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Scientists show how sperm and egg come together like a key in a lock

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Scientists show how sperm and egg come together like a key in a lock

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Scientists Show How Sperm and Egg Come Together Like a Key in a Lock

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Scientists have pinpointed how sperm and egg fuse together across the animal kingdom, from fish to people

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Are synthetic food dyes bad for you? Here's what the science says. 

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Are synthetic food dyes bad for you? Here's what the science says. 

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Are synthetic food dyes bad for you? Here’s the science.

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California is banning them in schools. The FDA says they’re fine. But synthetic dyes added to food to make them more colorful have a long, troubled history.

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Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior unerths paleontology's biases

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Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior unerths paleontology's biases

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Paleontologist David Hone’s latest book fleshes out our understanding of dinosaur behavior.

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Isabelle Boemeke: Nuclear power is our best hope to ditch fossil fuels

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Nuclear power is one of the safest, cleanest forms of energy -- yet to most people, it might not feel that way. Why is that? Isabelle Boemeke, the world’s first nuclear energy influencer and creator of the social media persona Isodope, deftly debunks the major objections to nuclear power and explains her unconventional way of educating people about this clean energy source.

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Around the turn of the 6th century B.C., beside the Aegean Sea in the city of Miletus, the first Greek philosopher concluded that "all is water." His name was Thales. His pupil, Anaximander, disagreed - he believed the underlying substance of the universe was "indefinite stuff." His own student, Anaximenes, thought it was air.

These ideas seem fantastic, but in them the scientific mind is taking root. They're arguably the first competing hypotheses, marking "a shift away from mythological explanations," says Brian Hepburn, a philosopher of science at Wichita State University. Setting aside gods and supernatural forces, these philosophers instead base their understanding of nature on observation. In other words, they employ a rudimentary form of what we now call scientific method .

Thales and his disciples influenced Aristotle, who in turn deeply influenced every prominent Western philosopher for the next two and a half millennia - that includes Francis Bacon, who repackaged scientific method for the modern age and set the agenda for the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Since then, science has earned its place among the most fruitful human enterprises. Not only is it "the most robust and rigorous tradition we have of applying scrutiny to stories about the world," Hepburn says, but it also "allows you to do things like build an Internet or a GPS satellite, or send a rocket to the moon." And, as the cosmologist Hermann Bondi put it, "There is no more to science than its method."

But for all its success, and all the legend surrounding it, this blueprint for knowledge-gathering isn't as simple as it appears in textbooks. For 500 years scientists and philosophers have argued over how it ought to work, and these days many question whether it even makes sense to search for the scientific method - history suggests there are many.

The Beginning of Method

What makes science, science? The details vary tremendously across time, space and field of study. For Aristotle, its foundation was passive observation of nature. In the modern age, it often involves experimentation, too. Besides these, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , the most common elements are "inductive and deductive reasoning, and the formation and testing of hypotheses and theories."

Bacon - often called the "father of empiricism" - thought of these strategies as an intellectual toolset for when our own cognitive abilities fall short. "The unassisted hand and the understanding left to itself possess little power," he writes in the opening lines of the Novum Organum ("New Organon" - a reference to Aristotle's logical treatise, the Organon , in which he gave perhaps the first guidelines for scientific inquiry). "Effects are produced by the means of instruments and helps," Bacon continues, "which the understanding requires no less than the hand."

As the microscope and telescope reveal spheres of reality hidden to the naked eye, so scientific method grants us myopic humans a view into the deeper structure of the natural world. This is crucial, since science often deals with objects and processes that are inaccessible, whether physically (the center of the Earth), temporally (the evolution of life) or intellectually (quantum mechanics).

Apart from his method, Bacon made no major discoveries himself. But a contemporary of his, Galileo Galilei - also sometimes called the "father of science" - put the new method to good use in his famous motion experiments and astronomical observations. Then came science's next superstar, Isaac Newton, with his monumental laws of motion and gravitation. In the Principia Mathematica , Newton even formulated his own methodological rules, or " regulae philosophandi ," for scientific reasoning.

Induction vs. Deduction

Scientists, and humans in general, use two modes of reasoning: inductive and deductive. Inductive reasoning moves from particular observations (all the birds I've seen have wings) to general claims (all birds have wings). Deductive reasoning works in the other direction, from information you already know (all men are mortal) to specific conclusions (Steve is a man, so Steve is mortal).

Both Bacon and Newton considered themselves inductivists. Newton made a point to say he "feigned no hypotheses," using derisively what is now a perfectly conventional scientific term. Charles Darwin also claimed to operate inductively when he constructed the theory of evolution, building from the ground up with his studies of Galapagos finches and other animals.

But the century after Newton brought David Hume, an Enlightenment philosopher who framed one of the great epistemological dilemmas: The problem of induction . Basically, he argued, there is no justification for assuming that what you do know has any bearing on what you don't know, or that the future will resemble the past. It makes no difference how many times a rock falls back to Earth after you throw it up - no logical necessity requires it to do so the next time.

In science, inductivism's counterpart is hypothetico-deductivism , in which you start with a hypothesis, deduce its implications, and test for them. A hypothesis can be as complex as Newton's idea that "all matter exerts force on all other matter," or as simple as "all knives are sharp." From there, you predict that X will happen if your hypothesis is correct, and see if X does happen. In this case, X is that you will find only sharp knives, so if you find a dull one you must reject the hypothesis. On the other hand, if you find 100 knives and each one is sharp, you might move the hypothesis up a rung on the ladder of confirmation.

The Rigorous Road to Theory

It should be clear from this example that no hypothesis can ever be definitively confirmed (the investigator has yet to encounter a butter knife). In fact, the scientist's goal should be to disprove the hypothesis, as emphasized by the influential 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper. If a claim can't be disproven, it's not falsifiable. And, as he wrote in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, "in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality" (the existence of ghosts and God, for example, fall into this category).

But it's equally important to understand that this inevitable uncertainty doesn't diminish the aim of science. In Popper's system of "falsificationism," the more scientists test a theory without refuting it, the more likely it is to be accurate - the better "corroborated" it is, in laboratory lingo. If it survives enough scrutiny, it earns the title of "theory," like Albert Einstein's general relativity or Nicolaus Copernicus's heliocentrism.

When scientists use the word "theory," they don't mean it in the colloquial sense of "just a theory." Quite the opposite: It's the highest honor an empirical explanation can receive. A theory may be wrong, of course, since the problem of induction prevents absolute certainty. But the rigors of scientific method do make it unlikely that any will gain consensus without formidable evidence.

Scientists are especially vigilant in assessing evidence that contradicts a well-established theory. When a team of researchers claimed in 2011 to have detected neutrinos moving faster than light - doing the impossible, that is - the British physicist Jim Al-Khalili was so prepared to defend the cosmic speed limit that he vowed to " eat my boxer shorts on live TV " if it turned out to be true. Luckily, within a year, further analysis spared him the embarrassment.

Scientists can be sometimes too obstinate in resisting new theories. Near the turn of the 20th century, when data on Mercury's orbit discredited Newton's longstanding gravitational laws, many physicists were wary. Even after decades of evidence favored relativity over Newtonian physics, "there were some who never accepted it," says Peter Vickers, a philosopher of science at Durham University. "They went to their graves saying, 'The theory's fine.'" Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, cynically remarked that a new scientific truth doesn't triumph by convincing everyone, "but rather because its opponents eventually die."

Even so, new generations have always accepted the truth (or the best available version). That, Vickers says, is the point. Scientific method is no guarantee against error in individual cases - it just ensures the wider scientific world will set the record straight. "People are going in all sorts of different directions, and many are blind alleys," he says. "But the idea is that the community as a whole moves forward."

Back to the Scientists

Vickers counts himself among the "science-first" philosophers of science, a recent movement that focuses on how scientists actually practice their craft. Considering their "manifest successes," if a philosophical view claims they should operate differently than they do, he'd sooner toss out the philosophical view. "That comes from the track record of science," he says. "At some point it's undeniable that scientists have got something right."

Take virology. Virus particles are far too small to actually observe as they go about infecting hosts and ravaging their bodies. An extreme skeptic might say scientists don't truly understand these processes, but that didn't prevent the eradication of polio (or the rapid development of a COVID-19 vaccine). At the astronomical end of the spectrum, no one has viewed the sun from close enough to be sure it's a star, yet "no scientist in the world would doubt that," Vickers says. "We've established some things beyond all reasonable doubt."

All that's to say: Science is doing fine. Indeed, it's unclear to what extent the shifting philosophical trends have shaped the course of science. ("Probably not much, Vickers says, although some prominent scientists have cited Popper as a major influence. Bondi's above quote continues: "There is no more to science than its method, and there is no more to its method than Popper has said.")

To accept a science-first philosophy is also to abandon the notion of the one true scientific method, as many philosophers have in recent decades. Nicolas Rasmussen, a historian of science at the University of New South Wales, likened the "ongoing quest" for a single method (or even a few) to "the forlorn leaping of salmon against an insurmountable dam."

At the broadest level, of course, science deploys all the methodological elements. But zooming in on specialized fields and individual scientists, it's clear they differ. As a theoretical physicist, Einstein used deductive reasoning to arrive at his theories, experimenting only in his own mind. Then there's Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin inductively, by noticing a peculiar mold in a petri dish and examining its properties.

Two celebrated scientists, yet "the kinds of practice they're doing from day to day are completely different," Vickers says. "I think a lot of philosophers now would look at all those theories of scientific method and say all of those get used sometimes, by somebody, in some context. And that's what you want."

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What Is the Scientific Method and How Did It Shape Science?

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How careful observation, strict reasoning and clever hypotheses guided the great human endeavor of science.

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NARRATOR: Remember when Pluto was a planet? Until very recently, Pluto's planetary status was an immutable fact learned by primary school kids the world over. Pluto had an undisputed place in papier mâché models of the solar system and even its very own song lyric 'And last of all there's Pluto too...' But in August 2006, Pluto found itself cruelly demoted to a dwarf planet after failing to meet one of three criteria the International Astronomical Union uses to define a full-sized planet. We are taught from an early age to think of scientific facts as, well, facts. And it can be unsettling when this turns out to not be the case. But does this uncertainty really mean that we can't trust science? According to the Royal Society, the world's oldest independent scientific academy, the answer is quite the opposite. Questioning established facts is actually at the heart of the scientific method. Think of the whole process as a giant system of checks and balances based on raw information drawn from experiments or observations of nature. Those experiments and observations lead to the formulation of a hypothesis which then goes through a rigorous process of checks by other scientists. However, there isn't always enough information to draw the right conclusions. Take for example Sir Francis Bacon, who noticed that the coastlines of West Africa and eastern South America looked like they were symmetrical. He believed that nature was copying herself. What he couldn't have known in the early 1620s was that the two coasts are two sides of a fault-line in an ancient supercontinent which split apart 140 million years ago. Bacon's hypothesis remained gospel for centuries, until new discoveries about the science of plate tectonics emerged in the 1950s and provided a neat explanation for Bacon's observation. There's also the fact that different experts examining the same raw data can draw different conclusions. Spare a thought for poor Robert Plot who, in the 1670s, found a fossilised bone that he thought was that of a giant human. At least he wasn't around when a geologist and zoologist proved it was in fact a Megalosaurus, a kind of dinosaur that roamed the Earth in the middle Jurassic. Sometimes the scientific method is all about setting up ground-breaking experiments at the right time, in the right place to test theories. In 1919, a blockbuster meeting of the Royal Society confirmed Einstein's theory of general relativity after a solar eclipse provided the perfect circumstances to measure the bending of starlight. This showed that the gravity of a massive object, such as the Sun, could bend light around it. Under the watchful eye of Sir Isaac Newton's portrait, the scientific community replaced Newton's previous theory with Einstein's newer and more general interpretation of gravity. But even with evidence in its favour, Einstein's theory still can't be thought of as a fundamental fact. It's even possible that in the future new breakthroughs will supersede our understanding of general relativity. Uncertainty in science isn't enough if all the perspectives are the same. Sometimes a lack of diversity in the system can skew the results. Until the 1970s, primatologists were mostly men and tended to limit their studies to male primates. They believed that the aggression observed in baboons meant human evolution had been driven by similar behaviour. That was until anthropologist Shirley Strum began observing both female and male baboons, disproving these earlier theories and facing a backlash for her troubles. Scientists don't always get it right on the first go. But rather than instilling doubt, it should inspire confidence that outdated ideas are replaced when new information becomes available. It's the difference between upgrading your mobile and clinging to your old rotary phone because you don't want to be wrong. And in most cases, newer breakthroughs would not be possible without the legwork that came before them. While the rotary phone isn't the best available technology today, your smart phone wouldn't exist without it. Uncertainty is baked into the scientific process. It's the fundamental reason that progress is possible. Ultimately, it comes down to who you trust more the person who's certain they're right, or the person who's willing to be proved wrong.

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Why getting things wrong is good for science - BBC Ideas

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When new facts emerge does it mean science can't be trusted? Quite the opposite. Here's why a little bit of uncertainty is a good thing.

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Welcome to BBC Earth, a place to explore the natural world through awe-inspiring documentaries, podcasts, stories and more.

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How Science Will Solve the Omicron Variant’s Mysteries

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So far, panic about the mysterious new Covid variant has outpaced actual information. Here’s what scientists around the world are trying to uncover.

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Watson and Crick, Schrödinger and Einstein all made theoretical breakthroughs that have changed the world's understanding of science.

Today big, game-changing ideas are less common. New and improved techniques are the driving force behind modern scientific research and discoveries. They allow scientists - including chemists like me - to do our experiments faster than before, and they shine light on areas of science hidden to our predecessors.

Three cutting-edge techniques - the gene-editing tool CRISPR, fluorescent proteins and optogenetics - were all inspired by nature. Biomolecular tools that have worked for bacteria, jellyfish and algae for millions of years are now being used in medicine and biological research. Directly or indirectly, they will change the lives of everyday people.

Bacterial defense systems as genetic editors

Bacteria and viruses battle themselves and one another. They are at constant biochemical war, competing for scarce resources.

One of the weapons that bacteria have in their arsenal is the CRISPR-Cas system. It is a genetic library consisting of short repeats of DNA gathered over time from hostile viruses, paired with a protein called Cas that can cut viral DNA as if with scissors. In the natural world, when bacteria are attacked by viruses whose DNA has been stored in the CRISPR archive, the CRISPR-Cas system hunts down, cuts and destroys the viral DNA.

Scientists have repurposed these weapons for their own use, with groundbreaking effect. Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist based at the University of California, Berkeley, and French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the development of CRISPR-Cas as a gene-editing technique.

The Human Genome Project has provided a nearly complete genetic sequence for humans and given scientists a template to sequence all other organisms. However, before CRISPR-Cas, we researchers didn't have the tools to easily access and edit the genes in living organisms. Today, thanks to CRISPR-Cas, lab work that used to take months and years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars can be done in less than a week for just a few hundred dollars.

