Futurismic

I expect most Futurismic regulars, much like myself, think they understand the basics of Darwin’s theory of evolution: random mutations occur in each generation, natural selection culls the poor adaptations, repeat and rinse ad infinitum, and the life a creature lives doesn’t affects its genetic legacy.

Well, here’s the thing: it turns out that the last point there – one which I’ll freely admit to having pedantically called people out on for years – may well not be true at all [via Kate Feld]:

… we’ve come to understand that the awesome power of natural selection – frequently referred to as the best idea in the history of science – lies in the sheer elegance of the way such simple principles have generated the unbelievable complexities of life. From two elementary notions – random mutation, and the filtering power of the environment – have emerged, over millennia, such marvels as eyes, the wings of birds and the human brain.Yet epigenetics suggests this isn’t the whole story. If what happens to you during your lifetime – living in a stress-inducing henhouse, say, or overeating in northern Sweden – can affect how your genes express themselves in future generations, the absolutely simple version of natural selection begins to look questionable. Rather than genes simply “offering up” a random smorgasbord of traits in each new generation, which then either prove suited or unsuited to the environment, it seems that the environment plays a role in creating those traits in future generations, if only in a short-term and reversible way.

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Epigenetics is the most vivid reason why the popular understanding of evolution might need revising, but it’s not the only one. We’ve learned that huge proportions of the human genome consist of viruses, or virus-like materials, raising the notion that they got there through infection – meaning that natural selection acts not just on random mutations, but on new stuff that’s introduced from elsewhere. Relatedly, there is growing evidence, at the level of microbes, of genes being transferred not just vertically, from ancestors to parents to offspring, but also horizontally, between organisms.

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Among the arsenal of studies at Shenk’s disposal is one published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience, involving mice bred to possess genetically inherited memory problems. As small recompense for having been bred to be scatterbrained, they were kept in an environment full of stimulating mouse fun: plenty of toys, exercise and attention. Key aspects of their memory skills were shown to improve, and crucially so did those of their offspring, even though the offspring had never experienced the stimulating environment, even as foetuses.

“If a geneticist had suggested as recently as the 1990s that a 12-year-old kid could improve the intellectual nimbleness of his or her future children by studying harder now,” writes Shenk, “that scientist would have been laughed right out of the hall.” Not so now.

And cue selective quote-mining by adherents of Creationism and other theologically-compromised pseudosciences in three, two, one…

Biology professor Anthony Cashmore at the University of Pennsylvania reckons that free will is illusory, and that believing in it is something akin to religious faith:

One of the basic premises of biology and biochemistry is that biological systems are nothing more than a bag of chemicals that obey chemical and physical laws. Generally, we have no problem with the “bag of chemicals” notion when it comes to bacteria, plants, and similar entities. So why is it so difficult to say the same about humans or other “higher level” species, when we’re all governed by the same laws?

As Cashmore explains, the human brain acts at both the conscious level as well as the unconscious. It’s our consciousness that makes us aware of our actions, giving us the sense that we control them, as well. But even without this awareness, our brains can still induce our bodies to act, and studies have indicated that consciousness is something that follows unconscious neural activity. Just because we are often aware of multiple paths to take, that doesn’t mean we actually get to choose one of them based on our own free will. As the ancient Greeks asked, by what mechanism would we be choosing? The physical world is made of causes and effects – “nothing comes from nothing” – but free will, by its very definition, has no physical cause.

All of a sudden, I’m reminded of Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument – perhaps the reason we can’t see a mechanism for free will is that we’re not actually real? Which is a heavy thought for a Monday morning… compare and contrast with Luc Reid’s summary of the neuroscience status quo, and it’s plain to see there’s a whole lot we just plain don’t understand. [image by Julia Manzerova]

Personally, I’m currently leaning somewhat toward the idea that our consciousnesses are enabled by quantum effects caused by entanglement with near-identical minds in universes closely similar to our own… but that probably has more to do with the fact that I finally finished reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem last week than anything else.

In case you don’t follow Clarkesworld Magazine already (and you really should do, because they’re one of the finest genre fiction webzines about, managing to pay pro rates for about five times as much material as this humble organ every month, and still delivering it to you for free), you might have missed Luc Reid’s essay that went up earlier this month – and it’s time you amended that situation. “Neuroscience Fiction and Neuroscience Fantasy” looks at the leading edge of neuroscientific research and refers back to some of the more common mind-related science fiction tropes – like mind control, brain uploading, or memory replay and editing – in order to show how likely they are to ever come true. [image via Hljod.Huskona]

Understanding these things about memory — that we extract details instead of making recordings, that memories are stored in fragments all across our brains, and that a lot of what seems to be memory is really our brains filling in the blanks — it becomes clear that we’ll never be able to download or view memories per se: that would be like trying to show a film when all you have is a capsule review. However, it might be possible eventually to view someone’s imperfect recollection of a memory, along with other thoughts they have.

Well-researched and clearly written, it even has a list of references at the bottom! It’s a great overview of the topic from the layman’s perspective… even if it does debunk a lot of our favourite sf-nal tropes.

Here’s a heads-up for anyone of a geeky bent – Wired reports that Popular Science has scanned nearly 140 years of its archived back issues and put them up for viewing on the intertubes, complete with all images and the original period advertising material. For free.

You can’t go directly to an issue to browse, but once you have arrived somewhere by search, there are no restrictions on scrolling around. You’ll also find a properly hyperlinked table of contents in each magazine. The early years are a little dry: I browsed an issue from 1902, and it made the average math textbook look like a Dan Brown novel (only better paced), so I’d recommend starting in the optimistic, tech-loving 1950s.

Of peripheral interest is the fact that PopSci has done this in partnership with Google Books…

How’s that for counterintuitive, eh? But it’s a genuine problem, as Ars Technica explains:

The problem is that our statistical tools for evaluating the probability of error haven’t kept pace with our own successes, in the form of our ability to obtain massive data sets and perform multiple tests on them. Even given a low tolerance for error, the sheer number of tests performed ensures that some of them will produce erroneous results at random.

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The problem now is that we’re rapidly expanding our ability to do tests. Various speakers pointed to data sources as diverse as gene expression chips and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which provide tens of thousands of individual data points to analyze. At the same time, the growth of computing power has meant that we can ask many questions of these large data sets at once, and each one of these tests increases the prospects than an error will occur in a study; as Shaffer put it, “every decision increases your error prospects.” She pointed out that dividing data into subgroups, which can often identify susceptible subpopulations, is also a decision, and increases the chances of a spurious error. Smaller populations are also more prone to random associations.

In the end, Young noted, by the time you reach 61 tests, there’s a 95 percent chance that you’ll get a significant result at random. And, let’s face it—researchers want to see a significant result, so there’s a strong, unintentional bias towards trying different tests until something pops out.

Especially when money and funding gets involved, I’m sure. There’s no conspiracy involved, just the psychic momentum of a human institution trying to maintain the status quo. A sort of collective mental flywheel, if you like; the same thing happens with political parties all the time, but they don’t have the same self-checking instinct that science does.

Between this and the rising efficacy of the placebo effect, I’ll bet it’s a weird time to be a medical practitioner… not to mention a patient.