Category Archives: Life

The Demise of the Expert

September 18, 2011 By in Life, Science Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

These days, I find myself turning off the news while thinking the same question. When did we stop valuing knowledge and expertise? When did impressive academic credentials become a political liability? When did the medical advice of celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Ricki Lake become more trusted than those of government safety panels, scientists, and physicians? When did running a small business or being a soccer mom qualify a person to hold the office of president and make economic and foreign policy decisions?

As Rick Perry, the Republican front-runner for president recently told us, “You don’t have to have a PhD in economics from Harvard to really understand how to get America back working again.” Really? Why not? It certainly seems to me that some formal training would help. And yet many in Congress pooh-poohed economists’ warnings about the importance of raising the debt ceiling and have insisted on decreasing regulations despite the evidence that this won’t help to improve our economy (and will further harm our environment.) Meanwhile, man-made climate change is already affecting our planet. Natural disasters such as droughts and hurricanes are on the rise, just as scientists predicted. But we were slow to accept their warnings and have been slow to enact any meaningful policies to stem the course of this calamity.

The devaluation of expertise is puzzling enough, but perhaps more puzzling still is the timing. Never before in human history have we witnessed the fruits of expertise as we do today. Thanks to scientists and engineers, we rely on cell phones that wirelessly connect us to the very person we want to talk to at the moment we want to talk. In turn, these cell phones operate through satellites that nameless experts have set spinning in precise orbits around Earth. We keep in touch with friends, do our banking and bill-paying, and make major purchases using software written in codes we don’t understand and transmitted over a network whose very essence we struggle to comprehend. (I mean, what exactly is the Internet?) Meanwhile, physicians use lasers to excise tumors and correct poor vision. They replace damaged livers and hearts. They fit amputees with hi-tech artificial limbs, some with feet that flex and hands that grasp.

Obviously none of this would have been possible without experts. You need more than high school math and a casual grasp of physics or anatomy to develop these complex systems, tools, and techniques. So why on Earth would we discount experts now, when we have more proof than ever of their worth?

My only guess is education. Our national public education system is in shambles. American children rank 25th globally in math and 21st in science. At least two-thirds of American students cannot read at grade level. But there is something our student score high on. As the documentary Waiting for Superman highlighted, American students rank number one in confidence. This may stem from the can-do culture of the United States or from the success our nation has enjoyed over the last 65 years. But it makes for a dangerous combination. We are churning out students with inadequate knowledge and skills, but who believe they can intuit and accomplish anything. And if you believe that, then why not believe you know better than the experts?

I think the only remedy for this situation is better education, but not for the reasons you might think. In my opinion, the more a person learns about any given academic subject, the more realistic and targeted his or her self-confidence becomes.

The analogy that comes to mind is of a blind man trying to climb a tree. When he’s still at the base of the tree, all he can feel is the trunk. From there, he has little sense of the size or shape of the rest of the tree.  But suppose he climbs up on a limb and then out to even smaller branches. He still won’t know the shape of the rest of the tree, but from his perch on one branch, he can feel the extensive foliage. He’ll know that the tree must be large and he can presume that the other branches are equally long and intricate. He can appreciate how very much there must be of the tree that’s beyond his reach.

I think the same principle applies to knowledge. The more we know, the more we can appreciate how much else there is out there to know – things about which we haven’t got a clue. As we climb out on our tiny branches, acquiring knowledge, we also gain an awareness of our profound ignorance. Unfortunately, many of America’s children (and by now, adults too) aren’t climbing the tree at all; they’re still lounging at the base, enjoying a picnic in the shade.

Should it surprise us, then, to learn that they don’t see the value in expertise? That they can support political candidates who disparage the advice of specialists and depict academic achievement as a form of elitism? Why shouldn’t they trust the advice of a neighbor, a talk show host, or an actor over the warnings of the ‘educated elite’?

No single person can know everything there is to know in today’s world, so the sum of human knowledge must be dispersed among millions of specialized experts. Human progress relies on these people, dangling from their obscure little branches, to help guide our technology, our public policy, our research and governance. Our world has no shortage of experts. Now if only people would start listening to them.

Locked Away

August 7, 2011 By in Books, Genes, Pregnancy Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

The results are in. The ultrasound was conclusive. And despite my previously described hunch that our growing baby is a boy, she turned out to be a girl. We are, of course, ecstatic. A healthy baby and a girl to boot! As everyone tells us, girls are simply more fun.

