From the NYTimes report: [Requires free registration. Or use BugMeNot for Firefox]

“Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.

Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago.”

In other news: many trees have green leaves.

I’m sorry, but to me this seems like a “Duh!” moment. Of course humans are still evolving. All Pritchard and company have done is find indications in the DNA that this is so. (These are indications, by the way, and not proof. They are good indications and deserve to be believed, but I expect you will hear people arguing that this isn’t proof.)

The interesting questions are: what kind of selection is happening? Some of it is natural selection, i.e. it has nothing to do with what people admire in mates. Lactose tolerance is probably one of these. People who could benefit from milk survived to reproduce and so their genes for lactose tolerance survived in that population.

Others might be mate selection rather than natural selection. Pritchard and company talk about hair texture genes. It’s hard to see what survival advantage different hair types would bring in a northern climate. (In the tropics, where it can provide an essential insulator, the situation is different.) Hair texture in temperate climates could well be due to the whims of fashion. The important thing to remember here is that sexual selection is notorious for leading to extreme forms that can lead to lower survival rates and even extinction of the whole species. Consider the Irish elk, which developed huge antlers for the purpose of showing off. When the environment changed, and their diet was no longer rich enough to support formation of what was practically an extra skeleton, they ran into big trouble. Sexual selection (and fashion, its young cousin) is an iffy thing.

The other factor is genetic drift. Counterintuitively, random processes can lead to a preponderance of one set of traits. Because of the way reproduction works, once the traits are preponderant, they tend to become even more so. In the end, the minority trait can disappear by random processes alone, without any selection, natural or sexual. Loss of wisdom teeth follows that trajectory. (This is not one of the characteristics the researchers mention.)

The researchers do mention some genes that affect brain development, whose precise function is unknown. The conclusion in the popular press will probably be that these genes must make some people smarter, faster, and better, if not cheaper. Those qualities are so complex, it is highly unlikely that one or a few genes would have much effect on any of them. The brain genes caught in the act of evolving may well do boring things like determine the distribution of glial cells, or affect the blood-brain barrier in subtle ways. They might well be changing by random genetic drift and have no particular significance.

Take all this stuff with many grains of salt. (It tastes better then, too.)

Technorati tags: human evolution, Pritchard

Everybody is boggling over the sudden news about a whole new generation of solar panels that have burst upon us from South Africa. So they’re discussed very tentatively (see below). The news first broke in South Africa on February 11, and was reported in Treehugger on Feb 16.

If this is really true, this is the beginning of a new and different world. It’d be nice if we could keep the oil addicts from turning it all gross and greasy, like everything else they touch.

From Pure Energy Systems wiki:

Professor Vivian Alberts of the University of Johannesburg . . . and his team seem to have developed a flexible, thin, metal alloy that is “photo-responsive”. This alloy is said to result in panels with are only 5 micron thick (compared to a human hair at 20 microns, and silicon photovoltaic cells at 350 microns.) Earlier reports (in 2004) indicated the alloy was copper-indium(gallium)-diselenide (CIGS), with another article inferring the panels would have a useful life of about 20 years, with the energy in fabricating them recovered within the first 1-2 years of operation. And that the materials used could all be later recycled to make fresh cells. It is said that a standard family home would need around 30m/sq (“(about the size of a living room”) of CIGS solar panels to meet all its electricity demands.

Unspecified new storage devices (batteries of some sort) and converters have been created alongside these new cells to store the collected energy. It is suggested these new panels can generate electricity even during winter, not requiring direct sunlight to function. Seemingly German investors are behind establishing European plants, which will be producing 1,000 such panels per day, with local South African factories also be contemplated. Much Thanks to TH Tipster Conrad Z. for pointing us to the piece in the ::Cape Argus.

Update, March 20,2006

The “improved solar panels” mystery grows a bit less mysterious. Via Treehugger comments and other sources, the following more detailed info is available.

Eskom (South Africa Electricity Supply Co.) provided some specifics about the panels in June 2005, (information that could, of course, be out of date by now).

Each 60-W panel to be produced is 1,2 m 5 500 mm in size. “The pilot plant has shown the production cost per watt to be €0,95, verified for a 25-MW production facility, assuming a 10% efficiency and average production yield of 85%,” says Alberts.

This means a 60-W panel would cost around R490, or R8 a watt [which equals approx. $1.27 per watt, compared to current technology costing about $5 per watt].

At the moment, intellectual property resides with PT IP Holdco, a company created by the University of Johannesburg.

Arthur Matteson, an electrical engineering graduate student at Michigan State University, noted in comments that the output of the early versions of the panels is similar to current silicon-based panels of similar size, ie 10% rather than 30%. However, cost is noticeably lower.

IFE is the German company that entered into a licensing agreement with PTIP and will be making the panels. (Web site is in German.)

From the company’s press release (pdf) comes the following, possibly rosy, information:

[my translation of small parts of the pdf]

aleo solar GmbH [IFE’s manufacturing subsidiary, I believe] has 16% of market share for silicon-based solar panel manufacture in Germany, and will be making the new panels. It is currently [“Spring 2006” is all it says] building the factory in Brandenburg an der Havel with a 30MW capacity, and expects to start delivering product in mid 2007. In 2009, the company expects to have expanded to a 60 MW capacity.

Eskom in South Africa is also supposed to be producing commercial quantities in the near future. On Eskom’s site, there is also mention of an Australian company producing the panels at some point.

Next year [ie 2006], if all goes according to plan, a full-size plant is to be constructed within South Africa.

This plant will be the first production line of solar panels in Africa. Another plant, in Germany, is set to follow [the Germans seem to be beating them to it], and then possibly yet another, in Australia.

The plan is for any one plant to produce 400,000 60-W panels a year, in order to make up a production capacity of 25 MW per plant.

Technorati tags: solar energy, photovoltaics, Vivian Alberts, energy, oil

For years I’ve been carrying around an idea about how homosexuality could be inherited. The news reports that jogged me to post are the ones about the work of Mustanski et al. (Human Genetics, online, Jan 12, 2005). The research is currently being widely reported under titles like: Moms’ Genetics Might Help Produce Gay Sons (By Randy Dotinga, Feb 21, 2006) [link no longer active, article removed] [apparent repost without attribution here.]

First a few carps about the reported research, and then some thoughts on my wild(?) ideas.

The Article on genetics and gay sons

Very briefly, this is the gist of Mustanski et al., A genome-wide scan of male sexual orientation (pdf, Jan 2005, Human Genetics). Quoted from the yahoo news article mentioned above:

Women typically inactivate one of their two X chromosomes at random. “It’s like flipping a coin,” Bocklandt [one of the authors] said. “If you look at a woman in any given (bodily) tissue, you’d expect about half of the cells to inactivate one X, and half would inactivate the other.”
…
“When we looked at women who have gay kids, in those with more than one gay son, we saw a quarter of them inactivate the same X in virtually every cell we checked,” Bocklandt said. “That’s extremely unusual.”

To begin with, what about gay daughters? That wasn’t even part of the study. I’m rather boggled that the researchers expect to say anything meaningful about homosexuality when they ignore one very obvious source of perspective on their findings . (I.e. is the mother’s X-chromosome deactivation as skewed or not when she has gay daughters? In either case, what does that plausibly say about the etiology involved?)

To go on with, how do “gay kids” transform into “gay sons”? The prejudices are showing, and given that the researchers are studying something as ringed with prejudice as homosexuality, that is not reassuring. Also, although the original article shows that the researchers know they are dealing with a possible correlation and not a cause of homosexuality, that’s not stressed enough for the popular press. Note the headline that says Moms’ genetics…”produce” gay sons.

The findings are interesting, but until they reflect a much larger sample size, and more thorough attempt to see what is cause and what is correlation, this is mainly a good start for further research.

The Idea

I was intrigued by the title because I’ve thought for ages that there is an overlooked factor in a constellation of traits which depend on alterations in brain wiring and which are are more common in males than females.

The traits involved are left-handedness (slight excess: about 4:3 male to female), mathematical ability of the kind demonstrated right from the earliest days of childhood, often with associated reduction in verbal ability (I don’t have the statistics handy, but my sense is that this is more common in boys), homosexuality (about 3:2 male to female), and dyslexia (approx 3:1). There are other traits, I’m sure, but those are examples of what I’m talking about.

Hormones play an important role in establishing the “circuitry” of the developing brain, and sex hormones are among the big players. One fact of pregnancy is that the person carrying the fetus is always female. If the fetus is female, her own hormones and those of her mother are more or less in synch, and the brain wiring process is less likely to receive conflicting information even if there is a surge of “strange” hormones. It’s the other way around if the fetus is male.

