First a rough translation of the text: Jesus came to the world to save us from sins. Thor came to the world to save us from ice giants. Now: The world is full of sins… But there isn’t a single ice giant. Thor wins. Where is your god now?

The first and obvious problem is the absence of a pre-intervention „baseline“ measurement. We don’t know if there were even any ice giants around when Thor came here — he could have played a great trick on us. Also, we have few information on how much sin there was in the world over 2000 years ago. The Thor issue reminds me of a joke I can’t tire of telling people for its deeper implication about anxieties: The psychiatrist sees a patient who has just been admitted to the psychiatric hospital. Already during the first sentences he notices the patient keeps clapping his hands. „What do you clap your hands for?“ he asks. The patient replies: „To scare away the elephants“. Psychiatrist: „But — there are no elephants here.“ Patient, triumphantly: „See how well it works!“

Apart from that, even if we set out to measure the amount of sins in the world, we would have trouble coming to a good definition and measurement procedure. Also, you can safely assume that a lot of sins are committed in private, making the practical measurement even more problematic.

The most stunning objection, and one which immediately reminded me of issues in psychotherapy research, was my friend saying: „Jesus didn’t come to save us from sins. He came to forgive them.“ It’s often not as easy as you would think to tell what somebody (or a group of people) is aiming at with a complex intervention, especially when you’re not part of that group. And so outside measurements and comparisons can get really tricky.

The last and somewhat nerdy (ok, even more nerdy than before) point concerns standardized effect sizes. As success of Thor’s and Jesus‘ social intervention is obviously on different scales (reduction in ice giant population vs. reduction in (frequency? intensity? of) sins), how do you compare them? What you would typically do is compare the change that is attributable to the intervention to natural fluctuations in the phenomena of interest. That would be hard to do here, even though theoretically possible — how did ice giant population and sins change over time before our two so different saviors came along? But of course, it doesn’t actually tell you anything about the clinical significance of each change. Maybe something similar to a change of quality occurs at some point of the scale — if ice giant population falls below a certain point, they retreat to their mystical homelands and leave humans alone. If sins are reduced beyond a certain point, society changes, preparing the earth for eternal heavenly rule. In psychotherapy, we mostly assume something like that actually, where the clinical disorder or syndrome (of, say, depression or phobia) is seen as no longer existing after a certain threshold, but often still measured as a severity of symptoms.

First of all, what is the Evolutionary Psychology that is being criticised here? There are admittedly big misunderstandings among outsiders what the research agenda is, and I’ll summarize a brief outline from Schmitt & Buss (2011, see above). The central idea is that our mental setup, including thoughts, feelings etc., has to be seen as outcome of an evolutionary process just like our physical one, with natural and sexual selection as the mechanisms that shape them. The in my opinion first somewhat counterintuitive and heuristically relevant claim is that this evolutionary process is manifested in quite specialized „psychological mechanisms, information processing devices“ that also respond to specific classes of information. Our thoughts, feelings and behavior then are the result of combination, coordination and integration of a large number of these mechanisms (and consciousness itself can be seen as an evolved device to achieve this integration). To think of Evolutionary Psychology as biological determinism is thus a common and big misunderstanding, because appropriate response to and interaction with different environmental factors is what these mechanisms are all about.

The search for these mechanisms is what characterizes most of Evolutionary Psychology research as far as I can tell, and is indeed a unique heuristic approach. All the same, the basic idea that evolution has shaped our mental setup seems to me about as trivial (very) as the basic claim of Neuroscience, that mental processes take place in the brain. And the value in and of itself of showing this in concrete examples I also consider equally low in both cases — the mere existence of a psychological mechanism that can be predicted from evolutionary hypotheses is as exciting (not at all) as the mere demonstration of a certain mental process correlating with activity in a certain brain region. Thus my first critique of Evolutionary Psychology: the field needs to be legitimized as achieving something more in either philosophical self-understanding or practical application.

This leads to my preliminary position on what and how we can know about „reality“, and what the role of science is in that process. I think that an at least mild constructivism is the only reasonable stance to adopt there. That means what we bring to our inquiry of reality in terms of interests, theoretical frameworks and research procedures has (at least) some impact on what we find — and that because a correspondence with reality beyond these preconditions is impossible to establish, scientific results cannot be evaluated based only on this correspondence with reality. The most reasonable proposed alternative (or complement) to „correspondence to reality“ as the standard for good science has been beautifully described by Jerome Bruner (1990. Acts of Meaning. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London) as „the pragmatist’s questions — How does this view affect my view of the world or my commitments to it?“ And for me it follows from there that a critical examination of these influences as well as the „pragmatist“ consequences is indispensable.

If that sounded too abstract, be reminded of the myriad ways in which the design of a study, statistical techniques and interpretation of the outcomes influence the results. There is so much discouraging research on how findings are exaggerated in medicine (e.g. Thomas A. Trikalinos et al. (2004). Effect sizes in cumulative meta-analyses of mental health randomized trials evolved over time. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 57(11), 1124–1130. doi:10.1016/j.jclinepi.2004.02.018), a field with very rigorous established standards of research and also a powerful party with interests opposed to those of the primary researchers (inventors and marketers of new medical procedures and drugs vs. governments and insurance companies who pay the bills) — imagine what happens in a field like Evolutionary Psychology where there are much less established procedures and which relies a lot on questionnaire research in Western culture contexts, often using descriptive correlational findings in a specific culture as support for universal claims about causal genetic mechanisms. Actually, you don’t have to imagine, read „Why Most Published Research Findings Are False“ by John P. A. Ioannidis (PLoS Medicine 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124) who concludes in the abstract: „for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.“

While this doesn’t render the idea of „better“ and „worse“ research in the sense of correspondence with reality useless, it certainly underlines the importance of examining which „mistakes“ in research are systematic due to an explicit or implicit agenda of the researchers and the dynamics inherent in the development of a theory. And to take into account the „pragmatist’s questions“ when considering accepting certain findings and whole research programs as part of our worldview.

