Month: September 2017

The Cult of Youth #Lab2017

Worrying trend at #Lab2017.

Reported on Newsnight last night and Angela Rayner interviewed on @BBCR4Today this morning. Corbyn / McDonnell emphasising – and McCluskey reinforcing – succession-planning in their government strategy, citing the younger female appointees to the shadow front-bench as part of that strategy. Rebecca Long-Bailey, Dawn Butler and Angela Rayner for example. So far so good. I’m better than good with that. Good with them as individuals too, from what little I know them.

What I’m not good with is the spin – the meme – “look at this uneducated girl from working-class background succeeding in making it to the front bench“. Not good with Rayner’s grasp of the English language either, given her education brief, but hey, she wasn’t my reaction to the original spin.

  • Great for hope, and hope has value – part of the anybody can achieve anything fallacy – but still spurious. They “succeeded” because of the political choice.
  • Great for gender balance – no buts.
  • Not great for the cult of youth. A balance is good, as is the “blooding” of succession-planning-exposure, but wisdom comes from living.
  • Not great for the “proud to be thick – I failed my Maths O-level” brigade. If education is just about qualifications for a job, who needs education if you’ve got a (good) job? And, if experts know no better, who needs education? Education and experience, knowledge and wisdom are to be valued.

Uneducated and inexperienced youth is another populist gimmick. Another on top of the whole Momentum-youth-and-personality-cult of Corbynism generally. Populism stinks in grown-ups.

Non-Biological Lamarckism and Residual Scepticism?

I expressed some scepticism at Massimo Pigliucci’s “One more time: no, epigenetics is not Lamarckism.”

Mary Paniscus also expressed some scepticism at the essay, but the difference is that she knows her genetic biology a lot better than I do. I need to clarify my residual interest in Lamarckism.

Firstly Massimo (and Mary) are correct. Epigenetics is not an opportunity – an excuse – to bring Lamarckism into biological evolution. Genetic or epigenetic, however and whenever the mutation occurs in relation to the environment, inheritance is “atomic” via the cells involved at conception / inception. There is no sense in which the mutation is in any direct sense adaptive in positive response to the environmental situation that may have caused the mutation. They are generally negative (maladaptive) damage to the existing genetic / epigenetic state, and can only turn out to be positive to individuals of the species (phenotype) in the long run. At the direct causal level, the evolutionary change is only randomly related to the mutation.

[Aside – such mutation cannot be inherently “positive”, not until the phenotype can value it as an “affordance” providing an advantageous opportunity to the species. All mutations that don’t wreck the reproductive cycle, and all historically preserved mutations, have that potential, but it’s the behaviour in the phenotype generations that turns the otherwise random – generally maladaptive – mutation into an evolved trait.]

That selection from random variation is the essence of Darwinism, so there is no sense in which it is Lamarckian, even if the mutation arises from environmental exposure. That’s true both genetically (DNA-based) and epigenetically (generic-atomic) anyway.

My scepticism is on two levels beyond biology because (a) Massimo is a philosopher and (b) my interests are epistemological and human. Biology is only part of science and science is only a part of this rational interest.

  • Firstly, causation itself. The significance in which it makes any sense to say “this event caused this outcome” when processes operate indirectly across many levels. As Mary says, phenotypic evolution is always indirectly related to genetic (or epigenetic) mutation. (The epigenetic / genetic confusion – opportunity for critics to slip-in spurious agendas – arises only from the “atomic” naming problem – see previous post on this. Words matter.)
    .
  • Secondly, in non-biological evolution (in Dennett’s design spaces) dealing with sentient and intelligent beings, not all changes are random, many are intentional and purposeful (if you’re not in denial of free-will, that is)(*). The situation varies from (0,0,0) to (1,1,1) Darwinian. The non-Darwinian end of that vector might usefully be thought of as positively Lamarckian – adaptive learning? Here, it’s just a word, a label. Neither Darwin nor Lamarck was anywhere close to the mechanisms of how all these processes happen, nor were they thinking beyond biological species when they proposed their ideas. No reason to demonise Lamarck just because Darwin was right.

So, neither of these points invalidates Massimo’s headline. Epigenetics is NOT an excuse to slip Lamarkism back into biological evolution. My scepticism simply expresses the fact that philosophically, beyond biology, there is more to this.

