Reinventing Lysenko

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet agrobiologist during the Stalin years, whose interest in trying to improve crop yields led him into some seriously sketchy pseudoscience.  He believed in a warped version of Lamarckism -- that plants exposed to certain environmental conditions during their lives would alter what they do to adjust to those conditions, and (furthermore) those alterations would be passed down to subsequent generations.

He not only threw away everything Mendel and Darwin had uncovered, he disbelieved in DNA as the hereditary material.  Lysenko wrote:

An immortal hereditary substance, independent of the qualitative features attending the development of the living body, directing the mortal body, but not produced by the latter -- that is Weismann’s frankly idealist, essentially mystical conception, which he disguised as “Neo-Darwinism.”  Weismann’s conception has been fully accepted and, we might say, carried further by Mendelism-Morganism.

So basically, since there were no genes there to constrain the possibilities, humans could mold organisms in whatever way they chose.  "It is possible, with man’s intervention," Lysenko wrote, "to force any form of animal or plant to change more quickly and in a direction desirable to man.  There opens before man a broad field of activity of the greatest value to him."

Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Soviet agricultural industry was ordered to use Lysenko's theories (if I can dignify them by that name) to inform their practices.  Deeper plowing of fields, for example, was said by Lysenko to induce plants' roots to delve deeper for minerals, creating deeper-rooted plants in following years and increased crop yields.  Farmers dutifully began to plow fields to a depth of five feet, requiring enormous expenditure of time and labor.

Crop yields didn't change.  But that didn't matter; Lysenko's ideas were beloved by Stalin, as they seemed to give a scientific basis to the concept of striving by the sturdy peasant stock, thus improving their own lot.  Evidence and data took a back seat to ideology.  Lysenko was given award after award and rose to the post of Director of the Institute of Genetics in the USSR's Academy of Sciences.  Scientists who followed Lysenko's lead in making up data out of whole cloth to support the state-approved model of heredity got advancements, grants, and gifts from Stalin himself.  Scientists who pointed out that Lysenko's experiments were flawed and his data doctored or fabricated outright were purged -- by some estimates three thousand of them were fired, exiled, jailed, or executed for choosing "bourgeois science" (i.e. actual evidence-based research) over Lysenko.  His stranglehold on Soviet biological research and agricultural practice didn't cease until his retirement in 1965, by which time an entire generation of Soviet scientists had been hindered from making any progress at all.

He is directly responsible for policies that led to widespread famines during which millions starved.

Lately, George Santayana's famous comment about being doomed to repeat history we haven't learned from has been graphically illustrated over and over.  Donald Trump, and the fascist, anti-science ideologues he hired to run the place while he's out golfing, have in the last three months:

• done a systematic search-and-destroy against government-sponsored research about climate change
• eliminated funding for the National Institute of Health and the Center for Disease Control, especially targeting anything that mentions mRNA (presumably because of the COVID-19 vaccine, which is still widely hated by the far right)
• issued a decree declaring that there are only two biological sexes; the CDC was instructed to delete any papers, articles, and online resources that even mentioned the word "gender"
• virtually shut down USAID, which funds global disease prevention, treatment, and care
• once again doubled down on the idiotic claim that vaccination causes autism; as an indication of the level to which he understands science, his pronouncement about this was, "If you look at things that are happening, something's causing it."
• fired staff at NOAA and the National Weather Service just in time for tornado and hurricane season

So just like in Stalin's day, we are moving toward a state-endorsed scientific party line, which non-scientists (and scientists in the pay of corporate interests or the politicians themselves) are enforcing using such sticks as censorship, funding cuts, and layoffs.  They're even calling the firings "purges;" how they don't cringe at using a word associated with the horrors of people like Stalin and Mao Tse Tung is beyond me.

Or maybe, given how proud people like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Marco Rubio seem to be of their own cruelty, they have no problem with their viciousness being out on display for all to see.

Lysenko died forty years ago, but his propaganda-based, anti-science spirit lives on.  My hope is that because of the greater transparency and freedom of information afforded by the internet, this sort of behavior will at least not be shrouded in secrecy the way that Stalin's and Lysenko's actions were.  But even if people know what's happening, they have to speak up, and demand action from the spineless members of Congress who are standing idly by while one man and his neo-fascist cronies destroy decades of vital scientific research.  

It's only been three months, and the damage is already horrific.  And keep in mind Trump is, astonishingly, only one-sixteenth of the way through his term.

You do the math.

We are following the same devastating path that annihilated the USSR's position in the scientific community for a generation.  Like the Stalin regime, our nation is at the mercy of the whims of one catastrophically vain, immoral, and stupid man who has elevated a cadre of anti-science zealots to control our science policy based not only what is right or true, but what lines up with party propaganda.  And I fear that over the next three years the claws of partisan politics will sink so deeply into scientific research that it will, as it did in the USSR, take decades to repair the destruction.

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Ruling over ashes

"Donald Trump is a stupid man's idea of a smart man, a poor man's idea of a rich man, and a weak man's idea of a strong man."

