I’m afraid that this is one of the things that makes me really rather angry about those who would reject science. Those, that is, who keep insisting that there’s some problem with the current system of vaccinations. No, mercury in vaccines does not cause autism, no, the MMR vaccine does not cause autism. But not vaccinating children can indeed kill them:

A child has died from suspected diphtheria – the first fatality from the rare infection in Britain for 14 years, health chiefs disclosed yesterday.

The Health Protection Agency said diphtheria, which attacks the breathing system, was the “most likely” explanation for the death in London. The child had not been vaccinated.

The only reason the infection is indeed (thankfully) rare is that almost all children are indeed vaccinated against it. It’s fairly complex, three injection, one at two, one at three and one at four months. Then a booster before starting school and another between 16 and 18.

And the reason we go through all that effort is that it’s a great deal better than having to bury a child.

As more people reject the science, as more people fall for the woo woo stories about how children are damaged by vaccination then more children will die from these easily preventable diseases.

Grr.

I do love this blog post over at Comment is Free.

As a result of wanting to be all touchy feely New Age and the like, this family doesn’t get their children vaccinated with the MMR vaccine. The writer, the father of the family, points out that it’s nothing to do with autism or mercury, rather that:

Our decision was not so much linked to the ongoing debate fuelled by Dr Andrew Wakefield, linking the MMR jab to autism and bowel disorders, as a desire to keep any drugs whatsoever out of our babies systems until they were strong enough to cope with them.

The children then of course get measles as a result of the fact that far too many people are taking this sort of nonsensical decision and only 65% of the children in their area are indeed vaccinated.

My response would be that a) vaccines aren’t drugs and b) wouldn’t it be a good idea to keep death dealing diseases out of your babies’ bodies until they were strong enough to cope with them?

But a great deal more fun is the comments thread. He is really taken to task for, well, for being a fool actually. So foolish as to put his childrens’ health, their very lives, at risk for no very good or even properly articulated reason.

Blog are fun, aren’t they?

That’s the claim, that Albert Einstein was autistic, that he had a (clearly,) high functioning form of the condition.

Many leading figures in the fields of science, politics and the arts have achieved success because they had autism, a leading psychiatrist has claimed.

Michael Fitzgerald, Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, argued the characteristics linked to autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) were the same as those associated with creative genius.

This certainly could be true, for the extreme systemizing which is the mark of autism would certainly help in scientific endeavours: indeed, there are not quite jokes that the Math Faculty at Cambridge University was built for the autistic, given that so many were likely to go there.

Prof Fitzgerald cited Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, George Orwell, H G Wells and Ludwig Wittgenstein as examples of famous and brilliant individuals who showed signs of ASDs including Asperger syndrome.

Beethoven, Mozart, Hans Christian Andersen and Immanuel Kant have also received post mortem diagnoses of Asperger’s.

Speaking at a Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Academic Psychiatry conference in London, Prof Fitzgerald said argued the link between ASD’s, creativity and genius were caused by common genetic causes.

“Psychiatric disorders can also have positive dimensions. I’m arguing the genes for autism/Asperger’s, and creativity are essentially the same.

“We don’t know which genes they are yet or how many there are, but we are talking about multiple genes of small effect. Every case is unique because people have varying numbers of the genes involved.

“These produce people who are highly focused, don’t fit into the school system, and who often have poor social relationships and eye contact. They can be quite paranoid and oppositional, and usually highly moral and ethical.

“They can persist with a topic for 20-30 years without being distracted by what other people think. And they can produce in one lifetime the work of three or four other people.”

The description of the people can certainly be true but I would worry a little about the genes part. The statement that the genes for autism (which we think is caused by the influence of testosterone upon the fetal brain) are the same as those for creativity looks like a remarkably strong one and as we all know, strong claims require strong evidence.

The claim that some who have been creative were autistic, even if you could prove it, is not that strong evidence. You would also need to show that there were no (or few) creative people who were not autistic and that’s something the Professor has not even addressed. Given that he’s failed that part of the argument, not just failed to prove it, he’s failed to address it, I think we’ll take all of this with a pinch of salt.

That’s not to say that Einstein wasn’t autistic though: just that even if he was we’ve not shown the link between the genes for autism and those for creativity.

Via Arnold, this paper.

Most economists are unaware of the evidence that certain personality traits are more malleable than cognitive ability over the life cycle and are more sensitive to investment by parents and to other sources of environmental influences at later ages than are cognitive traits. Social policy designed to remediate deficits in achievement can be effective by operating outside of purely cognitive channels.

Now that’s coming from a Nobel Laureate so it might be worth our paying some attention to the point. To explain it a little first.

Cognitive traits are things like IQ: in short, how well you think (that’s a horrible simplification of IQ but good enough for us here and now). Personality traits are much more like the sorts of things measured by our EQSQ personality tests. How systemising are you, how empathic, how well do you relate to the feelings of others and so on.

