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Corante Blogs examine, through the eyes of leading observers, analysts, thinkers, and doers, critical themes and memes in technology, business, law, science, and culture.

The Press Will Be Outsourced Before Stopped

Vin Crosbie, on the challenges, financial and otherwise, that newspaper publishers are facing: "The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn't that your content isn't online or isn't online with multimedia. It's your content. Specifically, it's what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you're giving them, stupid; not the platform its on."
by Vin Crosbie in Rebuilding Media

Travels In Numerica Deserta

There's a problem in the drug industry that people have recognized for some years, but we're not that much closer to dealing with it than we were then. We keep coming up with these technologies and techniques which seem as if they might be able to help us with some of our nastiest problems - I'm talking about genomics in all its guises, and metabolic profiling, and naturally the various high-throughput screening platforms, and others. But whether these are helping or not (and opinions sure do vary), one thing that they all have in common is that they generate enormous heaps of data.
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline

Disrobing the Emperor: The online “user experience” isn't much of one

Now that the Web labor market is saturated and Web design a static profession, it's not surprising that 'user experience' designers and researchers who've spent their careers online are looking for new worlds to conquer. Some are returning to the “old media” as directors and producers. More are now doing offline consulting (service experience design, social policy design, exhibition design, and so on) under the 'user experience' aegis. They argue that the lessons they've learned on the Web can be applied to phenomena in the physical and social worlds. But there are enormous differences...
by Bob Jacobson in Total Experience

Second Life: What are the real numbers?

Clay Shirky, in deconstructing Second Life hype: "Second Life is heading towards two million users. Except it isn’t, really... I suspect Second Life is largely a 'Try Me' virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use."
by Clay Shirky in Many-to-Many

The democratisation of everything

Over the last few years we've seen old barriers to creativity coming down, one after the other. New technologies and services makes it trivial to publish text, whether by blog or by print-on-demand. Digital photography has democratised a previously expensive hobby. And we're seeing the barriers to movie-making crumble, with affordable high-quality cameras and video hosting provided by YouTube or Google Video and their ilk... Music making has long been easy for anyone to engage in, but technology has made high-quality recording possible without specialised equipment, and the internet has revolutionised distribution, drastically disintermediating the music industry... What's left? Software maybe? Or maybe not."
by Suw Charman in Strange Attractor

RNA Interference: Film at Eleven

Derek Lowe on the news that the Nobel Prize for medicine has gone to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire for their breakthrough work: "RNA interference is probably going to have a long climb before it starts curing many diseases, because many of those problems are even tougher than usual in its case. That doesn't take away from the discovery, though, any more than the complications of off-target effects take away from it when you talk about RNAi's research uses in cell culture. The fact that RNA interference is trickier than it first looked, in vivo or in vitro, is only to be expected. What breakthrough isn't?"
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline

PVP and the Honorable Enemy

Andrew Phelps: "Recently my WoW guild has been having a bit of a debate on the merits of Player-vs.-Player (PvP) within Azeroth. My personal opinion on this is that PvP has its merits, and can be incredible fun, but the system within WoW is horridly, horribly broken. It takes into account the concept of the battle, but battle without consequence, without emotive context, and most importantly, without honor..."

From later in the piece: "When I talk about this with people (thus far anyway) I typically get one of two responses, either 'yeah, right on!' or 'hey, it’s war, and war isn’t honorable – grow the hell up'. There is a lot to be said for that argument – but the problem is that war in the real historical world has very different constraints that are utterly absent from fantasized worlds..."
by Andrew Phelps in Got Game

Rats Rule, Right?

Derek Lowe: "So, you're developing a drug candidate. You've settled on what looks like a good compound - it has the activity you want in your mouse model of the disease, it's not too hard to make, and it's not toxic. Everything looks fine. Except. . .one slight problem. Although the compound has good blood levels in the mouse and in the dog, in rats it's terrible. For some reason, it just doesn't get up there. Probably some foul metabolic pathway peculiar to rats (whose innards are adapted, after all, for dealing with every kind of garbage that comes along). So, is this a problem?.."
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline

Really BAD customer experience at Albertsons Market

Bob Jacobson, on shopping at his local Albertsons supermarket where he had "one of the worst customer experiences" of his life: "Say what you will about the Safeway chain or the Birkenstock billionaires who charge through the roof for Whole Foods' organic fare, they know how to create shopping environments that create a more pleasurable experience, at its best (as at Whole Foods) quite enjoyable. Even the warehouses like Costco and its smaller counterpart, Smart & Final, do just fine: they have no pretentions, but neither do they dump virtual garbage on the consumer merely to create another trivial revenue stream, all for the sake of promotions in the marketing department..."
by Strange Attractor in Total Experience

The Guardian's "Comment is Free"

