Personalized medicine research forum

Yesterday afternoon I attended a Personalized Medicine research forum at ASU's Biodesign Institute, sponsored by ASU's Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Affairs (OVPREA) and hosted by Dr. Joshua LaBaer of ASU's Virginia G. Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics.

The forum's speakers covered both the promise and problems and issues raised by the developing field of personalized medicine, which involves the use of molecular and genetic information in medical diagnosis and treatment. A few highlights:

Introduction (Dr. LaBaer)
Dr. LaBaer pointed out that these new diagnostics cost a great deal of money to develop, but they have the potential for cost savings, for instance, if they can be used to identify forms of disease that will not benefit from very expensive treatments. He gave the example of Genomic Health, which has developed a test for early stage breast cancer to determine if women will or won't benefit from adjuvant therapy (chemotherapy to prevent recurrence). A test that costs even a few thousand dollars to perform is something insurers will be willing to pay for if it has the potential of saving tens of thousands of dollars of expense on chemotherapy that will not provide any benefits. On the other hand, the mere promise of early detection of susceptibility for disease has the potential for overtreatment and an increase in healthcare expenses. This problem was discussed by a number of speakers, with particular bad potential consequences in the legal realm.

Personalized Diagnostics (Dr. LaBaer)
Dr. LaBaer talked briefly about his own lab's work in biomarker discovery and cell-based studies. In biomarker discovery, his lab is working in functional proteomics, using cloned copies of genes to produce proteins and building tests that allow examination of thousands of proteins at a time. His lab, formerly at Harvard and now at ASU, has 10,000 copies of human genes and 50,000 copies of genes from other animals, which are made available to other researchers. (There's more information at the DNASU website.)

The goal of biomarker discovery is to greatly improve the ability to find markers of human health using the human immune system, by identifying antigens that are markers for disease. The immune system generates antibodies not just in response to infectious disease, but against other proteins when we have cancer. Tumor antigens get into the bloodstream, though they may only appear in 10-15% of those who have the disease. Rather than testing one protein at a time, as is done with ELISA assays, LaBaer's lab is building protein microarrays with thousands of proteins, tested at once with blood serum. Unlike old array technology that purifies proteins and puts them into spots on arrays, where the proteins may degrade and lose function, their method involves printing the DNA that encodes the gene on the arrays, then capturing proteins in situ on the array at the time the experimental test is performed.

LaBaer's lab's cell-based work involves tryng to identify how proteins behave in cells when they are altered, in order to find out which pathways contribute to consequences such as drug resistance in women with breast cancer, as occurs with Tamoxifen. If you can find the genes that make cancer cells resistant, you can then knock them out and cause those cells to die. They tested 500 human kinases (5/7 of the total) and found 30 enzymes that consistently make the cancer cells resistant. Women with a high level of those enzymes who take Tamoxifen have quicker relapses of cancer.

Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative (George Poste)
George Poste, former director of ASU's Biodesign Institute and former Chief Scientist and Technology Officer at SmithKline Beecham, talked about the need to replace thinking about costs in the healthcare debate with thinking about value. The value proposition of personalized medicine is early detection, rational therapeutics where treatment is made based on the right subtype of disease being treated, and integrative care management where there's better monitoring of the efficacy of treatments. He said that the first benefits will come from targeted therapy and this will then overlap with individualized therapy, as we learn how our genome affects such things as drug interactions. He was critical of companies like 23andme, which he called "celebrity spit" companies, which do little more than give people a needless sense of anxiety about predispositions to disease that they currently can do nothing about except eat right and exercise.

Poste also had criticisms for physicians, pointing out that it takes 15-20 years for new innovations to become routinely adopted, and many physicians don't use treatment algorithms at all. Oncologists, he said, make money from distributing treatments empirically (that is, figuring out whether it's effective by using the treatment on the entire population with the disease) rather than screening first, even where tests exist to determine who the treatment is likely to work on. He said that $604 million/year in health care costs could be saved by the use of a single colon cancer screening test, and not proceeding with treatment where it isn't going to work. Today, where 12-40% of people are aided by treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars, 60-88% of that spending is being wasted. With the aging population, he said that Humana will in the next several years see all profits disappear, spent on expensive treatments of people who don't respond to them.

Pharmaceutical companies are beginning to do diagnostic test development alongside drug development now, and insurers will push for these tests to be done. Poste suggested that we will see the emergence of "no cure, no pay" systems, and noted that Johnson & Johnson has a drug that has been introduced for use in the UK under the condition that the company will reimburse the national health care system for every case in which it is used but doesn't work. Merck's Januvia drug for type II diabetes similarly offers some kind of discount based on performance.

Poste pointed out another area for potential cost savings, related to drug safety. With some 3.1 billion prescriptions made per year, there are 1.5-3 million people hospitalized from drug interactions, 100,000 deaths, and $30 billion in healthcare costs, though he noted this latter figure includes caregiver error and patient noncompliance.

He bemoaned the "delusion of zero risk propagated by lawyers, legislatures, and the media," and pointed out that the FDA is in a no-win situation. (This is a topic that's been recently covered in two of my classes, my core program seminar and my law, science, and technology class with Prof. Gary Marchant. If the FDA allows unsafe drugs to be sold, then it comes under fire for not requiring sufficient evidence of safety. If, on the other hand, it delays the sale of effective drugs, it comes under fire for causing preventable deaths. The latter occurred during the 1980s with AIDS activists protesting against being denied treatments, described in books such as Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On and Steven Epstein's Impure Science. This led to PDUFA, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act of 1992, under which drug companies started funding FDA drug reviewer positions through application fees to help speed approval. That has been blamed for cases of the former, with the weight-loss drugs Pondimin and Redux being approved despite evidence that they caused heart problems. That story is told in the PBS Frontline episode "Dangerous Prescription" from November 2003.)

Poste pointed out that there have been 450,000 papers published which have claimed to find disease biomarkers, of which the FDA has approved only five. But he didn't blame the FDA for delay in this case, because this consists of a mass of bad studies which he characterized as "wasteful small studies" with insufficient statistical power. In the Q&A session, he argued that NIH needs to start dictating clear and strong standards for disease research, and that it has abrogated its role in doing good science. He said that "not a single national cancer study with sufficient statistical power" has been done in the last 20 years; instead research is fragmented across academic silos. He called for "go[ing] beyond R01 grant mentality" and building the large, expensive studies with 2,500 cases and 2,500 controls that need to be done.