There are more than 10,000 genetic disorders caused by mutations that occur on only one gene, the so-called single-gene disorders. They affect millions of people. Sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease are among the most well-known of these disorders. These are all obvious targets for CRISPR therapy because it is much simpler to fix or replace just one defective gene rather than needing to correct errors on multiple genes.

For example, in preclinical studies, researchers injected an encapsuled CRISPR system into patients born with a rare genetic disease, transthyretin amyloidosis, that causes fatal nerve and heart conditions. Preliminary results from the study demonstrated that CRISPR-Cas can be injected directly into patients in such a way that it can find and edit the faulty genes associated with a disease. In the six patients included in this landmark work, the encapsuled CRISPR-Cas minimissiles reached their target genes and did their job, causing a significant drop in a misfolded protein associated with the disease.

Jellyfish light up the microscopic world

The crystal jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, which drifts aimlessly in the northern Pacific, has no brain, no anus and no poisonous stingers. It is an unlikely candidate to ignite a revolution in biotechnology. Yet on the periphery of its umbrella, it has about 300 photo-organs that give off pinpricks of green light that have changed the way science is conducted.

This bioluminescent light in the jellyfish stems from a luminescent protein called aequorin and a fluorescent molecule called green fluorescent protein, or GFP. In modern biotechnology GFP acts as a molecular lightbulb that can be fused to other proteins, allowing researchers to track them and to see when and where proteins are being made in the cells of living organisms. Fluorescent protein technology is used in thousands of labs every day and has resulted in the awarding of two Nobel Prizes, one in 2008 and the other in 2014. And fluorescent proteins have now been found in many more species.

This technology proved its utility once again when researchers created genetically modified COVID-19 viruses that express GFP. The resulting fluorescence makes it possible to follow the path of the viruses as they enter the respiratory system and bind to surface cells with hairlike structures.

Algae let us play the brain neuron by neuron

When algae, which depend on sunlight for growth, are placed in a large aquarium in a darkened room, they swim around aimlessly. But if a lamp is turned on, the algae will swim toward the light. The single-celled flagellates - so named for the whiplike appendages they use to move around - don't have eyes. Instead, they have a structure called an eyespot that distinguishes between light and darkness. The eyespot is studded with light-sensitive proteins called channelrhodopsins.

In the early 2000s, researchers discovered that when they genetically inserted these channelrhodopsins into the nerve cells of any organism, illuminating the channelrhodopsins with blue light caused neurons to fire. This technique, known as optogenetics, involves inserting the algae gene that makes channelrhodopsin into neurons. When a pinpoint beam of blue light is shined on these neurons, the channelrhodopsins open up, calcium ions flood through the neurons and the neurons fire.

Using this tool, scientists can stimulate groups of neurons selectively and repeatedly, thereby gaining a more precise understanding of which neurons to target to treat specific disorders and diseases. Optogenetics might hold the key to treating debilitating and deadly brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

But optogenetics isn't only useful for understanding the brain. Researchers have used optogenetic techniques to partially reverse blindness and have found promising results in clinical trials using optogenetics on patients with retinitis pigmentosa, a group of genetic disorders that break down retinal cells. And in mouse studies, the technique has been used to manipulate heartbeat and regulate bowel movements of constipated mice.

What else lies within nature's toolbox?

What undiscovered techniques does nature still hold for us?

According to a 2018 study, people represent just 0.01% of all living things by mass but have caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of all plants in our brief time on Earth. By annihilating nature, humankind might be losing out on new, powerful and life-altering techniques without having even imagined them.

[ Over 100,000 readers rely on The Conversation's newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

After all, no one could have foreseen that the discovery of three groundbreaking processes derived from nature could change the way science is done.

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From CRISPR to glowing proteins to optogenetics - scientists' most powerful technologies have been borrowed from nature

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Watson and Crick, Schrödinger and Einstein all made theoretical breakthroughs that have changed the world's understanding of science. Today big, game-changing ideas are less common. New and improved techniques are the driving force behind modern scientific research and discoveries.

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Why mercy killing wild animals is so controversial

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Why mercy killing wild animals is so controversial

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Two wild animals that strayed from their ordinary habitats and into close proximity to humans were recently killed in high-profile cases. The life of Freya the walrus was ended by officials in Oslo on August 14 2022, reportedly because the animal posed a threat to humans. Four days earlier, the life of a beluga whale that had strayed into France's Seine River was ended during a failed rescue attempt.

Many people followed the whereabouts of these animals, cared about their welfare, and were shocked and saddened by their deaths. A private fundraising campaign has even been set up to erect a statue of Freya in Oslo, with its creators arguing that the walrus should not have been killed.

Although the decisions to end the lives of the beluga whale and Freya the walrus were based on different factors, they both ultimately expose the contested nature of animal euthanasia, which is often referred to as " mercy killing ".

As a researcher of animal end-of-life situations and the decision-making behind animal euthanasia, I know these decisions aren't taken lightly. But they're also different from case to case, informed by different ethical perspectives on the moral value of animals.

Why we disagree

Public disagreements about when animals should be killed reflect the diversity of views in society about how we should treat animals. We tend to treat wild animals differently to kept animals, for instance, and we tend to see farm animals as different from pets.

These differences are a reflection of the different bonds formed between humans and animals in different contexts. But they also reflect the three different perspectives humans take on the moral value of animals.

First, animals can be recognised for their instrumental value. In this perspective, animals are valued as a source of companionship, animal products, or knowledge gained through research. Seen as mere instruments, this perspective permits using, keeping and killing animals for the benefit of humans.

Second, animals can be valued for their own sake, for instance, because of the capacity of being sentient. In this perspective, the moral value of an animal doesn't depend on its usefulness to humans but is intrinsic to the animal.

This means humans should respect the animal, including their welfare and integrity. Using, keeping or killing animals is consequently not permitted by this perspective unless there are strong arguments to justify these actions.

Finally, animals can be recognised as morally equal to humans. That grants animals the rights that humans have. This perspective means animals should not be used, kept or killed for human interests under any circumstances.

Although there is a trend in many societies to recognise the moral value of animals in law, there is still no consensus on how exactly we should treat animals. This explains part of the current discussion.

Ending a life

Whether or when animals themselves have an interest in the continuation or ending of their lives is the subject of an ongoing debate.

Animals are increasingly recognised as "sentient beings". Many are understood to possess the ability to evaluate the actions of others, to remember some of their own actions and their consequences, to assess risk, to have feelings, and to have some degree of awareness.

Despite this starting point, there remain challenges to deciding when to end an animal's life. Because in most cases humans cannot communicate with animals, we have to rely on veterinary, animal behaviour and animal welfare science to determine if it's in an animal's interests to end or continue its life.

It is therefore vital that species-specific experts are involved when decisions are made to end an animal's life. They are best placed to assess the interests of the animal, based on its quality of life and the suffering it may be experiencing.

Nonetheless, attitudes towards animal euthanasia are fluid. Freya and the beluga whale show that when animals cross contexts, in this case from the wild into human urban areas, views on how to treat them can change dramatically.

Human interests are often at play when an animal's life is ended. These interests can be diverse, including emotional, financial and societal considerations. They can influence the final decision to end the life of the animal, or the amount of time and money we might be willing to spend on potential alternatives.

Balancing interests

When the interests of humans and the presumed interests of an animal are identified, the interests at stake are balanced to come to a final decision. In many cases, interests are conflicting. Decisions are further complicated when the public weighs in, as they're likely to subscribe to different perspectives on the moral value of animals.

In these cases, there are no easy answers. What we learned from the recent cases is that ad hoc decision-making adds even more complexity, provides little room for reflection, and leaves the general public confused and in some cases outraged.

More comparable cases will follow in the future. An open discussion of different end-of-life strategies for animals, and the different interests of those involved, could help reduce that confusion and outrage in the future.

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Why 'mercy' killing wild animals is so controversial

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Two wild animals that strayed from their ordinary habitats and into close proximity to humans were recently killed in high-profile cases. The life of Freya the walrus was ended by officials in Oslo on August 14 2022, reportedly because the animal posed a threat to humans.

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New Ethics Guidance for top science journals aims to root out harmful research.

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New Ethics Guidance for top science journals aims to root out harmful research.

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The British journal Nature was founded in 1869 and is one of the world's most influential and prestigious outlets for scientific research. Its publisher, Nature Portfolio (a subsidiary of the academic publishing giant Springer Nature), also publishes dozens of specialised journals under the Nature banner, covering almost every branch of science.

In August, the company published new ethics guidance for researchers. The new guidance is part of Nature's "attempt to acknowledge and learn from our troubled deep and recent past, understand the roots of injustice and work to address them as we aim to make the scientific enterprise open and welcoming to all".

An accompanying editorial argues the ethical responsibility of researchers should include people and groups "who do not participate in research but may be harmed by its publication".

It also notes that for some research, "potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication", and licenses editors to make such determinations. Editors may modify, amend or "correct" articles post-publication. They may also decline to publish, or retract, objectionable content or articles, such as "[s]exist, misogynistic and/or anti-LGBTQ+ content".

The guidance is correct to say academic freedom, like other freedoms, is not absolute. It's also legitimate to suggest science can indirectly harm social groups, and their rights may sometimes trump academic freedom. Despite this, some aspects of the new guidance are concerning.

When science goes wrong

There's no doubt science can cause harm, both for its subjects and other groups. Consider an example from the late 19th century.

Harvard professor Edward Clarke proposed that taking part in higher education would cause fertility problems in women, because energy would be diverted from the reproductive system to the brain.

Clarke's account, set out in a bestselling book, has been credited with deepening public opposition to universities opening their doors to women.

At first glance, this seems like exactly the kind of objectionable content that Nature's new guidance says it would seek to amend or retract.

But the problem with Clarke's account was not the offensive conclusions it drew about women's capacity for intellectual development, or the discriminatory policies to which it gave support.

After all, suppose he had been right? If attending university really would harm women's reproductive health, surely they would want to know.

The real problem with Clarke's work was that it was bad science. Indeed, historian of science Naomi Oreskes has noted:

Feminists in the late nineteenth century found Clarke's agenda transparent and his non-empirical methodology ripe for attack.

So drawing a particular kind of conclusion about women and girls isn't what makes for sexist content in science. Nor is it favouring one side or another on gender-related policies. So what is it?

One answer is that it is science in which gendered assumptions bias scientists' decisions. In the words of historian and philosopher of science Sarah Richardson, this is science in which:

gendered practices or assumptions in a scientific field prevented researchers from accurately interpreting data, caused inferential leaps, blocked the consideration of alternative hypotheses, overdetermined theory choice, or biased descriptive language.

Language and labels

The guidance also stipulates scientists should "use inclusive, respectful, non-stigmatizing language". This merits pause for thought.

Scientists should certainly be thoughtful about language, and avoid causing unnecessary offence, hurt or stigma. However, the language must also be scientifically useful and meaningful.

Read more: What's at risk if scientists don't think strategically before talking politics

For example, it is the nature of categories that some entities or individuals are excluded from them. This should be based on scientific criteria, not political ones.

Or consider the following, offered as part of working definitions in the guidance:

There is a broad range of gender identities including, but not limited to, transgender, gender-queer, gender-fluid, non-binary, gender-variant, genderless, agender, nongender, bi-gender, trans man, trans woman, trans masculine, trans feminine and cisgender.

People should of course be able to identify with whatever gender label they prefer. However, "gender identity" is a vague and contested concept, and these labels (and their meanings) are subjectively defined and continue to change rapidly over time.

Labels that are personally meaningful, deeply felt or - as in some cases - part of a political project to dismantle gender binaries, may not necessarily be scientifically useful.

An invitation to politicking

By casting a wide range of content as potentially subject to editorial intervention or veto on the grounds of harm, the guidance opens the door to the politicisation of science. Other material caught in that net is:

content that undermines - or could reasonably be perceived to undermine - the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings.

But scientists often do research providing information used to make policies, which will include the bestowing of various rights. The findings of such research can therefore sometimes be unpalatable to groups with economic, political, religious, emotional or other vested interests.

Read more: Getting a scientific message across means taking human nature into account

The guidance opens the door for such groups to try to have findings contrary to those interests "corrected" or retracted. There is not much that can't be framed as a right, a harm, or an infringement of dignity - all notoriously difficult concepts to define and reach consensus on.

What will determine who is successful in their attempt to have articles amended or retracted? Potential harms will be assessed by journal editors and reviewers - and they will perceive these through the lens of their own prior assumptions, ideologies and value systems.

Editors may also face pressure to avoid tarnishing their journal brand, either in response to, or in anticipation of, social media mobs. After all, Springer Nature ultimately answers to its shareholders.

The responsibility of editors

As we know from the work of feminist and other critical scholars, scientific claims based on biased research have harmed marginalised groups in many ways: by explaining away group inequalities in status, power and resources; pathologising; stigmatising; and justifying denial of rights.

There is no contradiction between acknowledging these harms, and also having concerns about the new Nature guidance.

Science journals have an important role to play in facilitating socially responsible science in these sensitive areas.

Journal editors should certainly do all they can to discover and scrutinise hidden biases embedded in research, such as by commissioning reviews from experts with different or critical perspectives. However, they should not second-guess what scientific claims will cause social harm, then exercise a veto.

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New 'ethics guidance' for top science journals aims to root out harmful research - but can it succeed?

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The British journal Nature was founded in 1869 and is one of the world's most influential and prestigious outlets for scientific research. Its publisher, Nature Portfolio (a subsidiary of the academic publishing giant Springer Nature), also publishes dozens of specialised journals under the Nature banner, covering almost every branch of science.

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Most Americans do trust scientists and science based policy

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Most Americans do trust scientists and science based policy

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Most Americans - 81% - think government investments in scientific research are "worthwhile investments for society over time," according to the Pew Research Center's latest survey on public perceptions of science.

A similar proportion said they have at least "a fair amount" of confidence that scientists act in the public's best interests: 77% for all scientists, and 80% for medical scientists. As with previous surveys, this puts confidence in scientists at about the same level as in the military - 77%. It's also much higher than for any other group pollsters asked about and, unlike most groups, fairly stable over time, despite recent increasing political polarization.

Science supporters want researchers to share their insights to help address societal problems. Scientists themselves want their research to have an impact. So public judgments like those identified in the Pew report matter because of what they suggest about how Americans might see evidence-based guidance on issues such as climate change and public health.

Don't fixate on the negatives

It would be easy for the scientific community to look at this data and lament the 1 in 5 Americans who said they don't think government investments in science are important or who said they do not have confidence in scientists.

Same with the fact that confidence in scientists has retreated from a small surge that Pew surveys previously identified starting in late 2018, or the reality that Republicans appear to have increasingly more negative views about scientists and scientific investments than Democrats do.

