) produce unequivocal evidence that the phenomenon you've observed actually exists, (2) find correlations between that phenomenon and whatever you believe is causing it, and (3) show that those correlations actually do represent causation.

Polish "psychic" Stanisława Tomczyk levitating a pair of scissors, which totally wasn't connected to her fingers by a piece of thread or anything (ca. 1909) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Unfortunately, a lot of psychic researchers get the whole thing backwards, which is a little maddening.  Take the story I read yesterday in Mystery Wire about some research by the rather notorious Dean Radin, who has been for decades trying to put psychic stuff unequivocally on a scientific footing.  While, like I said, I have no problem with this as a general goal, much about what Radin does sounds an awful lot like assuming your conclusion and then casting about for incidental evidence to support what you already believed was true.

Turns out Radin was the co-author of a paper in Elsevier called "Genetics of Psychic Ability: A Pilot Case-Control Exome Sequencing Study," that basically looked at genome sequencing people who self-reported a family history of psychic abilities and compared those sequences to people who self-reported no psychic abilities in their family heritage.  And they found differences.

That, unfortunately, constitutes about the sum total of their findings, but Radin et al. proceeded to crow that they'd found a genetic basis for psychic ability.  But amongst the (many) problems, here are a few that jump out right away:

• Out of a sample size of 1,000, only thirteen people reported a family history of psychic stuff.  They then had to actively look for thirteen people who didn't, to use as a control.  This seems like an awfully small sample size from which to draw such a profound conclusion.
• There was no indication that they ruled out other reasons for the similarities.  Given that claims of psychic abilities have at least some tendency to be culture-dependent, isn't it at least possible that the common gene sequences they found were due to similar ethnic background?
• More reputable crowd-based human genomic studies -- such as the one being conducted by 23 & Me -- are still hesitant to assume the commonalities and differences they find in the DNA are causative of phenotype.  Due to the phenomenon of pleiotropy (one gene, many effects) and complicating factors like epigenetics, the most I've seen them say is that (after hundreds of thousands of sequences analyzed) "you have a higher than average likelihood of having trait X."  (Such as when I was told that I am likely to have hair that photo-bleaches in the sun -- which turns out to be true.)
• From their study, they concluded that being genetically psychic is the "wild type" and that we non-psychics are the mutants.  Why, with a grand total of 26 people to compare, they decided this I can't tell, and that's even after reading the actual paper.  Seems to me it's more along the lines of "the modern scientific approach has blunted our perception of the mystical oneness of reality that we once had in the past" stuff that you hear so often from these types.
• As I mentioned earlier, there has yet to be any sort of scientifically admissible evidence that psychic abilities exist, so looking for an underlying cause seems to be a tad premature.

Then, unfortunately, Radin launches off into the ionosphere during an interview with Mystery Wire's writer George Knapp.  He describes another "experiment" (I hesitate even to dignify it by that name) in which a supposed double-blind experiment showed that people who drank tea that had been blessed felt happier than ones who had drunk unblessed tea.  As if this weren't enough, Radin comes up with an inadvertently hilarious explanation:

So we used a little plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, which is in the mustard family.  So it’s got [sic] a little weed.  And a little weed is interesting because its genome was sequenced before the human genome.  And it turns out that like most living creatures around the world have very similar DNA.  [sic again]  So if this plant has a disease that’s genetically based it has an analogue in humans.  [Nota bene: This is where I started laughing.]  So the plants are used for studying genetic diseases without using humans for it.  [NB:  No, they're not.]  So, it also turns out that there are various mutations that are understood about this plant.  And in particular, all living systems on earth have a protein called cryptochrome.  So cryptochrome is interesting because it is a protein that is thought to have quantum properties.  [NB: All molecules have quantum properties.  That's kind of what "quantum property" means -- the behavior of matter and energy on extremely small scales.]  So we thought, okay, let’s get an Arabidopsis plant, that is a particular mutation where it overexpresses cryptochrome, so when there’s blue light on it, the cryptochrome is activated, it overexpresses, it grows more.  So we thought, well, maybe that would be an interesting target, to use for intention, because we think there may be a relationship between observing quantum systems, in this case of protein, and the response to that system.  So again, under double blind conditions, the Buddhist monks have treated water, they have the same water that is not treated, the seeds are grown into two water mediums.  And then there’s a variety of different measures you can take.  One of which is called a hypocotyl.  So the hypocotyl is the point where the stem begins from the seed up to the beginning of the leaves.  So if it’s short and fat, it means that it’s a healthy plant, because it’s not using all of its energy to try to reach the surface or turn upside down or something.  So short fat hypocotyl, we did nine repetitions of the experiment and got extremely significant differences, terms of magnitude is only a matter of a couple of millimeters. [sic]  But so many experiments in such precise results, we can tell there was a really significant difference in growth, better growth with the treated water or the blessed water.