I think this is not often made explicit by feminist critiques of Evolutionary Psychology, but I believe that most of them operate from a perspective on science similar to mine. And this is where evolutionary psychologist completely miss the point, and prefer to think of themselves as a purely „positive“ science describing „facts“ — dismissing criticism as committing the „naturalistic fallacy“. Let me illustrate this with two excerpts about „sexual coercion“ (the non-scientific term would be rape):

More generally, we believe that proponents of all theoretical perspectives should keep an open mind about the scientific hypothesis (and it is only that, a hypothesis), that men may have evolved adaptations for sexual coercion. It should go without saying that rape is illegal, immoral, and terribly destructive to women, and should in no way be condoned, whatever the ultimate causes turn out to be. Unfortunately, what should go without saying has to be repeated over and over, since those who advance evolutionary psychological hypotheses are unjustly accused of somehow condoning or excusing rape. The naturalistic fallacy, mistakenly inferring an ought from an is, seems to be a particularly stubborn error committed by critics of evolutionary psychology, despite the many published descriptions of this error (e.g., Confer et al. 2010). (Buss & Schmitt, 2011, see above)

In this spirit of simply stating the facts, this is the abstract of an article concerned with the connection between different female „mating strategies“ and sexual victimization:

Women show stable individual differences in mating strategies ranging from short-term to long-term. Short-term mating strategies may put women at greater risk of sexual victimization through increased exposure to risky situations or to men most inclined to pursue a strategy of sexual coercion. To test these predictions, we studied female college students who had experienced a completed rape, an attempted sexual victimization, or no sexual victimization. Women’s mating strategies were assessed through the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory. Victims further reported whether they engaged in consensual intimate behaviors with their victimizer before or after the victimization. Victims of completed rape scored highest on short-term mating strategy pursuit; non-victims scored lowest; women experiencing attempted victimization scored between these two groups. Victims of completed rape also more frequently reported consensual kissing and intercourse with their victimizer before and after the victimization than women who experienced attempted victimization. The findings of this study should not be interpreted as blaming the victim, but rather as identifying circumstances that put women at greater risk. Clearly, perpetrators are to blame for sexual victimization. Discussion focuses on future research directions and on practical implications for reducing rates of sexual victimization. (Complete Abstract of Carin Perilloux, Joshua D. Duntley, David M. Buss (2011). Susceptibility to sexual victimization and women’s mating strategies. Personality and Individual Differences, 51, 783–786. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2011.06.032)

From a feminist point of view it is cynical (and will often lead to an emotional rather than cool-minded response) that these statements which so obviously contribute to what is called „Rape Culture“ refer to aspirations of reducing sexual violence as their practical implications. The pillars of Rape Culture relevant here, in a nutshell, are the cultural believes around „men cannot resist sexual temptations and control their urges (at least some, and at least at a certain point)“ and „Women can and should avoid being raped in a variety of ways, especially through the way they dress and by avoiding casual sexual encounters“. These believes are at odds with findings in the feminist tradition that rapists are on the one hand a quite distinct group of men, and rape cases show a considerable amount of deliberation in choice of victim and circumstances, contradicting the „impulse“ trope. And on the other hand, they are enabled by widespread reiteration of exactly these believes, especially by other men.

A personal eye-opener for me was a seminar by „Men Can Stop Rape“ which I attended during my internship in a counseling center specialized in issues of sexuality (which means a lot of abuse and rape) in Glasgow. The seminar was attended by both men and women, and the facilitator started by asking the question „What do men usually do to avoid being raped“. After some laughter, the two responses from the plenum which were written on the blackboard were „avoid going to jail“ and „don’t pick up the soap“. The same question asked concerning women yielded a long long list of behaviors related to being in vulnerable places in public and especially in the dark, and all sorts of safety behaviors around going out and dating. So while recommendations for women on how to avoid getting into „risky“ situations may sound reasonable especially to male researchers and laymen at first, there is already a ridiculous amount of concerns women carry around on the issue, severely limiting their freedom to live a rewarding life. And while they don’t provide any real safety, because they don’t really causally relate to rape, they might help a little bit by at least avoiding to provide excuses to the perpetrators. But again, there are so many things women are supposed to do to avoid getting raped that it will be hard to find a single rape case where the woman didn’t do something that is seen as related to getting raped, tilting public opinion and the outcome of a court case in favor of the perpetrator.

What has here been illustrated for the problem of rape (which I consider one of the most pressing ones) applies in a similar fashion to questions of work, access to jobs in leading positions or political responsibilities. It applies to questions of housework and childrearing. It applies to domestic violence and abuse, where a recent publication by the same group (David M. Buss & Joshua D. Duntley (2011). The evolution of intimate partner violence. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 16, 411–419. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2011.04.015) innocently reports findings like a link between sexual infidelity and being victimized.

The conclusion of this epistemological line of thought is that even though I cannot at this point provide the reasons (and they would be interesting to know), social science that doesn’t have an explicit sociopolitical agenda seems to always slip into having the same implicit one: maintaining the status quo. And I believe this to be especially true for Evolutionary Psychology, Psychology in general and, as I have recently begun taking up to demonstrate, Economics.

Related to this is my argument that all social sciences should be „reflexive“ in two ways: Be able to explain their own activity as scientists and researchers as part of the psychological and social theories they develop, and be aware of the effects of their descriptions of people and society on what people actually do. I have recently started to look into that for economics, and was especially surprised to find how ignorance of the way our social organization and the descriptions thereof shape our behavior leads economists to cling to a thoroughly disproved „founding myth“ of pre-market societies‘ economic structures. As a side note, as far as I can tell our actual knowledge about what life was like in the „deep evolutionary time“ that has a central role in Evolutionary Psychology arguments is very limited, and feminists have a point when they say that what evolutionary psychologists think about especially the gender relations of that era looks „suspiciously like the American 50s“.

For evolutionary psychologists who advocate that even complex high-level behavior such as romantic feelings and relationships are essentially governed by evolved psychological mechanisms in the service of self-preservation and procreation, the same assumption certainly has to be made for their research endeavors. It already does a lot to take the edge out of their claims to objectivity and universality if you view their activities and proclamations as a means of predominantly upper-class men to advance their access to desirable „mates“ by, e.g., claiming that what they have to offer on the „mating market“ is what women in general are (and most people will read: should be) looking for.