But I suspect there are more shades of gray behind the black and white numbers themselves.

For instance, while two-thirds of Democrat-oriented respondents said they supported scientists' involvement in policy debates, less than a third of Republican-oriented respondents said they share this perspective, a further decrease from the proportion of Republicans who expressed this view in both 2019 and 2020.

But consider that this specific question only gave people two choices. Respondents could say they want scientists to take an "active role" in policy or "focus on establishing sound scientific facts."

Given the choice, I suspect many respondents from across the political spectrum would have given a more nuanced answer. Even the biggest science boosters likely want scientists to devote most of their time to research and teaching.

Within this new survey, in fact, only about a third of Republicans said scientists currently have "too much" influence in public policy debates and about a quarter said scientists have "not enough" influence. The plurality - 39% - said they have "about the right amount."

From my perspective, yes, it is disheartening that about 2 in 10 Republicans think scientists are "usually worse" at "making good policy decisions about scientific issues" than "other people" and that this proportion has doubled since 2019.

But about a quarter of Republicans still said scientists' decisions are "usually better" than others, with about half saying scientists' decisions are "neither better nor worse."

And it seems possible that while current Republicans responded to the survey they were thinking about issues such as abortion or COVID-19 policies that involve medicine, but also ethics and economics and personal values. Additionally, many Republicans presumably recognize that most scientists oppose current directions in the party and may be using their poll answers to communicate their sense of alienation.

What could improve overall perceptions

Data such as those provided by the Pew Research Center point to potential problems; they don't suggest a fix. Taking a positive view, though, puts the focus on potential solutions.

As Anthony Dudo and I argue in our new book on science communication strategy, anyone who wants to be trusted - including scientists - should consider social science research about what enhances trust and perceptions of trustworthiness.

Key among these findings: people perceive others as trustworthy if they appear to be caring, honest and competent.

Looking back at the Pew Research Center's 2019 surveys on trust in science, which are consistent with other research, it seems that Americans largely perceive scientists as fairly competent. However, Americans tend to be less likely to believe scientists "care about people's best interests," are "transparent about conflicts of interest" or willing to take "responsibility for mistakes."

These perceived characteristics help explain the chunk of the American population who don't feel confident about scientists' motivations. They are also perceptions that scientists, like others, can take responsibility for through their choices about how they behave and communicate.

Further, Americans tend to see "research scientists" less positively than science-focused practitioners such as doctors, suggesting that they feel more distant from academic researchers.

Looking on the bright side for better results

Focusing too heavily on the minority of people with negative perceptions is dangerous for those of us who want science to play a strong role in society because attacking one's critics may exacerbate the problem.

While it might feel righteous to "fight" for science, being aggressive toward people who question one's trustworthiness seems unlikely to spur positive perceptions.

Unlike politicians, science supporters probably can't win by making others look bad. Just like the press, members of the scientific community want to ensure their field's long-term place in society. Research suggests that for scientists, building real relationships with other members of the public will depend on communicating and behaving in ways that demonstrate caring, honesty and expertise.

Loud griping by scientists and their supporters about how too many people just don't appreciate science's place in society, or insults toward those who don't see its value, are bound to be counterproductive.

The stakes are high as humanity confronts a number of science-related challenges, including climate change, infectious diseases and habitat destruction. Anyone who wants scientific evidence to have a seat at the table where solutions are being discussed may need to follow the evidence on how to make that happen.

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Most Americans do trust scientists and science-based policy-making - freaking out about the minority who don't isn't helpful

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Most Americans - 81% - think government investments in scientific research are "worthwhile investments for society over time," according to the Pew Research Center's latest survey on public perceptions of science. A similar proportion said they have at least "a fair amount" of confidence that scientists act in the public's best interests: 77% for all scientists, and 80% for medical scientists.

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By Fact checking Thoreau's observations at Walden Pond...

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By Fact checking Thoreau's observations at Walden Pond...

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Henry David Thoreau, the environmental philosopher and author of "Walden", was a keen observer of seasonal change. In 1862, for example, he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly:

"October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight."

Over the past 20 years, researchers have used Thoreau's observations of plant flowering, leaf emergence on trees and shrubs, bird migration and spring ice melt on Walden Pond to study how these events have changed since the 1850s, largely in response to climate change.

Ecologists have also pulled data for modern-day research from museum specimens, journals of hunting guides and bird and butterfly club reports. Comparisons with historical records have provided insights into shifts in the natural world caused by climate change and other human influences. Examples include coral decline in American Samoa, amphibian losses in Mexico and shifts in birds' ranges in California's Sierra Nevada.

But how do scientists know that this historical data is appropriate to use? How can they tell good data from bad? And how can you know whether records you may have, such as an ancestor's journals or seashell collection, might be useful for science?

We recently published an article in the journal Bioscience that lays out a three-step approach for assessing the quality of historical observations. Using this approach, we believe that scientists can confidently use historical resources to inform studies reaching back to times and places where formal scientific data is not available.

A three-part test

Not long after Thoreau died, critics questioned the accuracy of his natural history observations. Writing in 1919, John Burroughs, a leading nature essayist of the time, offered perhaps the strongest criticisms.

Burroughs asserted that Thoreau's "observations are frequently at fault, or wholly wide of the mark." He questioned whether Thoreau knew basic facts, such as that hickory trees grew in Concord, Massachusetts, and that pine trees had seeds.

To determine whether Burroughs and other critics were right, we propose a straightforward three-step process.

- Is the information collected using rigorous methods that are well documented and clearly described? Modern researchers should be able to repeat them - for example, locating sites where past naturalists worked, making observations over the same number of days per week and following other key parts of their methods.

- How accurate are the observations, such as species identifications? Were they subject to any biases? Can researchers or naturalists replicate aspects of the observations that would be expected to remain consistent over time?

- Does the data have the precision, frequency and rigor that scholars need now? No data is right for all purposes. Modern researchers must decide whether the information can answer the question they are investigating.

Was Thoreau a good naturalist?

When we assessed the rigor, accuracy and utility of Thoreau's natural history observations, we found that he was indeed a good naturalist.

Thoreau thoroughly documented the dates, locations and descriptions of observations that he made as he walked around Walden Pond and greater Concord. We can read in his journals how often and for how long he made these notes.

We compared Thoreau's notes to modern observations and found that his observations of seasonal events such as leaf out, flowering, fruiting and bird arrivals were highly correlated with modern findings. This told us that Thoreau captured similar patterns.

For example, we can see that the order in which flowers bloom in spring around Concord is nearly the same in Thoreau's journals as in modern observations. In both data sets, certain species flower early, while other species bloom late in the season.

Thoreau's historical observations have tremendous utility in research. We and other researchers have used them to learn about the effects of climate change on plants and birds in Concord. Using Thoreau's findings as a baseline, we have found that spring leaf out and flowering are occurring earlier, but the timing of bird arrivals is not changing much.

Beyond Thoreau and Walden

Researchers can use this approach to evaluate other historical observations. For example, between 1904 and 1969, American field biologist Joseph Grinnell and his colleagues recorded observations of species in California. Their team carefully described most of their methods and collected specimens and photographs to document their work.

However, their sampling methods were sometimes inconsistent, and researchers cannot locate some of their sampling routes. These uncertainties make the Grinnell team's observations inappropriate to answer questions about changes in the abundance of some species. But their observations are excellent for answering questions about how climate change is altering the ranges of many species, including birds and small mammals like mice, voles and chipmunks that Grinnell's team observed there in the past and that still occur there.

Museum specimens such as dried plants, bird nests and animal skins are another source of historical information. The specimens themselves remove uncertainty around species identification and preserve many physical characteristics that interest researchers.

However, the people who collected the specimens sometimes fail to record precise location information. And some collectors target particular species, locations or seasons, which can bias what they find.

For example, if a collector targeted spring-flowering plants, their collection may be missing plants that flower later in the year. We urge researchers to watch for these biases when using historical data.

It's not uncommon to find historical data sets with little, if any, documentation about when, where and how the data was collected - for example, observations from someone's daily walks, collections of photographs or a birder's reports to an ornithological club. Even in these cases, it may be possible to determine how rigorous and accurate the data is.

For example, the frequency of photographs or observations may hint at how often someone made observations. And even poorly documented data can be useful to address some ecological questions, or could suggest new hypotheses that deserve further study.

Scientists are searching for more historical data. Following careful evaluation, we may be able to use this information to learn about the effects of climate change, land use practices and other environmental issues. People who have records that might be scientifically valuable should consider contacting ecologists, research stations, natural history clubs and the USA National Phenology Network, which collects, stores and shares data on the timing of seasonal events such as bird migration across the U.S.

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By fact-checking Thoreau's observations at Walden Pond, we showed how old diaries and specimens can inform modern research

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Henry David Thoreau, the environmental philosopher and author of "Walden", was a keen observer of seasonal change. In 1862, for example, he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly: "October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world.

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Using the Ocean to Fight Climate change raises questions

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Using the Ocean to Fight Climate change raises questions

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Heat waves, droughts and extreme weather are endangering people and ecosystems somewhere in the world almost every day. These extremes are exacerbated by climate change, driven primarily by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases that build up in the atmosphere and trap heat at the Earth's surface.

With that in mind, researchers are exploring ways to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and lock it away - including using the ocean. But while these techniques might work, they raise serious technical, social and ethical questions, many of which have no clear answers yet.

We study climate change policy, sustainability and environmental justice. Before people start experimenting with the health of the ocean, there are several key questions to consider.

Ocean carbon dioxide removal 101

The ocean covers about 70% of the planet, and it naturally takes up carbon dioxide. In fact, about a quarter of human-produced carbon dioxide ends up in the ocean.

Ocean carbon dioxide removal is any action designed to use the ocean to remove even more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it already does and store it.

It spans a wide range of techniques - from increasing the amount and vitality of carbon dioxide-absorbing mangrove forests to using ocean fertilization to stimulate the growth of phytoplankton that absorb carbon dioxide to building pipelines that pump liquid carbon dioxide into formations under the seabed, where it can eventually solidify as carbonate rock.

There are other forms of carbon dioxide removal - planting trees, for example. But they require large amounts of land that is needed for other essential uses, such as agriculture.

That's why interest in using the vast ocean is growing.

Would these methods store enough carbon?

The first crucial question is whether ocean carbon dioxide removal techniques could significantly reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide and store it long term, beyond what the ocean already does. Greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing globally, which means that ocean carbon dioxide removal would need to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for a long time, at least until greenhouse gas emissions have fallen.

Initial evidence suggests that some forms of ocean carbon dioxide removal, such as those that rely on short-lived biomass like kelp forests or phytoplankton, may not keep captured carbon stored for more than a few decades. That's because most plant tissues are quickly recycled by decay or by sea creatures grazing on them.

In contrast, mechanisms that form minerals, like the interaction when carbon dioxide is pumped into basalt formations, or that alter the way seawater retains carbon dioxide, such as increasing its alkalinity, prevent carbon from escaping and are much more likely to keep it out of the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years.

Ecological risks and benefits

Another key question is what ecological benefits or risks accompany different ocean carbon dioxide removal approaches.

Research shows that some options, such as supporting mangrove forests, may promote biodiversity and benefit nearby human communities.

However, other options could introduce novel risks. For example, growing and then sinking large amounts of kelp or algae could bring in invasive species. Dissolving certain types of rock in the ocean could reduce ocean acidity. This would enhance the ocean's ability to store carbon dioxide, but these rocks could also contain trace amounts of metals that could harm marine life, and these risks are not well understood.

Each process could also release some greenhouse gases, reducing its overall effectiveness.

Interfering with nature is a social question

The ocean affects everyone on the planet, but not everyone will have the same relationship to it or the same opportunities to have their opinions heard.

Much of the global population lives near the ocean, and some interventions might impinge on places that support jobs and communities. For example, boosting algae growth could affect nearby wild fisheries or interfere with recreation. People and communities are going to evaluate these risks differently depending on how they are personally affected.

In addition, people's trust in decision-makers often shapes their views of technologies. Some ways of using the ocean to remove carbon, such as those close to the shore, could be governed locally. It's less clear how decisions about the high seas or deep ocean would be made, since these areas are not under the jurisdiction of any one country or global governing body.

People's perceptions will likely also be shaped by such factors as whether or not they see ocean carbon dioxide removal as interfering with nature or protecting it. However, views of what is acceptable or not can change. As the impacts of climate change increase, tolerance for some unconventional interventions seems to be growing.

It's also an ethical question

Ocean carbon dioxide removal also raises a variety of ethical questions that do not have straightforward answers.

For example, it forces people to consider the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Are humans obliged to intervene to reduce the impact on the climate, or ought we avoid ocean interventions? Do people have the right to purposefully intervene in the ocean or not? Are there specific obligations that humans ought to recognize when considering such options?

Other ethical questions revolve around who makes decisions about ocean carbon dioxide removal and the consequences. For example, who should be involved in decision-making about the ocean? Could relying on ocean carbon dioxide removal reduce societies' commitment to reducing emissions through other means, such as by reducing consumption, increasing efficiency and transforming energy systems?

Who pays?

Finally, ocean carbon dioxide removal could be very expensive.

For example, mining and then adding rocks to reduce the ocean's acidity has been estimated to cost between US$60 and $200 per ton of carbon dioxide removed. To put that into context, the world produced more than 36 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from energy alone in 2021.

Even macroalgae cultivation could be in the tens of billions of dollars if done at the scale likely necessary to have an impact.

These methods are more expensive than many actions that reduce emissions right now. For instance, using solar panels to avoid carbon emissions can range from saving money to a cost of $50 per ton of carbon dioxide, while actions like reducing methane emissions are even less expensive. But the harm from continued climate change has been estimated to be in the hundreds of billions annually in the United States alone.

These costs raise more questions. For example, how much debt is fair for future generations to carry, and how should the costs be distributed globally to fix a global problem?

Ocean carbon dioxide removal could become a useful method for keeping global warming in check, but it should not be seen as a silver bullet, especially since there isn't an effective global system for making decisions about the ocean.
Sarah Cooley, a former research scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and director of climate science at the Ocean Conservancy, contributed to this article.

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Using the ocean to fight climate change raises serious environmental justice and technical questions

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Heat waves, droughts and extreme weather are endangering people and ecosystems somewhere in the world almost every day. These extremes are exacerbated by climate change, driven primarily by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases that build up in the atmosphere and trap heat at the Earth's surface.

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Researcher at the center of an epic fraud remains an enigma to those who exposed him

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JAPAN- The first thing that went through Alison Avenell's head when she heard Yoshihiro Sato had died was that it might be a trick. It was March 2017, and in the previous years, Avenell, a clinical nutritionist at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom, had spent thousands of hours combing through Sato's papers, together with three colleagues in New Zealand.

