Anthropology Aside

Yglesias notes with fascination that, in Brazil, a “undiscovered” group of people have, well, been discovered. He discusses research that shows that these hunter gatherer groups have more leisure time and higher living standards than comparable agricultural (though not technologically advanced) societies. Marshall Sahlins developed this theory based on field work with !Kung people in southern Africa showing that even though these hunter-gatherers didn’t ever have surpluses, they still weren’t living on the brink of starvation, as was previously thought. Their diets were varied and because of the impossibility of surplus, it may even be possible that they solved the central problem of economics: reconciling man’s unlimited desire with limited resources. Sahlins concluded that perhaps these hunter-gatherers simply wanted less. As he put it, they lived in the Original Affluent Society.

There was one major problem with this revisionist line of antropology: it underrated the extreme level of violence in hunter-gatherer society. Work done by Richard Wrangham, Matthew LeBlanc and others showed that our primate ancestors, namely Chimpanzees, are amazingly violent, and that this pattern is repeated in pre-state human society. Steven Pinker has a fantastic article detailing this and other research, in which he claims that “If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.” Lots of archaeological and anthropological work done in hunter-gatherer societies has discovered mass graves, implements of warfare and other indicators of fairly widespread violence in pre-agricultural settlements. This is very much in the mainstream of anthropology, which has largely rejected the idea of the Noble Savage and instead has adopted a much darker view of human pre-history.

Of course, just because chimpanzees were nastily violent doesn’t mean we have to be. We can also look to bonobos, our other primate ancestors. Unlike chimps, who will raid other chimpanzee groups, kill their men and rape their women, bonobos are not only matriarchal, but they are generally much more altruistic, compassionate and cooperative than their primate relatives. Oh yeah, and they love, just love, having gay sex with each other. It’s how they resolve conflicts and what not.

Bad Science Analogies - Krauthammer Edition

Charles Krauthammer gives us a doozy of a misleading scientific reference:

If you doubt the arrogance, you haven’t seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton’s laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming — infinitely more untested, complex and speculative — is a closed issue.

What Krauthammer is trying to say is that because science is an imperfect, speculative activity whose conclusions are always partially shrouded in doubt and subject to massive revision, we can’t put too much confidence in global warming models that predict catastrophe if we continue to emit carbon dioxide at our current rate. As evidence for his argument that models can be overturned (randomly! unpredictably!), he mentions that Newton’s account of physics was overturned by Einstein’s. And he’s right, we now know that a Newtonian model is not the best one to describe our physical reality. But it can still describe most of what’s important to us.

Just because Newton’s laws of motion can now be described in other ways doesn’t mean that when you drop an apple, it magically floats up. It just means that we have a different explanation for why the apple falls. What Krauthammer wants us to believe is that when Einstein came around, we viewed the world totally differently and had a radically different way of predicting the behavior of physical bodies and so it’s possible that something similar could happen for climate science. But relativity and quantum mechanics were more of an extremely nuanced correction to an account of physics that is overwhelmingly accurate, and more importantly, incredibly useful in nearly everything humans do. So it’s incredibly likely that our climate models are missing some rather meaningful nuances that will be discovered later, but the point is that there is a scientific consensus that when we put CO2 in the air, the climate is affected in very substantial ways. Surely this account can be updated and tweaked, but there is nothing that an obtuse reference to the history of science can do to make us place such extreme doubt in a rigorous scientific consensus.

Those Selfish Belgians Shouldn’t Be in Jail, They Should Be Under House Arrest

Nothing brings out the liberal fascist in me like people who refuse to take vaccines.  And so when I read about four Belgians parents who are facing jail time for refusing to make their kids get polio shots, I couldn’t help but admire Belgium for taking real public health interventions as seriously as we ought to.

Vaccinations are excellent for showing how coordinated, state action is the only necessary way to deal with a certain public policy issue, and also how simplistic concepts of individual autonomy are not useful in all situations.  Now, in most cases, I’m a total Millian individualist - I think that people should have as near unlimited freedom of choice, assuming they don’t harm others or violate their freedom of choice.  And it’s part because of this combination utilitarianism/individualism that I come down so hard on vaccine rebels.

