Witnesses, well-to-do or otherwise

This morning, when I read this passage in Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern---

While a dozen civil wars were raging, [17th-century chemist Robert] Boyle chose a method of argument--that of opinion-- that was held in contempt by the oldest scholastic tradition. Boyle and his colleagues abandoned the certainties of apodeictic reasoning in favour of a doxa. This doxa was not the raving imagination of the credulous masses, but a new mechanism for winning the support of one's peers. Instead of seeking to ground his work in logic, mathematics or rhetoric, Boyle relied on a parajudicial metaphor: credible, trustworthy, well-to-do witnesses gathered at the scene of the action can attest to the existence of a fact, the matter of fact, even if they do not know its true nature. So he invented the empirical style that we still use today. (18)

---I thought of the Guardian article I read yesterday, Rick Perry Officials Spark Revolt after Doctoring Environment Report, noting how all the scientists who had contributed to the report removed their names in the face of the Texas governor's censorship of the science he is determined to suppress.

By academic standards, the protest amounts to the beginnings of a rebellion: every single scientist associated with the 200-page report has demanded their names be struck from the document. "None of us can be party to scientific censorship so we would all have our names removed," said Jim Lester, a co-author of the report and vice-president of the Houston Advanced Research Center.

"To me it is simply a question of maintaining scientific credibility. This is simply antithetical to what a scientist does," Lester said. "We can't be censored." Scientists see Texas as at high risk because of climate change, from the increased exposure to hurricanes and extreme weather on its long coastline to this summer's season of wildfires and drought.

However, Perry, in his run for the Republican nomination, has elevated denial of science, from climate change to evolution, to an art form. He opposes any regulation of industry, and has repeatedly challenged the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Texas is the only state to refuse to sign on to the federal government's new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. "I like to tell people we live in a state of denial in the state of Texas," said John Anderson, an oceanography at Rice University, and author of the chapter targeted by the government censors.

That state of denial percolated down to the leadership of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The agency chief, who was appointed by Perry, is known to doubt the science of climate change. "The current chair of the commission, Bryan Shaw, commonly talks about how human-induced climate change is a hoax," said Anderson.

When I read the article yesterday, I thought about how Texas's government censorship of science is perfectly in line with the state's Stalinist approach to rewriting the history that is taught in its public schools. But today I'm thinking also that Perry's tactics exemplify the nature of the struggle underway. Although people who call themselves "fundamentalist" Christians claim the Bible as their source of authority, they in fact (as any scholar of the Bible could tell you) ignore that authority when it suits their purposes (as well as favor mistranslations and similar distortions of it) and prefer instead to seize control of the doxa (mostly by brute, well-capitalized, propagandizing force). I wonder what Boyle might have said about this development (other than to characterize the lunatic Republicans as having adopted the "raving imagination of the credulous masses").

ETA: As with the Bible, so with the US Constitution. Always, they ignore and distort what doesn't suit their interests.

Did a neutrino beam really move faster than the speed of light?

Cern Press Release, 23 September 2011:

OPERA experiment reports anomaly in flight time of neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso

Geneva, 23 September 2011. The OPERA experiment, which observes a neutrino beam from CERN 730 km away at Italy's INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory, will present new results in a seminar at CERN this afternoon at 16:00 CEST. The seminar will be webcast at http://webcast.cern.ch. Journalists wishing to ask questions may do so via twitter using the hash tag #nuquestions, or via the usual CERN press office channels.

The OPERA result is based on the observation of over 15000 neutrino events measured at Gran Sasso, and appears to indicate that the neutrinos travel at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light, nature's cosmic speed limit. Given the potential far-reaching consequences of such a result, independent measurements are needed before the effect can either be refuted or firmly established. This is why the OPERA collaboration has decided to open the result to broader scrutiny. The collaboration's result is available on the preprint server arxiv.org http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897.

The OPERA measurement is at odds with well-established laws of nature, though science frequently progresses by overthrowing the established paradigms. For this reason, many searches have been made for deviations from Einstein's theory of relativity, so far not finding any such evidence. The strong constraints arising from these observations make an interpretation of the OPERA measurement in terms of modification of Einstein's theory unlikely, and give further strong reason to seek new independent measurements.

"This result comes as a complete surprise," said OPERA spokesperson, Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern. "After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement. While OPERA researchers will continue their studies, we are also looking forward to independent measurements to fully assess the nature of this observation."

"When an experiment finds an apparently unbelievable result and can find no artefact of the measurement to account for it, it's normal procedure to invite broader scrutiny, and this is exactly what the OPERA collaboration is doing, it's good scientific practice," said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. "If this measurement is confirmed, it might change our view of physics, but we need to be sure that there are no other, more mundane, explanations. That will require independent measurements."

