How a factual story about astronaut DNA becomes fake news

Roxxsmom

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This is an interesting article about something I was gnashing my teeth about last week: the proliferation of stories about a study of an astronaut and his earthbound twin that stated things along the lines of, "7% of the astronaut's DNA had been mutated" after a stint in space.

I didn't have to read the articles in question, or find the original article, to know that this was untrue. If we changed 7% of our DNA, we wouldn't even be alive or if we were, we wouldn't be human anymore (a chimp shares 98.5 % of the base sequences with humans, and different members of our species only differ by a small fraction of one percent).

Sometimes the content of these articles about the astronaut didn't actually say what the headlines implied they did.

Fake news doesn't always start out as an intentional lie. It can arise from misreporting, or from sensationalistic headlines, written by people who didn't even read (or understand, at least) the original article.

So how does a factual story mutate into blatantly false interpretations or statements?

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/scott-kelly-dna-fake-news/555794/

It also brings to mind that old adage about how a lie makes it around the world before the truth gets its boots on. A recent article in Science reports on a study demonstrating that fake news stories get shared and retweeted much more rapidly and widely than factual stories do (and bots aren't primarily to blame for this--it's people. Fake news is spread by people).
 
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blacbird

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Popular reporting has forever been terrible at dealing with scientific stories, and continues to be. Having a public dreadfully uneducated in basic science allows this to go on.

Stephen Hawking died this week. I'd bet that at least half the American public doesn't have a whiff of a ghost of a zephyr of a clue who Stephen Hawking was, beyond maybe, "Dude, wasn't he, like, famous for being crippled, or something?"

caw
 
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mccardey

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Stephen Hawking died this week. I'd bet that at least half the American public doesn't have a whiff of a ghost of a zephyr of a clue who Stephen Hawking was
Oh, this. I still want to smack all the people who tweeted "Well I'm sorry he's gone, but I didn't agree with him." (I say that as someone who's read fewer than half of his books and even fewer of his co-authored books and understood less than half of what I read but seriously - I don't imagine he needs me to agree with him. Or understand him. And I'm still sorry he's gone.)
 
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Albedo

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Oh, this. I still want to smack all the people who tweeted "Well I'm sorry he's gone, but I didn't agree with him." (I say that as someone who's read fewer than half of his books and even fewer of his co-authored books and understood less than half of what I read but seriously - I don't imagine he needs me to agree with him. Or understand him. And I'm still sorry he's gone.)
They didn't agree with him? Like, these twitterers all felt particular aspects of the trans-Planckian problem as it pertains to Hawking radiation across an event horizon on very small scales couldn't be reconciled with quantum theory? Such learning. I don't know how you feel at all adequate amongst the luminaries of the twatter-sphere, Maccas. All shining brighter than the sun. We are ants unto them. šŸœ ANTS.
 

Brightdreamer

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... --it's people. Fake news is spread by people).

Tangent, here, but am I the only one who read this like the last line from Soylent Green?

I read a book a while back on the tangled, recently actively detrimental but always ambivalent relationship America has had with science and education since the start - Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America (Shawn Lawrence Otto) - that painted a grim picture of the future if this active, encouraged ignorance remains unchecked... and it was written in 2011/2012ish, before the crippling blow of 2016. Basically, rectifying the problem will require long-term, concerted efforts... efforts unlikely to happen while those in power are profiting directly off continued, increasing idiocracy.
 

neandermagnon

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Not to mention the people eulogising him as Stephen Hawkins.

In a recent article (I think on the BBC, one of the many with tributes to Hawking) Richard Dawkins said he'd had people him why he wasn't in his wheelchair. Personally, I never really made the connection with the shared letters between Dawkins and Hawking because one's an evolutionary biologist and the other's a theoretical physicist.

Is it still illegal to teach evolutionary biology in some parts of the USA?
 

frimble3

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I think the story plays on a particular set of fears, featured in a lot of science-fiction stories and horror films: that we will go out there and be changed.