As I was reading in my pregnancy book the other day, I came across an interesting bit of trivia about baby girls. At this point in my pregnancy (nearly 6 months in), our baby’s ovaries contain all the eggs she’ll have for her entire life. As I mentioned in a prior post, the fact that a female fetus develops her lifetime supply of eggs in utero represents a remarkable transgenerational link. In essence, half of the genetic material that makes up my growing baby already existed inside my mother when she was pregnant. And now, inside me, exists half of the genetic material that will become all of the grandchildren I will ever have. This is the kind of link that seems to mix science and spirituality, that reminds us that, though we are a mere cluster of cells, there’s a poetry to the language of biology and Life.

But after stumbling upon this factoid about our baby’s eggs, I was also struck by a sense that somewhere someone seemed to have his or her priorities mixed up. If our baby were born today, she would have a slim chance of surviving. Her intestines, cerebral blood vessels, and retinas are immature and not ready for life outside the womb. Worse still, the only shot her lungs would have at functioning is with the aid of extreme medical intervention. The order of it all seems crazy. My baby is equipped with everything she’ll need to reproduce decades in the future, yet she lacks the lung development to make it five minutes in the outside world. What was biology thinking?

Then I remembered two delightful popular science books I’d read recently, The Red Queen by Matt Ridley and Life Ascending by Nick Lane. Both described the Red Queen Hypothesis of the evolution of sex, which states that the reason so much of the animal kingdom reproduces sexually (rather than just making clones of itself) is to ‘outwit’ parasites. In short, if each generation of humans were the same as the next, parasites large and microbial could evolve to overtake us. By mixing up our genetic makeup through sexual reproduction, we make it harder for illnesses to wipe us out. Like the Red Queen from Lewis Carroll’s classic, we keep running in order to stay in the same place (which is one step ahead of parasites and disease).

Just as there are parasitic organisms and bacteria, one might say that there are parasitic genes. For example, mutations in the DNA of our own replicating cells can cause cancer, which is essentially a self-made, genetic parasite. Moreover, retroviruses like HIV are essentially bits of genetic material that invade our bodies and can insert themselves into the DNA of our cells. And the ultimate road to immortality for a parasitic gene would be to hitch a ride on the back of reproduction. Imagine what an easy life that would be! If a retrovirus could invade the eggs in the ovaries, it would be passed on from one generation to the next without doing one iota of work. It’s the holy grail of parasitic invasion – get thee to the ovaries! According to Matt Ridley in another of his books, The Origins of Virtue, the human germ line is segregated from the rest of the growing embryo by 56 days after fertilization. Within two months of conception, the cells that will give rise to all of the embryo’s eggs (or sperm, in males) are already cordoned off. They are kept safe until they are needed many years in the future.

So perhaps my little baby’s development isn’t as backwards as it seemed at first. Yes, lungs are important. But when you’ve got something of value to others, it makes practical sense to hurry up and lock it away.

The Trouble with (and without) Fish

August 2, 2011 By in Pregnancy, Science Tags: , , , 1 Comment

Once upon a time in a vast ocean, life evolved. And then, over many millions of years, neurons and spinal cords and eyes developed, nourished all the while in a gentle bath of nutrients and algae.

Our brains and eyes are distant descendants of those early nervous systems formed in the sea. And even though our ancestors eventually sprouted legs and waddled out of the ocean, the neural circuitry of modern humans is still dependent on certain nutrients that their water-logged predecessors had in abundance.

This obscure fact about a distant evolution has recently turned into a major annoyance for me now that I’m pregnant. In fact, whether they know it or not, all pregnant women are trapped in a no-win dilemma over what they put into their stomachs. Take, for instance, a popular guidebook for pregnant women. On one page, it advocates eating lots of seafood while pregnant, explaining that fish contain key nutrients that the developing eyes and brains of the fetus will need. A few pages later, however, the author warns that seafood contains methylmercury, a neurotoxic pollutant, and that fish intake should be strictly curtailed. What is a well-meaning pregnant lady to do?

On a visceral level, nothing sounds worse than poisoning your child with mercury, and so many women reduce their seafood intake while pregnant. I have spoken with women who cut all seafood out of their diet while pregnant, for fear that a little exposure could prove to be too much. They had good reason to be worried. Extreme methylmercury poisoning episodes in Japan and Iraq in past decades have shown that excessive methylmercury intake during pregnancy can cause developmental delays, deafness, blindness, and seizures in the babies exposed.

But what happens if pregnant women eliminate seafood from their diet altogether? Without careful supplementation of vital nutrients found in marine ecosystems, children face neural setbacks or developmental delays on a massive scale. Consider deficiencies in iodine, a key nutrient readily found in seafood. Its scarcity in the modern land-based diet was causing mental retardation in children – and sparked the creation of iodized salt (salt supplemented with iodine) to ensure that the nutritional need was met.

