I’m currently pursuing a Master’s in Teaching, and during a lecture, my Educational Lecturer explained that educational theories are not as clear-cut as scientific ones. They’re more nuanced and often involve subjective ideas, such as whether students should be encouraged to challenge the status quo as free thinkers or be guided to become successful within the current system. She contrasted this with scientific theories, which are often viewed as objective and, in many cases, are considered facts—like the theory of gravity, which she described as essentially a fact.

This perspective is common. People might even accuse someone of being scientifically ignorant if they question the theory of gravity. However, it’s crucial to recognize that gravity is actually something we know we don’t fully understand. Einstein’s theory of relativity replaced Newton’s theory, but we now realize that Einstein’s theory doesn’t work at the quantum level—the realm of tiny particles. And it doesn’t work at the very large level without the help of some “Dark” arts.

For instance, in the famous double-slit experiment, a single electron appears to pass through two slits simultaneously. Yet, we don’t know if the mass of that electron causes two distinct half-strength wobbles in space-time under each slit as if it’s split in two, or two full-strength wobble under each slit as if it momentarily has double its mass, or something else entirely. Our current theory of gravity can’t explain this, and it will likely need to be rewritten.

In contrast, the theory of evolution is much closer to being a fact. Evolutionary theory is built on a robust foundation of evidence and observations that have been consistently validated across various branches of biology. The core principles of evolution—inheritance, variation, and natural selection—are observable in everyday life. For example, we can see inheritance at work when children resemble their parents, variation when no two individuals are exactly alike, and natural selection when certain traits increase an organism’s chances of survival and reproduction.

These principles are so fundamental and well-supported that they are unlikely to be overturned. While our understanding of the mechanisms of evolution may continue to evolve and deepen, the basic framework remains solid. Unlike gravity, which still holds mysteries at the quantum level, evolution has withstood rigorous scientific scrutiny for over a century and remains a cornerstone of biological science.

In many ways, evolution is not just a theory; it’s an explanation that consistently aligns with the facts we observe in nature. It has been repeatedly confirmed through fossil records, genetic research, and even direct observation of evolutionary changes in various species. As a result, while scientific theories are always open to refinement and expansion, evolution stands as one of the most reliable and factual explanations we have about the natural world. So if you want an example of “a Fact” with a capital F, I think evolution should be your go to!

The Research Behind the Bias
A growing body of research highlights how the material environment is predominantly designed by men and for men. This bias extends to various tools and devices, including surgical instruments. A recent study revealed that surgical tools are typically designed for larger male hands, making them difficult for women to use effectively (1). Interestingly, men with smaller hands also report similar difficulties, underscoring that the issue lies in the design rather than the user’s gender.

The Impact on Women
Women often face challenges in using tools that are not designed with their ergonomics in mind. This isn’t a matter of skill or capability but rather a mismatch between the tool’s design and the user’s physical attributes. For instance, surgical tools designed for larger hands can be cumbersome for women, leading to discomfort and decreased efficiency. This pattern is not limited to surgical instruments but extends to everyday items like hammers, drills, bricks, and even seatbelts.

Broader Implications
The implications of this design bias are far-reaching. When tools and environments are not inclusive, it can lead to unfair judgments about women’s abilities and performance. This can affect their confidence and career progression, particularly in fields that rely heavily on manual dexterity and tool use.

Moving Towards Inclusive Design
Addressing this issue requires a shift towards inclusive design practices. By considering the diverse needs of all users, designers can create tools and environments that are accessible and efficient for everyone. This includes conducting ergonomic studies that account for a wider range of body types and incorporating feedback from a diverse group of users during the design process.

Conclusion
The material world we live in should not favor one gender over another. By acknowledging and addressing the inherent biases in design, we can create a more equitable environment where everyone can perform to the best of their abilities. As research continues to shed light on these disparities, it is crucial for designers and manufacturers to take proactive steps towards inclusivity.

Study: (1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11108343/
Great book on this topic: Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

The Issue with Observational Studies
These studies are observational, meaning they can show a link but can’t prove that one thing causes the other. Just because two things happen together doesn’t mean one is causing the other.

Hidden Correlations
A big problem with these studies is hidden correlations. In this case, a reduced sex drive is an early symptom of Alzheimer’s disease. So, men who are starting to show early signs of Alzheimer’s might be less likely to use Viagra. This could explain why men who take Viagra seem to have a lower risk of Alzheimer’s—they might simply be less likely to have early symptoms of the disease in the first place.

Reinterpreting the Findings
Given this, the headline “Men on Viagra may reduce their Alzheimer’s risk – study” could be more accurately interpreted as “Men who don’t have symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease are less likely to use Viagra.” This shows why it’s important not to jump to conclusions based on these kinds of studies.

Other Confounding Factors
It’s also important to consider that sexually active individuals often lead different lifestyles. They may be more likely to have a loving partner, be physically healthy, play sports, and have a strong community. Each of these factors can contribute to overall well-being and cognitive health, potentially influencing the study’s findings. These hidden confounding factors further complicate the interpretation of the results.

In summary, while the findings are interesting and worth further research, it’s important to remember that correlation does not equal causation. More rigorous studies are needed to determine if Viagra truly has a protective effect against Alzheimer’s disease.

Study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10977448/

In medicine a case report is when a detailed description of a patient is published because something can be learnt from this one case. Case reports are a kind of evidence that must be scrutinized carefully because ultimately it’s just an N of 1 (only one person in the study). But on occasion they can be a striking piece of evidence.

The case study of Phineas Gage is a classic example. Phineas had the frontal lobe of his brain removed by an accident involving a metal rod, propelled by explosives, flying through his head. He went from a nice responsible person to a difficult individual with a gambling problem. Because it’s extremely unlikely that Phineas Gage uses his brain differently to the rest of us, we learnt that the frontal lobe is important in social understanding and risk management.

In this blog I’m going to do a case report, but not of a medical case, of a criminal case involving two sexual predators, and I will argue that we can learn (or re-learn) a lot from this case report. 