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[(*) And remember, even genetic (and epigenetic) changes can be engineered by imperfect human intention.]

Neuro-Linguistic-Programming and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Hearing a news story this morning from BBC’s science correspondent Tom Feilden, apologetically reporting a study finding value in Neuro-Linguistic-Programming (NLP) behind treatment for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME) …

Here the BBC R4 Today clip.
Here the actual Lancet-published paper here.
Grauniad story here (doesn’t mention NLP).

NLP suffers from confusion with natural language programming in the AI / Technology space, but is in fact a thoroughly discredited marketing packaging of 1970’s life-style neuro-bollox. At least that’s the story you’d get from Wikipedia.

Scientifically discredited in the lack of repeatable objective evidence to support it, that is. That doesn’t mean it’s not real or true or valuable to careful practitioners. Let’s face it science is prepared to discredit the reality of human consciousness itself, so it’s unlikely to support a method of psycho-talking-therapy that targets behaviour modification through choice of language subconsciously affecting conscious action. CFS/ME as an illness has always suffered from scepticism as essentially a psycho-somatic condition, the subjective feeling of a disease with little causal explanation of any physical condition. So much “mental illness” and explanations of the sub-conscious relationships with physical behaviour and competence could be considered scientifically doubtful.

Frankly, at the common sense level, NLP is simply a talking therapy. However it works, it’s good to talk. Better to understand limitations to the science of using it, with care.

One problem is the packaging as a “thing” with a name, as if it is objectively well-defined. A recurring theme here. The other problem is that however well or badly defined, the model can have metaphorical and analytical value, often a checklist or taxonomy of issues, but will obviously fail if its values are codified prescriptively – like some magic recipe.

NLP suffers all of these problems. What’s in a name?

  • Neuro? Definitely a neuro-bollox prefix for anything “mental” these days, irrespective of how brain stuff supports mental stuff. But of course it does, unless you’re a consciousness-denying scientist that is. No-one using NLP needs to explain how the brain works, simply show that careful use of language in talking therapies can subconsciously and positively influence physical behaviour. (In that sense, nudge depends on similar thinking. The whole of psycho-therapy suffering problems trying to satisfy its own demands to be scientific, to be treated as a science.)
  • Linguistic? Well OK, we’re dealing with the language of communication. One out of three ain’t great.
  • Programming? Hmmm. This is a consequence of the will-to-systematise (and sell) the magic TLA recipe. Psycho-therapeutic modification of feelings and behaviour – mind-games – are never going to be programming when dealing with real humans and not machines.

I see Castaneda is cited as being an influence on NLP – guaranteed to attract the hippy-new-age-alt-lifestyle-bollox reaction. He he.

Also interesting that lack of “NICE” accreditation for NLP is also cited. Another symptom of overly scientific management expectations in public organisations.

Listening to the news item on BBC R4 Today. Both critics and practitioners acknowledging “flakey” nature of NLP basis. An obvious scientific issue is the discounting the credibility of subject testimony when dealing with any “mental” condition, but use it we must with care when we’re dealing with how people “feel”. Science is almost by definition in denial of the subjective. You need to be an expert on the subtleties to understand what makes good science in this domain.

The real bollox is the expectation of shoe-horning all aspects of human life into some mechanistic scientific mould. We humans are flakey and science does have its limits.

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[Post Notes:

Expert reactions here.

All I’m adding to this debate is it whilst it is pseudoscience, that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable or useful, especially if you’re open minded, understand how to treat the myriad of subtleties, and the procedure is not being spun simplistically for dishonest commercial reasons. See @DeeVeeBee contribution.

And as well as the original discrediting of NLP – commercially interested pseudoscience – LP itself has been debunked and challenged recently. Some of these are referred to in the expert reactions above, but provided here thanks to @ssppeerroo

Skeptics Dictionary debunking of LP
Advertising standards adjudication.
Original promotional material (since taken down from the web).

My own points unchanged. About Pseudoscience / NLP / LP / CFS / ME generally, not about LP & ME specifically.]

