It’s the Thought that Counts

Elvis Costello said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.” What a great image. While I’m not sure that I agree with him, I do think that a similar thing could be truthfully said about popular science. Writing about science is often just as effective as dancing about architecture, although it’s hardly a stupid thing to want to do well.

I used to enjoy reading, listening to, or watching reports on science for a general audience. That was back when I was still part of the general audience. Once I began to study physics at the university level, I realized how empty most of those reports really are. The conventional wisdom says that they have to be, since most people don’t have enough background knowledge to process most of the content. You can’t talk about Lorentz invariant quantities, since most of your audience thinks a matrix is a place without spoons, and will tell you to just relax if you mention a tensor. Obviously you can’t get that technical.

Still, I really can’t stand seeing all those books that claim to explain some scientific concept “with no equations at all!” or “made simple for everyone” or some similar promise. There are lots of them. Even Einstein wrote one on relativity subtitled “A Clear Explanation that Anyone Can Understand.” Yeah, right. Einstein was a great writer and a clear thinker and all that, but maybe it’s okay to admit that your audience is not really “anyone” and “everyone.” It would be nice if everyone really could understand relativity, but either not everyone can understand it, or you’re not really explaining relativity (you’re just dancing about architecture, as it were).

I’m all for improving science literacy. Don’t get me wrong. I just think that science literacy would be better served by being willing to communicate how complex the scientific process is, rather than smoothing everything over and pretending no math was involved. If all you know about string theory is the animation of a donut and coffee cup morphing into each other (illustrating their topological equivalence), as was shown over and over and over again in that PBS Nova special, it’s hard to imagine why string theory is hard. What are string theorists doing all day? Staring at coffee cups and playing cellos? Of course it’s not worth funding them — being in academia is easy street! …Even if people intellectually acknowledge that math is involved in science, the sugar-coated version of science presented in popular media still downplays the reality of the scientific method: it’s a long process of theory, experiment, data analysis, comparison with theory, and back-to-the-drawing-board. Depicting science as something reducible to sound bites and cute animations ultimately harms science literacy rather than helping it. It also encourages people who have dismissed the entire field of mathematics as not worth their time, since it implies you can understand science while being bad at math.

I don’t blame the science reporters for this. Some of them have almost no science background themselves, and are presenting the analogies and handwaving that felt like an effective explanation when they heard it. Most of the reporters that do have science background have editors who don’t. Nevertheless, in an ideal world I would hope that science writers stop billing their works as math-free, and stop asking Nobel Prize-winners to explain their research in a mere sentence or two. Dumbing down the reporting doesn’t help us appreciate the intelligence behind what’s reported on.

Tags: intelligence, journalism, science

Gail Collins’ latest column had me literally laughing out loud. It’s called “Digging Ourselves a Black Hole,” and it’s about the hyped-up fears that the Large Hadron Collider will create a singularity that will devour our planet. The LHC is a new particle accelerator built in Switzerland and intended to go into full operation later this year. Collins simultaneously debunks and embraces the black hole speculations, lending a bit of perspective to more common concerns:

I am bringing this up now because it is always important to remember that things could be worse. You may be worried about a new cold war or a major bank failure, or afraid of losing your job or your house or your credit rating. You may be depressed by your first look at the fall TV schedule. …

Perspective is all. If you’re going to fret, I say, fret about that black hole. For one thing, it makes it much easier to schedule unpleasant tasks for the second half of September. Heads, the planet survives. Tails, the root canal never happens.

I had a very similar realization right around when I took my first quantum mechanics course. One notable thing about quantum physics, as distinguished from classical physics, is that particles are described as having some small probability of being in places which are classically forbidden. Without getting too technical, let me make an analogy. Imagine you had a ball rolling back and forth in a valley, but on the other side of each hill is another valley. Classically, unless you let go of the ball at one hill’s peak, there’s no chance of it rolling all the way over into the next valley. It’s limited by the amount of total energy it has — potential plus kinetic. On the other hand, if the ball was a tiny particle governed by quantum mechanics rather than by macroscopic rules, there would be a small chance of it tunneling through one of the hills and popping out on the other side. (When I say small, I mean extremely minuscule. But nonzero.)