That’s because, as Megan McArdle so well explained, vaccines are only effective when everyone, and I mean everyone, takes them.  That’s because vaccines do two things.  They protect the people who take them from contracting an infectious disease, and they also create “herd immunity” which means that they prevent the disease from incubating in the population.  This means that if vaccines become ineffective, there won’t be any disease left to contract and that they also protect those who are unvaccinated.  So we have a free-rider problem - there will be those, who because of the small risks associated with vaccination, think that because everyone else is protected, they don’t need to take the shots.  The problem is compounded when just a few brave souls - like these Belgian parents - get away with not vaccinating.  Why are other parents supposed to let their kids shoulder the burden of vaccination risk if only the other 90% of kids need to get vaccinated.  When you have a collective action problem, and you can’t get everyone on board, it makes sense for everyone to defect.  So how do we prevent defection?  By coming down hard on those first few free-riders so that we can make the cost to not vaccinating high enough to outweigh the low risks of vaccination.  This means that kids shouldn’t be allowed to go to school if they aren’t vaccinated and/or their parents should pay fines or even go to jail.  Of course, we should also make vaccinations free and easily available.  I don’t want to see any parents get punished, but I want to threat of harsh punishment to be there.

Irrational Belief and Irrational Practice

While I, like many secular-minded people, think it’s kinda weird that Catholics gather every Sunday to eat the body of Christ and drink his blood, I really don’t care that much because I see little evidence that this practice necessarily results in any irrational or damaging behavior.  And so when Bill Maher criticizes the Eucharist as being obviously insane, but then has totally wacko beliefs on alternative medicine and health, I’m not particularly impressed with his secularism or his rationalism.

It’s frustrating when people like PZ Meyers commend Maher for going after religion, and yet ignore his more irrational and deleterious beliefs.  Now, one can say that religion is institutionalized irrationality and encourages other irrational behavior, but let us compare the Eucharist to thinking vaccines are ineffectual and poisonous(which Maher does).  As far as evidence that the bread and wine consumed in Church is the blood and body of Christ, I’d say that it’s scant, but if you don’t assume a purely materialistic worldview, then it’s at least plausible.  And considering the phenomena of Catholic faith-as-experience, which to us rationalists seems ridiculous, the “reality” of the Eucharist is actually a perfectly  reasonable belief for Catholics.  And even if you don’t buy that, there really isn’t any downside to the Eucharist itself. Hell, red wine is good for your heart anyway, so it comes out as a wash.

Vaccine paranoia on the other hand is incredibly dangerous to both individuals and other people.   Because when people don’t get vaccines, they free-ride off everyone else who does.  While this is OK for a while, when a critical mass of people think like Bill Maher, diseases like smallpox and polio will come back. What’s even worse is that for contagious diseases, it’s not the dumbasses who are the victims, but also other people who catch the disease that’s been able to mutate inside the host-body of vaccinophobes.

But if you want to look at things more broadly, does anyone really think that Maher has actually studied virology, molecular biology, epidemiology or even has reviewed the relevant medical research to come up with his anti-medicine/vaccine conclusion?  Is his attachment to those beliefs really anymore irrational than belief in the Eucharist?  John Cain explains what’s wrong with Maher best:

Maher rightly views the evidence-free assertions of Christian supernaturalism as bullshit, yet amazingly can’t bring this skepticism to bear on non-Christian supernaturalism. This is because his views arise from mindless contrarianism, not critical examination of the evidence. He’s an atheist because everyone else is Christian, not because the evidence of a deity is lacking. Similarly, he’s an altie because most people use scientific medicine, not because he’s actually looked into the scientific validity of what he’s saying.

So when Bill Maher is offering me his traditional remedy for measles, pass the wine and the wafer.

Gerson Evolves

Yes, Minipundit already said this, but otherwise educated people shouldn’t be able to get away with Michael Gerson’s BS “ignorance.”

I have little knowledge of, or interest in, the science behind this debate. Can gradual evolutionary changes account for the complex structures of cells and the eye? Why is the fossil record so weak when it comes to major mutations? I have no idea. There are unsolved mysteries in Darwinian evolution. There is also no credible scientific alternative.