Asymptote to Asymptote

Over the course of the last couple of days BBCFour TV showed:

Tilda Swinton (June 2017) as Gertrude Bell in Letters from Baghdad

@RoryStewartUK (2010) Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia Episode 1 and Episode 2

These caught my attention because apart from her association with T E Lawrence, Bell is of local interest and I’m guessing showing the one provided an opportunity to re-show the other, older documentary. The significance of “the Middle East” as a ubiquitous issue for UK, US & European politics is reason enough to take the lessons of Bell and Lawrence seriously. Like Rory I’ve been fascinated by TEL since childhood, read just about everything by or about him and visited UK and Jordanian locations of his life. Bell I’ve only known by association and general knowledge until recently moving back to living not far from her Redcar home.

In fact it was that moving around, US and Norway and back to the UK that meant I missed Rory’s documentary first time around. It was 2012/2013 before I picked-up on Alan Little’s Lawrence Man & Myth and Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia and the fact that US-led operations in Iraq were drawing on TEL’s contributions to working with Arabs, and taking them perhaps too prescriptively rather than simply learning his lessons.

Somehow since then I also managed to miss the critically panned Werner Herzog / Nicole Kidman Queen of the Desert

Anyway, this is just a link-gathering post for now. The Asymptote to Asymptote title is a quote from TEL used by Rory illustrating TEL’s overly flowery classical language in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He was a classics scholar of course, and I still find his poetic writing very relevant – both content and style – to my epistemological and humanist agendas, despite the original interest like everyone else in the flawed visionary hero.  It was also instrumental in my seeing barriers broken between the practical military engineering and a man of letters – in some small way not unlike C P Snow’s Third Culture.

Full on-line copy of Seven Pillars here.

The irony is that the choice of the word asymptote in the quote is self-deprecating in a later quote where he admits he’s using it inaccurately in its true mathematical sense. He is of course talking about the perennial swing between binary extremes that dominates any more subtle discourse. More truth in literature than scientific fact.

Their thoughts were at ease only in extremes.

They inhabited superlatives by choice.

 

 

Is Lamarckism Really Dead?

Mentioned a few posts ago that pretty much everything posted by the EES (Extended Evolutionary Synthesis) project seemed to be valuable to my own research agenda. I also noted at that point that I wasn’t really sure who they were, simply a large collection of like-minded thinkers posting under the one on-line banner. I realised pretty quickly the reason I am plugged into EES is because some of the individuals I follow (including eg @MassimoPigliucci and @DanielDennett) were amongst them.

Today Massimo’s post on his own Footnotes to Plato blog was specifically about the distinction between epi-genetics and Lamarckian inheritance in the EES sphere. Biologically, clearly, only materials present in the gametes (sperm or egg) can be inherited at conception (or in the cells that divide-off in asexual reproduction). However it gets replicated into all (relevant) cells of the new adult and offspring of the new adult, if it does, it’s inherited. If it can be systemically modified by environmental exposure of the individual, that can be over and above random mutation in the DNA-based gene. The bit that’s Darwinian either way is the mechanism by which divergent populations eventually turn-out (with hindsight) to be distinct species.

Genes / genetic have suffered the same evolution in meaning as atoms / atomic – conceptually the smallest units, or simply the first such units so named? Really the smallest particles of heritable reproduction are genetic, whether in the stuff we now call “genes” or elsewhere in the reproducing cell structures of the new individual.

What is clear is that what is inherited “genetically” is particulate / digital at the cellular level – even if modifications can be acquired by environmental exposure – they are not acquired qualitatively by degrees between whole individuals. In that sense there is no Lamarckian (biological) inheritance of acquired “traits” per se – where a cell is the smallest unit of identity and cells don’t have traits as properties.

The reason I’m more relaxed about hanging on to Lamarckism is because I’m interested (like Dennett) in the whole human evolutionary design space (0,0,0 to 1,1,1 Darwinian) which includes mental / cultural evolution as well as cellular / biological. In that space memes (and patterns / memeplexes) are even less objective than genes (in the generic non-DNA sense) and as I say even genes are not that well defined objectively. Epi-genetic, like “sub-atomic” is a somewhat artificial category, simply a consequence of what has previously been defined as genetic / atomic.

Need to re-read Pigliucci more closely – using the genotype / phenotype language around species and populations of individuals – and see if this digital distinction is apparent.

[Hold – epigenetics beyond cell contents – post-fertilisation development environment?]
[Hold – systemic bio-DNA-gene modification beyond random mutation?]