From Ray Bradbury's 'Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed', where people go to Mars and are gradually changed, to the aliens in 'Alien' who burrow into us and burst out, and the supposedly 'nice' characters in 'Starman' and 'E.T.' who creep into our hearts, the fear is out there.
The fear that what's out there will change us, become us, and use us as disguises to sneak in and take over.

It's xenophobia, usually expressed as foreigners and minorities doing these things, but stories about astronauts being changed, in any way, presses those same buttons. Especially for people with no knowledge of science, scientific method or, indeed science-fiction.
 

mccardey

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these twitterers all felt particular aspects of the trans-Planckian problem as it pertains to Hawking radiation across an event horizon on very small scales couldn't be reconciled with quantum theory?
Yes, because twitter. I can't even.
 

ElaineA

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I first heard about the twin study from Kelly himself in an NPR interview he did for his book. Link is here if you want to listen. It's about more than the study, but interesting listening.

As for Hawking and all those who disagreed with him (about God, mostly), God has weighed in a series of tweets (courtesy @TheTweetOfGod):
"Itā€™s only been a few hours and Stephen Hawking already mathematically proved, to My face, that I donā€™t exist."

"Now Stephen Hawking is going on and on about how I need to reconcile general relativity with quantum dynamics to create a single Theory of Everything and blah blah blah... dude, you're in heaven! Stop with the thinking, relax and enjoy the harp music!"

He's also having a disagreement with Franklin Graham over Hawking's fate, so...:ROFL:
 
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shootseven

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I see this with supposed historical discoveries all the time. Today, it was the story of a newly discovered and now "authenticated" photo of Jesse James.

Of course, the only people who believe it's been authenticated are the photos owner, the two supposed experts who were also behind the alleged photo of Billy the Kid playing croquet (that wasn't Billy, either), and the reporters who are apparently too lazy to reach out to any other experts besides those provided by the photo's owner. It drives me nuts.
 

Roxxsmom

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Popular reporting has forever been terrible at dealing with scientific stories, and continues to be. Having a public dreadfully uneducated in basic science allows this to go on.

Stephen Hawking died this week. I'd bet that at least half the American public doesn't have a whiff of a ghost of a zephyr of a clue who Stephen Hawking was, beyond maybe, "Dude, wasn't he, like, famous for being crippled, or something?"

caw

His book A Brief History of Time was a bestseller, though, and they made a movie based on the book. Other books for the general, if educated, "lay" public by scientists have been popular. I think there's a hunger for this kind of thing, at least in some circles.

But there is indeed a gap between the people who are interested and reasonably informed (or willing to be) and those who think science that isn't about finding cures for diseases, or other immediately "useful" things, is a waste of time and resources.

Tangent, here, but am I the only one who read this like the last line from Soylent Green?

Nope. I intended it to sound like that.

SoylentGreen.png
 
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MaeZe

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...Is it still illegal to teach evolutionary biology in some parts of the USA?
Define 'illegal' in this context and whether or not you are talking about grade school, high school or college.

There are no effective laws banning such education. There are a few local laws that insist evolution theory in grade and high schools be balanced with disclaimers suggesting the theory is weak and other options should be included in science classrooms.

But when challenged in court, the laws are almost universally overturned. Kitzmiller v Dover School District settled the case.

At the university level, some private religious universities deny evolution theory is valid. Liberty University Creation Studies
The Center for Creation Studies is an interdisciplinary education and research institute committed to the study of the origin of the universe, the earth, life, and diversification of species. This study draws upon knowledge from religion, science, philosophy, and history.

Liberty is a religious indoctrination university established by Jerry Falwell.

To my horror they have a 4-year nursing degree, teaching nurses that evolution isn't a valid theory.
 

Albedo

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Define 'illegal' in this context and whether or not you are talking about grade school, high school or college.

There are no effective laws banning such education. There are a few local laws that insist evolution theory in grade and high schools be balanced with disclaimers suggesting the theory is weak and other options should be included in science classrooms.

But when challenged in court, the laws are almost universally overturned. Kitzmiller v Dover School District settled the case.