This quote -- often credited to Fran Leibowitz, although I can't find certain attribution -- is spot-on.  He flaunts his wealth in a way that ought to be embarrassing, engages in flexes that crumble whenever someone stands up to him (witness his ongoing war of words with the leaders of Canada), and trots out just enough fancy-sounding verbiage to give the impression, at least if you don't dig very deep, that he knows what he's talking about.  But even a half-assed effort at a close look, and the whole house of cards collapses.  To give just one of countless examples, two days ago he announced a long litany of tariffs that are supposed to somehow fix the American economy despite just about every economist in the country saying, "No no no please merciful heavens no please don't do this it's a terrible idea," and lo and behold, the stock market had its worst day since 2020 (when, not coincidentally, he was also president).  At least there was a grimly humorous note, because on the list was a ten percent tariff on imports from the Heard and McDonald Islands.

If you can't think of any American imports from the Heard and McDonald Islands, there's a good reason for that.  There aren't any.  

The Heard and McDonald Islands are uninhabited.

Well, they're inhabited by elephant seals and penguins.  But lemme tell you, if the seals and penguins start exporting goods, the Stable Genius here in the United States is ready for 'em.

So what's happening is that people who (1) are dramatically uninformed and fact-resistant, and (2) get all their information from Fox News and OANN, are all in on policies that have most of the rest of us repeating "What the fuck?" over and over.  Consider, for example, the effect that "DOGE" has had on scientific research, only two months into the second Trump presidency.

Elon Musk's clearcut-the-government approach -- I was going to call it a strategy, but it's closer to arson -- has already gutted science across the board.  Some examples:

• Officials at the National Institute of Health have been told to scrub all mention of mRNA from grants, presumably because the COVID-19 vaccine, long a bête noire of the right, is mRNA-based.  This comes at the same time as an announcement that an mRNA-based vaccine was shown to have the potential to cure pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest and hardest-to-treat types of cancer known.  Not halt its progress; cure it.  But no, can't have that, not with RFK Jr., Mr. Treat-Measles-With-Cod-Liver-Oil, running health policy.
• Speaking of RFK, he just announced that he's laying off the entire staff of the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy.  All of them.
• Because one loony alt-med type running stuff evidently isn't enough, Dr. Mehmet Oz was just confirmed as the director for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid.
• Work at many medical research institutions has ground to a halt, because seemingly random cuts, firings, and layoffs have taken out not only the researchers themselves, but critical support staff, supplies, and equipment.  "Warehouse staff are also gone, and incoming shipments of reagents and biological samples are now being turned away," said one staff member, who only spoke on condition of anonymity.  "We have orders in mid-process with no idea how to move forward."  This, apparently, constitutes "governmental efficiency."
• The journal Nature conducted a poll of over 1,600 scientists working in the United States, and found that three-quarters of them are now actively looking for jobs elsewhere, particularly in Europe or Canada.  One, who works in agricultural genomics, said, "This is my home -- I really love my country.  But a lot of my mentors have been telling me to get out, right now."
• Responding to firings at NASA and NOAA, and bogus and partisan "investigations" of colleges and research institutions, 1,900 scientists signed a letter warning the American public of the damage Trump and his cronies are causing to our standing as a leader in scientific research.  "We see real danger in this moment," the letter says, in part.  "We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry.  We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated."

The problem is -- to be completely frank -- Trump doesn't give a flying rat's ass about any of this, because he lacks even the smallest shred of empathy, and also because he's too catastrophically stupid to understand science.  Recall that he's the guy who wanted to nuke a hurricane, and when that got nixed, thought he could change its path by drawing on a map with a sharpie.  

Apparently, "Making America Great Again" somehow involves tanking the stock market, killing vital medical research, slicing other scientific programs to the bone, wiping out weather forecasting and climate modeling agencies just as we're heading into tornado and hurricane season, intimidating and censoring researchers, and forcing a mass exodus of the smartest people we've got to other countries where they'll actually have a chance at a stable career.

It'd be different if Trump and his cadre had an actual plan, but at this point I honestly don't believe they do -- beyond (1) stay in power and (2) get as rich as possible.  The rest is just window-dressing, and any damage they do along the way falls into the "Oh, Well!" Department.

Even if a miracle happens and the Republicans grow a spine and start standing up to him and saying "Enough," there's already been so much vandalism done to our reputation worldwide that it's hard to see how it'll be reversible, at least in the short-term.  If I were an investor in another country, no way in hell would I risk aligning myself with the United States right now, not with a capricious, thin-skinned, low-IQ egomaniac running the place.

What I'd be doing is trying to lure qualified Americans to relocate elsewhere.

The whole thing reminds me of another quote.  Like the one I started with, it's of uncertain provenance, and has been misattributed to Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War.  Wherever it originated, it's still apt here. 

"An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground, as long as he is allowed to rule over the ashes."

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Spark of lies

Let me just say for the record that if you're making a claim, your case is not strengthened by lying about the evidence.

The topic comes up because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link along with a message ending with the words "HUGE FACEPALM," and I have to say that is, if anything, an underreaction.