Kevin Anderson: "First off, I want to say that I really admire the ambition of the Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free. It is one of the boldest statements made by any media company that participation needs to be central to a radical revamp of traditional content strategies... It is, therfore, not hugely surprising to find that Comment is Free is having a few teething troubles..."
by Kevin Anderson in strange
In the Pipeline: Don't miss Derek Lowe's excellent commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry in general at In the Pipeline

The Loom

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October 21, 2004

The God Gene Meme

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Posted by Carl Zimmer

Hamercover.gifLast month I blogged about my Scientific American review of Dean Hamer's new book, The God Gene. I was not impressed. It's not that I was dismissing the possibility that there might be genetic influences on religious behavior. I just think that the time for writing pop-sci books about the discovery of a "God gene" is after scientists publish their results in a peer-reviewed journal, after the results are independently replicated, and after any hypotheses about the adaptive value of the gene (or genes) have been tested.

Apparently Time doesn't agree. In fact, juding from this week's issue, they think it's the stuff of cover stories. I should point out that the article itself contains some pretty good interviews with people other than Hamer about their own work--studies of spirituality in twins and the like. But Hamer's work gets the lion's share of space, without any mention that his results haven't been published in a journal (let alone that the last results that got Hamer this sort of press--about a "gay gene"--could not be replicated). Time even copied Hamer's title on their cover, despite the fact that in his book, Hamer backpedals furiously from it, saying that the gene he has identified must be one of many genes associated with spirituality. In fact, the Time article has to backpedal, too. It quotes John Burn, medical director of the Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Newcastle in England as saying:

“If someone comes to you and says, ‘We’ve found the gene for X, you can stop them before they get to the end of the sentence.”

You may be able to stop them from getting to the end of the sentence, but you can't stop the presses.

Update, 11/1: The Time story is no longer available for free. I've linked instead to a Time press release.

Comments (7) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Evolution


COMMENTS

1. razib on October 21, 2004 02:41 PM writes...

it will sell well.

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2. gwangi on October 21, 2004 02:46 PM writes...

It's not just the popular press that's guilty of using poorly supported theories to sell copies of their journals. Both Science and Nature have fairly well documented histories of publishing work that's sexy instead of good.

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3. John Wilkins on October 21, 2004 10:29 PM writes...

Time Magazine also published a cover story in 1975 entitled "Sociobiology"...

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4. Rosemarie Lieb on October 24, 2004 04:42 PM writes...

There do exist individuals who cannot be "argued out of" their belief in the supernatural by stacks of physics books.In the past, such have gone to the gallows and to the stake ,convictions intact. Alive and well today, these folks are still equally certain, immovable.If not a gene, then a cocktail of brain chemistry?

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5. Lya Batlle on October 25, 2004 08:10 AM writes...

Personally, I'm just tired of correlation being offered as cause and effect in science today. This is just another example of someone taking information a step further and jumping to conclusions.

In today's world, where the correlation between shifts in brain chemistry and depression, stress, etc, make drug companies attempt to convince people that the physical shifts are in fact the cause of the emotional reactions, is it any surprise that the media is excited about taking away yet another of what we consider our personal choices and leaving us with genetic pre-determined paths. I wonder if religious belief will be our next disease? I also wonder what these people would think of the extremely high correlation between ice cream orders in New York and deaths in Bombai? (Maybe they die of brain freeze when they receive shipments of ice cream?:P)

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6. Kenneth Lackey on October 27, 2004 02:36 AM writes...

Lya Battlle,
I'm interested in your suggestion that religion might be interpretted as a physically curable phenomenon, and also in your comment about causal inferences. Of course you are right that scientists (or rather, everyone) should be careful about making the leap from data to conclusion. However, would you agree that there are scientists out there who know with what level of authority a given set of data allows us to speak about a given conclusion?

The problem with Hamer's publications in the wider public is that even if he eventually takes a step back he later make the sorts of irresponsible jumps you're talking about - a move which leads to big titles and big sales, coincidentally.

As far as religion , I think that no, at least in America it is in no danger of being categorized as something we need to cure. While the evidence is and has been stacked against its ability to accurately describe reality in every relevant field - where we do not mean reality in a Jamesian sense, and while it has almost none to offer in its defense (despite folks like Lee Strobel who are good at playing fast and loose with science and history), the religious sentiment is far too strong and pervasive to come under any sort of mainstream attack here.

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7. Adam on October 29, 2004 09:12 AM writes...

Personally I think the "gene" thing is over sold. We only have 25,000 of them - the exons in the genome are smaller than Windows 98 in information terms - hence to make a multi-billion neuronal/glial mass like a brain involves a lot of repetition-in-parallel. A brain can only be rough hewn by the genes, and surely must be sculpted by experience. If more of the public got that message then the genes->behaviour meme might wither away and die.

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