Lab Notes : Explainer

The Passions of Voters: Whose Morals Are They, Anyway?

Sharon Begley — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 20:11:48 GMT

The AP story on John McCain’s taking a 48-44 lead over Barack Obama included this quite: “My heart sort of runs with McCain and my mind probably tends to run toward Obama,” said David Scorup, 58, a county government official in Othello, Wash. “I think I resonate more with McCain.”

That sent me scurrying for the latest on the power of emotions to sway voters—rational analysis of candidates’ positions and records be damned. I’ve written on the ascendancy of heart over head before, starting with a review in June 2007 of Drew Westen’s book “The Political Brain” and including the Newsweek story in February on how emotions trump reason. Most of the focus has been on how different candidates inspire fear or hope (with the former being more powerful than the latter), or even on how likable they are. But in an essay for the online salon Edge, psychologist Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia looks at something that may be even more potent: voters’ gut feelings about candidates’ moral values.

“When gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare,” he writes—something every political psychologist I’ve spoken to this election year agrees with. “Feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete,” he continues. “If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.”

The Democrats, as Haidt sees it, have really blown it by thinking that morality is about fairness, equality, individual rights and other manifestations of how people treat one another and how society treats individuals. In fact, he writes, morality “is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats ‘just don’t get it,’ this is the ‘it’ to which they refer.” And nothing arouses voters’ passions more strongly than morals and, especially, the perception that the other guy's are just plain wrong.

Haidt’s alternative definition of morality is “any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.” That means favoring self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concerns for people different from you (racism, anyone?).

Many people have a gut instinct favoring policies that do this, such as by producing social cohesion and downplaying the rights of the individual (sex? abortion?) for the good of the group (intact nuclear families?). How many is “many”? According to Haidt, “one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years [is that] they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. . . . Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions . . . they err, they alienate, and they earn the label ‘elitist’.”

The plain fact is that many voters—we’ll see on November 4 if it’s “most” voters—value loyalty and respect for authority above values that liberals (mistakenly) think are synonymous with morality, such as fairness and caring for the less fortunate. (You can test which values you hold dearest at www.YourMorals.org.) Read Haidt’s essay, and you’ll be less puzzled about why working-class voters so often make election-day choices that go against their economic self-interest, the “what’s the matter with Kansas?” conundrum.

Don't Drink the Water

Sharon Begley — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:42:24 GMT

Warning to anyone planning a crime: don’t drink the water.

Scientists are reporting this evening that an analysis of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes in human hair reveals where a person drank water, which will allow investigators to figure out if a suspect was in the vicinity of a crime—and also to track past movements of unidentified murder victims.

The new technique analyzes isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen, forms of the elements that have an extra neutron in its atomic nucleus. The ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 in air is the same everywhere, and ratios of both hydrogen and oxygen ratios in food are also basically the same across the country because the American food supply is so uniform. But water is still like a microbrew, containing different constituents depending on where it comes from.

As a result, geochemist Thure Cerling and ecologist Jim Ehleringer of the University of Utah report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a single hair bears clues to where someone has been over the last few weeks or even years, depending on the length of the hair. “You are what you eat and drink—and that is recorded in your hair,” said Cerling in a statement from the university.

Salt Lake County Sheriff's Detective Todd Park is using the hair-isotope method to try to identify a murdered woman whose remains were found by hunters near Interstate-80 along the south end of the Great Salt Lake on October 8, 2000. Detectives recovered 26 bones, some hair, a T-shirt and a necklace. Despite creating a facial reconstruction and publicizing it nationally, the police have been unable to ID the woman, who stood about 5 feet tall and was 17 to 20 years old when she was killed. But when Park arranged with Ehleringer for an isotope analysis of the victim’s hair, it showed that for the last two years of her life she lived in the Northwest, mostly in the Idaho-Montana-Wyoming area, and maybe into Oregon and Washington. Park hopes that examining missing persons records from those areas will lead to an ID.

Ehleringer and Cerling are co-founders of IsoForensics, Inc., which sells isotopic analysis of forensic substances. A method Ehleringer developed to trace the origins of cocaine or heroin is now used by the a method now used by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration: variations in the amount of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in soil and water show up in coca and poppy plants.

For the hair analysis, says Ehleringer, “You can tell the difference between Utah and Texas,” but probably not Chicago and Kansas City. In general, the amount of the heavy isotopes oxygen-18 and hydrogen-2 levels in drinking water decreases as you move inland from the West Coast: as rainstorms move off the Pacific Ocean, rain drops containing oxygen-18 and hydrogen-2 tends to fall first because it is heavier. But cloud temperatures and season also affect which isotopes rain drops contain, with the result that heavy isotopes are also relatively more common in water inland from the Gulf and southern Atlantic coasts. The lowest concentrations of hydrogen-2 and oxygen-18 are found in water in northern and western Montana, north-central Idaho and northwest Wyoming (because the heavy isotopes drop out of clouds before they reach these inland areas), while the highest amounts of hydrogen-2 and oxygen-18 in drinking water and hair are in southern Oklahoma, north-central Texas, Florida, south Georgia and southern South Carolina (in warm regions with more evaporation, lighter-isotope water evaporates from surface sources first, leaving heavier-isotope water behind to find its way into drinking water.

Raining on the Super Tuesday Parade

Sharon Begley — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:24:26 GMT

If the band of showers stretching from the Midwest to New England dampens voter turnout today, we’ll know what to blame.

Cars. Factories, too.

