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The Neuroscience of Screwing Up
resistant writes "As the evocative title from Wired magazine implies, Kevin Dunbar of the University of Toronto has taken an in-depth and fascinating look at scientific error, the scientists who cope with it, and sometimes transcend it to find new lines of inquiry. From the article: 'Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) "The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen," Dunbar says. "But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn't make sense."'"
"The science is settled!" :P
The WIRED piece threads what is written in the summary around the story of how Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs discovered Cosmic Radiation after being puzzled for a year about background noise on their radio telescopes ... even scraping pigeon poop off their gear as a possible source until they realized the signal was real - Homer Simpson would have said D'OH! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
"It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn't make sense."
That doesn't mean the data is wrong, it means the /hypothesis/ was wrong, if not the theory, and needs to be modified.
If they're really throwing out date just because it 'doesn't make sense', they're doing religion, not science.
If the data don't make sense according to your theory, you don't discard the data, you discard the theory and work out a new one that fits the facts as you've observed them. TFA says that Dunbar was watching postdocs doing research, and if so, they should have known better. Alas, too many people who call themselves scientists are more interested in proving their pet theory true than in finding out what's actually going on.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Question *Everything*.
Disclaimer: I am an academic research associate
Here's a quote from the article:
"But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data...The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y."
The dirty little secret is that the Y is not always unexpected, just too politically incorrect and dangerous to be released to the public. For example, my team at Rutgers just completed a comprehensive experiment measuring a variety of factors including intelligence and genetic makeup(read: race). What we discovered would have caused a political shitstorm orders of magnitude worse than that of Don Imus when he referred to our Women's basket ball team as "Nappy-headed Ho's", so we declared it unsucessful and quietly buried it.
We tried, we really did. We developed formulae which would account for environmental/nutrure factors. We were very forgiving with the fairness of our methods, and yet the numbers still added up in a way that was unflattering to our hypotheses.
Oh, well. Maybe they'll finally figure it out when a monkey-ass coon tries to blow up a plane and ends up lighting his nuts on fire. Wait, what? HA HA! Oh, man! What a Gorilla!
Proving a theory incorrect is often just as valuable as proving a theory correct.
If problems occur as you postulate elaborate hypothesis, then stop piling up the elaborate hypothesis! But be sure and still make available your existing (complex) hypothesis, methodology and unexpected data - preventing others from going down the same path with the same methodology is still highly valuable!
Let's say you're looking at a production and consumption cycle involving neurotransmitters and neuroreceptors of some sort, and the various channels of input and output involved. Your starting presumption you base your hypothesis on is that there is a buildup which triggers an electrical signal to stop consumption and clear the channel. The only evidence you can realistically gather for now is protein density at a certain output channel - but others have worked to ensure this is a reliable approach specifically under these circumstances.
So, you do the specific experiment, trigger the signal, but you get a wildly different result - the stop in consumption occurs, but the protein density does not change at all in the output channel. What actually happened is still unknown, only you haven't verified any correlation with your hypothesis. You still have valuable data, but no mechanism to verify under the circumstances. Either your methodology failed, or you misunderstood what was happening - and the world of knowledge is made larger by either... even if your paymasters won't get happy about the result.
Science is often like throwing pebbles in complete darkness - it takes a lot of stones and close listening to make out a mental picture of the scene - especially when there's a lot of noise already around. Everyone would love it if we could just flip the lights on - but we have yet to invent a light that can see into the inner workings of the functioning brain very well. Gotta keep throwing those pebbles for now.
Ryan Fenton
I think the parent post is a brilliant example of what happens when someone perfects trolling to a science.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Any chance you have a preliminary write-up, or even raw data I could read? Sounds exquisitely interesting. ResidntGeek@gmail.com if you can.
ResidntGeek
The dirty little secret is that the Y is not always unexpected, just too politically incorrect and dangerous to be released to the public.
So, when reality is racist, you change it?
Is it just me or does this sound like an explanation for some of the Climategate science... But in that case they just massaged or ignored data that didn't agree with their conceptual framework of CO2 causing global warming.