This naturally leads to the other side of the reflexivity issue. I strongly believe that a culture in which stories like this are passed around for facts will have different relationships than a culture with a different, or maybe just more diverse, story on the interactions between men and women:

Sexual conflict, for example, can occur on the “mating market” over whether or not sexual intercourse will occur or in the amount of time and investment required before sexual intercourse will occur. Deception and sexual persistence are two common tactics men use in the “battleground” of pre-mating sexual conflict (Buss, 1989a; Haselton, Buss, Oubaid, & Angleitner, 2005). Deflecting sexual attention, imposing longer time delays, and requiring additional signals of commitment are common tactics women use in the “battleground” of pre-mating sexual conflict. (Buss & Duntley, 2011, see above. Emphasis original)

First of all, take a moment to link the descriptions of normal and expected male „tactics“ like deception and sexual persistence back to the rape culture arguments. Second, while the argument makes immediate sense from a point of view of evolutionary logic, think about how well this describes what you observe in your own love life and that of the people around you. My personal answer to that is: not very. And while I don’t want to claim that personal experience is what science has to be measured against, I want to make the point that often to see the flaws in a certain argument you have to step out of the frame of reference of that argument (in this example: from abstract-logical to concrete-experiential). Thus my bottom line: A valid and successful feminist critique of Evolutionary Psychology does not try to disprove empirical claims to differences between men and women applying the same methods as Evolutionary Psychology does. It points out the flaws in Evolutionary Psychology’s objectivist scientific premise and holds it accountable for both motivations guiding the research process and practical implications of its results, including their public reception.

Where does all this leave Evolutionary Psychology as a field? In my opinion in need of an explicit agenda of why they are doing research and what they want to achieve with it. And a good argument as to how their products (both their explicit „findings“ as well as spreading their mode of thinking into popular culture) contributes to a better society. I believe that for some branches of Evolutionary Psychology, that can be done successfully. But for many others I am pessimistic, and this includes the whole field occupied with evolutionary gender roles and relations.

It also means that feminist critique that seems to misunderstand Evolutionary Psychology, especially where the „naturalistic fallacy“ comes into play, should be read as coming from some roughly constructivist-pragmatist viewpoint similar to what I have described, and as asking accountability for what findings and research process do to our actual social world. Which certainly doesn’t mean that all feminist critique is right. But a lot of it that sounds stupid if you stay within a positivist view of science suddenly makes sense if you appreciate what they are actually talking about.

The core argument is about how money came to be — which in most economic textbooks is explained as a logical development from a barter trade system, where you have to find somebody with a complementary need and offer in the marketplace. But this assumption about our economic past is soundly refuted by actual anthropological and historical research. It is very fascinating to follow the research as to what are actual probable pathways to money usage. And how economic activities were organized before that tells us a lot about how the economic system shapes even deep-rooted human qualities. The bottom line there is that behavior in accordance with „Homo Oeconomicus“ models probably only really came about after markets were invented. And it is because economists cannot (or don’t want to) imagine a human being with different ways of decision-making that they persist on the „money developed from barter trade“ myth despite solid evidence to the contrary. This is, again, in the service of not acknowledging the own status as a „reflexive“ social science which not only describes but also strongly influences human behavior and social processes.

So, first of all, how did people go about their business before money was around?

Anthropologists gradually fanned out into the world and began directly observing how economies where money was not used (or anyway, not used for everyday transactions) actually worked. What they discovered was an at first bewildering variety of arrangements, ranging from competitive gift-giving to communal stockpiling to places where economic relations centered on neighbors trying to guess each other’s dreams. What they never found was any place, anywhere, where economic relations between members of community took the form economists predicted: “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” Hence in the definitive anthropological work on the subject, Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey concludes, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing” [2]

A gift economy (even though that should not be read to imply selflessness) was probably the most common modus operandi among people who had established relationships, with rough judgments of equivalence between different kinds of goods:

a. The great flaw of the economic model is that it assumed spot transactions. I have arrowheads, you have beaver pelts, if you don’t need arrowheads right now, no deal. But even if we presume that neighbors in a small community are exchanging items in some way, why on earth would they limit themselves to spot transactions? If your neighbor doesn’t need your arrowheads right now, he probably will at some point in the future, and even if he won’t, you’re his neighbor—you will undoubtedly have something he wants, or be able to do some sort of favor for him, eventually. But without assuming the spot trade, there’s no double coincidence of wants problem, and therefore, no need to invent money.

b. What anthropologists have in fact observed where money is not used is not a system of explicit lending and borrowing, but a very broad system of non-enumerated credits and debts. In most such societies, if a neighbor wants some possession of yours, it usually suffices simply to praise it (“what a magnificent pig!”); the response is to immediately hand it over, accompanied by much insistence that this is a gift and the donor certainly would never want anything in return. In fact, the recipient now owes him a favor. Now, he might well just sit on the favor, since it’s nice to have others beholden to you, or he might demand something of an explicitly non-material kind (“you know, my son is in love with your daughter…”) He might ask for another pig, or something he considers roughly equivalent in kind. But it’s almost impossible to see how any of this would lead to a system whereby it’s possible to measure proportional values. After all, even if, as sometimes happens, the party owing one favor heads you off by presenting you with some unwanted present, and one considers it inadequate—a few chickens, for example—one might mock him as a cheapskate, but one is unlikely to feel the need to come up with a mathematical formula to measure just how cheap you consider him to be. As a result, as Chris Gregory observed, what you ordinarily find in such ‘gift economies’ is a broad ranking of different types of goods—canoes are roughly the same as heirloom necklaces, both are superior to pigs and whale teeth, which are superior to chickens, etc—but no system whereby you can measure how many pigs equal one canoe. [3]

The most common actual barter on the other hand is in long-distance trade, where people knew which goods the other party had, and that they had something to offer themselves which the others wanted. Graeber makes the argument that for that instance, there is no need to invent money when you can instead operate on the basis of „traditional fixed equivalences“. Instead, money would make you much more vulnerable to being robbed, and indeed it seems the Phoenicians, famous long-distance traders of the Classic World, adopted money usage very late.

And even in such trade among non-familiar groups, a social aspect seems to have been at least as important as the economic one:

The second example is the Gunwinngu of West Arnhem land in Australia, famous for entertaining neighbors in rituals of ceremonial barter called the dzamalag. Here the threat of actual violence seems much more distant. The region is also united by both a complex marriage system and local specialization, each group producing their own trade product that they barter with the others.