Meteorologists have long known that particles “seed” rainclouds, a process in which water and ice in the clouds grab hold of the particles, forming additional (and larger) droplets that are more likely to fall as rain. That led to the suggestion that particulate pollution emitted by traffic, businesses and factories, all of which are greater during the workweek than on the weekend (traffic to malls notwithstanding), should make for greater rainfall Monday through Friday. A competing theory, however, held that the increased pollution might instead thwart rainfall, by dispersing the water in clouds over more seeds; that would prevent the droplets from growing large enough to fall as rain.

At least for summertime rainfall in the southeastern United States, the verdict is in: weekday pollution is causing more rainfall midweek than on weekends.

So conclude scientists analyzing data from NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite, known as TRMM. As they report in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, those data show that midweek storms tend to be more intense than those during the weekend, dropping more rain, compared to calmer and drier weekends. Human-caused atmospheric pollution also peaks midweek, as the emissions from tailpipes and smokestacks build up before falling off as Friday approaches.

The scientists find that, on average, it rains more between Tuesday and Thursday than from Saturday through Monday. Tuesday has 1.8 times more rainfall than Saturday, which has the least amount of afternoon rain. Now I understand why, on this Super Tuesday, I am wringing out my drenched socks after venturing out into the storm to vote.

Eureka! How the Brain has 'Aha' Moments

Sharon Begley — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 01:00:14 GMT

Think of one word that can form a compound word with “sauce,” “pine” and “crab.”

I’ll wait . . . .

Time’s up: did you come up with “apple,” to make “applesauce,” “pineapple” and “crabapple”? OK, let’s consider that a warmup. Try the same exercise—finding a word to make a compound word—with “bump,” “step” and “egg.”

Did “goose” pop into your head?

One more: for “back” “clip” and “wall.” . . . .It’s “paper,” for “paperback,” “paperclip” and “wallpaper.”

If you’re like many people, you tried to solve each problem methodically, first finding a word that would go with, say, “sauce” and then trying it out with “pine” and “crab.” But if you’re like most people in a more important way, if you solved these brain-teasers you did so not through this grind-through-the-possibilities approach, but through insight. That is, you thought a little and then, wham, the answer suddenly hit you.

Scientists have approximately no idea how this happens.

But they’re trying to figure it out, partly because some of the more notable achievements in, especially, science and math came to their discoverers through such “eureka” moments—Archimedes' law of buoyancy and Newton’s theory of gravity, for instance. (“Eureka” is in fact what Archimedes yelled when he leapt out of his bathtub upon figuring out how to calculate the volume of an irregularly shaped object: measure how much water it displaces.)

In each case, the moment of genius was preceded by two things, First came a mental impasse (“I’m stuck and have no idea what the &^$*ing answer is!”). Then came a restructuring of the problem ("OK, I must be thinking about this all wrong”) that leads to deeper understanding. Finally, you suddenly see the answer—which, in retrospect, seems blindingly obvious. In the most far-reaching study conducted so far on what the brain is doing before achieving an “aha” moment, two scientists used EEGs (electroencephalograms) to determine the site and type of brain activity during the stages leading up to the sense of eureka as well as the eureka moment itself.

They gave volunteers those sauce/pine/crab kind of word problems while electrodes monitored their brain activity. Sure enough, the volunteers reported being at a mental impasse at first. But those who eventually solved the problem also reported restructuring (moving from an inappropriate way of thinking about the problem and not knowing how to proceed to a state of knowing how to solve it). That is made possible by what the scientists call “internal retrieval processes,” which search your memory for ideas that can be used to reinterpret your knowledge (for instance, don’t think only of words that come before the given ones).

As Joydeep Bhattacharya of Goldsmiths College, London, and Simone Sandkuhler of the Medical College of Vienna report in their new study, being published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE tomorrow, mental impasse was characterized by excessive gamma waves. This brain rhythm is enhanced with focused attention; simply put, the would-be problem solvers were thinking too hard about one specific thing.

But those who successfully solved the puzzles, sometimes after the scientists gave them a hint, seemed to let their thoughts run free, rather than overthinking either the problem or their own thought processes. That suggests that success depends on an unconscious restructuring of information, as volunteers let their brains reshuffle words almost randomly until they came up with the answer.

Solving these word problems may not be precisely akin to, say, Archimedes’ eureka moment, but it’s not exactly feasible to scan the brains of everyone trying to solve a real-world problem to see what brain activity precedes the moment of insight. And in fact, these new results fit with the little work that has been done to date on the brain mechanisms underlying insight.

In 2004, for instance, Bhavin Sheth of the University of Houston measured the brain waves of people trying to solve problems like this: moving as few sticks as possible, turn the incorrect Roman-numeral equation XI + I = X (11 + 1 = 10, for those who forgot Roman numerology), made out of matchsticks, into a correct one. Some people try to solve it, Sheth told the 2004 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in a plodding, uncreative, trial-and-error way, usually moving the matchstick that makes up XI on the left to get X + I = XI. But if you mentally rotate the equation (or turn the paper it’s written on upside down, as Sheth’s volunteers could do), XI + I = X becomes X = I + IX (10 = 1 + 9) without moving a single stick.

In people who found the creative, zero-stick solution, low-frequency brain waves known as delta and gamma dropped just before the eureka moment. Delta waves are characteristic of such mental processes as memory; gamma waves, of coordinated mental activity. Both seem to mark focused, but conventional, mental activity. The fact that both disappeared right before the eureka moment suggests that the brain was escaping from conventional thought patterns, just as the latest study also found.

Right before the eureka moment, but not before the unimaginative solution, theta waves in the front of the brain increased. Theta waves seem to encode new information, so this suggests that people were forming new associations between previously unconnected concepts, or seeing the information in the problem in a new light. Specifically, they mentally rotate the matchsticks, coming up with a spatial solution to a numerical problem.