At the university level, some private religious universities deny evolution theory is valid. Liberty University Creation Studies

Liberty is a religious indoctrination university established by Jerry Falwell.

To my horror they have a 4-year nursing degree, teaching nurses that evolution isn't a valid theory.
No, this is good news! It means we don't have to worry about antibiotic resistance any more, because creation is immutable. IMMUTABLE.
 

Roxxsmom

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It's not illegal to teach evolution anywhere, as far as I know, but as MaeZe said, some localities attempt to pass laws requiring that they "teach the controversy" and that pseudoscience du jour (creation science, intelligent design, or whatever the current buzzword for Biblical creation masquerading as science) be taught alongside evolution. These laws are regularly struck down in courts, but religious activists keep attempting them in some states.

The more insidious effect, though, is that many school districts, and individual instructors, gloss over evolution, teach it badly, or don't cover any explanation of life's diversity at all. At best, they reduce it to a single chapter near the end of the standard biology text, which they might not get to at all. Some do so because they are poorly versed in evolution themselves, or are even creationists themselves, and others simply want to avoid argumentative students, complaints from parents, or pressure from the school boards or principals. Without evolution to provide the framework and unifying theory for the discipline, biology becomes an unconnected collection of facts that make little sense.

My brother is an MD, and he's told me that he's run across colleagues (other MDs) who are creationists. Evidently, you can get into med school without being well versed in the underpinnings of modern biology.
 
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Cyia

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Too few people understand how biology works. Some will see the stats about how similar human and simian DNA are, then see numbers about how we only share fractions of our genes with our parents / siblings, and they get confused. They don't realize that there's a difference in saying that base sequences overlap, and chromosomal count, allele expression, mitochondrial DNA used for relationship chains, etc.

Too few people understand what evolution actually refers to, with the prevailing argument against being "Men didn't come from apes." (The point of the conversation where I usually say "evolution agrees with you on that point." and they get very confused.)


Curriculums are set by states and districts, so you get wildly varying lessons, even in closely aligned schools. Texas schools have their faults, but I don't ever remember having Creation taught anywhere but Sunday School. This is including the year our science teacher literally was a Sunday school teacher on the weekends.

(Personally, I find no reason a person can't believe both, with Creation being the "spiritual" side of things and Evolution being the "physical" side of things. Like seeing a clock tick, then opening it up to see how the mechanism actually gets from point-A to point-B. YMMV, but I will never understand how science became the enemy of faith. It seems like people who believe they're the God-ordained stewards of earth and all the life upon it would want to be the most educated about how that life and planet operate.)
 

MaeZe

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.... Curriculums are set by states and districts, so you get wildly varying lessons, even in closely aligned schools. Texas schools have their faults, but I don't ever remember having Creation taught anywhere but Sunday School. This is including the year our science teacher literally was a Sunday school teacher on the weekends.

(Personally, I find no reason a person can't believe both, with Creation being the "spiritual" side of things and Evolution being the "physical" side of things. Like seeing a clock tick, then opening it up to see how the mechanism actually gets from point-A to point-B.
The Catholics are going for Steven Gould's non-overlapping magisteria. Pope Ratzinger, aka Benedict the 16th, tried to take approval of evolution theory back but I believe Pope Frances reversed the reverse. There's a Catholic astronomer that is on TV programs often but I can't recall his name. He just ignores the cognitive dissonance and goes with God initiating the Big Bang and Genesis as metaphor or something.

.... YMMV, but I will never understand how science became the enemy of faith. It seems like people who believe they're the God-ordained stewards of earth and all the life upon it would want to be the most educated about how that life and planet operate.)
Gould wrote about separating faith from science. I think the 'science as the enemy' has grown from scientific evidence that contradicts the Bible, especially with the Evangelical faith that focuses deeply on Jesus. Evolution contradicts the Original Sin mythology and if you don't have Original Sin you can't have Jesus' sacrifice to save people from the Original Sin.
 

neandermagnon

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Define 'illegal' in this context and whether or not you are talking about grade school, high school or college.

