Politifact, Genes and Jumps, and the Row over Religious Woo

Workout notes
Yoga plus running afterward. The run was my Rivertrail course with one gooseloop (51:37); I was winded early but then felt better. It was just over freezing but dry: 51:37. I felt a bit hot.

Topics
This is just a FAIL on so many levels:

Mitt Romney’s problem with evangelical Christian voters has been well documented.

But as the Republican presidential nomination fight heats up in Florida, a Mormon rite that leaves many Jews seething could prove awkward for the candidate in a state that’s home to more Jewish people than any other besides New York and California.

The religious rite is proxy baptism for the dead. According to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormon Church, these posthumous “blessings” are intended to “save” ancestors and others who weren’t baptized in life or were baptized “without proper authority.”

Any Mormon may baptize any person posthumously. [...]

Let’s see: some members of one religion are upset with what some other people are doing in a ritual for “dead people”…in private. Ahem: no one is is really doing anything other than magic and hocus-pocus.

Tell you what: I said a prayer that would automatically baptize you in the name of the Great Frog God if you have read this far.

Politics

Social
This article is a bit interesting; it contrasts the French way of raising a kid with the English/US model:

Every so often a new parenting book triggers the sort of conflicting passions most recently associated with the Arab Spring. Pamela Druckerman’s French Children Don’t Throw Food, is just such an incendiary work. We mothers are a notoriously touchy lot at the best of times, so when another woman dares to suggest there might be a better way of rearing our offspring than muddling through, bribery, intemperate amounts of wine, empty threats and inconsistency, forgive us for digging in our heels. [...]

“In France, children are presented with a fait accompli and the phrase “C’est moi, qui decide” – I make the decisions – is used a lot,” says Druckerman, who has a daughter aged five and twin boys of three. It’s this discipline that sets us monarchist slackers apart from the rigorous republicans. French parents believe that saying “Non” is a responsibility and “rescues children from the tyranny of their own desires”.

Also, their authority derives from a consensus about how children should be brought up. While we pick and mix our attitudes, in France boundaries are reinforced by society. Couples are in charge, the children are not. C’est tout. It may be old-fashioned, but it appears to work.

“Children are an important part of the family, but family life doesn’t revolve round them,” points out Druckerman. “In America and Britain, there’s a belief that having children must entail self- sacrifice and that we must push them to succeed. The French are more patient and allow their children far more freedom. You never see French mothers hovering anxiously round their children in a park.”

French women don’t dedicate themselves selflessly to motherhood. French fathers aren’t enslaved at weekends, driving children to activities. And babies are seldom breast-fed for long – the emphasis instead being on the mother’s sex life returning to normal as soon as possible.

Of course this article ends with a paragraph about how this mom has…wait for it…wonderful kids (surprised?) and how she likes them just as they are.

Social/Political
Paul Krugman shares a snippet about our current lack of economic class mobility (he is quoting John Quiggin):

For years, opinion leaders have told us that it’s all about family values. And it is — but it will take a while before most people realize that they meant the value of coming from the right family.

Politicfact
Paul Krugman takes politifact to task for saying “half true” (upgraded to “mostly true”) by politifact and then makes a larger point:

Unfortunately, Politifact has lost sight of what it was supposed to be doing. Instead of simply saying whether a claim is true, it’s trying to act as some kind of referee of what it imagines to be fair play: even if a politician says something completely true, it gets ruled only partly true if Politifact feels that the fact is being used to gain an unfair political advantage. In the case of Obama’s job statement, Politifact first called it only half true, then upgraded that to mostly true, not because Obama said anything factually incorrect, but because Politifact perceived Obama as trying to imply that he was responsible for the gains.

This is deeply wrong on two levels. First, fact-checking should be about checking facts — not about trying to impose some sort of Marquess of Queensbury rules on how you’re allowed to use facts. Aside from undermining the mission, this makes the whole thing subjective — notice that Politifact wasn’t even analyzing what Obama said, they were analyzing their impression about what he might have been trying to imply. Leave that for the talking heads!

Second, in practice this turns into a partisan affair. The simple fact is that in today’s US political scene, Republicans make a lot more factual howlers than Democrats. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is. Yet Politifact wants to be seen as nonpartisan.

I take a slightly different view; this is how and why:

Ok, here is a dissenting opinion (sort of): yes, a fact checker should check to see if the statement is factual or not, but there is some duty, IMHO, to see if the fact is being used responsibly.

Remember the statements about the “lucky duckies” that pay no federal income taxes, as in “in year 200x, 4x percent of Americans paid no Federal Income taxes.” That statement is literally true. However it is deceptive because it cherry picks both a particular year (atypical) and it leaves off things like payroll tax, local taxes, etc.

Climate change deniers do this all the time; they say things like “hey, the average temperature of the planet went up from year X to year X 1″ which might be literally true…but irrelevant to the actual long term trend, especially if there was some other smaller cycle (El nino, La Nina) involved.

Of course, I agree that Politifact is not doing this responsibly; they sure appear to be bending to conservative pressure to be “balanced” because, well, the conservative are lying so much.

Note: this is from my comment.

Science/Evolution

Genes and evolution (by Jeremy Yoder )

Does evolutionary change happen in big jumps, or a series of small steps? The question may seem a little esoteric to non-scientists—how many mutations can dance on the head of a pin?—but it has direct implications for how we identify the genetic basis of human diseases, or desirable traits in domestic plants and animals.

That’s because the evolutionary path by which a particular phenotype, or visible trait, first evolved in a population is closely related to the genetics that underlie the trait in the present. Phenotypes that arose in a single mutational jump will probably remain connected to one or a few genes with large effects; phenotypes that evolved more gradually do so because they are created by the collective action of many genes. So what kind of evolutionary change is most common will determine which kind of gene-to-phenotype relationships we should expect to find.

In an excellent recent review article for the journal Evolution, Matthew Rockman, a biologist with the Department of Biology and Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at New York University, makes the case that the era of genomics has, so far, been much too focused on finding genes of large effect. Fortunately, Rockman also sees the beginnings of a new movement towards acknowledging the importance of small-effect genes—one which may ultimately make genomic association studies more useful.

He goes on to talk about Genewise association study (GWAS). Here is the idea: some evolved traits are Mendelian (a mutation of only a few genes, possibly only one are involved). Some involve the mutation of many genes with all of these genes working together to get the given effect (ability to tolerate heat is one such trait). Since these genes didn’t mutate together, this track is far more difficult to find.

I recommend surfing to the blog and reading the rest.

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