The placenta is a very effective barrier and generally prevents the passage of huge molecules like maternal sex hormones. However, not all women and fetuses have equally functioning placentas. A “leakier” placenta-uterine interface might, sometimes, let through more of the mother’s sex hormones than usual. With a female fetus, this is less likely to matter. With a male fetus, especially if it comes at a critical time for brain wiring, the surge of female hormones may well alter the process.

It’s important in this context that the placenta is fetal tissue in very close association with specialized maternal tissue on the uterine side. So the genetics of either the fetus or the mother or both could play a role. Clearly, that makes things even more complicated.

The characteristics of the placenta-uterine interface depend on many factors, including nutrition, stress, and so on, but they also depend on genetics. So it may not be homosexuality or mathematical ability, per se, that is heritable. What is heritable may be a placenta or uterus that allows some maternal sex hormones to reach the developing embryo or fetus. This would make the traits in question not inherited, strictly speaking, but congenital. The placental or uterine characteristics are the inherited component.

This does not necessarily mean that, for instance, left-handed people would also tend to be dyslexic. Which trait is manifested depends on individual susceptibility, timing of maternal hormone surges, and exactly which part of the fetal brain is developing right then.

It does mean that any of these charactersitics should cluster in families. In other words, a family with lefties, should also have a higher probability of children with dyslexia, early math ability associated with late verbal ability, and so on. Depending on how big a factor the uterine component is, there might or might not be an association with matrilineal inheritance.

There are several ways to test this idea. Surrogacy, where the egg donor is not the woman carrying the pregnancy, could help to show the relative contribution of each side of the uterus-placenta equation. Genome mapping could identify areas on chromosomes that are associated with more-permeable placenta-uterine interfaces. Then the correlation between those areas and any of the traits in question could be studied. Most directly, if maternal sex hormones could be tagged in some way (not using radioactive elements, obviously) and their possible passage to the fetus tracked, and then if the children could be followed through to adulthood, that would be the most direct way to observe how close the correlation is between stages of brain development, hormonal surges, and subsequent development. The latter research project would be both complex and expensive.

The Big Issues

Whenever the discussion turns to the genetics of homosexuality, a blizzard of issues falls. People imagine future headlines like: “Christian Right Now Favors Abortions . . . In Some Cases.” Ministers who run self-help groups to “cure” homosexuality start to fear a loss of business. Legions of heterosexuals despair when they realize there is no hope for them.

Okay. I’ll admit it. I’m making fun of the whole thing because that, to me, is how ridiculous all the fears are.

Does a genetic component to homosexuality determine whether it’s a choice or a fate? No, not really, because a behavior as complex as sexual orientation is likely to be based on a whole range of causes. In some people it may be a matter of choice, in others it may be cast-iron genetics, and in others it may be anything in between. The genetic or congenital component, as with many complex traits such as intelligence or height, is more of a predisposition than an absolute law.

However, the most important point is that genetics says nothing about how people should live their lives. The most important point is that sexuality is nobody’s business but your own. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a choice or not. The whole debate is useless, because the whole debate is nobody’s business.

Technorati tags: homosexuality, genetics, Human Genetics, Mustanski, Bocklandt, placenta, uterus

Inspector Gregory: “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Sherlock Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Inspector: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

The analogy to global warming is that those who can understand the evidence, even when it doesn’t make obvious noise, understand the problem. Those who don’t, don’t.

Where’s the proof?

Hurricanes, fires, and droughts notwithstandng, the evidence for global warming lies in statistics. No single weather event can be pinned on global warming, any more than a specific price increase at a specific grocery store indicates inflation. Next summer could be the coldest one on record, and yet it would neither prove nor disprove the existence of global warming. Because specific events can always be found that contradict the general trend, it feels like statistics prove nothing, and since statistics are the only evidence for global warming, it feels like global warming has no proof.

But, actually, statistics do sort of prove things. Let me explain.

Statistics aren’t proof in the common meaning that there is 100% certainty. However, in day-to-day life we make almost every decision without proof. Which college to go to, which presidential candidate to vote for, which house to buy, which job to take, these are all things with elements of uncertainty where we place bets and hope for the best.

Depending on the consequences of betting wrong, we’re less tolerant of risk. If my house turns out to be on top of a superfund site, and that means I have 20% excess chance of getting leukemia, I won’t wait till I get leukemia before moving out. That kind of certainty, I don’t need.

Statistics can indicate which bet we’re likeliest to win, and it can do so to a much, much higher degree of certainty than we have in almost every aspect of our day-to-day lives. How many people wait to invest in a mutual fund until they are sure it has a better than nineteen to one chance of exceeding its previous returns? That’s the standard of acceptability in biological sciences. After the study has been confirmed many times, it’s considered very likely to be right. “Very likely” in that case would be more like several hundred to one. That kind of certainty about a mutual fund would make it a better bet than US Treasury bonds.

On the other hand, statistics can also be used as in the phrase, “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” This, however, isn’t the fault of statistics, any more than Latin is at fault when a priest puts one over on us by speaking authoritative gobbledygook. The difficult part, for those of us whose statistical abilities are nonexistent, is to evaluate when the numbers are being used truthfully, and when not.

It’s not as difficult as it might seem, although you’re on your own to figure it out. The media don’t help at all. Dramatic tension, which packs in the viewers, requires opponents, so the media will find opposing points of view even if there’s only one and a half scientists on one side, and 99,999 on the other. (Yes, I’m thinking of the “intelligent” design vs. evolution debate.) Although the media ignore it, the consensus among independent scientists is the main indication of whether scientific conclusions (which are always based on statistics) are lies or good guesses. Keep an eye out for boring statements like “95% of scientists think X, 3% think Y, and 2% are on sabbatical.” X stands an extraordinarily good chance of being true in that case. With that kind of informed consensus on a stock market tip, you could bet the farm and win.

In the case of global warming, there are two layers of statistics. There are the numbers concerning temperature, ice melting, ocean currents, carbon dioxide sequestration, and so on and on and on. Then there are the numbers of scientists who are convinced by the research that global warming is in progress, and that it is due to human activities. In recent years, the number of scientific specialists convinced by the research has grown vast. It’s near 99%. You can bank on that type of consensus, especially when the opposing voices are loudest among those funded by Big Oil.

Global warming is happening, and it’s due to human activities.

What does global warming mean?

The other problem with perceptions of global warming is the inability to understand what it means. We hear numbers like “five degree average rise in global mean annual temperature,” and our eyes glaze over. Five degrees? Good grief, we think. We won’t even have to turn up the a/c.

Not so.

Keep in mind that the last Ice Age represented approximately 7C drop in temperature. Mean annual temperature is a meaningless number, just as the average height of human beings tells you little about the height of, say, your uncle. The mean rise is composed of much warmer temperatures in the hot, dry interiors of continents. Texas, for instance, could go from having summer highs of 105F to 120F. That’ll do a lot more than raise electrical bills, or even than increase deaths among vulnerable people. Crops won’t grow well in that kind of heat, and will require massive irrigation. Cattle will die. And wildlife will be decimated. Before you think that’ll be the least of our worries, remember that insects are wildlife too. And if the natural enemies of, say, mosquitoes, are gone, we’ll have clouds of mosquitoes and of the diseases they carry. Start with malaria, go on through dengue, and you start to get the picture.

Ocean levels will rise, even if there is no ice melting (and there is ice melting). Air expands when heated, and so does water. The effect is miniscule on the scale of a pot of water, but it is huge on the scale of an ocean. Expected rises in temperatures are projected to lead to about a meter rise in sea levels, based on thermal expansion alone. This is not a calm process where every year things just seem to get a bit damper underfoot if you live in Miami. What happens is that one day a storm blows through and floods occur where they didn’t before. There is no effect if the flood doesn’t happen to soak you. If it does, your whole livelihood, even your life may be destroyed.

There is no comfort in the fact that even awful local disasters are overcome, in time. The point with global warming is that there will be more frequent and larger disasters, and sooner or later, nobody will be immune. After Hurricane Katrina, Rita would not have weakened (because the warmer water near Texas would have sustained it). Then a Category 5 would have taken out Galveston. Imagine, a week later, if another Category 5 had taken out Miami. At 200,000,000,000+ in damages for each one and the two major centers of energy production decimated, there would have been a national recession. That would affect everyone.