Not that the skeptics are all that immune. They seem to cherry pick data almost as well (just not quite as successfully from the POV of selling their story to the media and political left ..)
"It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn't make sense."
No need to discard perfectly good data when all you need to do is adjust it a little. Don't they know about Mike’s Nature trick?
That's what wikileaks is for, man. If you're telling the truth, then you have an obligation to see that the data is released so that it can be evaluated, tested, and verified (or debunked).
No, when reality is politically incorrect, you bury it. Just imagine if the ACLU sued life, the universe, and everything...
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
I can't help but think that Neuroscience needs to calm down, sit back, and take a deep breath. We are examining a system and we are trying to reverse engineer it. We can't start out by trying to create elaborate hypothesis for large systems, we need to go low level and examine the simpler systems. I really think they should hold on to the higher cognitive models for a later time because we can't even completely model C. Elegans and it has the least neurons of any, current, living organism. The way I see it, I total expect their hypothesis to be wrong, because they don't thoroughly understand the low end of the system.
Eat sleep die
It came late in the year but I would nominate this linked article as the best of slashdot, 2009.
So, when reality is racist, you change it?
I thought World War II empirically proved that the master race is not all its cracked up to be. American mutts and Soviet subhumans kicked the living shit out of the master aryan race. The whole concept of NAZI ideology was that they were the master race, they were not only deserving of victory, but destined, thus, by the most racist rules there are, they proved themselves inferior.
PS. Polish women are the hottest of all European women.
This is my sig.
They'd get 42 dollars?
1)Check your instruments.
2)Check them again.
3)Check the calibration of said instruments.
4)Check system again.
5)Check the software, what assumptions are being made in the software? Are there misplaced decimals? Are your variable selections all appropriately classed/typed?
If you complete this checklist without coming across any failures, RECOLLECT DATA.
Compare new data with old data. What are your applicable/appropriate error measurements?
Perform steps 1 - 5 again.
Your sets of data should help you decide whether it is your hypotheses, or first data sets that need to be thrown out.
If you have been hired to prove something that is mostly false: gut check time. Are you a scientist or a really smart P.R. hack?
As a researcher myself, I certainly hope they don't throw out data too often. There is occasion to do so...sometimes, when trying to establish correlations (admittedly the weakest form of describing a phenomenon, etc), you learn that there is not one. There are times you obtain data that simply says, "These two phenomenon do not strongly affect each other" or "Something we do not know about or have not accounted for is happening all over this mess."
This data could be kept forever in the unlikely event it will prove useful, especially if there is something else going on...could be as simple as a RF/EM noise (which actually happened to a coworker of mine, though I helped to figure out the issue and make alterations to block/filter this noise out.) In previous years, data storage was sometimes at a premium, although lately this is not an issue as HDD climb to extraordinary capacities (until that capacity becomes the norm, then it is merely ordinary.) My point is that rejected or discarded data, at least in my experience, is due to situations such as these.
Things such as "massaging" or ignoring data are not only horribly bad scientific practice, they are a tremendous drag on humanity's progress...you usually learn through failure, but we are led away from the truth by practices such as those.
If he is, then he got nothing on you, who is also an expert in using reverse psychology for trolling. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Or when the results you get aren't acceptable to the people responsible for continued funding.
Years ago, I worked for months trying to reproduce the Polywater research,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater
and eventually reported that I was unable to do so.
The department considered my work a failure (as in, I must have been incompetent) and did not publish my findings. When, years later, the publications reporting successful discovery/creation of Polywater were shown to be fraudulent, and my results were correct, I did not even receive an apology.
Throwing out results is unethical as well as irresponsible. Many discoveries have come from re-evaluating what appears to be "bad" data. It might not be possible to use it now, but it should be at least stored.
For instance, it has been reported that the "bit of "scruff" on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars"[1] looked like bad data to Jocelyn Bell Burnell's supervisors. Today we call the phenomenon a pulsar.
[1] Wikipedia
If the data doesn't fit your theory, the problem is most likely neither with the data (which is fine) nor with your theory (which may also be fine) but with the method you used to produce your data. You probably wired in an incorrect resistor, forgot to close a parenthesis in your Perl code, forgot to add the correct amount of EDTA to your reaction, etc. Then your results ended up looking like shit, and not surprisingly. Doing science is hard.