Guess I’m reacting to the hard statement – implying no such thing as Lamarckism. Quite happy with questioning how much use is left in the word, and where. (I already inhabit a physical world where the fundamentals are digital information, so no suggestion that the Lamarckian / non-Darwinian end of the scale is about traits acquired by an individual being “somehow, to some extent” inherited by future offspring as a whole.)

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Post Note: After rambling around the issues in my doubts above, I read again focussing on the genotype phenotype distinctions, and the whole question was made clear in this Twitter exchange.

“Only genotypes are inherited.
Phenotype is always indirect.”

Mary’s point says it clearly, Darwinian or Lamarckian, inheritance is genetic (DNA-genetic or generic / epi-genetic). Phenotypic properties – however developed / acquired – are never inherited directly between individuals.

Mary goes on to make a further important point, although it doesn’t yet seem signigicant to my own agenda:

The point is neither Lamarck, nor Darwin, was really saying anything about the mechanism of inheritance. Darwin’s key point was that the population divergence and speciation was “natural selection”. Neither even imagined the underlying digital significance; inheritance at the information level.

Massimo’s headline claim is true – “Epigenetics is not Lamarckism” – but the rant against Lamarck per se (almost nobody writing today has actually read Lamarck) seems unwarranted?

What is (relatively) new and important in the work behind Massimo’s essay is not what it says about Lamarck, but what it says about the enormous possibilities for acquired mutations in reproductive development lifecycles, beyond simply DNA (mis)replication. Epigenetics. Genetic biology is more than “genes” in the same sense that atomic physics is more than “atoms”. Biology or physics, what matters is information.

[Aside – Even Crick knew we were talking about information.

The “War” on anti-science

Terry, Let’s unpick this one, so we can actually “walk our talk”. You asked “What is?”

(1) Wherever possible criticism in private. Praise and support in public. Wherever possible dialogue instead of conflicting argument.

(2) You said it yourself the other night, has anyone ever changed anyone’s mind – who wasn’t already a friend or held in “good faith” – by telling them they were wrong in public? What we need is good-faith dialogue.

  • Me and you.
  • Us and “Atheists Against Pseudoscientific Nonsense (AAPN)”.
  • Antivaxers and the rational skeptics community generally.

(3) In this case the original Mercury / Aluminium video was already a viral meme – amongst people who appreciate fascination with science – very basic, elemental physical science 101. (I shared / liked it myself a couple of weeks ago.)

(4) Some (mischievous) person at Vaxxed saw a delicious opportunity to wind-up the Skeptical crowd by inventing a counter-meme that they knew would just make the “scientistic” types blood boil. And it worked. AAPN fell for it. John Richards fell for it …. all typical behaviour fully predicted by Vaxxed. No-one at Vaxxed and no-one at AAPN believed it was anything but nonsense – the clue is in the name and Snopes had already debunked it for anyone (!) who actually needed to check, without spreading it over all their would-be friends FB & Twitter feeds. No-one who subscribes to anti-vax conspiracy theories is going to check, are they? – except for their mission to debunk the debunking and stoke the conspiracy and/or have some fun on social media. No (good-faith) “friend” following AAPN’s page – or your Skeptcs page – is going to disagree that it’s nonsense. What has been achieved? Except Vaxxed successfully winding up a certain kind of Skeptic and wasting the time of many more, and generating hundreds more clicks, the large majority of which will be (trigger / keyword) bots even if they’re actually human.

(5) This is not about “ignoring” the nonsense meme – we’re well past that – it’s about deciding the most rational action and most productive expression. Not a knee-jerk “against” response – that’s a tit-for-tat “war” – exactly what some / they want. We’re well past doing the dumbest responses too. As you said any number of Skeptic responses will not make any difference numerically. The clue again is in AAPN’s name – “against” – they’re just looking for a war too – an arms race pushing up the numbers and stakes. Just because something is wrong, a lie, is not a good reason to say so, outside a controlled scientific environment. Life is not science.

(6) The rational response is to seek good faith and continue the dialogue. To move us on from two parties – with no mutual respect – screaming and hurling insults at each other. Let’s walk the talk?