An earlier study that used the sauce/pine/crab type of problem reinforces this idea. When psychologist Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern University asked volunteers to find one word that could form a compound word with all three of the given words, he and colleagues found in a 2004 study that some people solved the problem uncreatively, thinking of every word that goes with “crab” and then trying them all on “pine,” for example. But volunteers who got it through insight rather than drudgery said they just stared at the words until “apple” popped into their head. Right before this insight, there was a spike in activity in the brain’s anterior cingulated, which reorients attention. That reinforces the idea that insight requires directing the brain away from the dead ends that characterize mental impasses.

So if you’re stuck on a problem that requires creativity, the first thing to do is relax, mentally. Stop pursuing the same old dead ends. Let your thoughts wander. Let your attention flit between seemingly irrelevant memories and thoughts. That’s the best way to let disparate pieces of the puzzle come together into your own eureka moment.

Apes and Monkeys: Going, Going . . .

Sharon Begley — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 01:00:19 GMT

The murder of gorillas in Congo which so shocked the world's conscience is only the tip of the iceberg of the threats facing vanishing primates. This evening, Conservation International is releasing a report documenting the world's 25 most endangered apes, monkeys, lemurs and other primates, which are under unprecedented threat from destruction of tropical forests, illegal wildlife trade and commercial bushmeat hunting.

Today, 29 percent of all species in danger of going extinct, and we may soon witness the first primate extinctions in more than a century. (Overall, 114 of the world’s 394 primate species are classified as threatened with extinction.) One species, Miss Waldron’s red colobus of Ivory Coast and Ghana, already is feared extinct, while the golden-headed langur of Vietnam and China’s Hainan gibbon number only in the dozens. The Horton Plains slender loris of Sri Lanka has been sighted just four times since 1937.

Some images of the possibly doomed:

Hainan Gibbon. ©CI/Stephen Nash.

Cat Ba Island Golden Headed Langur. Photo: Russell A. Mittermeier/CI.

Horton Plains slender loris. ©CI/Stephen Nash.

Miss Waldron's red colobus. ©CI/Stephen Nash.

Why California's Wildfires are America's Future

Sharon Begley — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:57:31 GMT

I'm pretty conservative about attributing weird weather and other climate anomalies to global warming: all you can say is that a record-setting hot October, or a string of 70-degree days in January in New York, is consistent with what a greenhouse world would be like. But when scientists go on record with a specific prediction of how climate change will play out, and when it indeed plays out that way, attention must be paid.

Last year, a study in the journal Science found that "large wildfire activity increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s, with higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons." The greatest increases were in forests of the Northern Rockies, but was seen throughout the west The pattern of western fires matched what would be expected not from changes in land use--mostly logging and ranching--but from climate change.

Specifically, a warmer world caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases produces alternating deluges and droughts. The extra heat causes greater evaporation, but the water vapor remains in the atmosphere longer, or travels farther, before falling--in buckets. The result is alternating wet and dry years. In wet years, vegetation grows like mad. In drought years, that vegetation becomes tinder, exactly what southern California is now experiencing. As the scientists said, "an increased incidence of large, high-severity fires may be due to a combination of extreme droughts and overabundant fuels."

And no, it's not just a matter of media attention or the ubiquity of fire video on YouTube. The scientists found that the frequency of wildfires beginning in the mid-1980s was nearly four times that of 1970 to 1986, "and the total area burned by these fires was more than six and a half times its previous level." It's real, and it's going to continue.

. . . and get worse. Just as this season we call summer is now slipping well past Sept. 21, so the fire "season" is busting out of its former bounds. The average time between the reported first wildfire and the last in any given year increased by 78 days (64%), comparing 1970 to 1986 with 1987 to 2003.

Another factor is snowmelt, which has been dissipating in the west (with dire consequences for water supply, but that's another story). The earlier the snowmelt, the worse the wildfire season, because if the snowpack holds on into late spring or summer it releases its water slowly and gradually, reducing the flammability of vegetation. But if the snow has all melted by early in the season, much of it is lost to runoff rather than retained in the soil, where it would dampen the flammability of vegetation. Also, the warmer the summer--another consequence of climate change--the worse the burn: warmer temps, by increasing the rate of plants' evapotranspiration, make brush more flammable.

"This is exactly what we’ve been projecting to happen, both in short-term fire forecasts for this year and the longer term patterns that can be linked to global climate change," says Ronald Neilson of Oregon State University, who is also a bioclimatologist with the U.S. Forest Service.

He and other scientists are careful to acknowledge that there is no way to prove that the increase in wildfires has been caused by climate change--just as every prudent climatologist makes the same disclaimer about a heat wave or intense hurricane. But their conclusion is worth quoting in full: "virtually all climate-model projections indicate that warmer springs and summers will occur over the region in coming decades. These trends will reinforce the tendency toward early spring snowmelt and longer fire seasons. This will accentuate conditions favorable to the occurrence of large wildfires"---as California is seeing all to well this week.

It may soon have a lot of company. Nelson, who has served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific body that periodically assesses climate change research and that shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize, says that other regions of the U.S. may be experiencing a fire-friendly pattern of precipitation: several wet years followed by several that are drier than normal.

The result can be "heavier vegetation loads popping up and creation of a tremendous fuel load," says Nelson, whose climate models accurately predicted this week's California blazes. "But the warmth and other climatic forces are also going to create periodic droughts. If you get an ignition source during these periods, the fires can just become explosive. . . . In the future, catastrophic fires such as those going on now in California may simply be a normal part of the landscape." (The IPCC report released earlier this year also projected worse wildfires, in chapter 14 of the report by Working Group 2.)

How bad might it get? In 2002, OSU's Nelson and colleagues projected that droughts or heat waves made more frequent by climate change would lead to wildfire more frequent and severe than almost any that have occurred since colonial days.