We fail to trust and support victims of sexual assaults. During any public case involving sexual assault there is a chorus of distrust of the victims by a fair proportion of the vocal population; particularly if the victim is reporting an assault from several years ago. Just see the latest conservative op-eds or even any comment thread relating to the accusations leveled at Supreme Court Judge nominee Brett Kavanaugh, actually forget comment threads and just look at the President of the United States of America. A large proportion of the population think sexual assault is a rare event and think it unlikely that any upstanding male individual who went to university would do such a thing. They are victim deniers.

Consistent victim deniers are very similar to climate change deniers, they ignore the evidence. Study after study has shown that sexual assaults occur in unfathomable frequency, the majority of which go unreported. Several studies have found that around 1 in 5 to 1 in 10,  female college students are sexually assaulted during their time at university (reviewed here). However, this statistic is not widely trusted. Conservative commentators are often very critical of these studies; they write pieces attacking the research by feeding the slut shaming narrative or polarizing politicizing rhetoric that is attractive to modest conservative audiences. Like Glenn Harlan Reynolds from USA today writing ..”the current moral panic over campus rape seems more like political agitprop and mass hysteria than anything else” . Victim deniers ask things to the effect of -why haven’t all these women press charges?, why didn’t they report this at the time of the incident?, or claim that these women just regret their decision to have consensual sexual encounters – like Naomi Schaefer Riley who wrote “…there’s been no epidemic of assault but instead a preponderance of sexual encounters fueled by bad judgment and free-flowing alcohol”.

The truth is that the prevalence of sexual assault are undoubtedly as high as 1 in 10. Victims don’t come forward partly because convictions are incredibly rare -41,150 rapes were reported in England and Wales in 2016-17 but only 2,991 people were convicted of the crime (reported here)- and partly because of personal reasons that we have no right to judge, such as not wanting to re-live the experience and not wanting the label of “victim”.

Now for those who are victim deniers and doubt the numerous studies that provide strong evidence for the indefensible-horrific-disgusting rates of sexual assault, there is now an salient case report that completely confirms what victims, scientists and feminists have been saying. Grant William Robicheaux, 38, and Cerissa Laura Riley, 31, have been charged with two separate sexual assaults on two women in 2016.

They are accused of getting the victims drunk, drugging them, and then raping them. This is horrible. But it gets worse. When the police raided their home they found, guns, date rape drugs, and, their cell phone and computer. And on their cell phone and computer the police report finding thousands of videos taken by Grant William Robicheaux and Cerissa Laura Riley of them performing nearly identical sexual assaults (reported here).

The women in these thousands of videos “appear to be highly intoxicated beyond the ability to consent or resist, and they’re barely responsive to the defendant’s sexual advances” -District Attorney Tony Rackauckas; adding that there are likely “hundreds” of victims who have not come forward. Silent victims.

This case has, in my opinion, definitive proof of hundreds of sexual assaults of which only two women came forward. This is as close to an experiment of sexual assault reporting as you could get. Hundreds of women were raped with irrefutable evidence (in my opinion) and only two reported the incident. In this case more than 98% of sexual assault victims didn’t report the crime. Survey studies suggest the rates are around 90% of case unreported. Think about this in the context of the 41,150 rapes which were reported in England and Wales last year.

This case study completely supports the survey based studies which suggest that 1 in 5 (to 10) women have been sexually assaulted of which a minority ~2-10% are reported. Like the case study of Phinaes Gage, we have no reason to believe that the case study of Grant William Robicheaux and Cerissa Laura Riley’s victims is abnormal. The vast majority of sexual assaults are not reported and no conviction occurs in vast majority of reported sexual assaults. People (mostly women) are being sexually assaulted at disgusting rates and only a fraction of a fraction of the men perpetrating these crimes are ever brought to justice.  

The case study of Grant William Robicheaux and Cerissa Laura Riley’ flies in the face of any victim doubters. Anyone who claims the statistics are cooked. Anyone who thinks like Glenn Harlan Reynolds claiming the sexual assault epidemic is just “mass hysteria than anything else” (if you don’t already, you should hate the word “hysteria”… and Glenn Harlan Reynolds). There are millions of silent victims out there. When they come forward, believe them. When they come forward, support them. When they come forward stand with them. Because each of these women is just the tip of an atrocious iceberg, they represent dozens of other silent victims they likely never met.  

A quote, perhaps wrongly attributed to Stalin goes “The death of one man: that is a catastrophe. One hundred thousand deaths: that is a statistic!”. If what I’ve written feels like a cold uncatastrophic statistics, then listen to this one women’s story , and believe her – Dr. Christine Blasey Ford

References

Abbey A (2002) Alcohol-Related Sexual Assault: A Common Problem among College Students. Journal of studies on alcohol Supplement (14):118-128

Cantor D, Fisher B, Chibnall SH, Townsend R, Lee H, Thomas G, Bruce C, Westat I (2015) Report on the AAU campus climate survey on sexual assault and sexual misconduct.

Krebs CP, Lindquist CH, Warner TD, Fisher BS, Martin SL (2009) College Women’s Experiences with Physically Forced, Alcohol- or Other Drug-Enabled, and Drug-Facilitated Sexual Assault Before and Since Entering College. Journal of American College Health 57 (6):639-649. doi:10.3200/JACH.57.6.639-649

Lonsway KA, Fitzgerald LF (1994) Rape Myths: In Review. Psychology of Women Quarterly 18 (2):133-164. doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.1994.tb00448.x

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/unreported-rapes-the-silent-shame-7561636.html

If you need access to any of the these references please email me.

Proteins are not just a food group used to make ‘massive gains’ in the gym, they are the tools, building materials and micromachines of the body. How do you see? The protein rhodopsin changes shape when it’s hit with light. How do you digest food? Proteins called enzymes cut up your food into tiny pieces which can then be transported into your blood (by, you guessed it, transport proteins). How do you lift? Actin and myosin proteins slide across each other to contract your muscles. Below is a protein (kinesin) moving a package around the cell by walking down another protein (actin).

Source an animation extracted from The Inner Life of a Cell by Cellular Visions  (https://imgur.com/gallery/TKtA28B).

The point is proteins are the “doers” of the body. There are over two million kinds of proteins in your body and a huge part of biological research is trying to figure out what the heck all these proteins do. In our latest paper we used a left field approach to figure out what the protein IL-1α does and we got some excellent results with help from some whales.