There are no effective laws banning such education. There are a few local laws that insist evolution theory in grade and high schools be balanced with disclaimers suggesting the theory is weak and other options should be included in science classrooms.

But when challenged in court, the laws are almost universally overturned. Kitzmiller v Dover School District settled the case.

That's good to know :Thumbs::Thumbs: I was going by news reports (on the UK news) from probably more than 15 years ago now that one state (Kentucky?) had banned the teaching of evolution in schools (I took that to mean classes from kindergarten to 12th grade) - but it's good to know that it was never as bad as that and these laws get overturned.

At the university level, some private religious universities deny evolution theory is valid. Liberty University Creation Studies

Liberty is a religious indoctrination university established by Jerry Falwell.

To my horror they have a 4-year nursing degree, teaching nurses that evolution isn't a valid theory.

I've heard of places like that. I didn't know they were allowed to award actual validated degrees though. That's very worrying.


----

general rant (not aimed at any individual post)

Evolutionary biology has so much to offer medicine and it's a very poorly understood area. Many genetic illnesses are caused by genes that had an evolutionary advantage in the past but don't work quite the same way in the modern world. Like allergies and Crohn's disease - thought to have evolved to give protection against internal parasites, but when the body has no parasites they make the body attack itself. Crohn's disease genes have been found in Neandertals, along with several other genes that aren't so good for modern people. Understanding what the original benefit of the gene can help find treatments, but it doesn't seem like very much research is going into this aspect of disease.

I just skim-read the Wikipedia article on Crohn's disease and found just one sentence about this "Another study has theorized that the human immune system traditionally evolved with the presence of parasites inside the body, and that the lack thereof due to modern hygiene standards has weakened the immune system. Test subjects were reintroduced to harmless parasites, with positive response" and no mention of the fact that a gene for Crohn's disease has been found in Neandertals. In spite of the fact that the study showed the treatment to be successful, it just got ONE sentence. This kind of sums up the whole thing.

Research into allergies has recently found that a particular species of gut bacteria stops people with the allergy gene developing allergies as long as they're exposed to it in infancy, and also that combining exposure treatment (where they give tiny doses of the allergen in an attempt to desensitise the person) is a lot more effective when combined with giving the person this bacteria species as a probiotic.

Some mental illness such as PTSD and CPTSD could be a lot better understood in an evolutionary context, viewed as adaptive responses to life threatening situations. PTSD could be seen as a useful adapted response to an external threat, e.g. predators, enemy humans. CPTSD could be seen as a set of adaptive responses to enable primates to survive being the "omega" of their own group (omega = lowest ranking, the one everyone else picks on), i.e. living alongside a constant, ongoing threat to their survival, on a knife edge between being cast out and dying alone in the wilderness (social primates, especially humans*, rely on the group for survival) and the threat of finally being killed off by members of your own troop/tribe. It also explains why it's so extremely hard for victims of abuse within their own families to leave - millions of years of evolution of survival instincts to stay with the group because death is more likely if you leave your troop/tribe and try to survive alone than if you stay and endure the abuse. This knowledge could be applied to help people leave abusive families, abusive social groups (like religious cults, etc) and so on, but most people don't even think of it because they know fuck all about how our ancestors lived. They just blame the victims: "well why didn't you just leave?"

Note: the above about PTSD/CPTSD is not the whole picture, it's a lot more complex than that, but I think there's a strong case to be made that the above is at least part of the picture and should be further researched and considered a lot more especially when it comes to helping people.

And that's before we get onto things like why bisexuality and homosexuality evolved and how this helped early human societies survive.

There are so many things that make more sense with evolutionary biology, and so much of it can be applied to help modern people deal with modern illnesses and modern situation... but even most people who "believe" in evolution know very little about actual human evolution. They believe our ancestors were knuckle-dragging brutes that were stupid and unable to talk.

