Rational Philosophy

On the genetic ancestry of the duck-billed platypus, the beating of suspects by police in Philadelphia, and the race tensions in the Democratic primary contest.

The duck-billed platypus has a bill, webbed feet, lays eggs, but has fur and nurses its young. And now that an international team of scientists has decoded the duck-bills genome its uniquely ambivalent classification — part reptile, part mammal — has become a little less mysterious. The team found that the duck-bill’s genetic line split off from the other primary line over 166 million years ago. It has many genes in common with other mammals, but has retained many reptilian genes.

In Philadelphia, police and city officials have hurried to stress that the beating of restrained suspects caught on tape by television news reporters wasn’t racially motivated. The police officers were mostly white, the suspects black. (One presumes that this means they would have beaten white suspects, too.)

And in the contest for the Democratic nomination Hillary Clinton has again hinted that her success with white voters makes her a better matched against the Republicans.

We live in the confines of our prejudices. Prejudice rests on the fear that our identity of self isn’t supreme.

Philadelphia city officials probably believe they act out of a different fear when claiming that race wasn’t a factor in the beatings. One presumes that they fear the incident will fuel racial tensions. Asserting that race wasn’t a factor allows them to feel that they’re acting to diffuse the tension. But asserting that race is not a factor before that aspect of the beatings has been thoroughly investigated seems to work counter to that aim.

Hillary Clinton fears losing more than she fears anything else, even betraying her bigotry. However latent and denied it is, bigotry does seem to underpin Clinton’s use of the difference of her race from Obama’s as a tool to further her campaign.

The duck-billed platypus, amalgam of reptile and mammal, can stand as an emblem of the possibility of living without prejudice. Rather than spending so much time parsing our differences, how much better would the world be if we could acknowledge that the world is just as diverse and bizarre as we can accept it to be.

On postulates and their place in shaping our lives.

“Wishful thinking,” so says Roger Cohen, “often masquerades as analysis.” He’s referring to those who warn that the days of U.S. world leadership are numbered. And yet Cohen could have been speaking of himself. He refers to the United States as “the most vital, open, self-renewing and democratic society on earth.” And says that to imagine that Europe or China “can become powers of influence equal to the United States within the next half-century is implausible.” (Did he forget about the rapid decline and fall of empires far grander and more imposing than that of the present day United States?)

As the hook for his thesis Cohen uses the fascination of the rest of the world with the current presidential election. They come with their cameras and microphones, Cohen surmises, because they recognize the importance of America and America’s choice of leader. But throughout the terms of Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton (twice), the rest of the world viewed American politics as uninteresting, its leaders more or less interchangable. Surely, the reporters come from far afield because American politics is suddenly interesting. They come for the spectacle of an African american man competing with a woman for the democratic candidacy, and to goggle at the spectacle of ever-more-wacky conservatives pandering to the religious right at a time when the rest of the civilized world has long since disentangled its politics from overt religious influence.

While Cohen alludes to the horror the world feels at the Bush presidency and legacy, he doesn’t dwell on it. Why? Well, I suppose because that would destroy the foundation of his argument.

What kind of leadership does Cohen think that America has been providing to the world on human rights, civil rights, education, environmental protection, and economic development? I’m sure the world can do without the kind of leadership we’ve been providing on interventionism, dissembling, torture, cronyism, intermingling of church and state, and corporate corruption.

Last week I expressed simultaneous excitement and disquiet at the news that a team of scientists had synthesized life in the form of a bacterium. This week, the Science Times ran a fluff piece about a secret message (the name of the Venter Institute and the names of those on the team) encoded into the genome of the bacterium by arranging the letters of the constituent amino acids in a particular sequence. On reading about this, the ratio of my excitement to my disquiet dropped considerably. Move over natural selection, here comes Will Shortz.

Another team of scientists, this time anthropologists, have been looking back 650 years to the time of the Black Death to try to learn something about the plague that killed millions across Europe. They have deduced that the plague, which was previously thought to have killed indiscriminately, taking the young, the old, the healthy, and the sick, in fact tended to kill those who were weakened by previous illness, age or malnourishment.

These three examples of conjecture give us insight into the philosophy of the concept.

In the first instance, we have Roger Cohen speculating from a position of fear. He conjectures that the doomsayers about American supremacy are wrong because he wants them to be wrong.