To understand our approach have a look at this fantastic collage of coffee cups in our lab. What you can see is that there are some differences and some similarities between the cups. Note that the differences are in things not essential to the function of the cup such as the colour, the shape of the handles and what is written on the front. What’s the same is essential to the cup’s function, a big sealed cavity for the life giving, sacred, fruit of the gods, coffee.

Note the enlightenment began just after coffee was introduced to the west and became one of the most widely drunk beverages. i.e. we’d still be in the dark ages if it weren’t for coffee (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-diamandis/from-beer-to-caffeine_b_5538535.html). Note – very reliable source. Note- the evidence is pretty loose for this. Note- shut up I believe what I want to believe. Alternative fact – we’d still be monkeys if it weren’t for coffee.

The same is true for proteins. Most animals have a different version of the same protein. However, like the coffee cups, there are some differences in the protein between animal species (i.e. the monkey IL-1α looks a little different to the elephant IL-1α). The differences will be in parts of the protein which are not important to the protein function and the similarities will be in the parts of the protein essential to its function. Our protein, IL-1α, was thought to be pretty much like my dinosaur cup, with three elements, the essential cup part, the less useful handle part and the completely useless spikes on the handle.

I really hope this analogy works.

We had this understanding because of what we know about the protein through experiments.  The job of IL-1α is to signal inflammation (the swelling and redness you get from and injury or infection). Now we know that if you inject the whole protein you won’t get a lot of inflammation and if you inject the handle or spikes you won’t get any inflammation, but if you inject the cup part into someone a massive inflammatory response will kick off. Also, when we look at what proteins are floating around people’s blood who have injured themselves you’ll only see the cup part of the protein. We also know that the cells that detect the infection or injury and want to signal inflammation, cut the handle and spikey part off and only release the cup part into the tissue or blood. From this we all concluded that the handle and spikey parts can’t be essential to the function of the protein. We then thought that the handle part must do something because when we did experiments where we mutated the handle, the location of the protein changed, so it seemed the handle was important for telling the cell where to keep the protein. But as for the spikes on the handle, we all thought that they were useless and didn’t do anything.

This is where we stepped in with our cool evolution research. We looked at the protein in a range of animal species expecting the cup to look the same in all animals (because it’s essential), the handle to look somewhat similar (because it does something) and the spikes to look completely different between animals species (because they don’t do anything).  However we actually found the opposite, the spikes were identical in all animals while the cup was reasonably variable. This suggests the spikes have an essential function to the protein. Interestingly, toothed whales didn’t even have the handle they just had the cup and spike part. Showing that whatever the spikes do is independent of the function of the handle.

Basically because the spikes part of the cup is present in all animals, it must be a very important part of the protein.

But how do we figure out what the spikey part does? Well it turned out that a number of other proteins all have the spikes too. So then what we did was see what feature was similar between all these proteins. What we found was that these spikes always appeared in proteins which bind to another protein call HAX1. Because of this we can now predict that our protein IL-1α binds to HAX1 and that this binding is essential to its function because this feature is unchanged in all animal species.

All this research was done on a computer. I next had to confirm HAX1 binding in the lab. For this I used an experiment called a dot blot and it worked! Basically I stuck a bunch of different proteins to a piece of plastic and then soaked the plastic in a solution with HAX1. Then I checked whether HAX1 stuck to any of the proteins stuck on the plastic. From this I found that HAX1 only bound to the spikes of IL-1α and not other proteins or other parts of IL-1α. This was exactly what we predicted from the evolution work I did sitting at my desk drinking coffee (out of my dinosaur mug). To find out why HAX1 and IL-1α binding is important, you’ll have to tune in to our next paper.

P.S. We looked at a lot of proteins in a lot of animals.

If you want to know more, try reading the actual paper!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03362-1

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29559685

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29559685/

Right now in New Zealand there is a heated election going on and people are debating the validity of the polls. The most common criticism is that many of the major polling organisations use landline phone calling. The average Facebook user or political party leader (TOP I’m looking at you), will say something like “these polls can’t be accurate,  only old people use land lines, they’re so biased” (interestingly, everyone thinks the polls are biased against their party (fig.1)). Now one of two things has happened, either you, the average Facebook user, has discovered a bias ruling out the usefulness of polls taken by professional polling organisations whose sole business relies on accurate polls and these million dollar organisations who have professional statisticians with PhD’s in statistics hadn’t considered your brilliant insight, OR these companies know more than the average Facebook user about polling and statistics and they’ve taken steps to address these issues. Two points on why it’s undoubtedly the latter: First, the polls have been very accurate in past elections (4), second, if you read the information on the statistical methods used they mention that these are weighted estimates of voting percentages, which is a statistical technique that adjusts the polling percentages based on the expected voting demographics. Here is a crude example of how this works.

Figure 1: Biased polls’ bias are clearly biased

Statistics (stay with me)

Say in the last election 20% of voters were aged between 18-25, and in your opinion poll only 10% of voters were aged between 18-25. The results of your poll show that 50% of your 18-25 polled people intended to vote TOP and 50% vote Greens, while 40% of your 25+ poll users intended to vote NZ First, and 60% vote National. Your unadjusted poll would come out as:

50% x 10% = 5% TOP

50% x 10% =5 % Greens

40% x 90% = 36% NZ First

60% x 90% = 54% National

Now our land-line study only got 10% of 18-25 age bracket, that was because of bias in the sampling method, but we can account for this by reweighting based on the previous demographics of the last election. And so it would look like this:

50% x 20% = 10% TOP

50% x 20% =10 % Greens

40% x 80% = 32% NZ First

60% x 80% = 48% National

Now you can do these kinds of adjustments using much more sophisticate techniques to include income, ethnicity, gender, age, etc. to limit the bias caused by the sampling method. In short, there are people with PhD’s in statistics who have thought of this simple problem and so much more.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum#/media/File:UK_EU_referendum_polling.svg
2. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
3. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-north-korea-fire-and-fury-like-the-world-has-never-seen-nuclear-threat-a7883386.html
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_New_Zealand_general_election,_2014

More than half the world was intellectually disabled prior to 1917 CE….. if you extrapolate the Flynn effect. This blog will be an interesting dive into IQ, intellectual disability, crime, time travel and the Flynn effect. Let’s start by saying that you are probably “smarter” (whatever that means) than your parents. That’s right, when you were a pimply, hormone-fillfed teenager and you thought your parents were morons, you might have actually been right. Well not morons, but maybe 6 to 9 IQ points lower than you.