Our whole understanding of humanity and what is "default" for our species and what is the result of culture and modern problems like overpopulation/trying to live in much greater numbers than we evolved for would be of great benefit to humanity. I would take hunter-gatherer as default for the species for the simple reason we spent over 2 million years being hunter-gatherers, we went from australopith to human and from Homo ergaster* to Homo sapiens sapiens as hunter-gatherers and agriculture only started 10,000 years ago, which is a mere blink of the eye. But how many people know even the most basic things about hunter-gatherer society? Their heads are full of a bunch of racist and completely inaccurate myths.

*going by the latest theories of high diversity/variation in early humans, which would mean all the early species like H. habilis, H. rudolphensis and H. ergaster are all in fact the same species, which I think should be called Homo ergaster, but there are rules about how they should be named and I don't know which name it would be going by the rules, but I like Homo ergaster the best, so there :greenie

Also, sorry for the long rant, but another thing... when people try to find evolutionary reasons for things, they need to first be well enough versed in modern theories of human evolution before doing so. I have lost count of how many times psychologists do this just because it's trendy in psychology. Okay, it's good that they appreciate the importance of evolutionary biology. BUT they make such basic, fundamental mistakes that I want to bang my head against a brick wall. It's either a) they've taken a study on young, white, mostly middle class people from modern USA and extrapolated it to the whole entire human genus*, or even the whole of hominins*!! (You have to prove that the same effects is seen in all human populations including recently-contacted hunter-gatherers that have yet to be influenced by western culture before you can extrapolate it to the whole of Homo sapiens sapiens, nevermind extrapolating) or b) they're interpreting it in light of theories that were disproven decades ago. Or, quite often, both of them at the same time.

*they don't realise they're extrapolating it that far, but if you're discussing things like why men don't like shopping (apparently because they evolved as hunters) then you're talking about the whole human genus. If you're talking about the evolution of bipedalism, you're talking about the entire hominin clade. But often they don't know enough about evolutionary biology to realise they're doing this. Plus they're taking the whole thing of "white young cis het USA male" being the default for all humans to the extremes of extremes.

Okay rant really is over now. I wish so much so much so much that evolutionary biology was a) taught so much better b) taught in so many more science courses - especially psychology!! - and c) much more valued generally.
 
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neandermagnon

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The more insidious effect, though, is that many school districts, and individual instructors, gloss over evolution, teach it badly, or don't cover any explanation of life's diversity at all. At best, they reduce it to a single chapter near the end of the standard biology text, which they might not get to at all. Some do so because they are poorly versed in evolution themselves, or are even creationists themselves, and others simply want to avoid argumentative students, complaints from parents, or pressure from the school boards or principals. Without evolution to provide the framework and unifying theory for the discipline, biology becomes an unconnected collection of facts that make little sense.

This is exactly what I fear is happening.

And not just in the USA. While the creation/evolution thing is much less of a thing over here, historically, it was a thing and I feel that the UK hasn't fully recovered from this and evolution is still not given enough importance. It's on the national curriculum and in GCSE exams, but IMO not enough of it. Evolution by natural selection (as in the process) is covered and kids get asked questions involving things like why giraffes necks evolved to be long, and what adaptations polar bears have to survive the cold, etc, but I've yet to see any GCSE syllabus that covers human evolution in any detail. It's not beyond the conceptual level of GCSE to learn about which human species lived at which times in the past, what tools they made, when humans first started using stone tools, fire etc and a little look at some of the evidence for when humans started to speak (like the Neandertal hyoid bone and FOXP2 genes). I'm inclined to think that it's not included because it's still considered controversial at some level or not valued enough, not because it's too difficult (because it's not).
 
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Roxxsmom

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I'm inclined to think that it's not included because it's still considered controversial at some level or not valued enough, not because it's too difficult (because it's not).

This is it, exactly. In the US the move towards narrowing curriculum to focus on "the basics" for standardized testing has gone even further. As far as I know, there's no natural or social sciences included at all.

From what my brother (a doctor) has told me, medical school emphasizes the memorization of symptoms, disease processes and treatments with little-to-no attention paid to the role evolution has played in human health. Nowadays, doctors spend a lot of time in front of computer monitors, reading test results and following insurance-company algorithms in order to determine which tests to run and which treatments to prescribe. How long before robots can do that job?
 