Shaking the Family Tree With Recreational Genetics

Sharon Begley — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 20:43:06 GMT

Hit a wall in your efforts to construct your family tree? Can’t get past the garbled last name that authorities at Ellis Island conferred on great-grandpa Maurizio? It’s DNA to the rescue—or, as critics say, yet another example of questionable “recreational genetics.”

Tomorrow, Ancestry.com, the Website where 15 million people have been accessing census and other records to build their family trees since the company’s founding in 1997, is rolling out its latest genealogy resource. Called DNA Ancestry, it starts by having you take a cheek-swab sample and mail it to the company, which will compare it to DNA samples in its database and tell you if it gets a hit—that is, someone to whom you are even distantly related. If it finds someone, you can contact him or her through an anonymous email and piggy-back on their own genealogy research. “If you don’t know your family history, you can match your DNA profile to one in our database and connect to other people who are related to you and might have broken through the wall” of historical records needed to construct a family tree, says Ancestry.com vice-president Brett Folkman.

Both women and men can have a DNA analysis of their mitochondrial DNA for $179. mtDNA, which is inherited by sons and daughters from their mothers, has become a standard way for a number of online sites to trace ancestry, as Family Tree DNA and Ancestry By DNA, among others, do. Men can also have their Y chromosome, which is inherited by sons (but not daughters) from their fathers virtually unchanged, analyzed for $149 or $199, depending on whether you want 33 or 46 genetic markers included. Unlike other DNA-based ancestry sites, which focus on telling you where in the world—sometimes down to the village—your family roots are sunk and even when your “family” migrated out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago, DNA Ancestry aims to link you to specific individuals. It can’t tell you your exact relationship to someone else, only that a relationship exists. For example, a Y-DNA test could verify that you’re related to a co-worker, but not that you both share the same great-grandfather.

This will work as the company says—linking you to someone who has mined federal census data from 1790 to 1930 and the 100 million names in passenger ship records from 1820 to 1960 in Ancestry’s database, among other sources, to piece together a family tree—only if Ancestry.com has lots of DNA profiles in its database. Within six months, that should be about 50,000, says Megan Smolenyak, the company’s chief family historian and co-author of the 2004 book "Trace Your Roots with DNA." “As more people add their results,” she says, “the DNA Ancestry database becomes a powerful asset for users to make connections and discover their family tree.”

The question is whether even 50,000 is enough. The service might tell you that you and another user share a great-great-grandfather—that is, four generations back. Everything more recent than that would diverge, so although genealogical research that this long-lost cousin of yours has done might fill in the distant parts of your family tree, it won’t help much with the branches that include your grandfather’s and father’s generations.

Overselling the value of DNA for ancestry searches is causing more and more scientists to scorn what they are calling “recreational genetics.” Since 2000, a study finds, some 460,000 people have bought DNA tests from some two dozen companies that trace ancestry, and some users are doubtless being misled. One problem is that by testing only a limited number of genetic markers, the services miss many relatives: while they tell you that your family roots are sunk in, say, the Piedmont, they overlook that you have just as many roots in, say, Nova Scotia, or this African village as well as that one. More problematic, in terms of identifying an individual to whom you are related, is that it can make the connection sound more notable than it is. Yes, you and Sam might have the same great-great-great-grandfather but, under standard assumptions about reproduction and survival, so do (on average) 500 other people living today. But hey, you might just get lucky and find that one of them is a demon genealogist who has done all the census-digging and Ellis-Island sleuthing for you.

Pick the Obscenity: FUBAR, Snafus, or Beheadings

Sharon Begley — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 07:56:19 GMT

Something leaped out at me from my colleague David Gates' provocative review of the upcoming Ken Burns World War II documentary, "The War." As he wrote, "some affiliates—which didn't seem to mind the obscenely gruesome Holocaust pictures or the scene where a machine gun blows off a soldier's head—had a problem with the four uses of cusswords, one of which is alluded to in the anagrammatic title of episode five, "FUBAR." (For you youngsters, this was a GI term standing for "F---ed Up Beyond All Recognition." Perhaps it was a snafu to include that.)

This is not news, of course. Films get in trouble with the motion picture ratings board for saying the F in FUBAR and snafu, but not for a high, gruesome body count. You can stop a pleasant dinner cold by uttering that word, but not by describing in gory detail the latest atrocity on the battlefront. For insight into the peculiarities of profanity, I turned to psychologist Steven Pinker's new book, "The Stuff of Thought."

Why is sex, which at first glance (and, if you're lucky, subsequent glances) seems like a nice thing, the source of so many taboo words, including the above? Because "sex has high stakes," Pinker writes, "including exploitation, disease, illegitimacy, incest, jealousy, spousal abuse, cuckoldry, . . . and rape." As a result, "plain speaking about sex"--and what is plainer that using variations on the f-word as noun, adjective and adverb?--"conveys the attitude that sex is a casual matter." Society as a whole does not want that conveyed, and if you think we're beyond that, Pinker counsels, notice that for all our sexual liberation most of us "still don't copulate in public, swap spouses at the end of a dinner party, [or] have sex with their siblings and children." Most people want to keep it that way. Sex-loaded terms starting with f--- threaten to erode the barriers we erect to behaviors like the above, so we treat them as taboo. Indeed, this aversion to casual sex is so embedded in the human psyche that trying to reason your way around it---surely no form of sex, casual or otherwise, is as bad as battlefield atrocities?---just doesn't work.