The story starts with a piece of (legitimate, and actually fascinating) research that appeared in Nature a few years ago.  It used the technique of fluorescence tagging to establish that rapid movement of zinc ions at the moment of fertilization is one of the mechanisms that prevents polyspermy -- the fusion of an egg with two sperm cells, which would result in a wildly wrong number of chromosomes and (very) early embryonic death.

Well, a woman named Kenya Sinclair, writing for Catholic Online, found this research -- I was going to say "read it," but that seems doubtful -- and is claiming that this "zinc spark," as the researchers called it, represents the moment the soul enters the embryo.  Thus proving that an immortal soul is conferred at the moment of conception.

Don't believe me?  Here is a verbatim quote:

Catholics have long believed life begins at the moment of conception, which is why in vitro fertilization and the use of contraceptives are considered immoral.  Now, with the discovery of the spark of life, science just may have proven the Church has been right all along...

Researchers discovered the moment a human soul enters an egg, which gives pro-life groups an even greater edge in the battle between embryonic life and death. The precise moment is celebrated with a zap of energy released around the newly fertilized egg.

Teresa Woodruff, one of the study's senior authors and professor in obstetrics and gynecology at the university, delivered a press release in which she stated, "to see the zinc radiate out in a burst from each human egg was breathtaking."

Of course it is breathtaking - she saw the moment a soul entered the newly fertilized egg!

Though scientists are unable to explain why the egg releases zinc, which then binds to small molecules with a flash, the faithful recognize this must be the moment God allows a miracle to occur.

This then spawned a YouTube video (because of course it did) that has garnered over forty thousand views, and comments like the following:

• This gives the idea that the Shroud of Turin somewhat resembles this kind of event, where a burst of light brings someone into life.
• Glory to Lord and Savior Jesus for all eternity Thank you Lord, THANK YOU!!!
• For me if soul exist then also god exist
• In vitro fertilizaton [sic] is playing God, and should be illegal, and fertilized eggs SHOULD NOT BE DESTROYED, they are killing human beings!  Life begins at conception no matter what athiest [sic] scientists say!
• I am a Christian but I'm confused on this.  If the flash of light has something to do with God and the souls entering the body, why does it happen in animals?  I've been told that animals don't have souls... is that wrong idk?

IDK either, honestly, but mostly what IDK is how people who post this stuff remember not to put their underwear on backwards.

The whole thing put me in mind of the map that was circulating in the months after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, and was claimed to show the spread of horrible toxic nuclear contamination from the breached nuclear reactor:

I mean, look at that!  Glowing purple at the center, with evil red and orange tendrils reaching out like some kind of malign entity all the way across the Pacific!

There are just a couple of problems with this.  First, if you'll look at the scale on the right, you'll see that the colors represent something measured in centimeters.  I don't know about you, but I've hardly ever seen radioactivity measured in units of distance.  ("Smithers!  We've got to get out of here!  If this reactor melts down, it will release over five and a half furlongs of gamma rays!")

In fact, this is a map showing the maximum wave heights from the tsunami.  But that didn't stop people from using this image to claim that NOAA and other government agencies were hiding the information on deadly contamination of the ocean in a particularly nefarious and secretive way, namely by creating a bright, color-coded map and releasing it on their official website.

Look, I get that we all have our pet theories and strongly-held beliefs, and we'd love it to pieces if we found hard evidence supporting them.  But taking scientific research and mischaracterizing it to make it look like you have that evidence is, to put it bluntly, lying.

And the fact that you're successfully hoodwinking the gullible and ignorant is not something to brag about.

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Academic predators

Today's topic, which comes to me via a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, has a funny side and a not-so-funny side.

The link my friend sent me was to a paper called "The Psychometric Measurement of God," by one George Hammond, M.S. Physics.  In it, he claims to have used the methods of physics to prove that God exists, which would be a pretty good feat.  So I eagerly read the paper, which turned out to be an enormous mélange of sciency-sounding terms, evidently using a template something like this: "(big word) (big word) (big word) God (big word) (big word) (big word) (big word) matrix (big word) (big word) scientific measurement (big word) (big word) (big word) God exists q.e.d."

Don't believe me? Here's a representative passage:

I had already published in 1994 a peer-reviewed paper in a prominent journal pointing out that there was a decussation in the Papez Loop in Jeffrey Gray’s fornical septo-hippocampal system indicating that it regulated not only Anxiety as he said it did, but in a diagonal mode of operational so regulated his Impulsivity dimension.  In the brain the septum is located dead center in the “X” formed by the fornix thus regulating information to and from all 8 cubic lobes of the brain via the fornical Papez Loop.  Since then the septal area is also dead center in Thurstone’s Box in the brain I eventually realized that Gray’s septo-hippocampal system controls all 13 personality dimensions of the Structural Model of Personality!...  Meanwhile, factorization of this 4 x 4 matrix yields one, single, final top 4th order eigenvector of Psychology.  What could this factor be?...  [T]he final top factor in Psychology is in fact the God of the Bible.  Since this is a scientific measurement, God can actually be measured to 2 decimal point accuracy.

