Strollerderby : scientists

Dinos and Dragons: On the Scientific Method for Kids

Miriam Axel-Lute — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

On my post about errors about the natural world in kids books, a few people piped up to say that the social biases in kids books bother them more—stupid fathers, prissy girls, everyone white, etc. I wish it were as easy to dispatch those with a simple top ten list, but they're far more insidious and numerous.

However, here's one tiny stab at the overlap: A bit of a commentary about the blinders that social biases put on scientists.

The book in question is called Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs. It was recommended to me by a commenter on my previous post, and billed as an introduction to the scientific method, a window into the process of making theories based on the evidence you have, testing them (when that’s possible), and changing them based on new evidence.

And, of course, it’s about dinosaurs, which hold a not entirely explicable fascination for a massive proportion of kids, mine included.

It is in fact, a pretty great book, full of neat stories such as people mistaking Iguanodons’ massive conical thumb bones for horns until they found a complete skeleton, or how some bone cross-sections look more like those of warm-blooded animals than of cold-blooded ones—which is part of what spurred the whole movement toward dinosaurs-as-bird-ancestors and away from dinosaurs-as-big-lizards.

But the book also is a better example of how science works than it really set out to be: It contains two glaring examples of how, for all the real power of the scientific method and (most) scientists’ genuine commitment to objectivity and open-mindedness, science is carried out (and interpreted and written about) by people who are subject, to a greater or lesser extent, to all the biases and assumptions of their day. Those blinders creep into their conclusions far more than they would like to admit.

For example, one of the points that the book makes is that we used to think of dinosaurs as having reptile-like parenting skills—i.e., none; they lay eggs and leave. But then paleontologists found evidence (such as nests with older hatchlings in them) that dinosaurs may have been more active parents.

Except the book doesn’t say parents.

It says mothers. Over and over.

I have no need to project egalitarian parenting onto other species, where it often doesn’t exist. But since it does exist among birds quite often, I would have been pretty slow to make such a massive assumption and present it as a “discovery.”

And in fact, last December a flurry of articles about active dinosaur dads came out—some researchers think in some cases they were the primary parent.

Boy, was the book wrong—not in a scientific way though, in a lazy way.

This kind of assumption can actively bog science down. In the 1990s, cultural anthropologist Emily Martin described how researchers working on new forms of contraception were incredibly slow to recognize key information about how human fertilization works because they were so wedded (unconsciously) to their culturally influenced assumptions of mighty aggressive sperm and passive eggs. (Turns out sperm are weak uncoordinated swimmers and have to be entrapped and engulfed by the egg while they try to get away.)

The other bias in Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs strikes even closer to the heart of scientists and their self image. It starts off with a description of how the ancient Chinese found dinosaur bones and, in trying to figure out what they came from, came up with the creature we now know as the Chinese dragon. It shows a picture, says that they figured they must have been magic to have been so big, and thought they might be still around. “Boy, were they wrong!” Then it says, “Now we think many of our own past guesses about dinosaurs were just as wrong as those of ancient China.”

Toward the end of the book we come back to this theme, but less diplomatically: “Perhaps today’s ideas about dinosaurs will someday seem just as silly as the magic dragons of long-ago China.”

Interestingly, instead of “Boy, were they wrong,” everyone else, starting with European scientists from hundreds of years ago gets “Boy, were we wrong!” (emphasis mine). The message is clear: real scientific inquiry began after those initial discoveries, with the “we” of the rest of the book (all white by the illustrations).

Let’s pause and consider for a second. What did the ancient Chinese think those bones belonged to? A large, long, scaly reptilian creature. What did the first Europeans to try to make a theory about the same sorts of bones—a long time later and with far more technology—come up with? A large, long, scaly reptilian creature. They gave it a different name. They came up with different wrong embellishments. They placed it into a different cosmology. But the ancient Chinese were basically doing the same thing, with fewer tools, and had remarkably similar results. They weren't right, but they were hardly silly.

I understand and support what the book’s authors were trying to do: show how early scientific hypotheses can turn out to be as off-base as something that even a child can recognize as untrue. Only in the process of doing so, they revealed their own ethnocentric biases: They feel that dragons were an obviously silly, superstitious theory, while gray, reptilian brontosauruses dragging their tails through the mud were an educated hypothesis that happened to turn out to be inaccurate.