There's no need to postulate any grand conspiracies or take pot-shots at science in general. This paper is examining real people doing real shit. Most of the time we fuck up, and we're not smart enough to figure out where we made the error.
Indeed. The sort of thing being discussed in TFA is one of the classic themes of late 20th century philosophy and history of science: the disconnect between traditional philosophy of science and the actual practice of science.
Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a good place to start. Just one tiny example of the book: Kuhn goes on about how during normal science, scientists perform experiments to confirm the results that they expect to get. When an experiment contradicts the theory, they don't automatically assume that the theory is wrong; on the other hand, they assume that the experiment was flawed.
Feyerabend and many other philosophers of science take a complementary stand to this by stressing the theory-ladenness of "facts." The claim that the "facts" contradict a hypothesis is never a theory-independent observation, but rather, the conclusion of a different theory that we may overthrow. Feyerabend's classic example is the Tower Argument that Aristotle used to refute the theory that the Earth moves. Wikipedia's article on Paul Feyerabend has a decent, if terse, explanation of this:
Feyerabend goes on to argue that many of our most successful contemporary scientific theories (e.g., heliocentrism and geodynamicism) became so because their Renaissance and Enlightenment proponents held on to them and continued to elaborate on them despite them being contradicted by "the facts," as judged by the application of theories that were better established at the time (e.g., Aristotelian mechanics). That is, new scientific theories often succeed because their proponents keep working on them and improving them despite being contradicting by the "facts"; then as the new theories become stronger and better accepted, people start juding the "facts" by the lens of the new instead of the old, and forget the problems that the new theories were judged to have and never resolved (e.g., things like Newtonian physics not having the same explanatory range as Aristotelian physics).
Are you adequate?
Really? Or is it that you are SO politically correct that you cannot see truth.
I happen to have mod points and my on-the-fly ranking went from insightful to interesting to troll and back to interesting.
I've lived long enough to understand that each of the 6 billion people on this earth is different than every other. Some are remarkably good and some are remarkably bad. Most of us are just average in our own interesting ways.
But still, I do believe that genetic differences affect what we are and that genetic differences can be attributed to where our genes came from.
Those who choose to never risk offending anyone are perhaps the most intellectually dishonest among us.
Should I post this or should I mod YOU the troll?
in my experienced - I'm a physical chemist doing atomic resolution condensed phase computer modeling. It's so common that I am troubled when the first analysis gives the answer I expected. I likely spend more time looking for errors when the answer makes sense the first go through. Really.
46 & 2
"Those who choose to never risk offending anyone are perhaps the most intellectually dishonest among us."
All fine and good, except the OP does not contain anything more intellectual than a bunch of bald assertions wrapped in the emotions of a xenophobe. In other words, you should have modded the GP informative, the OP is a well formed troll.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The dirty little secret is that the Y is not always unexpected, just too politically incorrect and dangerous to be released to the public.
So, when reality is racist, you change it?
Don't attempt to reason or argue with Anonymous Cowards. There is no way to corroborate anything he/she said.
Just a little advice.
Are groups of people from very different locations, such as whites and blacks, different? Of course they are! Not so different as to be separate species (yet, and with global communication, maybe never), but evolved in different directions to adapt to different conditions. Just being different means there are activities for which one group will be better suited than the other group. There has to be, otherwise they aren't different, are they? Get over both the racism and the political correctness, and admit this basic fact. Skin color is a fairly superficial difference. Africa has by far the most diversity-- the Eastern African perhaps has less in common with the Western African or the Pygmy than with whites.