So far, I’ve sketched out famine, pestilence, and flood as consequences. War wouldn’t be far behind. The people displaced by catastrophe will try to move to places where they can survive. Other people will try to replace resources lost in disasters by taking them from someone else. People who lose their living may become entrepreneurial robbers or meth cooks. The politicians will be “realistic” and “tough-minded” and will make the “hard choices” involved in dealing with the situation “as it is now.” They’ll be too busy selling wars to waste money on switching over to non-carbon energy sources and to removing carbon from the atmosphere. (If you can think of current examples of these future scenarios, there’s a good reason for that. The process has begun, and the future has arrived.)

Not all places will grow hotter. Some will become colder. There are several indications that global warming could cause the Gulf Stream to stop flowing. Europe would look like Newfoundland, or colder. That would have a massive economic and agricultural impact. It wouldn’t mean much to them that the global mean annual temperature was actually up.

And that was the good news.

The bad news is what happens if global warming spirals out of control. Venus is described as a planet with a runaway greenhouse effect. Earth is too far from the sun to have a surface temperature of 890F. But 200F would be plenty bad enough. Vast quantities of carbon are fixed in arctic peat bogs. The permafrost there is starting to melt, and they’re starting to exhale their carbon. Coral reefs sequester masses of carbon into limestone where it stays for millions of years. Warmer oceans would be more acidic, which dissolves limestone faster, which liberates increasing amounts of that carbon back into the atmosphere. Just because we stop behaving like idiots, doesn’t mean the feedback loops we’ve set in motion will stop too.

That means that if we don’t prevent global warming before the symptoms become acute, flood, fire, famine, pestilence, and war could look like nice problems to have. What we are doing here is taking the chance on making our whole planet unlivable. Is that outcome likely? No. Does it therefore make sense to take the chance? Only if you’d be happy raising your kids on top of a superfund site. We’re okay with other people having to take that chance, but nobody on Earth, speaking for themselves, would say anything but, “Hell, NO.”

We have only this one planet. The loaded gun isn’t pointed at someone else. It’s pointed straight at my head. And yours.

What to do?

There is really only one thing to do. Start reducing carbon, methane, and other greenhouse gas emissions now. We’re past the stage when we had the luxury of tapering off slowly. We’re even past the stage when we could afford to hold levels constant and reduce gradually. The exhaling peat bogs and quietly bleaching coral reefs are telling us that. Even the Kyoto accords are too little too late. We have to start reducing, and we have to start now.

That means coordinated, global programs away from coal, oil, and all fossil fuels, even nice, clean-burning natural gas. Biodiesel, ethanol, and other biomass energy sources aren’t in that group because the carbon they release is carbon they fixed within the previous few years. They don’t reduce carbon in the atmosphere, but they don’t increase it either. Active carbon sequestration is a good idea, if done right, but, by itself, it couldn’t be done on a sufficient scale to reverse all the decades of carbon liberation. Nor is there any way it could compensate for continued carbon profligacy.

The main thing to do is to stop pumping carbon out. Solar, wind, tidal, and all clean alternative energies, as well as efficient mass transit systems, need to be perfected and promoted in nationwide efforts worthy of wars. This isn’t an exaggeration. Even the good news about global warming means that we’re fighting for our survival here. A war effort might be enough. We have to hope. Less than that probably won’t be.

It is also pointless to piss and moan about the expense. The expense of continuing our current course will dwarf anything we pay to switch to a nonlethal track. As a very minor case in point: The “impossible” cost of dealing with Louisiana’s levees, coastal erosion, and wetlands was around ten to twenty billion dollars. The price tag after Hurrican Katrina is at least two hundred billion, and that won’t get it back even to where it was before the hurricane, or pay for the lives ruined and lost. I am not joking or exaggerating or using poetic licence when I say that the expense of cures will only get worse compared to that of prevention.

Well, you may say, it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to spend money they don’t have to. Just make the best of it.

Unfortunately, I agree with that. Unlike nuclear war, which terrified people, global warming sounds rather benign, especially as the northern hemisphere heads into the season of sleet and ice. I cannot imagine that enough people will wake up to our mortal danger in time to avoid it. I hope the real problem is my lack of imagination. But that’s why the original title for this piece was going to be: Global Warming: Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

More information:
RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists.

Technorati tags: global warming, alternative fuels

From a biologist, a rant on what works and what doesn’t for H5N1. Below: fiction, then fact, then what to do. I apologize in advance for the hectoring tone, but I’m fed up with the balderdash I keep hearing. Eat tamiflu, and barricade yourself into Fortress Wherever with a gun to keep out the feverish hordes. I mean, honestly.

(Nov 1, update, at end)

Fiction 1: We’re all going to die.
It makes for a good movie script, but this is not the way diseases work. The most lethal disease on record, Marburg hemorrhagic fever, causes death in over 90% of patients in the worst outbreaks. Ebola’s rate hovers around 80%. (Aids, a long-term illness, is in a different category, but even untreated Aids is not 100% fatal. See the research on prostitutes with immunity in Nigeria.) Both Marburg and Ebola are very different from flu. Sars is more closely related, and it had a fatality rate of around 15%.

Obviously, these are all very high fatality rates, and the only good rate is zero. The point I’m trying to make is that exaggerating risk does not help anyone to deal with it.

There is some early data coming out of Indonesia that suggest 100% fatalities. What the number means is that 100% of the people diagnosed as definitely having H5N1 virus have died. These tests are done at hospitals. People don’t normally go to hospital for flu, certainly not in the Global South. The people seen at the hospital are in a very bad way when they’re brought in, and many fatalities are expected in a group in that condition. But in order to know what the chance of surviving the disease is, you’d need to know the total number of people who have the virus. You’d need to know how many carry the virus without symptoms, how many recover, and how many die. We know none of this, so we have no idea what the rate is. It could be 100%, it could be 5%. H5N1 is a very bad strain of flu with pandemic potential. The intelligent thing would be to deal with the real threat (more on that below), and the stupid thing would be to do nothing but stock up on tamiflu. [Update Oct 8, below, on antivirals.]

Fiction 2. Quarantine outbreak areas to contain the disease.
You feel the first twinges of something that could be bird flu. Imagine two different scenarios. In the first, you go to the hospital, get tested, receive free medication, your whole family and all your contacts are tested and also receive any necessary medication. In the second, you go to the hospital, get tested, are quarantined for an unspecified length of time, your family is quarantined and unable to go to work, pay the rent, go to school, or do anything they have to do. The money spent on finding and quarantining you and yours is not available to provide an adequate supply of drugs. It’s a no-brainer that in the second case you’ll rush to the hospital and turn yourself in. Not.

Non-punitive quarantine is an essential public health measure. Punitive quarantine just makes people hide disease symptoms, infecting other people the whole time, until they physically collapse. What’s true on an individual level is also true on a national level in that governments try to cover up problems, citizens try to evade border controls, and the spread of the disease becomes unknowable and can’t even be tracked.

None of this is smart. It satisfies the need to spend money on oneself rather than others, but unfortunately that’s the only thing it accomplishes. In the case of flu, quarantine doesn’t achieve containment of the disease, and it doesn’t stop an ever-widening number of people from getting sick. It does, however, cost lots of money. Spending the same amount of money on an actual solution would be smarter, even if it meant we had to donate to others.

Fact 1. Flu viruses mutate.
Flu viruses mutate a lot. There are uncountable trillions of them, all changing in various ways. Some of those changes make them able to infect bats, or civet cats, or Canada geese, or humans. The way they do this is the same way spaghetti sticks to the wall when you throw it to see how done it is. Most of it slides off, but a few noodles hang on. In the case of viruses, the ones who manage to hang on have a whole new defenceless host to grow in. After a few years, the host learns how to unstick that particular kind of virus, and the hunt is on for yet another new home. The point of all this is that sooner or later, any flu virus will have a mutation that allows it to pass between humans. If one outbreak of lethal human flu is stopped, that’s not the end of the danger. A few months later, there will be another outbreak.

That’s another reason why quarantine, by itself, doesn’t solve the problem. All you’re doing–if it works!– is putting out brush fires, while the viruses keep pouring on fuel just out of reach.

Fact 2. Flu and cold viruses are transmitted mainly by touch. (Some recent work on that reported in the BBC Oxford & Lambkin, 2005, Journal of Infection, August 2005, pages 103-9)

A small amount of cold and flu transmission is by the dreaded droplet infection and inhalation of the virus. The risk is especially high for air travellers because the airlines save money by recirculating air without filtering it well enough, by keeping the air too dry because that’s cheaper, and by keeping its oxygen content too low, likewise because that’s cheaper. Airlines should be kicked, repeatedly, until they do what is necessary for the safety and health of their passengers and flight attendants, especially so since air travel is the best way for the virus to hop continents.