In the 1940s, an anthropologist, Ronald Berndt, described one dzamalag ritual, where one group in possession of imported cloth swapped their wares with another, noted for the manufacture of serrated spears. Here too it begins as strangers, after initial negotiations, are invited to the hosts’ camp, and the men begin singing and dancing, in this case accompanied by a didjeridu. Women from the hosts’ side then come, pick out one of the men, give him a piece of cloth, and then start punching him and pulling off his clothes, finally dragging him off to the surrounding bush to have sex, while he feigns reluctance, whereon the man gives her a small gift of beads or tobacco. Gradually, all the women select partners, their husbands urging them on, whereupon the women from the other side start the process in reverse, re-obtaining many of the beads and tobacco obtained by their own husbands. The entire ceremony culminates as the visitors’ men-folk perform a coordinated dance, pretending to threaten their hosts with the spears, but finally, instead, handing the spears over to the hosts’ womenfolk, declaring: “We do not need to spear you, since we already have!” [9]

In other words, the Gunwinngu manage to take all the most thrilling elements in the Nambikwara encounters—the threat of violence, the opportunity for sexual intrigue—and turn it into an entertaining game (one that, the ethnographer remarks, is considered enormous fun for everyone involved). In such a situation, one would have to assume obtaining the optimal cloth-for-spears ratio is the last thing on most participants’ minds. (And anyway, they seem to operate on traditional fixed equivalences.)

How did a need for money actually arise, then, and how could it happen? There are two answers — first as unit of calculation that was hardly ever handed over physically for long-distance trade and use in most notably temple bureaucracies. For this reason they usually took the form of equivalencies between „a common long-distance trade item [and] a common subsistence item“, e.g. silver and grain. Second, and to me quite surprisingly, it probably developed out of the legal system, where there was a need for specifying the appropriate compensation for material and moral offenses:

For example, Welsh and Irish codes contain extremely detailed price schedules where in the Welsh case, the exact value of every object likely to be found in someone’s house were worked out in painstaking detail, from cooking utensils to floorboards—despite the fact that there appear to have been, at the time, no markets where any such items could be bought and sold. The pricing system existed solely for the payment of damages and compensation—partly material, but particularly for insults to people’s honor, since the precise value of each man’s personal dignity could also be precisely quantified in monetary terms.

Here’s how Graeber sees the concept of Homo Oeconomicus as our natural state (which is implicit in the assumption that trade before money could only have taken the form of barter) refuted by these findings:

[…] it goes back precisely to this notion of rationality that Adam Smith too embraced: that human beings are rational, calculating exchangers seeking material advantage, and that therefore it is possible to construct a scientific field that studies such behavior. The problem is that the real world seems to contradict this assumption at every turn. Thus we find that in actual villages, rather than thinking only about getting the best deal in swapping one material good for another with their neighbors, people are much more interested in who they love, who they hate, who they want to bail out of difficulties, who they want to embarrass and humiliate, etc.—not to mention the need to head off feuds.

Even when strangers met and barter did ensue, people often had a lot more on their minds than getting the largest possible number of arrowheads in exchange for the smallest number of shells.

See the barter story above for illustration of the last point. The final argument is what all this implies for the role of Economics as a science, which is basically my old idea about necessary but mostly absent „reflexivity“:

At this point, it’s easier to understand why economists feel so defensive about challenges to the Myth of Barter, and why they keep telling the same old story even though most of them know it isn’t true. If what they are really describing is not how we ‘naturally’ behave but rather how we are taught to behave by the market—well who, nowadays, is doing most of the actual teaching? Primarily, economists. The question of barter cuts to the heart of not only what an economy is—most economists still insist that an economy is essentially a vast barter system, with money a mere tool (a position all the more peculiar now that the majority of economic transactions in the world have come to consist of playing around with money in one form or another) [10]—but also, the very status of economics: is it a science that describes of how humans actually behave, or prescriptive, a way of informing them how they should?

In a way, this really is an old argument: Whenever somebody tries to tell you a certain way of going about things, from gender roles to economic activities and social structures, is „natural“, they probably have an interest in you not looking for alternatives too hard. The sad thing is that they sometimes might not even be aware of this themselves, because their benefiting from the status quo is part of their unquestioned privilege.

(See the original article for all the references in [brackets])

The case becomes interesting and even illustrative because it pits two camps against each other that I both subscribe to: open communication (and sexuality) advocates and feminists. And because the fascinating issue of „privilege“ (in this case the classic „male privilege“) comes in, which I’m starting to find a useful figure of thought in a number of social issues. To give my conclusion away: I’m siding with the feminist critique. And here’s why:

The woman who made public her complaint about the guy’s behavior is Rebecca Watson, and here’s her summary (quoted from an article of hers about the back-and-forth discussions):

You may recall that last week I posted this video, in which I describe an unpleasant encounter I had with a fellow atheist that I thought might serve as a good example of what men in our community should strive to avoid – basically, in an elevator in Dublin at 4AM I was invited back to the hotel room of a man I had never spoken to before and who was present to hear me say that I was exhausted and wanted to go to bed.

I unfortunately couldn’t watch the video (yay, developing world internet) but on second reading I find it noteworthy how much apologies she feels she has to offer for taking offense — „he heard me say I was tired before“!

A probably prototypical criticism of her complaint is this, quoted by Watson from Stef McGraw from UNI Freethinkers:

My concern is that she takes issue with a man showing interest in her. What’s wrong with that? How on earth does that justify him as creepy? Are we not sexual beings? Let’s review, it’s not as if he touched her or made an unsolicited sexual comment; he merely asked if she’d like to come back to his room. She easily could have said (and I’m assuming did say), “No thanks, I’m tired and would like to go to my room to sleep.”

Now, I see two criticisms here (without any claim to being exhaustive). The first is the one Watson makes herself, saying that the comment in its first sentence

[…] demonstrates an ignorance of Feminism 101 – in this case, the difference between sexual attraction and sexual objectification. The former is great – be attracted to people! Flirt, have fun, make friends, have sex, meet the love of your life, whatever floats your boat. But the latter involves dismissing a person’s feelings, desires, and identity, with a complete disinterest in how one’s actions will affect the “object” in question.

True, but the to me more relevant line of thought starts when rising numbers of (especially male) commentators weigh in, like it seems even Richard Dawkins did (quoted from a comment by Jen McCreight):

The man in the elevator didn’t physically touch her, didn’t attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn’t even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that.