He also raised challenges about the "very complex statistical analysis required" in order to do "multiplex tests" of the sort Dr. LaBaer is trying to develop. And he pointed out the challenge that personalized medicine presents for clinicians, in that "only about six medical schools have embraced molecular medicine and engineering-based medicine." Those that don't use these new techniques as they become available, he said, "will open themselves up to malpractice suits."

Science and Policy (David Guston)
David Guston, co-director of ASU's Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO) and director of ASU's Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) spoke about "cognate challenges in social science" and how CNS has been trying to develop a notion of "anticipatory governance of emerging technology" and devising ways to build such a capacity into university research labs as well as broader society, to allow making policy decisions in advance of the emergence of the technology in society at large. He described three capacities of anticipatory governance--foresight, public engagement, and integration, and described how these have been used at ASU.

Foresight: Rather than looking at future consequences as a linear extrapolation, CNS has used scenario development and a process of structured discussions based on those scenarios with scientists, potential users, and other potential stakeholders, about social and technical events that may be subsequent consequences of the scenarios. This method has been tested with Stephen Johnston's "Doc-in-a-Box" project at ASU's Center for Innovations in Medicine, which Guston said led to some changes in the conceptualization of the technology.

Public Engagement: The "scope and inclusion of public values is important for success," Guston said, and gave as an example the "national citizens technology forum" that CNS conducted in six locations to look at speculative scenarios about nanotechnology used for human enhancement. These were essentially very large focus groups whose participants engaged in "informed deliberation" over the course of a weekend, after having read a 61-page background document and spending the prior month engaging in Internet-based interaction.

Integration: Guston described the "embedding of social scientists in science and engineering labs," to develop productive relationships that help lab scientists identify broader implications of their work while it's still in the lab rather than after it's introduced to the general public.

Guston suggested that there might be other ways of implementing "anticipatory governance" in the form of legislative requirements or standards and priorities set by program officers at funding organizations, but that the lab setting is "the best point of leverage at a university" and can set an example for others to follow.

Clinical Perspective (Larry Miller)
Larry Miller, Research Director at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, spoke about the healthcare provider's approach to personalized medicine. He said that Mayo is committed to individualized care, and that now that we are beginning to understand the power of human variation, these new developments have "to be transformational for providers or they won't survive." He suggested that the future of medicine will move from reactive and probabilistic to more deterministic selection of treatments based on diagnoses. He emphasized the need for education for doctors, and pointed out that "standards of care will become outmoded," which is "disruptive to law and [insurance] coverage." He said that Mayo sees a big challenge of complexity, where what was one disease (breast cancer) is now at least ten different subdiseases. Doctors need to make their treatment decisions on the detail, to predict how the disease will behave, and choose the best drugs possible based on safety, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness.

Miller pointed out that this requires interdisciplinary work, and said that Mayo in Arizona has a huge advantage with its relationship with ASU, where so much of this work is going on. While Mayo has scientific expertise in a number of areas, these new technologies draw on expertise from beyond medicine, in particular informatics and computational resources needed to build an effective decision support system that will become essential for doctors to use in a clinical setting.

He talked about Mayo's program for individualized medicine, which involves not just incorporating new developments in diagnostics and therapeutics, but in regenerative medicine for repair, renewal, and regeneration of deficits.

Mayo has had electronic medical records for the last 15 years, on 6 million people, but these are kept in multiple incompatible systems and were not built with research in mind. They hope to improve their systems so that it can be used in an iterative process to learn more about the efficacy of therapies, and so therapies can be combined with "companion diagnostics for monitoring progression, recurrences, and response to therapy."

Like Poste, he raised objections to the companies that market gene sequencing directly to individuals, which just "scare people inappropriately," but identified learning about disease predispositions as an important part of these developing technologies. We need to develop methods of risk analysis that can help people correctly understand what these predispositions mean.

He sees the future as having three waves--the first wave will be the new diagnostics, the second wave improvements in clinical practice and therapy, and the third wave embedding the new technology into the healthcare system, with significant changes to policy and education.

Health Informatics (Diana Petitti)
Diana Petitti, former CDC epidemiologist and former director of research for Kaiser Permanente, where she built a 20-year longitudinal data repository for its 35 million members, spoke about the importance of health informatics. (She is now a professor in ASU's Department of Biomedical Informatics.) Dr. Petitti raised concerns about how in the United States we are "loathe to deny anyone anything" in terms of medical treatments, but in fact "we do deny lots of people lots of things." She worried that personalized medicine has the potential to lead to greater maldistributions of healthcare, with the "haves" getting more and better treatment and the "have nots" getting less and worse treatment, unless we plan carefully. She advocated evidence-based medicine and assessing value of treatments to be deployed to the general population.

Dr. Petitti brought up as an example the fact that oral contraceptives result in a 2x-10x increase in the likelihood of a venous thrombotic event, and that the Factor V Leiden gene is predictive of susceptibility to that consequence, but no screening is done for it. Why not? Because the test only predicts 5% of those who will have the event, it's a very expensive test, and we don't have good alternatives for oral contraceptives. These kinds of issues, she suggested, will recur with multiplex diagnostics.

She explicitly worried that "we have dramatically oversold preventive medicine" and doesn't think it's likely that savings from prevention will allow coverage for more extensive treatment. She advocated that everyone in the field see the film "Gattaca," and stated that ASU provides "unique opportunities to train people to think about these issues" using "quantitative reasoning and probabilistic thought." She concluded by saying that we need to "work towards rational delivery of healthcare that optimizes public health."