Once a word becomes taboo, of course, it can be employed to great rhetorical effect, conveying the speaker's emotion and triggering emotion in the listener. Compare the emotional punch of "pick up your dog's s--- and stop him from pissing on my roses!" to "pick up your dog's droppings and stop him from urinating on my roses!" Which speaker sounds so angry that you figure you better placate him (or get a bigger, meaner dog)? Vulgarity has its uses. And a word's taboo status can itself give the word an emotional wallop. If you want sympathy for how your boss treated you, you're more likely to get it if you tell your friends "he f---ed me over" than if you say "he treated me unfairly."

Pinker is a linguist by training, so his analysis of sex-themed profanity inevitably involves verb types. As he notes, transitive verbs for sex---which can fit in the slot, 'Bill verbed Sue'--are "jocular or disrespectful at best and offensive at worst." But intransitive verbs---'Bill verbed with/to Sue'---such as 'made love with, 'slept with,' 'went to bed with' and many others--convey a mutual activity. Words in the latter group lack a direct object, so there is no entity that is acted upon or made to change. They are semantically symmetrical, since if Bill slept with Sue then Sue also slept with Bill. But words of the 'Bill verbed Sue' variety imply that one active agent has exploited a direct object, gramatically speaking, or even damaged that object. That, too, we prefer not to think about casually; making verbs of the 'Bill verbed Sue' variety taboo goes some way toward achieving that since we are not routinely exposed to them.

We humans are conflicted about whether sex is a mutual, shared activity or something shameful (if you don't believe there is a hint of shame in sex as viewed by the most hook-up-happy teenager, refer to above discussion of public copulation). In the latter view, Pinker writes, 'sex is a forceful act, instigated by an active male and impinging on a passive female, exploiting or damaging her. . . . The second [model] is taboo," and its language is, too.

Of course, explaining why some words are taboo doesn't fully explain why they are more taboo than those Holocaust and battlefield scenes in Burns' documentary, at least in the eyes of the protesting affiliates. To account for that, you'd have to posit that something deep in our evolutionary history made casual and public mention of sex more threatening to society than did the most heinous acts of cruelty and violence. And, sad to say, as long as those acts were directed at outsiders rather than fellow tribesmen, that was probably the case.

How to Make Sure the 'Best' Team Wins

Sharon Begley — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 15:30:22 GMT

Any Dallas Mavericks fans who groaned when the execrable Golden State Warriors knocked their team out of the NBA playoffs this spring, or New York Yankees diehards still shaking their heads that their 97-65 (regular season) team watched as the 83-78 St. Louis Cardinals went home with World Series rings last year, take heart: two physicists have devised a way to make 99 percent sure that the “best” team really does win.

Sure, upsets spice up the game. But let’s get real: the 91-71 Florida Marlins as the 2003 world champions and not, say, the 101-61 Atlanta Braves or Yankees? Over the last 100 years, find Eli Ben-Naim and Nicolas Hengartner of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the lower-ranked baseball team “had an astounding 44% chance of defeating” a higher-ranked team. Fans know that this reflects the fact that even a worse team can have a terrific pitcher, and a better team can suddenly find itself putting on the mound someone who just flew in from the minor leagues to fill a gap in the rotation, or that a few bad bounces can determine a game, among other quirks that make the sport exciting. The result, of course, is that “even after a long series of competitions, the best team does not always finish first,” the scientists write in an upcoming paper in the journal Physical Review E.

Should we ever get fed up with travesties like the 116-46 Seattle Mariners not winning the 2001 World Series, the Los Alamos battery has calculated how we can ensure that the best team emerges as champion at season’s end. The first point is that you need to increase the sample size. Given the randomness inherent in any one match-up, a league with X teams would have to have X times X times X games to guarantee that the best team will end the season and post-season with the most wins. In the 16-team National League, that means 4096 regular-season games; the 14-team American League would have to cram in 2744 games.

Since that’s not exactly practical, the physicists have another solution: add a preliminary round to the season. That would help eliminate the weakest teams before regular league play begins and ensure that a top team is not wiped out of the playoffs through bad bounces, bad luck or just too many off-nights in a row (I’m talking about you, Mavericks). Using numerical simulations, the physicists showed that it would then take on the order of 100 or so games—the current 162 in baseball or 82 in basketball would work just fine—to make 98-percent sure that the champion at the end of the season is among that year’s top two or three teams.

As for football, the 16 games in the regular National Football League season means that the pro football season outcome is even more random than baseball’s.

Climate Cassandras? Not This Time, Either

Sharon Begley — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 14:04:47 GMT

As I walked from my house to the train station during last week’s torrential downpour in New York, I found myself in need of a 21^st-century Sir Walter Raleigh (you know, he who spread his cloak over a puddle in 1581 so Queen Elizabeth I would not get her feet wet). A cloak wasn’t going to do it for me, though: the intersection I needed to cross to reach the street climbing up to the station had become a 2-foot-deep lake, judging by where the water reached on cars intrepid enough to try to get through. A garbage can bobbed along in the current. I flagged down a passing car, who drove me around the block rather than through the flood.

This comes to mind on yet another morning of torrential rain in the city because of a new study, to be published later this week in the journal Nature (subscription required). Scientists compared global rainfall records from 1925 to 1999 to various models of precipitation: those that include only natural causes (normal variability in the planet’s climate system and changes due to volcano eruptions, for instance), those that include only human effects (release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere) and those that include both. Their conclusion: human activity “has had a detectable influence on observed changes in average precipitation,” they write, and these changes “cannot be explained by internal climate variability or natural forcing.” (Natural forcing includes things like changes in solar output as well as volcanoes.) In fact, “the estimated contribution of natural forcing to observed zonal precipitation trends is small in relation to the estimated contribution from anthropogenic [that is, manmade] forcing,” the scientists conclude.