Let’s start at the beginning. IQ (Intelligent quotient) is a scaled score given to people who have undergone one of the many variations of an IQ examination and is a way of quantifying intelligence. This score is (normally) scaled such that the median is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. By scaling this score, it allows us to very easily calculate what proportion of the population you are smarter than based on simple normal distribution statistics. For example, if you score 100 you are smarter than approximately 50% of the population; a score of 115 (1 standard deviation from the median) means you beat out 84.1% of the population; 130 and you can rule over the bottom 97.9% of the population and can join the MENSA group; if you score 145 you are more intelligent than 99.9% of the population and join the ominously named Triple 9 society (who apparently weren’t smart enough to think of a better name). MENSA and the Triple 9 society are just groups for “smart people”, but why intelligent people feel the need to form exclusive groups is beyond me. Unfortunately, if there are winners there must be… not winners. IQ is also commonly used to identify intellectual disability and this is normally set at 2 standard deviations below the median at an IQ of less than or equal to 70. In this respect intellectual disability is the MENSA of below average intelligence.

How do you get a high IQ?

Efforts to ascertain how someone gets a good IQ have been thorough and largely fruitless. No single strong genetic or early life factors have been identified, and no interventions have been found robustly effective. The massively expensive Head Start Programme  in the USA – which provides comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families – failed to cause a lasting effect on IQ. Largely, IQ seems to be out of your’s or your parent’s control. Now obviously genetics plays some role, but large genome wide association studies looking at 2.5 million locations in the genome in ~7,000 people have found that genetic variation only explains about 35% of the variation in IQ (Kirkpatrick et al. 2014). Interestingly, these studies found that the genome locations with the biggest effect sizes on IQ didn’t code for a protein, i.e., late 90’s scientists would have considered these bits of DNA as “junk”. So if big interventions in your environment like the Head Start Programme don’t affect your IQ and gene’s only explain some of IQ what the heck makes you smart? Well it is probably a complex mix of genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors that interact and interweave in such a way that it is basically unpredictable, like the weather (fig. 1. ). What this means is that your IQ is your IQ, there isn’t a lot you can do about it, so don’t judge people for things that they have little control over. 

Now back to the early 20th century morons.

Notice that IQ is scaled. What this means is that every year or so the scores on the test are averaged, and then adjusted such that the median is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. Because of this we missed something big in the data for decades – we are getting smarter. We couldn’t see it because the median was 100 every year, but that is because we made it that way. If we hadn’t scaled it we would see a rise in IQ of around about 3 points every 10 years (Trahan et al. 2014) (fig.2). This rise in IQ is a well-studied phenomenon and is known as the Flynn effect, named after New Zealand’s very own Prof. James Robert Flynn. This means 100 years ago the average IQ would be the equivalent of 70 today (if the trend holds true), meaning half of the population in 1917 would be defined as intellectually disabled if they were DeLoreaned to today.

Fig. 2. Change in IQ over time – The Flynn effect, by continents. (Pietschnig and Voracek, 2015).

Why does it matter?

This is an interesting biological phenomenon that will give us a better understanding of IQ and perhaps help us establish what environmental factors influence IQ. But beyond the biology, this drift in IQ has interesting ramifications. For example if you score 130 today you would be let into MENSA, but then in 10 years time you would perform relatively worse on the test and be forced out of the club (fig 3.). 

Fig 3. Who rigs every Oscar night?

Being part of MENSA may be a trivial issue, but this drift upwards in intellectual standards may have very important implications in criminal cases. A person who killed someone may be initially found to have sufficient IQ to understand right from wrong and subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to death. However, while on death row their IQ relative to the adult population would be decreasing as new and smarter generations enter adulthood. They may then have their IQ tested again just before being committed to death and found to have an IQ too low to consider a functioning adult that has a complete understanding of right from wrong. It has been argued that this legal threshold should be set at intellectual disability (IQ<70). Whether this person should be judged based on the IQ at the time of the crime or the time of the punishment is still argued over in legal circles. My two cents are that this IQ-death row hypothetical situation merely highlights the arbitrary nature of the legal definition of ‘competent’ and perhaps the lack of utility IQ provides in a legal (or perhaps any) context.

What is causing this?

Why the Flynn effect occurs is still hotly debated. Some say genetics, claiming that in the last 100 years we have mixed our genes more than ever, creating individuals with a greater diversity of alleles, AKA the heterozygous advantage (Mingroni 2007). Basically this means we are less inbred than we used to be. Others say pre- and post- natal nutrition has improved (Lynn 2009). Noting that with the invention of the freezer and transporting food, our diets are more nutritionally complete now compared to when we started testing IQ 100+ years ago. To support this, scientists point out that height has seen similar increases to IQ over the same period, and that there is a correlation that demonstrates that taller people are smarter (Taki et al. 2012). Others say that we are having fewer siblings, allowing more parental care (Sundet et al. 2008). Or perhaps we are drinking less alcohol and smoking less during pregnancy (Lewis et al. 2012, Dobson 2005). Or is it because we are better at testing due to significantly more testing in schools or just education in general? As you might have guessed, we don’t know. Again it is likely a culmination of many factors.

Rant about complexity

I know that sounds like a cop-out answer, but that is the truth. In fact I would argue that in biological and social sciences there is a correlation between the simplicity of an idea and the likelihood of it being incorrect (which is why you shouldn’t read any book by Malcolm Gladwell). The complexity of causes for the Flynn effect nicely demonstrates a problem with any trend over time: because so many things are changing over time, it is impossible to draw simple conclusions of cause and effect. For example, there has been a steady decrease in the rate of car related deaths over time, the car industry would claim that it is because cars are safer (air bags, ABS brakes etc.), the government might argue the advertising campaigns on safer driving are working, the police might argue that all those speeding tickets are sending a clear message and my mate Prof. Flynn might argue that it is because we are smarter now than we used to be. The point is that societal influences are complex and ever changing, so trying to point out a simple X is causing Y is very difficult and nearly impossible if the time-span you are looking at is 100 years. Unless it is an obvious effect like the decline in pirate numbers is causing global warming (fig. 4.). May his noodly appendage guide you. 