For the rest of us, however, the most effective flu prevention is washing hands or using alcohol wipes after touching doorknobs, phones, toilet handles, and anything else touched by many different people. Basically, you should be cleaning your hands about six times a day. The next most important thing is cleaning and disinfecting surfaces that are touched often (counters, phones, desks, etc.). The virus is activated when virus-laden fingers touch our mouths, nose or eyes. It is truly amazing how difficult it is not to touch one’s face, and how unconscious and automatic the process is. One of the interesting effects of wearing rubber gloves is that you find out how often you touch your face.

Most face masks are useless for stopping viruses. Viruses are *tiny*. They’re just big molecules, after all. Any face mask that is easy to breathe through has a pore size that looks like chicken wire to a virus. However, what face masks can do, and do very effectively, is stop you from touching your nose or mouth.

Fact 3. The public health system in the US has become inadequate to deal with a flu pandemic.
Any system will be stressed by a big outbreak of flu, but ours has fallen down on three important counts. The first is vaccine production. Production has been allowed to concentrate in very few plants. Problems at even one plant, as in the 2004 flu season, then cause nationwide problems. The second issue is vaccine distribution. This is part of the great nationwide infrastructure decay that makes it difficult to provide any emergency supplies to where they’re needed. We’ve had all the proof we need of how bad the situation is during the 2005 hurricane season. Vaccine distribution is bad, too. The 2004 season proved that.

The third issue is tailoring vaccines to current outbreaks. The approved method involves sterile incubation of virus in chicken eggs and takes months. A flu season gears up around November and extends into spring. About nine months earlier, scientists have to *guess* what the next epidemic strain will be, and then start the months-long process of designing a vaccine for it. It then takes a couple of months, at best, to distribute it. For decades, there was no alternative.

Now, DNA-based methods could make a tailored vaccine in *weeks*. There are valid reasons to make sure the method is safe enough to apply to millions of people, so it should have been pushed through testing at the earliest opportunity and the fastest speed. It hasn’t been. It’s still sitting on the shelf. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have to guess about the right vaccine to use for the current flu season. And if a new strain showed up suddenly, we could deal with it right then and there. As for distribution, I’d bet UPS could give the government a hint or two that would get that time down to weeks as well.

Take home message: Vaccines are the best personal preventive measure. Get shots if you can. Assume government response to a pandemic will be reasonably useless.

Some links for more information:
Dr. Charles paints a plausible doomsday scenario if we do everything wrong.

Centers for Disease Control “what’s new” page with links to other CDC info on transmission, vaccines, and prevention.

The 2005-2006 flu season US vaccine contains two A series elements (related to H5N1): A/New Caledonia/20/99-like (H1N1) and A/California/7/2004-like (H3N2). The third element is from B, the other major group, B/Shanghai/361/2002-like viruses.
Update Oct 11: Dr. Chris Grant, writing in comments on the excellent BBC article on bird flu: “H5N1 is a description of two tiny virus peptides (H = hyaluronidase type 5 and N = Neuraminidase type 1). (Fun factoid: Hyaluronidase is the same stuff on the surface of sperm to help them make a way into the egg.)

World Health Organization, data on confirmed cases and transmission.

Wikipedia, facts and figures about avian flu and its history.

Things to do:

• Get your and your family’s flu shots, even if you have to pay for it yourself out of the milk money, and even if it’s not for bird flu. Different strains of flu are related, though not identical. Immunization against one strain may help reduce the effect of another strain, even if it doesn’t eliminate it.

  If and when H5N1 vaccine is needed and is available, get that if you can without depriving more needy people. These are, in more-or-less order, frontline public health workers (nurses, ambulance drivers, and the like); school-age and day care-age children (the main vectors); the elderly, infants, and the immune-suppressed; people who deal with the public a lot (teachers, hairdressers, police, funeral workers, and so on), and, finally, the rest of us.

• Wash your hands a lot during flu season, clean surfaces, and don’t touch your face.
• Vote for people who care enough about public health to fund it intelligently.
• Help the source areas for flu implement vaccination, treatment, information for the population, and other useful public health measures.
• Get a bottle of tamiflu if you want, by all means, but don’t go crazy.
• Stop whingeing. (Definition for non-Aussies: whine + cringe + complain + do nothing useful)

[Update, Oct. 8.] More on tamiflu, and flu antivirals. They are not useless, but:

Tamiflu (oseltamivir phosphate) reduces the severity of flu and/or shortens its duration IF treatment is started within hours of the first symptoms. It does not work against colds. When self-medicating without positive diagnosis, you need to differentiate between cold and flu symptoms within the first 4-12 hours of onset. Tamiflu can have side effects, the main ones being nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, diarrhea, bronchitis, or dizziness. Relenza (zanamavir), the other major antiviral, is likewise strong medicine.

Flu viruses are growing resistant to antivirals: “…in a special online edition of The Lancet, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 12% of influenza A strains worldwide have developed resistance to the most widely used flu medications.” Bird flu (H5N1) has already shown some resistance to tamiflu. Whether the strain that mutates into human-to-human transmission will be susceptible or resistant can’t be known until the strain actually evolves. Resistance is arising the same way antibiotic resistance did. Amantadine and rimantadine are apparently ineffective against H5N1, and many other flu viruses, some say because the drugs are widely used to medicate poultry in China. Tamiflu is widely prescribed in Japan for any flu-like illness.

Stockpiling and self-medicating with tamiflu will likely exacerbate viral resistance. Anybody who doesn’t take the full course will help the evolution of resistant viruses. There are always plenty of people who “save some for next time.” So, by trying to take care of number one, instead of everyone, we’ll end up breeding resistant disease, potentially in a matter of weeks, and we’ll all be defenseless.

When is it sensible to take an antiviral? When it is part of the public health measures to contain an outbreak, (or, on an individual level, when you or someone you live with has a diagnosed case of flu). This is the main reason why there aren’t enough doses of antivirals for everyone. We don’t need enough for everyone. We need enough to blanket regions with outbreaks, and we need those viruses not to be already resistant to the only drugs available because people have been using them wrongly. Outbreak regions involve a few million people at most. This is not to say our current public health system has enough doses even for that, but the shortfall is nowhere near as stark as the scaremongering about, “There’s only two million doses for three hundred million Americans!”

Update, Oct 11. My earlier information was too sanguine. The WHO recommends enough antivirals to cover 25% of the population. In the US, that’s closer to 80 million than a few million. So we have a BIG shortfall. As I said, expect the government response to be pretty useless. The shortfall doesn’t change all the other points made about incorrect usage, viral resistance, and promoting the spread of the virus, potentially to yourself.

Containing outbreaks is better for everyone than stockpiling drugs uselessly, depleting supplies until outbreaks are uncontainable, or, worst of all, breeding resistant strains. Getting yours while you can could be worse-than-useless by making it MORE difficult to contain an outbreak, an outbreak just as capable of infecting you as anyone else.

This is one of those difficult situations where, if we’re all sensible and unselfish, there won’t be a problem, but if we try to take care of ourselves, we’ll end up hurting ourselves. A minute’s thought shows how stupid selfishness is in this case, but it feels so right, people will invariably do it unless there is strong leadership to the contrary. I think part of the reason there is so much pressure for self-centered (and useless) actions is the assumption of an adversarial, or at least uncaring, relationship between people and government. The sad thing is that unless the government is doing its job, there is no way for an individual to solve the problem. It would be like trying to have a mass transit system all by yourself.

[Update: Nov. 1 2005]
File this under “OMIGOD, I can’t bel-eeeeve it!” I wonder what the CDC threatened them with to make them listen? Or is the Shrub’s popularity so low, somebody in the Administration decided they can’t be complete screw-ups about absolutely everything? Somebody’s even figured out that cell culture-based vaccine-making methods are Important. I am shocked. Shocked!

From the BBC:

“Bush unveils bird flu action plan

“…At the heart of the plan is a request for $2.8bn to accelerate development of vaccines using cell-culture technology. …

“The strategy entails:

• $1.2bn for the government to buy enough doses of the vaccine against the current strain of bird flu to protect 20 million Americans
• $1bn to stockpile more anti-viral drugs that lessen the severity of the flu symptoms
• $2.8bn to speed the development of vaccines as new strains emerge, a process that now takes months
• $583m for states and local governments to prepare emergency plans to respond to an outbreak

“To equip Americans with accurate information on how to protect themselves and their families, the government is launching a website: www.pandemicflu.gov.”

