{"id":1651,"date":"2008-06-13T00:20:16","date_gmt":"2008-06-13T00:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2008\/06\/13\/nobody_expects\/"},"modified":"2008-06-13T00:20:16","modified_gmt":"2008-06-13T00:20:16","slug":"nobody_expects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2008\/06\/13\/nobody_expects\/","title":{"rendered":"Nobody expects…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…the Spanish Inquisition<\/del> Science Police.
\nMy friends fall into several groups, with only minimal overlap. A couple of groups are almost exclusively scientists, but in another I am the only person with any science background at all. I tend not to talk about science much when I get together with the latter group; I have been known to go off on long alcohol-fuelled rants about Why Creationists Are Wrong, which is apparently quite amusing on an occasional basis but should not be allowed to happen too often.
\nI was compelled to stick my neck out twice in one pub dinner last week though. Apparently I just can’t help myself. My husband already calls me the Word Police, and now I’m the Science Police as well.<\/p>\n


\nFirst up: a discussion of the local floating foot mystery<\/a>. One friend was incredulous that the police couldn’t even give the victims’ race. \u201cSurely they can just sequence their genes and at least work out if they’re white or Asian or whatever\u201d. Erm, no. Beyond the unrealistic expectations of rapid personal genome sequencing (one day, maybe), as far as I know there is not one single genetic marker that can tell you a person’s race. I suppose you could get really lucky and find something strongly associated with a particular ethnicity, such as the sickle cell anemia<\/a> allele that is most common in sub-Saharan African populations. But even then you would at best know the probability<\/em> that your victim is black. You might come up with an extremely high probability in some cases, but there’s no such thing as a distinctively African or Asian or Caucasian gene. (Or at least there wasn’t during my undergrad days).
\nOur discussion moved on to a friend of a friend, a lovely girl who has some, erm, unusual beliefs. The first time I met her, she asked me if it was possible to change the sequence of mutated DNA, to cure people with cystic fibrosis for example. I launched into an enthusiastic explanation of gene therapy<\/a> and why it shows promise but can also cause cancer<\/a>. She listened politely, then said \u201cyeah, I’d heard about that, but what I meant is, isn’t it possible to change the sequence of your DNA using the power of your mind?\u201d Torn between good manners and extreme sarcasm, I chose the path of light and politely explained that no, actually, it isn’t. She repeated that she’d heard it was possible, and then the conversation mercifully moved on to other topics that were much less likely to make my brain explode.
\nPerhaps unwisely, I brought the episode up at the pub once the whole race thing had died down, and told everyone how hard it had been to answer that question politely. A surprising number of my friends told me off for being too negative: they all thought the phenomenon she’d mentioned sounded really plausible.
\nNow, this is a group of friends who are not afraid of sarcasm and the good old-fashioned piss-take. \u201cShow me the evidence!\u201d, I said. \u201cFind me one published report of spontaneous reversion of an inherited disease! Explain why people still have cystic fibrosis! Propose a mechanism!\u201d
\nI was countered with \u201cpositive thinking\u201d.
\nI have no problem whatsoever with correlations between positive thinking and general well-being. The reason is that I can think of plausible mechanisms – the negative effect of stress hormones on the immune system, for example. But when faced with a table full of people demanding to know \u201cWhy Not?\u201d, all I could come up with was negatives. There’s no evidence for conscious control of DNA sequences. No plausible mechanism. No published studies. It was the same as with the race issue – there are no race-specific genes. No way for the police to sequence the victims’ entire genome.
\nI think I have most of my friends at least partially convinced, but it was a struggle.
\nIt’s no wonder that science can be such a hard sell; we don’t half sound like miserable buggers sometimes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…the Spanish Inquisition Science Police. My friends fall into several groups, with only minimal overlap. A couple of groups are almost exclusively scientists, but in another I am the only person with any science background at all. I tend not … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1651\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}