Please note that I didn't select this passage because it sounds ridiculous; it all sounds like this.

Or maybe, with my mere B.S. in Physics, I'm just not smart enough to understand it.

The fact that this is a wee bit on the spurious side is accentuated by the various self-congratulatory statements scattered through it, like "this is nothing less than awesome!" and "if you think discovering the gods is an amazing scientific turn of events, brace yourself!" and "my personal scientific opinion as a graduate physicist is that the possibility [of my being correct] is better than 1 in 3."  Also, the inadvertently hilarious statement that "evolutionary biology discovered the 'airbag theory' millions of years before General Motors did" might clue you in to the possibility that this paper may not have been peer reviewed.

But so far, this is just some loony guy writing some loony stuff, which should come as no big surprise, because after all, that's what loony guys do.  And there's not much to be gained by simply poking fun at what, honestly, are low-hanging fruit.  But that brings us to the less-than-amusing part.

The site where this "paper" was published is academia.edu.  My general thought has been that most .edu sites are pretty reliable, but that may have to be revised.  "Academia" is not only not peer reviewed -- it's barely even moderated.  Literally anyone can publish almost anything.

Basically, it's not a site for valid scientific research; it's purely a money-making operation.  If you poke around on the site a little, you'll find you're quickly asked to sign up and give them your email, and badgered to subscribe (for a monthly fee, of course).  I probably don't need to say this, but do not give these people your email.  It turns out there's a page on Quora devoted to the topic of academia.edu, and the comments left by people who have actually interacted with them are nothing short of scathing.  Here's a sampler:

• If you sign up, the people who upload the pdf files will give you exactly what it seemed like they would give you, a paper pdf that makes you sign up using another link, which is also fake!  If you ask to contact the person who wrote it, they will either ignore you or block you. Don’t sign up for Academia, because when you do they just take you to another link, which is ridiculous.  Academia is a public research company, they don’t review anything or enforce rules.
• I found it very unsettling that the ONLY permission they ask for is to….VIEW AND DOWNLOAD YOUR CONTACTS!  That was a SERIOUS tip-off to me that something wasn’t right.
• It’s a scam, they try every trick in the book to get you to sign up; according to them I must be one of the most famous people on the planet.
• I hate this site.  Looks like scammy trash.  I tried to sign up and after receiving my e-mail (use an account you don’t care about), then it looks like I can only proceed if I sign up for a bulk download account, and that costs money.  Fuck 'em.
• They are scammers trying to get your money.  They told me I was cited in more than 2k papers.  My name is not common and I don't participate in the academic world.
• Be careful with this.  Academia.edu was flagged by gmail and seems to have full access to my Google Account, not even partial access.  Given some of the other privacy and IP considerations with sharing your content on this site I would steer clear of it in future regardless - it’s basically a LinkedIn with similar commercial ambitions to make VCs a ton of money so there are the common concerns of “you’re the product” and “your content is now their content”.  Regardless this level of access to gmail is unwarranted and an invasion of privacy and was not clearly disclosed when I signed up (quick sign up to download a document).

So, the sad truth is that just because a site has .edu in its address, it's not necessarily reliable.  I always say "check sources, then check them again," but this is becoming harder and harder with pay-to-play sites (often called "predatory journals") that will publish any damn thing people submit.  From what I found, it seems like academia.edu isn't exactly pay-to-play; there's apparently not a fee for uploading your paper, and the money they make is from people naïve enough to sign up for a subscription.  (Of course, I couldn't dig into their actual rules and policies, because then I would have had to sign up, and I'm damned if I'm letting them get anywhere near my email address, much less my money.)  Even so, what this means is that the papers you find there, like the one by the estimable Mr. Hammond (M.S. Physics) have not passed any kind of gatekeeper.  There may be legitimate papers on the site; it's possible some younger researchers, trying to establish their names in their fields, are lured in by the possibility of getting their work in print somewhere.  Those papers are probably okay.

But as Hammond's "(big word) (big word) (big word) I proved that God exists!  I'm awesome!" paper illustrates, it would be decidedly unwise to trust everything on their site.

So once again: check your sources.  Don't just do a search to find out if what you're looking into has been published somewhere; find out where it's been published, and by whom, and then see if you can find out whether the author and the publication are legitimate.

It may seem like a lot of work, but if you want to stem the rising tide of false claims circulating madly about -- and I hope we all do -- it's well worth the time.

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People made fun of Donald Rumsfeld for his statement that there are "known unknowns" -- things we know we don't know -- but a far larger number of "unknown unknowns," which are all the things we aren't even aware that we don't know.

While he certainly could have phrased it a little more clearly, and understand that I'm not in any way defending Donald Rumsfeld's other actions and statements, he certainly was right in this case.  It's profoundly humbling to find out how much we don't know, even about subjects about which we consider ourselves experts.  One of the most important things we need to do is to keep in mind not only that we might have things wrong, and that additional evidence may completely overturn what we thought we knew -- and more, that there are some things so far out of our ken that we may not even know they exist.