Technorati tags: bird flu, avian flu, H5N1, pandemic, epidemic, public health

In the grand tradition of men wondering what it is that women want, or grownups discussing the depravity of youth, I think it’s time to address the Conservative Problem. Story after story comes out about hawks who never served in the military, closet gays with public homophobia, and now I hear about a church pastor and apparent serial rapist who helps decide on women’s health at the national level. The mind boggles. Inquiring minds want to know what the hell is going on.

Let’s start by going back to basics. People younger than seventy, or possibly a hundred, won’t remember this, but in the Old Days conservatives were supposed to be the voice of caution. They argued against spending too much money on hard luck cases, but, strange to say, this was not because they wanted the money for themselves. In those days, conservatives tried to hold down spending because they feared bankruptcy. They also argued for larger armies because they feared war. So, yes, they were a voice for fear, but fear does have a useful function. It keeps us away from harm.

So far, so good. Nothing crazy there. These are not the conservatives I’m talking about. These are not the Conservative Problem.

The problem is radical conservatives, who have taken fear to the realm of insanity.

One of the few remaining unmentionables is to point out that fact. After all, a cornerstone of democracy is respect, and few things are less respectful than labelling someone a loony. On the other hand, continuing to tolerate people who are dismantling tolerance is idiocy of another kind.

There are many different kinds of insanity: repeating actions that have never worked, expecting magical effects from unrelated events, and generally being disconnected from reality. Every kind seems to be represented among radical conservatives. I’ll rehash the usual evidence.

Consider the “just say no” campaigns, especially the ones dealing with sex. In thousands of years of recorded history, telling people not to have sex has not worked. So the conservative solution to a lethal disease like Aids is exhortations not to have sex. Likewise, no one has ever been forced to be free. So the solution to Middle Eastern despotism is an invasion.

One could argue that the cover story has nothing to do with the real motivation, such as stealing oil or finding a cheap way to ignore a public health problem. I’m sure that’s true for many of the politicians involved, but if the only trouble was corrupt kleptocrats, we wouldn’t be fooled for long. The power of radical conservatives comes from those who really believe that the light they see at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train. That’s why it is important to identify the vision for what it is.

Evidence of irrationality is not limited to things that can double as convenient excuses. The US reaction to terrorism is another case in point. The country was turned on its ear over a few envelopes containing anthrax. Meanwhile, vaccine stocks for flu and measles are currently depleted to the point where the next epidemic will claim hundreds of lives. (Luck has kept us from having an epidemic so far, which is not the same as having effective countermeasures.) Similarly, millions of tons of air, ship, and truck cargo enter the country with barely a glance, while security agents worry about the quantity of explosives grannies might be hiding in their shoes. This is hysteria, not caution.

Interestingly enough, radical conservatives don’t deny their disconnectedness from reality. On the contrary, they seem to be proud of it, judging by the now-famous quote reported by Suskind in the NYTimes Magazine (Oct. 17, 2004). “We,” said a senior adviser to Bush, “create our own reality,” unlike those in the “reality-based community” who are reduced to studying it. Usurping God’s role as Creator seems like a strange thing to do for an administration that prides itself on faith, but lunacy and consistency don’t usually go together.

Being uninterested in reality is not necessarily harmful (so long as there’s someone to provide dinner and do the laundry), but radical conservatives seem to demand everyone’s participation in their delusions. It’s interesting to understand why this is so, especially for its value in predicting what they’re likely to do next.

Psychologists have studied conservative and liberal attitudes. Conservatives, both problematic and normal, have something the boffins call “reduced stimulation seeking.” In other words, conservatives avoid the unfamiliar, the unknown, and the new. That’s hardly a surprise, since it’s almost a definition of conservatism. (See Jost et al., 2003, Political conservatism as motivated social cognition, Psychological Bulletin 129: 339-375 for recent research and original sources spanning decades, all the way back to 1936. The article can be ordered downloaded here, but I haven’t found direct links.)

Psychologists have also contributed the perspective that shows where those feelings fit on the whole spectrum of fear-related attitudes. The normal roots of conservatism lie in the same caution anyone needs for self-preservation, which is what makes it hard to realize that extreme forms are not normal. It would be like hearing someone laugh, and then realizing that they’d been laughing for no reason for twelve hours straight.

The critical point about feeling fear is the predictable reaction. Nobody says, “Ooh, my brain chemistry is very interesting today.” Instead, an external threat is found, even if none exists, that can explain the feeling. The tendency grows, for instance, to see communists islamists behind every problem. The sense of persecution is central to the world view, and only the labels change.

Given that conservatives generally feel higher levels of fear, it clarifies why right-wingers also tend to find a group, or groups, whose fault it must be. Anyone will do as a target–blacks, Jews, women, or the liberal media. The only actual requirement is that the group be no real threat, so that they’re safe to dump on.

Another psychological characteristic shared by many conservatives is an orientation toward authority rather than self-direction. It stands to reason that a heightened sense of fear would lead to a desire for a strong protector, whether that is a specific person or a group. If the fear is strong enough to unseat reason, then strength becomes the most important thing. Once it is more important than truth or justice, the government ceases to be one of laws and becomes instead the biggest dog on the block. (Or tries to.)

Desire for protection means putting oneself in the hands of a protector, that is, downgrading one’s own sense of right and wrong in favor of the authority’s. Without an internal compass, the world becomes an even more frightening place, and it is more necessary than ever to shelter behind an authority. Obviously, a less-than-benign authority could tell its loyal minions to do just about anything. In recent history, it has. And does.

The easiest way to feel part of a powerful group is to exclude someone else. Combined with the need to explain feelings of fear, there’s even more reason to find someone, anyone, to put down (in both meanings of the phrase).

The important result is that tolerance, in that world view, becomes the problem, not the solution. There is no point preaching live-and-let-live or pluralistic democracy. All it means to someone irrationally in the grip of fear is that the floodgates of evil will be opened.

One final point completes the picture of caution gone crazy. In a world view that fears what’s different and needs to exclude it, women are always available as an easy target. Even homogeneous societies have two sexes in them, one of which has less muscle. The opposite sex is mainly interesting for, well, sex. So if men are going to despise women, they’ll wind up despising sex. However, it’s kind of a drag to fight your hormones your entire adult life, so the simple solution is to put the enforcement function onto women. Before you know it, evil is being defined as sex for its own sake, and women need to stay at home to avoid being polluted.

Aside from the fact that this is no fun, the biggest problem is that it’s impossible. Trying to live against human nature has as much chance of success as jumping your way to orbit. So large numbers of people don’t actually lead the sexless lives they preach, which, to an outsider, looks like hypocrisy. On the inside though, there are mental tools for dealing with it. Among some Christians, for instance, the contradictory behaviors fit into an arc of sin and redemption (and sin and redemption and sin and redemption and so on). This is taken as evidence of God’s love, not of hypocrisy. Never say humans aren’t an inventive species.

The other effect of trying to live an impossible life is the desire for rigid rules. After all, under the circumstances, one needs all the help one can get. Again, tolerance and the freedom to live and let live are the problem in this worldview, not the solution.

Moving along to the question of where radical conservatism is headed, it’s first worth asking whether we really have nothing to fear but fear itself. Isn’t it better, it could be argued, to err on the side of caution? You can’t be too safe, right?

That seems like a reasonable view, and yet history says otherwise. How many countries have failed through fearlessness? How many have killed themselves by being too kind? None.

On the other hand, how many have bankrupted themselves building huge armies against non-existent threats? How many have torn themselves apart by destroying their own people? Every empire that fell of its own weight did it this way.

This is not to say that external threats don’t exist or that defense is a waste of time. There’s nothing wrong with caution. It’s erring on the side of caution that is unsafe, no matter how good it feels.

So, radical conservative ideas are destructive, as you might expect from delusions, and radical conservatives are crazy. That’s what’s wrong with them. Does the recognition serve any purpose, aside from the obvious satisfaction of labelling the opposition?

The advantage to seeing the insanity clearly is that one can see where it’s headed. Totalitarian governments are the only ones that can meet the needs of people for whom tolerance and freedom are the problem. That’s where they’re taking us. The writing has been on the wall for a while.