Fig. 4. Clear evidence that as pirate numbers decrease the global temperature increases. The proposed mechanism is that pirates are unarguably cool and, therefore, cool the planet.

Reference

Dobson R (2005) Smoking in late pregnancy is linked to lower IQ in offspring. BMJ : British Medical Journal 330 (7490):499-499

Kirkpatrick RM, McGue M, Iacono WG, Miller MB, Basu S (2014) Results of a “GWAS plus:” general cognitive ability is substantially heritable and massively polygenic. PloS one 9 (11):e112390. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112390

Lewis SJ, Zuccolo L, Davey Smith G, Macleod J, Rodriguez S, Draper ES, Barrow M, Alati R, Sayal K, Ring S, Golding J, Gray R (2012) Fetal Alcohol Exposure and IQ at Age 8: Evidence from a Population-Based Birth-Cohort Study. PloS one 7 (11):e49407. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0049407

Lynn R (2009) What has caused the Flynn effect? Secular increases in the Development Quotients of infants. Intelligence 37 (1):16-24. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.07.008

Mingroni MA (2007) Resolving the IQ paradox: heterosis as a cause of the Flynn effect and other trends. Psychological review 114 (3):806-829. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.114.3.806

Pietschnig J, Voracek M (2015) One Century of Global IQ Gains. Perspectives on Psychological Science 10 (3):282-306. doi:10.1177/1745691615577701

Sundet JM, Borren I, Tambs K (2008) The Flynn effect is partly caused by changing fertility patterns. Intelligence 36 (3):183-191. doi:10.1016/j.intell.2007.04.002

Taki Y, Hashizume H, Sassa Y, Takeuchi H, Asano M, Asano K, Kotozaki Y, Nouchi R, Wu K, Fukuda H, Kawashima R (2012) Correlation among body height, intelligence, and brain gray matter volume in healthy children. NeuroImage 59 (2):1023-1027. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.08.092

Trahan L, Stuebing KK, Hiscock MK, Fletcher JM (2014) The Flynn Effect: A Meta-analysis. Psychological bulletin 140 (5):1332-1360. doi:10.1037/a0037173

New year’s resolutions- the Babylonians did it, the Romans did it and now we do it; with one survey suggesting that this ancient tradition is still popular reporting that over 40%  of Americans take part. Evidence can also be found in trends of Google searches, there is an annual cycle of Google searchers for the word “diet” nearly doubling between the beginning of December to the beginning of January. But do news years resolutions work?

Fig 1. The annual cycle of failed aspirations.

One group of University of Scranton researchers would argue that resolutions definitely do work (Norcross et al. 2002). They recruited 434 people into a study in December 2001. These people were asked are you planning on making a new year’s resolution this year? 159 said yes and the rest said no. But of the people who said no; 123 said that they had a problem behaviour that they were seriously thinking about changing.  The researchers then followed these people up by phone for the next 6 months. What they found is that of those who made a new year’s resolution 46% self reported that they have succeeded in changing behaviour. However, the success rate of those who wanted to change but didn’t want to make a resolution was only 4%! Now there are a myriad of limitations to this study for example the comparison shouldn’t be between people who want to change and haven’t set a date to people who set new year’s resolution; the comparison should be between resolutioners and people who commit to changing a behaviour at a specific date throughout the year. But then again who cares? Certainly not the funding bodies, hmmm should I fund research into curing cancer or whether or not new year’s resolution work?
Now you might be thinking that one reason new year’s resolutions might work is because we do it as a group and we are supported by peers? Buuuut maybe not. A group of University of Michigan researchers wanted to know if a peer network or a buddy system would help older adults achieve their goal of walking regularly (Kullgren et al. 2014). They randomly allocated 92 participants into a control group, a peer network group where they were to encourage each other to walk and arrange times through an online message board, or a financial reward group where the participants who achieved their goal would have the chance to win $200. After 24 weeks of studying these participants the researchers found that the control group achieved their goals the best with about 35% of people achieving their walking goal. The financial incentive group performed about the same, but the peer support group was significantly worse with only 18% achieving their walking goal. What might be causing this is that if any of the peer support group didn’t want to or couldn’t do the walk that day the rest of the group was more likely to cancel. The group became as strong as the weakest link (fig 2.). This suggests that doing resolutions as a group may not be the best idea.

Fig. 2. Obscure reference to English game show. 

OK but what are some good suggestions for resolutions? Well most of the research isn’t to do with resolutions but is about goals in general. This research is still not that fundable, hence the small sample sizes, and probably shouldn’t be relied on heavily. But I’ve committed to writing a blog about it, so here you go:

1. Make the resolution measurable and measure it regularly. One study coming out of the University of North Carolina recruited 47 people (small sample size) who wished to lose weight (Steinberg et al. 2015). They randomly allocated the people into two groups, one group was asked to record weights everyday and the other group was told to weigh themselves when they felt like it. The group that recorded their weights everyday lost 6.1kg more than those who didn’t (this grouped average a once-a-week weighing schedule).
2. Make the resolution specific? Possibly not. One study from the University of Sydney analysed records of pharmacist-patient interactions (n=~1700) (Smith et al. 2013). They extracted goals set by the pharmacist and patient, and rated them as specific, moderately specific and not specific based on set criteria. They found that success rates were relatively equal across the specificity groups. So maybe specificity isn’t that important in goal achievement? When you look in detail into this study you see a trend where specific goals weren’t achieved unless the goal was method based. So be specific in your method not in the achievement….. might be the take-away from this paper. E.g. Good resolution: go to the gym three times a week. Bad resolution: lose 10.8kgs. Both resolutions are specific but one is method based.
3. Make the resolution achievable? This too may be a motivational myth. One study from the University of Birmingham on 126 participants (small sample) looked into whether failure of goal affected your ability to achieve a second goal (Healy et al. 2015). They did this by rigging up exercycles with dodgy speedometers so they could induce failure or success in the goal of biking a set distance in a set time. They then set the participants another biking goal and looked to see if the rate of achievement of the goal differed between the groups that had been made to succeed or fail at the first task. They found absolutely no effect of induced failure or success. So go ahead and reach for the stars (#BeatConorMcGregor)?