Much more harmful is the tendency to oversimplify fitness to a single, grossly over broad measure of a difficult to define concept that is not universally relevant, such as IQ, and declare one group superior to another based on only that. When a declaration of superiority is made, you may be sure it is for purposes of propaganda. Geniuses (defines as people with IQ > 140, or perhaps > 160) make their share of fatal mistakes, have flaws that can render their supposed advantages much less valuable, take risks and sometimes lose, sometimes let success go to their heads (most recently, Mike Leach), just like everyone else. Bobby Fischer was a genius, but that monomania which made him able to be World Chess Champion hurt him in so many other ways. The Soviet Union really bought into the idea of chess (and other contests such as the Olympics) as a good measure of a society's fitness, and devoted so much effort to it that except for Fischer, they pretty much mopped the boards with other nations' best players. And what was it all for? Propaganda that ultimately proved empty when Communism collapsed. I expect the Space Shuttle astronauts all do very well on IQ tests, but is that a smart gamble, risking their lives on that thing, for the fame and money they get? For other sorts of fitness, there are many fantastic athletes, rock stars, leaders, and the like who ended tragically. A small change in conditions can at a stroke reverse the fitness of most any trait.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
But still, I do believe that genetic differences affect what we are and that genetic differences can be attributed to where our genes came from.
The theory that race has nothing to do with intelligence has nothing to do with political correctness, and all with science: specifically, the scientific discovery that the taxonomy of human races is not definitive, not specific and has no basis in genetics. Which in turn means that the ggp's assertion that race was a statistically significant factor in their research means that their research was utter crap to begin with.
So let me ask you this then: what makes you think that race is the same as genetics, or that you can even reliably a race? I mean, outside of some outdated and non-scientific notions of physiognomy and phrenology?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Are you really asking an AC troll for sources?
You're wasting your time.
Eh, so the scumbag may have been racist. Dosen't make the first 5/6 of his post any less true. In science, the experiment comes first. The troll is probably just disappointed that science didn't prove his racist views wrong, as well as advance his career and get him more funding.
HehehehehHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH!
For example consider seismic data. You've got 50Hz or thereabouts induced in the cables near powerlines, you have wind blowing on the geophones, passing cars or trains, differences in soil above the rock and other sources of noise. A lot of seismic data processing seems to be about throwing away the noisy data and stacking up what is left to limit the effect of noise even furthur.
For other things there are different sources of error which may not be obvious. It's tempting to think it really is 27.23 Celcius becuase the digital thermometer say so, but the little semiconductor measuring probe may be out a full half a degree or more even if it does spit out numbers that fool people into thinking it is more accurate. Sure enough ten seconds later it could be telling you it is 26.8 Celcius when nothing has changed.
If what is actually going on is that a train went past when the reading were taken or if the mains power had a minor spike then nobody really cares. It can take a while to set up a good experiment or set of measurements and some of the initial information collected may be rubbish. I've had bits of mid range steel tested where the results came back with large amounts of tungsten - and instead of compiling some theory about how it got there I've told the lab to kick the new kid off the machine, clean the electrodes and spark test it again.
A troll from Anonymous Coward suddenly equals reality?
How the fuck did that get modded interesting?
The idea that race is a fiction is a bad, well, fiction, and a clear example of the distortion of thought due to political correctness.
There are a number of human traits (and the genes which cause them) that statistically cluster into groups that correspond to what we consider race. You can test a person's DNA and determine their racial heritage, to a fairly accurate degree. Obviously race is real, if you can nearly automate measuring it. The fact that statistical clusters don't have firm boundaries doesn't mean those clusters don't exist.
Is race relevant? Not for most purposes, but it is for some. I understand that Asians are more likely to have difficulty digesting milk, for example; blacks have a higher tendency to have sickle-cell anemia. Declaring that any test that shows a tendency for races to vary based on genetics is CERTAIN to be flawed because you don't believe race exists is ludicrous.
More likely B ends up on the journal peer review panel because he is a respected pillar of his field, and causes pesky upstart A's paper to be rejected for publication. Forcing the field to wait 40 years for B and his ilk to shuffle off before followers of "crackpot" A can finally get their corroborating data published.
The thing that makes it less true is that it is from an anonymous coward and the science was not published. Nothing that was said can be 'proven' or sought out based on what is there.
Once again, we see the prophetic genius of Douglas Adams. The investigations described in the article are working out the basic science required to enable the future engineering advance known as the "Somebody Else's Problem Field."