If she felt his behaviour was creepy, that was her privilege, just as it was the Catholics‘ privilege to feel offended and hurt when PZ nailed the cracker. PZ didn’t physically strike any Catholics. All he did was nail a wafer, and he was absolutely right to do so because the heightened value of the wafer was a fantasy in the minds of the offended Catholics. Similarly, Rebecca’s feeling that the man’s proposition was ‚creepy‘ was her own interpretation of his behaviour, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum. But he does me no physical damage and I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out of the elevator. It would be different if he physically attacked me.

What he basically says is: it’s all in her head. She had the freedom to interpret the guy’s „only words“ and it’s her own fault she interpreted in a way that offended her. And he ignores there are certain interpretations delivered by the context and history of men and women interacting, which he can be (and is) oblivious of because he is on the happy side of the gender divide in this respect. As Jen McCreight elaborates:

Words matter. You don’t get that because you’ve never been called a cunt, a faggot, a nigger, a kike. You don’t have people constantly explaining that you’re subhuman, or have the intellect of an animal. You don’t have people saying you shouldn’t have rights. You don’t have people constantly sexually harassing you. You don’t live in fear of rape, knowing that one wrong misinterpretation of a couple words could lead down that road.

You don’t, because you have fucking privilege.

And she links to a „privilege 101″ that has a nice metaphor about a furry dog and a lizard living together in a house in a temperate area, where the dog controls the air conditioning to keep the temperature low and nice for him. Now, when the lizard complains about the cold, the dog has no clue what cold feels like, because being too cold is no experience in his life. That’s his privilege, which, as is explicitly pointed out, is not his fault. The problem (and his wrong behavior) arises when he denies the feeling of cold could exist because he doesn’t know it, and makes a „in your head“ argument similar to Dawkins.

This is illustrated for human life with a (sadly commonplace) exchange about leering:

A man has the privilege of walking past a group of strange women without worrying about being catcalled, or leered at, or having sexual suggestions tossed at him.

A pretty common male response to this point is “that’s a privilege? I would love if a group of women did that to me.”

And that response, right there, is a perfect shining example of male privilege. [emphasis in the original]

Back to the dog and lizard, it looks like this:

So one day, she sees the dog messing with the A/C again, and she says, “hey. Dog. Listen, it makes me really cold when you do that.”

The dog kind of looks at her, and shrugs, and keeps turning the dial.

This is not because the dog is a jerk.

This is because the dog has no fucking clue what the lizard even just said.

Consider: he’s a nordic dog in a temperate climate. The word “cold” is completely meaningless to him. He’s never been cold in his entire life. He lives in an environment that is perfectly suited to him, completely aligned with his comfort level, a world he grew up with the tools to survive and control, built right in to the way he was born.

So the lizard tries to explain it to him. She says, “well, hey, how would you like it if I turned the temperature down on you?”

The dog goes, “uh… sounds good to me.” [emphasis in the original]

Back to humans, the relevant male privilege in a nutshell: „you don’t ever have to be wary of sexual interest“ [emphasis in the original].

This, as some commenters have rightfully pointed out, is of course not true, and that’s the twist in the privilege argument that I’m happy I found brought up and answered in the comments. Men do have to be wary of sexual interest in some circumstances, and not in all of them the perpetrator is another men (which isn’t even relevant to the argument, but an important point in its own right). In addition to that, one could talk about the (female) privilege of receiving sexual interest in the first place, the lack of which seems to be the reason why some men react so dismissingly to complaints about sexual harassment in the form of leering etc. The problem lies in the perspectives, as commentator LoneLobo sums up:

The parable is self-refuting because it both claims to offer knowledge of the subjective states of the dog and the lizard, then claims that precisely the reason privilege is incomprehensible to many dogs is because this sort of knowledge is impossible. That’s a big contradiction.

The practical effects on the parable are obvious: we have no way of knowing if the dog would not suffer equally by any change in temperature, or even if the dog also currently suffers as much or more than the lizard in the situation he is in. Thus, it is impossible to establish who has privilege in a situation, because that would require one of them or a third party knowing what both of them feel (which the parable says is impossible). It’s a logical contradiction. So the parable may be a fine illustration of the concept of privilege, but what it reveals is that this concept is severely flawed.

Which sounds reasonable, and can throw you into the abyss of relativism and so on. But got very wisely answered by a lauraT, thank you:

Listen, one thing. No the Lizard does not share some absolute knowledge of the Dog’s subjective existence, but he does have a better grasp on it than vice versa. Why? Because he lives in the Dog’s world, interacting with all of the structures that benefit the Dog and impede the Lizard.

This is like saying that any minority can’t possibly understand the majority world because they aren’t the majority, when the majority dominates almost every aspect of our shared culture and society except in the tiny niches said minority may have carved out as places to share their common aspect.

This minority, which doesn’t actually have to be a minority for this to be true, usually understands the dominant group better because they have to, they are constantly exposed to it and subjected to and often to exist on its terms.

The Other is not unfathomable, there is no “absolute otherness” in play here. We observe each other constantly, and part of the process of rectifying privilege is actually paying attention to the realness of the other persons experience, and that they may not have the option to conduct themselves on the same terms as you.

So, as always, a sound relativism or perspectivism is — relative. No side can objectively judge what the other side feels, nor is either side forever barred from learning and empathizing. But the starting point is obviously better (in terms of understanding the other’s life) for the party that has to live their life in the other’s world, so to speak, and has to do a lot of learning to get along.

But this is only a starting point, and in the knowledge of it we have to find ways of negotiating „privilege“, which so often finds the typical „but I am disadvantaged in this other area“ response (see my comment on Oppression Olympics if you haven’t already). We need to find a way to answer sentiments like increasing numbers of white people in the US feeling on the worse side of racism now [!], as indicated in a study also quoted by that same critical commentator. Again, this will have to be somewhere between objective and subjective. What in qualitative social research is called inter-subjective…

I liked watching the first few classes of Robert Sapolsky’s „Human Behavioral Evolution“ course at Stanford from 2010, which are available for free on iTunes U (yes, you need iTunes). Even though the pointedness and entertainment of his arguments can be a little too much for a European audience, I highly recommend it for everybody who wants to fill in gaps in his or her understanding of evolution. And for people who consider themselves solid on the basics, I recommend a 20-minute summary of the criticism of evolutionary biology, at least as it is perceived and used by the public. I’m talking about the last 20 minutes, starting at 1:14, of the lecture 3 — Behavioral Evolution II (April 2, 2010). Here is a brief summary:

Sapolsky argues that evolutionary theories are criticized in three basic assumptions that they rest on, which he calls:

• Heritability (of behavioral traits)
• Adaptiveness (of every feature of organisms)
• Gradualism (of the evolutionary process)

The main problem with the heritability assumption is, of course, that things are very muddy on the actual genetic/molecular level if you try to point to genes that are causal to certain behavioral trends. But (as I would add) this could be dismissed as a temporary problem, waiting for advances in the science involved. Nobody doubts the general role of the brain in causing our behavior just because our knowledge of the brain regions and processes involved is still very rudimentary.