Boy, were they wrong. But at least they gave the parents reading it a ready phrase to critique their own book with.

More by this author:

Video: Doing Science Experiments on Your Kids

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:46:00 GMT

After writing about a new generation of scientists who are increasingly using their own kids as test subjects, I found this fascinating (and often adorable) video about a scientist, Deborah Linebarger, who has conducted experiments with her four children.

For me, the upshot of these interviews with ethicists, scientists, and children test subjects is that Linebarger struggles with balancing her career and her family, making mistakes with her older kids that she doesn’t repeat with her younger kids, worrying unnecessarily about her children's development. In other words, she struggles, like everyone, with being parent. She just happens to hope that she’ll make a huge scientific breakthrough while playing with her kids—and hey, what’s wrong with that?

Photo: New York Times

Is It Ethical for Scientists to Use Their Kids as Test Subjects?

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:10:00 GMT

Here’s a reason for wanting a baby that you don’t hear everyday: “I really want to study him and do experiments with him.” This was the thinking of Dr. Sinha, an MIT neuroscience professor, upon the birth of his son.

According to the New York Times, Dr. Sinha is just one of many scientists using their kids as test subjects in large part because “children make reliable participants in an era of scarce research financing.” Is this creepy or just practical?

Numerous kids of scientists have been instrumental in research on everything from brain scans to the effects of media on children. In an extreme example, scientist Deb Roy recorded nearly 70 percent of his son’s waking hours for the first three years of his life in order to study language development.

Many scientists argue that using their own children as subjects proves the safety of the experiments: why would they put their own kids, whom they love above all else, at risk? Furthemore, review boards establish rules for safe experimentation, including a prohibition on videotaping toilet training, which could prove embarrassing later.

I understand this argument, and don't doubt that well-meaning scientists would never willingly put their children at risk. However, I do question the ways experimenting on children can affect parent-child relationships. So does Robert M. Nelson, the director of the Center for Research Integrity at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “The role of the parent is to protect the child,” he said. “Once that parent becomes an investigator, it sets up an immediate potential conflict of interest.”

Like most parenting issues, this question defies a black-and-white answer. Some grown children of scientists look back on their time as test subjects as a fun way to bond with their parents, while others remember the experiments as stressful, colored by an uncomfortable need to please their parents.

Do you think there’s a surefire way to predict whether experiments with children will be harmless or harmful? If not, is it wrong for scientists to use their children in the service of scientific inquiry?

Photo: New York Times

U.S. Children's Health - Biggest Study Ever

SunnyChanel — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:14:00 GMT

Autism, asthma, birth defects, childhood disorders; all scary and all are on the rise. Thing is, there doesn’t seem to be a clear cut answer to why these maladies are affecting more and more babies and kids each and every year. The biggest suspect? The environment. Scientists are going to try their darndest to find some answers to this mystery and prove or disprove this assumption and are about to launch the largest study on children of the United States ever. They have begun signing up mothers-to-be in North Carolina and New York to participate and are looking for women who are newly pregnant or are planning on becoming pregnant soon. In the spring, they’ll be looking for recruits in California, Pennsylvania, Utah, South Dakota and Minnesota with a total of about 100,000 participants.

The scientists will study the newborns from birth (or conception) until they turn twenty-one. The moms-to-be will be required to give various samples of their blood, hair, urine, drinking water, and house dust and will have to participate in various interviews. After the baby is born, the child’s house will be environmentally examined and the baby’s health will be carefully tracked.

This lofty study has been in the works for about a decade and is now just coming to fruition. They’re hoping to have the first set of results in 2012 with data on birth defects and premature births and data on early childhood issues/disorders within five years.
Here’s hoping some answers are found. It’s a shame it’s taken ten years to make this happen, we probably would have had some clues sooner than later. But with the funds necessary and the complexity of such a big study, it doesn’t come as a surprise it did take a decade to happen.

Do you blame the environment?

Source

I can tell how much you orgasm because of how you walk

Brett Singer — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Let's say a guy tells a group of female college students that he can tell how often they've had orgasms by watching them walk. That guy would likely get a smack for that, right?