Specifically, greenhouse emissions have contributed to increased rainfall here in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere (40 to 70 degrees N), where human influence is responsible for 50 to 85 percent of the extra precip. In contrast, human activity is responsible for only 20 to 40 of the observed drying trend in the northern tropics and subtropics, from the equator to 30 degrees N. Human activity is behind more than 75 percent of the 20^th-century’s extra raininess in the southern hemisphere’s tropics and subtropics, from the equator to 30 degrees S.

Those who accuse climate modelers of Cassandra-ism, take note: this is another example where the models of human-induced climate change fall short of the observed changes. That is, the models forecast smaller changes in rainfall than has been documented.

We have seen the same thing with Arctic sea ice, where models forecast less sea-ice loss than has been observed. In May, for instance, scientists writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that, over the last 50 years, summer sea ice in the Arctic had shrunk at three-times the rate that the best climate simulations had forecast. That’s something that greenhouse contrarians downplay. They are happy to point out uncertainties and imprecision in the models, without mentioning that those uncertainties cut both ways: rather than overstate the effect of greenhouse emissions, they may understate them, meaning climate change will be even worse than the models indicate.

What, Me Sacrifice? Take 2

Sharon Begley — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 18:39:36 GMT

Sacrifice is not a message most Americans want to hear when it comes to what they can do to reduce their carbon footprint; my favorite, from a party held in conjunction with the LiveEarth concerts on July 7, was to take only one napkin with your fast food, not a handful. A study from Japan offers support to more meaningful action. The researchers have calculated that one beef cow during its lifetime is responsible for 10,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent (that is, greenhouse gases with the same heat-trapping power as that much CO₂). In more user-friendly terms, that means a couple pounds of beef—about what Americans would buy to grill for a family of four carnivores this weekend—is responsible for about as much greenhouse gas emissions as “driving for three hours while leaving all the lights on back home,” as the British weekly New Scientist calculates.

The study, published in the August issue of Animal Science Journal, examines beef production from calf birth to slaughter, including transporting feed but not the meat. Most greenhouse gas emissions from cattle production are methane (the always-good-for-a-laugh fact that ruminants release methane from the nether end of their digestive systems), while almost all the CO₂ itself is the result of fossil fuel used to generate energy to produce and transport feed. For those who can stomach neither beef-abstinence nor the purchase of enough carbon offsets to balance their carnivory, cheer up: a 2003 study from Sweden concluded that organic beef, from cattle that eat the grass they trod rather than concentrated feed trucked to them, is responsible for 40 percent less greenhouse emissions than standard beef, and requires 85 percent less energy to produce, pound per pound.

Scientists & Engineers: Will Work 4 Food?

Sharon Begley — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:13:11 GMT

Right-wing opponents of immigration and of what they called “amnesty” for illegals weren’t the only ones celebrating last month’s defeat of the White House-backed immigration bill.

In 2002 I was naïve enough to write a column channeling the angst of technology CEOs about the “shortage” of scientists and engineers (a theme that has been sounded since the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation projected a shortfall of about 675,000 over the following two decades, something that never materialized, as discussed in a paper by MIT mathematician Eric Weinstein). Scores of engineers, in particular, wrote to me. In addition to pointing out my basic stupidity (well, credulity), they explained that the career prospects of an engineer these days are so bleak they steer their children away from the field. Most of all, they argued that the shortage is and was a myth.

No wonder, then, that engineers are cheering the defeat of the immigration bill, which would have increased the number of high-tech employees that companies could bring in on temporary H-1B visas from the current 65,000 per year to 115,000 and eventually to as many as 180,000.

The economic argument for this rests on basic free market ideology, as editorials in The Wall Street Journal espoused more than a decade ago:

Feb. 1, 1990: “The U.S. has the best university system in the world, yet about half of our technical graduate school slots are filled by foreigners. As long as we don’t train enough scientists, engineers or software designers ourselves, immigration is a saving grace. ... Come to think of it, with jobs available why have a quota at all? ... Our view is, borders should be open.”

March 16, 1990: “As long as the teachers’ unions prevent education reform, the U.S. needs to import scientists and engineers. ... Whatever happened to competitiveness?”

(The labor market for engineers crashed in the 1990s, but no matter.)

The argument against increasing the number of foreign engineers and scientists allowed to work here comes down to the bitter experience of American scientists and engineers who see their jobs going to lower-paid H-1Bs. One H-1B who is suing over the long wait for a green card was paid $40,000; according to government data, that put her in the bottom quartile for this occupation (land planner). Even when H-1Bs do return to their native country (often India) once the visa expires, they are sometimes used to lay the groundwork for outsourcing. That is, they learn the job here, then go home and lead the effort to do the work overseas.

Engineer Sam Florman eloquently captures the angst of the profession in a recent paper. He starts from the premise that “engineers have been good for America: diligent creators of comfort and wealth” and “America has been good to its engineers: rewarding their efforts, if not with riches or fame, at least with plentiful employment opportunities.” That relationship, he laments, is now fraying badly: “With the coming of globalization, the climate for American engineers has turned ominously inhospitable. Specifically, the outsourcing of technological work requires American engineers to compete with skilled professionals abroad whose salaries are very low. At the same time, Congress has attracted thousands of foreign technical workers to the U.S. by authorizing a special new visa category (H-1B). . . . To rub salt in the wounds, at the very moment that American engineers are faced with multitudes of new competitors worldwide, an energetic campaign is under way to recruit more young Americans to study engineering.” Florman ends with what he calls an “appalling thought”: that the interests of U.S. engineers “have come into conflict with those of the nation as a whole.”

That clash is spilling into other fields of science. With the budget cuts at the National Institutes of Health, labs from Harvard to the University of California plus many top biomedical institutions in between are having to lay off technicians as well as post-doctoral fellows. Even full professors with stellar track records are struggling. Since their salary comes out of their grant (unbeknownst to most civilians, few profs at medical schools draw a salary from the institution; we, the taxpayers, cover it) if they are unable to renew a grant they are essentially without gainful employment.