Yeesh.  A hypocotyl a "couple of millimeters" longer constitutes "extremely significant results"?  That rule out all other possible factors, including natural variability and the difficulty of measuring the stem of a small plant to millimeter accuracy?

And as an aside, beginning every other sentence with the word "So" is almost as annoying as the people who use "like" as, like, a punctuation in, like, every, like, thing they say.  What it does not do is make you come across as an articulate intellectual.

Anyhow, I encourage you to read the Mystery Wire article, and (especially) the original paper, which is helpfully included therein.  See if you think I'm being unwarrantedly harsh.  And it's not that I expect scientists -- or anyone, really -- to be completely unbiased; they obviously can't start out from the standpoint that all possible explanations are on equal footing, and they understandably have at least some intellectual and emotional investment in showing their own hypotheses to be correct.

But to say this study lacks dispassionate objectivity is a colossal understatement.  I do have respect for people who investigate fringe phenomena from a scientific standpoint -- the work of the Society for Psychical Research in the UK comes to mind -- but unfortunately, this one ain't it.

So back to the drawing board.  I guess I'll have to keep waiting for McConnell's soul to appear and for Carlson to humiliate himself completely in front of millions of viewers.  Pity, that.

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Author Michael Pollan became famous for two books in the early 2000s, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which looked at the complex relationships between humans and the various species that we have domesticated over the past few millennia.

More recently, Pollan has become interested in one particular facet of this relationship -- our use of psychotropic substances, most of which come from plants, to alter our moods and perceptions.  In How to Change Your Mind, he considered the promise of psychedelic drugs (such as ketamine and psilocybin) to treat medication-resistant depression; in this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week, This is Your Mind on Plants, he looks at another aspect, which is our strange attitude toward three different plant-produced chemicals: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

Pollan writes about the long history of our use of these three chemicals, the plants that produce them (poppies, tea and coffee, and the peyote cactus, respectively), and -- most interestingly -- the disparate attitudes of the law toward them.  Why, for example, is a brew containing caffeine available for sale with no restrictions, but a brew containing opium a federal crime?  (I know the physiological effects differ; but the answer is more complex than that, and has a fascinating and convoluted history.)

Pollan's lucid, engaging writing style places a lens on this long relationship, and considers not only its backstory but how our attitudes have little to do with the reality of what the use of the plants do.  It's another chapter in his ongoing study of our relationship to what we put in our bodies -- and how those things change how we think, act, and feel.

[Note:  if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A tsunami of lies

One of the ways in which the last few years have changed me is that it has made me go into an apoplectic rage when I see people sharing false information on social media.

I'm not talking about the occasional goof; I've had times myself that I've gotten suckered by parody news accounts, and posted something I thought was true that turns out to be some wiseass trying to be funny.  What bothers me is the devastating flood of fake news on everything from vaccines to climate change to politics, exacerbated by "news" agencies like Fox and OAN that don't seem to give a shit about whether what they broadcast is true, only that it lines up with the agenda of their directors.

I've attributed this tsunami of lies to two reasons: partisanship and ignorance.  (And to the intersection of partisanship and ignorance, where lie the aforementioned biased media sources.)  If you're ignorant of the facts, of course you'll be prone to falling for an appealing falsehood; and partisanship in either direction makes you much more likely to agree unquestioningly with a headline that lines up with what you already believed to be true.

Turns out -- ironically -- the assumption that the people sharing fake news are partisan, ignorant, or both might itself be an appealing but inaccurate assessment of what's going on.  A study in Nature this week has generated some curious results showing that once again, reality turns out to be more complex than our favored black-and-white assessments of the situation.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

A study by Ziv Epstein, Mohsen Mosleh, Antonio Arechar, Dean Eckles, and David Rand (of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Gordon Pennycook (of the University of Regina) decided to see what was really motivating people to share false news stories online, and they found -- surprisingly -- that sheer carelessness played a bigger role than either partisanship or ignorance.  In "Shifting Attention to Accuracy Can Reduce Misinformation Online," the team describes a series of experiments involving over a thousand volunteers that leads us to the heartening conclusion that there might be a better way to stem the flood of lies online than getting people to change their political beliefs or engaging in a massive education program.