When I first learned about quantum tunneling, I had a horrifying thought: This means there is some chance of me spontaneously falling through my chair and the floor below me and landing on some poor unsuspecting student in the classroom below us! But then I had a more horrifying thought: Because the probability of tunneling decays exponentially with distance in the classically forbidden region, it’s many orders of magnitude more likely that I fall partway through the floor and then get stuck. Ew.

Of course, my body is made up of so many atoms, and even my flimsy chair was so thick from a quantum-mechanical perspective, that the probabilities we’re talking about here are so tiny as to be effectively zero. (I would be more likely to win the lottery while being struck by lightning for the second time and being bitten by a shark.) Nevertheless, “effectively zero” is not the same as zero. It is still technically possible… yet somehow, we manage to go on. (We laugh in the face of danger every day, we physicists. That’s why we’re heroes.)

In a way similar to this quantum tunneling issue, the black hole fears about the LHC are not entirely unfounded, but they do give a great example of making mountains out of molehills. We don’t know everything about particle physics — that’s why the LHC was built, after all — so we have a couple different theoretical questions that we’re trying to answer. The old “Standard Model” theory says that the LHC will not yield energies high enough to create black holes. It is hypothesized that the Standard Model needs to include large extra dimensions in order to account for various unresolved questions, and in very large-scale experiments like LHC the energies needed for black hole production might possibly be accessible. In fact, one of the many purposes of such large-scale experiments is to test for evidence that would support this hypothesis. Even if we did see black holes, though, they would be so tiny that they are likely to evaporate almost immediately by Hawking radiation. We don’t have any direct evidence supporting the idea of Hawking radiation yet, because its levels would be very small and difficult to detect, but it has held up to thorough theoretical checks and the safety of LHC has been accepted by the vast majority of physicists.

Recap: The mainstream theory says black holes cannot occur at LHC. One alternative hypothesis posits a possibility of micro black holes at LHC, but the mainstream understanding of these black holes is that they would evaporate almost immediately and pose no danger whatsoever.

Recap of the recap: You need to go to the alternative alternative theorists to get someone who believes there might be a danger from black holes at LHC.

Don’t get me wrong, though. The LHC makes me very afraid — just not about black holes. I’m afraid for the future of pure science research in the US. The LHC was built in Switzerland, already the home of CERN. ITER is going to be built in France. No large-scale experimental physics facilities are planned for sites in the US. Back in the early 1990s, the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) was being built in Texas, but Congress decided to cut funding and the project had to be canceled.

It used to be the case that physics professors would come to American universities and research facilities to participate in international collaborations. If you were involved in a large-scale, groundbreaking project, chances were good you’d be spending part of the year in the US. Now that funding and facilities for new experiments are not available in the States, American professors and researchers are going to Europe and Asia for several months at a time to get their research done. I’m not saying this is objectively bad — science should be done everywhere, and people of every nationality are equally capable of doing it — but it’s definitely bad for the United States. When research is done here, researchers visit here and, for their careers, want to live here. A significant number of them start billion-dollar companies here, sometimes based on spinoff technology from their research and sometimes spontaneously spawned in the fertile intellectual environment of research-focused communities. Other already-existing companies also benefit from new discoveries. This creates jobs, contributes hugely to the economy in general, and raises the American standard of living. And Congress decided that this is not worth considering as a national priority? Now that’s terrifying.

Tags: lhc, physics, research funding, science

Several stories have been floating about lately, all generally on the topic of popular understanding of science. Here are the highlights.

A court has ruled that the University of California was well within its rights to deny admission to students they found unqualified as a result of their having attended Christian schools. The schools in question taught many classes that were extremely Bible-centric, to the exclusion of nearly all other content, making it impossible to meet the UC admissions requirements with their courses misleadingly called “biology” or “history.” I found this personally interesting in light of my earlier comments on how far it’s appropriate to extend religious tolerance. Even though it has upset some religious people, the courts have ruled that it’s okay to assess religious descriptions of the world and find them academically lacking.