It's pretty rare for everything to go right.
I work with holography. I shine a laser at a piece of film, then develop the film. And presto, I get no image. Do I throw out the theory that exposing film to light should produce an image? No, I assume that I screwed up and go back and start again. It's not uncommon for me to spend 3 months of cleaning, aligning, measuring and so on until I produce a proper image. I then throw away all the "bad" data. Maybe, theoretically, that data could be useful, but there's too many parameters to account for.
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."
- Richard Feynman
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! but rather, "hmm.... that's funny...."
- Isaac Asimov
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Keep it simple, stupid. Only measure one thing at a time. It is amazing how many people screw that up.
So let me ask you this then: what makes you think that race is the same as genetics, or that you can even reliably a race? I mean, outside of some outdated and non-scientific notions of physiognomy and phrenology?
It's simple evolution based on enviromental conditions :
Everyone simply evolved so they can best survive in there current environment.
Like the difference between a polar bear and a black bear . It's basically the same bear , that has evolved to suit it's environment better.
Slipping shoelaces ?
Well, tell me then, just how do you define "race"? What are you testing for? How much melanin is in a person's skin? It's not like there's some "German" gene out there and another "Nigerian" gene and another "Japanese" gene that's common to all people who share a certain heritage. Culture isn't genetic, you know.
And then you changed the question: you said that we can test for certain traits of populations. That's true. But what has that got to do with race? Are you going to tell us that the amount of melanin in the skin correlates with IQ or something? (Even though "IQ" is poorly understood and is something that gets defined as "what IQ tests measure").
I'm pretty sure no one has ever claimed a race of sickle-cell anemiacs, after all. If you put them all in a room, would you really think that anyone would mistake them all for relatives?
Don't think the summary quite found the central point of TFA.
"Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn't the presentation -- it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they'd previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work."
"I saw this happen all the time," Dunbar says. "A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they'd be getting a little defensive, and then they'd get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they'd finally understood what was important."
So that's it: The keys are multiple viewpoints, skepticism, and intellectual competitiveness.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I am calling this neuroscience because it has nothing to do with how the nervous system operates. In this sense I am following the lead of WIRED and/or Dunbar, who can't tell a neuro from a social. From TFA: "Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists study things". OK, he studies things called scientists. scientists are people. The study of people and how they behave is psychology. Science is a social activity. Investigations of social activities are sociology when taken as a whole, or social psychology when considered in terms of the activities of individuals operating within a social group. Dunbar studied social psychology, not neuroscience. There's not a speck of neuroscience cereal in it anywhere. There's very little if any actual social psychology, and psychology, or any science at all. There's talking about science, there's talking to scientists about doing science, and there's watching them do science. There's watching and talking about getting good results and not getting good results, and what people do in the matter case. If Dunbar thinks he's doing neuroscience, I suspect he's not even very clear on science itself, much less the various branches. And it does say he's "a researcher in", not that he's a scientist. I do research in curry recipes from different countries and cultures. I'm a researcher, but not a cultural curriology scientist.
In fact I'll go s far as to say he's a researcher because he knows precious little and is trying to find out basic things, not as is the case with most scientists, someone who knows a fair amount and is trying to build on that with new knowledge. He is apparently not clear on the difference between 'screwing up' and not getting good and/or clean results. This may well be because he was unclear himself as to what it was he was looking at and talking about, and he thought he was just not getting good or clean results, when actually, guess what?
He doesn't let loose any secrets. Anyone can talk to scientists and as what happens if and when things don't turn out as expected. If you get an honest (ie. less concerned with appearances than truth) scientist, anyone would get the same answers. Or one could simply read work from real social psychologists and others who study science and scientists and learn the same things. I myself always recommend Collin's & Pinch's "The Golem" as an illuminating, instructive and entertaining starting point.