The setup of the study was as simple as it was elegant.  They first tested the "ignorance" hypothesis by taking test subjects and presenting them with various headlines, some true and some false, and asked them to determine which were which.  It turns out people are quite good at this; there was a full 56-point difference between the likelihood of correctly identifying true and false headlines and making a mistake.

Next, they tested the "partisanship" hypothesis.  The test subjects did worse on this task, but still the error rate wasn't as big as you might guess; people were still 10% less likely to rate true statements as false (or vice versa) even if those statements agreed with the majority stance of their political parties.  So partisanship plays a role in erroneous belief, but it's not the set of blinders many -- including myself -- would have guessed.

Last -- and this is the most interesting test -- they asked volunteers to assess their likelihood of sharing the news stories online, based upon their headlines.  Here, the difference between sharing true versus false stories dropped to only six percentage points.  Put a different way, people who are quite good at discerning false information overall, and still pretty good at recognizing it even when it runs counter to their political beliefs, will still share the news story anyhow.

What it seems to come down to is simple carelessness.  It's gotten so easy to share links that we do it without giving it much thought.  I know I've been a bit shame-faced when I've clicked "retweet" to a link on Twitter, and gotten the message, "Don't you want to read the article first?"  (In my own defense, it's usually been because the story in question is from a source like Nature or Science, and I've gotten so excited by whatever it was that I clicked "retweet" right away even though I fully intend to read the article afterward.  Another reason is the exasperating way Twitter auto-refreshes at seemingly random moments, so if you don't respond to a post right away, it might disappear forever.)  

Improving the rate at which people detected (and chose not to share) fake headlines turned out to be remarkably easy to tweak.  The researchers found that reminding people of the importance of accuracy at the start of the experiment decreased the volunteers' willingness to share false information, as did asking them to assess the accuracy of the headline prior to making the decision about whether to share it. 

It does make me wonder, though, about the role of pivotal "nodes" in the flow of misinformation -- a few highly-motivated people who start the ball of fake news rolling, with the rest of us spreading around the links (whatever our motivation for doing so) in a more piecemeal fashion.  A study by Zignal Labs, for example, found that the amount of deceptive or outright false political information on Twitter went down by a stunning 73% after Donald Trump's account was closed permanently.  (Think of what effect it might have had if Twitter had made this decision back in 2015.)

In any case, to wrap this up -- and to do my small part in addressing this problem -- just remember before you share anything that accuracy matters.  Truth matters.  It's very easy to click "share," but with that ease comes a responsibility to make sure that what we're sharing is true.  We ordinary folk can't dam the flow of bullshit singlehandedly, but each one of us has to take seriously our role in stopping up the leaks, small as they may seem.

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Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Simon Singh's The Code Book, prompted a reader to respond, "Yes, but have you read his book on Fermat's Last Theorem?"

In this book, Singh turns his considerable writing skill toward the fascinating story of Pierre de Fermat, the seventeenth-century French mathematician who -- amongst many other contributions -- touched off over three hundred years of controversy by writing that there were no integer solutions for the equation  aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than 2, then adding, "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain," and proceeding to die before elaborating on what this "marvelous proof" might be.

The attempts to recreate Fermat's proof -- or at least find an equivalent one -- began with Fermat's contemporaries, Evariste de Gaulois, Marin Mersenne, Blaise Pascal, and John Wallis, and continued for the next three centuries to stump the greatest minds in mathematics.  It was finally proven that Fermat's conjecture was correct by Andrew Wiles in 1994.

Singh's book Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 350 Years describes the hunt for a solution and the tapestry of personalities that took on the search -- ending with a tour-de-force paper by soft-spoken British mathematician Andrew Wiles.  It's a fascinating journey, as enjoyable for a curious layperson as it is for the mathematically inclined -- and in Singh's hands, makes for a story you will thoroughly enjoy.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A lens on bias

It's astonishing and humbling how hard it is to see bias when you're inside it.

This comes up in matters of privilege.  As a middle-class American white male, I have had conferred upon me privilege so deep that it's a struggle for me even to know it exists.  I have instant, unquestioned entrée to places and situations that would be difficult, if not blocked entirely, if I were a different ethnicity, gender, or nationality.

It's even more unpleasant when you realize how bias colors science.  Because science is supposed to be above that kind of stuff, isn't it?  Objective, rational, logical, and even-handed.  But I ran into an interview in Science a couple of days ago, conducted and written by Kai Kupferschmidt, of German psychologist Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which referenced a paper Haun and others wrote nine years ago about the bias in psychological studies introduced by the fact that the majority of the test subjects were WEIRD -- Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.  (The last word is -- hopefully obviously -- being used in its broader sense of "from a country with democratically-elected leaders," not in the sense of belonging to the American Democratic Party.)