Law (Gary Marchant)
Prof. Gary Marchant of the Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law at ASU, who has a Ph.D. in genetics and is the executive director of ASU's Center for the Study of Law, Science, and Innovation (formerly Center for the Study of Law, Science, and Technology), spoke about legal issues. First he listed the many programs available at ASU in the area, beginning with the genetics and law program that has been here for 10 years and was the reason he first came to ASU. Others include a new personalized medicine and law program at the Center for Law, Science, and Innovation, a planned center on ethical and policy issues regarding personalized medicine in conjunction with the Biodesign Institute, CSPO, TGEN, Mayo, etc., and research clusters at the law school on breast cancer, warfarin, and personalized medicine. He also gave a plug for an upcoming conference March 8-9, 2010 at the Arizona Biltmore sponsored by AAAS and Mayo, which also has a great deal of corporate support.

Prof. Marchant indicated that liability is the biggest issue regarding personalized medicine, and he sees doctors as "sitting ducks," facing huge risks. If a doctor prescribes a treatment without doing a corresponding new diagnostic test, and that has complications, he can be sued. If he does the diagnostic test, it shows a very low likelihood of a disease recurrence, and advises against the treatment, and then the patient ends up being one of the rare people who has the recurrence, the doctor can be sued. The doctor is really in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. The insurers and pharmaceutical companies are at less risk, since they have already developed enormous resources for dealing with the lawsuits that are a regular part of their existence. In a short discussion after the forum, I asked Prof. Marchant if doctors would be liable if they performed a diagnostic test, found that it showed a low likelihood of recurrence or benefit for a treatment, and then recommended the treatment anyway, knowing the insurance company would refuse to pay for it--would that shift the liability to the insurance company? He thought it might, though it would be unethical for a doctor to recommend treatment that he didn't actually think was necessary, and there's still the potential for liability if the insurance company pays for the treatment and the treatment itself produces complications. It seems that this problem really needs a legislative or regulatory fix of some sort, so that doctors have some limitation of liability in cases where they have made a recommendation that everyone would agree was the right course of action but a low-probability negative consequence occurs anyway.

Prof. Marchant observed that the liability issues are particularly problematic in states like Arizona, where each side in the suit is limited to a single expert witness. He said there is "no clear guidance or defense for doctors," and the use of clinical guidelines in a defense has not been effective in court, in part because doctors don't use them.

Q&A
A few additional points of interest from the Q&A sessions (some of which has already been combined into the above summaries):

Dr. LaBaer pointed out that most markers for diseases don't seem to have any role in the cause of the disease, such as CA25 and ovarian cancer. So his lab is looking not just for biomarkers, but for those that will affect clinical decisions. 4 out of 5 positive results in a mammography for breast cancer are actually cases where there is nothing wrong and the woman will not end up getting breast cancer, but some procedure ends up being undergone, with no value. So he wants to find a companion test that can tell which are the 4 that don't need further treatment.

George Poste pointed out that baby boomers are going to bankrupt the system as they reach the end of their lives, and about 70% of the $2.3 trillion in healthcare spending is spent in the last 2-3 years of life, with many treatments costing $60K-$100K per treatment cycle on drugs that add 2-3 weeks of life. The UK's National Institute of Clinical Excellence has been making what are, in effect, rationing decisions by turning down all of the new cancer drugs that have come along because they have such great cost and such minimal benefit. He asked, "how much money could you save with a 90% accurate test of who's going to die no matter what you do?"

Prof. Marchant said more about legal issues involving specimen repositories, including a case at ASU. The developer of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, William Catalona, had a specimen repository with 30,000 tissue samples at Washington University, that he wished to take with him to Northwestern University when he took a new position there. He began asking patients for permission to move the samples, and 6,000 gave permission. But Washington University sued him, claiming that the samples were property of the university. Patients pointed out that their consent agreement gave them the right to withdraw their samples from future research and they had only consented to research on prostate cancer, but federal judge Stephen Limbaugh ruled in favor of the university and that patients had no property rights in their tissue. This ruling has reduced incentives for patients to consent to give specimens for research.

A current lawsuit against ASU by the Havasupai Indian tribe involves blood samples that were given for a study of diabetes by researchers who are no longer at ASU. They wanted to take the samples with them, and samples had also been given to other researchers for use in studies of schizophrenia and the historical origins of the tribe, even though informed consent was apparently only given for the diabetes research. Although this case was originally dismissed, it was recently reinstated.

Other cases involve patent protection of genetic information. About 25% of the human genome is patented, including Myriad Genetics' patent on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes which are predictive of breast cancer and can only legally be tested for by Myriad. This case is likely to go to the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the issue of whether human genes can be patented. The courts so far have ruled that a gene in isolation outside of the human body is patentable, even though (in my opinion) this seems at odds with the requirement that patents be limited to inventions, not discoveries. There has already been a legislative limitation of patent protection for surgical procedures for the clinical context, so that doctors can't be sued for patent infringement for performing a surgery that saves someone's life; it's possible that a similar limitation will be applied on gene patents in a clinical context, if they don't get overturned completely by the courts.

These gene patents create a further problem for the multiplex tests, since they inevitably include many patented genes. Prof. Marchant observed that someone from Affymetrix spoke at an ASU seminar and stood up and said they were building their GeneChip DNA microarrays for testing for the presence of thousands of genes, and were ignoring gene patents. They were subsequently sued. Dr. LaBaer stated that his lab is doing the same thing with cloned genes--they're cloning everything and giving them away, without regard to patents.

The session was videotaped and will be made available to the public online. I will add a link to this posting when it becomes available.

If you've read this far, you may also be interested in my summary of Dr. Fintan Steele's talk at this year's The Amazing Meeting 7, titled "Personalized Medicine or Personalized Mysticism?", in my summary of the Science-Based Medicine conference that took place just prior to TAM7, and in my short summary of Dr. Martin Pera's talk on regenerative medicine and embryonic stem cells at the Atheist Alliance International convention that took place earlier this month.

Atheist Alliance International Convention summary in Arabic

The Arab Atheists Network has begun posting an Arabic translation of my summary of the AAI convention here. Thanks to Alpharabius and the Arab Atheists Network for doing that, and for their promotion of atheism in the Arab world!

Skepticism, belief revision, and science

In the comments of Massimo Pigliucci's blog post about the scope of skepticism (which I've already discussed here), Skepdude pointed to a couple of blog posts he had written on similar topics some time ago, about what atheists have in common and skepticism and atheism. He argues that skeptics must be atheists and cannot be agnostics or theists, a position I disagree with. In an attempt to get to the bottom of our disagreement after a few exchanges in comments on his blog, I wrote the following set of questions which I first answered myself, so we can see how his answers differ.