So what is being said (apart from the point that economists don’t pay enough attention to this) is that it’s extremely difficult to increase someone’s actual intelligence. Easy enough to increase their knowledge, but that’s a very different thing. But things like how well you understand systems or people are not simply set in stone like raw intelligence. There’s a combination there of both innate talent and also learnt behaviour. So, as it can be learnt, it can (although with effort) be taught.

This has two further meanings. The first is that you don’t have to think of the results of our tests as being set in stone. You can, if you should be so minded, see where you think you are weak and thus work on that side of your personality so as to strengthen it.

The second is that it makes the work that Simon Baron Cohen is doing with autistic children more hopeful. Autism is, in one manner, described as an almost complete lack of empathy, not a disregard for but an incomprehension of the feelings of others. If personality traits can be taught, so can empathy and, if this description of autism is correct then so can that condition. “Cured” would almost certainly be too strong a word but ameliorated is good news enough, isn’t it?

Things have certainly changed since I was involved in the computer games industry (yes, really, I am credited as being the producer of one successful release). Twenty years ago it was all about how much graphics could we fit into the computer of the time: now it seems to be about psychology as well. Here’s a fascinating little post (for an admittedly odd meaning of “fascinating”) about what’s being worked on for the next generation of games.

What the developers are looking for is authenticity, believability, in the actions of the characters. Currently, much of this is done using live actors and video capture: no one has quite built engines which will react to the actions of other characters believably just yet.

Now where this touches on our concerns here is that what the developers actually want is to build software that will have empathy: if one character frowns, or yawns, then the other characters in the game should react appropriately. In effect, they want to teach the computer models empathy, almost for them to pass an empathic (as opposed to intelligence) Turing Test.

And yes, in modelling human behaviour so as to be able to describe it in code, they are using the basic theories of Simon Baron Cohen, he of our EQSQ personality tests. I was most taken with this piece of advice:

Give your characters a simple model of the emotional status of others to make them seem less autistic when making decisions.

That’s really a rather good description of both empathy and autism there, isn’t it? The ability to divine the emotional status of others is generally agreed to be what autists lack and the ability to both recognise and react properly to them is empathy.

But it’s amazing how these things go, isn’t it? Research orginally intended to discover the underlying causes (and thus possible treatments for) of autism is leading to more realistic computer games.

Arrgh! The charlatans are after us again! Yes, it is clearly and obviously true that autism is real and that it can be, for some sufferers (depending upon where on the spectrum they are), something that makes a normal life entirely impossible. However, we do think we know what causes it, as Simon Baron Cohen’s research tells us (and you will recall that he is the inventor of our EQSQ personality tests as well, something that comes directly out of his research).

Simply put there is a spectrum of brain types: from female to male, passing through balanced. The female brain type is associated with greater empathy and the male with more systemizing. There is a probability that those who are genetically female will have the female type brain and those male the male: but it is a probability, not a certainty. Some 17% of men have the female and vice versa female the male. That, within the definitions we’ve set ourselves, is observable. Quite why and how this happens is as yet unproven, although the thought is that it’s something to do with exposure to fetal testosterone.

The link with autism is that it is an expression of an extreme type of the male brain. There has been a rise in autism in recent years and so there are a lot of people wanting to point to a reason for that rise. One paper blamed TV (although it was pointed out that his association worked just as well for rain). Others have blamed the MMR vaccine, something that is now conclusively disproven. Another line has been the use of mercury in vaccines. As Japan took mercury out and the autism rate didn’t fall that one has fallen by the way side as well.

The fact is that, as best we know, autism is a genetic problem (it certainly runs very strongly in extended families) and not an environmental one. The best explanation for the rise is assortative mating. However, there do seem to be those who are insistent that there must be an environmental cause. Perhaps out of idiocy, perhaps out of a predatory instinct to feed off the fears and hopes of the parents of autistic children, but no less mistaken for that. The latest candidate is Wi-Fi: yes, it’s the old radio waves scam again.

The autistic children followed specific detoxification protocols in an environment that was mitigated with regard to sources of EMR including mobile phones and WiFi. Heavy metal excretions were monitored from hair, urine and feces over periods ranging from several weeks to several months. The researchers found that with protocols administered in the mitigated environment, heavy metals were cleared from the children?s bodies in a pattern dependent on time and molecular weight. The heaviest metals, such as mercury and uranium, cleared last. In many of the children, the decrease in metals was concomitant with symptom amelioration.

This is simply the worst poosible preying upon the gullible yet from the “alternative” health field. Well, until you get to this one:

Although Mariea believes that autism is a complicated condition that must have several factors at play for a child to fall to this diagnosis, she does believe that the three largest factors at play are:

• Genetically determined detoxification capacity,
• Early insult to immune system via contaminated vaccines and
• Being born with high levels of toxic burden and into a technologically advanced society riddled with ever increasing levels of radiation.

These are the key areas for research regarding the cause and etiology of autism spectrum disorders. Perhaps the genetic mutations that are being discovered in autism research are created through the DNA damage from radiation emitting devices used by families and in the households of ever member of our global society.