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.... general rant (not aimed at any individual post)

Evolutionary biology has so much to offer medicine and it's a very poorly understood area. Many genetic illnesses are caused by genes that had an evolutionary advantage in the past but don't work quite the same way in the modern world. Like allergies and Crohn's disease - thought to have evolved to give protection against internal parasites, but when the body has no parasites they make the body attack itself. Crohn's disease genes have been found in Neandertals, along with several other genes that aren't so good for modern people. Understanding what the original benefit of the gene can help find treatments, but it doesn't seem like very much research is going into this aspect of disease.
There's a lot of pop medical science out there such as the claim dirt exposure in childhood prevents allergies. Someone poses an hypothesis and it spreads word of mouth as if extensive medical research supports the pilot study.

I just skim-read the Wikipedia article on Crohn's disease and found just one sentence about this "Another study has theorized that the human immune system traditionally evolved with the presence of parasites inside the body, and that the lack thereof due to modern hygiene standards has weakened the immune system. Test subjects were reintroduced to harmless parasites, with positive response" and no mention of the fact that a gene for Crohn's disease has been found in Neandertals. In spite of the fact that the study showed the treatment to be successful, it just got ONE sentence. This kind of sums up the whole thing.
Sounds like another pilot study.

.Research into allergies has recently found that a particular species of gut bacteria stops people with the allergy gene developing allergies as long as they're exposed to it in infancy, and also that combining exposure treatment (where they give tiny doses of the allergen in an attempt to desensitise the person) is a lot more effective when combined with giving the person this bacteria species as a probiotic.
They found an allergy gene? I can't believe there is a single gene responsible for the complexity of allergy and autoimmune syndromes. But it's interesting they have pinned down at least one genetic precursor.

A lot of hypothesizing about genetic origin of various current day behaviors and maladies do indeed come from people applying intuitive solutions based on really poor understanding of evolutionary theory.

Infectious disease researchers are well up on their genetic science even if practicing docs don't have time to keep up. :D
 
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Criccieth

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Research into allergies has recently found that a particular species of gut bacteria stops people with the allergy gene developing allergies as long as they're exposed to it in infancy, and also that combining exposure treatment (where they give tiny doses of the allergen in an attempt to desensitise the person) is a lot more effective when combined with giving the person this bacteria species as a probiotic.

that's interesting. I remember in the very early 2000s when I was first pregnant, the advice to pregnant mums was that if you had a history of asthma or eczema in either family, to avoid nuts in pregnancy and (if breast-feeding) for the first few months after childbirth to reduce the chances of nut allergy in kids. I was in the UK - don't know if the advice was very wide-spread outside the UK.

Apparently the incident of nut allergies exploded. By the time I came to have my last child, only 9 years after my first, the advice had been explicitly reversed - if you had a history of asthma/eczema it was now recommended that you eat nuts in pregnancy (if safe for mother) in order to avoid the chance of nut allergies!

I know there's a wide-spread (though not sure how far proven) theory that the (genuine) rise in (real, sometimes life-threatening) allergies is due to modern sanitation demands and food safety demands! Which makes one wonder where the "happy, safe medium" is. I don't care if my kids get a bit mucky (my girl does rugby - those kids drop their mouthguards in the mud, step on them, pick them up, shake them off, stick them back in their mouths and then come in to eat with mud-covered hands and are some of the healthiest kids I know) and i don't bleach my kitchen worktops or washing machine - but I want clean water, sterile doctor's/dentist's implements and I want to know that the people working in the food industry are paying attention to hygiene !
 
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Roxxsmom

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Too few people understand how biology works. Some will see the stats about how similar human and simian DNA are, then see numbers about how we only share fractions of our genes with our parents / siblings, and they get confused. They don't realize that there's a difference in saying that base sequences overlap, and chromosomal count, allele expression, mitochondrial DNA used for relationship chains, etc.

This actually is confusing, and it's easy for those of us who are biology instructors to assume that students will understand "share fifty percent of your DNA" with each parent to be a broad reference to the chromosomes themselves, and for the differences only to "apply" to that tiny fraction of base sequences that vary among humans.

