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Why empiricism will always be imperfect
A new year is upon us, and that’s always a great time to clean out the skeletons in your closet. So without further ado, let’s take a look at Jonah Lehrer’s explanation of “the decline effect” (published in The New Yorker last month). Lehrer describes this odd phenomenon whereby statistical significance of previous scientific findings seems to decrease with age, as we get further and further away from the time that it was initially reported in literature.
As any scientist can tell you, the holy grail of an experiment is a low p-value, a statistical measure that tells whether your findings are indicative of an actual effect, not just randomness and chance. This sounds fairly straightforward – of course we want to find things of actual importance, rather than being lulled into a false discovery by arbitrary data – but it turns out to be much hazier than a simple “yes” or “no.”
Another year, another controversy at Cal
Jasper Rine, the molecular and cell biology professor at the center of this debate, had no idea that his relatively simple project would ignite a firestorm of publicity and controversy that would eventually bring him head-to-head with the California Department of Public Health. His plan had been to provide a unifying experience for Cal’s incoming freshman class and teach them a little about understanding genetic data, by collecting some of their DNA and testing them for three simple genetic variants associated with the metabolism of alcohol, lactose, and folate.
Though scientifically very straight-forward, Rine and his co-planners knew that collecting genetic information can be a very sensitive issue, so they took a number of steps to ensure that safety and privacy concerns were met.
Genetically modified organisms? That’s old news
Would you be excited about a swiftly growing salmon that yields the same amount of flesh as a normal fish in half the time, yielding more product for less input and saving time, energy, and money? Great news: such fish already exist! But the producer, AquaBounty, faces major opposition in bringing them to market because they carry the dreaded label of “genetically modified.” (Their speedy development is thanks to the introduction of an extra gene for a growth hormone.)
Opponents have two main objections: the dangers of consuming engineered meat (shown to be minimal) and the potential environmental impact if the animals were released to the wild (a much more open question).