These ideas -- the perimeter of human knowledge, and the importance of being able to learn, relearn, change directions, and accept new information -- are the topic of psychologist Adam Grant's book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know.  In it, he explores not only how we are all riding around with blinders on, but how to take steps toward removing them, starting with not surrounding yourself with an echo chamber of like-minded people who might not even recognize that they have things wrong.  We should hold our own beliefs up to the light of scrutiny.  As Grant puts it, we should approach issues like scientists looking for the truth, not like a campaigning politician trying to convince an audience.

It's a book that challenges us to move past our stance of "clearly I'm right about this" to the more reasoned approach of "let me see if the evidence supports this."  In this era of media spin, fake news, and propaganda, it's a critical message -- and Think Again should be on everyone's to-read list.

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

Algae aura

Can I just say that I am sick unto death of people misrepresenting science?

Some scientist somewhere makes a discovery, and it seems to take only milliseconds before every woo-woo with a favorite loony idea about how the world works is using it to support their claims.  These people have taken confirmation bias and raised it to the level of performance art.

A long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a particularly good (or bad, as the case may be) example of this yesterday, in the form of an article by Michael Forrester called "People Can Draw Energy From Other People The Same Way Plants Do," that is apparently getting passed all over social media.  So let me illustrate my point by telling you what some of Forrester's conclusions from this scientific research are, and afterwards I'll tell you about the actual research itself.

See if you can connect the two.

Forrester says that we absorb "energies" from our surroundings.  He never defines what he means by "energy," but I'm pretty sure it's not the standard physics definition, because he includes stuff about being around "negative people."  He cites "psychologist and energy healer" Olivia Bader-Lee, who says:

This is exactly why there are certain people who feel uncomfortable in specific group settings where there is a mix of energy and emotions...  The human organism is very much like a plant, it draws needed energy to feed emotional states and this can essentially energize cells or cause increases in cortisol and catabolize cells depending on the emotional trigger...  Humans can absorb and heal through other humans, animals, and any part of nature.  That's why being around nature is often uplifting and energizing for so many people.

We're then given specific recommendations for how to "absorb and heal" efficiently.  These include:

• Stay centered and grounded
• Be in a state of non-resistance
• Own your personal aura space
• Give yourself an energy cleanse
• Call back your energy

I was especially interested in the "energy cleanse" thing, and fortunately, Forrester tells us exactly how to accomplish this:

The color gold has a high vibration which is useful for clearing away foreign energy.  Imagine a gold shower nozzle at the top of your aura (a few feet above your head) and turn it on, allowing clear gold energy to flow through your aura and body space and release down your grounding.  You will immediately feel cleansed and refreshed.

So all I have to do is imagine it, eh?  Given that I spent 32 years working with teenagers, I wish I'd known that "owning your personal aura space" was something that would happen if I imagined it.  Teaching a room full of tenth graders is like trying to herd hyperactive puppies.  Since I found that yelling "BACK OFF" was seldom effective, it would have been nice if all I'd had to do was to picture my "aura space" (gold-colored, of course) and the teenagers would have been repelled backwards in a comical fashion, sort of like Yoda did to Count Dooku at the end of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

But I digress.

Okay. So you're probably wondering what scientific research led Forrester and Bader-Lee to come to this conclusion.

Ready?

The discovery by a team of scientists in the Biotechnology Department of Bielefeld University (Germany) that a species of algae can digest cellulose.

If you're going, "Um, but wait... but... how... what?" you should realize that I had exactly the same response.  I spent several minutes thinking that I had clicked on the wrong link. But no. In fact, Forrester even mentions the gist of the research himself:

Members of Professor Dr. Olaf Kruse’s biological research team have confirmed for the first time that a plant, the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, not only engages in photosynthesis, but also has an alternative source of energy: it can draw it from other plants.

And from this he deduces that all you have to do to be happy is to picture yourself underneath a gold shower nozzle.

I've seen some misrepresentations and far-fetched deductions before, but this one has to take the grand prize.

I get that people are always casting about looking for support for their favorite theories.  So as wacky as Forrester's pronouncements are, at least I see why he made them.  But what baffles me is how other people can look at what he wrote, and say, "Yes!  That makes complete sense!  Algae that can digest cellulose!  Therefore aura spaces and energetic quantum vibrations of happiness!

Okay, I admit that I can be a hardass rationalist at times.  But seriously, what are these people thinking?

Not much, is my guess.

So anyhow, watch out for those negative energies.  Those can be a bummer.  But if you're feeling like your vibrations are low, don't despair.  I hear that getting into psychic communication with algae can help.

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If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

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

Buzzing off

I have great respect for scientists, which I hope is obvious from the content of this blog.  Even so, there are times I read scientific research and say, "What the hell were they thinking?"