Much more important to me, then, is the critique of the adaptiveness assumption. It has been argued (and Sapolsky himself is mostly convinced, as am I) that many observable features of organisms (including many behavioral features) are merely „spandrels“ (from architecture as „space between arches“), meaning they are there only as unavoidable by-products of something that evolution is really about. This has, for instance, been famously shown for the evolution of human chins as a by-product of our „shortened muzzle“, after interesting theories on the adaptive value of chins had been put forward. And that leads to another important critique of the adaptiveness arguments: They are mostly what Sapolsky calls „Just-So-Story-Contests“ — finding the most convincing story to explain why something is (and has to be) the way it is.

What was really new to me was the argument against the assumed gradual way in which evolution takes place, and which is the foundation of the famous idea that small advantages pay off over time. Actually, there is evidence pointing towards a more stepwise evolution, long phases of relative stability interrupted by short, drastic episodes of change, a theory called „punctuated equilibrium“. As a result, the element of constant competition which feature so centrally in our „narrative of evolution“ has to be revised, with its importance reduced drastically. And that’s quite a revolution, especially to the layperson’s perception of (social) evolution.

And I’m very happy that in this context he even discusses the political side of evolutionary theories of (human) behavior. Coincidentally, the dominant model of evolution, focussed on constant competition, was put forward by a number of white southern (US) male researchers, while the challenges and modifications come from researchers from the more politically liberal North-East of the US, called „Marxist“ by Sapolsky. And he mentions sociobiologists form the former Soviet Union who have developed models of evolution more focussed on the interaction with difficult external living conditions rather than the competition within a species, called „abiotic selection“. Whoever wants to claim that science is just progressing on its path of objective truth, with random imperfections that will be smoothed out over time, good luck

The range of social issues he mentions which are justified as „natural“ through the dominant understanding of evolution is broad, from male domination to social hierarchies, aggression and sexual coercion.

I am very impressed that somebody who so obviously enjoys looking at human behavior through the evolution glasses sides on most points with the critics who argue for keeping the researchers own interests, world-view and ideology in mind, and who modify the dominant image of evolution in ways that very much change the implications for our (human) social life that are commonly drawn. And I’m very curious how he will live up to that standard in the classes to come.

The picture that presents itself is shocking. A majority of randomized controlled trials of drugs is funded by the respective companies by now, they adhere to high scientific standards and are published in high-ranking peer-reviewed journals, and they still manage to be deceptive — for instance, being four times more likely to yield favorable results than independently funded studies in one comparison. How?

From the journal article:

The companies seem to get the results they want not by fiddling the results, which would be far too crude and possibly detectable by peer review, but rather by asking the “right” questions—and there are many ways to do this [10]. Some of the methods for achieving favourable results are listed in the Sidebar, but there are many ways to hugely increase the chance of producing favourable results, and there are many hired guns who will think up new ways and stay one jump ahead of peer reviewers.

Then, various publishing strategies are available to ensure maximum exposure of positive results. Companies have resorted to trying to suppress negative studies [11,12], but this is a crude strategy—and one that should rarely be necessary if the company is asking the “right” questions. A much better strategy is to publish positive results more than once, often in supplements to journals, which are highly profitable to the publishers and shown to be of dubious quality [13,14]. Companies will usually conduct multicentre trials, and there is huge scope for publishing different results from different centres at different times in different journals. It’s also possible to combine the results from different centres in multiple combinations.

These strategies have been exposed in the cases of risperidone [15] and odansetron [16], but it’s a huge amount of work to discover how many trials are truly independent and how many are simply the same results being published more than once. And usually it’s impossible to tell from the published studies: it’s necessary to go back to the authors and get data on individual patients.

Here are the „sidebar“ tricks to „ask the right questions“:

• Conduct a trial of your drug against a treatment known to be inferior.
• Trial your drugs against too low a dose of a competitor drug.
• Conduct a trial of your drug against too high a dose of a competitor drug (making your drug seem less toxic).
• Conduct trials that are too small to show differences from competitor drugs.
• Use multiple endpoints in the trial and select for publication those that give favourable results.
• Do multicentre trials and select for publication results from centres that are favourable.
• Conduct subgroup analyses and select for publication those that are favourable.
• Present results that are most likely to impress—for example, reduction in relative rather than absolute risk.

All that makes the work very hard for peer-reviewers, as most of these manipulations will not be visible in the manuscript and, as mentioned, could only be revealed through additional data provided from the authors…

The editors‘ and publishers‘ own financial interest play an important role, too, of course:

Publishers know that pharmaceutical companies will often purchase thousands of dollars‘ worth of reprints, and the profit margin on reprints is likely to be 70%. Editors, too, know that publishing such studies is highly profitable, and editors are increasingly responsible for the budgets of their journals and for producing a profit for the owners. Many owners—including academic societies—depend on profits from their journals. An editor may thus face a frighteningly stark conflict of interest: publish a trial that will bring US$100 000 of profit or meet the end-of-year budget by firing an editor.

The majority of high-ranking articles are by now payed for by the industry:

[…] between two-thirds and three-quarters of the trials published in the major journals—Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, and New England Journal of Medicine—are funded by the industry [9].

And the interest of the pharmaceutical companies is easily explained:

A large trial published in a major journal has the journal’s stamp of approval (unlike the advertising), will be distributed around the world, and may well receive global media coverage, particularly if promoted simultaneously by press releases from both the journal and the expensive public-relations firm hired by the pharmaceutical company that sponsored the trial. For a drug company, a favourable trial is worth thousands of pages of advertising, which is why a company will sometimes spend upwards of a million dollars on reprints of the trial for worldwide distribution. The doctors receiving the reprints may not read them, but they will be impressed by the name of the journal from which they come. The quality of the journal will bless the quality of the drug.