Do we have voluntary control over what we believe?

In general, no. The credence we place in various propositions--our belief or rejection of them--is largely out of our voluntary control and dependent upon our perceptual experiences, memories, other beliefs, and established habits and methods of belief formation and revision. We can indirectly cause our beliefs to change by engaging in actions which change our habits--seeking out contrary information, learning new methods like forms of mathematics and logic, scientific methods, reading books, listening to others, etc.

How does someone become a skeptic?

People aren't born as skeptics--they learn about skepticism and how it has been applied in various cases (only after learning a whole lot of other things that are necessary preconditions--like language and reasoning). If skepticism coheres with their other beliefs, established habits and methods of belief formation and revision, and/or they are persuaded by arguments in favor of it, either self-generated or from external sources, they accept it and, to some degree or another, apply it subsequently.

When someone becomes a skeptic, what happens to all of the other beliefs they already have?

They are initially retained, but may be revised and rejected as they are examined through the application of skeptical methods and other retained habits and methods of belief formation and revision. Levels of trust in some sources will likely be reduced, either within particular domains or in general, if they are discovered to be unreliable. It's probably not possible to start from a clean slate, as Descartes tried to do in his Meditations.

Is everything a skeptic believes something which is a conclusion reached by scientific methods?

No. Much of what we believe, we believe on the basis of testimony from other people who we trust, including our knowledge of our own names and date and place of birth, parts of our childhood history, the history of our communities and culture, and knowledge of places we haven't visited. We also have various beliefs that are not scientifically testable, such as that there is an external world that persists independently of our experience of it, that there are other minds having experiences, that certain experiences and outcomes are intrinsically or instrumentally valuable, that the future will continue to resemble the past in various predictable ways, etc. If you did believe that skeptics should only believe conclusions which are reached by scientific methods, that would be a belief that is not reached by scientific methods.

Massimo Pigliucci on the scope of skeptical inquiry

Massimo Pigliucci, a biologist and philosopher at the City University of New York and regular writer for the Skeptical Inquirer, has offered up his thoughts about the relationship between skepticism, atheism, and politics. He wants to argue that skepticism and skeptical inquiry are identical with scientific skepticism, and mostly distinct from philosophy, religion, and politics. He restricts the domain of skeptical inquiry to "the critical examination of evidential claims of the para- or super-normal," and further restricts his notion of "evidential" to the empirical. (He subsequently refers to philosophical arguments and reasons as "non-evidence based approaches." I disagree, though this may be strictly a terminological dispute--I often use the word "evidence" to apply to reasons and arguments, not just empirical observations or reports of empirical observations, and I think this is common usage.)

He ends up drawing a Venn-style diagram which has an outer circle labeled with "critical thinking" and "rational analysis," within which is a series of three overlapping circles labeled "atheism," "skeptical inquiry," and "political philosophy." He argues that skeptical inquiry only overlaps with atheism where religions make empirical claims that are subject to scientific investigation, and likewise for political philosophy.

I offered a few critical comments at his blog, noting that it is odd that "atheism" is the only label on his diagram which is the name of a specific position rather than a method or discipline, and suggesting that it be labeled something like "views on religion." I also suggested that that circle extend beyond the scope of the "critical thinking" and "rational analysis" circle, though that's presupposing his diagram is descriptive rather than normative. [Note added 1:31 p.m.: If his diagram is understood as a diagram of what is appropriate subject matter for critical thinking, rational analysis, and skeptical inquiry with respect to atheism and political philosophy, then those two circles should arguably not extend outside the border of critical thinking/rational analysis.] Similar considerations should apply to the "political philosophy" circle. People hold religious and political views for reasons other than those produced as a result of critical thinking and rational analysis.

I also took issue with his identifying "skeptical inquiry" with scientific skepticism. Skeptics have always used philosophical tools as well as scientific ones, but I would find his diagram more accurate if the middle circle was labeled "scientific skepticism" or even "scientific inquiry."

I also have some skepticism about this taxonomic enterprise in general, which is arguably both philosophical and political itself--Pigliucci is not using scientific methods to set up this framework, it's philosophy, and there are political and pragmatic reasons for wanting us to accept it--to issue in a ruling that certain domains are off-limits for skepticism, namely the examination of religious and political claims that are not subject to empirical investigation.

I think there are good pragmatic reasons for skeptical organizations to restrict themselves in such a way--the methods of skepticism can be used by anyone, regardless of their political or religious views, and organized skepticism has tried to appeal to a broad audience to focus critical attention on paranormal claims where scientific methodology can be brought to bear. But I'm skeptical of this as a general picture of the applicable domain of the methods of skepticism or skeptical inquiry. (I should note that I don't think that atheism implies skepticism--thus the reason for extending a circle with that name outside the boundaries of critical thinking and rational analysis--nor that skepticism implies atheism. Skepticism is about the methods used, not the conclusions reached. An atheist might think that any consistent application of skepticism will lead to atheism, but that presumes both that atheism is true and that consistent application of skepticism is a guarantee of truth, which it is not.)

I agree with commenter Maarten that the boundaries of these circles are fuzzy--just as the boundary between science and non-science doesn't admit to a bright-line demarcation. People can conceptualize the boundaries differently, even granting Pigliucci's conception of "empirically investigatable" as the domain of skeptical inquiry or scientific skepticism. The boundaries between scientific disciplines are themselves fuzzy and they use different methodologies, with huge differences between experimental and historical sciences, for example.

Finally, I agree with commenter Scott (Scott Hurst), who observes that religious believers do make very specific claims "about the nature of the universe, how it works, and its history (including our own)," and specifically noting belief in the power of prayer. These things are empirically testable and do make at least some common (one could say "vulgar") conceptions of God and religion refutable by science. The fact that a more sophisticated believer or theologian can construct a view that uses the same words yet withdraws from the realm of the empirical doesn't mean that the vulgar conception hasn't been refuted. This is perhaps more obvious with modern religions such as Mormonism and Scientology, where in the former case historical evidence and DNA evidence falsifies some key claims, and in the latter case where scientific evidence falsifies a great number of its claims. Hubbard's cosmology, for example, includes the idea that Xenu dropped thetans into a volcano on Hawaii 75 million years ago, but Hawaii didn't exist 75 million years ago. His book History of Man includes Piltdown Man in the human lineage, even though that fossil was discovered to be a hoax shortly after the book was published. And so forth.