Perhaps the hardest nutrient to get without seafood is an omega-3 fatty acid known as DHA. In recent years, scientists have learned that this particular fatty acid is essential for proper brain development and functioning, yet it is almost impossible to get from non-aquatic dietary sources. At the grocery store, you’ll find vegetarian products that claim to fill those needs by supplying the biochemical precursor to DHA (found in flaxseed, walnuts, and soybean oils), but we now know that the precursor simply won’t cut it. Our bodies are remarkably slow at synthesizing DHA from its precursor. In fact, we burn the vast majority of the precursor for energy before we have the chance to convert it to DHA.

So pregnant women must eat food from marine sources if they are to meet all the needs of their growing babies. Yet thanks to global practices of burning coal and disposing of industrial and medical waste, any seafood women eat will expose their offspring to some amount of methylmercury. There’s no simple solution to this problem, although recent studies suggest that child outcomes are best when women consume ample seafood while avoiding species with higher levels of methylmercury (such as shark, tilefish, walleye, pike, and some types of tuna). Of course much is still unknown. Exactly how much DHA intake is enough? And since mercury levels vary based on where the fish was caught and what waste was released nearby, you can never be sure it’s safe to eat.

Unless we start cleaning up our oceans, pregnant women will continue to face this awful decision each time they sit down at the dinner table. Far worse, we may face future generations with lower IQs and developmental delays regardless of which choice their mothers make. Thanks to shoddy environmental oversight, we may be saddling our children with brains that don’t work as well as our own. And that is something I truly can’t swallow.

Guessing at Sex

July 2, 2011 By in Minds, Pregnancy Tags: , , 3 Comments

Something’s happened. Something both miraculous and mundane. Over the past few months I’ve been transformed from a woman into an incubator. A walking, talking (and often eating and napping) incubator programmed to provide the perfect environment for a growing baby . . . something. We’ll find out the gender in a couple weeks. Still, it’s always the first question people ask when they hear that I’m pregnant: “Is it a boy or a girl?” And since we haven’t had an answer for them, my husband and I have been showered with an astonishing number of guesses. It seems that everyone we’ve ever met is secretly a gender-divining expert.

They all have their methods. One woman had me turn around so she could size up my back fat. “If you gain weight in the back, it means you’re having a boy,” she explained. Another examined my face as she explained her theory that women who carry a girl look more beautiful (thanks to the added female hormones) while those carrying a boy start looking more, well, dude-like. Others have sworn by the shape of the belly – if the stomach looks pointed versus broad. One acquaintance asked for the baby’s fetal heart rate, saying that babies with faster heart rates always turn out to be girls. Another friend described her theory that the mother’s personality predicts the baby’s sex; apparently, soft-spoken mothers tend to have boys.

I like when people guess the gender. It’s interesting to hear their varied theories and sweet to think that they’re excited enough about our pregnancy to venture a guess. It makes a personal, biological experience more communal. But I can’t say much for their accuracy. So far, the guesses have been evenly split between boy and girl.

That’s the thing about guessing gender; with a 50-50 chance of either outcome, it’s unimpressive if you’re right and even more unimpressive if you’re wrong. And yet with such odds, it’s only natural that people start thinking they’ve hit on a good heuristic. No matter how wrong your method, you will, on average, be right 50% of the time. That already subjectively feels like a lot of rightness. If you try your method out on a small number of people to start, you could wind up with a lower success rate (by chance) and perhaps abandon your technique, but you might luck out and guess right 75% of the time or higher, at least for a little while. Someone who starts out on a lucky streak may well become a diehard believer who swears by his method, even after his batting average declines.

There’s simply no way that so many people can be so sure of their gender-guessing strategies unless they pick and choose their outcomes. Or unless, as I suspect, their memories do it for them. Consider the conundrum of the grocery store line. Many of us believe we are cursed (or mysteriously inept) at choosing a checkout lane at the grocery store. No matter which line we wind up in, it turns out to be the slowest. If we switch to another, that one mysteriously slows down. You rarely hear about the reverse – people who claim to have a special gift for picking the fastest lane. How can the majority of people be below average at the same task? If their memories are skewing the results. We never notice and remember the times we breeze right through checkout or overtake our neighbors in the next line over. The salient events – and the ones we’ll remember – are the times we’ve been stuck behind someone arguing prices or heaping coupons on the counter. Times when six people go by in the next line over while your food wilts and thaws on the conveyor belt.