Speaking of lack of academic background, I was happy for once to read USA Today, which reported that 76% of Americans believe that improving science education should be a priority issue for presidential candidates. In keeping with this, about 26% say that they themselves have an adequate understanding of science, but more ridiculously “44% couldn’t identify a single scientist, living or dead, whom they’d consider a role model for the nation’s young people.” My reaction is similar to Doug Natelson’s: Or dead? Really? We couldn’t name, oh I don’t know, Einstein? Perhaps he is not hip enough for the youth. (Check out Doug’s post for some more details on presidential candidates and their support for science research funding, as well.)

The USA Today article discussed science literacy in the context of voting ability. If Americans aren’t sufficiently “science-savvy,” how can we make the right choices about science issues? It’s not just about budgeting for research, it’s also about healthcare availability, education, stem cells, abortion… and it’s about every issue that invokes statistics. A bit more math than science, yes, but if we were more educated about science we’d be better at identifying large enough sample sizes and acknowledging deviations from the mean. That applies to almost every issue on which there is public debate involving presentation of evidence.

I certainly agree that science education should be a bigger priority than it currently is, and my opinions were only reinforced by this report on end of life care, which stated that 57% of the American public believes that “God’s intervention could save a family member if physicians declared treatment would be futile.” Almost 20% of medical professionals share this belief. While I don’t believe in miracles myself, I of course can’t offer positive falsification of their existence. What we should all be able to agree on, though, is that if all medical signs point to imminent or already-real death, a miracle recovery is not coming this time. There are many other interesting outcomes in the study, such as differing opinions about persistent vegetative state and how long it is acceptable to demand continuing treatment of a dying loved one. Orac of Respectful Insolence wrote a very thoughtful and thorough treatment of all this, cautioning against becoming too preoccupied with the religion aspect. I agree wholeheartedly with his bottom line:

Indeed, the focus on religion takes away the focus from the real issue: improving public understanding of scientific medicine and what it can and cannot accomplish. Lots of patients have unrealistic beliefs about health care based on all sorts of things, be they religion, faith in pseudoscientific quackery, or just fears based on misinformation that is rife in the media (i.e., the claim by antivaccinationists that vaccines cause autism). … Persuading families and patients that what evidence-based medicine recommends is the best for their injured or ill loved ones requires a far gentler touch.

Tags: discrimination, education, pseudoscience, religion, science

Due to some scheduling freedom, I’ve lately become a bit nocturnal, and I’ve found myself watching a lot of late-night/early-morning TV. This has given me the opportunity to reflect on the ridiculous ads that companies save until we are maximally sleep-deprived and hopefully stupid enough to believe the crap that they are shoveling. Frankly, it is unbelievable.

I wanted to write something all about Dr. Frank’s No Pain Spray, because I’ve seen about nine zillion commercials for that. But once you get over the fact that it’s an oral spray that looks like a breath freshener but that’s supposed to provide all the way up to post-surgery level pain relief (no, I’ll take the Percocet, please), the fact that it claims not one but ten different homeopathic ingredients (slightly increasing the probability that a single non-water molecule might exist in the spray), and the fact that it’s only advertised at 3 AM (not a good sign for credibility), there’s really not a lot more to mock. Borrr-ing. Besides, someone else has done it more thoroughly than I would care to.

However, I think it’s important to say something about a more general problem I have with this class of advertisements. All these diet pills, “male enhancement” tablets, and so on make their claims of widespread success, then display the tiny text: “This product has not been evaluated by the FDA.” Is that enough to meet our legal standard for truth in advertising?

The Federal Trade Commission has this very clear FAQ about false advertising on their website. In particular I think it’s worth highlighting this one.

What makes an advertisement deceptive?
According to the FTC’s Deception Policy Statement, an ad is deceptive if it contains a statement - or omits information - that:

— Is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances; and
— Is “material” - that is, important to a consumer’s decision to buy or use the product.

It goes on to explain the process the FTC uses to investigate claims of false advertising, and uses the particular example of a mouthwash that claims to prevent colds. The FTC looks from the point of view of a “reasonable consumer” and evaluates both “express and implied claims,” checking to see if the advertiser has enough proof to back them up. In the particular example of medical or other scientific claims, the advertiser is expected to have “competent and reliable scientific evidence.”