In order to perform this study, the OPERA Collaboration teamed up with experts in metrology from CERN and other institutions to perform a series of high precision measurements of the distance between the source and the detector, and of the neutrinos' time of flight. The distance between the origin of the neutrino beam and OPERA was measured with an uncertainty of 20 cm over the 730 km travel path. The neutrinos' time of flight was determined with an accuracy of less than 10 nanoseconds by using sophisticated instruments including advanced GPS systems and atomic clocks. The time response of all elements of the CNGS beam line and of the OPERA detector has also been measured with great precision.

"We have established synchronization between CERN and Gran Sasso that gives us nanosecond accuracy, and we've measured the distance between the two sites to 20 centimetres," said Dario Autiero, the CNRS researcher who will give this afternoon's seminar. "Although our measurements have low systematic uncertainty and high statistical accuracy, and we place great confidence in our results, we're looking forward to comparing them with those from other experiments."

"The potential impact on science is too large to draw immediate conclusions or attempt physics interpretations. My first reaction is that the neutrino is still surprising us with its mysteries." said Ereditato. "Today's seminar is intended to invite scrutiny from the broader particle physics community."

The OPERA experiment was inaugurated in 2006, with the main goal of studying the rare transformation (oscillation) of muon neutrinos into tau neutrinos. One first such event was observed in 2010, proving the unique ability of the experiment in the detection of the elusive signal of tau neutrinos.

Further information:

OPERA website: http://operaweb.lngs.infn.it/

Blog post about the topic:

http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/09/23/elementary-my-dear-neutrino/

Pictures available here:

http://www.infn.it/comunicazione/scambio
http://ccwebcast.in2p3.fr/cnrs/videos/webcnrs/presse/neutrino/photos.zip

Study Finds: Positive Attitudes Don't Slow or Cure Cancer

Now that I've knocked Pharyngula a few times, I guess I'll do a post favoring some good ol' enlightenment rationalism, based on this study from the BBC.

An oft-touted example of mind over matter is the efficacy of optimism in aiding cancer cures. A good outlook is supposed to equal a cure. "How brave and corageous she was," we hear of those who pull through. "She struggled and she overcame."

Sometimes nastier stories drift in of assumptions that people who died from cancer somehow sinned in succumbing. They gave up. They were weak. They failed to fight. They didn't want to live. They weren't strong enough.

My mom had such an anecdote a few years ago, to describe the way that her hairdresser's husband had died. "[My hairdresser] says he gave up, and died a week after that. What a shame. It's too bad he gave up."

The appeal of such a narrative is obvious -- it gives us a sense that we control our own fates. It gives us a tool -- optomism -- to hold against insurmountable odds. If we can be positive and uplifting enough, we have a chance against illness. It's only those who give up that die.

Optomism as medical cure is a secular replacement for prayer as medical cure. For some religious people, it's a way to talk about the power of prayer in language that's acceptable to the ears of people who don't believe in the efficacy of appealing to god for intervention. For areligious people -- like my mother -- it can be a replacement for prayer, a way of capturing the sense of control that we gain from something like prayer, and applying it to a (mostly) materialist view of the universe.

Unfortunately, it doesn't actually work.

The power of the mind has been overestimated when it comes to fighting cancer, US scientists say.
They said they found that a patient's positive or negative emotional state had no direct bearing on cancer survival or disease progression.

They do suggest that cancer patients continue with therapy and working toward a positive attitude -- but they suggest it so that cancer patients can be happier, not as a life-saving measure. From the article, "Lead author Dr James Coyne said: "If cancer patients want psychotherapy or to be in a support group, they should be given the opportunity. There can be lots of emotional and social benefits. But they should not seek such experiences solely on the expectation that they are extending their lives."

Of course, on one hand, it's depressing to discover that we can't cure ourselves through sheer cheerful bloodymindedness. It's hard to acknowledge that we don't have control over these things, that our outcomes are determined by factors we can't affect.

I am reminded of the debates about rape, in which people will go to great lengths to blame the victim. We understand why many men do it, but I've always found it insightful when feminists observe that one reason many women will do it, too, is because women want to convince themselves that they have the power not to be raped. That if they are not sluts, that if they don't drink at the wrong time, or trust the wrong person, or go out at night, or wear a short skirt, they can eliminate the possibility of being attacked.