For how this is realized in practice, I highly recommend the Guardian article, but here is a decisive part about this new industry:

Drug companies exert this hold on knowledge through publication planning agencies, an obscure subsection of the pharmaceutical industry that has ballooned in size in recent years, and is now a key lever in the commercial machinery that gets drugs sold.

The planning companies are paid to implement high-impact publication strategies for specific drugs. They target the most influential academics to act as authors, draft the articles, and ensure that these include clearly-defined branding messages and appear in the most prestigious journals.

[…]

There are now at least 250 different companies engaged in the business of planning clinical publications for the pharmaceutical industry, according to the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals, which said it has over 1000 individual members.

Now, the most interesting aspect of the PLoS article is maybe its recommendations for solving that problem, particularly this radical idea:

Secondly, journals should perhaps stop publishing trials. Instead, the protocols and results should be made available on regulated Web sites. Only such a radical step, I think, will stop journals from being beholden to companies. Instead of publishing trials, journals could concentrate on critically describing them.

That would be pretty interesting work for a researcher! But he or she would still need somebody to pay for that, and it would certainly not be the industry.

I bought it in Palo Alto before my real traveling started, and it has lasted me well into the second quarter of this year, of course as frequent visitors of my blog know with another big and some small readings in between.

Once again, my generally high esteem of artists‘ late work was reinforced — while the original book is funny, the later books are far better. I laughed my hardest reading the second last one, „So Long and Thanks for All the Fish“, and the last one, „Mostly Harmless“, apart from still being very funny, I found most insightful. That despite how I just read on Wikipedia the author himself describing this book as „bleak“, and saying he had a very bad year when he wrote it. I suppose that tells us something about the relationship between art and happiness…

Anyway, here are just some examples of important topics of life made understandable with the help of absurdity, Science-Fiction at its best.

Let’s start with Astrology, explained by a modern (you could say cynical) Astrologer, and en passant Parliamentary Democracy, Psychology and maybe life itself…

„I know that astrology isn’t a science,“ said Gail. „Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or, what’s that strange thing you British play?“

„Er, cricket? Self-loathing?“

„Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.“

In a similar vain, and maybe taking that thought one step further, we get a cosmology for Constructivism (or at least you can look at it like that)…

The first thing to realize about parallel universes, the Guide says, is that they are not parallel.

It is also important to realize that they are not, strictly speaking, universes either, but it is easiest if you try and realize that a little later, after you’ve realized that everything you’ve realized up to that moment is not true.

The reason they are not universes is that any given universe is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at what is technically known as the WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of General Mish Mash. The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash doesn’t actually exist either, but is just the sum total of all the different ways there would be of looking at it if it did.

The reason they are not parallel is the same reason that the sea is not parallel. It doesn’t mean anything. You can slice the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and you will generally come up with something that someone will call home.

Please feel free to blither now.

Next up, a painfully accurate description of the history (and in many ways present working) of scientific Psychology:

Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.

Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (The MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).

A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, „Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.“

It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, „Ah! A herring sandwich…, etc., and repeated the same action over and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot.

The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper to this effect, which was widely criticized as being extremely stupid. They checked their figures and realized that what they had actually discovered was „boredom“, or rather, the practical function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went on to discover other emotions, Like „irritability“, „depression“, „reluctance“, „ickiness“ and so on. The next big breakthrough came when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for study, such as „relief“, „joy“, „friskiness“, „appetite“, „satisfaction“, and most important of all, the desire for „happiness“. This was the biggest breakthrough of all.

Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out for themselves.

Also one of my favorites, and very suitable to the recent debate about (former) Pope John Paul II’s Beatification:

He had discovered that the reason for the carnival atmosphere on Saquo-Pilia Hensha was that the local people were celebrating the annual feast of the Assumption of St Antwelm. St Antwelm had been, during his lifetime, a great and popular king who had made a great and popular assumption. What King Antwelm had assumed was that what everybody wanted, all other things being equal, was to be happy and enjoy themselves and have the best possible time together. On his death he had willed his entire personal fortune to financing an annual festival to remind everyone of this, with lots of good food and dancing and very silly games like Hunt the Wocket. His Assumption had been such a brilliantly good one that he was made into a saint for it. Not only that, but all the people who had previously been made saints for doing things like being stoned to death in a thoroughly miserable way or living upside down in barrels of dung were instantly demoted and were now thought to be rather embarrassing.

So much for the more or less deep thoughts. Here’s something that became relevant to me in trying to get the concept of definite (e.g. „the“) and indefinite (e.g. „a“) articles across to people who’s native language doesn’t feature articles at all:

Ford shouted in Arthur’s ear, „Where did he say we were going?“

„He said something about a King,“ shouted Arthur in return, holding on desperately.

„What King?“

„That’s what I said. He just said the King.“

„I didn’t know there was a the King,“ shouted Ford.

„Nor did I,“ shouted Arthur back.

I’ll finish with two little quotes that are well worth becoming aphorisms (and which I have, accordingly, added to my growing Quotes Collection). The first can be seen as relevant to psychological practice, but certainly at least as much to a traveller in different cultures like myself:

It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training. — Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Mostly Harmless, p. 742, 1992

And the second, which has the beauty and limitation of perspectivist thought in a nutshell:

“I think we have different value systems” – “Well, mine’s better” – “That’s according to your… oh, never mind.” — Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Mostly Harmless, p. 772, 1992

His argument is basically that the assumption of rationally maximized utility (elaborating the obvious flaws of which has been a favorite area of research in Economics recently) has come to much greater influence than it deserves because it is conductive to a certain way of doing science, which earns merit in the world of scientists:

But notice that I’ve framed this in terms of “reasonable” behavior; it’s a lot harder to tell these stories in terms of perfectly rational, maximizing behavior.

One response — a pretty good response — is, “So?” After all, maximization isn’t a fact about human behavior, it’s a gadget — an assumption we use to cut through the complexities of psychology and all that, one that can be very useful if it clarifies your thought, but by no means an axiom or a law of nature.

But maximizing models have a special appeal for modern academic economists: they require solving equations! They’re rigorous! They make it easy to show that you’re doing “real research”. And so maximization tends to acquire a bigger importance in economic thought than it deserves.