I also found a page on the FTC’s website called Dietary Supplements: An Advertising Guide for Industry. It has a lot of important and relevant information, and in particular in section II.C.3 mentions the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) disclaimer, “that the statement has not been evaluated by FDA and that the product is not intended to ‘diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.’” DSHEA doesn’t explicitly apply to advertisements, but this document does say that it’s a good idea to include the disclaimer “to prevent consumers from being misled about the nature of the product and the extent to which its efficacy and safety have been reviewed by regulatory authorities.” I was glad to see this example used to illustrate the issue:

Example 34: An advertisement for an herbal supplement includes strong, unqualified claims that the product will effectively treat or prevent diabetes, heart disease, and various circulatory ailments. The advertiser does not have adequate substantiation for this claim, but includes the DSHEA disclaimer prominently in the ad. In face of the strong contradictory message in the ad, the inclusion of the DSHEA disclaimer is not likely to negate the explicit disease claims made in the ad, and will not cure the fact that the claims are not substantiated.

This is a good standard to have. There are two prongs to the DSHEA disclaimer; I’ve usually only seen the first half used (in small and hard-to-read print, no less). The second half, that the product is not intended to provide any actual medical service, would seem ridiculous when compared to the explicit claims of medical service made over and over again in the ad. Of course it’s intended to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure something! The first half of the disclaimer, though, is even less effective at offsetting the false advertising. The lies may not have been evaluated by a regulatory agency, but that doesn’t make it okay to lie. It’s the advertiser’s job to make sure what’s in the ads is true, and this feeble attempt to displace blame is laughable.

The problem, then, is not that we don’t have a good standard delineating what’s false advertising, bur rather that the standard is not being enforced. These advertisements aren’t just stupid, they’re nefarious — they’re lies told only when viewers are expected to be at their weakest emotionally and blurriest rationally.The FTC needs to step it up and get these cranks off the air.

Tags: health, law, pseudoscience, science

Given all the comments on my post about people who readily admit to being bad at math, as well as the discussion occurring on various other blogs, I figured it was time to respond to some of what’s been said.

There were some people who expressed skepticism of the phenomenon I was complaining about.  These comments (both here and elsewhere) were things like “I always talk about how bad I am at writing” or “I’m an English major, but I know plenty of science.”  I have no doubt at all that the incidents cited in the comments really did happen, and they do go against the trend I talked about, but I think they are the exception rather than the rule.

Putting aside for a moment the question of how much knowledge someone should have about any particular field, I want to give some clear support for my assertion that math/science people do know more about the humanities than humanities people know about math and science.  I should first be clear about what I’m counting as what.  By “humanities” I mean not only literature and fine arts, but also history, social sciences and languages.  While there are some arguable cases (economics comes to mind), I think it’s pretty clear that that stuff clearly goes on the humanities side of the divide.  When I refer to “sciences,” I mean technical fields in general, including both theoretical and applied math, computer science, engineering, and applications like medicine.

It’s obviously impossible to compare levels of understanding in two different fields.  How much calculus do you need in order to equal the amount of knowledge that encompassed by fluency in a foreign language?  It doesn’t make any sense to compare these things directly.  Still, I believe that we can make the general claim that some incredibly basic, simple science is considered “equivalent” to much more advanced levels of humanities knowledge.  Z commented to this effect, using Jeopardy! questions as a proxy.  Something a little more quantitative (ha, ha) would of course be preferable.