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Melodie Yashar: How to build for human life on Mars

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We’re going to be building on the Moon this decade -- and next will be Mars, says space architect Melodie Yashar. In a visionary talk, she introduces her work designing off-world shelters with autonomous robots and 3D printers and explores how it might help uncover radical solutions to some of the problems troubling humans on Earth today.

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If we do succeed in killing ourselves and destroying the world, then it will not matter who was right and who was wrong about science, the pandemic, climate change, or a host of other problems and afflictions. Our vicious quarrels, which at the moment so distort our perspective and seem so vital to our identity, will be as dry leaves in the autumn wind.

I.
The Scientific Revolution was among the most transformative series of events in the history of the western world. Yet, for centuries, it had little impact on the way in which the vast majority of Europeans thought, believed, and lived. Most persons remained ignorant of, unaffected by, and perhaps indifferent to the discoveries of science. It made no practical difference to them that thinkers from Copernicus to Kepler, from Galileo to Newton, from Bacon to Descartes had learned that the ancient and medieval view of nature and the universe were wrong. The sun did not actually rise and set. The earth was not the stationary center of the solar system. It rotated on its axis and orbited the sun. Subject to uniform laws of motion that were expressed in mathematical formula, objects on earth and in heaven moved according to the same mechanical principles. There was no perfect heavenly sphere and no corrupt earthly realm. The laws of science had replaced the laws of God, and were as valid on earth as they were in heaven.

Although it led to a fundamental reevaluation of religion, morality, government, society, and human nature; although it devalued or rejected all other forms of knowledge, such as revelation and magic, the Scientific Revolution was no revolution at all. The process that established this new vision of the universe and the place of humanity in it was neither rapid nor complete. It never involved more than a few hundred thinkers at work in musty studies and crude laboratories, engaged in a long, slow, and often tedious process of observation and experiment. Rather than offering an objective transcript of reality, science, on the contrary, was the product of the human mind and imagination. The most original scientists themselves acknowledged this truth. In Physics and Philosophy, Werner Heisenberg wrote that "natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." The Danish physicist Niels Bohr similarly cautioned that "it is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature."[i] The advance of science thus owes more to the evolution of consciousness than it does to the attainment of knowledge about the natural world. The prestige that science long enjoyed in large measure was but an extension of the growing confidence in the aptitude of the mind.

Sir Francis Bacon, the first evangelist for science, encouraged his contemporaries in all fields of endeavor to strike out on their own, to study the evidence for themselves, to test fresh hypotheses, and to seek new knowledge rather than to accept conventional wisdom without question. Among the first European writers to advocate change and innovation as matters of principle, Bacon, in books such as The Advancement of Learning (1605), Novum Organum (1620), and New Atlantis (1627), attacked the notion that truth rested on the mere authority of the past. His optimism about the future was inexhaustible. Bacon wanted seventeenth-century Europeans to develop confidence in their own abilities rather than adhering slavishly to tradition. He proposed to liberate the mind and to restore faith in its vigor and potential, which he argued were casualties of the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion that had followed.

Anticipating the day when human beings, using reason, would subdue and control nature, Bacon proclaimed that science represented an alternative to the confusion, disorder, and superstition that he insisted had characterized medieval thought. But in one sense Bacon was the heir to the magicians and alchemists of the Middle Ages, who had hoped to uncover the secrets of nature in order to command the forces of nature. Science offered Bacon a more powerful instrument than his forebears could ever have envisioned. Armed with science and mathematics, was there any limit to what the rational mind could accomplish?

Comparing himself to Christopher Columbus, Bacon plotted a new course of intellectual discovery. Neither European civilization nor European thought could be contained within their existing boundaries. There were not only new worlds to conquer, but new ideas as well. Bacon and many of his contemporaries rejected the past not because they hated it but because they considered it irrelevant. They had come to understand that nature, society, and humanity were far more complex than earlier generations had supposed.

By the eighteenth century, many thinkers believed that science rendered inevitable material and moral progress. The more flamboyant among them, such as Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Carita, the Marquis de Condorcet, were satisfied that the achievement of human perfection, the advent of a veritable heaven on earth, was preordained. Thinkers such as Condorcet persuaded themselves that the rigorous application of the scientific method would, in the fullness of time, unravel all the mysteries of the universe that had confounded their predecessors. Some few, among them Blaise Pascal, himself a scientific and mathematical genius, had from the outset entertained serious doubts not only about the unalloyed benefits but also about the intellectual foundations of science. Pascal questioned objectivity, which constituted the essence of modern scientific thought until the twentieth century.
II.
Only after 1945 did Americans and peoples around the world come more fully to appreciate the critique of science that Pascal had voiced nearly three hundred years earlier. The use of atomic weapons against Japan quickened popular disillusionment with science. In addition, the terrible human costs of the Allied strategic bombing campaign prompted some to question its morality. Amid the desperate crisis of war, the British and the Americans, it seemed to critics, had abandoned their sense of humanity and had sunk to the same level of viciousness as their enemies. The triumphant accomplishments of science, observed Richard M. Weaver, ironically portended the destruction of man:

The Western genius for technology had invented a weapon of destruction which took no account of terrain or of distance-the bombing plane, which could fly practically anywhere and drop its lethal cargo on any target that military science or the spirit of vengeance might suggest. . . . . Mass killing did in fact rob the cradle and the grave. Our nation was treated to the spectacle of young boys fresh out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust which is said to have taken tens of thousands of lives, pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. . . . Such things are so inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built that they cast into doubt the very possibility of recovery. [ii]

Similarly, although the French philosopher and historian Bertrand de Jouvenel recognized that the barbarism of the Second World War emerged from, and was sustained by, ruthless national passions, he argued that the destruction would not have been so extensive or so indiscriminate had it not been for the weapons that science put at the disposal of combatants:

In this war everyone-workmen, peasants, and women alike-is in the fight, and in consequence everything, the factory, the harvest, even the dwelling-house has turned target. As a result the enemy to be fought has been all flesh that is and all soil, and the bombing plane has striven to consummate the utter destruction of them all. [iii]

By the end of the war, it had become apparent that the Nazi regime also depended on modern science and would not have been possible without it. German scientists conducted murderous experiments on prisoners and the inmates of concentration camps. As Churchill early understood, a Nazi victory would not initiate a return to the Middle Ages but the lurch toward a new Dark Age. "The Battle of Britain is about to begin," Churchill told the House of Commons on June 18, 1940. "Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. . . .@ If Hitler wins and Awe fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science." [iv] The incipient and growing opposition to science rested on Churchill's intuition that science could do as much harm as good, a reality that the experience of war too amply demonstrated.

At the same time, modern science, or more accurately modern scientists, intentionally or not, abandoned the pretense of objectivity and became political. The refinement of poison gas during the First World War, like the creation of atomic bombs during the Second, arose in response to the demands of politics not the requirements of scientific inquiry. In the 1950s, scientists affiliated with the Democratic Party warned of the dangers associated with nuclear fallout while their Republican counterparts were at pains to deny them. Ordinary citizens hardly knew what to make of these political disagreements, but grew apprehensive and mistrustful, fearing that something had gone amiss.

Such disenchantment notwithstanding, many who vilified science in one moment extolled its virtues in the next. The allure of science remained, evinced, for example, by the popular fascination with computers as well as the academic prestige of the social sciences. Meanwhile, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle shattered the intellectual foundations of objective science, confirming Pascal's initial skepticism. But like the early findings of the Scientific Revolution (so-called), Heisenberg's recognition of indeterminacy in the basic substance of the material world, although a momentous advance in the intellectual history of the West, exercised almost no practical effect on the conduct of scientific research. Most scientists, including Albert Einstein, denied, or at least failed to contemplate, its implications. Perhaps, again like Einstein, they did not wish to do so.

In any event, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle did not-at least it has not yet-overcome the Cartesian dualism that expediently partitioned the world into subject and object. It has not produced a more realistic, more chastened, or more humane understanding of the nature and limits of scientific investigation. Instead, we are left with the outworn conception of science as the source and arbiter of objective truth and the persistent rejection of science as a collection of fables and lies. If neither perspective has much utility, at least the latter view, nonsensical though it often is, has the merit of stumbling blindly toward the right questions: for what purpose do men and women intend to use the scientific knowledge they have accumulated? Can that knowledge be isolated from the purpose that it was designed to serve?
III.
Conflicting attitudes toward science are at the heart of the debates about climate change and the Coivd-19 pandemic. Either science, which has contributed to both crises, offers the only salvation for humanity or, alternately, science is a weapon in the hands of experts to deceive and oppress the masses. I am not proposing a false equivalence. Criticism of science, or rather of "scientism," the conviction that science holds a monopoly on truth, is not the same as the denial of science. The mindless rejection of science today is as deadly as was the credulous acceptance of science during the 1940s and 1950s. Both positions are dangerously irresponsible. The problem may be beyond solution, for it originates in human nature.

Human beings may on occasion be capable of reasoned judgments, but that ability does not make them rational creatures. They are, in fact, often impervious to rational inquiry. Under stressful circumstances, they tend to abandon reason altogether and made superstition, fear, and even hatred vital components of life. Many, at least enough to make a difference, come to believe that the rules and standards of society have subjected them to a terrible violation of their rights. "Primitives in revolt," as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset characterized them, they have inherited a comparatively prosperous and stable world, while remaining unaware of, and perhaps apathetic toward, the effort required to create and sustain the many advantages from which they now benefit. [v] As a consequence of their grievances and their ignorance, they forsake any and all obligations to their fellow human beings. Like perpetual children, they yearn to be free to exercise the rights and privileges that they think they deserve, which the unrighteous and the unjust, the cunning and the diabolical, have so cruelly denied them.

They dream that life is perpetually easy and bountiful, or that it ought to be. When they find themselves toiling under grave restrictions, deprived of the things to which they believe justice entitles them, they look for someone to blame. In their determination to assert themselves and to exercise power over others, they forfeit intellectual and emotional maturity. They dispense with civility and truth. They come to mistrust ideas and to scorn intelligence. They negate morality, adopting whatever expedient serves the interests of the moment and enables them to justify actions for which there can be no justification. They are consumed by partisan zeal. The nineteenth-century German historian Theodore Mommsen concluded that those bewildered but uncompromising souls routinely dismiss "logical and ethical arguments. . . . They listen only to their own envy and hatred, to the meanest instincts. Nothing else counts for them. They are deaf to reason, right, morals. One cannot influence them." [vi] Mommsen likened such a disposition of mind and soul to a terrible disease for which medicine has no cure.

Are such men and women perverse? Are they stupid? It turns out that they may be merely human. The human capacity for self-delusion is almost boundless. What people already believe about the world is more important in determining their judgment and their conduct than evidence or facts. It has ever been thus. Although I am not fully conversant with the literature, scholarship in psychology and neuroscience suggests that expecting people to be convinced by reasonable arguments is itself unreasonable. Reason is inseparable from emotion. How people feel about controversial issues, from gun control to abortion rights, from climate change to vaccine and mask mandates, shapes their thinking far more than logical argument or factual proof. Bias is an innate quality of mind. It predisposes men and women to discredit ideas that they find odious or threatening. They substitute rationalization for reason, making an impassioned case for a preordained conclusion. To put matters bluntly: people believe what they want to believe and go to unconscionable lengths to alter or dismiss an unwelcome but incontrovertible reality.

Studies reveal that people do not brazenly ignore or massage scientific evidence to deny or validate climate change or to diminish or affirm the severity of the pandemic. Instead, they tend to reject the authenticity of science or to disavow scientific expertise if outcomes not only challenge their ideas but also, and more important, contradict their values. Liberals are not immune. The Anti-Vaxx Movement, which insisted that ordinary childhood vaccines had caused an epidemic of autism, originated among liberal activists such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and actors such as Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey. The most ardent opponents of vaccines continued to defend their beliefs even after Andrew Wakefield, who initially asserted the connection between vaccines and autism, repudiated his conclusions. Like those who abjure climate change and the pandemic, anti-vaxxers created their own paradigm to sustain the alternate reality they preferred to inhabit.

Wither then do we goest? People can change their minds and even alter the neuro-pathways of the brain. But those with strong convictions are unlikely to do so. The appeal to fact, evidence, reason, and logic will continue to fall on profoundly deaf ears. Meanwhile disagreements and confrontations become increasingly malicious, portending violence. Everyone, it seems, is frustrated, angry, and demanding retribution. Experts, of course, are often wrong, mostly because they project a continuation of the present into the future. The unpredictable is always possible. The future can astonish and confound the expectations of the present, sometimes miraculously so. I take what comfort I can from Jacob Burckhardt's recognition that "for the people that seems the most sick the cure may be at hand." In his wisdom, Burckhardt also knew that the people appearing "to be healthy may bear within it the ripening germs of death, which the hour of danger will bring forth from their hiding-place."[vii] Are we a sick people trying to get well or have we assented to, and even welcomed, our destruction?

I intend no hyperbole when I say that we have long been peering into the abyss even as we pretend to be immune from its gravitational pull. I believe the pandemic may forever alter our way of life. I wonder whether we will awaken to its horrors before it is too late, or whether we can stop shouting at one another long enough at least to mourn the dead, which may, in the end, be all the remains for us to do. I believe that climate change may make large portions of the earth uninhabitable, and more quickly than most climate models anticipated. In all candor, I have never so ardently hoped that those who disagree with me about these matters are right and that I am wrong. I am not confident that it is so, but the world would be better served if it were.

Both the dominion over the natural world that science has made possible and the abdication of responsibility that the unreserved denunciation of science exemplifies propel us headlong toward death. It is no longer implausible to assume that human beings, in fact, entertain a death wish. "To be perfectly realistic in this matter," declared Richard Weaver, "we must put the question of whether modern civilization wishes to survive." Do men and women "wish to go on living, or do they wish to destroy the world?"[viii] Weaver was most concerned about the deployment and use of nuclear weapons; his apprehension, sensible though it was, seems almost quaint now. We must admit that if we remain on our present course, we will have lost control of our destiny. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse-pestilence, war, famine, and death-again thunder across the face of the earth, this time summoned not by a vengeful God but by human beings submerged at once in their arrogance and their ignorance.

If we do succeed in killing ourselves and destroying the world, then it will not matter who was right and who was wrong about science, the pandemic, climate change, or a host of other problems and afflictions. Our vicious quarrels, which at the moment so distort our perspective and seem so vital to our identity, will be as dry leaves in the autumn wind. They will be no more than "tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."[ix] Only no one may live to tell such tales, and no one who by some extraordinary chance does manage to survive will want to hear them.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics-we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

[i] Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York, 1962), 81; Niels Bohr, quoted in Aage Peterson, "The Philosophy of Niels Bohr," in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 19/7 (1963), 12; see also, David Favrholdt, "Niels Bohr and Realism," in Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 153, ed. by Jan Faye and Henry J. Folse (n.c., 1994), 83.

