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Pink, Blue, and Bad Science
DocDJ writes "Ben Goldacre writes an excellent column in The Guardian called Bad Science, which regularly demonstrates how poor the mainstream media are at reporting science. He recently pointed out the flaws in the reporting of research that purported to show the evolutionary basis of 'blue for boys, pink for girls'." Another Guardian writer, Zoe Williams, has an even more acerbic take on the research.
On the one hand, the media is definitely at fault for overhyping every burp and gurgle coming from medical research. An old amino acid causes an unexpected hypertrophy of T-cells? OMFG! It's teh cure for cancer!
On the other hand, grants seem to awarded to any post-doc with an itch to scratch. The problem is that most of those idiots (for want of a better term) can't tell the difference between the itchiness caused by an ingrown ass-hair and the ass-hair itself. That's what Zoe's ripping on in her article.
There's something to be said for "pure research" which theoretically expands our collective knowledge. Without pure research, we wouldn't have found penicillin, US America, or bread-yeast. However, I can't even begin to understand what kind of expectations the grant awarders had when they supported "Boys like blue, Girls like pink" research.
For a couple bucks, the researchers could have just as well satisfied their itch with a tube of Preparation H.
About 6 years ago, I was working in a virology lab, where one of the post-docs was doing some anthropological virology and investigating the possibility that one of the last extinctions was the result of a pandemic.
Discovery Channel did a 30-minute segment about this, which I decided not to participate in, and will be happy not to have done so till the end of my days. When I saw the final product a couple months later, I just sat with my mouth open for about 20 minutes... because I couldn't figure out whether I've been an idiot and couldn't figure out what my colleague was doing until I saw the segment, or the editors/journalists massacred the subject to the point that the research was rendered unrecognizable within the mounts of selectively quoted pseudo-science bullshit.
Whenever I watch a news story about something which I know something about, I find that they are inaccurate or misrepresentative. Interestingly, I find that even though I KNOW they have facts wrong on every single occasion that they reported on something I had knowledge of, it doesn't seem to shake me from accepting as accurate the items they report on of which I have NO knowledge. I believe this to be the case with most people.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Actually, males (if old enough) want to see females naked, while females don't seem to have the same desire to see males naked. Observe the dress of the sexes in Western cultures: the standard formal male dress leaves hands and head (not including neck) exposed, and everything else covered; females normally expose more skin, and sometimes much more. In business casual wear, a woman can expose quite a bit of leg, while men are required to wear long pants. Women can have lower necklines than men, too.
Also, observe men's and women's magazines. Men's magazines often show scantily-clad good-looking women on the cover, which makes some sort of sense to me, but so do many women's magazines. I don't understand why (not that I'm complaining when I'm stuck in a slow checkout line at the supermarket).
Therefore, as long as we're throwing out strange ideas, here's one: the natural state of a man in Western culture is clothed while the natural state of a woman in Western culture is at least less clothed. The dominant skin color in Western culture is pink (sometimes misstated as "white"), so the standard clothes suggest naked girls and clothed boys.
The observations in the first two paragraphs are correct, as far as I can tell, and the standard colors for little boys and little girls are blue and pink, at least in the US. I'm not giving out any warranties on the reasoning and conclusion, though.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I've seen a real problem with researchers seeming to always want to report the results as though it supports their hypothesis, probably in the interest of continued funding. My experience with this is mainly limited to the behavioural sciences, mostly as related to cognitive psychology but man, you want to talk about some SHITTY papers that get published. They'll gloss over large portions of their methods, consolidate hundreds of points of data in to 3 numbers and not provide the originals, write conclusions that vastly overstate what was found and sometimes even run contrary to the evidence and so on.
To be clear: This isn't crap in a newspaper, this is crap from actual academic journals. We are talking things bad enough that a smart undergrad can find sever problems with it in 5 minutes.
As far as I can tell it is this attitude that to keep getting grants, you have to generate "results" and "results" mean being right. So doing a study and proving your hypothesis wrong isn't ok. Even doing a study that indicates something very weakly and suggests further research isn't ok. Nope, you've got to come to a strong conclusion, the evidence be damned!
So I am with you in saying it isn't 1005 the media's fault. They cannot be expected to be experts in everything, you can't expect them to read over every paper and carefully review the whole thing. They more or less have to assume that's been done and take the abstract to be correct. In my experience, it isn't in a shocking number of cases.
The problem is not that they decided to do the research. The problem is the utter bullshit way they did it and the absolute bollocks they concluded.
What they said was was girls are genetically predisposed to like red, and boys are genetically predisposed to like blue. Now there is a problem with this because of one small fact. Their study does not show that at all! The British and Chinese group showed different results, and they were the only 2 cultures they tested, that doesn't eliminate cultural bias at all, and the results showed there was cultural differences, but they just ignored that.
Second they then went on to say it was an evolutionary trait because cave women pick berries and cavemen went hunting. WTF???!?! A) There is no evidence whatsoever supporting that idea of primitive gender roles, someone just made it up. B) They measured preference, not ability to recognise the colour, plus, most berries aren't red, and what's more many poisonous red berries are poisonous, plus berries are tiny, other fruits are much better. C) they just pulled that straight out of their arses.
No one said they are bigots or Nazis, they said they are chumps, complete and utter chumps, who wasted their time on a dumb subject, and fucked it up anyway, then talked utter shit about their own fucked up, incorrect results.
Fact is evolutionary psychology is not science, and all the people who eat it up like it is are chumps, utter chumps. The basic structure of every evolutionary psychology study I've ever seen is this:
1. Gather statistics on some human behaviour.
2. Draw conclusion that confirms what most people expect.
3. Pull from your ass some supposed beneficial behaviour based on stereotypical 'caveman' society, with an evidence whatsoever, and claim this is the purpose of said human behaviour.
4. Call your self a scientist, and watch the journalists lap it up like a bunch of chumps.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?