Too few people understand what evolution actually refers to, with the prevailing argument against being "Men didn't come from apes." (The point of the conversation where I usually say "evolution agrees with you on that point." and they get very confused.)

This too. It doesn't help that pop culture representations of evolution often present a rather "Lamarkian" view of things (the idea that every species has some perfect form it is aspiring to attain via deliberate acts) or all those cartoons depicting the chain of being (again implying progress and us as an end product of all vertebrate evolution).

Also, those people who say that they know the arguments for evolution make sense, but they "can't" believe in evolution because their religion says they can't. They are often wrong about this, and in fact they are as ignorant about the religion they claim to be following blindly as they are about evolutionary theory.


... but I will never understand how science became the enemy of faith. It seems like people who believe they're the God-ordained stewards of earth and all the life upon it would want to be the most educated about how that life and planet operate.)

I think it's the principle that is sometimes referred to as "god in the gaps." The more science can explain, with no need of a divine mechanism, the smaller the role of god becomes in explaining the natural world. Each new discovery makes the need for God as an explanation of physical things smaller and smaller. As a consequence, many have decided they can live just fine without religion, and the world has grown increasingly secular. This makes people for whom religion is still central to their lives feel very threatened, even outdated and in danger of extinction.

There are a number of rational ways of dealing with this, and many people have done so. But not everyone has, especially when a particular approach to religion is central to their cultural identity and drives their moral outlook and the way they see other people.

I am betting there are other reasons too, ones that are impossible to grasp if one isn't religious in a particular way. I'm trying to reiterate what has been explained to me.
 

neandermagnon

Nolite timere, consilium callidum habeo!
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They found an allergy gene? I can't believe there is a single gene responsible for the complexity of allergy and autoimmune syndromes. But it's interesting they have pinned down at least one genetic precursor.

Bad phrasing on my part. It's a genetic tendency that's inherited so I should've said that, not "allergy gene" (though plenty of doctors when speaking to my family call it that, probably to simplify it when they explain it).

There are specific genes that have been identified as playing a role, for example a consultant dermatologist told me that the type of atopic eczema in my family is the result of a faulty gene that codes for a protein in the skin's barrier - the faulty gene causes the skin barrier (the stuff that's secreted on top of the epidermis) to be water soluble when it shouldn't be, the result being that it washes away too easily leaving the skin vulnerable to infection and allergens. It's probably not the only gene involved, and plus there are various environmental factors, some known about, others an area of further research.

The research still has a long way to go but I'm keeping a close eye on the current NHS trials into treatments for anaphylaxis because my younger daughter has a list of severe allergies so long I can't even just give a plain answer to "what's she allergic to?" I also can't leave her alone at parties or anywhere where there's food (she's too young to administer the epipen herself - she has to be with someone trained in epipen use at all times). I tried to volunteer her for the next round of trials for the treatment involving combining exposure to the allergen(s) with the species of bacteria that got the high success rate in the trials, but my GP said that's not possible, and it's probably going to be five years before the treatment's generally available. So yes the research is still quite new but it looks extremely promising. Not just in terms of developing an effective treatment but also in getting a better understanding of why allergies happen in the first place.


Infectious disease researchers are well up on their genetic science even if practicing docs don't have time to keep up. :D

I agree, and retrospectively, should've phrased my post differently to reflect that. I'm a "big picture" thinker and the details get blurred (especially when I type out a whole rant at 90 words per minute :greenie ). Current researchers in biological sciences are clued up about evolutionary biology but zoom out a bit and a general lack of understanding about the importance of evolutionary biology means that these areas don't get as much attention or funding.

Plus there might be other connections to be made between modern health problems and evolutionary biology. If a genetic problem is widespread, that fact alone begs the question as to how come it got passed on so much - maybe the gene had no effect in the past or maybe it had an advantage in the past. Answering those questions may open doors to better prevention and treatment of the problems. That would require more specific knowledge about the environment our ancestors lived in, not just general knowledge about evolutionary theory.