This bias colors everything psychological studies have turned up about human behavior, because it takes as a given what's normal, common, and acceptable as "what is normal, common, and acceptable in WEIRD societies."  Haun starts out with an example having to do with ownership -- something most of us pretty much take for granted as obvious to everyone.

"In the #Akhoe Hai//om community in Namibia," Haun says, "who were hunter-gatherers until three generations ago, everything that is shareable in principle belongs as much to you as it belongs to me. I could tell you to give me 'my' shoes, and the fact that you're currently wearing them does not matter.  The natural consequence is that everybody has about similar amounts of everything."

Namibian child [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mosmas at http://www.retas.de/thomas/travel/namibia2008/index.html, Namibia Child 2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

These "givens," of course, turn out to be not so given when you look at other societies. 

He follows up with another example from the #Akhoe Hai//om (whom Haun has studied extensively).  "We assume that concepts true in our own cultural context are true generally," he said.  "For example, Marie Schaefer, a former member of my group, led a study on fairness norms. Let's say a friend and I go to the beach and look for shells.  I spend a lot of time searching and find a lot.  He spends his time laying on the beach.  If we divide up the shells, I get a lot more than he will, and that's fair, right?  That's what German children mostly do.  But #Akhoe Hai//om children distribute the goods equally most of the time, no matter who contributed how much.  Everybody has this emotional gut response to being treated 'unfairly.'  But depending on where you grew up, the gut feeling you develop might be completely different."

I recall being in a cultural anthropology class in college and running into this idea the first time.  The professor recounted the interactions between northeastern Native American tribes and Europeans in the early colonial period.  When the Europeans staked out land and said, "This is my land," the Native Americans couldn't even make sense of what they were trying to say.  The concept of land ownership simply didn't exist for them.  The idea you could draw an arbitrary line around a piece of something that had been there long before you arrived and would still be there long after you were dead, and call that piece "mine" in the same sense that you said "this shirt is mine," was so ludicrous as to be laughable.

It wasn't long, of course, before they found out what the implications of the concept of land ownership were -- to their own undoing.

Haun is well aware that studies like his might have the opposite effect of what he intends -- not that cultures (including our own) must be studied on their own terms, but that some cultures are literally better than others.  (And guess whose would probably come out on top?)  Haun says this specter of cultural superiority should not be ignored.  "[It must be dealt with] by confronting it head on," Haun said.  "Scientists can be careful in interpreting their data and engage in the debate.  I don't think racism goes away if we avoid the fact that there is variation as well as similarity across humans.  And the drivers of variation might give us some answers about fundamental questions of who we are and how we work."

I've always thought that the best way to eradicate prejudice is to have people interact with others of different ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, and nationalities -- that it's hard to remain prejudiced against someone who is smiling and chatting with you over a cup of coffee.  Our country's current determination to pull the cloak of insularity around us will have the opposite effect, further demonizing what the phenomenal science fiction writer Nisi Shawl calls "the other" and making us even blinder to our own biases.  Instead of holing up in our little towns, where everyone thinks and looks like ourselves, we should be going to other countries, seeing our common humanity despite our very real differences.

It puts me in mind of a quote from Mark Twain that seems like as good a place as any to conclude.  "Travel is fatal -- it is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

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In August of 1883, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history (literally) obliterated an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The island was Krakatoa (now known by its more correct spelling of "Krakatau").  The magnitude of the explosion is nearly incomprehensible.  It generated a sound estimated at 310 decibels, loud enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away (sailors forty kilometers away suffered ruptured eardrums).  Rafts of volcanic pumice, some of which contained human skeletons, washed up in East Africa after making their way across the entire Indian Ocean.  Thirty-six thousand people died, many of whom were not killed by the eruption itself but by the horrifying tsunamis that resulted, in some places measuring over forty meters above sea level.

Simon Winchester, a British journalist and author, wrote a book about the lead-up to that fateful day in summer of 1883.  It is as lucid and fascinating as his other books, which include A Crack at the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), The Map that Changed the World (a brilliant look at the man who created the first accurate geological map of England), and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (the biographies of the two men who created the Oxford English Dictionary -- one of whom was in a prison for the criminally insane).

So if you're a fan of excellent historical and science writing, or (like me) fascinated with volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, you definitely need to read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.  It will give you a healthy respect for the powerful forces that create the topography of our planet -- some of which wield destructive power greater than anything we can imagine.