That was my first thought when I read a BBC News article claiming that playing dubstep music by Skrillex makes mosquitoes less likely to bite and mate.  If you don't know who Skrillex is, that's probably a good thing if you've got reasonably refined musical sensibilities.  I try to be tolerant of other people's musical tastes and acknowledge that what you like is a matter of opinion, but it is my considered judgment that Skrillex sounds like a robot having sex with a dial-up modem.

So apparently what they apparently did is to play Skrillex for some mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes apparently didn't feel like eating or mating, which I have to admit is kind of the effect it has on me.  "[T]he occurrence of blood feeding activity was lower when music was being played," the scientists write.  "Adults exposed to music copulated far less often than their counterparts kept in an environment where there was no music...  The observation that such music can delay host attack, reduce blood feeding, and disrupt mating provides new avenues for the development of music-based personal protective and control measures against Aedes-borne diseases."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons, Aedes aegyptii, photograph taken by Muhammad Mahdi Karim]

When I finished reading the article, my first thought was that this was a typical sensationalized report on scientific research, where popular media completely misrepresents what the scientists did in order to get clicks.  Sadly, this is not the case.  The BBC News actually did a pretty good job of describing the research -- it's just that the research was kind of... um... terrible.

Here's a piece from the paper itself, which appeared in Acta Tropica last week and is entitled,
"The Electronic Song 'Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites' Reduces Host Attack and Mating Success in the Dengue Vector Aedes aegypti," by a team of researchers led by Hamady Dieng of the University of Malaysia:

Sound and its reception are crucial for reproduction, survival, and population maintenance of many animals.  In insects, low-frequency vibrations facilitate sexual interactions, whereas noise disrupts the perception of signals from conspecifics and hosts.   Despite evidence that mosquitoes respond to sound frequencies beyond fundamental ranges, including songs, and that males and females need to struggle to harmonize their flight tones, the behavioral impacts of music as control targets remain unexplored. In this study, we examined the effects of electronic music ("Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" by Skrillex) on foraging, host attack, and sexual activities of the dengue vector Aedes aegypti.   Adults were presented with two sound environments (music-off or music-on).  Discrepancies in visitation, blood feeding, and copulation patterns were compared between environments with and without music.  Ae. aegypti females maintained in the music-off environment initiated host visits earlier than those in the music-on environment.  They visited the host significantly less often in the music-on than the music-off condition.

Which is pretty much what the BBC News article said.

What's wrong with this research is that it falls into what I would call "so what?" studies.  It's the kind of thing that even if the protocols and controls were appropriate, doesn't tell you very much.  Okay, Skrillex screws up mosquitoes.  Why?  They only did "music on" and "music off;" they didn't try different kinds of music, various pure tones, harmonics, combinations of sounds, and other sorts of sounds.  So the outcome really gives us very little information about what's actually going on, and why -- nor how this could be used to reduce the spread of mosquito-borne diseases.

Because frankly, if I had a choice of getting dengue fever and listening to Skrillex all day, I'd have to think about it.

So anyhow, I guess having a paper in a scientific journal doesn't necessarily guarantee that the research it describes isn't kind of silly.  And it also highlights the importance of going from the account in the popular media to the research itself before making a judgment.  Most of the time, if there's a problem or a misrepresentation, it's the popular media that's at fault.

But not always.  So if you want to repel mosquitoes, you might want to do your own experiments.  There must be a better way than subjecting yourself and everyone around you to dubstep.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation combines science with biography and high drama.  It's the story of the discovery of oxygen, through the work of the sometimes friends, sometimes bitter rivals Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier.   A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen is a fascinating read, both for the science and for the very different personalities of the two men involved.  Priestley was determined, serious, and a bit of a recluse; Lavoisier a pampered nobleman who was as often making the rounds of the social upper-crust in 18th century Paris as he was in his laboratory.  But despite their differences, their contributions were both essential -- and each of them ended up running afoul of the conventional powers-that-be, with tragic results.

The story of how their combined efforts led to a complete overturning of our understanding of that most ubiquitous of substances -- air -- will keep you engaged until the very last page.

[Note:  If you purchase this book by clicking on the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

What we've got here is a failure to replicate

I frequently post about new scientific discoveries, and having a fascination for neuroscience and psychology, a good many of them have to do with how the human brain works.  Connecting behavior to the underlying brain structure is not easy -- but with the advent of the fMRI, we've begun to make some forays into trying to elucidate how the brain's architecture is connected to neural function, and how neural function is connected to higher-order phenomena like memory, learning, instinct, language, and socialization.

Whenever I post about science I try my hardest to use sources that are from reputable journals such as Science and Nature -- and flag the ones that aren't as speculative.  The reason those gold-standard journals are considered so reliable is because of a rigorous process of peer review, wherein scientists in the field sift through papers with a fine-toothed comb, demanding revisions on anything questionable -- or sometimes rejecting the paper out of hand if it doesn't meet the benchmark.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

That's why a paper published in -- you guessed it -- Nature had me picking my jaw up off the floor.  A team of psychologists and social scientists, led by Colin Camerer of Caltech, took 21 psychological studies that had been published either in Nature or in Science and didn't just review them carefully, but tried to replicate their results.

Only 13 of them turned out to be replicable.