This might be a good time to mention that science, and in particular psychology, is going through a repeatability crisis. A large number of studies have been repeated and the results have not been the same. We are calmly dealing with the situation (fig. 3.). One group attempted to repeat 98 papers, 97% of which found a significant result (Open science collaboration 2015). When these were repeated, often with the help of the original authors, only 36% had a significant result. So everything I just said about making a good or bad resolution comes with a grain of salt. A grain of salt 50km wide, similar to those shiny patches of salt found on the dwarf planet Ceres. 

My new year’s resolution is to write one blog a month on science and not science. This resolution doesn’t involve a peer support network, is specific (in a non-specific way), and is measurable. So I’ve got all the potentially unrepeatable science backing me!

Fig. 3. Calmly dealing with the induction fallacy. 

Reference

Norcross JC, Mrykalo MS, Blagys MD (2002) Auld lang syne: success predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of New Year’s resolvers and nonresolvers. Journal of clinical psychology 58 (4):397-405

Kullgren JT, Harkins KA, Bellamy SL, Gonzales A, Tao Y, Zhu J, Volpp KG, Asch DA, Heisler M, Karlawish J (2014) A Mixed Methods Randomized Controlled Trial of Financial Incentives and Peer Networks to Promote Walking among Older Adults. Health education & behavior : the official publication of the Society for Public Health Education 41 (1 0):43S-50S. doi:10.1177/1090198114540464

Steinberg DM, Bennett GG, Askew S, Tate DF (2015) Weighing every day matters: daily weighing improves weight loss and adoption of weight control behaviors. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics 115 (4):511-518. doi:10.1016/j.jand.2014.12.011

Smith L, Alles C, Lemay K, Reddel H, Saini B, Bosnic-Anticevich S, Emmerton L, Stewart K, Burton D, Krass I, Armour C (2013) The contribution of goal specificity to goal achievement in collaborative goal setting for the management of asthma. Research in social & administrative pharmacy : RSAP 9 (6):918-929. doi:10.1016/j.sapharm.2013.02.002

Healy LC, Ntoumanis N, Stewart BD, Duda JL (2015) Predicting subsequent task performance from goal motivation and goal failure. Frontiers in Psychology 6:926. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00926

Open science collaboration. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science  (2015). Science (New York, NY) 349 (6251)

There was a recent piece in New Zealand news about mass governmental censorship of scientists. Starting with apocalyptic images of the Fukushima nuclear power plant incident to instill fear, they painted a picture of mass governmental meddling with scientists reporting their results, with the clear insinuation that our lives could be at risk because of this censorship. To give you an idea of how this was an obvious piece of propaganda, they manipulated the video footage of the Fukushima reactor exploding to make it appear more like the nuclear blasts we’ve seen in the movies, adding a bright white flash that isn’t there in the raw footage . This is a classic media approach- fear gets views. But are we really in danger? Are there scientists in New Zealand right now currently aware of a cataclysmic disaster but aren’t speaking up because they have signed a non-disclosure agreement with the government or they are scared of losing their funding? I very much doubt it. In fact I think the converse is true.

First of all, let’s look at the law. Academic freedom is protected under the Education Act 1989 which states:

It is declared to be the intention of Parliament in enacting the provisions of this Act relating to institutions that academic freedom and the autonomy of institutions are to be preserved and enhanced……[including] the freedom of academic staff and students, within the law, to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas and to state controversial or unpopular opinions.

That seems pretty clear right there. So what of the claims of the news piece? First the claim that in response to the botulism in our milk scare, the government signed the top scientists to a technical advisory group which wrapped them up in a non-disclosure agreement. Interestingly, the motives of the government were never discussed in the piece but the implication was that the government wanted to hide something. Perhaps hide the real science in order to continue selling poisonous milk to the Chinese? Well call me Mr. Skeptical-poopy-pants but I call BS. Put yourself in the government’s shoes. You are going to want to be advised by the best people in New Zealand to find out the truth (have we exported poisoned milk or not) so you create an advisory panel of the top scientists. Then you are not going to want the potential downfall of the New Zealand economy to be released in a tweet by one of the scientists #WeMayHaveKilledYourBaby #NewZealandIsSorry #GoTheAllBlacks. You are going to want the results of the investigation to be released by the greezy concerned face of John Key the prime minister (fig 1.). So yes, I completely understand the non-disclosure agreement and I think it had nothing to do with a cover up.

Fig. 1. The right honourable John Key

Next in the piece, there were also the results of a “survey” conducted by the New Zealand Association of Scientists that suggested that 40% of scientists said they were prevented from making a public comment on a controversial issue by management’s policy or fear of losing research funding. That seems scary right? Well let’s start with this “survey”- as a New Zealand scientist I am actually embarrassed by the scientific rigour of this survey conducted by the NZ Association of SCIENTISTS! Was is a stratified randomized sample with a high response rate? Nope… “The survey link was circulated via our twitter account and by email to all our members” and had less than 400 respondents (out of ~29,000 people who work in research in NZ). In other words the survey method was – if you can be bothered… fill this out. Which, much like a yelp review, is normally only filled out by people who have something to complain about. As discussed previously on this blog, this form of data collection is incredibly biased to the point that it is essentially useless. Not only that, the question has nothing to do with the government, it is the restriction of making public comments through the fear of losing research funding or management policy by their employer. I feel there are perfectly acceptable management policies which restrict public interactions. To start with, all private company researchers will of course be prevented from publicising their research by policy of their employer because pharmaceutical or engineering companies aren’t in the habit of spending millions or billions of dollars on a new drug or product and then releasing the details of the invention prior to copyright – “Hey Samsung, it’s Iphone, check out this prototype! Pretty sweet eh?”. Furthermore, all scientists working in the public sector who do animal experiments (which I am one), will undoubtedly – by policy- be restricted from publicising their research. This is because universities are harassed by crazy organisations like PETA for trying develop cures to horrific diseases. But fear not, the research will be in the public domain through publications in journals available through Pubmed, but just the way it is release is often restricted, it should be released in a professional respectful setting. The University of Otago probably doesn’t want to snapchat their research which involves shooting anesthetized pigs in the head. I understand this policy. The fear of losing research funding is an interesting complicated issue, but let’s just say that the people who decide whether your lab gets funding are mostly fellow scientists, it is peer reviewed, not the government or management. This has it’s issues, but is in no way a cover-up by “the man”.   