It's fine for Pigliucci to define and use the terms the way he wants, but I don't think he's given strong reasons for the rest of us to accept the specifics of his formulation.

UPDATE (October 24, 2009): Russell Blackford has written "Pigliucci on science and the scope of skeptical inquiry" at the Sentient Developments blog, which comes to similar conclusions with a somewhat more comprehensive argument.

Vote for RESCUE!!

There is a new contest for animal rescues and shelters to win big money. Please visit the Mutt Madness Contest, and vote for RESCUE (third bracket down on the left). You do have to register and vote in each bracket, but there is a grand prize of $50,000!!!

Voting for the first round ends October 25th. If they win this round, they receive $1,000 and advance to the next round. Please vote today and ask others to vote!

No God on Twitter

The #1 "trending topic" on Twitter is "No God," apparently started by re-tweeting of "Know God, Know Peace. No God, No Peace." This prompted atheists to jump in promoting the "No God" part of it, and then angry theists to complain about "No God" being the top trending topic--but perpetuating it with each of their complaints.

The topic is generating lots of hilarity, as Attempts at Rational Behavior (@rationalbehavio) has pointed out in a couple of blog posts, with some people trying to start "Yes God" as an alternative topic--but including the words "No God" in their tweets!

UPDATE (4:41 p.m., Arizona time): Twitter has decided to censor its "Trending Topics" list, and has merged tweets matching either "No God" or "Know God" into a topic labeled "Know God." If you actually click on that link to see the matching tweets (it explicitly does a search for either string), there are still a lot more that match "No God" than "Know God."

UPDATE (10:10 p.m., Arizona time): Benjamin Black offers this entertaining commentary of what almost happened, which provides a better explanation of "Trending Topics" for those unfamiliar with Twitter.

Atheist Alliance International conference, quick version

The Atheist Alliance International convention took place over the weekend, October 2-4, 2009, at the Burbank Airport Marriott hotel, and I took my usual level of notes for the talks I attended. But rather than (or perhaps temporarily in lieu of) giving detailed summaries of each talk over the next several weeks, this will be one post with brief comments on each. If there's demand, I can follow this up with more detailed posts on individual talks of interest.

There were over 700 attendees at the conference, and I believe I heard that last year's conference was about 450. It's not as big as The Amazing Meeting, but if that rate of growth isn't an artifact of say, the fact that this conference was co-sponsored by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason and featured an unbelievable set of high-powered speakers, then they'll catch up quickly. The AAI conference participation seemed to be more diverse than TAM, with a higher proportion of women and minorities, though it's still not close to representative of the population--there's still a white male dominance.

The conference talks were divided into "tracks" which were really more just rough categories than a system of tracks that could be followed, which were Science, Advocacy, Heritage, and Development. Events that weren't talks included an optional pre-conference event of attending a live studio taping of a TV show ("100 Questions"), an optional post-conference event of an L.A. bus tour and visit to the La Brea tarpits, a live viewing of "Real Time with Bill Maher" featuring Richard Dawkins (shortly before they both showed up in person), entertainment by Mr. Deity (including live performance and a few of the shows, as well as some personal background from Brian Keith Dalton), a live recording of the Dogma Free America podcast with a panel of speakers, a standup comedy showcase hosted by Comedy Jesus Troy Conrad, a "taste of Camp Quest" for kids, and an Atheist Nexus live music party.

Friday
I arrived a bit later than planned--my expected driving time of just under six hours turned out to take over seven due to a few traffic issues along the way--and I missed three things I had wanted to attend. Those were Rich Orman's panel discussion for his Dogma Free America podcast, with P.Z. Myers, William B. Davis, and Sunsara Taylor; Alpharabius' talk on atheism in the Arab world; and Russell Blackford's talk on attempts to regulate against "defamation of religion." Fortunately, Alpharabius gave me a capsule summary of his talk and I had a few chances to chat with Russell Blackford and Rich Orman, so that partly made up for it.

P.Z. Myers gave an entertaining talk on "Design v. Chance" that began with a parody of a typical intelligent design creationist presentation, argued that ID arguments are at root an "over-extended metaphor" of design accompanied by misrepresentations of science. He showed how the ID claim that Darwin thought cells were mere "balls of protoplasm" is false, and presented evidence that various features thought to be characteristic of multicellular life have been found to be present in choanoflagellate protists. He ended by sharing a couple of useful words, "kipple" (from Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," meaning accumulated useless objects) and "granfalloon" (from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Cat's Cradle, meaning a label on a group that doesn't really have anything significant in common, like "Hoosier"). For "granfalloon," he quoted the statement from Bokonon in Vonnegut's book, "if you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon." Isn't "atheist" a good example of a granfalloon, if all we share is lack of a belief in God? (This ended up being relevant to Brian Parra's talk at the end of the conference.)

After a cocktail and socializing session, the main ballroom showed "Real Time with Bill Maher" on a big screen, featuring his guests Janeane Garofalo, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, and Thomas Friedman, then joined by Richard Dawkins. Maher demonstrated the witty and incisive criticism of religion that won him the Dawkins award, though he also made some comments about environmental causes of cancer that have raised controversy about his receiving an award with "science" in its name when he has pseudoscientific opinions about matters such as medicine (as Orac has forcefully argued in a series of posts at his Respectful Insolence blog: one, two, three, four). This was followed by entertainment from Mr. Deity in the form of both live performance and videos, along with some personal history from Brian Keith Dalton. Then Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins entered the room. Dawkins recounted the highlights of Maher's "Religulous" as the reasons for the award, and Maher accepted the award, noting (accurately) that Dawkins summary was better than the movie itself, followed by his routine of reading from Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life which you can find on YouTube. Maher was the least-approachable celebrity at the entire conference; even those sitting at his VIP table were unable to ask him questions, as P.Z. Myers reported firsthand.