[Meta (7) Your suggestion that I had suggested ignoring it was the personal “insult” in public – but it’s OK because we happen to be friends 😉 ]

[Meta (8) And as I’m sure we’ve agreed before anti-vaxxing has nothing to do with the science of vaccines, it’s everything to do with the politics of anti-establishment freedoms.]

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[Post Note – a comment / response exchange cut and past across from the Medium version of this blog:

Go to the profile of vigilant vigilant  
Nice, but using Snopes shows your own “blind spot” which is exactly the same as the “antivaxxers” (include derogatory pejorative here).

I can’t claim to understand everything about everything on this planet, but the scientific atheists who do claim such are IMHO vile caricatures of those who they so loudly despise.

To which I responded:

Good point ” I agree on two counts.
(1) Same risk even with Snopes, only advantage is it not not attached to any particular campaigning issue or ideology so far as I have been able to tell over many years ” even if it is sometimes wrong. (Was using the pejorative “antivaxxer” terminology because that was the default line already in the context of the Skeptics facebook thread in which the comment was made. Should have used scare quotes ” as I often do.)
And (2) “scientific atheists” are not just part of the problem, but the worst half of the problem IMHO ” turning into caricatures of the ideologies they claim to oppose. (Pretty sure you’ve agreed with me on this before.)
(PS will copy this Comment & Response into the WordPress version of the blog too, where I often add post-notes that don’t show up in Medium.)
Thanks.]

The Baying Mob

Apart from passing references, I’ve never made this the focal issue of any post or tweet, but it is a pet hate of mine in the way Twitter works.

The baying mob is easy to see in the trolls that inhabit comment threads of pretty much all on-line content these days, so much so that it’s a meme to simply refer to them as trolls, and practically discount or disable all such un-moderated threads. Twitter is of course almost all thread and little content.

My particular pet-hate is the immediate “like” of a put-down response. Disagreeing is always easier than constructive dialogue and shared disagreement is made instant by the like facility. Almost invariably an immediate put-down is at minimum a straw-man that misrepresents the point, a thinly disguised ad-hominem or more often a blatant insult like “silly” or something even less polite. Before any dialogue is possible disagree’ers pile-in on the put-down. Some people’s timelines in blogs and social media have their “numbers” swollen by hoards of people who share a common basis for disagreement, whatever the specific point at issue and its worthiness of dialogue.

It’s mob rule. Populism. Tyranny of a (numerical) majority.

[Worse still, many such trolls are of course key-word-triggered bots
– but few people keep their Twitter following clear of such dross.]

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[Post Note: As I say, I’ve mentioned this “baying-mob” effect many times before, and it is very much part of the right to offend with satirical humour story – The Court Jester.

This morning, following the Parson’s Green incident:

Everyone has their own agenda, and all agendas are ultimately political – even naming the topic and naming any opposing views are political. Great (political) care is taken in the first tweet from the mayor, in how the word “terrorist” is confirmed. However as Bob points out as soon as “the baying mob” pile into the thread, everyone else’s agendas are piled on the original point. A nexus of ideologies.(*)

The problem is not so much “offence” as disrespect – opportunistically diverting the thread to competing agendas, with the help of wise-cracks, as if attempted humour makes it OK to do so. I’ve not even read the thread, but I already know the “part & parcel of Parsons Green” meme. Leave offensive satirical humour to the professionals we can respect (eg Frankie Boyle) in the meantime respect the people and motives in the original thread by not hijacking it.

Competing agendas is a key point in this – with maximum clamour for attention in the streams of media – competitions get binary between the no-brainer extremes, nuance is trampled over. A mob all toeing the line with short-sharp versions of their chosen party line – an echo-chamber of competing echo-chambers. The odd funny crack or meme may result, but the chances they add anything to solving the original problem is miniscule – much more likely to add to one or both competing echo-chambers.

The problem is disrespect of other parties’ positions – not least the person that started the conversation. No one has the right not to be offended, but no-one has the right to disrespect another’s position with attempts to divert the conversation towards your own ideology with (or without) spurious humour. That disrespect is the offense.]

[Post Post Note (*) That nexus of ideologies is the point I am making to SitP (Skeptics in the Pub) – that, whatever the topic, all debates / presentations / Q&A converge on this same clash of conflicting ideologies, UNLESS it is dialogue conducted with respect.]