We know it's not true with rape, and now we know it's not true with cancer either: you can't force yourself to be safe, or be cured. But the silver lining in both situations is the same. If we accept that optimism and ineffective safety measures are not the protection that we want to claim, then we can stop blaming the victim. We can stop suggesting that women invite their own rapes, and we can stop suggesting that people invite their deaths because they don't try hard enough to maintain a sunny disposition.

Julia Frater, of Cancer Research UK, said: "People with cancer can feel under pressure to cope well with their disease and treatment and to stay on top of things. They are often urged to feel positive.

"These results should reassure them that if they don't feel like this, it's okay. Many people do feel worried or low following a diagnosis and this isn't likely to affect the outcome of their treatment."

Gender Delusions and Gaps

About a week ago, Nancy Jane Moore posted on what, following Gwyneth Jones, she calls “The Great Divide.” Today, Mark Liberman has posted The "Fiction Gap": Empathy, Prestige, or What? on the Language Log, showing just how far the obsession with gender differences can go. (With thanks to The Mumpsiumus for the link.) Liberman begins by noting recent reports that the women purchase 80% of books of fiction and men 20%. His post surveys various explanations for this apparent gender gap.

Theories attempting to explain the “fiction gap” abound. Cognitive psychologists have found that women are more empathetic than men, and possess a greater emotional range of traits that make fiction more appealing to them.

Apparently the theories for explaining the “fiction gap” even wander into the territory of “mirror neurons.”

The research is still in its early stages, but some studies have found that women have more sensitive mirror neurons than men. That might explain why women are drawn to works of fiction, which by definition require the reader to empathize with characters.

Liberman summarizes a study of gender differences in mirror neurons based on magnetoencephalography and discusses whether or not its results (based on a sample of ten young Taiwanese men and ten young Taiwanese women) are statistically significant and then moves on to the 2004 NEA report on reading and decides that since the differences between racial and ethnic groups were as large or larger than the differences between males and female that the argument that gendered differences in empathy explains the gap is dubious.

What strikes me as really weird about the various “theories” Liberman cites is their apparent failure to notice that if this gap actually does now exist in present-day US, Britain, and Canada (and Liberman notes that he’s by no means certain that it does), it is a reflection of a particular cultural juncture and not a hard-wired biological imperative controlling the behavior of men and women. I seriously doubt that the 80/20 split (if it’s real) has always existed for as long as fiction has existed and I would be surprised if the same results were reproduced in other cultural milieus. That any cognitive psychologists or neuroscientists could entertain for a moment the idea that women are hardwired to read fiction and men aren’t stinks of nineteenth century pseudo-science—the kinds of “science” that used calipers to “prove” that Caucasians are intellectually superior to non-Caucasians and that men are intellectually superior to women. I find myself wondering why these people are so obsessed with “the Great Divide” that they are apparently unable to ask reasonable questions. It shouldn’t be possible for someone still cherishing such discredited assumptions to get an advanced degree in any science. The amount of time and money spent trying to demonstrate hardwired sex differences for shoring up the credibility of the Great Divide is scandalous.

If I were certain there was a “fiction” gap between men and women (and of course I’m not), what I’d write about what it might mean in light of the domination by male critics and reviewers, male tastes, and male values of all literary discussion. The critic gap certainly exists: we all know that. But that’s not the kind of gap anyone but women are interested in thinking about, explaining, and discussing, is it. And certainly not the relation between the critic gap and the “fiction gap.”

Science, Speculation and Gendered Narratives

Timmi's post is weirdly coincidental as I was teaching a Masters session on Media, Health and Science at Cardiff University today, and one of the issues we were discussing was the distinction made in various 'factual' media forms between illegitimate speculation about the future - science fiction - and legitimate speculation about the future: the language of potential and promise or the use of modelling tools for extrapolation - and how sfnal is that? Legitimate speculation is authorised by the taken-for-granted expertise of the speculators - scientists, regulators and legislators heavily invested in the science = progress model, or of the genres in which they publish - although peer-reviewed scientific journals have come in for much criticism - external and internal - of late in the wake of significant scientific frauds such as the claim by Professor Hwang of Seoul National University to have produced patient-specific stem cell lines via therapeutic cloning.

But as to the gendering of this speculation, the ways in which biological processes are imagined and the effects this has on research programmes, check out the work of Evelyn Fox Keller. Her analysis of the use of gendered root metaphors in the conceptualisation of science can be found in the titles Reflections on Science and Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science. Emily Martin's work in The Woman in the Body also points to the ways in which the process of fertilisation of women's eggs by men's sperm was rendered in biological textbooks as a narrative of romantic conquest with active questing sperm, and passive receptive eggs. More recent texts represent a more equal co-operative enterprise, only thinkable, she argues, once gendered inequality had been raised as a social issue. Apologies to Fox Keller and Martin for sketchy late night renderings of their work, but it is superb and highly to be recommended - along with the work of Rose and, of course, Donna Haraway for their sensitivity to the material impacts that narratives - linguistic and visual - have on the practice of science and on gendered social relations writ large.