Juxtaposed against the constant calls for more young people to enter science and engineering, this is an odd situation indeed.

Why Doesn't Evolution Get Rid of Ugly People?

Sharon Begley — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Why isn’t everyone beautiful, smart and healthy? Or, in a less-polite formulation, why haven’t ugly, stupid, unhealthy people been bred out of the population—ugly people because no one will have them as mates, meaning they don’t get the chance to pass their ugliness to the next generation; stupid people because they’re outgunned in the race to financial success (that is, acquiring resources needed to survive and reproduce); unhealthy people because they die before they get a chance to reproduce?

Evolutionary theory predicts that the unfeeling hand of natural selection would lead to a culling of disadvantageous traits—or, as biologists more delicately phrase it, “depletion of genetic variation in natural populations as a result of the effects of selection.”

But look around, and you’ll see that that has not happened—not in people, and not in wild animals where homely and infirm offspring are born all the time.

Evolutionary geneticists try to explain this paradox by positing that mutations for disadvantageous traits keep popping up no matter how hard natural selection attempts to wipe them out, but in their more honest moments the scientists admit that in real life undesirable traits are way more common than this mechanism would account for; “ugly” mutations just don’t occur that often. In a groundbreaking study, biologists at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland have figured out why, at least in one species: genes that are good for males are bad for females and, perhaps, vice versa.

The scientists studied red deer, 3,559 of them from eight generations, living on Scotland’s Isle of Rum. They carefully noted each animal’s fitness, who mated with whom, how many offspring survived, which offspring mated and with what results. Bottom line: “male red deer with relatively high fitness fathered, on average, daughters with relatively low fitness,” Edinburgh’s Katharina Foerster and her colleagues conclude in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Nature. “Male red deer with a relatively high lifetime [fitness, which includes their reproductive success, the only thing evolution cares about] sired, on average, daughters with a relatively low [fitness].” The reverse also holds. Males that were relatively less successful in their reproductive success and fitness had daughters that were extra successful.

The reason is that any particular gene-based trait may have very different effects on males than in females. Extrapolating to humans (and oversimplifying, sorry) you might imagine that a particular shape of the nose or turn of the chin would look drop-dead hunky on a male, but horsey on a woman; dad got to mate because his looks attracted a female, but the result of their togetherness produced daughters whose pulchritude was less than obvious. Traits that evolutionary psychologists tell us make women unfit for mating (having the “wrong” shape) remain abundant in the human race because the DNA for the traits, when inherited by sons, confers a selective advantage; when those sons have daughters, presto—more females with less-than-hourglass shapes. Or as the Edinburgh biologists put it, “optimal genotypes differ between male and female red deer, because a genotype that produces a male phenotype with relatively high fitness will, on average, produce a phenotype with lower fitness when expressed in a female.”

This discovery reminds me of other seminal studies that contribute to our understanding of why “bad” genes persist. The best know is the gene for sickle-cell disease, which is prevalent through the Mediterranean region and much of Africa. Why wouldn’t natural selection get rid of it? Because, it turns out, carrying one copy of the gene increases your resistance to malaria (this is explained well here), which is prevalent—surprise!—in the exact same regions.

Much of the theorizing about fitness in human biology has been undermined by empirical studies (see, for instance, “Adapting Minds” by David Buller ). The study of red deer provides one more cautionary tale for those who would be tempted to weed out “undesirable” traits in the human population. On a less lofty note, it should make us think twice before we reject as a mate someone who does not conform to the “fitness” stereotype promulgated by evolutionary psychologists (such as a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 for women, and alpha-male behavior for men). You may think, subconsciously, that you’re choosing someone who will transmit “good genes” to your kids, but just ask yourself how that perky little nose will look on your son or those rippling pecs on your daughter.

Lab Notes Goes to the Movies

Sharon Begley — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 14:43:14 GMT

Buzz Aldrin didn't get to be the first man to set foot on the moon--that privilege went to Neil Armstrong--but he did get his own first. After Armstrong took his historic "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" during the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, it was Aldrin's turn to back down the steps of the lunar landing module toward the dusty surface. NASA had told the astronauts to move slowly, Aldrin recalls. So in between steps, he decided he had a moment to, as he delicately puts it, fill the liquid-waste bag inside his space suit. Believe me, you will never again look at the footage of Aldrin slowly descending the steps and pausing almost imperceptibly to stake a claim to his own first the same way again. "Everyone has their own first on the moon, and that one hasn't been disputed," Aldrin says.

If you want to see and hear astronauts as you've never seen and heard them before, see "In the Shadow of the Moon." At the 2007 Sundance film festival, it won the World Cinema Audience Award, and also picked up prizes for Best Documentary and Outstanding Achievement in Filmmaking at this year's Sedona International Film Festival, the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Indianapolis International Film Festival, and the Grand Prize at the Boulder International Film Festival. It won't be released in theaters until September, but put it on your calendar now: director David Sington got 10 of the 12 astronauts who walked on the moon to open up as never before. He pairs their reminiscences with space footage that you'd swear is simulated, but it's real: Sington and his crew dug through thousands of hours of NASA archives for scenes in space, at mission control and inside the Apollo spacecraft that have never been shown to the public.