It must be the same with guessing gender. When people are right, they are ecstatic and vindicated. When they are wrong, they notice and remember it less. And those that do notice their error may wonder if they misjudged the belly shape or back fat. The problem wasn’t necessarily with the heuristic, but rather with its execution. If only the pregnant lady’s dress had been tighter or if the guesser hadn’t been distracted by hors d’oeuvres, the method would certainly have worked!

I am by no means immune to these twisted ways of thinking. I can’t help but believe that I’m cursed at picking grocery lines. And I also seem to have a guess about this baby’s gender. For no apparent reason, I have it in my head that the baby is a boy. No heuristic here, just a feeling I can’t seem to shake. It’s not that I’d prefer a boy – I’d be equally delighted to have a girl. And I know that there’s no scientific merit to the inkling. Even if a woman could tune into some subtle something in her body and know, she’d need prior experience to compare it to. This being my first pregnancy, I have no idea what it might feel like to carry a boy versus a girl, if such a thing were even possible. So I should put no stock in such a feeling.

And yet when the ultrasound rolls around, I know I’ll be surprised if we learn that the baby’s a girl. Equally happy and excited, to be sure. But most definitely (and illogically) surprised.

Good Morning, Sleepyhead

March 5, 2011 By in Books, Brains, Life Tags: , , , 1 Comment

A few weeks ago, I passed out. One moment I was standing by the door to our apartment, wishing my departing husband a good day at work. The next, my eyes had rolled back in my head and I fell face-first into the wall. My forehead struck the lower hinges of the door; I bruised my cheek and arm and knee, nothing badly. My husband, who was halfway out the door when I fell, rushed to gather me up. He held me and said, “Are you all right? Are you okay?” And that was how I awoke, as if from a long dreamless sleep, on the floor beside our front door.

I was only out a few seconds, but it felt like it could have been hours. I remembered the minutes leading up to my dramatic tumble, but they felt like long ago. A bit ethereal, and separated from the present by a gap that didn’t feel odd to me in the slightest.

I’ve always tended toward low blood pressure and often felt dizzy when standing up. After the fall, doctors checked me out and said I was fine. (My prescriptions are to drink more water and maybe eat more salt.) Still, the experience got me thinking about memory and how it’s a strange and elusive creature. How we always think we’ve caught it but we never have.

Back in my grad school days, we studied the case of H.M., the famous amnesic patient who was unable to form new memories. We learned that his journal was filled with descriptions of waking up as if for the first time and having no recollection of writing any of the prior journal entries, nor of how he came to be where he was. I wonder if the feeling was something like my contradictory experience on the floor, when I lacked memory of the preceding moments and yet felt as if nothing were missing. Time felt continuous, despite the fact that my memory was not.

The experience also reminded me of a dramatic story I read in the nonfiction book Soul Made Flesh. In 1650, a young British servant named Anne Green was seduced by her master’s grandson and gave birth to a stillborn baby. Thanks to the social mores of the time, she was tried and convicted of infanticide and sentenced to death. She proclaimed her innocence to the crowd that gathered in the courtyard of Oxford Castle to watch her hanging. After her speech, the executioner kicked the ladder out from under her and she hanged for almost half an hour before they cut her down and sent her body down the street to be dissected for science. Her designated dissectors were Drs. William Petty and Thomas Willis (of the Circle of Willis). But when they opened the coffin, they heard a rattle in her throat and managed to revive her with water, heat, and herbs.

When Anne Green came to, she began reciting the speech she’d delivered at the gallows. She didn’t remember leaving the prison, climbing the ladder, or giving the speech, much less (thankfully) hanging. A pamphlet later circulated about the event described her memory as “a clock whose weights had been taken off a while and afterward hung on again.” The incident illustrated the machine-like quality of memory. Today we describe it as flipping a switch. Anne Green’s memory had been turned off and then turned on again.

As strange as the stories of H.M. and Anne Green sound, their wild memory lapses aren’t so different from what happens to us everyday. We all experience time as continuous and ongoing, even though our memory is often shot through with holes. We spend a full third of our lives in unconscious slumber and remember little of our dreams. Even our waking lives are terribly preserved in the vault of our memory. How many of your breakfasts can you recall? How many birthday parties and drives to work? How many classroom lectures and airplane rides and showers can you individually call to mind?

Our recollections are mere fragments. They pepper the timeline of our past just enough to form a narrative – one’s life story. This story may feel solid and unbroken, but don’t kid yourself. Your memory is not. We are all amnesic, all a little untethered from the passing moments of our lives. We are continually rediscovering and resurrecting our past to move forward in the present. In one way or another, we have all roused from our coffin reciting a speech from the gallows or come to on the floor with a sore face and an astonished husband. We are all perpetually in the process of waking up for the very first time.