[ii] Richard M. Weaver, "A Dialectic on Total War," in Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1995; originally published in 1964), 98-99

[iii] Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth (Indianapolis, IN, 1993; originally published in English in 1948), 3.

[ iv] Winston Churchill, "Finest Hour" Speech, June 18, 1940, in Never Give In!: The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches (New York, 2003), 228. Yet, Churchill could declare that "no extreme of violence would be considered too great for victory." See Weaver, "A Dialectic on Total War," 99.

[ v] Jose Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses, (New York, 1964; originally published in 1930), 98.

[vi] Quoted in Peter G. J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York, 1964), 299.

[vii] Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York, 1995; originally published in 1860), 319.

[viii] Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, 1948), 185.

[ix] William Shakespeare, "Macbeth," Act 5, Scene 5.
The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.

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If we do succeed in killing ourselves and destroying the world, then it will not matter who was right and who was wrong about science, the pandemic, climate change, or a host of other problems and afflictions.

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Science can answer moral questions | Sam Harris

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TED Talks are influential videos from expert speakers on education, business, science, tech and creativity, with subtitles in 100+ languages. Ideas free to stream and download.

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Western science is finally catching up with traditional knowledge. 

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Western science is finally catching up with traditional knowledge. 

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Our knowledge of what the denizens of the animal kingdom are up to, especially when humans aren't around, has steadily increased over the last 50 years. For example, we know now that animals use tools in their daily lives. Chimps use twigs to fish for termites; sea otters break open shellfish on rocks they selected; octopi carry coconut shell halves to later use as shelters.

The latest discovery has taken this assessment to new heights, literally. A team of researchers led by Mark Bonta and Robert Gosford in northern Australia has documented kites and falcons, colloquially termed "firehawks," intentionally carrying burning sticks to spread fire. While it has long been known that birds will take advantage of natural fires that cause insects, rodents and reptiles to flee and thus increase feeding opportunities, that they would intercede to spread fire to unburned locales is astounding.

It's thus no surprise that this study has attracted great attention as it adds intentionality and planning to the repertoire of non-human use of tools. Previous accounts of avian use of fire have been dismissed or at least viewed with some skepticism.

While new to Western science, the behaviours of the nighthawks have long been known to the Alawa, MalakMalak, Jawoyn, and other Indigenous peoples of northern Australia whose ancestors occupied their lands for tens of thousands of years. Contrary to most scientific studies, Bonta and Gosford's team foregrounded their research in traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge. They also note that local awareness of the behaviour of the firehawks is ingrained within some of their ceremonial practices, beliefs and creation accounts.

The worldwide attention given to the firehawks article provides an opportunity to explore the double standard that exists concerning the acceptance of Traditional Knowledge by practitioners of Western science.

Traditional knowledge

Our knowledge of the world comes from many sources. In my field, archaeologists have long depended upon ethnographic sources of information - detailed observations or information derived directly from communities studied - to help develop or test interpretations about past peoples' lives.

In recent years, many scholars have become aware of the large body of information known as Traditional Knowledge (TK), Indigenous Knowledge (IK), or Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), amongst other terms. These knowledge systems, developed over countless generations, are based on individual and collectively learned experiences and explanations of the world, verified by elders, and conveyed and guided experiential learning, and by oral traditions and other means of record keeping.

Traditional Knowledge has today become a highly valued source of information for archaeologists, ecologists, biologists, ethnobotanists, climatologists and others. This information ranges from medicinal properties of plants and insights into the value of biological diversity to caribou migration patterns and the effects of intentional burning of the landscape to manage particular resources. For example, some climatology studies have incorporated Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit traditional knowledge) to explain changes in sea ice conditions observed over many generations.

Despite the wide acknowledgement of their demonstrated value, many scientists continue to have had an uneasy alliance with TK and Indigenous oral histories. On the one hand, TK and other types of local knowledge are valued when they support or supplements archaeological, or other scientific evidence.

However, when the situation is reversed - when Traditional Knowledge is seen to challenge scientific "truths" - then its utility is questioned or dismissed as myth. Science is promoted as objective, quantifiable, and the foundation for "real" knowledge creation or evaluation while TK may be seen as anecdotal, imprecise and unfamiliar in form.

Multiple ways of knowing

Are Indigenous and Western systems of knowledge categorically antithetical? Or do they offer multiple points of entry into knowledge of the world, past and present? There are many cases where science and history are catching up with what Indigenous peoples have long known.

In the past two decades, archaeologists and environmental scientists working in coastal British Columbia have come to recognize evidence of mariculture - the intentional management of marine resources - that pre-dates European settlement. Over the course of thousands of years, the ancestors of the Kwakwaka'wakw and other Indigenous groups there created and maintained what have become known as "clam gardens" - rock-walled, terrace-like constructions that provide ideal habit for butter clams and other edible shellfish.

To the Kwakwaka'wakw, these were known as loxiwey, according to Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) who has shared this term and his knowledge of the practice with researchers.

As marine ecologist Amy Groesbeck and colleagues have demonstrated, these structures increase shellfish productivity and resource security significantly. This resource management strategy reflects a sophisticated body of ecological understanding and practice that predates modern management systems by millennia.

These published research studies now prove that Indigenous communities knew about mariculture for generations but Western scientists never asked them about it before. Once tangible remains were detected, it was clear mariculture management was in use for thousands of years. There is a move underway by various Indigenous communities in the region to restore and recreate clam gardens and put them back into use.

A second example demonstrates how Indigenous oral histories correct inaccurate or incomplete historical accounts. There are significant differences between Lakota and Cheyenne accounts of what transpired at the Battle of Greasy Grass (Little Big Horn) in 1876, and the historical accounts that appeared soon after the battle by white commentators.

The Lakota and Cheyenne can be considered more objective than white accounts of the battle that are tainted by Eurocentric bias. The ledger drawings of Red Horse, a Minneconjou Sioux participant in the battle, record precise details such as trooper's uniforms, the location of wounds on horses, and the distribution of Indian and white casualties.

Red Horse (Minneconjou Lakota Sioux, 1822-1907), Graphite, colored pencil, and ink. NAA MS 2367A_08570700. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

In 1984, a fire at the battleground revealed military artifacts and human remains that prompted archaeological excavations. What this work revealed was a new, more accurate history of the battle that validated many elements of the Native American oral histories and accompanying pictographs and drawings of the events. However, without the archaeological evidence, many historians gave limited credence to the accounts obtained from the participating Native American warriors.

These examples, along with the firehawks study, demonstrate the reliability of Indigenous knowledge.

Opportunities at the intersection

As ways of knowing, Western and Indigenous Knowledge share several important and fundamental attributes. Both are constantly verified through repetition and verification, inference and prediction, empirical observations and recognition of pattern events.

While some actions leave no physical evidence (e.g. clam cultivation), and some experiments can't be replicated (e.g. cold fusion), in the case of Indigenous knowledge, the absence of "empirical evidence" can be damning in terms of wider acceptance.

Some types of Indigenous knowledge simply fall outside the realm of prior Western understanding. In contrast to Western knowledge, which tends to be text based, reductionist, hierarchical and dependent on categorization (putting things into categories), Indigenous science does not strive for a universal set of explanations but is particularistic in orientation and often contextual.

One key attribute of Western science is developing and then testing hypotheses to ensure rigor and replicability in interpreting empirical observations or making predictions. Although hypothesis testing is not a feature of TEK, rigor and replicability are not absent.

Whether or not traditional knowledge systems and scientific reasoning are mutually supportive, even contradictory lines of evidence have value. Employing TK-based observations and explanations within multiple working hypotheses ensures consideration of a variety of predictive, interpretive or explanatory possibilities not constrained by Western expectation or logic. And hypotheses incorporating traditional knowledge-based information can lead the way toward unanticipated insights.

The travels of Glooscap, a major figure in Abenaki oral history and worldview, are found throughout the Mi'kmaw homeland of the Maritime provinces of eastern Canada. As a Transformer, Glooscap created many landscape features. Anthropologist Trudy Sable (Saint Mary's University) has noted a significant degree of correlation between places named in Mi'kmaw legends and oral histories and recorded archaeological sites.

Indigenous peoples don't need Western science to validate or legitimate their knowledge system. Some do appreciate the verification, and there are partnerships developing worldwide with Indigenous knowledge holders and Western scientists working together.

This includes Traditional Ecological Knowledge informing government policies on resource management in some instances. But it is nonetheless problematic when their knowledge, which has been dismissed for so long by so many, becomes a valuable data set or used selectively by academics and others.

To return to the firehawks example, one way to look at this is that the scientists confirmed what the Indigenous peoples have long known about the birds' use of fire. Or we can say that the Western scientists finally caught up with TK after several thousand years.

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It's taken thousands of years, but Western science is finally catching up to Traditional Knowledge

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Our knowledge of what the denizens of the animal kingdom are up to, especially when humans aren't around, has steadily increased over the last 50 years. For example, we know now that animals use tools in their daily lives.

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Paul Wolpe on his bioengineering experiments 

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Paul Wolpe on his bioengineering experiments 

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Yesterday, TED posted a jaw-dropping talk from Paul Root Wolpe that rounds up new bio-engineering experiments, most involving animals, that push our current ethical systems to their limits. From bioengineered glow-in-the-dark pets to supersized salmon, from ratbots to the mouse that grows a human ear - Wolpe asks us to think deeply about what bioengineered animals mean. The TED Blog talked with Wolpe yesterday and asked a couple of followup questions on how we might frame these brave new ethical dilemmas.
Can you build a little on your closing statement: How would you frame a response to the ethical questions raised by this new bio-technology? Where do we start?
It's one of the things that ethicists do. People in this field have been talking about the question of how you create ethical standards around biotech for a very long time. It's a well-developed field, and though there are disagreements, there are also really strong agreements about harms and how you determine harms, risk and how you determine risk. The first and most important part is actually framing the ethical question. What is really the question we're asking here?

If you take, for example, animal manipulation - we've been using and breeding animals for millennia. And if you go to a chicken farm and see how the animals we eat are treated, you wonder, why are we worrying about rats in a lab? Also, we have ethical rules for the treatment of lab rats, but these are the same rats that you're allowed to poison and snap-trap in your basement. We have conflicting ideas on how we treat animals depending on the context. Which is difficult for people who want very clear standards around animal use - they just aren't there. There are different groups that are starting from different ethical assumptions, both defending their ethical perspective, and there isn't yet consensus.

On the other hand, there are clear ethical violations that we tolerate. Think of the way we treat chickens on chicken farms that we're going to eat. I don't know anyone who takes an ethical stand on this who thinks the way they are treated is right, and yet we continue to do it.

What would your response be to Sanjiv Talwar's grad student, who asked if it was ethical to take away an animal's agency?

Well, the answer I would give is this: There is nothing intrinsically wrong in using animals for jobs. We ride horses, we plow with oxen, we have working dogs. The question is, how do we encourage to the degree possible the flourishing of that creature in the context of the job it has to do?

I don't think the experiment itself is intrinsically wrong. One can think of ethical uses for it. If a building collapses and there may be people alive in there, and you could send in a ratbot with a camera on its head that could explore the rubble looking for signs of life, that is a justifiable use of an animal like this. The question becomes, first of all, is the technology being used for its own sake - are we doing it just to see if we can do it? And b, how are the animals treated, and to what use are they put once the technology is in place? There are a series of question one has to answer in the process.

What I do give Talwar credit for is raising the question and discussing it. You need to engage the ethical question all along the way. Do you ask the questions, do you engage them seriously, and if the answer is, 'We have serious questions,' do you override them - or do you change your model to accommodate the ethical problems? And if you can't resolve the ethical dilemma, do you not do the experiment? That's what real ethical engagement requires. And if you get to a point in the conversation where there is no ethical consensus, that's when you call in an expert in ethics.

I wrote a piece once on the eight reasons why scientists don't think about ethics - and the main one is, this tendency to think other people will handle the ethics piece. Yet ethics is everyone's responsibility, we all ultimately must assume responsibility for the ethics of the activities we engage in.
What kind of ethical review happens before you start working on projects like this?
Well, every research institution has IRBs (institutional review boards) that oversee all research on humans, and the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) that oversees animal research as well as their housing, feeding and maintenance. All these experiments can be and must be reviewed to see if it conforms to regulations and to basic principles of ethics. But there are ethical questions that are not really an IACUC's job to answer, and those are the kinds of calls that I do get, from someone who's got a deeper or subtler ethical question. Not about the care of the animal, but about the rightness of an experiment. Should we be doing this in the first place? Is this the best use of resources? What do we mean by "harm" - how far should we interpret the concept? You use the ethicist for the tough ones.
How can a nonscientist make a difference in this debate?
I think most people engage in ethical activity all the time. People have very good instincts about things that are ethical or not ethical. People engage in ethics when they think about the kind of food they buy or other activities - do they buy free-range chicken eggs or regular eggs, are they vegetarians or meat-eaters, do they buy pets from puppy mills or the SPCA. People make ethical decisions in almost everything they do, but most people aren't conscious about the nature of the ethical decisions they make. One of the most important things is just to be conscious that the decisions you make every day have an impact on perpetuating things you think are immoral or moral. The consumer has a big impact.

You can also be a vocal advocate for the ethical positions you take. There are lots of groups that are advocating for different positions on a variety of social and ethical issues, in biotechnology, ecology, geopolitics, poverty, you name it. Support or join a group and engage in the ethical debate.

I really believe that the debate itself is the more important thing, more important than even the outcome. By showing how important ethical decisions are, by engaging in the conversation, we elevate ethical sensitivity.
And in doing so, we also address the powerlessness we can feel in the face of these big changes.
I think, though, that the powerlessness we feel is illusory. We make decisions every day that express our power. Recycling is a wonderful example of this. When people first started community-based recycling in this country, they thought it would take 10 or 15 years to catch on, that most people wouldn't do it, wouldn't bother. Two years later, they found that people took to recycling so quickly and so powerfully that recycling centers were overwhelmed. People were ready to do something at that cultural moment.

The same energy is in the culture now around biotech. People come up to me and express this all the time. There's a cultural momentum right now that people can tap into. There are many, many different ways for people to express their concern and exercise their power over these technologies, just as we have over issues of environementalism and sustainability. There is not a major company or university now that doesn't have a program in environmentalism, at sustainability. To me, that's incredible. I remember corporate America resisting it with all their power. You know, "Nuke the Whales." And now look. Here in Atlanta, Emory is working with Coke. Coke wants to be a zero-net-water-usage company. They want to return to the environment all the water they use. And that wouldn't have been their goal 15 years ago. And that all comes from the public sensibility, which has made sustainability and environment such a powerful ethic that corporations can no longer ignore it.