Lying to our faces

Why are humans so prone to falling for complete bunk?

I ask this question because of two rather distressing studies that I ran into a while back, but which (understandably, when you see what they're about) didn't get much press.  Both of them should make all of us sit up and take notice.

In the first, a group of medical researchers led by Christina Korownyk of the University of Alberta studied over 400 recommendations (each) made on The Dr. Oz Show and The Doctors, medical talk shows in which advice is liberally dispensed to listeners on various health issues.  The recommendations came from forty episodes from each show, and both the episodes and the recommendations were chosen at random.

The recommendations were then evaluated by a team of medical scientists, who looked at the quality of actual research evidence that supported each. It was found that under half of Dr. Oz's claims had evidential support -- and 15% were contradicted outright by the research.  The Doctors did a little better, but still only had a 63% support from the available evidence.

In the second study, an independent non-partisan group called PunditFact evaluated statements on Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN for veracity, placing them in the categories of "True," "Mostly True," "Half True," "Mostly False," "False," and "Pants On Fire."  The latter category was reserved for statements that were so completely out of skew with the facts that they would have put Pinocchio to shame.

Fox News scored the worst, with only 18% of statements in the "True" or "Mostly True" categories.   60% of the statements on Fox were in the lowest three categories.  But before my readers who are on the liberal side of things start crowing with delight, allow me to point out that MSNBC doesn't win any awards for truth-telling, either.  They scored only 31% in the top two categories, and 48% in the lowest three.

Even CNN, which had the best scores, still only had 60% of their statements in the "True" or "Mostly True" categories!

Pretty discouraging stuff. Because far too many people take as gospel the statements heard on these sad examples of media, unquestioningly accepting what they hear as fact.

I think the reason is that so many of us are uncomfortable questioning our baseline assumptions.  If we already believe that liberals are going to lead the United States into ruination, then (1) we'll naturally gravitate toward Fox News, and (2) we'll hear lots of what we already thought was true, and have the lovely experience of feeling like we're right about everything.  Likewise the liberals who think that the Republicans are evil incarnate, and who therefore land right in happy MSNBC fantasy land.

And as the first study shows, this isn't confined to politics.  When Dr. Oz says, "Carb-load your plate at breakfast because it's heart-healthy" (a claim roundly contradicted by the evidence), the listeners who love waffles with lots of maple syrup are likely to say, "Hell yeah!"

What's worse is that when we're shown statements contradictory to our preconceived beliefs, we're likely not even to remember them.  About ten years ago, two of my students did a project in my class where they had subjects self-identify as liberal, conservative, or moderate, and then presented them with an article they'd written containing statistics on the petroleum industry.  The article was carefully written so that half of the data supported a conservative viewpoint (things like "government subsidies for oil companies keep gasoline prices low, encouraging business") and half supported more liberal stances (such as "the increasing reliance on fossil fuels has been shown to be linked with climate change").  After reading the article, each test subject was given a test to see which facts they remembered from it.

Conservatives were more likely to remember the conservative claims, liberals the liberal claims.  It's almost as if we don't just disagree with the opposite viewpoint; on some level we can't even quite bring ourselves to believe it exists.

It's a troubling finding.  This blind spot seems to be firmly wired into our brain, again bringing up the reluctance that all of us have in considering that we might be wrong about something.

The only way out, of course, is through training our brains to suspend judgment until we've found out the facts.  The rush to come to a conclusion -- especially when the conclusion is in line with what we already believed -- is a dangerous path.  All the more highlighting that we need to be teaching critical thinking and smart media literacy in public schools.

And we need to turn off the mainstream media.  It's not that one side or the other is skewed; it's all bad.

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Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Contention in the ganzfeld

I just ran into an article over at Psychology Today that I thought deserved a close examination.

It's by Steve Taylor, senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, and is called "Open-Minded Science."  A one-line summary of the article is that science has an inherent bias against considering parapsychological phenomenon, and that there is compelling evidence of telepathy (known as "psi" by aficionados) from what is known as the ganzfeld experiment.

So, a little background.  Ganzfeld is a German word meaning "entire field," and purports to set test subjects up to maximize their ability to collect data from another mind telepathically.  First proposed by German psychology researcher Wolfgang Metzger, what the procedure entails is placing the subject in complete (or as complete as can be managed) sensory deprivation.  A series of patterns or letters, either on cards or on a computer screen, is observed by the researcher, and the subject attempts to identify what the researcher is seeing.  The removal of other sensory inputs, supporters claim, makes subjects better able to sense telepathic signals, and results in a far higher than chance ability to select the correct target patterns.