Gerson clearly has very little interest in the science of the debate, because he simply could have typed “evolution of the eye” into Wikipedia’s search bar, and come up with this. Of course, he follows up with some typical concerns about Naturalism, which aren’t as scientifically incoherent as his short list of problems with Darwin that aren’t actually problems. Gerson comes in to inform us that a naturalistic world view implies that we can just kill people because…well, because they’re meat:

And so, in a purely material universe, human beings are reduced to what one writer calls “temporarily animated meat” — even our consciousness a byproduct of our chemistry. This view, by necessity, has disturbing moral and political implications. Those who believe that men are meat are more likely to treat men as meat. “If I had to burn a man alive,” concludes Lewis, “I think I should find this doctrine comfortable.”

This makes some superficial sense, but how many murders have been prevented by “I would kill you, but I believe that your consciousness isn’t an emergent property of your mental processes”? If Gerson can’t offer up a convincing argument why consciousness isn’t an emergent property of overlapping mental processes, than he shouldn’t be making a vague appeal to consequences to justify his sketchy belief. Gerson concludes thusly:

“Let us assume that creation is evolution,” argues Leon Kass, “and proceeds solely by natural processes. What is responsible for this natural process? . . . Can a dumb process, ruled by strict necessity and chance mutation, having no rhyme or reason, ultimately answer sufficiently for life, for man, for the whole? . . . And when we finally allow ourselves to come face-to-face with the mystery that there is anything at all rather than nothing, can we evolutionists confidently reject the first claim of the Bible — ‘In [the] beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’?”

I shouldn’t be criticizing these attempts at reconciling Genesis and Darwin so harshly, frankly we evolution-believers need all the help we can get. But I’m compelled to point that Kass’ questioning here is silly. First, the mechanisms of evolution, if you believe that’s how life emerged, which Kass does, clearly did create “life” and “man.” Secondly, unless you’re trying to ask a “what came before the big bang” type of question, the evolutionary account of life provides a fairly solid logical reason to reject a “creating” deity. When life evolves, it subsequently gets more intelligent and complex. Since God is the most complex and intelligent being/life-form in the universe, it doesn’t make sense that, in an evolutionary world view, that God would come before the most basic lifeforms. If one is looking for God in evolution, Robert Wright’s ideas about increasing cooperation or de Chardin’s Omega Point and noosphere.

Boys, Girls and Math

Scientific American has what appears to be the definitive article on gender differences in mathematical ability and pursuing science careers. It’s full of interesting data, one of which is a confirmation of a suspicion I and many others had about male and female math ability: that boys aren’t necssarily better at math, it’s just that their ability is more spread out (has a greater standard deviation). This means that there are more boys are the best at math, while there are more girls in the pretty good to very-but-not-amazingly good range. Another way of saying this is that the boys who are best, among boys, at math are better than the top girls (and that the boys who are worst at math are worse than the worst girls). There’s no need to despair, or to think that these differences in the distributions are necessarily fixed. In fact, the number of girl “math wizards” has been going up a lot in the past 20 years:

Although it has drawn little media coverage, dramatic changes have been occurring among these junior math wizards: the relative number of girls among them has been soaring. The ratio of boys to girls, first observed at 13 to 1 in the 1980s, has been dropping steadily and is now only about 3 to 1. During the same period the number of women in a few other scientific fields has surged. In the U.S., women now make up half of new medical school graduates and 75 percent of recent veterinary school graduates. We cannot identify any single cause for the increase in the number of women entering these formerly male-dominated fields, because multiple changes have occurred in society over the past several decades.

This period coincides with a trend of special programs and mentoring to encourage girls to take higher-level math and science courses. And direct evidence exists that specifically targeted training could boost female performance even further. A special course created by engineering professor Sheryl A. Sorby and mathematics education specialist Beverly J. Baartmans at Michigan Technological University, for example, targeted improvement in visuospatial skills. All first-year engineering students with low scores on a test of this ability were encouraged to enroll in the course. This enrollment resulted in improved performance in subsequent graphics courses by these students and better retention in engineering programs, which suggests that the effects persisted over time and were of at least some practical significance for both women and men.

Y’all should read the whole thing. Like so much research about genetic bases for sex differences, there’s a lot we don’t know and it’s nearly impossible to figure out what extent these differences are the result of a variety of social factors and to what extend they can be explained by genetic/physiological dimorphism. What we do know, however, is that the current gender disparities in science careers can not be fully explained by innate differences, but instead reflects some open discrimination, the challenges of having a family, subconscious discrimination against women and a variety of remediable factors.