The next few minutes address research which scientists published and was then discussed in an uneducated manner by John Key (fig. 1.). That wasn’t censorship, it was just embarrassing for New Zealand, because while Obama and Trudeau were pushing the need for evidence (science) based policy, John Key was saying “Yeah nah” to actual research about the state of our rivers. The last segment was a bit concerning, where academics reported being put under pressure not to discuss the risk of aftershocks following the Christchurch earthquake. While concerning, it sounds more like one moronic politician (fig. 2) than mass censorship of scientific research.  

Fig. 2. Gerry Brownlee not eating a hotdog

A much bigger global problem is that scientists have to published. In my opinion we don’t have a censorship issue, we have a …. publicly-publish-several-times-a-year-about-your-amazing-research problem. There is a saying in science “publish or perish”, which basically means you will lose your job if you don’t publish, particularly in the early to mid stages of your career (like me – yay). To get published in a good journal your discovery has to be new, sexy and positive. These and a myriad of other factors creates an environment where rigorous and conservative approaches to science could result in you not publishing well and often enough to keep your job. The words “great result, let’s try it in another animal model or cell type, just to make sure” does not get said often enough. To me, the New Zealand news piece missed the real story, which is scientists are under such pressure to publicly disseminate their amazing research that the validity of the results are coming second. But perhaps why the news doesn’t report on this story is that the news is going through the same thing. Quality, rigorous and truthful journalism doesn’t get subscribers, telling them “Watching Kim Kardashian cures cancer and you won’t believe what Nicki Minaj said about  Tay tay” does. It is actually depressing the parallels between the problems of the 24 hour news cycles and the problems of publish or perish science.

Every single life-form on earth has formed from genetic modification. 4.1 – 3.8 billion years ago the first life form on earth emerged from the primordial mud (unless we are aliens

Let’s start with selective breeding, Tristan mentioned this before in his blog about the cutest experiment ever; this is a process where we take the outliers, the unnatural mutants, the freaks, and breed them with other freaks to create super freaks. We have carried out this process of freak breading for 1000s of years creating unnatural abominations that have such a modified genome that many of these super freaks cannot successfully breed with their wild counterparts. Note that one definition of a species is a group of organisms which can successfully breed with each other. Therefore, because these super freaks (domesticates) can only breed with each other and not with their wild counterpart from which they were created from this means humans have created whole new species. This doesn’t seem natural to me at all! Take the wolf as an example, we have bred the freaks of this species for thousands of years until we created the abomination that is the chihuahua. Yes, we took the 45kg bison killing wolf and bred the freakish mutant outliers until we created the 2kg purse accessory which is the chihuahua. That would be like breeding short outlier people like Tom Cruise and Shakira, then breeding the freakishly short and undoubtedly beautiful children, and continuing this process until we had a human species which had a full adult weight of approximately 3.7kg. I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t consider the chihuahua or the Cruise and Shakaira offspring (the CrusKira) mini-adonises natural. 

Figure 1: Two fine specimens of CrusKira. Note the males are in a continuous state of running just as their founding ancestor Tom Cruise was.  

Yet paleo-diet enthusiasts and detox-nutritionists claim that the normal orange pumpkin is a natural food despite it’s weight ranging from 5kg to 1000kg. Like the chihuahua this weight is freakish and was only possible through the CrusKiraification (selective breeding) from a wild cultivar that’s fruit normally weighs between 0.3-1kg. Nothing we eat is close to natural; we are eating 3.7kg CrusKiras (figure 1). That isn’t natural and it IS a process of genetic modification. OK, but the misinformation queen Dr. Libby might defend her organic obsession by saying that the plants were selected from the natural pool of genetic variation, so although humans are guiding it, it is still natural. I would argue that CrusKiras aren’t even close to natural, but let’s except the point that I fabricated for Dr. Libby and look at some more unnatural things that we’ve done to crops: like how did we make fruit seedless given that seeds are the entire reason fruits evolved (so poop filled animals would eat the seeds and then poop them out in a new location with ample fertilization (poop))

Seedless mules: We all know mules are the hybrid baby of a donkey and a horse and you probably know that all mules are infertile. This is because DNA is packaged up into chromosomes and every normal animal on the planet has an even number of chromosomes because we have two complete sets; one from the mother and one from the father (humans have two sets of 23 chromosomes). Unfortunately for the mule, the donkey has 64 chromosomes and the horse has 62 chromosomes, each of them donate half their chromosomes to the sperm or egg and so the mule ends up in an awkward situation of having 63 chromosomes. This can’t divide into two to create fully functional gametes (sex cells like sperm or eggs) and so the poor old mule is sterile or you might say seedless.

A similar process has been used on the watermelon to create delicious seedless crops. Except to create the uneven number of chromosomes, the devilish gardeners have been doing something VERY unnatural. They have treated the plants with the toxin Colchicine which prevents the division of chromosomes seen below (figure 2) by preventing the formation of those beautiful green Spindle apparatus which pull the sets of chromosomes apart. This means the ovum (plant egg) contains either two sets of chromosomes or none, the one with none dies (you kind of need DNA) and the one that lives can be fertilized. When this ovum is fertilized by a normal pollen cell the resulting embryo has three sets of chromosomes!! This uneven number leads the plant to be as fertile as the poor old mule.

Figure 2: Chromosome sets getting pulled in half to create gametes (sex cells) with half the
DNA of the original cell (SOOO COOL, Biology rulz)(that z wasn’t even intended to be ironic).  

These awkward plants with an odd number of chromosomes have been spread throughout the world using cuttings (vegetative propagation) which means they are all clones of each other with no genetic variation within a strain. This lack of variation makes them incredibly vulnerable to disease and this has in the past all but wiped out the normal supermarket banana (Gros Michel). A new awkward odd-numbered chromosome species (the Cavendish) was propagated to replace the commercially extinct Gros Michel.