The best metric I could come up with was simply to look at how much effort was being put into learning material on the other side of the divide, rather than how much material was actually being learned.  I decided to look up core curricula at some of the country’s most prestigious universities.  These curricula seem as good a proxy as any for what the intellectual class feels a well-educated person should know.  The humanities part of the core requirement generally determines how much time a science student has to spend on humanities, while the reverse is true of the science part of the requirement.  Of course, many on both sides choose to learn much more than is required, but I think the requirements are a good proxy of what is considered necessary in order to consider yourself well-educated.  I tried to vary the colleges I looked at.  I chose two schools with a technical focus (MIT and Caltech), three general top universities (Harvard, Princeton, and Yale), and two of the top liberal arts schools (Swarthmore and Williams).  Results below:  read the rest »

Tags: culture, education, math, science

Yesterday I was skipping around on the radio when I came to a Christian station broadcasting a story. Read slowly, deliberately, and with almost comical voices for the different characters, it was the tale of a young girl who had seen a TV preacher explaining why next Saturday was the day of Christ’s Second Coming. He had an equation (?) and a book all about it, and that convinced her, so much so that she began putting up posters all around her town. Her parents, good Christians of course, saw this as crazy behavior, but they weren’t sure how to talk to her about it. After all, if they told her that Jesus wouldn’t be returning on Saturday, she’d start to question whether he’d ever return at all! They didn’t know how to get her to stop acting crazy without shaking her faith.

The real issue seemed so blatant I couldn’t believe they were just sweeping it under the rug. What are the actual reasons for believing in the deity of Jesus, and for believing in the apocalypse accompanied by his return? Why is a televangelist’s take on this not seen as credible, but a local church minister’s is? How can you challenge one irrational belief without applying the same sort of scrutiny to your other beliefs? That’s exactly what the parents were worried about — that the “good” skepticism they wanted to teach her would turn into “bad” skepticism (i.e., distrusting things she was supposed to believe blind).

It got me thinking about… well, not exactly hypocrisy, because I feel like that word should be reserved for intentional cases. I suppose I should say contradictions. We all (perhaps to differing extents) compartmentalize various controversies and rationalize beliefs we’re predisposed to, rather than making judgments from first principles. It’s very easy for this to lead to a situation in which you hold very different opinions simultaneously. The more rational you are, the more likely you are to catch these instances when they do occur, and the quicker you resolve the inconsistency. However, understanding the importance of rational thinking doesn’t mean that you never hold contradictory beliefs.

This is more than just the doctor who smokes, or the obese gym teacher. There’s the “creation scientist” who, after being presented with carefully constructed scientific theories that have withstood rigorous testing, demands proof beyond any shadow of a doubt (clearly misunderstanding the concept of science), but who would never think of turning such a critical lens on the religious beliefs that form their large set of assumptions. There’s the pro-life advocate who wants abortion to be illegal because it is murder, but who would never consider assigning sentences of the same magnitude as what murderers get. There are liberals who think of the Constitution as a set of fundamental principles, which justifies giving absolute protection to expression and religion even if that’s not how the Founding Fathers would have interpreted it — but prefer to look to 18th-century laws to justify gun control in the face of the 2nd Amendment. Alternatively, you have conservatives who would oppose the “fundamental principles” interpretation in general, deferring to the attitudes of the Founders to define Constitutional protections — except in cases about gun control where they’re happy to embrace it.

I’m not saying you can’t believe in making abortion illegal while also supporting low sentences for it. What I’m saying is that, if that’s your position, you have to have reasonably subtle logic to back it up. A good way to examine whether your opinion on a topic is rational is to look at the underlying principles and assumptions, and see if you agree with the implications of those assumptions — in all cases, not just in the limited context of the original situation.

I also think this is good to keep in mind during discussions with others. Say you present some scientific evidence to a creationist, and they respond with criticism of the study methods. It’s not worth your time to defend the study; take their point about scientific rigor and run with it. If they really believe in the scientific method, they can’t make a reasonable claim that creationism is science. Rather than just trying to refute every statement they make as though the conversation were some horrible game of Whack-a-Mole, it can be helpful to agree with them while they’re making the portion of their arguments that are better suited to your side.

This way of thinking — about basic principles that reach beyond isolated opinions — seems especially helpful in political debates. Among most intelligent people, the controversy over, say, school vouchers isn’t really about school vouchers. It’s about underlying ways of thinking about political issues, with opposing views on vouchers being obvious conclusions based on different philosophical starting points. Testing and debating those underlying beliefs is more productive (and much more interesting) than trying to deal with the specific policy issue in question.