This is a serious problem.  I know that scientists are fallible just like the rest of us, but this to me doesn't sound like ordinary fallibility, it sounds like outright sloppiness, both on the part of the researchers and on the part of the reviewers.  I mean, if you can't trust Nature and Science, who can you trust?

Anna Dreber, of the Stockholm School of Economics, who co-authored the study, was unequivocal about its import.  "A false positive result can make other researchers, and the original researcher, spend lots of time and energy and money on results that turn out not to hold," she said.  "And that's kind of wasteful for resources and inefficient, so the sooner we find out that a result doesn't hold, the better."

Brian Nosek, of the University of Virginia, was also part of the team that did the study, and he thought that the pattern they found went beyond the "publish-or-perish" attitude that a lot of institutions have.  "Some people have hypothesized that, because they're the most prominent outlets they'd have the highest rigor," Nosek said.  "Others have hypothesized that the most prestigious outlets are also the ones that are most likely to select for very 'sexy' findings, and so may be actually less reproducible."

One heartening thing is that as part of the study, the researchers asked four hundred scientists in the field who were not involved with the study to take a look at the 21 papers in question, and make their best assessment as to whether it would pass replication or not.  And the scientists' guesses were usually correct.

So why, then, did eight flawed, non-replicable studies get past the review boards of the two most prestigious science journals in the world?  "The likelihood that a finding will replicate or not is one part of what a reviewer would consider," Nosek said.  "But other things might influence the decision to publish.  It may be that this finding isn't likely to be true, but if it is true, it is super important, so we do want to publish it because we want to get it into the conversation."

Well, okay, but how often are these questionably-correct but "super important" findings labeled as such?  It's rare to find a paper where there's any degree of doubt expressed for the main gist (although many of them do have sections on the limitations of the research, or questions that are still unanswered).  And it's understandable why.  If I were on a review board, I'd definitely look askance at a paper that made a claim and then admitted the results of the research might well be a fluke.

So this is kind of troubling.  It's encouraging that at least the inquiry is being made; identifying that a process is flawed is the first step toward fixing it.  As for me, I'm going to have to be a little more careful with my immediate trust of psychological research just because it was published in Nature or Science.

"The way to get ahead and get a job and get tenure is to publish lots and lots of papers," said Will Gervais of the University of Kentucky, who was one of the researchers whose study failed replication.  "And it's hard to do that if you are able run fewer studies, but in the end I think that's the way to go — to slow down our science and be more rigorous up front."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from one of my favorite thinkers -- Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke has made several documentaries, including Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and After the Warming -- the last-mentioned an absolutely prescient investigation into climate change that came out in 1991 and predicted damn near everything that would happen, climate-wise, in the twenty-seven years since then.

I'm going to go back to Burke's first really popular book, the one that was the genesis of the TV series of the same name -- Connections.  In this book, he looks at how one invention, one happenstance occurrence, one accidental discovery, leads to another, and finally results in something earthshattering.  (One of my favorites is how the technology of hand-weaving led to the invention of the computer.)  It's simply great fun to watch how Burke's mind works -- each of his little filigrees is only a few pages long, but you'll learn some fascinating ins and outs of history as he takes you on these journeys.  It's an absolutely delightful read.

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

The hydra of horrible ideas

For today's post, we will focus our attention on a Skeptophilia frequent flyer -- Representative Lamar Smith, who is narrowly edged out by Senator Mitch McConnell as the world's most punchable face.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Smith is in the news this week because of his appearance as a keynote speaker at the 12th annual conference of the Heartland Institute, a petroleum-industry-funded "think tank" dedicated to casting doubt on climate change science.  Smith has been unrelenting in his attacks on the scientific community, which makes it even more appalling that he has since 2013 been the chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, a committee that also includes not only the virulently anti-science Dana Rohrabacher but Bill Posey of Florida, who believes that vaccines cause autism.

So the governmental oversight of scientific research in the United States falls clearly into the category of "heaven help us."  There's no doubt that Smith is in the pocket of the fossil fuels industry; they are far and away his largest donors, having funded his campaigns to the tune of $600,000.

And no one can say the industry isn't getting what they paid for.  Smith's talk at the Heartland Institute was fairly crowing with delight over the opportunity they have to completely gut any environmental legislation they want, given the appointment by the Trump administration of anti-environmental climate change deniers to damn near every leadership post in Washington.  "I think the president has ushered in a permanent change in the political climate," Smith said, to cheers from the audience.  "And by that I mean I think he’ll keep his promises and that he’ll do exactly what he said.  You’re seeing that in his appointments, like Scott Pruitt at EPA, for example.  So … I don’t think you’ll have any disappointment on any of those issues."

When an audience member suggested that Smith stop using the term "climate science" in favor of "climate studies" and "scientific research" in favor of "politically correct science," Smith agreed with a grin, and said he'd go a step further.  "I’ll start using those words if you’ll start using two words for me," Smith said.  "The first is never, ever use the word progressive.  Instead, use the word liberal.  The second is never use the word 'mainstream' media, because they aren’t.  Use 'liberal' media. Is that a deal?"