In the second instance, we have a team of scientists playing with nature, conjecturing about the boundaries of scientific achievement; the insertion of a secret message into the genome reveals a lack of gravity about their work and the seriousness of its consequences.

And in the third instance, anthropologists take conjecture and submit it to careful testing in order to help society better understand the pathology of epidemics, perhaps helping ultimately to save millions of lives.

Without conjecture we would have no progress. Conjecture lets us ask what will happen if? as well as did this happen because?

The basis for our conjecture and the intent of the conjecture determine whether the questions being asked have value and yield positive results. Or, not all conjectures are made equal. It takes little speculation to state that American world leadership will, one day, come to an end, that we will need to grapple with the troubling issues raised by the creation of synthetic life, and that the world will face the risk of new epidemics. What takes courage and foresight is to face these speculations with the integrity and seriousness they deserve.

And with that said I’m off to bet on the Giants to win the superbowl…

New studies provide evidence that young children entering school with behavioral problems don’t necessarily suffer poor academic performance in older grades, and that children exhibiting symptoms of attention deficit disorder may in fact just have slower development of certain areas of the brain, something that eventually will right itself.

On a different, but, I think, related subject the incredible scientific work that’s been done to decode the human genome brings with it the possibility that information about genetic differences will fuel racial stereotypes.

When my own daughter began having some problems keeping up in school a few years ago, I was concerned and surprised that several people quickly suggested she might have ADHD. At that time it already seemed to me that ADHD had become a reflex diagnosis, a ready explanation for too many real or perceived problems, and my own experience only served to help confirm that.

Of course, as a logical rebuttal to this line of reasoning one could say that many children have been helped by the diagnosis and treatment of behavioural problems and ADHD. But my question is how many have been harmed and whether there wouldn’t have been a better way to integrate the information then available into our understanding of child development.

As the article on genetic differences between races points out, we should be worried that the output of genetic research will be used selectively by those who have ulterior motives, and that by its nature it will give an incomplete picture of any genetic differences between races.

Both situations point to the human characteristic of leaping to conclusions. It’s a useful, sometimes extremely useful, mental tool to be able to abstract and apply a pattern from a set of data. In everyday life, the risks of abstraction tend to be low and the upside tends to be high. But when we’re talking about complex and farreaching abstractions which can affect the lives of thousands and millions of people, we need to be very cautious about the conclusions we draw.

When we draw conclusions from partial analysis we will inevitably draw incorrect or incomplete conclusions. I say that we will draw incorrect or incomplete conclusions rather than that we may draw incorrect or incomplete conclusions because a conclusion drawn on partial analysis will be, by its nature, incorrect or incomplete. (To show this by analogy, let’s say that we’re quickly shown a piece of paper on which are printed a large number of small circles. We’re asked to guess how many circles we’ve seen. Even if we guess the correct number of circles, our answer is still a guess. Likewise, if we diagnoze a child with ADHD and the child turns out to have ADHD, but our diagnosis was based on an incomlpete set of criteria, the diagnosis is still flawed even though the outcome is what it would have been had we had a complete set of criteria.)

The critical question though is one of how we should approach such situations in life. We’ll always be faced with life circumstances that provide us with the need to reach a conclusion without all the data. As a society we will inevitably face questions or policy or approach knowing that new studies will bring to light new information. We can’t avoid decisions just because we don’t have perfect analyses.

Which brings me to my point: It seems critical that we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we have sufficient information to a draw a conclusion when we don’t in fact have sufficient information, whether or not we have to make a decision.

When earlier studies indicated that behavioural problems indicated reason to worry about later school performance or that ADHD symptoms indicated a need for ADHD drugs there should have been significant discussion of the likelihood that these studies were incomplete and may lead to overdiagnosis. Even a lay person could have raised skepticism about the rates of diagnosis. How did so many kids get through school just fine before ADHD was even heard of?

As a society we need to develop a process of reasonable skepticism.

Right now, with the research into genetic characteristics, we need to build skepticism into our findings. We need to recognize that the conclusions we draw will be incorrect and incomplete. If we don’t do that we know only too well that many will be quite happy to take the incomplete data and put them to work in the service of ill-conceived agendas.