Update: I found the radio show I mentioned at the start of this post. It’s called Adventures in Odyssey, and you can read a plot summary of the episode here.

Tags: christian radio, debate, politics, psychology, religion, science

I care a whole lot about the environment and humanity’s impact on it, but I hesitate to describe myself as an “environmentalist.” That’s because I disagree vehemently with one of the fundamental beliefs of major environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace and the various PIRGs. I think nuclear power is a big part of the answer to our environmental woes, rather than part of the problem. When canvassers with clipboards and pamphlets approach me on the street to ask for a donation, I ask them if they’re still against building nuclear power plants. Then, when they launch into a prepared speech beginning with an enthusiastic yes (they think I’m on their side), I tell them to call me when they change their mind, and I walk away.

Setting aside all the science for a (brief!) moment, I want to point out that the tactics environmental groups use for pushing this anti-nuclear agenda are often pretty shady. It’s often merely implied by the language they use — for an example, see this US PIRG report that constantly refers to “fossil fuels and nuclear power,” that exact phrase, as if they’re equivalent in all important respects. Fossil fuels are bad for the environment, so it’s implied that nuclear plants must be equally so. After all, they’re always right there, one after the other! Never mind that the vast majority of the text devoted to explaining this is actually only talking about fossil fuels.

That said, let’s get to it. This “fact sheet” written in 2005 claims to explain why nuclear power is “expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary”. It’s full of generalizations and misleading statements, and not full enough of hard facts (though it’s decorated with lots of pretty charts to help disguise that). I could go through it sentence by sentence, but that wouldn’t do much more than make me too angry to finish this post. Instead, I will explain why all three of those adjectives aren’t fitting, and that nuclear power is affordable, safe, and absolutely necessary. read the rest »

Tags: energy, environment, nuclear power, science

Female Science Professor wrote a great post today, prompted by an essay in Journal of Cell Science, about how stupid can be a good feeling. I found it really spot-on and insightful. “What are you talking about, Z?” I can hear you saying with outrage. “This blog is about being intelligent and using your brain! How can you agree with the idea that stupid is good?”

I don’t think it’s good to be stupid, so hold your horses. The problem is, it’s easy to feel stupid when you’re really not. Somehow, the popular conception of a smart person is someone who knows lots of things. That has an element of truth to it, but true intelligence is a lot more than being able to recall trivia. It’s important for scientists — and I dare say people in general — to get comfortable saying “I don’t understand this at all,” really confronting their lack of knowledge rather than staying in a safer place where all the answers are memorized or easy. Acknowledging your ignorance is really the smartest thing to do. If you never find yourself asking questions you don’t already know the answers to, you’ll never find out anything new. That seems pretty obvious in an abstract sense (it’s a big part of why Socrates is revered as a great thinker), but if you’re used to sailing through your classes and being the smartest kid in the room, the feeling of not getting it right away can be pretty jarring.

In order to do well in science, or in math, or in analytical aspects of any pursuit, it’s important to learn to appreciate a feeling of cluelessness, because it’s out of those moments that major learning really happens. That’s why, whenever I tutor or teach, I make an extra effort to help my students realize that they’re not the only ones who’ve had a hard time understanding the material. I like to say things like, “I thought this was really confusing the first time I heard about it, but I found it useful to…” or “That last part was pretty tricky, do you want me to go through it again?” That feeling when you’re struggling to understand can really turn people off to science, especially when they wonder how anyone could make a whole career out of studying stuff that’s not yet in a textbook (or a solution manual). That’s why students really need to hear that everyone makes mistakes, gets confused, or spends days blankly staring at a problem with no idea where to begin. Those experiences don’t mean you’re unsuited for science — they only become an issue if you respond by panicking and giving up.

I was surprised that FSP and some of the commenters on her blog were worried about sending that essay on to some friends/students/colleagues they knew who were feeling discouraged. They anticipate those people will read it as, “Yes, you’re stupid” rather than, “See? Everyone feels this way, and it’s a good thing.” I’ve doubted whether I was cut out for physics on plenty of occasions, and I’m sure if even at the worst of those times I was given an article called “The importance of stupidity in scientific research” I would find it uplifting rather than upsetting. Maybe it just needs to be framed with the right introduction and given at an opportune time. I do think it could do a world of good.