The hallmark of losing a government of law is, well, losing it. Extralegal detentions, detentions without trial, and torture are found in dictatorships. And they’re always done for the same reason: in the service of a higher good.

The US currently carries critical hallmarks of a dictatorship: detention without trial, torture of prisoners, and a population that is willing to look the other way.

Comparisons between the US and dictatorships are considered offensive, which they are. But if they fit the facts on the ground, they are also essential. Saying “it can’t happen here” doesn’t make it so.

The usual excuse is to say that in our case, it’s different. The reason why the targeted group has to lose its rights is different. It’s not the same old lunacy this time. This time it’s justified.

However, the differences mean nothing. Everything is always different. Nothing ever happens the same way twice. South African apartheid is different from Saudi Arabian, which is different from ghettoizing Jews, which is different from Hutus slaughtering Tutsis. It’s not the differences that tell us what we’re dealing with. It’s the awful similarities.

We need to get our heads around a few simple facts. No matter how reasonable it looks, no matter how great the threat (which is another way of saying no matter how great our fear), it is never all right to deprive other human beings of the same rights given to full citizens. It was insanity the last time, and it is insanity this time. There is no way to be a civilized society and do those things. It is crazy, obviously, to destroy civilization in order to save it.

For those of us who want to stop enabling lunacy, it is important to call things by their right names. We need to stop being respectful toward attitudes that destroy respect. Reserve tolerance for opposing points of view. Insanity does not need tolerance. It needs treatment.

As a person who’s heavily on the freedom side of the freedom vs caution debate, I certainly wouldn’t advocate compulsory treatment. Moonbats can live next door, if they want, so long as they keep to themselves. However, in public life, whether for voters, politicians, or media, intolerance cannot be tolerated.

If radical conservatism continues to be tolerated as something normal, it’s not hard to see what will happen. Those few symptoms–detention without trial, torture, or making up legal excuses in the name of a greater good–tell us that we’ve crossed the line. We’re not headed for the slippery slope. We’re on it. It is past time to say no. The only question now is when we’ll open our eyes and see where we’re going.

Update: July 12, 2006

It seems John Dean is getting it figured out (via Raw Story). The only thing I don’t understand is why he says it’s not generally known that conservatives blindly follow authority. It’s been obvious since the 1930s or so. I can’t even say you heard it here first. I wonder how many more years will pass before Dean and company see the rest of the whole twisted mess that I, following so many others, have been ranting about for a while now.

Technorati tags: conservative paranoia dictatorship

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Slightly changed from an LA Times letter to the Editor of the Sunday Magazine, regarding an article by Matthew Heller, Healthy, Wealthy, but Wise? The article concerned the controversy about regulation of ephedra and ephedrine, which speed up metabolism, and therefore help weight loss, as well as cause heart problems and even death in some people. I was an ethnobotany (Special Concentrations) major as an undergrad, have a naturopathic doctor’s degree, and a PhD in botany, so herbs and drugs are subjects I feel very strongly about. Hence the rant.

The hoopla over weight loss drugs is just the beginning. There are tens–hundreds–of potentially dangerous things people can take for their “health.” Go into any health food store and take a look at the products that “support vitality.” The flyers, although not the labels, suggest anything from bigger and better Viagra substitutes to cures for old age. The only reason there isn’t more of a problem is that most of them don’t work. If even one of them was as effective as ephedrine for what it claims to do, the National Guard would have to be called out to contain the stampede.

Supplements are called that because they’re supposed to be benign, like food, rather than dangerous, like drugs. Disregarding for now whether such a neat division is real, some natural products are harmless and some aren’t. Dosage is the critical issue. Coffee is natural and rather benign, but a teaspoon of pure alkaloid caffeine would kill you. The milky juice in the central stem of lettuce contains compounds similar to opiates, but salads don’t have the same effect as heroin, and even the most fanatical just-say-no campaigner has never refused a plate of greens.

Ephedrine is no different. A little bit, such as in a tea made of ephedra, is no worse (and maybe no better) than a cup of coffee. However, it is utter bilge to call the pure alkaloid harmless. A statement like that can only be rendered true with a lot of fine print about not exceeding recommended dosages.

If we were all rational, all the time, none of this would be a problem. Labels would never make big promises, and would clearly list the maximum dose and possible side effects. Consumers would never look for hope in a bottle. But even in a perfect world, well-intentioned ignorance could still cause problems. Kava, for instance, is an excellent tranquilizer and generally harmless, yet it turns out to cause liver damage in a few people. This is analogous to the bad effect of aspirin on a few children, and could be dealt with the same way, by providing clear information. However, some people feel that a total ban is the right response.

The appropriate response is a thorny issue. It would be nice to find a middle ground between requiring prescriptions for lettuce and allowing the sale of an herbal Viagra that causes parts to fall off. The Germans have dealt with this issue by demanding proof of safety, but not of effectiveness, which means that people who would like to pay for pink sugar pills, can do so. That is perhaps as it should be.

Who decides on the regulations is also problematic. Science would like to, but it has its own brand of ignorance. In the 1950s, for instance, the official position ridiculed people who took vitamins. After decades of evidence on the benefits of vitamins, including such things as the recent discovery that vitamin B6 helps prevent spina bifida, officialdom takes a different line. Given their track record, I’m not at all sure that the AMA or the FDA deserves to have a lock on what is defined as good or healthy.

Difficult as these issues are, they’d become easier if we could get our minds around a few simple facts. Drugs are drugs, whether packaged by Nature or Merck. Low-dosage drug delivery, whether as camomile tea or coca leaves, isn’t the same as high dosage, whether it’s alkaloids or antibiotics. If we grasp that, a more rational approach becomes possible to the whole issue of drugs, whether legal and illegal, herbal or pharmaceutical, and safe or unsafe.

Technorati tags: drugs herbal medicine FDA supplements

[This is a re-posting of an earlier post, with the comments turned on this time. Unfortunately, current events–read: “Kansas” [Oct24, 2005: good grief, and now Dover!]–keep making it relevant. It’s amazing that almost a century after the Scopes monkey trial, we STILL have to argue about this nonsense.]

Evolution is said to be one dogma among many, nothing more than part of the orthodoxy known as science. Other beliefs are just as valid, and they deserve equal time because anything less is unfair.

There is only one thing wrong with this viewpoint. Evolution is not a belief. Even though nobody is ever going to see birds evolving from dinosaurs, evolution does not rest on the same sort of faith as, say, belief in an afterlife. You might as well say you believe in stars or electrons because you, personally, have never seen great flaming balls of gas or infinitesimal blips zipping by. Switching on a lamp or a computer doesn’t feel like an act of faith. (Well, maybe just a little bit, in the case of computers.) The physical world isn’t something to believe in. It’s just there. Likewise, believing in science would be like believing in a yardstick. It’s just a way of studying that world.

Science is defined by a method, and that method explicitly involves only measurable objects and testable predictions whose results can be independently verified. That means science doesn’t work on anything that can’t be measured and verified. It does *not* mean that everything immeasurable is unimportant. Quite the contrary, since love, joy, hate, hope, beauty, and God are all beyond measurement. Science doesn’t have the tools to tell us anything about them.

What science can tell us about is the physical world, and it is so effective in its own limited range that it’s given us vast power. This has a whole slew of unscientific consequences. Humans, as a matter of observable fact, adore power, so science has acquired a mantle of god-like authority that doesn’t remotely fit. Scientists, who are human beings in their spare time, tend to like the authority and all the perks that go with it, and they’ve certainly come up with their own share of stupid orthodoxies. But that has nothing to do with science itself. Science is not, and by its nature cannot be, a belief system any more than carpentry could be.

So where does that leave evolution? It’s called the Theory of Evolution, and in order to understand what that means one has to understand how scientists use language. Truth is immeasurable, so science can’t find truth. It doesn’t try to. It talks only about the likelihood that a given result will be observed again.

All scientific conclusions are probability statements: an observation is repeated a number of times and, say, nine times out of ten the results confirm a given idea, so . . . the idea is thrown out. A ninety percent chance of being right is not good enough. The probability of being right has to be nineteen out of twenty in the biological sciences. It has to approach ninety nine out of a hundred in the physical sciences. Imagine applying those standards in your personal life.

In science, that’s just the beginning. The hypothesis, which is an expensive word for educated guess, is merely said to be confirmed once it passes that bar. These guesses are dignified with the name of “theory” when they have been confirmed so many times there is no real chance they won’t continue being confirmed. They are called “laws” when that certainty becomes crushing, but even laws are probability statements. The law of gravity is a probability statement with an extraordinarily low chance of not working.