The gist of Taylor's article is that these positive results -- well beyond what would be considered statistically significant support for psi -- are being ignored by the scientific establishment because of an entrenched bias against anything that's "paranormal."  Taylor writes:

In recent years, a series of studies showing significant results from psi phenomena have been published in a whole range of major psychology journals.  A number of comprehensive overviews of the evidence have also been published.  Most notably, last year American Psychologist carried an article by Professor Etzel Cardeña entitled “The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A Review.”  Cardeña showed clearly that the evidence for phenomena like telepathy, precognition and clairvoyance has proven so significant and consistent over a massive range of difference experiments that it cannot simply be explained away in terms of fraud, the “file drawer” effect (when researchers don’t bother to publish negative results) or poor methodology.  Cardeña also showed that there is no reason at all to take the view that these phenomena break the laws of science, science they are compatible with many of the theories and findings of quantum physics (which is why many quantum physicists have been open to their existence.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, it drives me nuts when people start attributing psychic phenomena to quantum physics, because those associations are usually based upon scant knowledge of what quantum physics actually says.  But let's look past that for now.  Taylor goes on to say that the evidence has been mounting for years:

A meta-analysis of more than three thousand Ganzfeld trials that took place from 1974 to 2004 had a combined ‘hit rate’ of 32 per cent.  A seven percent higher than chance rate may not seem so impressive, but over such a large number of experiments, this equates to odds of thousands of trillions to one—and a figure far too significant to explained in terms of the file drawer effect.  In addition, in Ganzfeld experiments that have been undertaken with creative people, there has been a significantly higher than normal rate of success.  In 128 Ganzfeld sessions with artistically gifted students at the University of Edinburgh, a 47% success rate was obtained, with odds of 140 million to one.  Similarly, in a session with undergraduates from the Juilliard school of performing arts, the students achieved a hit rate of 50%.

If these figures are correct, then Taylor's right; this is evidence that demands an honest analysis.  As skeptics, we can't just pay attention to the evidence that lines up with the way we already decided the world works, and ignore everything else.  So let's take a look at his claim.

In 1999, Richard Wiseman and Julie Milton, of the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Edinburgh respectively, published a meta-analysis of ganzfeld results in the Psychological Bulletin.  Wiseman and Milton were unequivocal:

The new ganzfeld studies show a near-zero effect size and a statistically nonsignificant overall cumulation.  Out of three autoganzfeld internal effects that the new database examined, only one effect was replicated, and it turns out to have been mistakenly reported by Bern and Honorton (1994) as having been statistically significant in the autoganzfeld studies...  Whatever the reason, the autoganzfeld results have not been replicated by a "broader range of researchers."  The ganzfeld paradigm cannot at present be seen as constituting strong evidence for psychic functioning.

The pro-psi researchers then launched their own rebuttal.  A paper by Daryl Bem, John Palmer, and Richard S. Broughton in the Journal of Parapsychology, published in September of 2001, didn't argue with Wiseman and Milton's analysis, but said that there were ten new studies, and when those are added to the ones analyzed by Wiseman and Milton, "the overall ganzfeld effect again becomes significant."  Thus they stood firm on claims Daryl Bem and Chuck Honorton had made seven years earlier, when they had published their own meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin in which they stated outright that "the psi ganzfeld effect is large enough to be of both theoretical interest and potential practical importance."

Here's where we get into murky water.  Psychological researcher Susan Blackmore, who has a well-deserved reputation for being one of the clearest, most open-minded thinkers on the subject -- and who herself is not willing to dismiss psi out of hand -- clobbered Bem and Honorton in a 2017 article in Skeptical Inquirer, stating that they had included in their analysis a series of studies by Carl Sargent that had been widely criticized for methodological flaws, and in which "the better the quality of the study, the smaller the apparent psi effect."  More troubling still is that Bem and Honorton, apparently deliberately, never mentioned Sargent's name as the source of some of their data, knowing that -- quite rightly -- this would cast doubt over their whole analysis.  Blackmore writes:

They also admitted that “One laboratory contributed 9 of the studies.  Honorton’s own laboratory contributed 5…  Thus, half of the studies were conducted by only 2 laboratories.” (Bem & Honorton, 1994, p 6).  But they did not say which laboratory contributed those nine studies.  Even worse they did not mention Sargent, giving no references to his papers and none to mine.  No one reading their review would have a clue that serious doubt had been cast on more than a quarter of the studies involved. 