I'm part of the Savannah Ocean Exchange; we're trying to find innovative ways to restore and protect the Southeastern coast of the US. And Coke is a partner, UPS is a partner, Gulfstream is a partner. It is a new model, because the environmental groups aren't demonizing the corporations anymore. Calling each other names is not the way to get anything done. In talking with Coke, they have understood what every big company needs to understand - that the developing country of today is tomorrow's Coke drinker, and by sustaining and promoting, they're promoting tomorrow's consumers. I think that's also part of that general shift in the way we think about these things.
Many of the technologies you mention in your talk have a military application. Should we be questioning them differently?
The question is, are they different? They're not different in kind but may be slightly different in degree. The question of military ethics is in some ways a specialized field, but military and defense needs do not trump ethical reflection. And it isn't that, because this is military, everything is OK. From the Bible on, there are discussions about standards of war ethics, there are people who talk about how we make ethical decisions about combat and war itself. It's actually a very modern idea that all is fair in love and war. Throughout history, there were very powerful ideas about what is ethical and unethical in war, and about the ethics of soldier conduct.

I can illustrate this with a story. I grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and we used to go to the Gettysburg battlefield all the time. One time, I was at Gettysburg listening to one of the guides who was standing next to a cannon, talking about the use of cannons in the Civil War. And he said, "Do you know, if I put you out in that field right now, I could shoot 100 cannonballs at you and I could never hit you. Because you can stand there and see that cannonball coming and just step to the side. It's like a softball coming at you. You just step to the side." So I asked the guide, "Then how did people get killed by cannonballs?" And the guide said: "It was considered cowardly to step to the side." People let themselves be hit by cannonballs because it was part of the ethics of war.

What can you tell me about your work with NASA - is there ongoing research that you're interested in?

My basic job there is to look at two things: research on astronauts in space, and also, NASA does a lot of ground-based research. For instance, astronauts have serious bone loss problems, so they do ground-based studies on osteoporosis. I look at problems in space-based clinical care. For instance, living in zero gravity creates metabolism problems, so drugs work very differently in space. How do we respond?

And there are ethical problems with long-duration space flight (which until recently was very much on the mind of NASA). Even on the shorter flights, astronauts still get an enormous dose of radiation. They exceed the daily allowable dosage; they just don't let them exceed the lifetime dosage.

What are you working on now at Emory - what's an issue that should be on people's radar?

The thing I'm working on most closely is the question of ethics in neuroscience. I'm the editor of The American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience, and we're doing a number of interesting things there; I was just working with a student on a paper about the question of prodromal mental illness, especially schizophrenia. The idea is, we're beginning to get better and better at diagnosing young people, sometimes as young as 6 but mainly in the early teens, and being able to separate out those who are at higher risk of eventually developing mental illness. Then the question becomes: What do you do about it? The average chance of someone becoming schizophrenic is about 1%. So if we find that this person is at a 10% risk, what do you do about that? Do you put them on meds that are prophylactic, that we hope might keep them from developing schizophrenia? These meds are not pretty meds, they have all kinds of very problematic side effects. And the person is still 90% likely not to be schizophrenic. As we get better and better at prediction, without having the therapies to prevent the disease ... there are all these questions of bioprediction.

I'm also doing some work on synthetic biology. I testified in front of the President's Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues this past summer on synthetic biology. I'm especially interested in the midrange ethical issues. There's the basic ethical issues of 'Are we doing harm,' but there are also midrange issues that aren't talked about.

Such as the issue of speed. This comes up, for instance, in selective breeding. If you're doing traditional selective breeding, it takes many generations of offspring to get to a target state, and during that time there's an opportunity for reflection, self-correction, if you see it going off in the wrong direction. It has a built-in corrective component, and that is time. But if you can do it in one generation, through genetic modification, you've eliminated all those self-correcting steps. Skipping over time and multiple steps with that technology means we have to be much more cautious and thoughtful.

Another is incrementalism: When we're developing a technology, we start at Point A and then go to Point B and to C, and we may end up at M, where no one wants to be. Let's say we all know we don't want to get to M. But where do you put the brakes on? There is no qualitative jump where you can say, "We need to stop at this point." Because everywhere along the line, someone can say, "But there's really no difference today to what we were doing yesterday."

The solution has to be incentive-based. There's no good place to stop certain kinds of scientific progress, but what you do is incentivize people to get where you want them to go. That's what we do with the NIH, the NSF - set goals that drive research in the right direction. So - they're not the mega-issues like harming people, or the micro-issues of how to do an individual experiment. It's the midrange issues of process and scientific progress, how the enterprise as a whole moves in an ethical way, and asking pragmatic questions about that.

Photo: kimkochphotos.com

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"You need to engage the ethical question all along the way": A Q&A with Paul Root Wolpe

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Yesterday, TED posted a jaw-dropping talk from Paul Root Wolpe that rounds up new bio-engineering experiments, most involving animals, that push our current ethical systems to their limits.

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Should countries put limits on their populations? 

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Should countries put limits on their populations? 

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Should countries enforce population control? Let us know by email or in the comments below.

Bai Shaofeng hasn't met a single woman who will date him after nine years of living in Beijing. As a hairdresser in the world's second-largest city, he doesn't make a lot of money and can't afford his own apartment - a deal breaker for most Chinese bachelorettes who have endless options when it comes to suitors.

Today, China is home to 30 million more men than women, thanks to the decades-long one-child policy - which forced parents to pay fines, submit to abortions and raise children in secret. The government's heavy hand on this matter was largely deemed by the West to be in violation of human rights. In 2015, a two-child policy was introduced to compensate, but the damage was done: China now faces a labor shortage and a rapidly aging population without enough caregivers, or taxpayers.

History is rife with examples of abusive population control efforts. Eugenics laws in 20th-century America, for example, saw at least 60,000 people in mental institutions sterilized in a bid to weed out "criminality, feeblemindedness and sexual deviance," according to Alexandra Minna Stern's Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in America. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in its 1927 Buck v. Bell decision the legality of involuntarily sterilizing patients with mental disabilities, which has never been overturned.

Some of their sons will never have the chance to marry.

Author Lihong Shi

But the 7.6 billion-strong global population is expected to hit 9.8 billion by 2050. Greater numbers compute to fewer resources for everyone to share. Food security is a big concern, as is environmental degradation. According to the World Wildlife Fund, more than half the global population of wild animals was killed off between 1970 and 2010, including 76 percent of freshwater wildlife. Widespread poverty is another worry, especially given that birth rates are higher in developing countries.

So is it time for all countries to turn to drastic population control in order to sustain life on Earth, or is it a violation of human rights, no matter what?

China first implemented its one-child policy law in 1979, aiming to curb its burgeoning population and conserve resources. The costs of the policy were high - approximately 20.7 million people were sterilized and 14.4 million women received abortions in 1983 alone, according to 2016 research in the journal Studies in Family Planning. As a society that largely favored sons back then, female fetuses were more commonly aborted, and the policy is estimated to have prevented 400 million births in China overall. Three years of the new two-child law has done little to compensate. The labor and caretaking needs aside, there's an even sadder prospect: For these parents, "some of their sons will never have the chance to marry," says Lihong Shi, author of Choosing Daughters: Family Change in Rural China.

But government measures aren't always so effective. In 1975, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi responded to accusations of corruption by declaring a state of emergency. Her son Sanjay used this distraction as a means for introducing radical population controls. Roughly 8 million men were sterilized in 1975, but this did little to dwindle India's population growth. Poor women simply continued having babies, and India is expected to surpass China as the most populous country in the world by 2024.

So what can be done to effectively address our planet's dwindling resources and degrading climate? In this case, those bumper stickers and T-shirts might be right: The future is female. Project Drawdown, a coalition on climate solutions, found that the combination of family planning among women and educating girls about career and income opportunities has the most potential, not only to slow population growth but also to reduce greenhouse gas emissions this century. "Once women have more education and earn an income, they decide to have fewer children," Shi advises.

Educating and empowering women just might save us all.
What do you think? Do we need to start having fewer babies - and is it the government's responsibility to force us? Let us know via email or in the comments below.

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Should Countries Enforce Population Control?

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Should countries enforce population control? Let us know by email or in the comments below. Bai Shaofeng hasn't met a single woman who will date him after nine years of living in Beijing.

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This is an article from Head to Head, a series in which academics from different disciplines chew over current debates. Let us know what else you'd like covered - all questions welcome. Details of how to contact us are at the end of the article.
Felicity Boardman: The birth of a child with genetic disease is generally an unexpected event. The parents of these children typically won't have a family history with the condition, or even be aware that they are genetic "carriers": that they can transmit a genetic condition to their offspring, but do not have it themselves. Indeed, there are currently only two carrier screening programmes active in the UK that are implemented during pregnancy (one for for thalassaemia, and the other for sickle cell trait). So for most parents, discovering the condition in their family occurs through their child's diagnosis, either through the newborn heel prick test, or following the onset of symptoms.

Even in cases where a genetic condition in the foetus is identified during pregnancy, the options for would-be parents remain extremely limited. Many of the most common genetic conditions still lack effective treatments or cures. This means that, for many parents, the information leads to a decision about whether or not to terminate the pregnancy, or continue in the knowledge that the child will have the condition.

SB Lucas/Wellcome Collection, CC BY

The introduction of genome editing, however, signals a dramatic departure from this usual pathway through reproductive care. Although the foundations of genome editing were laid initially in the 1960s when proteins were first used to "cut" DNA, the recent development of new techniques and technologies (such as CRISPR-Cas9) has made genome editing more precise, more cost-effective and consequently more accessible than ever before.

By intervening before a child is even born, the use of genome editing in human reproduction has the potential to alleviate some of the complicated and painful decisions around pregnancy termination - by providing a reproductive option that has, up until now, not been possible. That is, the possibility of removing the disease-causing genetic variant, while simultaneously preserving the life of the foetus.

Helen O'Neill: Genome editing indeed marks a significant shift, and not only in the area of reproduction, but also in the direction of tailored treatments and personalised medicine. It offers hope to those who, before now, have not had any better options than prescriptions and palliative care.

It's an incredibly exciting time for such research both in terms of discovery and diagnostics. The advent of CRISPR genome editing has catapulted previous efforts in genomics and is being adopted globally. My research, for example, uses CRISPR genome editing to assess the treatment and understanding of sex chromosome disorders and neuromuscular disorders. There are two ways in which genome editing could be used for both treatment and prevention: somatic cell therapy, which could be used in newborns and adults, and germline genome editing, which would be used in an early embryo to prevent a disorder. In this second type, genome editing would aim to alter every cell of a resulting baby, and therefore these changes would be passed on to future generations, meaning that disease causing variants would be prevented from being passed on.

Vrx/Shutterstock.com

The use of genetic technologies in reproduction is frequently criticised for harbouring eugenic undertones. But genetic selection occurs with or without these technologies. For example, we make decisions about the genetics of our future offspring when we choose our mate. We make decisions about the health of our future offspring when we take supplements such as folic acid and improve our diet during pregnancy. Decades of research have yielded ever-increasing information about how we can protect and nurture our embryos, not only by including essential macronutrients but also by excluding harmful exposures such as alcohol and tobacco. We don't ignore these welfare warnings. Nor is it considered elitist to adhere to them by choice to deliver a healthy baby.

But when comparing these genetic prompts to more purposeful permutations of our genetics using gene editing technology, the rationalisation for wanting a healthy baby somehow becomes displaced with irrational ideas about the creation of a "perfect" baby.

It is true that advances in research rarely lend themselves so quickly to clinical adoption. But safety is obviously the number one prerequisite for any research development to become medical practice. Proceeding with such medical advances will always be subject to rigorous oversight. So for many, genome editing - and the era of personalised medicine - is not something to be feared but embraced.

Mistrust and myth

FB: While caution is a good thing, fear of the technologies can make meaningful and progressive debate quite difficult. The association of genome editing with " designer babies ", for example, although making for catchy headlines, masks the intended uses of the technologies. The connotations of frivolity, commercialism and superficial decision making that comes with the term "designer" does a great disservice to the parents in these difficult situations who are facing complex and often deeply painful decisions.

HON: Yes: the term "designer" suggests that there is an element of choice and privilege to a baby that may be born with an edited genome. In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true; people will not edit the genomes of their embryos out of choice, but because they have no choice if they are to deliver a healthy, viable baby.

And as it stands, we are still debating the number of genes in the human genome and certainly do not know what all of the genes do. Even if we did, the unpredictability in the mechanism of genetic crossover between parental genomes precludes any realistic control or prediction of the majority of traits. Choosing partners based on what we see on the outside is a far more reliable method for designing our babies' appearance.

Jacob Lund/Shutterstock.com

There is no doubt that a subject like this needs widespread discussion and debate and in fact recent surveys show that the public are optimistic about genome editing for curing diseases, but there can also be a lack of trust about the intended use of this technology. The distraction from the good that this technology can do is frustrating as a researcher. We should not extrapolate the worst possible outcome which encourages unrealistic and disingenuous ideas focusing on dystopian scenarios.

FB: I think some of this mistrust stems from fear of the unknown and a concern that this technology stands to alter not only our biology, but also our society. People with genetic disabilities, for example, those with spinal muscular atrophy, haemophilia and cystic fibrosis (who I work with during my research), are set to be impacted by the consequences of genome editing, yet they are not always included in stakeholder debates as much as they could be. This is in spite of the fact that people with disabilities have much to contribute to our understanding of what life with genetic disease is really like. Insights that are highly relevant to decisions about which conditions are suitable candidates for genome editing.

HON: But the use of genome editing can also be seen as addressing some of the objections to prenatal testing and pregnancy termination raised by disability rights supporters. By treating the foetus' or embyro's condition, rather than terminating them, genome editing may be an attractive alternative for those who disagree with pregnancy termination or embryo disposal on the grounds of disability or otherwise.

Guy Tear/Wellcome Collection, CC BY

What's at stake?

FB: That's of course true, but for some, this development is regarded as coming at a cost. Genome editing not only changes the genome of the embryo it treats, but also that of every generation that comes after it, and so critical questions still remain about how and when it would be ethically and socially appropriate to implement it. Indeed, it has been suggested that over time, genome editing could effectively remove particular disease-causing traits from the human gene pool.

While this may seem a positive development to many people, the question of which conditions and traits genome editing should be used to treat, and which it should not, is far from straightforward. Research I have conducted with families living with a range of conditions that could all one day be candidate conditions for genome editing, for example, has revealed that a person's relationship to their genetic condition is often complex. For some, their disability is an integral and valued part of their identity, while for others, an unwelcome burden. As such, ascertaining the quality of life of a person with a genetic disorder (particularly before birth) is a near impossible task.