Cross-posted on campusprogress.org/blog

The Incomplete Flynn Enthusiasm

I’m as happy as anyone that James Flynn is getting his due in the popular press and blogosphere. The Flynn Effect — the continual rise in IQ scores over the last 50 or so years — is one of the most fascinating bits of social science research that has some of the broadest implications for how we view the world. Malcolm Gladwell showed explained how the Flynn Effect helps debunk the “IQ fundamentalists” who think that race based IQ gaps can mostly be explained by genes. The problem with Flynn, at least with this full scale adoption of his environmentalist viewpoint, is that it raises questions that American liberals generally tend to avoid talking about: namely the deficiencies of black culture.

While Flynn clearly believes that IQ is largely environmental, he thinks that important environmental inputs are the cognitive environment in which children grow up in, so he puts a lot of weight on the black cognitive environment. If you watch his debate with Charles Murray at the Manhattan Institute, literally the first thing he says is “its very difficult ot give an environmental explanation…without discussing the black environment…you have to say that there are things about black subculture that mean that blacks do not have the same encouragement to develop cognity as white children are. How else are you to make an environmental case?”(emphasis added) If you watch more of the debate, Flynn explains that even black professional households are less “cognitively rich” than white homes, specifically relating to certain child rearing practices. Gladwell too, in his New Yorker Podcast, discusses how black culture is simply not as good at providing the environment in which people can fulfill and expand their cognitive potential. To make it simple, Flynn and Gladwell are making the Cosby-esque argument that it’s not all discrimination, segregation, institutional racism et al that are responsible for the black-white IQ gap, and more broadly, with the dysfunction and poor outcomes among poor blacks. This gets weird when bloggers like Amanda Marcotte or Kay Steiger, who generally don’t cotton to what is generally the “conservative” explanation for black outcomes or black-white differences, endorse Flynn, while not talking about his harsh criticisms of black culture.

Bias Towards Race Science

While I’m not as hostile to Andrew Sullivan as some, I think that his instincts as far as race and IQ go are disturbing. Let me state first, in extremely condensed form, what I think about the Race and IQ debate really quick. I think that it’s plausible that racial groups — in so much as they are really expanded gene pools — could display aggregate differences in intelligence. The problem comes not with “is it possible that there are racial differences in intelligence” but with “are their meaningful racial differences in intelligence, meaningful enough to discuss at the risk of engaging in a discourse that has been used by racists to justify all sorts of horrible actions for hundreds of years.” And considering the evidence on the environmental effects of IQ (best non-technical articles are here and here), I really have to wonder why people like Sullivan are so desperate to interpret everything they see as yet another piece of evidence for the racial component of IQ and just have to talk about it so much.

Today’s example is Sullivan’s post on the rather fascinating research suggesting that human evolution has sped up by a factor of at least 10 in the past 10,000 years. He decides to cherry pick the one bit implying that Africans are less evolved than white people, largely because they haven’t had to adapt to new climates like Europeans and Asians have, meaning that there are fewer mutations. Sullivan, of course, suggests that because Africans “show a slightly lower mutation rate” (emphasis mine), then this must explain the gap in IQ. There’s no explanation of specific alleles that are more frequent in European populations that are then correlated with higher IQ, or how these frequencies would explain the ten point IQ gap between African Americans and American Whites.

There are situations in which one could make a good faith argument that it is plausible that there are persistent racial gaps in IQ and that we can observe one — say at a psychology conference or a debate at the Manhattan Institute. But it’s frankly offensive to take preliminary evidence saying that Africans have had slightly fewer mutations in the past 10,000 years so therefore they are just less intelligent. It’s intellecutally lazy, irresponsible and only raises ugly questions about one’s motivations.