Saturday
Ed Buckner gave a talk about how atheist and freethought organizations are learning to cooperate, which I live-tweeted comments on.

Lawrence Krauss gave a talk on "Our Miserable Future" or "Life, the Universe, and Nothing: The Future of Life and Science in an Expanding Universe," in which he argued that the best evidence shows that we are in a flat, rather than an open or closed universe, which means that it will continue expanding towards some limit. He gave a history of cosmology from the discovery of the expansion of the universe to dark matter, and pointed out that we are fortunate to live in a time when the energy density of dark matter vs. ordinary matter in the universe is approximately the same, and the expanding universe is at a point where other galaxies are still visible. The upshot of this is that we are fortunate to live in a time where we have the evidence of Hubble expansion and the Big Bang. Intelligent civilizations of the distant future will be unable to see any galaxies other than their own, or any evidence of the Big Bang, and will conclude that they are in a static and eternal universe based on the best evidence that they have. Such people will be "lonely and ignorant, but dominant," which Krauss said those of us here in the U.S. are already used to. They will have an irreparably wrong picture of the universe from their epistemological blindness due to state of the universe around them. (What similar blindness do we suffer from due to our current place in the universe and observational abilities?)

Carolyn Porco gave a talk which began as a celebration of Galileo's steps towards a scientific method, which she said couldn't be applied to God because no experiment is possible that is relevant to God. (This strikes me as erroneous in a number of ways, since claims about God usually have empirical consequences, it's possible to make philosophical arguments which draw upon scientific data, and her picture of science seemed to be based on an overly simplified Popperian philosophy of science.) She argued that it is "very difficult to prove a negative" (as if "proof" is what science cares about--but at least she didn't make the mistake of saying it's impossible). She claimed that science and religion are "completely different" and are not only not equivalent (certainly true) but are "not intersecting"--apparently advocating something like Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" view, which is falsified by the fact that religions do make empirical claims. She complained about Hollywood's depiction of scientists in a negative light and blamed it for deterring young people from going into science, though she supplied no scientific evidence to support this (though she referred to a survey of science-related films from 1920-1994 by two researchers that concluded depictions were overwhelmingly negative). I think it's unlikely that such depictions have much of a negative effect at all, since polls in the U.S. and other countries about what professions are most trusted put doctors, teachers, and scientists very high compared to most other professions. Businessmen are similarly victims of negative portrayals in Hollywood, and are also less trusted, but that doesn't seem to translate into fewer undergraduates choosing to become business majors. I suspect a better explanation of any reduction in science enrollments (if that's actually happening) would be found in elementary and secondary education, along with the fact that people find science and math difficult. She concluded with a series of fantastic photographs of Saturn and its moon Enceladus from the Cassini mission.

Martin Pera spoke about embryonic stem cells, science and policy, arguing that it will revolutionize medicine by allowing restoration of cell loss through transplantation as well as the development of new methods of research using stem cells. He pointed out various challenges to "regenerative medicine," including rejection, tumor formation, and implanted stem cells developing the same pathologies that they're designed to treat, but observed that these also present new opportunities to learn. On the public policy side, he argued that scientists need to engage more with the public, patient advocacy plays a key role in policy discussions, and careful and thoughtful regulation is preferable to "premature prescriptive regulation." (This ties into a lot of the subject matter in law, science, and technology I'm studying this semester, and Pera's talk had considerable overlap with a talk I attended earlier this year at the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix on embryonic stem cells by Prof. Jane Maienschein of ASU. If I write up a more detailed summary of this talk, I'll bring some of that into it.)

Jerry Coyne gave a summary of his book, Why Evolution is True. He defined five constituents of the theory of evolution and pointed out predictions, retrodictions, and evidence supporting each of them from a variety of scientific disciplines. He book-ended his discussion with the famous chart of rate of acceptance of evolution by country (from a study co-authored by Eugenie Scott) at the start, and a suggestion as to why that pattern of acceptance holds at the end (appealing to Greg Paul's evidence that belief in God is correlated with social dysfunction). He concluded that the real way to increase the effectiveness of teaching of evolution is to build a better, more just society. I'm skeptical--I think there are likely other causes behind the correlation, and that the strength of religious belief in the U.S. may be the result of religious competition due to the lack of an official state religion.

Daniel Dennett gave what I thought was the most interesting talk of the conference, titled "The Evolution of Confusion." His initial premise is that you reverse engineer things by trying to break them, and to reverse engineer religion, you can look for "experiments of nature" in the same way neuroscientists reverse engineer the brain by looking for cases of humans with particular brain lesions or damage due to accidents, and compare them to those without. In the case of religion, the form of pathology he chose to study is preachers who are atheists. Not former preachers who are atheists, but those who are still in the pulpit and in the closet, yet don't believe in God. Working with Linda LaScala, he's found six cases of such preachers (who themselves think there are many others), ages 37-72, one female and five male, three in liberal denominations and three in literalist/fundamentalist denominations. These people have fallen into what he called "the not so tender trap" where they have financial dependence upon their jobs, have lost opportunities for other training, and find it "difficult to say to the rest of the world I have wasted the last 40 years of my life." Half of them, though, he thinks will go public in the near future, while two will probably never do so, because they feel like they will do less harm by living a lie than by coming clean.

Dennett compared these closeted atheist clergy to homosexuals in the 1950's, either having no "gaydar" or being afraid to test it. They'll occasionally resort to the age-old subterfuge of saying things like "I have an uncle who thinks X, what do you think of that" to their colleagues to try to identify other possible atheists by expressing their doubts with a thin veil of plausible deniability.

Each traces the roots of their problems to seminary, because professors of Bible studies tend to tell the truth about the evidence, and the evidence isn't good for the Bible. But they do so with a theological spin that is an attempt to use clever ways of speaking to glide over problems and provide ministers with answers to "What can I say to the parishioners?" which have the features of not being a bare-faced lie, relieving skepticism without arousing curiosity, and seeming to be profound. Dennett introduced the concept of a "deepity"--propositions that seem to be profound, because they are actually logically ill-formed, having one meaning that is trivially true and another which is false but would be earth-shattering if true. A familiar deepity is "Love is just a word." On one reading, it's true--"love" is just a word. On another, it's false--"whatever love is, it isn't a word," he observed, and noted "You can't find love in a dictionary--that's almost a deepity itself." This is an elementary logical mistake, failing to distinguish the use of a word (in the latter case) from a mention of a word (in the former case). If you quote a word to talk about the word itself, that's a mention; if you use the word to convey its meaning, in order to refer to the things described by the word, that's a use. This is a common error in undergraduate philosophy papers, so common that many graders identify it as "UME" -- "use-mention error."