Between 1969 and 1972, from Apollo 11 to Apollo 17, six missions deposited astronauts on the surface of another world. Maybe it's the passage of time, maybe it's the perspective that comes with age, but the astronauts Sington filmed have thrown off the old "right stuff" taciturnity and toe-the-NASA-line reticence. Jim Lovell, best known as the commander of the aborted Apollo 13 mission (Tom Hanks played him; Lovell himself had a cameo at the end as the commander of the naval ship that picked up the crew once they finally landed safely in the Pacific), remembers how he and other astronauts felt at the time President Kennedy declared it the nation's mission to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s: "At the time, the Atlas boosters were blowing up every other day at Canaveral. It looked like a good way to have a very short career."

John Young, who commanded the first space shuttle mission in 1981 as well as flying on Apollo 10 and 16, remembers Gus Grissom, who died in the infamous 1967 fire on the launchpad because no one thought to ask what would happen to a 100%-oxygen environment in the event of a spark. "Gus said, if I say anything about the wiring, they'll fire me." It makes you wonder if the NASA culture of shutting up about potential risks--which contributed to both the Challenger and Columbia tragedies--will ever change.

Gene Cernan, the last man on the moon, is eloquent as he describes the guilt he felt over being an idolized astronaut while his peers were flying and losing their lives in Vietnam. Michael Collins, who stayed in the orbiter while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon on the fateful July day, describes being "worried all the time," and thinking how forbidding the moon looked and how disinclined "to welcome us into its domain."

As a kid, I watched live news coverage of the Apollo 11 landing, but I don't remember--I'm pretty sure it wasn't revealed at the time--how dicey the landing was. Armstrong had to pilot the lander over miles and miles of the surface looking for a place to put down, avoiding boulder fields and craters and hills. Mission control was about to abort the landing when he finally set down on--of course--the Sea of Tranquility.

Collins recalls being greeted as a hero as he traveled the world upon his return, and was struck by something. "People said, 'we did it'--we, we, we. I thought that was a wonderful thing," that people throughout the world saw the moon landing as a triumph for humanity and not only America (ironic, since the space race was fueled by cold war competition with the Soviet Union). It's been a while since the world saw America as inspirational. Or, as Collins adds, ". . . ephemeral, but wonderful."

Even if you can't imagine being interested in the Apollo era, this film will surprise and delight, and have you wondering where that spirit went.

And the Sun Orbits Earth, Too

Sharon Begley — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 20:19:36 GMT

When educators and corporate leaders bemoan America's scientific illiteracy, they're usually referring to how we're losing our competitive edge in science and technology (see, for instance, the 2006 report from the National Academy of Sciences, "Rising Above the Gathering Storn,") or to the fact that fewer than a third of adult Americans know that DNA is the molecule of heredity, that only 10 percent know what radiation is and that 20 percent think the Sun revolves around Earth. But more and more, scientists grappling with the question of what you need to know about science to participate in civic discourse are concluding that the need is more fundamental: you need to know what science is, what it is not, and what it can and cannot answer.

And on that, there is ignorance at the highest levels.

When three Republican presidential hopefuls raised their hands during the recent debate to indicate they "didn't believe in evolution," as moderator Chris Matthews put it, biologist Jerry Coyne was appalled (though not necessarily surprised). As he writes in a scathing—though more in sorrow than in anger—essay, "Because there is just as much evidence for the fact of evolution as there is for the existence of atoms, anyone raising his hand must have been grossly misinformed." But while some of the hand-raising could have been the result of political calculation (more than half of Americans don't believe in Darwinian evolution, and it's always good strategy to be in sync with the majority), when Sen. Sam Brownback expanded on his hand-raising in a New York Times op-ed, the extent of his science ignorance was impossible to ignore.

For starters, Brownback wrote that "there is no one single theory of evolution." But there is: it's the Darwinian paradigm of random mutations acted on by natural selection. Brownback thinks that evolution holds that "man is merely the chance product of random mutations." But that too is a misunderstanding. Yes, mutations are random, but the crucial next step—natural selection of those variants that are the most evolutionarily fit—is not. Last but not least, he thinks evolution can account only for small changes within species, such as bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics, and not for big changes like fish evolving into amphibians. But there is ample fossil evidence for that; see, for instance, this.

A worse and more dangerous problem is Brownback's understanding (or lack thereof) of what science is. He explains that he rejects evolution if "it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence." As Coyne notes, "Using that criterion he'd have to reject all of science, including physics and chemistry."

Brownback seems to yearn for a science that embraces the supernatural. But as Coyne explains, "Science simply doesn't deal with hypotheses about a guiding intelligence, or supernatural phenomena like miracles, because science is the search for rational explanations of natural phenomena. We don't reject the supernatural merely because we have an overweening philosophical commitment to materialism; we reject it because entertaining the supernatural has never helped us understand the natural world. Alchemy, faith healing, astrology, creationism—none of these perspectives has advanced our understanding of nature by one iota. So Brownback's proposal to bring faith to the table of science is misguided: 'As science continues to explore the details of man's origin, faith can do its part as well,' [Brownback writes]. What part? Where are faith's testable predictions or falsifiable hypotheses about human origins?"

It's lovely that Brownback believes that "the unique and special place of each and every person in creation is a fundamental truth that must be safeguarded," "that each human person, regardless of circumstance, was willed into being and made for a purpose," and that "the process of creation-and indeed life today—is sustained by the hand of God in a manner known fully only to him." But none of these is a scientific statement because none can be falsified. They are statements of faith. They may be true, they may be false, but science is silent on that. They are just not amenable to empirical testing.

This is about more than evolution. Brownback argues that we should reject scientific findings if they conflict with religious beliefs. But as Coyne argues, "This attitude has enormous political—and educational—implications. What happens if scientific truth conflicts with a politician's "spiritual truth"? This is not a theoretical problem, but a real one, as we see in debates about stem-cell research, abortion, genetic engineering, and global warming. Ignorance about evolution may be widespread, but it's not nearly as dangerous as dogmatic certainty about the real world based on faith alone."