More cheers.

Most alarmingly, Smith said he's planning on increasing the pressure on research scientists to publish only results that support the goals of his political backers.  In fact, he spoke at length about his plans to craft legislation to punish federally-funded researchers who publish data that contradicts the party line -- in other words, that doesn't meet his warped concept of peer review, which means essentially having to pass a governmentally-set purity test.  To hell with what the evidence says; science becomes whatever the conservative agenda says it is.

The timing of this meeting is not without irony.  Just this week, research was published in Nature that the amount of warming we've already seen is leading to "devastating" bleaching of coral reefs; that climate change is enhancing the conditions that lead to life-threatening "smog events" in Beijing and elsewhere; that the winter of 2016-2017 showed "exceptional... periods of record-breaking heat" in the Arctic; and that last month was the second warmest February in the 139 years such records have been kept -- the warmest was February 2016.

But to Smith and his cronies, none of that matters.  It's all "politically correct climate studies."

All of this illustrates one rather sobering fact; for those of us on the left-ish side of things who breathed a sigh of relief when Paul Ryan's disaster of a health care bill died on the floor of the House last week, the fight is far from over.  This administration is proving to be a hydra of horrible ideas.  Destroy one of them, and two more appear in its place.

And this time, one of the hydra's heads is wearing the smarmy, smirking face of Lamar Smith, which is a mental image that will haunt my nightmares for some time to come.

Silencing the experts

First, we had Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper imposing a rule on scientists mandating that their research pass government approval (i.e., not say anything that contradicts the party line) before they could publish it.  That rule was, fortunately rescinded within nanoseconds of Justin Trudeau winning the election last November, once again allowing scientists to speak to the media freely.

Then, here in the United States, we have such intellectual featherweights as Lamar Smith and James Inhofe at the helm of committees overseeing scientific research -- making about as much sense as putting weasels in charge of a henhouse.  The result has been round after round of budget cuts for scientific agencies, a pledge to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, and a campaign of harassment against climatologists researching anthropogenic climate change.

Now, presumably because this has all worked out so well for Canada and the United States, the leadership of the United Kingdom are doing exactly the same thing.

According to an op-ed piece by Robin McKie in The Guardian, the Cabinet Office has decided that researchers paid by government grants will be banned from lobbying for changes in laws or regulations.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm sorry, but isn't science supposed to inform government, and not the other way around?  The universe really doesn't give a rat's ass if you're liberal or conservative; data has no political spin.  The desperation of politicians to muzzle scientists when the science they're working on is inconvenient for the dominant political agenda is maddening at best and dangerous at worst.  Despite forty years of warnings from the scientific community, we here in the United States have sat on our hands with respect to all of the problems that come with runaway fossil fuel use -- environmental degradation from oil drilling and fracking, skyrocketing levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, and a global temperature rise that is predicted by mid-century to melt most of the Earth's remaining on-land ice, raising sea levels enough to inundate nearly all of the world's coastal cities.

And why?  Because of a disinformation campaign waged by anti-science politicians who are being funded (i.e., controlled) by the petroleum industry.  (I can't even bring myself to call them "climate change deniers" any more; at this point, the data are so completely clear that in order to disbelieve in climate change, you'd have to ignore the evidence deliberately and completely.)

Despite all of this, the British government is going ahead with its policy of keeping the experts out of the decision-making process.  As Robin McKie writes:

The government move is a straightforward assault on academic freedom...  [C]ritics highlight examples such as those of sociologists whose government-funded research shows new housing regulations are proving particularly damaging to the homeless; ecologists who discover new planning laws are harming wildlife; or climate scientists whose findings undermine government energy policy.  All would be prevented from speaking out under the new grant scheme as it stands.

Cambridge University zoologist William Sutherland agrees.  "If they go ahead with this new anti-lobbying clause – and they are leaving it very late if they are not going ahead – then we will have many more poor decisions being made by government for the simple reason that it will have starved itself of proper scientific advice."

The illogic of preventing the people who know the most from influencing public policy is apparently obvious to almost everyone except the ones in charge.  "Politicians don’t have to agree with scientists, but does anyone believe we will make better decisions without hearing what the evidence says on flooding, climate change, statins and e-cigarettes?" said Fiona Fox, head of Britain's Science Media Centre.  "The anti-lobbying clause will send some of our best researchers back to the relative safety of the laboratory and away from the media fray they already fear.  That will be a victory for ignorance and a blow for the evidence-based policy that our politicians claim to want."

"Claim" being the operative word, here, because as we've seen over and over again, most politicians are only interested in science if it supports the views that are expedient for their political agenda.

So the whole thing is infuriating, and it's to be hoped that the outcry from scientists and science-minded citizens will overturn this decision.  In other words, that they follow Canada's example, and not the United States', where (by and large) the anti-science types are still running the show.  Here in the US, my fear is that it will take some kind of catastrophe to demonstrate that letting the tail wag the dog is a bad idea -- and by then, it will be too late.