I have since met Bem more than once, most recently at one of the Tucson consciousness conferences where we were able to have a leisurely breakfast together and discuss the evidence for the paranormal.  I told Bem how shocked I was that he had included the Sargent data without saying where it came from and without referencing either Sargent’s own papers or the debate that followed my discoveries.  He simply said it did not matter.

But one study -- and one researcher's apparent shoulder-shrug at including debunked studies in his analysis -- doesn't mean much.  There was an in-depth analysis done in 2013 by Jeffrey Rouder, Richard Morey, and Jordan Province, published in Psychological Bulletin, that had the following to say:

Psi phenomena, such as mental telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance, have garnered much recent attention.  We reassess the evidence for psi effects from Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Risio's (2010) meta-analysis...  We find that the evidence from Storm et al.'s presented data set favors the existence of psi by a factor of about 6 billion to 1, which is noteworthy even for a skeptical reader.  Much of this effect, however, may reflect difficulties in randomization: Studies with computerized randomization have smaller psi effects than those with manual randomization.  When the manually randomized studies are excluded and omitted studies included, the Bayes factor evidence is at most 330 to 1, a greatly attenuated value.  We argue that this value is unpersuasive in the context of psi because there is no plausible mechanism and because there are almost certainly omitted replication failures.

And because there can never be enough meta-analyses, researcher and skeptic Andrew Endersby did his own in 2005, and had the following to say:

At the end of my research I find a hit rate of between 28.6% and 28.9% depending on certain choices concerning which scoring methods to use on particular experiments.  This doesn't have quite the headline grabbing appeal of 1 in 3 instead of 1 in 4 but the hit rate is still highly significant for 6,700 sessions.  However, this contains all experiments.  Flawed or not, standard or not.  There's no doubt that this figure can be tweaked up or down according to ruling in or out certain experiments.

Not exactly a ringing proclamation of support.

So where are we now?  Same place, pretty  much.  You've got your true believers, your fervent disbelievers, and people in the middle like myself who would very much like to know if there's actually something there to study.  Because if the ganzfeld effect actually works, it would be kind of earthshattering, you know?  It would mean that there actually was a mechanism for information transfer between minds, and would overturn the basic assumption we have about neuroscience -- that what occurs in your mind is solely the result of electrical and chemical signaling within your own skull.  Even The Skeptic's Dictionary -- usually squarely on the side of the scoffers -- is unwilling to discount it out of hand.  Here's how the entry for the ganzfeld effect ends:

Actually, what we know is that the jury is still out and it probably will never come in if the best that parapsychologists can come up with is a statistic in a meta-analysis that is unlikely due to chance.  Even if we take the data at face value, we know that no matter how statistically significant the results are, the actual size of this psi effect is so small that we can’t detect it in a single person in any obvious way.  We have to deduce it from guessing experiments.  What hope do we have of isolating, harnessing, or expanding this power if a person who has it can’t even directly recognize its presence?

I'll end with another quote from Susan Blackmore, which I think is spot-on.  If anyone has replicable, well-controlled experiments showing the existence of psi, I'm more than willing to consider them.  But until then:

Perhaps errors from the past do not matter if there really is a repeatable experiment.  The problem is that my personal experience conflicts with the successes I read about in the literature and I cannot ignore either side.  I cannot ignore other people's work because science is a collective enterprise and publication is the main way of sharing our findings.  On the other hand I cannot ignore my own findings—there would be no point in doing science, or investigating other people's work, if I did.  The only honest reaction to the claims of psi in the ganzfeld is for me to say "I don't know but I doubt it. "

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a brilliant look at two opposing worldviews; Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.  Mann sees today's ecologists, environmental scientists, and even your average concerned citizens as falling into two broad classes -- wizards (who think that whatever ecological problems we face, human ingenuity will prevail over them) and prophets (who think that our present course is unsustainable, and if we don't change our ways we're doomed).

Mann looks at a representative member from each of the camps.  He selected Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and driving force behind the Green Revolution, to be the front man for the Wizards, and William Vogt, who was a strong voice for population control and conversation, as his prototypical Prophet.  He takes a close and personal look at each of their lives, and along the way outlines the thorny problems that gave rise to this disagreement -- problems we're going to have to solve regardless which worldview is correct.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Probing the scientists

Because we clearly needed something else to be angry about, today we have: a cadre of four senators who are calling for an investigation into the National Science Foundation's grant program designed to educate meteorologists about climate change.