Dennett gave examples of such errors in statements by Karen Armstrong, including in the title of her book, A History of God. It's not a history of God, it's a history of the concept of God. Similarly for Robert Wright's recent The Evolution of God. And he provided some further examples from sociologist of religion Rodney Stark (who seems to me to be using the "symmetry principle" just as sociologists of science do) and from Karen Armstrong, including this answer from the latter in response to the question "Do you believe God exists?" from Terry Gross on NPR: "That's the wrong question. It presupposes that God is the sort of being that could exist or not exit. God is no being at all. God is being itself. God is the God beyond God." Dennett observed that "God is no being at all" is sophisticated theology, while "No being at all is God" is crude atheism, yet those are logically equivalent statements. Theology, Dennett argued, is "like a magician doing a trick where you can see the card up his sleeve."

At dinner, we watched a short three-minute promotional video for the Richard Dawkins Foundation that featured Michael Shermer, P.Z. Myers, and Brian Greene, among others, talking about what is science. Richard Dawkins then spoke, summarizing the last chapter of his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, which has chapter sections related to and titled from the words of the last paragraph of Darwin's Origin of Species. One of the more memorable sections was about "The Four Memories" we have--the memory of past successes encoded into our biology and preserved by natural selection, the immune system's memory of diseases we've experienced during our lifetime, the memories accumulated by our brains, and the collective memory of transmitted culture.

Dawkins spent a very, very long time signing books, and looked exhausted when he signed my copy of The Blind Watchmaker near the end of the line.

The evening ended with a live music and karaoke party put on by Atheist Nexus.

Sunday
The first talk of the morning I attended (and live-tweeted) was Gerardo Romero of Ateismo desde Mexico, about atheism in Mexico. His group has been around for about 10 years. It first started on MSN forums but migrated to its own website and forums, and has now begun to migrate into the real world with two atheist marches. The First World Atheist March occurred on September 28, 2008 in Mexico City and Guadalajara in Mexico, as well as in Italy, Spain, Peru, and Colombia. They received newspaper coverage in the Excelsior, a major Mexico City newspaper. A second march was held on September 27, 2009 (Spain did theirs on a different day due to a holiday conflict), with participation also from ArgAtea in Argentina and Ateos from Peru. He talked about ADM's plans for further activism to promote science and critical thinking, separation of church and state, and distribution of condoms. ADM has a podcast, Masa Critica, as well as an electronic magazine, Hidra, published on their website.

Jonathan Kirsch spoke about the "Inquisitorial toolbox," first in the context of the history of the Inquisition and then as applied to more recent events. The main tools he described were the use of torture as punishment for wrong belief (as opposed to wrong action), calling this torture by a different name to conceal the real purpose behind the act, and requiring the "naming of names" as an act of contrition to show the sincerity of a recantation. In practice, this was used to eliminate competition and accumulate wealth, as well as to combat heresy (a word that derives from the Greek word for a free choice). He described the beginnings of the Inquisition as a tool to root out and eliminate the Cathars or Albigensians, whose heresy was to disbelieve in the newly-introduced 13th century doctrine of transsubstantiation. The Cathars reasoned that this doctrine was the opposite of holy belief--if we believe it, we must believe that "when we go to the privy we will piss out the blood of our savior, and excrete the body of our savior." A crusade against them failed to wipe them out, and so the Inquisition was invented to root them out by using informants, the threat and actuality of torture, and the collection of names. The Inquisition was subsequently used to wipe out the Templars and seize their wealth--forfeiture was also a key tool in the toolbox, making the victims pay for the privilege of being tortured.

Kirsch gave more modern examples including the use of "spectral evidence" in the Salem witch trials, the show trials of Stalinist Russia, and Hitler's forcing Jews to wear identifying badges and the identification of Jews in terms of bloodline as elements consciously copied from the Spanish Inquisition. And although the last victim of the Inquisition was executed in 1826 (garroted and placed in a barrel with flames painted on it as a reminder of the glory days of burnings at the stake) and the Inquisition was formally ended in 1834, The Holy Office which was created to run the Inquisition still exists to this day under a different name ("Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith"), headed by the Pope. I was reminded of how the Church of Scientology, after being prosecuted for criminal activity associated with its "Guardian Office," claimed to reform by changing the name of that unit to the "Office of Special Affairs."

Kirsch also observed that the tactics of the McCarthy Era and of the "global war on terror" have also used tools from the Inquisitor's toolbox. I think he could have also pointed out uses of the toolbox in the war on drugs (especially the use of civil forfeiture and "naming of names").

Eugenie Scott gave a talk about intelligent design which focused primarily on the strategies that have been used to try to get it into the public schools. While the direct approach failed in Kitzmiller v. Dover, the latest approach has been with "academic freedom" and "explore alternative evidence" bills and attempts to change state educational standards. She recounted recent events in Texas regarding attempts to put "teach the controversy"-style wording into the Texas Educational Knowledge and Skills document, which started as a requirement to teach "strengths and weaknesses" across all domains, and ended with "all sides of scientific reasoning." She then looked at some 1990's-2000 cases where individual teachers tried to teach creationism and were slapped down (Ray Webster, John Peloza, and Rodney LaVake), and noted that the "academic freedom" bills are essentially an attempt to legislate against such further slapdowns. Such a bill has passed in Louisiana, which allows teachers to bring in supplemental materials to critique biological evolution, global warming, and human cloning. She pointed to a phylogeny of these bills constructed by Anton Mates that showed how they have evolved.