And he continues to claim that an essential part of what goes on in economic life has been lost in this process, because it didn’t go well with the preferred way to do research. Sadly, the part that would (have) helped a lot in dealing with (preventing) the Financial Crisis:

But from the 1970s onwards, what happened was that the drive to base everything on maximizing behavior narrowed the profession’s thinking — and, crucially, led first to a de-emphasis, then to a total forgetting, of the great insights about interaction. We created an economics profession which believed that Keynesian economics, and for that matter Bagehotian finance, had been “proved wrong”; whereas all that had really happened was that those things proved hard to model in terms of perfectly rational maximizing agents. Again, so?

I believe this to be true at least also in my field, Psychology — the current choice of method (which is, like Economics, centered around computation and modeling) is blind to many important aspects of what is going on in life.

The problem here is obviously how merit is ascribed by fellow researchers, how quality is defined. Social sciences (in which I include Economics, whether or not economists like that) are still trying to copy the (natural) Sciences in this respect. But I am hopeful, with people like this Nobel laureate speaking up. I wish we had a voice like that in Psychology.

But then, I feel that at least we are actually taught alternative ways of doing science, if only marginally. Are there any alternative methods in Economics waiting to be promoted?

Life in the zone comes at a hight cost for the individuals and species involved:

They have gathered a rising mountain of data and published dozens of papers, all suggesting that the chronic low-level radioactivity of the zone and the hot particles that find their way into the soil and food in the area cause long-term damage to the organisms that live there. In barn swallows, they found deformed beaks and eyes, tumors, damaged toes, and asymmetrical tails. (All of these changes, of course, can make the birds less successful at catching food, migrating, and breeding.) They also found high rates of dead or deformed sperm in birds nesting in the most contaminated areas, further demonstrating the reproductive cost of living in the zone. When they examined a wider sample of bird species, and then invertebrates and spiders, they found similar results: “a very strong signal of contamination effects on abundance and biodiversity,” Mousseau says. In other words, populations declined as radioactivity increased. The evidence of the damage caused by the contamination was alarming: Gathering their results on abnormalities in barn swallows for a Biology Letters paper that same year, they described the external examination of 7,700 individual birds, declaring it “the most extensive data set on abnormalities in animals ever recorded.”

So much so that it seems it requires a constant inflow of animals to sustain the populations.

Most startlingly, in 2005, Møller and Mousseau did a chemical analysis of the feathers of swallows captured in Ukraine and Denmark to identify where each bird had spent its winter migration. They compared the results with those from specimens caught in Ukraine before 1986, found in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History in Kiev, and noticed a distinct pattern. Barn swallows were now coming into the zone for the summer from a greater number of locations than before the accident. This suggested that the population of birds living in contaminated areas around Chernobyl was not sustaining itself without outside help: The area was a sink. Given the low survival and fertility rates, the population could only be propped up by constant immigration. And what is true for swallows might also be true for the other species whose presence in the zone, drawn in by the absence of humans, has seemed so remarkable.

There are of course also critics cited, but it seems much of it is due to the politics that the science either way would have direct and strong implications for. The argument sounds pretty solid and differentiated to me:

“I’ve never seen any data related to any kind of census, any kind of quantitative assessment of numbers,” Mousseau says. (Indeed, Gaschak’s assertions about the population density of large mammals in the zone are based on observational estimates.) This year, Møller and Mousseau hope to finally gather enough data to conclusively establish the density and abundance of mammal populations in the zone, returning with a team to conduct a widespread census. In the meantime, they have continued to produce attention-grabbing research on avian life. At the beginning of February, the online journal PLoS ONE published their latest paper, showing that birds they captured within the zone had brains 5 percent smaller than those they found outside it. “Microcephaly,” Møller says. “A common condition in humans in Ukraine in these contaminated areas.”

Which raises a key point: If the entire debate about the ecosystem of Chernobyl were simply about the fate of barn swallows or wild boar, the conflict might be easily dismissed as arcane bickering between biologists. But the stakes are much higher, because the animal studies may shed real light on the effects of long-term radiation exposure on humans. Post-Chernobyl, obtaining statistically significant epidemiological data on cancer was complicated by Soviet-era secrecy and disinformation and by the scattering of the hundreds of thousands of workers who participated in the cleanup and then returned to their homes across the Soviet Union.

But one of the few certainties to emerge from research into low-level radiation since 1986 is that different species react to chronic exposure in different ways. Pine trees cope less well than birch. Migrant barn swallows are apparently very radio-sensitive, resident birds less so. Winter wheat seeds taken from the Exclusion Zone in the days after the disaster and since germinated in uncontaminated soil have produced thousands of different mutant strains, and every new generation remains genetically unstable, even 25 years after the accident. Yet a 2009 study of soybeans grown near the reactor seemed to show that the plants change at a molecular level to protect themselves against radiation. No one can be certain where human beings might fall on this continuum of DNA damage and long-term adaptation. “That’s what we want to know,” Møller says. “Are we more like barn swallows or soybeans in terms of radiation-induced mutation?”

Finding the answer to this question may take decades or even centuries. The genetic effects of chronic radiation exposure on each species studied so far have often been subtle and varied and only conclusively shown after many generations. The potential genetic changes in human beings—only now producing their third generation, as the children of the liquidators themselves raise families—may take hundreds of years to fully unravel. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government, seemingly satisfied with the anecdotal evidence of the zone-based research team, is pushing ahead with its plan to open the zone to tourism. Sergey Gaschak fears that future plans will include repopulating the Exclusion Zone at the earliest opportunity.

Some of the chemistry involved:

While iodine-131 decayed long ago and the strontium and cesium are slowly becoming less potentially lethal, the hot particles of plutonium-241 scattered across the landscape are actually decaying into an even more toxic isotope, americium-241. A more powerful emitter of alpha radiation than plutonium, americium is also more soluble and can easily find its way into the food chain. Americium-241, in turn, decays into neptunium-237, another energetic alpha emitter that has a half-life of more than 2 million years. As of yet, the long-term effect of americium-241 on animals remains largely unknown.

PS: Some more awesome comics from the same source:

• Pain Rating & Imagination
• Statistical Significance, Jelly Beans and Cancer
• Science & Wonder
• The Secret Behind Productivity
• Charity
• Mathematical Look at Advertising
• IPv6