Imagination, Language, and Narrative in the Practice of Science

Speaking of language, imagination, & the irresistible force of narrative—checking out the April 20 issue of Science, which has a special section on germ cells, I was struck by the prominent role imagination is playing in a piece of fascinating research being undertaken by a developmental biologist—and also by the narrative-laden language used to characterize cellular processes in a couple of the other papers and articles in the special section.

An article titled “A Close Look Urbisexuality: A developmental biologist takes aim at understanding the evolutionary origins of eggs and sperm in our 600-million-year-old ancestor” by John Travis invokes the power of imagination before it even mentions Cassandra Extavour and her work. What, you may wonder is “urbisexuality”? If you haven’t heard of “Urbilateria,” a “hypothetical organism that lived 550 million to 800 million years ago and was the last common ancestor of a menagerie that includes mollusks, worms, flies, mice, and people,” then you’re probably thinking it has something to do with urban bisexuality. Get ready for something completely different: Travis tells us that “scientists have vigorously debated whether [urbilateria] sported legs or antennae, whether it had a true heart, and whether its body was segmented.” In short, urbilateria is a sort of methodological construct, a fiction created by scientists, though not what we here in sf-land think of as “science fiction.” This speculative construct serves the serious purpose of helping biologists theorize how “the current diversity of bilaterians emerged form the twists and turns of evolution.”

Interestingly (perhaps significantly?), Extavour notes that although “so much of evo-devo over the last 20 years centered on what Urbilateria looked like,” no one ever wondered how it reproduced. After raising that very question, Extavour took on the task of answering the question. (& it is she who coined the term “urbisexuality.”) The rest of the article discusses Extavour’s work and its significance (including its prompting her to “rethink the evolutionary connections between primordial germs cells, which ultimately make sperm and eggs, and the stem cells that give rise to other tissues”). A far-ranging, disciplined imagination is obviously essential for the kind of science Extavour does.

That’s the most interesting piece, for me, in the issue. In a couple of the other articles and papers, though, the anthropomorphic language used distracted me. Here, imagination is neither free-ranging nor disciplined to the extent that applies anthropomorphic language to single, non-conscious cells. Take the article titled “The Mysteries of Sexual Identity: The Germ Cell’s Perspective,” for example. In the one-paragraph abstract at the top of the paper, the authors write: “…how do germ cells interpret those external cues to acquire their own sexual identity? A critical aspect of a germ cell’s sexual puzzle is that the sperm-egg decision is closely linked to the cell-cycle decision between mitosis and meiosis…” Cells, it seem, exercise agency: they interpret, they make decisions, they have sexual puzzles; in short, they are caught up in a dramatic narrative arc: which makes me wonder whether the authors of the paper really believe that individual cells possess consciousness. (But no, this is yet another kind of science fiction. It’s all about germ cells “choosing” their “sexual identity,” as the authors call it.) It gets better. In Figure 1, we see depictions of two models of decision-making: in the first model, “sex-specific control of meiotic entry is equivalent to the sperm/egg decision,” while in the second model “gender-neutral control of meiotic entry is modified by sex-specific regulators.”

“Gender-neutral”? Say what? Is “gender” not a term associated with culture? How can germ cells, which are presumably not sentient, have culture? I must admit that I’ve run into other uses of this before, where “gender” (not “sex”) is attributed to rats or dogs: a clear indication that scientists, like the general public, have simply substituted the word “gender” (which began to be used by feminist theorists to designate something other than a linguistic category) for “sex” because “sex” has become an uncomfortable word. (This substitution of “gender” for “sex” is often applied anachronistically to pre-1970s contexts. For instance, sometime back in the 1980s I saw a BBC episode of the David Suchet Poirot series in which a 1920s feminist was constantly talking about “gender.”)

Obviously, such anthropomorphic language is unnecessary (since not all the articles use it & at certain points in the article the authors shed the language of agency: “What molecular machinery inside germ cells directs their differentiation as sperm or egg?”); it seems such a risky choice to use it that I wonder why they do. Joan and Helen will know more about this issue than I, but I seem to recall that philosopher of science Hillary Rose has written about the ways in which the use of sexual narratives have demonstrably distorted science practice by obscuring what was really going on; these aren’t quite sexual narratives, but they are certainly anthropomorphic narratives.