But if he's a SCIENTIST… well, that's different.

"A new study found that trained sexologists could infer a woman's history of vaginal orgasm by observing the way she walks. The study is published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine."

Oh! Only TRAINED sexologists. Not those UNtrained sexlogists. (I think every male on the planet qualifies as an "untrained sexologist.")

"Led by Stuart Brody of the University of the West of Scotland in collaboration with colleagues in Belgium, the study involved 16 female Belgian university students. Subjects completed a questionnaire on their sexual behavior and were then videotaped from a distance while walking in a public place. The videotapes were rated by two professors of sexology and two research assistants trained in the functional-sexological approach to sexology, who were not aware of the women's orgasmic history.

"The results showed that the appropriately trained sexologists were able to correctly infer vaginal orgasm through watching the way the women walked over 80 percent of the time. Further analysis revealed that the sum of stride length and vertebral rotation was greater for the vaginally orgasmic women. 'This could reflect the free, unblocked energetic flow from the legs through the pelvis to the spine,' the authors note."

So they videotaped college girls walking and then determined that the way they walked revealed fascinating details about their sexual experiences. Are these guys geniuses or just too nervous to actually get into porn?

I realize I'm not a scientist, but did the Beavis and Butthead Foundation fund this study? "Hey Beavis… heh heh heh heh… I bet I can tell you how many times that chick O'ed by the way she walks…" "Dude, you can't even spell orgasm." Heh heh heh heh…

image: some blog

Source: Science Daily via Morning News

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They Say: no link between autism and measles vaccine

Brett Singer — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:30:00 GMT

This news is unfortunately not likely to solve anyone's questions about whether or not vaccines are a cause of autism.

"Dr. W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University, collaborating with a team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Trinity College in Dublin, tackled the hot-button question: whether the MMR vaccine causes autism.

"'We are persuaded there is no link,' said Lipkin, director of the center on infection and immunity at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health in Manhattan."

HOWEVER…

"The study was not designed to address other rumored theories of autism's cause, such as thimerosal, the much-debated mercury-based preservative in some other vaccines, Lipkin said."

Now, as usual, the devil is in the details. The 1998 study that linked MMR vaccines to autism was based on a whopping 12 children. I'm no scientist (nor have I played one on TV) but that doesn't sound like a very large sample base.

For this new study, "Lipkin and colleagues searched for traces of genetic material linked to the virus in intestinal tissue taken from 25 children with autism and gastrointestinal problems. They compared the samples to those from 13 children without autism but with intestinal problems. In 24 of the group of 25 and in 12 of the 13, there was no evidence of viral persistence, leading researchers to conclude the vaccine did not cause autism or gastrointestinal problems." So it’s a larger group of kids. Not that many, but on the surface it sounds more valid.

HOWEVER…

Why not do a study on thimerosal, which contains, as Jenny McCarthy calls it, "frickin' mercury"? Wouldn't that be, like, actually useful?

In theory, this study will put to rest parents' fears about this particular vaccine. Of course, as the great Homer Simpson once said, communism works -- in theory. In other words, I doubt this news will do anything to change anybody's mind one way or the other.

source: Newsday

image: timesonline.typepad.com

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Scientists Play With Toys; I Want to be a Scientist

Karen Murphy — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 12:10:00 GMT

When I was about 14, I was convinced I was going to be a research biologist. That occupation had everything I was looking for in a job then: I could work completely alone and wouldn't have to talk to or interact with anyone, perfect for my budding Goth persona; I could do "science stuff"; and I could probably play with test tubes and all. In short, the perfect job.

But now I've found a better one: researchers at the University of Cambridge are using kid's toys to try to understand the evolution of weather patterns and the magnetohydrodynaics (huh? I dare you to say that three times fast!) of spinning stars and planets. Yeah, they're using, like, tops and stuff to learn about, uh, weather. And that other thing, magne-, magne-, yeah. That. (I totally would have KICKED ASS as a scientist!)

Here's what they said about it: "Understanding the behaviour of spinning toys can teach us a lot about some of the fundamental principles of dynamics...Scientists take toys seriously."

See? They totally want to play. Can you blame them?