Against that backdrop, evolution is called a theory because there are so many facts in its favor. It’s a parallel case to our understanding of stars and electrons. We have no personal experience of any of them, but scientists who have studied the facts have come up with coherent explanations that pan out. Evolution can explain practical things, such as how bacteria develop antibiotic resistance and why measles epidemics run in cycles, and it can provide mind-altering insights such as that insects and mammals have the same basic body plan, except the plan is back to front.

None of the other ideas for explaining the patterns of life rests on any facts that contradict evolution. The theory of intelligent design (and “theory” is used here in its common meaning) has not been able to show the existence of intelligence in the design, using scientific methods. Creationists can’t show that creation occurred. If the scientific method is not used, the result is not science.

People who argue against evolution can, and do, fit some of the facts into their theories, but they have to ignore all the facts that disagree, which is about as far from the scientific method as you can get. They have no measurable observations and no testable, independently verifiable predictions.

Intelligent design and creationism, by those or any other names, are not competing scientific theories. They are simply theories. They may deserve equal time, but only with their equals in the realm of ideas. Discussing intelligent design in a class on evolution is like considering theories on good government when building a rocket ship.

At the heart of the problem lies confusion about science and religion. Both may have authority and try to explain the world, but the worlds they’re trying to explain are different, the way they explain things is different, and their authority rests on different foundations. Science is not, *and cannot be*, in conflict with religion because they address fundamentally different questions. Facts can certainly contradict specific scriptures, because God’s stenographers do suffer the occasional hiccup, but that doesn’t mean science can suddenly answer cosmic questions about the reason for our existence, or that religion becomes a good way to cure AIDS.

Using religion, or anything else for that matter, to argue against facts is a hopeless endeavor. You can’t argue with facts any more than you can believe in them. And evolution is as close to a fact as biology gets. In Bill Bryson’s inimitable words, denying evolution proves conclusively that the danger for those who try it is not that they may be descended from apes but that they may be overtaken by them.

Technorati tags: evolution intelligent design creationism

Rights of embryos | Cell lines and other scientific issues | Are stem cells really that good? | Prop. 71.

[Written October 20th, 2004. The proposition passed, despite deficiencies in funding oversight, public ownership of eventual patents, and conformity to California’s sunshine laws. The industry, unfortunately but not unexpectedly, has jumped on these loopholes. Whether this ruins the whole initiative remains to be seen.] [Comment added approximately December 2004.]

Stem cells have become the umpteenth topic in the culture wars. The Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign made it something of an issue (although maybe they acted in haste and are now repenting at leisure, since it loses them more votes than it gains), and we Californians have a high-profile Proposition 71 on the ballot to kickstart research despite the lack of federal funds. Lives were always involved, but now money is part of the picture and the discussion has heated up.

What about the rights of embryos?

Part of the complexity is that a whole series of interdependent questions must be answered to come to an informed decision. They start with the big one of which lives are more important, embryos’ or patients’? That’s the way the question is usually framed.

And that’s why it is unanswerable.

The real first question is whether the early-stage embryos providing the stem cells are human beings. If they are, they can’t be used to save other lives, and that’s all there is to it. If they aren’t, there’s nothing left but a few technical issues and a lot of shouting about how much money to spend.

So, beginning at the beginning, consider the facts regarding human embryos. Biologically, early-stage embryos have less nervous system than a clam. Clams are sentient, but it’s hard to say a lot more for them. It has to be agreed that embryos don’t have a human mind, but at least they do have human DNA. However, every scraped knee leaves behind countless cells packed with human DNA, yet we don’t have funerals for them. Nor do we feel that a transplant recipient has turned into two people after the operation. Having human DNA is not enough.

The final refuge is to say that an embryo *could* become a human being, even if it isn’t yet. But potential humanity is not enough either. Given modern in vitro fertilization techniques, every human egg in the world could be fertilized and turn into a human being. Nobody regrets all the wasted lives because, really, they aren’t. Potential is not the same as actual, any more than my potential to win a Macarthur grant is equivalent to winning one.

The fact is that embryos are not recognizably human by any objective standard. We’re really arguing about something much harder to define. We’re trying to decide whether embryos have the essence of humanity. Call it a soul, for short.

Putting it in plain terms shows that we’re really arguing about a *belief*. Arguments about beliefs cannot be settled, and that’s why the argument about patients’ versus embryos’ rights keeps going around and around and around. That argument is pointless, and our personal beliefs about the embryo’s human status are relevant only to our personal behavior. What matters is that beliefs can legitimately conflict in a matter where the facts are unclear, and public policy has to be separate from the beliefs of any one group. In other words, beliefs and state must be separate. It’s the only way.

Nobody can prove that an embryo is or is not a full human being, so those who believe embryos are not yet human should be free to act accordingly, and those who believe they are human, likewise. Stem cell therapy shouldn’t be forced on anyone, but neither can anyone demand that it be banned.

A side issue is whether people can legitimately be asked to fund actions they oppose. For the large ethical questions involving life and death, the answer seems to me to be no. However, pacifists are taxed to fund wars. People who consider it state-sponsored murder are taxed to fund capital punishment. One group should not be given special consideration in taxation. Either all conscientious objectors should be free to withhold funds, or none should.

Research on stem cells is a legitimate endeavor, so lesser questions are not just a waste of time. Let’s go to it.

Stem cells, schmem cells. What are the scientists talking about?

First, why not use adult stem cells? Because, for the most part, we can’t yet reliably find them, grow them, or use them. Medical use of these cells is many more years in the future than is that of embryonic ones.

Another issue is that early-stage embryos don’t have much of an immune system. This means that there may be no rejection issues with embryonic stem cells. And that means those cells can be given to any patient who needs them, without having to tailor each therapy to a specific person. Given social realities, adult stem cell therapy would be so expensive and labor-intensive that, at least for the first few decades or generations when it was available, only the rich or well-insured would benefit.

Umbilical cord cells are harvested at birth, when the newborn has a well-developed immune system. (The umbilicus is genetically part of the fetus, not the mother.) Thus, without lifelong anti-rejection drugs, they will only be usable by that individual, the same as adult stem stem cells.

Second, what is “somatic nuclear cell transfer”? One side says it involves destroying embryos, the other says it doesn’t. Well, they are both right, in a way. The technique, like use of adult stem cells, is a therapy usable only by the person involved (without anti-rejection drugs). The patient provides a cell nucleus, which contains one copy of that person’s DNA, all 46 chromosomes. This is injected into an egg cell whose own nucleus has been removed. The non-nuclear part of the egg is what starts cell division, so the resultant egg+nucleus starts dividing and creates a small mass of cells which can be used as stem cells. In humans, there have been no documented cases of successfully getting these cells to organize into a healthy embryo that can develop to term. Human embryonic development turns out to be more complex than that of mice and sheep, so cloning Dolly is not the same as cloning people. Even when human cloning is eventually successful, use of this method is only objectionable if you believe embryos are human. That goes right back to the whole essentially philosophical argument about the status of embryos.

Third, why not use the existing cell lines? The federal clampdown on research happened at such an early stage that there are nowhere near enough different embryonic lines for medical use. In a very loose analogy, it’s as if kidney transplants were the only ones doctors could study. There’d be no liver, pancreas, heart, or lung transplants.

Even worse, the existing lines were intended for research, not direct medical application. As such, they were grown using mouse feeder cells, and may contain mouse DNA and mouse viruses. Consider that HIV is a virus that crossed species from monkeys to us (most likely while butchering bushmeat), and it becomes obvious why nobody in their right minds would use those cell lines in medicine.

Are stem cells just another big scientific pie-in-the-sky?

The puncturing of the high tech bubble has left many people with the feeling that biotech is all hype. Genetic engineering didn’t make us all tall and thin and blond. It didn’t even give us immortality.

There is a big difference between stem cells and genetic engineering, even if both are done by people in white coats peering into petri dishes.

Genetic engineering involves fiddling with an individual’s actual DNA. DNA is very resistant to fiddling. If it wasn’t, you’d be dead. Viruses are the only natural method of interfering with it, which is why genetic engineers use a form of weakened cold virus to insert the bits of DNA they want into the cells. But that’s not all because the bit has to go into the *right place*. That’s largely a matter of luck. Then, cells die. The new cells are made according to the original (faulty) template, and need to be engineered all over again. This sequence of events describes what happens when everything is working perfectly. Anyone who knew anything about it knew that genetic engineering was being wildly overhyped among non-scientists.