You and I are gonna live forever

It’s a general rule that any webzine/online debate forum (Cato Unbound) edited by my two favorite libertarians, Brink Lindsay and Will Wilkinson, should always be read, and this month’s issue on radical life extension is no exception. Aubrey de Gray and Ronald Bailey defend that medical science should try to expand life expectancy and forgo aging as much as possible while Diana Schaub and Daniel Callahan think that there would be profound negative moral, psychological and societal consequences of radically prolonging death. You can read the four articles if you want a more in depth summary, but this argument Callahan makes is typical of his side of the debate:

There are a few premises of de Grey’s convictions that need to be examined. One of them — and I say this at age 77 — is that getting old is “tragic and potentially preventable by medical intervention.” Maybe age is “potentially preventable”; it is a mistake in science to say that something could never happen. But the word “tragedy” sounds like the voice of youth to me. Most of us who are getting old, or are already there, have many complaints about it, physical as well as mental; it isn’t the best stage of life (but then adolescence wasn’t great either).

I had a child who died a few months after birth, and I considered that tragic as did everyone else, but when my mother died at 86 of cancer, no one considered it a tragedy or even a great evil. Those who knew her said at her funeral that “we loved your mother and will miss her, but she had a good and full life.” I have never heard anyone say it is a tragedy that Socrates, Shakespeare, George Washington, and Albert Einstein died and are no longer with us. And while I hope in my more self-regarding moments that my friends and families will wail and gnash their teeth at my funeral, I doubt at my age they will do so; and I can, so to speak, live with that. I will get old and will die, an ancient story, but not a tragic one.

It is certainly true that with today’s technology, medicine and life expectancies, gracefully dying at 88 isn’t really a tragedy. The thing is, and Callahan even hints at this, is that in the 13th century, one could say that dying at the age of 32 wasn’t a tragedy. Or in 1850s, when the life expectancy at birth was 40 years. I should include the caveat that life expectancy numbers are slightly misleading because these awfully low life expectancies are mostly due to high child mortality, if one got to middle age, one had a decent chance of making it to old age. But with that caveat, it’s still true that people are living longer and that lifespan is going up, which means that our standards for what constitutes a “full life” are not fixed. While de Gray talks about “radical life extension” and Methuselah-like 1000 year lives, in the short to medium term, we are talking about lifespan gains of 15-30 years. Against that tableau, Callahan and Schuab’s arguments against life extension fall apart. Who are they to deny the possibility of a longer life — to those who want it? How odd would it seem to those who came before us that there are people who seriously think that we shouldn’t try to live longer?

The deal breaker for the pro-mortalists is the option of choice. If you are like Seneca or Callahan and think that the problem with our lives is that we don’t live them to the fullest, not that they’re too long, then you don’t have to take advantage of increased life expectancy. But why can’t those who want, as Ronald Bailey put it, to pursue “an ever-increasing menu of life plans and choices” do so? Even putting aside the specific claims and counter claims made by both sides, it’s important to look at what the pro-mortalists have to disprove: that the extension of the human life span, whose average has almost doubled in the last 200 years, is fundamentally undesirable and we should arbitrarily decide that for the first time in human history, we should make a society-wide decision to stop living longer. That’s quite the burden to overcome and neither Callahan nor Schuab do so very well.

Stubbon Skepticism

Arnold Kling has some reassuring things to say to climate skeptics:

The most disturbing part of the movie, and what makes it worth spending the hour-plus to watch it, is the way it portrays the momentum of the global warming crusade. When you have lots and lots of people heavily invested in a point of view, how can they possibly change?

While it is true that people tend to be stubborn about their beliefs, much the same thing be said about climate skeptics.  And even if one was a total agnostic about global warming, wouldn’t the fact that there are simply more scientists who believe anthropogenic global warming is real be substantial evidence for which side to pick?  And, in so much as people are changing their mind on climate change, it’s skeptics turning into believers, not the other way around.

I really have to wonder about Kling, does he really disagree with the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists?  His blogging parter - Bryan Caplan - wrote an entire book about how governmental policy should be dictated by academics - economists -  whose science is significantly less rigorous than that of climate scientists. Maybe Kling should listen a bit more to him.

Stem Cell Triumphialism

With the creation of pluripotent stem cells from adult skin cells, the Bush administration and their backers on the inane stem cell policy got really, really lucky. Triumphianlists like Krauthammer would like you to think that the policy — which banned federal funding for the creation of new embryo lines from which to extract stem cells — was at all relevant to the recent discoveries. But it wasn’t, they didn’t pump up funding for the skin cell research or anything of the sort, they instead were winging it and their policy was more than just a neutral ban on federal funding for new stem cell lines or embryo-destructive research, it instead hampered other research, as the Times editorial on the subject explains:

His new policy, portrayed as a statesmanlike compromise, permitted federal support for research using only a small number of stem cell lines that already existed, crimping the field from the start. Worse yet, scientists had to ensure that no federal money ever came near their privately supported embryonic stem cell research. No sharing laboratories or equipment that were bought, even in small part, with federal funds. No collaborating with federally supported scientists. It was a mess that persuaded many scientists to avoid the field altogether.