And a technical point on methodology: a study that does not find a difference between groups, treatments, whatever, 'fails to reject the null hypothesis' (the assertion that there is no observable difference). It does not prove there is no difference, it merely fails to find one. It fails, but only to find a difference, not to produce a result. It can't say there is no difference, it can only say that it couldn't find one. And, it fails to find a difference, no matter how nicely or hapazardly the data come out. The only studies that "fail" produce no data. Scientists may further fail to find an interpretation, but there's no limitation on trying to figure this out, and it applies to both 'results' (reject null hypothesis) and 'no results' (fail to reject null). Studies that produce data that 'makes no sense' produce data that fails to reject the null. The 'making no sense' is a post hoc evaluation of the data based on an incomplete understanding of the design, collection, analysis or interpretation. Such evaluations are done in science, but they are not part of the scientific process. Therefore when this occurs, it is not a "scientific" result and cannot be taken to reflect in the nature or quality of the work done. If you can't figure what it means, you can't figure out. You cannot say that since you cannot figure it out, then you figure out that it fails. If you think you can take something that 'doesn't make sense' and then say that it makes sense in that it represents a failure, then you've contradicted the assertion that it makes no sense. All you can say is that you don't understand it, and since you d
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Here's the problem. If you can't order every single human into one race or another, your model is flawed. If you're forced to resort to mixes of races, well, then you don't have any distinct race left.
Race concepts fall apart once actual taxonomic principles are applied to them. Your examples actually illustrate the problem quite nicely: not nearly all asians have problems with milk - specifically the Japanese the do. Indians (from the Indian subcontinent in Asia) do not. Blacks do not have a higher tendency for sickle-cell anemia, a certain group of people in Africa do. Blacks in the US do not have that trait.
How much does it suck to be so wrong? Your cognitive dissonance must be at a record high.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Indeed!
No scheme of inequality can be defended as corresponding to natural fact.... Superior and inferior can be determined only with respect to a single quality for a single purpose. Nor can a man's qualities be added together and averaged to give a final score or merit. In short, men are incommensurable and must be deemed equal.
- Jacques Barzun
Your brain is not a computer.
"So let me ask you this then: what makes you think that race is the same as genetics,..."
I don't think they are the same, but there is correlation between certain genes and certain groups of people. Whether to classify those groups as races or as extended families is more of a political question than a scientific one.
Just to clarify where I'm coming from, I don't believe that all people of a given skin color should be grouped together as a single race.
Which is why people who claim scientists only care about the truth are wrong. You only cared about the truth and were fired. Plenty of other people would have been looking out for their job first, and made sure their results confirmed what the department expected.
That said- the great thing about science is that eventually the truth will be discovered despite the pressure for money/jobs. It may not happen in a lifetime, but as long as science continues, it will happen.
About sex with the woman on top? (Yeah, I know bad joke.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Here's the problem. If you can't order every single human into one race or another, your model is flawed. If you're forced to resort to mixes of races, well, then you don't have any distinct race left.
Race concepts fall apart once actual taxonomic principles are applied to them.
Sort of. In a traditional hierarchical phylogenetic taxonomy, yes, race concepts fall apart. But if they don't necessarily fall apart with a cladistic genetic taxonomy.
Defining race is a classic problem of, well, classification. Put another way, it's like organizing books. Where do you place 'War and Peace'? In the fiction section? In the history section? In the classics section? In the russian literature section? It could legitimately be placed in any of those sections. The problem is that the book has a single physical instance. The book only exists in one place at one time. So, it can only be placed in one category at a time. And this is the problem with any phylogenetic based hierarchical taxonomy. It's not unique to race; it also applies to species, books, weblinks, and any other number of objects. It's why, before search engines, we had all these portal sites, like Yahoo!, who were focused on creating giant taxonomies of weblinks. And it was always a pain, because we had this intuition that a weblink should only exist in a single category at a time. This was a hold-over from library systems, where any particular book can only be placed on a single shelf at a time.
But then we discovered tagging. With tagging, a new type of taxonomy is possible, where a single entity can be placed in multiple categories at a time. And it turns out that tagging is equivalent to a genetic taxonomy. Each tag is equivalent to a gene (or meme, to be more precise). And we now give webpages lists of keywords, which function like a genome of sorts.
So, you're correct that race concepts fall apart at a hierarchical, phylogenetic based taxonomy. But with a genetic based taxonomy, race is 'tagged' by combination of genes... melanin count, lactose sensitivity, sickle-cell anemia, etc.