Nope, it’s not true. It’s the charlatans coming out of the woodwork again.

Yes, autism exists, yes there are indeed ameliorative treatments (Simon Baron Cohen reports some success with a DVD of trains with faces on them for example) but it isn’t Wi-Fi, it’s not heavy metals, it’s not DNA damage and it most certainly is not the MMR vaccine that causes it.

We’ve mentioned the Flynn Effect here before: the idea that IQs are getting higher, generation by generation, across the world. James Flynn has now taken his thinking on this a little further:

James R. Flynn, the discoverer of the famed “Flynn effect” and author of the new book What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect, argues that “the brain is much more like our muscles than we had thought” and that the genetic component of IQ is weaker than many have supposed.

Now this gives us something to think about when we ponder on the uses of our EQSQ personality tests. Are they telling us what we already have a partiality to? Are they telling us what we are already likely to be good at? Or are they pointing to the things that we should be practising, the things which we aren’t good at and thus need to improve upon?

Well, what Flynn is saying about the brain being a muscle means that perhaps, while the tests do tell us whether we’re systemizers or empathizers, they can also show us where our weaknesses are and thus what we ought to work harder upon.

Not, in fact, all that wonderful an answer. At least not for me. I’d got used to the idea that I wasn’t an empathizer, that my not caring about other people’s feelings was just an innate part of me. Now I’m, supposed to work at it? Try and become emotionally literate?

Gee, thanks Professor.

A fascinating piece of research written about here. It speaks to one of the questions about our EQSQ personality tests. Should we use them to find out what we’re likely to be good at, systemizing or empathizing careers, or should we use the personality tests to find out what we’re not good at and thus need more training at?

What the researchers wanted to know was, how can doctors and nurses perform treatments that they know will hurt their patients? Sure, they will do the patient long term good, but the immediate pain would stop most people from starting (or continuing) even if intellectually they knew that in the long term it was a good idea? Most especially, how could nurses, known to be amongst the most empathic of careers, do this?

When the control group (the normal people) watched film of painful procedures, the part of their brain that feels emotions sparked up. When the doctors and nurses saw the same movies, that part didn’t: but the part of the brain known to control emotions did. The researchers concluded that it’s part of the training of the medical professions, to learn how to control these instinctive reactions. To move, if you wish, the consideration of pain and harm from being a short term matte, like it is for most of us, to a longer term perspective. Yes, this treatment may hurt, but it will do you good, save you more pain in the future.

Which brings us back to our personality tests: we still say that nurses need to be empathizers: but the training makes it possible for you to change your instinctive reactions, as you will need to to perform properly.

I do love these sorts of things. Deborah Cameron had an extract of her upcoming book, The Myth of Mars and Venus, in The Guardian a few days ago. She wants to take issue with, amongst other people, Simon Baron Cohen, the researcher whose work underlies our EQSQ personality tests. Excellent, this is the way science advances.

However, actually reading through it I think she really rather misses her mark. Her basic thrust is that the differences between men and women are socially created and enforced, rather than being anything innate or genetically based. Thus, say, the idea that men interrupt more than women could be based on the fact that the powerful interrupt more than the non-: and it’s men that hold the power in our society.

She might even be right on that specific point, but I think she rather spoils things by stating that the variability between men and women on many things isn’t actually all that great (well, quite, we are the same species, after all) and then going on to state that the variance within men and within women is greater than that between the averages between the two groups. This is true, of course, but she uses it as a refutation of Baron Cohen and thus the science upon which our personality tests are based. But, err, the whole point of using them is that being XX or XY doesn’t tell you whether you are systemizing or empathic. We’re actually insisting that the variance amongst men and amongst women is greater than the averages between them, that’s why you take the tests to find out rather than looking between your legs.

Telling us that what we’re doing is right is a very odd way of refuting the argument.

It seems that we’re not really supposed to discuss our EQSQ personality tests. You see, it is possible that by explaining why, given that the systemizing and empathic attributes revealed by those personality tests can help to explain why there might be a preponderance of men in a profession, (or, of course, women in another) we might be causing harm.

That’s the rather odd assertion that this post over at Overcoming Bias rejects. You see, some psychologists think there is something called the stereotype threat. If women are told (as appears to be true, on average) that women on average are worse at high level maths than men, then it is being told this truth that makes the perform worse on the tests of high level maths ability.

This to me is a quite remarkable thought: we shouldn’t tell people the truth because….well, because of anything. There’s an old line out there, along the lines (sorry) of “the universe isn’t here to confirm your prejudices”. Indeed it isn’t, the universe simply is. Vastly better to my mind to find out the truth and then propagate it. If it is true that more men than women will have those systemizing abilities required for the upper levels of math, well, fine, that’s not something to be afraid of: it’s something to be propagated, shouted from the rooftops almost. If more people had understood these points then perhaps Larry Summers wouldn’t have lost his job.