The policy was still a bad one, and the recent discoveries are not a vindication of it. Could you imagine if we applied this logic to all government funding for research? The government could then arbitrarily refuse to fund any research program or treatment they could think up some vacuous objection to, and then yes, it would encourage other research. It’s pretty obvious why that isn’t the best way to fund research. Michael Kinsley has more wise words to say on the subject

What’s The Point

Why do we have the International Space Station?  THe only purpose I can divine is that it’s necessary to keep our shuttle fleet in flight.  Why we need to give our shuttle fleet something to do, I really don’t know.  Especially when the thing is falling apart:

Spacewalking astronauts yesterday found evidence of damage to a crucial part of the International Space Station’s power system.

 The discovery of what appear to be metallic shavings in one of the station’s enormous rotating joint assemblies suggested problems for the orbiting space station that could affect ambitious plans to add two power-hungry laboratories.

And why do we need to add these “power-hungry” laboratories?

Burke and Stem Cells

Yuval Levin, in his response to David Brooks excellent column, makes a rather strange argument about where him and Brooks come down on stem cell research:

The notion that Burke would have advocated an ideology of unrestrained science is highly implausible, though of course no one can say where he would come down in the stem-cell debate. But Brooks’s argument relies on a more serious error. He argues that what he calls “legislation to slow medical progress” is not conservative because it is grounded in an abstract principle.

But Burke believed that it was precisely such radical claims to progress as those offered by modern science that needed to be moderated by the tempering forces inherent in each society. In our society, the greatest force for the moderation of such excess (and therefore for moral progress) is the view that all men are created equal. Whether you believe the claim is true or not (it seems that Burke did in some form, though perhaps not in the same way Jefferson did), it is the organizing principle of American life, and it is also the premise in which opponents of embryo-destructive research ground their case. A Burkean would not seek carelessly to overthrow that view in the name even of progress — let alone in the name of the kind of dubious promises now made on behalf of embryo-destructive stem-cell research. He would seek, more likely, a way to advance medical research without trampling on the most essential moral and intellectual premises of his society.

It’s obvious what is missing from Levin’s argument - the connection between all men being created equal and giving stem cells and embryos some of the rights of personhood. Brooks’ argument is that the claim by religious conservatives that embryos deserve the protections of persons is an abstract notion that can only be justified by strong religious and philosophical claims about when life begins.  The tempermental — or, for the leftist, pragmatic — argument is that it’s too counter intuitive and requires too many abstract logical leaps to conclude that bundles of eight cells are deserving of legal protection, so we should default to out shared moral sense.  In America, those who don’t go out of their way to call a bundle of cells a “person”, we have concluded that stem cell research isn’t violating any deeply shared moral principles.

What’s baffling is that Levin is writing for an audience where the assertion that “all men are created equal” implies personhood for stem cells doesn’t even require a perfunctory justification.

Though I don’t want to go into it here, Brooks and Larison hint at something that’s been bugging me for as long as I’ve been thinking about Burke:  he really has nothing to do with conservatism as practiced in the United States, ever.  If that sounds strong, it’s certainly true that post war, and especially movement, conservatism is so distant from Burke that I refuse to believe that conservative intellectuals who try to tell us that the modern GOP has any sort of Burkean foundation are doing anything less than pulling some sort of prank.

Thougts on Pink

Amanda Marcotte blasts a study showing that “women really do prefer pink”

I think the logic goes something like this: Armchair evolutionary psychologists are always trying to argue that women were born to wear aprons and abhor shoes and book-learning. Which we all know is silly. But if they can establish in people’s minds the idea that women are born preferring pink, then it’s easy to start convincing people that other, less arbitrary and more oppressive markers of femininity are also innate.