Tags: education, psychology, science

Reason Hit & Run blogger Ronald Bailey recently asked, Are You Genetically Determined to Vote? He discussed a recent political science study from the University of California, San Diego which claims that the answer is yes. Dr. Fowler and Mr. Dawes observed relationships between voter turnout and the genes MAOA and 5HTT, which are already known to be involved in how social (or antisocial) an individual is.

In this article we demonstrate that possessing a particular gene is associated with voting activity. Even after controlling for factors known to influence turnout, having a high MAOA allele raises the likelihood of voting by about 5%. Among people active in their religious organizations, having a long 5HTT allele raises the likelihood of voting by about 10%. We theorize that since low efficiency MAOA and 5HTT alleles limit the degree to which individuals are socially oriented, these alleles inhibit their desire or ability to participate in the political process.

I’m not qualified to dissect their methodology in detail, though I do have a healthy suspicion of political science data analysis. I say “healthy” because I think most political scientists would share it. There are always so many factors in play, and it’s difficult to pin down any mechanisms by which effects happen in society, so it’s difficult to give genuine evidence for something rather than simply suggesting that your hypothesis could be true. (Remember, kids, correlation is not causation.) They did control their results against the effects of gender and ethnicity (at least, white vs. non-white) on voter turnout. I’m not quite sure that changes in likelihood of 5-10% are significant enough to frame as a genetic “determination,” but perhaps given turnout rates and population size, that makes a big enough difference when elections happen to be meaningful in the aggregate.

More research still needs to be done to understand these effects fully, but I think there’s an interesting possibility on the horizon. What if it turns out to be true that genetic makeup predisposes some people to vote, and other people not to vote? I mean, what if elections and referenda are decided by a genetically select few who, as a result of their participation, “matter” to the government more than the rest? If someday we have scientific proof of this, how should we make policy in response?

I think the answer is probably that we shouldn’t be worried too much about it, unless there’s a particular group of people with distinct interests that is consistently missing from the vote count. It’s not a rights violation — no one’s being prevented from voting, no one’s being told not to vote. It’s just a matter of people acting on their individual preferences. Anyone’s allowed to be disinterested in voting. Certainly, anyone’s allowed to be gregarious or to be introverted, and plenty of research has been done into the neurochemistry behind those differences. Even if we weren’t sure which genes were causing different neurochemicals to be released in response to different stimuli, it’s surely differences in genetic information that leads to the creation of different cellular mechanisms. In some sense, all this paper is saying is that people who are more extroverted are more likely to be active civic participants, which seems predictable almost to the point of being unremarkable.

In the event that a specific group was being systematically left out of the voting process, we’d have a bigger issue on our hands. That’s why it was important for Fowler and Dawes to control for gender and ethnicity (qualities that are obviously related to what genes a person has). If it turned out that, hypothetically, people of Asian descent were likely to have the genes that made people less social and less likely to be politically involved, the interests of Asian-Americans might be underrepresented at the polls. Without a voting bloc commensurate with population size, those interests could get unfairly ignored, leading to potentially discriminatory policies being enacted. In that case, in an effort to ensure that the government provided equal protection to all citizens, some people might argue for some kind of statistical compensation in the vote counting, or perhaps for some special offices designated for the protection of the interests of the subgroup in question. Of course, solutions like those come with their own backlash and societal unease. It would definitely be a messy situation.

Even if there aren’t any direct links between genetics and underrepresentation, it’s possible that there are correlations with these genetic traits that lead to practical harms. There are other groups of people who have concurrent interests besides those formed by gender and ethnic divisions — labor unions, for example, or residents of a state — and of course union membership and state residency aren’t genetically determined. It’s definitely true, though, that there are some careers that require one to be extroverted and other careers better suited for the introverted. If how socially inclined a person is really does have a meaningful effect on whether they vote, genetic factors might make teachers and nurses come out in force on election day while truckers and assembly line workers mostly stay home. (I have no idea if those trends actually manifest, and even if they did there could be other factors to explain it — but it’s possible for the social/antisocial genes to account for at least some of it.) The world is getting smaller every day as travel becomes easier and easier, but many people still do live relatively close to their parents, who provided their genetic material, meaning that a genetic tendency to vote or not vote could possibly be correlated with regions of the country or in some cases even neighborhoods. It would take a lot more data analysis, to be sure, but it’s possible that some subgroups of society could be underrepresented and subject to detrimental policies because association with that group is highly correlated with the genes that make one less likely to vote.

