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~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: genetics

The Curious Case of Fruit Flies, Grizzly Bears, and Sarah Palin’s Contempt for Science

17 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

biology, C-Span, C-Span In-Depth, DNA, Down Syndrome, Endangered Species, Federal Funding for Science, Fruit Flies, genetics, Grizzly Bears, interview, John McCain, Republicans, Research, Sarah Palin, science, Steven Pinker, War on Science

Sarah Palin

Interviewer: Often, government-funded scientific research gets on the front pages of newspapers, where people see it as not being a good thing: ‘We’re spending x millions of dollars studying such-and-such behavior of chimpanzees!’ When you see something like that, what’s your response?

Steven Pinker: Oh, well, am I allowed to bring up Sarah Palin?

The most hair-raising, egregious, nauseating example of this occurred just last week, when Sarah Palin ridiculed the idea that the federal government would sponsor research on fruit flies. She followed by saying, “I kid you not,” as if this was the most absurd thing she’d ever heard — ignoring the fact that almost everything we know about genetics originally came from research on fruit flies, such as the existence and behavior of chromosomes, which is one of the things that allows us to determine the cause of Down syndrome, something that she claims to be interested in devoting more resources toward.

So genetics is something you study with fruit flies. Fruit flies are also a major economic pest: our huge citrus industry in California and Florida can be threatened by quirks of the behavior of the fruit fly. So in picking what she thought sounded like an example of government waste, she was identifying one of the most important bodies of research in the entire scientific enterprise.

And John McCain did the same thing. In two debates, he ridiculed research on the DNA of grizzly bears, not realizing that nowadays if you’re a biologist, you study DNA. Even if you’re a field biologist looking at conservation of endangered species (and grizzly bears are a threatened species, so there’s a federal mandate to keep track of their numbers). How do you know whether you’ve seen two grizzly bears or one grizzly bear twice? Well you snag bits of their hair, and you do DNA analysis, and that’s how we know how many grizzly bears are out there.

In making the cheap shot of joking, “Well I don’t know if it’s for a paternity test or a crime scene,” both he and Palin I think showed a certain contempt for science that I and many other scientists find deeply disturbing.

If you describe any scientific research out of context, you can make it sound silly. I think it’s utterly irresponsible for a politician to do that, given how much of the fate of our country — and of our species — is going to depend on basic and applied scientific research.

__________

A moment from In Depth with Steven Pinker shown on C-Span in November, 2008.

Last evening, the Senate voted 72-26 to approve our federal budget for the upcoming year. The bill now heads to the White House to receive President Obama’s signature before the deadline at midnight on Saturday.

Sarah Palin with a Bear

The above photo: a keen lesson in gun un-safety, from a recent Facebook photo-op of Palin posing with a dead (black) bear.

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About Half of You Have Violent Genes

28 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Science

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

biology, crime, David Eagleman, genes, genetics, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, psychology, the brain, the mind

David Eagleman“Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It’s a nice idea, but it’s wrong…

Who you even have the possibility to be starts well before your childhood — it starts at conception. If you think genes don’t matter for how people behave, consider this amazing fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent. Here are statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, which I’ve broken down into two groups: crimes committed by the population that carries this specific set of genes and by the population that does not:

Average Number of Violent Crimes Committed
Annually in the United States

Offense                     Carrying the genes            Not carrying the genes

Aggravated assault           3,419,000                           435,000

Homicide                           14,196                               1,468

Armed robbery                 2,051,000                            157,000

Sexual assault                   442,000                              10,000

In other words, if you carry these genes, you’re eight times more likely to commit aggravated assault, ten times more likely to commit murder, thirteen times more likely to commit armed robbery and forty-four times more likely to commit sexual assault.

About one half of the human population carries these genes, while the other half does not, making the first half much more dangerous indeed. It’s not even a contest. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes, as do 98.4 percent of those on death row. It seems clear enough that the carriers are strongly predisposed to a different type of behavior – and everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behavior.

We’ll return to these genes in a moment, but first I want to tie the issue back to the main point we’ve seen throughout this book: we are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time to before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and egg granted us with certain attributes and not others. Who we can be begins with our molecular blueprints – a series of alien codes penned in invisibly small strings of amino acids – well before we have anything to do with it. We are a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history.

By the way, as regards that dangerous set of genes, you’ve probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you’re a carrier, we call you a male.”

__________

From David Eagleman’s eye-opening and highly digestible Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. If you’re looking for a layman’s guide to the mind, fan through Incognito.

The photograph is of Eagleman at his laboratory and office in my hometown of Houston, Texas.

Check out a philosophical and a fictional work of Eagleman’s below:

David EaglemanWhat Is Happening When We See Someone Die?

Clouds and MetalIn the Afterlife You Relive All Your Experiences

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