While I don’t agree that there’s some secretive cabal of “armchair”(by which Amanda must mean the researchers and scientists with PhDs and MDs who do these studies) evolutionary psychologists, this is not the point I want to argue.  One thing that is lost in the latent social construction vs inborn traits/evolutionary debate is that just because scientists can do a study showing women are, on average, more attracted to  pink doesn’t mean its an inborn or an evolutionarily defined trait.  Even if it holds true for a large number of women and there’s a scenario for it being genetic or inborn, it could still easily be “socially constructed”(or at least not genetically determined).  A lot of time is wasted whenever a study showing some sort of persistent gender difference and some feminists have a knee jerk reaction that implies that whoever doing said study is some sort of misogynistic tool.

It should be noted that I like pink because I (think that I) look fantastic in it.

Gattacagenics?

Ross backs down from the semantics, but charges forth with the substance on the entire abortion-eugenics-biotechnology-progressivism debate.

  In the case of Gattaccagenics, that’s where the logic of Roe-style reproductive rights will carry progressives, I predict - to open-ended opposition to any attempt to restrict genetically-selective abortion and (eventually) genetic engineering in utero, whether it’s intended to eliminate Down’s Syndrome today, or autism tomorrow, or homosexuality or a predisposition to cancer or what-have-you the day after that.

Two things, its unclear how genetic engineering in utero is really all that objectionable.  From a pro-life standpoint, it should even be preferable to selective abortions, because the fetuses are altered, not destroyed.  Moreover, it seems absurd to object to engineering a fetus with Down syndrome or autism to not have those diseases.  Hell, it would be near unconscionable to not “engineer” the fetus in those situations.  I feel people like Ross should welcome the engineering of fetuses in utero - it allows parents to avoid being saddled with an unfair, random burden while preserving the life of the fetus.  Of course, this engineering is still far off - at least in the way Ross describes.

Another thing - when reading pro-choice “liberal eugenics” opponents like Michael Sandel, or any liberal eugenics skeptics, I can’t shake the feeling that they are being awfully imperious. Their celebration of the wonder and mystery of parenthood doesn’t seem to grapple with the fact that many parents don’t have the resources, desire or energy to raise children with crippling genetic diseases.   Also, Sandel and co. constantly talk about “Promethean ambitions” and “exalted place for human beings in the cosmos” when discussing this whole host of issues.  This annoying vocabulary seems to be a classic case of what happens when philosophers and intellectuals approach an issue like this.  For the people who actually practice liberal eugenics, they do not think of themselves as Prometheus or pursuing some Progressive Historical telos the cosmos, instead it’s the aggregation of many parents individual choices for them and their families.  To ascribe greater notions - just because that’s how philosophers and intellectuals trained to think - is greatly missing the point of the actual reality of the situation.

If we could discuss genetic engineering, enhancement, PHD, eugenics, abortion and the like without the word “Prometheus” being said, or the notion brought up at all, both sides would be much better off.  I think the punishment for the next person to do so should be an eagle eating their liver.

Disability, Abortion and PGD

Apropos Nick Kristof’s latest column and this Dana Goldstein Tapped post, I’ve decided to post a piece (a facebook note, actually) I wrote about preimplantation genetic diagnosis, down syndrome, and the entire brave new world of using technology to “improve” children.  More fun below the fold.  Beware, I think my writing has improved since I wrote this,  though I’m sure others might disagree.

Penance is Sweet - TNR Edition

It’s great to see TNR go into full apology mode recently. It’s like they’re trying to erase the 90s from the institutional memory of the magazine. The editors (Frank Foer) apologized for bashing Hilarycare and demanded universal health care and Jonathan Cohn’s wrote a sweet article praising Hilarycare.

And even more juicy, TNR published an article today by Merlin Chowkwanyun bashing…wait for it… genetic/racial determinism. Though I was only 4 when the Bell Curve hit book-stands, among many, Andrew Sullivan’s decision to publish an excerpt of it and praise it is a near indelible stain on TNR. I agree with much of the criticism of TNR, specifically of Marty Peretz, over their relentless hawkishness, willingness to bash dovish Democrats, disdain for the netroots, and support such sundry characters as Joe Lieberman and Scooter Libby, but TNR is a flexible institution, and it seems that with every day, they’re getting past the glory days of “at least it’s counter intuitive” and making some good, honest liberal journalism. Good for them.