And what's more, this tagging and clustering, is a precursor to speciation. Consider the following simplified hypothetical example: a) mutant gene (A) interacts with the gene for lactose sensitivity such that, together, they cause a change in sperm mobility due to a lack of calcium, and b) another mutant gene (B) interacts with the gene for sickle-cell anemia such that, together, they cause a change in permeability to an egg due to lack of iron. If these two things were to hypothetically occur, it would make for a situation where sperm and egg couldn't unite, and a lactose intolerant father and sickle-cell anemic mother couldn't have children. Now then, one more consideration: say that these two mutant genes were actually very advantageous. Mutant gene A protects against flu and pnemonia, and mutant gene B codes for sexy pheremones. If these mutant genes are advantageous, then they'll spread throughout the population. But as the mutant genes spread through the population, the carriers of those genes, who also carry the genese for lactose intolerance and/or sickle cell anemia, would lose the ability to breed together. And this would be defined as a speciation event. Not only would those people be of different races, they would be unable to breed together, and would be different species.
Anyhow, it's worse than people fear. Not only does race actually exist, it's a precursor to speciation. Race just doesn't fit neatly into hierarchical phylogenetic taxonomies. Genetic taxonomies allow for overlapping, fuzzy boundaries. And that's exactly what Race is. Race doesn't fit into neat little hierarchical tree structures; rather, it's a fuzzy network of genes.
If you can't order every single human into one race or another, your model is flawed? That doesn't mean the model is wrong either. If you're forced to resort to mixes of races, well, then you don't have any distinct race left? So what? Call them populations and everything is okay? different alleles of a lot of genes cluster; and they do so relating to ancestry and population history. Thats neither surprising nor shocking.
While this is true, it still doesn't validate existing concepts of race. You can pick out a preexisting notion of race and, indeed, find genetic markers which will correlate with that concept. However, if you do it the other way around, throw out all such preconceived notions, look at the data and derive groupings of humans, you get totally different results. You don't get what people typically think of as the major races. ALFRED has some of this information although it takes a lot of work to go through all the data and the maintainers of the site try to stay out of discussions of race.
So how do you figure out formulas for environmental/nurture factors?
"Well, group X is more likely to smoke during pregnancy than group Y, leading to lower amounts of blood oxygen, which results in an average difference of 3 IQ points."
"Well, group Y is less likely to be stressed during pregnancy than group X, leading to an healthier environment for the fetus, which is good for a difference of 2 IQ points."
"Studies have shown that teachers are 25% less likely to call on students of X race, which should be good for a cumulative effect of 12 IQ points?"
I'm kind of curious how this works. And are the effects cumulative? If someone smokes and is stressed during pregnancy, do these two factors slightly cancel each other out? Or do they reinforce each other to cause more damage?
Blacks do not have a higher tendency for sickle-cell anemia, a certain group of people in Africa do. Blacks in the US do not have that trait.
ORLY? The US Government says:
...making your closing amusingly ironic:
How much does it suck to be so wrong? Your cognitive dissonance must be at a record high.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
But polar bears and black bears are separate species. "Races" are not. Races are more like breeds of cats, although significantly less distinct. So maybe more like gray squirrels.
Gray squirrels live all over North America, but don't look the same. Gray squirrels where I live are small and in fact, gray. Gray squirrels where my parents live are reddish brown and sort of chubby, and gray squirrels in Canada are huge and very dark, almost black. All the same species. They just look different. So maybe Canadian squirrels have fat storing genes that are, on average, 1% more efficient than the eastern American squirrels to deal with the cold. So now imagine that gray squirrels have developed air travel and boats and cars and the internet, and started meeting squirrels who looked different than they did. Now you can easily imagine some large, black squirrels who developed a fetish for tiny, gray, New England squirrels. They have babies and move here to RI, and now the eastern US has a lot of black squirrels, because black fur is a strong gene compared to light gray. But they do not share much more genetic heritage with big, black, Canadian squirrels than with midwestern squirrels.