The toxin Colchicine used to create the seedless watermelon has also been used to duplicate the number of chromosomes multiple times to create mutants that instead of having two sets of chromosomes they have eight! The advantage of eight sets of chromosomes is that more DNA can often result in more protein and larger cells, and larger cells can mean bigger juicier fruits. This is one of the ways the tiny wild strawberry was turned into the monstrous size it is today, by genetically engineering it through toxins to have four times the amount of DNA it should have, some varieties even have 10 sets of chromosomes called decaploidy! But remember this isn’t considered proper GE or GM and IS considered natural and organic.  Because of this, these mammoth chemically-induced mutant freak strawberries can be found in the organic section at your local supermarket. But don’t worry, the story of what is considered genetic engineering and what is considered natural and organic is about to reach the next level of inconsistency; because up next we will delve into the use of radioactive materials to create new mutant crops that are still considered by health nuts to be natural and are probably on display at the organic section of your local supermarket.

The millennia old process of selectively breeding the freakiest best plants with other freaks to produce even freakier plants relies on the naturally occurring freaks of nature. These freaks occur infrequently, but they’re out there, just think of the Donald Bradmans, the Jonah Lomus and the pre-domestic-troubles-Tiger-Woodses. Freaks exist. But the naturally occurring mutated freaks selective breeding process was, for many agricultural scientists, too slow and so the scientists wanted to speed up the mutation process so they would have more freaks to selectively breed. Basically, the naturally occurring freaks weren’t freaky enough. Here’s what they did, they figured out that x-rays, gamma rays and radioactive materials mutated genes, so they exposed seeds and pollen to these sources of radiation and this randomly mutated the crops giving a whole new source of variation with which the selective breeding process can be applied. What started in the 1920s with firing x-rays at corn has now grown into millions of seeds being placed in lead boxes with the highly radioactive cobalt-60. This process has created many popular crops such as dwarf rice and blood red grapefruit. Radiation induced mutation is still being used today and isn’t considered by governments or Greenpeace to be GE or GM.

So what the heck is considered GE or GM? These terms have come to refer to the insertion of specific genes into an organism using a range of gene-editing techniques.  Interestingly, these techniques are based on naturally occurring genetic engineering processes that bacteria and viruses use. That’s right, in your intestines right now bacteria are genetically engineering themselves by inserting genes from viruses into their own genome; some viruses also insert their genomes into the DNA of their host. GE is a natural process. Humans have commandeered these processes by utilizing them to insert the genes we would like inserted into the organisms of our choosing. Genetic engineering is a controlled process which produces very specific and far more predictable changes to the crop than the radiation method. Yet for some reason there are huge lobby groups who are very effectively villainizing GM with various smear campaigns without mentioning the fact that all crops are unnatural mutant freaks created by toxins, hybridization, 1000s of years of unnatural selection and/or even radiation. These groups are often: well funded, aggressive , dishonest and, from this blog I hope you can see, inconsistent. One example of a smear campaign against GE/GM was the widely spread claim that GM crops were failing in India and this was causing thousands of farmers to commit suicide. As you can see from the graph below this just clearly isn’t true.

Figure 3: Spurious correlation suggesting that the uptake of the GM crop BT cotton is not causing farmer suicides in India.
Gruère, G. & Sengupta, D. (2011), Bt cotton and farmer suicides in India: an evidence-based assessment, The Journal of Development Studies, 47(2), pp 316–337

The truth is that specific insertions of genes into crops can do wonderful things like: prevent blindness in children who are vitamin A deficient¹, create cheap edible vaccines for the prevention of deadly diseases², produce crops which require 33% less pesticides ^3,4, increase crop yields by 22%³ , and increase farmer profits by 68% ³. This can help stimulate the economies of low income nations such as Uruguay who have enthusiatically embraced this technology. Not to mention the application for non-crop related GM like: GM yeast that is creating biodiesel and ethanol fuels, antibacterial, anti-fungal and hormone based medicines,  and insulin for diabetics ⁵. I could go on but the point is that the potential for GM to improve the lives of people is nearly limitless.

We created unnatural mutant freak crops 1000s of years ago, we then ramped up the freakification process using toxins, hybridization and radioactive material and this gone under the radar without a whimper from the Foodbabes of this world. But now that scientists have a real opportunity to help people with some amazing technology there is a huge up-roar which is slowing the process, costing potentially billions of dollars and lives. All because we have have a false idea of what is natural and we are scared of something we don’t understand. I’m not saying nothing bad can come from GM and that it shouldn’t be regulated. I’m saying that we’ve been playing god of the crops for 10,000 years and we’ve been doing it blind. Why are we turning away from a process where we can finally see what we are doing. Single gene insertions have a bad press agent, that is all.  The population is expected to peak at 12 billion, 5 billion more than we have now. If we are going to feed these people, we have two choices: 1) chop down rains forests, divert rivers to turn deserts into fertile soil and use loads of pesticides and fertilizers to create more arable land, OR 2) get way way way better at producing more food on less land. I’d prefer the second option and don’t see how we can do this without GM.

1. Tang G, Hu Y, Yin SA, Wang Y, Dallal GE, Grusak MA, Russell RM (2012). beta-Carotene in Golden Rice is as good as beta-carotene in oil at providing vitamin A to children. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 96(3): 658-664.
2. Tiwari S, Verma PC, Singh PK, Tuli R (2009). Plants as bioreactors for the production of vaccine antigens. Biotechnology Advances 27(4): 449-467.
3. Klümper W, Qaim M (2014). A Meta-Analysis of the Impacts of Genetically Modified Crops. PLoS ONE 9(11): e111629.
4. Li G, Wang Y, Liu B, Zhang G (2014). Transgenic Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) rice is safer to aquatic ecosystems than its non-transgenic counterpart. PLoS ONE 9(8): e104270.
5. Steensels J, Snoek T, Meersman E, Nicolino MP, Voordeckers K, Verstrepen KJ (2014). Improving industrial yeast strains: exploiting natural and artificial diversity. FEMS Microbiology Reviews 38(5): 947-995.