(This is not to say genetic engineering doesn’t hold a lot of hope for the future. It does. It’s our only real chance to cure the common cold, for one. But, as the scientists say, much work remains to be done.)

Stem cells are a different matter. There is no messing with intricate cellular processes. On the contrary, the stem cells do their own thing without assistance. All they need is to be given the conditions for growth, whether that’s in a petri dish or inside a person. The situation is much more analogous to an organ transplant, except that the organ is tiny, and doesn’t even need to have blood vessels hooked up. We know how to transplant organs, and we know how to transplant stem cells. What we don’t know is exactly how to use them (although in some applications, we do know that at this point). The methods to learn how to use them are pretty well worked out by now.

So, yes, stem cells are extraordinarily promising. And yes, there will be many needed applications in the near future. Some recent examples are regrowing heart tissue and regrowing retinal tissue in certain kinds of blindness. Cures for diabetes and Parkinson’s are straight matters of transplanting the necessary cells into the relevant organs. Farther down the road, stem cells will allow improved nerve growth and hence cures for spinal cord injuries. Furthest of all, they’ll eventually allow lost limbs to be regrown. Stem cells are the biggest thing in medicine since the invention of antibiotics. Come back and talk to me in five years, if you don’t believe me now.

Coda for Californians: Are stem cells worth the money?

California is the place currently struggling with this issue because Proposition 71 is on the November 2nd ballot. Prop. 71 gives three billion dollars to fund stem cell research, the idea being that California will reap gigabucks from becoming a biotech mecca. Singapore has already done something similar by throwing two billion dollars at stem cells, which has made it one of the foreign destinations draining away scientific brains who can’t do their work in the US federal climate.

Several questions arise. For instance, if stem cells are so marvelous, why does the taxpayer and our government need to get involved? Why aren’t the venture capitalists funding the research? I think it’s simply because of the vast sums involved. The task is to launch a new industry whose startup costs are on the order of a few billion. Even Bill Gates might hesitate. It’s a project of a magnitude that can really only done by a large, technologically advanced society. California is one of the few entities smaller than a nation that even has a hope in this regard.

One flaw of Prop. 71 is that the state government provides seed money, but there is no provision for a cut of subsequent royalties. If stem cells are going to be lucrative, why isn’t the taxpayer getting a return? Why indeed. Taxpayer-funded development without any subsequent return to the government is an entrenched idea at this point, even though it shouldn’t be. It’s part of the whole ethos of socializing risk while privatizing profit. It would be a good topic for the Legislature to act on, or, failing that, for yet another initiative. But voting down this initiative for that reason alone will do nothing but accelerate the brain drain we’re already suffering to other countries with stem cell-friendly policies.

There are other, less valid, objections to financial provisions of Prop. 71. There is, supposedly, not enough oversight. Fraud must be rigorously and totally guarded against. But to suppose that desk jockeys or committees have a better understanding than scientists of how and where to spend stem cell research money is simply delusional. Federal funding of research has shown how easy it is for bureaucrats to push research into pet projects that go nowhere. We need less of that, not more.

The exceptions to sunshine laws are because of the extreme financial incentives to rip off this type of research. If everyone knows what’s going on, some people are going to take dishonest advantage of it. Things shouldn’t work that way, but it is a reality we have to deal with.

So, to put it in a nutshell, stem cells do hold enormous promise. The payoff is likely to be vast, especially because stem cells will also open whole new ways of making money that didn’t even exist before. The human benefit is incalculable. The earliest applications are very few years, not decades, away. I’m a biologist, and to me the financial arguments against Prop. 71 sound just plain silly.

Technorati tags: stem cells, ethics, human life, Proposition 71

Maybe the search for middle ground in the abortion debate is doomed. Maybe there is none. What do two sides have in common, when one sees babies being murdered and the other sees women demoted to walking wombs? Polite people want the decencies of debate preserved, but on the rare occasions when it happens, that achieves only less shouting, not a solution.

Abortion is supposed to be a complex issue, fraught with emotional, ethical, legal, social, and religious problems. Approaches that try to address the complexity have, so far, led nowhere. Instead of trying to deal with the issue in its full-fledged form, a better approach might be to simplify its terms as much as possible.

At its heart, abortion is a very simple problem. If we’re killing babies, it has to stop. If we’re not, we don’t.

The first question is whether an unborn “baby” really is a baby, that is, a human being in her or his own right. That leads directly into the question of what it means to be human, one of the thorniest problems people grapple with, even though humans should be the experts on the subject. Deciding on the relative merits of women versus babies is easier, which may be why people concentrate on that.

Science is the one method capable of finding objective proof for an idea, but it can only work its magic on objective data, and hence it can’t answer the big questions. It can tell us that human beings have forty three chromosomes, and that there is 95% similarity between our DNA and that of chimpanzees. The growing combination of egg and sperm is not called a baby in biology. It is a zygote, morula, blastula, gastrula, embryo, or fetus, depending on its stage of development.

Few people would feel that the purely physical parameters are very important. Human DNA in a petri dish isn’t exciting (except to biologists), and a corpse looks much more human than a zygote. Qualities of feeling and mind are really what we’re thinking of when we say that humans are special.

Science can actually provide some data for the discussion of feelings and mind. Nerves, for instance, become myelinated beginning around the fourth month of development. Myelination gives nerves the ability to transmit the sensations we traditionally associate with feeling. Unmyelinated nerves provide that curious awareness of touch and pressure that you can feel under local anesthetic. It is the degree of sensation found in clams.

Thus, one can say with certainty that the developing embryo’s unmyelinated brain is not thinking or feeling in a way that we could recognize. The process of myelination continues after birth, and if the process is disrupted, as for instance in fragile X syndrome, severe retardation can result. That is how far away a fetus is from having a mind like ours, so it is perhaps best not to lean too heavily on the human mind to define humanity.

There are other problems with relying on brain power as a defining characteristic. It is not unique to us. Animal behavior studies have shown that many animals can reason, and once the decision point depends on the degree of reason, fetuses won’t do particularly well.

The only mental skill that has not yet been found in the rest of the animal kingdom is grammar. Bees can say, “excellent flowers, southeast, five miles,” but they can’t distinguish between, “Fly southeast for five miles to find excellent flowers,” versus “Toward the southeast there are five miles of excellent flowers.” Of course, if grammar is to be the hallmark of humanity, it will be a bit of a letdown in our self-image.

Another problem for any argument that rests on our special qualities of mind or emotion is that fetuses don’t have them. Even infants aren’t any too impressive. If they survive, they may eventually show subject-verb agreement, but that is only one possible future. Potential is not the same as actual. I may have the potential to win the Nobel prize, but that doesn’t mean anyone actually gives me one. As reproductive technology advances, every cell in my body may have the potential to become an entire new human being, but that doesn’t mean it will ever make sense to save each cell my body sheds in the course of a day. Being potential human beings makes embryos interesting, but it’s not enough, by itself, to give them special status.

So there are no objective criteria by which to define something as human. “Looks like a human” won’t work, certainly not at the embryonic stage. Chromosomes won’t work because every bit of DNA doesn’t equal a human being. A person with a transplanted organ, even transplanted ovaries or testicles, doesn’t suddenly become two people. And being a potential human won’t work because potential is far from the same as real.

Without any objective answers, the only possible answers are subjective. Like great art, we can recognize fellow human creatures when we see them, but we can’t define them. Unfortunately, what we recognize differs. Some people see a baby, others see an organized collection of cells, and–this is the point–there is no way to prove either point of view. They are both based on beliefs about what makes a being essentially human. These convictions can be very deeply held, but that does not make them facts.

It is frightening and troubling to understand that our definition of humanity is a matter of opinion. Some cultures didn’t even consider newborns human. If they lived to be some days, weeks, or months old, then they were named and accepted as members of society. The definition of who is human in a given culture is based on consensus. In these modern times, one can probably say that newborns are considered human the world over (although the consensus seems to slip when it comes to adults who belong to “them” instead of “us.”) There is no equivalent agreement about fetuses.

There is no way to resolve the debate about fetuses, because there is no way to prove one belief right or wrong. The more deeply held the beliefs, the closer the argument comes to a holy war, and there is no middle ground in a holy war. The fight over abortion is just that: a holy war between faiths with no end in sight.

The good news is that we know how to deal with conflicting beliefs. We separate beliefs and state. That is why it has to be a choice, not a child.

Technorati tags: abortion, pro-choice, pro-life, ethics, human beings, church and state, beliefs