Are the black squirrels in my back yard still the same race as the black squirrels in Canada? It depends a lot on what the word race means. If you define is "do they have black fur?" then, yes. If you define it as "do they have the same percentages of the telltale gene clusters as the black squirrels in Canada?" then, no. Maybe some of these squirrels have that more efficient fat storing gene, but only a few, since not does it not hinder their survival if they lack it, it's been watered down with the normal fat genes of the New England squirrels.
I think the issue really is that the way we define our race as individuals has very little bearing on anything other than appearance, which is a poor indicator of all but a small handful of genes, none of which relate to anything OTHER than things like hair , eye color or shape, skin color... yes, you are more likely to have a gene for sickle cell anemia if you have dark skin, but the frequency of the gene does not replicate the frequency found in most native African populations.There probably was a time in human history where there were populations which could more easily be genetically defined, but it would have to have been a time before there was any considerable interaction between cultures from different geographical areas. Which was clearly long before we knew we were made of cells, or that there was such a thing as DNA.
I plan on listening very closely when a study comes out of trying to link something like IQ to race in populations that have not had a lot of external genetic influence, but good luck designing that study. It would not be possible in the US, and good luck designing a reliable IQ testing method that will work on , say, aboriginals, isolated pockets of native Africans, and a small community deep in the Appalachian mountains. And good luck finding enough subjects to make statistical significance.
Heh. Looks like I was indeed wrong on sickle-cell anemia in the US. However, the original statement is still wrong: blacks do not share a uniform likelihood of coming down with the disease. On top of that, it isn't even restricted to black people. As a result, race is not a predictor for, or even correlated with, the disease.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Absolutely. Genetic taxonomies work great, because you have a simple definition that can be applied to everybody and comes up with a result that works.
However, when people talk about race, they never talk about a genetic taxonomy: they always talk about an appearance taxonomy. Flat nose, dark skin, curly hair: black. Blond hair, blue eyes, white skin: white. Etc. But that only classifies a fraction of the world's population, and means nothing outside of appearance.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Ah, yeah. I'd agree with that. :)
I thought you were arguing against racial taxonomies in general. But it seems that we're in agreement that it's just the hierarchical phylogenetic taxonomies that don't work.
Where did he say that he was fired?
Ben Stein? Is that you? :)
As for the bit about "plenty of other people ... confirming what the department expected" .... if you replace the word "plenty" with "a few" you'd be much closer to the truth. As you correctly point out, eventually the truth will be discovered (although it tends to take a much, much shorter amount of time than what you suggested). Scientists who intentionally fake data tend to be relegated to janitorial duties once their deception is discovered. So while there may be some short-term incentive to fake data, and while some scientists may be unethical enough to consider doing it, it rarely happens.
Of course, that number could probably be even further reduced if there wasn't a tendency in the scientific community to throw out negative results. That's one area that definitely needs improvement.
I bet Einstein turned himself all sorts of colors before he invented the
lightbulb.
Where did he say that he was fired?
Doh! I could have sworn it said that... Apparently I falsified my reading to support my point.
I also never said anyone had to fake their data- not outright at least. Just throw away what you don't like and maybe 2nd or 3rd try will be close enough to keep the grant payers happy. Its hard to shame someone if they can claim they made a best effort- even if they didn't.
I really hope its not prevalent, but especially in the 'softer' sciences it'd be hard to tell, wouldn't it?
Data that is not published is still valid but wasted. Can we collect this data somewhere more public
even if the data does not fit a well known or lesser known theory - maybe a person viewing the
data can connect the dots. Asimov was correct 99% hard work and 1% inspiration leads to
"hmmm - thats funny"
A little voice in my mind screams:
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
So essentially, Linus ported critical thinking to software development! :-)
Maybe we could backport something to science?
Here's the problem. If you can't order every single human into one race or another, your model is flawed. If you're forced to resort to mixes of races, well, then you don't have any distinct race left.
I think you've just proven that colors don't exist.
The lack of distinct boundaries between states doesn't mean those states don't exist in reality. In the case of statistical clustering, they can even be rigorously mathematically defined.