The four senators are James Lankford (Oklahoma), Rand Paul (Kentucky), Ted Cruz (surprise! -- Texas), and James Inhofe (even bigger surprise! -- Oklahoma).  Inhofe, you may remember, is the knuckle-dragger who doesn't know the difference between weather and climate, and illustrated the fact by bringing a snowball onto the floor of the Senate and presenting it as evidence that the world wasn't warming up.

Along the same lines, every time Inhofe eats dinner, world hunger goes away for a while.

The four drafted a request for a probe into the NSF's Climate Central program, stating that it was "not science -- it is propagandizing."

My question is: what would it take to make the NSF's stance on climate "science?"  Saying that fossil fuels are great for the environment because plants like carbon dioxide?  That dumping coal ash into streams -- now completely legal in states that do not have a standard "maximum contaminant level" for water, and have demonstrated the need for "regulatory flexibilities" -- is perfectly safe?  That we should all be optimistic, because even if it does warm up, it'll make the Alaskan tundra nice and toasty warm?

These four -- and others like them -- have zero respect for science.  Science, to them, is what is expedient for their constituents and (especially) the lobbyists who fund their campaigns.  They've somehow confused "peer-reviewed valid science" with "science that aligns with the way I'd like the world to work."

And anything that doesn't align in that fashion is summarily dismissed.  Can't have the universe be inconvenient to your preconceived biases, after all.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Welp.sk, Air pollution, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Ben Strauss, CEO of Climate Central, was (understandably) livid at the impending investigation.  "Climate Central is not an advocacy organization, and the scientific consensus on climate change is not a political viewpoint," Strauss said in an email to NBC News.

Which, I predict, will have exactly zero effect, given that Scott "Fuck Ethics" Pruitt, who said last year that "Science should not be something that's just thrown about to dictate policy in Washington, D. C." is still in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency, despite having amassed more allegations of misconduct in his short tenure than any other appointed or elected official I've ever seen.

So if we shouldn't use science, what should we use to dictate policy?  Astrology?  Divine inspiration?  Thoughts and prayers?

The anti-science bent goes all the way to the top, given that every time any science-related subject is brought up with Donald Trump, he gives evidence of having maxed out his science education when he outgrew My First Big Picture Book of the Universe in second grade.  All you have to do is look at the list of appointments he's made to high government positions to convince yourself that if you're a anti-intellectual young-Earth creationist, you've got a good shot.  (Just to mention one particularly egregious example: Teresa Manning, who was deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Population Affairs, went on record as saying that contraception "does not work to prevent pregnancy."  After making use of the revolving door Trump has installed in all of the government offices, Manning was replaced by Diane Foley, who said that teaching teenagers how to use condoms correctly was "sexual harassment."  Foley's qualification for the post seems to be her tenure as president and CEO of "Life Network," the mission statement of which is to "present the gospel of Jesus Christ.")

I know I'm prone to hyperbole at times, but I don't think it's overstating the case to say that the people in charge right now wouldn't know a valid, evidence-based scientific argument if it walked up and bit them on the ass.

I'm finding it harder and harder to stay optimistic, here.  The pro-Trump faction, along with their answer to a North-Korea-style state sponsored media (Fox News), have done their job too well.  When we've devolved from respecting the research of the people who actually understand how the world works to accepting whatever Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity say without question, we've entered a realm where facts -- hell, reality -- doesn't matter.  As I've said before, once you teach people to doubt the data, you not only can convince them of anything, no logical argument you could craft will ever change their minds.

As a long-ago environmental science student of mine said, things are going to have to get a whole lot worse before people will wake up.  We've already seen prolonged droughts, killer storms, blistering heat waves, and various other weather weirdness that (taken together) form a pattern that is incontrovertible.  But for most people in the United States, it hasn't become dire enough yet.  We can still sit in our comfortable homes, go to the grocery store to pick up food, turn on the tap and get clean water, cool things off with air conditioning.

Once those things start being affected by climate change -- when we get jolted out of our complacency, and say, "Hey, maybe the scientists were right after all!" -- I'm afraid it will be too late to do anything.

Which is just what Paul, Lankford, Cruz, and Inhofe want.  They're just counting on it being delayed long enough for them to retire with cocky grins and full bank accounts.

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This week's book recommendation is the biography of one of the most inspirational figures in science; the geneticist Barbara McClintock.  A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller not only explains to the reader McClintock's groundbreaking research into how transposable elements ("jumping genes") work, but is a deft portrait of a researcher who refused to accept no for an answer.  McClintock did her work at a time when few women were scientists, and even fewer were mavericks who stood their ground and went against the conventional paradigm of how things are.  McClintock was one -- and eventually found the recognition she deserved for her pioneering work with a Nobel Prize.