As genome editing technologies move into mainstream healthcare and become widely adopted, it is possible that would-be parents will feel under pressure to use them. This is a concern that has long been raised in relation to informed consent and antenatal screening for Down's Syndrome. The potential stigmatisation and branding of parents who forgo the technologies as "selfish" or "irresponsible" needs to be seriously considered, as well as the possibility that this stigma could extend to the disabled people already living with "editable" conditions (the numbers of whom are likely to reduce over time).

Indeed, the public profile of these (often rare) genetic conditions will shift and alter through the use of genome editing - from conditions once considered "chance" occurrences, to preventable diseases. This change is likely to have social consequences, as well as biological ones.

Anne Clark, University of Oxford/Wellcome Collection, CC BY

HON: It is essential to put genome editing in context with what is already available in terms of screening and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis - which has been available for 30 years. With this, every single condition needs to be appraised and legally approved before it can be tested for. And ultimately, the decision comes from the parents.

It is also important to remember that we cannot predict the pattern of genetics or the heritability of disorders. So suggesting that conditions would be "eliminated" is certainly not the goal of researchers, nor is it realistic. Not all genetic disorders are inherited from the family line, many are sporadic or "" mutations which occur through chance. While germline genome editing certainly has consequences for future generations, many current standard treatments are not ideal and have unwanted side effects, but they are the best we currently have. Take for example cancer radiation therapy, which not only alters, but destroys, the germline.

More research is critical. We know less about the early developmental stages of a human embryo than we do of mice, worms, flies and fish. Knowledge is the most powerful prescription you can give, but it comes with a burden. It is important that with each new discovery we are able to fully consolidate our knowledge before advancing to the next level in research.

FB: I agree - and also think it's important to note that we need more research that explores the technologies from a range of vantage points. Currently, there is a lack of dialogue between the various disciplines working in this area, including geneticists, scientists, bioethicists, sociologists and disability studies scholars. By removing some of the disciplinary divisions, we may better be able to see the full consequences of the technologies for everyone whose lives will be affected by them, the list of which seems to be ever-expanding.
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Should we edit the genomes of human embryos? A geneticist and social scientist discuss

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This is an article from Head to Head, a series in which academics from different disciplines chew over current debates. Let us know what else you'd like covered - all questions welcome. Details of how to contact us are at the end of the article.

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The female problem: male bias in medical trials

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The female problem: male bias in medical trials

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From the earliest days of medicine, women have been considered inferior versions of men. In On the Generation of Animals, the Greek philosopher Aristotle characterised a female as a mutilated male, and this belief has persisted in western medical culture.

"For much of documented history, women have been excluded from medical and science knowledge production, so essentially we've ended up with a healthcare system, among other things in society, that has been made by men for men," Dr Kate Young, a public health researcher at Monash University in Australia, tells me.

Young's research has uncovered how doctors fill knowledge gaps with hysteria narratives. This is particularly prevalent when women keep returning to the doctor, stubbornly refusing to be saved.

"The historical hysteria discourse was most often endorsed when discussing 'difficult' women, referring to those for whom treatment was not helpful or who held a perception of their disease alternative to their clinician," Young wrote in a research paper published in the journal Feminism & Psychology.

"Rather than acknowledge the limitations of medical knowledge, medicine expected women to take control (with their minds) of their disease (in their body) by accepting their illness, making 'lifestyle' changes and conforming to their gendered social roles of wife and mother. Moralising discourses surround those who rebel; they are represented as irrational and irresponsible, the safety net for medicine when it cannot fulfil its claim to control the body."

In her work, Young has shown how endometriosis patients are often viewed by their treating doctors as "reproductive bodies with hysterical tendencies". One gynaecologist said to Young: "Do mad people get endo or does endo make you mad? It's probably a bit of both." Another said: "There's a lot of psychology, just as much as there is pathology [in gynaecology]."

Nobody suggests that endometriosis is not a real disease, or is somehow imagined, but there is a general feeling in medicine that women's reaction to having endometriosis is somehow hysterical, especially when symptoms prevail after treatment has been offered, which is common. And it is not just endometriosis patients treated this way. One male GP said to me: "I've never had a fibromyalgia patient who wasn't batshit crazy."

Historically, Young says, men have made "the medical science about women and their bodies, and there is an abundance of research evidence about the ways in which that knowledge has been constructed to reinforce the hysteria discourse and women as reproductive bodies discourse. One of my favourite examples is that in some of the first sketches of skeletons, male anatomy artists intentionally made women's hips look wider and their craniums look much smaller as a way of saying: 'Here is our evidence that women are reproductive bodies and they need to stay at home and we can't risk making them infertile by making them too educated, look how tiny their heads are.' And we see that again and again."

Not only have doctors, scientists and researchers mostly been men, but most of the cells, animals and humans studied in medical science have also been male: most of the advances we have seen in medicine have come from the study of male biology. Dr Janine Austin Clayton, an associate director for women's health research at the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), told the New York Times that the result is: "We literally know less about every aspect of female biology compared to male biology."

Medicine has always seen women first and foremost as reproductive bodies. Our reproductive organs were the greatest source of difference to men - and because they were different, they were mysterious and suspicious. But the fallout of this difference is that for a long time medicine assumed it was the only difference. Because women had reproductive organs, they should reproduce, and all else about them was deemed uninteresting.

In the early 20th century, the endocrine system, which produces hormones, was discovered. To medical minds, this represented another difference between men and women, overtaking the uterus as the primary perpetrator of all women's ills. Still, medicine persisted with the belief that all other organs and functions would operate the same in men and women, so there was no need to study women. Conversely, researchers said that the menstrual cycle, and varied release of hormones throughout the cycle in rodents, introduced too many variables into a study, therefore females could not be studied.

Diseases presenting differently in women are often missed or misdiagnosed, and those affecting mainly women remain largely a mystery: understudied, undertreated and frequently misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. This has major knock-on effects for both medical practice and the health of women.

As Young has argued: "Medicine defines the female and male bodies as distinct but not equal; analyses of medical texts throughout history reveals the male body to be constructed as superior and the template against which bodies are judged. Any aspect of the female body that differs from the male or that cannot be given a male comparative (exemplified by the uterus) is viewed as evidence of deviation or "fault".

"Because women can bear children, medical discourse associated women with the body and men with the mind, a binary division that reinforces and is reinforced by the public-private division ... In addition to restricting women's public contribution, such beliefs provide medicine with an explanatory model of disease and illness in women: to deny one's 'biological destiny' is to incite all manner of diseases, as Plato stated when theorising the wandering womb."

We see this in many predominantly female conditions: women with endometriosis are told that delayed childbearing causes the illness, or that pregnancy will cure it; women with breast cancer were once fed this line until advances in research (which only occurred because women campaigned for better knowledge and treatments) proved otherwise.

During the 80s, a group of female scientists in the US formed a society to campaign for better health research in women, now called the Society for Women's Health Research. They teamed up with some US Congress members to draw attention to the discrepancies in medical research and the effect on women's health.

An anatomy lesson: historically, medical research was an exclusively male preserve. Photograph: ilbusca/Getty Images

In 1985, a report by the US Public Health Service Task Force on Women's Health warned that "the historical lack of research focus on women's health concerns has compromised the quality of health information available to women as well as the health care they receive".

The campaign drew attention to some of the absurdities that resulted from this male bias, which Maya Dusenbery has summarised in her 2018 book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed and Sick. She notes that, in the early 60s: "Observing that women tended to have lower rates of heart disease until their oestrogen levels dropped after menopause, researchers conducted the first trial to look at whether supplementation with the hormone was an effective preventive treatment. The study enrolled 8,341 men and no women ... And a National Institutes of Health-supported pilot study from Rockefeller University that looked at how obesity affected breast and uterine cancer didn't enrol a single woman."

And that's not all.

"The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, which began in 1958 and purported to explore 'normal human ageing', didn't enrol any women for the first 20 years it ran. The Physicians' Health Study, which had recently concluded that taking a daily aspirin may reduce the risk of heart disease? Conducted in 22,071 men and zero women. The 1982 Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial - known, aptly enough, as MRFIT - which looked at whether dietary change and exercise could help prevent heart disease: just 13,000 men."

The result of this male bias in research extends beyond clinical practice. Of the 10 prescription drugs taken off the market by the US Food and Drug Administration between 1997 and 2000 due to severe adverse effects, eight caused greater health risks in women. A 2018 study found this was a result of "serious male biases in basic, preclinical, and clinical research".

The campaign had an effect in the US: in 1993, the FDA and the NIH mandated the inclusion of women in clinical trials. Between the 70s and 90s, these organisations and many other national and international regulators had a policy that ruled out women of so-called childbearing potential from early-stage drug trials.

The reasoning went like this: since women are born with all the eggs they will ever produce, they should be excluded from drug trials in case the drug proves toxic and impedes their ability to reproduce in the future.

The result was that all women were excluded from trials, regardless of their age, gender status, sexual orientation or wish or ability to bear children. Men, on the other hand, constantly reproduce their sperm, meaning they represent a reduced risk. It sounds like a sensible policy, except it treats all women like walking wombs and has introduced a huge bias into the health of the human race.

In their 1994 book Outrageous Practices, Leslie Laurence and Beth Weinhouse wrote: "It defies logic for researchers to acknowledge gender difference by claiming women's hormones can affect study results - for instance, by affecting drug metabolism - but then to ignore these differences, study only men and extrapolate the results to women."

Since the 90s, more women have been included in clinical trials but researchers have not always analysed results by sex and/or gender. And though clinical studies have changed substantially, preclinical studies remained focused on male cell lines and male animals.

A 2010 study by Annaliese Beery and Irving Zucker reviewed sex bias in research on mammals in 10 biological fields during 2009 and their historical precedents. It found: "Male bias was evident in eight disciplines and most prominent in neuroscience, with single-sex studies of male animals outnumbering those of females 5.5 to 1. In the past half-century, male bias in non-human studies has increased while declining in human studies. Studies of both sexes frequently fail to analyse results by sex. Under-representation of females in animal models of disease is also commonplace, and our understanding of female biology is compromised by these deficiencies."

The study also found the justification that researchers gave for excluding female animals - that it introduced too much variability in results - to be "without foundation".

It took until 2014 for the NIH to begin to acknowledge the problem of male bias in preclinical trials, and until 2016 for it to mandate that any research money it granted must include female animals.

These policies and practices have often been framed as paternalistic, designed to protect women against the harmful effects of medical research. But history belies this notion. The practice of brutal experimentation of medical treatments on women throughout history makes medicine's unwillingness to include women in scientific studies seem a lot less like magnanimous paternalism. Rather, we are left with the impression that women are not interesting enough for scientific endeavour but good enough for practice.
This is an edited extract from Pain and Prejudice by Gabrielle Jackson, published by Little, Brown (£14.99 rrp). To order a copy for £11.24 with free UK p&p, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837
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The female problem: how male bias in medical trials ruined women's health

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Centuries of female exclusion has meant women's diseases are often missed, misdiagnosed or remain a total mystery

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PHILOSOPHY - Epistemology: Science, Can it Teach Us Everything?

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The Scientific Methods: Crash Course History of Science #14

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Published: March 10, 2017

A theory is a carefully thought-out explanation for observations of the natural world that has been constructed using the scientific method, and which brings together many facts and hypotheses.

In a previous blog post, I talked about the definition of "fact" in a scientific context, and discussed how facts differ from hypotheses and theories. The latter two terms also are well worth looking at in more detail because they are used differently by scientists and the general public, which can cause confusion when scientists talk about their work.

In common parlance, theory is often used to refer to something that is rather speculative. Because of this, it sometimes takes on a negative tone (for example, when creationists refer to evolution as "just a theory"). This definition strongly contrasts with the definition of theory as it is used in science: a theory is a carefully thought-out explanation for observations of the natural world that has been constructed using the scientific method, and which brings together many facts and hypotheses. The term hypothesis is good to define in this discussion as well: a hypothesis is an idea that we can test with further scientific observations.

With these definitions in mind, a simplified version of the scientific process would be as follows. A scientist makes an observation of a natural phenomenon. She then devises a hypothesis about the explanation of the phenomenon, and she designs an experiment and/or collects additional data to test the hypothesis. If the test falsifies the hypothesis (i.e., shows that it is incorrect), she will have to develop a new hypothesis and test that. If the hypothesis is corroborated (i.e., not falsified) by the test, the scientist will retain it. If it survives additional scrutiny, she may eventually try to incorporate it into a larger theory that helps to explain her observed phenomenon and relate it to other phenomena.

That's all fairly abstract, so let's look at a concrete example involving some recent research I undertook with a group of collaborators. The theory of evolution states that the process of natural selection should work to optimize the function of an organism's parts if the changes increase the chances of the organism successfully producing offspring and the changes are heritable (i.e., can be passed down from generation to generation).

Consider a turtle's shell. Turtles with stronger shells will be more likely to survive encounters with predators, and thus will be more likely to successfully produce offspring. Over time, natural selection will weed out turtles with weaker shells (i.e., those individuals will produce fewer offspring), resulting in a species that has relatively strong shells.

But what happens when there are multiple selective pressures at work? We might hypothesize that turtles that spend most of their time in water face a trade-off between having a strong shell and one that is streamlined (making them more efficient swimmers), whereas streamlining would be less important to turtles on land, allowing them to evolve stronger shells even if they aren't very streamlined.

My collaborators and I tested this hypothesis in the following way. First, we digitized the shell shapes of a number of turtle species, some of which are aquatic and others of which spend most of their time on land. We then used an engineering technique called finite element analysis (or FEA) to examine the strength of the differently shaped shells when they were subjected to a crushing force, similar to a predator's bite. To measure how streamlined the shells are, we measured their cross-sectional areas, with the idea that a domed shell with a tall cross-section is less streamlined than a flattened shell with a low cross-section. Finally, we used a mathematical model of natural selection to estimate how much of a trade-off between strength and streamlining each species was forced to make, given the observed shape and strength of its shell.

Our results corroborated our hypothesis that aquatic turtles are forced to make more of a trade-off between strength and streamlining than turtles that live on land. In general, the shell shapes of our aquatic turtles were more streamlined but weaker than those of our land turtles, and our mathematical model of natural selection indicated that selection for streamlining was acting more strongly on the aquatic species.

As with any idea in science, our results are open to further testing. For example, other researchers might develop a better model of natural selection that shows that our model was overly simplistic. Or they might collect data from more turtle species that shows that our results were based on a false pattern stemming from sampling too few species (we considered 47 species in our dataset, about 14% of living turtle species). For now, though, our results can be added as a piece of evidence that is consistent with the predictions of the large explanatory theory of evolution.

If you would like to learn more about this research, the scientific paper describing the work can be found in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. You can see some of the turtle specimens that we used in this research in The Field Museum's exhibition Specimens: Unlocking the Secrets of Life, open through January 7, 2018.

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Published: March 10, 2017 A theory is a carefully thought-out explanation for observations of the natural world that has been constructed using the scientific method, and which brings together many facts and hypotheses. In a previous blog post, I talked about the definition of "fact" in a scientific context, and discussed how facts differ from hypotheses and theories.