I suppose the real question is, what do we use voting for? Is it a way to average out competing interests to arrive at an outcome that’s best for society as a whole? Or, is it intended to measure the societal consensus by finding out what each person believes and summing up over the whole society? If it’s the latter, then it’s fine if people pass up the opportunity to vote when they don’t have strong opinions that they want counted. If it’s the former, though, certain groups not showing up could really cause problems. Obviously we don’t know enough yet for this to be a real issue at the moment, but it’s definitely something to think about.

Tags: genetics, politics, science

Several of John McCain’s energy initiative ideas have been in the news lately. Aside from the totally preposterous gas tax holiday, he’s talking about lifting the federal ban on offshore drilling and awarding a huge prize for better battery technology. He also wants to build 45 new nuclear reactors within the next 22 years. (You can hear his June 17 energy policy speech here, thanks to NPR.)

Meanwhile, Barack Obama remains deeply connected to ethanol, a fuel additive made from cellulose. In the US, this generally means corn, and currying favor with the ethanol lobby correlates strongly with winning big in corn-growing Midwest states. As a senator from Illinois it’s unsurprising that Obama is involved with the ethanol industry. However, it’s scientifically ambiguous whether corn ethanol actually yields more energy than it takes to produce it — but either way it’s many times less efficient than ethanol made from sugar cane, which is a major export of Brazil, and on which there is currently a substantial tariff that Obama just happens to support. Also, the demand for ethanol corn drives up food prices. (Fuel corn and edible corn are different varieties, brags the American Coalition for Ethanol, seemingly ignoring the fact that that’s exactly the problem. Fuel corn is displacing edible corn being grown, making the edible kind more scarce.) Support for ethanol is little more than pandering to Big Agriculture, and that isn’t exactly bringing the change.

That’s not to say Obama’s position on energy policy is bad overall — far from it. His campaign website outlines his plans. He wants to spend $150 billion in clean energy technology and infrastructure over the next 10 years. He’s generally supportive of nuclear power, but has specifically proposed the goal of making 25% of US electricity consumption derived from renewable resources by 2025 (about double the current percentage). Obama is also in favor of a cap-and-trade system for regulating carbon emissions by auctioning off credits to the highest bidders.

And while I’m thrilled to hear McCain talking about big initiatives for technological developments and a serious effort to bring our nuclear power generation capabilities up to where they ought to be (I’m not so sure about the offshore drilling — it might be a reasonable thing to do, though it won’t have any effect on our oil supply for decades) his energy position does leave a bit to be desired. First of all, I don’t really feel confident endorsing the policies of anyone who thought the gas tax holiday was a good idea. (He’s still not letting it go!) Is he just throwing everything out there to see what sticks? McCain is also a proponent of cap-and-trade carbon regulation, but unlike Obama would give away most of the credits to firms that currently pollute the most — meaning less government revenue, and a reward for past pollution. He supports subsidies for nuclear power plants but not for solar or wind power, despite some misleading imagery in his ads.

A lot of good ideas have been proposed, but so have a lot of bad ones. Unfortunately, each candidate has a few from each category, so neither looks clearly in the right. The thing is, science isn’t naturally a political thing. It’s not about ideologies, and it doesn’t care about opinion polls. Wouldn’t it be nice if Obama, McCain, and their campaign staffs could sit down and brainstorm together, then pick and choose the best ideas from each? Lots more nuclear plants, auctioning off carbon credits, ending ethanol subsidies to corn farmers, supporting solar, wind, and geothermal generation… good policies are out there. Here’s hoping politics will get out of the way.

Tags: barack obama, energy, john mccain, oil, politics, science