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Thomas Kuhn's impact on scientific thought

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Thomas Kuhn's impact on scientific thought

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This article explains Thomas Kuhn's philosophy on scientific thought and progress.

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Fifty years ago this month, one of the most influential books of the 20th century was published by the University of Chicago Press. Many if not most lay people have probably never heard of its author, Thomas Kuhn, or of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but their thinking has almost certainly been influenced by his ideas. The litmus test is whether you've ever heard or used the term "paradigm shift", which is probably the most used - and abused - term in contemporary discussions of organisational change and intellectual progress. A Google search for it returns more than 10 million hits, for example. And it currently turns up inside no fewer than 18,300 of the books marketed by Amazon. It is also one of the most cited academic books of all time. So if ever a big idea went viral, this is it.

The real measure of Kuhn's importance, however, lies not in the infectiousness of one of his concepts but in the fact that he singlehandedly changed the way we think about mankind's most organised attempt to understand the world. Before Kuhn, our view of science was dominated by philosophical ideas about how it ought to develop ("the scientific method"), together with a heroic narrative of scientific progress as "the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors", as the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy puts it. Before Kuhn, in other words, we had what amounted to the Whig interpretation of scientific history, in which past researchers, theorists and experimenters had engaged in a long march, if not towards "truth", then at least towards greater and greater understanding of the natural world.

Kuhn's version of how science develops differed dramatically from the Whig version. Where the standard account saw steady, cumulative "progress", he saw discontinuities - a set of alternating "normal" and "revolutionary" phases in which communities of specialists in particular fields are plunged into periods of turmoil, uncertainty and angst. These revolutionary phases - for example the transition from Newtonian mechanics to quantum physics - correspond to great conceptual breakthroughs and lay the basis for a succeeding phase of business as usual. The fact that his version seems unremarkable now is, in a way, the greatest measure of his success. But in 1962 almost everything about it was controversial because of the challenge it posed to powerful, entrenched philosophical assumptions about how science did - and should - work.

What made it worse for philosophers of science was that Kuhn wasn't even a philosopher: he was a physicist, dammit. Born in 1922 in Cincinnati, he studied physics at Harvard, graduating summa cum laude in 1943, after which he was swept up by the war effort to work on radar. He returned to Harvard after the war to do a PhD - again in physics - which he obtained in 1949. He was then elected into the university's elite Society of Fellows and might have continued to work on quantum physics until the end of his days had he not been commissioned to teach a course on science for humanities students as part of the General Education in Science curriculum. This was the brainchild of Harvard's reforming president, James Conant, who believed that every educated person should know something about science.

The course was centred around historical case studies and teaching it forced Kuhn to study old scientific texts in detail for the first time. (Physicists, then as now, don't go in much for history.) Kuhn's encounter with the scientific work of Aristotle turned out to be a life- and career-changing epiphany.

"The question I hoped to answer," he recalled later, "was how much mechanics Aristotle had known, how much he had left for people such as Galileo and Newton to discover. Given that formulation, I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all... that conclusion was standard and it might in principle have been right. But I found it bothersome because, as I was reading him, Aristotle appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well. About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation."

What Kuhn had run up against was the central weakness of the Whig interpretation of history. By the standards of present-day physics, Aristotle looks like an idiot. And yet we know he wasn't. Kuhn's blinding insight came from the sudden realisation that if one is to understand Aristotelian science, one must know about the intellectual tradition within which Aristotle worked. One must understand, for example, that for him the term "motion" meant change in general - not just the change in position of a physical body, which is how we think of it. Or, to put it in more general terms, to understand scientific development one must understand the intellectual frameworks within which scientists work. That insight is the engine that drives Kuhn's great book.

Kuhn remained at Harvard until 1956 and, having failed to get tenure, moved to the University of California at Berkeley where he wrote Structure... and was promoted to a professorship in 1961. The following year, the book was published by the University of Chicago Press. Despite the 172 pages of the first edition, Kuhn - in his characteristic, old-world scholarly style - always referred to it as a mere "sketch". He would doubtless have preferred to have written an 800-page doorstop.

But in the event, the readability and relative brevity of the "sketch" was a key factor in its eventual success. Although the book was a slow starter, selling only 919 copies in 1962-3, by mid-1987 it had sold 650,000 copies and sales to date now stand at 1.4 million copies. For a cerebral work of this calibre, these are Harry Potter-scale numbers.

Kuhn's central claim is that a careful study of the history of science reveals that development in any scientific field happens via a series of phases. The first he christened "normal science" - business as usual, if you like. In this phase, a community of researchers who share a common intellectual framework - called a paradigm or a "disciplinary matrix" - engage in solving puzzles thrown up by discrepancies (anomalies) between what the paradigm predicts and what is revealed by observation or experiment. Most of the time, the anomalies are resolved either by incremental changes to the paradigm or by uncovering observational or experimental error. As philosopher Ian Hacking puts it in his terrific preface to the new edition of Structure: "Normal science does not aim at novelty but at clearing up the status quo. It tends to discover what it expects to discover."

The trouble is that over longer periods unresolved anomalies accumulate and eventually get to the point where some scientists begin to question the paradigm itself. At this point, the discipline enters a period of crisis characterised by, in Kuhn's words, "a proliferation of compelling articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals". In the end, the crisis is resolved by a revolutionary change in world-view in which the now-deficient paradigm is replaced by a newer one. This is the paradigm shift of modern parlance and after it has happened the scientific field returns to normal science, based on the new framework. And so it goes on.

This brutal summary of the revolutionary process does not do justice to the complexity and subtlety of Kuhn's thinking. To appreciate these, you have to read his book. But it does perhaps indicate why Structure... came as such a bombshell to the philosophers and historians who had pieced together the Whig interpretation of scientific progress.

As an illustration, take Kuhn's portrayal of "normal" science. The most influential philosopher of science in 1962 was Karl Popper, described by Hacking as "the most widely read, and to some extent believed, by practising scientists". Popper summed up the essence of "the" scientific method in the title of one of his books: Conjectures and Refutations. According to Popper, real scientists (as opposed to, say, psychoanalysts) were distinguished by the fact that they tried to refute rather than confirm their theories. And yet Kuhn's version suggested that the last thing normal scientists seek to do is to refute the theories embedded in their paradigm!

Many people were also enraged by Kuhn's description of most scientific activity as mere "puzzle-solving" - as if mankind's most earnest quest for knowledge was akin to doing the Times crossword. But in fact these critics were over-sensitive. A puzzle is something to which there is a solution. That doesn't mean that finding it is easy or that it will not require great ingenuity and sustained effort. The unconscionably expensive quest for the Higgs boson that has recently come to fruition at Cern, for example, is a prime example of puzzle-solving because the existence of the particle was predicted by the prevailing paradigm, the so-called "standard model" of particle physics.

But what really set the cat among the philosophical pigeons was one implication of Kuhn's account of the process of paradigm change. He argued that competing paradigms are "incommensurable": that is to say, there exists no objective way of assessing their relative merits. There's no way, for example, that one could make a checklist comparing the merits of Newtonian mechanics (which applies to snooker balls and planets but not to anything that goes on inside the atom) and quantum mechanics (which deals with what happens at the sub-atomic level). But if rival paradigms are really incommensurable, then doesn't that imply that scientific revolutions must be based - at least in part - on irrational grounds? In which case, are not the paradigm shifts that we celebrate as great intellectual breakthroughs merely the result of outbreaks of mob psychology?

Kuhn's book spawned a whole industry of commentary, interpretation and exegesis. His emphasis on the importance of communities of scientists clustered round a shared paradigm essentially triggered the growth of a new academic discipline - the sociology of science - in which researchers began to examine scientific disciplines much as anthropologists studied exotic tribes, and in which science was regarded not as a sacred, untouchable product of the Enlightenment but as just another subculture.

As for his big idea - that of a "paradigm" as an intellectual framework that makes research possible -well, it quickly escaped into the wild and took on a life of its own. Hucksters, marketers and business school professors adopted it as a way of explaining the need for radical changes of world-view in their clients. And social scientists saw the adoption of a paradigm as a route to respectability and research funding, which in due course led to the emergence of pathological paradigms in fields such as economics, which came to esteem mastery of mathematics over an understanding of how banking actually works, with the consequences that we now have to endure.

The most intriguing idea, however, is to use Kuhn's thinking to interpret his own achievement. In his quiet way, he brought about a conceptual revolution by triggering a shift in our understanding of science from a Whiggish paradigm to a Kuhnian one, and much of what is now done in the history and philosophy of science might be regarded as "normal" science within the new paradigm. But already the anomalies are beginning to accumulate. Kuhn, like Popper, thought that science was mainly about theory, but an increasing amount of cutting-edge scientific research is data- rather than theory-driven. And while physics was undoubtedly the Queen of the Sciences when Structure... was being written, that role has now passed to molecular genetics and biotechnology. Does Kuhn's analysis hold good for these new areas of science? And if not, isn't it time for a paradigm shift?

In the meantime, if you're making a list of books to read before you die, Kuhn's masterwork is one.
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Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science

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Fifty years ago this month, one of the most influential books of the 20th century was published by the University of Chicago Press. Many if not most lay people have probably never heard of its author, Thomas Kuhn, or of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but their thinking has almost certainly been influenced by his ideas.

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Centuries of scientists thought that the four humors caused human illness...before empirical evidence was adopted as a crucial part of modern science.

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Journal of Ethics | American Medical Association

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To students and beneficiaries of western biomedicine, the greatest contribution of the ages-old humoral model might seem to be the expressions it provides for describing someone's disposition: he is in good (or bad) humor; or we might even say, "he is phlegmatic." But the humoral theory left more than a linguistic legacy. The group of fourth- and third-century BC physicians known as the Hippocratics who formulated (and more importantly wrote about) their theories, were the first organized group to consider that illness had natural-not supernatural-causes. The significance of this change in attention cannot be overstated for reasons I will return to later. Their notion that 4 bodily fluids-blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile-caused illness persisted for more than 2000 years in the West until the rise of controlled empirical science in the mid-19th century. Humoral medicine's most compelling claim on our attention, though, is its belief that health and its opposite, dis-ease, were due to complex interactions among an individual's 4 internal humors, his lifestyle and habits, and his environment.

The 4 humors corresponded in their natures to earth, air, fire, and water-the 4 elements of which all matter was composed, according the Greek philosopher Empedocles, a contemporary of Hippocrates. As evident in the diagram above, blood was hot and wet like air; phlegm was cold and wet like water; yellow bile was hot and dry like fire; and black bile was cold and dry like earth. Health consisted in humoral equilibrium. Illness resulted when an excess or a deficiency occurred in one or more or the humors. The disturbance could result from overindulgence in food or drink, too much or too little physical exertion, or changes in the so-called "naturals," ie, the uncontrollable environment and climate. Because of the similarity of the natural elements and humors, certain humors were more likely to become excessive during given seasons of the year. Phlegm increased during the winter, bringing with it bronchitis and pneumonia because phlegm was cold and wet, like the chilly Mediterranean winters [1]. In warm, wet spring, hot, wet blood increased, causing dysentery and nose bleeds [2].

The physician's task was to diagnose which humor was out of balance; treatment then focused on restoring equilibrium by diet or by reducing the offending, out-of-balance humor by evacuating it. Medicinals were not an important part of Hippocratic treatments. (It was Galen who, in the first century AD, concocted and treated with medicinal herbs and compounds. "Polypharmacy," says history-of-medicine scholar, Robert Hudson, "was Galen's legacy" [3].)

The all-important Hippocratic breakthrough to which I alluded earlier-the conviction that disease had natural rather than supernatural etiology-forced the Hippocratic physicians to observe their patients closely. Such observation of the patient and his or her physical condition, dietary and exercise habits, and environment were irrelevant when disease was thought to have a supernatural source. In that view, the offending curse or possession was independent of the physical characteristics of those afflicted and their environments. But, for the Hippocratics, diagnosis and treatment began with the knowledge of the patient.

The Hippocratics derived their specific theories about which imbalance caused which symptoms by observing the fluid excretions of sweat, urination, hemorrhage, vomiting, and defecation that coincided with a return to health. They then applied this empirical information to future patients. The Hippocratic Aphorisms attest to close and careful observation of many, many patients: "Persons who have had frequent and severe attacks of swooning, without any manifest cause die suddenly." Hudson explains that this aphorism describes Stokes-Adams syndrome characterized by insufficient cerebral blood flow, victims of which faint frequently and often die suddenly [4]. (Today, Stokes-Adams is treated by the implantation of pacemakers.) Another aphorism, Hudson notes, anticipates present-day insurance actuarial tables: "Persons who are naturally very fat are apt to die earlier than those who are slender" [5].

Their "scientific" observation notwithstanding, the Hippocratics had it all wrong. Though they knew illness had natural causes, they believed that cause to be generalized and in the fluids of the body. The history of medical science is the story of discovering ever more localized cause of illness. That history is familiar, beginning with Vesalius's new anatomy, published in 1543 and based upon his many dissections of human cadavers. Though others had speculated on the role of anatomy in illness, the anatomical idea-that function of the body is related to its structure-took permanent hold after Vesalius. In 1761, the Italian physician Morgagni published the results of his comparisons of organs observed in autopsy with the symptoms those individuals had exhibited before their deaths. His treatise, On the Seats and Causes of Diseases, concluded that sickness and death resulted from changes in the organs.

From there, the localizing of disease narrowed further and further. Bichat and Virchow located disease in tissues and cells in the early and mid-1800s, respectively. Next came the discoveries, starting with Pasteur and followed by Koch, about an external cause for the pathological changes in the cells, tissues, and organs of the body-the germ. By 1900, the germ theory was indisputably established in western medicine.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, infectious medicine was ruled by the dominance of the germ theory and the spectacular control of germs that antibiotics increasingly afforded. It is humbling, in a way, to note medicine's re-attention to lifestyle and environment in the late 20th and early 21st century. Germs and, now, genes are indeed "master molecules," to be reckoned with in the diagnosis and treatment of illness. Yet, we are coming to realize more and more that the same germ or gene affects different people differently. As the Hippocratics turned their focus away from the supernatural and toward the individual patient, the contemporary physician, too, knows that neither germs nor genes are sacred; successful treatment begins with understanding the individual patient.

Citation

DOI
10.1001/virtualmentor.2002.4.7.mhst1-0207.
The viewpoints expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the AMA.

Author Information

Faith Lagay, PhD is the managing editor of Virtual Mentor.

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To students and beneficiaries of western biomedicine, the greatest contribution of the ages-old humoral model might seem to be the expressions it provides for describing someone's disposition: he is in good (or bad) humor; or we might even say, "he is phlegmatic." But the humoral theory left more than a linguistic legacy.