These bills are constructed to try to avoid the possibility of legal challenge. They avoid any mention of religion to avoid establishment clause violations. They stress free speech and academic freedom. They are phrased as protective of a teacher's right to teach alternatives. And they are formulated as permissive rather than directive bills, which means that they have avoided a facial challenge--a judge isn't likely to grant an injunction against them on the vague language of the bill, but only to do so on the basis of an "as applied" challenge if there's a particular case of where a teacher following the bill engages in activity that infringes the constitution and a parent and student with standing can be found to sue.

The final talk of the day I attended was Brian Parra's talk, "All Together Now: Strategies for Growing the Freethought Community." He distinguished identity vs. beliefs, pointing out that the Pew polls on belief are structured by first asking how a person self-identifies, then asking them a series of questions about belief. Only 1.6% of the U.S. population self-identifies as atheist, and it can be daunting to look at 1.6% vs. 98.4% of everybody else. But if you add agnostics, you get another 2.6%, a total of 4.2%, which is a group larger than Jews and Mormons put together. If you add "none"'s, you get another 12.1%, and a total of 16.3%--about the size of the black community. If you add in the "don't know" answerers, and adherents of nontheistic religions, you get up to 18.5%. If you look at not-monotheists, you get 20.1%. And if you look at not-evangelical-Christians, you get 74.3%.

He further noted that if you look at how self-identified Catholics answer the question "Do you believe in God?", you'll find that 25% of them said no. (By the same token, though, if you look at how self-identified atheists answered that question, you'll find that 21% of them said yes.)

He suggested that we define positive aspects of atheism and create coalitions based on common ground, and drew squiggly circles around a diagram that showed all of these groups regarding their answers to the questions, for those who don't believe in God, who believe in a physical universe and natural cause (I believe he meant *only* in, i.e., rejection of the supernatural), who support secular government, humanistic ethics, and have confidence in science and reason. These he identified as the "Big Five" for creating an atheist worldview. Afterward, I asked him what's the difference between his "Big Five" and secular humanism, to which he answered "Nothing." If it is different, it is only in being somewhat more concisely (and vaguely) formulated.

He concluded by saying that a possible model for success is church minus the theology--it's just a community that plans varied activities aimed at different age groups and interests, not just about atheism but in the name of atheism, which stays in touch with constituents via various media, which brings new people into positions of responsibility, and which seeks out "public displays of atheism, not merely for protest and activism, but also to demonstrate that atheists exist and are nice people."

I'm not sure I'm optimistic about that approach. Not only is it already being done by the humanists (including both CFI and AHA), while his initial remarks were about ways to increase the scope and size of coalitions, his "Big Five," by looking at the intersection of those "squigglies" rather than the union, inherently shrinks them. And by far, the one that cuts down the group the most is the first one, nonbelief in Gods. I think this is, to some degree, an advantage that skeptics have over atheists, which is that they put the emphasis on the last item on his list, support for science and critical thinking, rather than the first. I'm inclined to think that the last three of the "Big Five" are far more important things to share in a civil society than the first two.

All in all, it was a great conference, despite a few glitches involving errors in room assignment, last-minute schedule changes, and technology. The most appealing aspects for me were the top-notch speakers on science and the chance to socialize and engage in discussion with many like-minded, intelligent people, even if they are part of a granfalloon.

UPDATE (October 11, 2009): Relevant to Brian Parra's talk is Luke Galen's sociological study of nonbelievers, the Non-Religious Identification Survey, as well as Bruce E. Hunsberger and Bob Altemeyer's book Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America's Nonbelievers, which I just read about in the presentation slides of a talk by Taner Edis of the Secular Outpost.

UPDATE (October 23, 2009): You can find a translation of this summary into Arabic at the Arab Atheists Network website.

UPDATE (November 16, 2009): Daniel Dennett's talk from the AAI conference is online here.

UPDATE (December 27, 2009): Lawrence Krauss's talk, Jerry Coyne's talk, Andy Thomson's talk, Richard Dawkins' talk, P.Z. Myers' talk, and Carolyn Porco's talk are all on YouTube as well.

Other Blogs on the AAI Convention
P.Z. Myers wrote about Russell Blackford's talk on defamation of religion, Toni Marano, Robert Richert's talk on Vietnam, Maurice Bisheff's apparently kooky talk on Thomas Paine, the Dogma Free America panel, the Maher/Dawkins Award ceremony, an exhibit on Evolutionary Genealogy, a gift of a bottle of wine supplied while having dinner with Daniel Dennett, acting in a forthcoming Mr. Deity episode, other gifts of wine and Surly-Ramics jewelry, proof of meeting Mr. Deity and Lucy supplied by your truly, and a challenge regarding the Atheist Nexus.

Paul Fidalgo wrote summaries of the Dogma Free America panel, Lawrence Krauss's talk, Caroline Porco's talk, and the Bill Maher award.

John Crippen describes his AAI convention experience in three posts: one, two, and three.

Surly Amy offers her observations on why "You Don't Have to Be a Skeptic to Be an Atheist," which nicely complements P.Z. Myers' review of Maurice Bisheff's talk. I agree with her, and also note that you don't have to be an atheist to be a skeptic. These two posts illustrate why I prefer to self-identify with skeptics.

Rich Orman interviewed a number of the speakers for his Dogma Free America podcast, including P.Z. Myers, Ed Buckner, Stuart Bechman, Sean Faircloth, Alpharabius, and Brother Richard of AtheistNexus.

If anyone comes across other summaries worthy of mention, note them in the comments or in email and I'll append them here.

(Photo of UFO sighting in Marriott lobby by Reed Esau.)

Mirror neurons and the study of science

Tony Barnhart was kind enough to invite me to a psychology seminar yesterday afternoon that was a discussion of mirror neurons, at least partly inspired by (or inflamed by) Marco Iacoboni's August 27 talk which I attended and summarized.

I found the discussion particularly interesting in light of my current studies, as it touched repeatedly on issues of what's appropriate in science--what does and does not conform to the norms of good science.

The discussion leaders began with quotes from V.S. Ramachandran and Marco Iacoboni:

"The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution…is the single most important ‘unreported’ (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments." (Ramachandran, 2001)

and

"We achieve our very subtle understanding of other people thanks to certain collections of special cells in the brain called mirror neurons. These are the tiny miracles that get us through the day. They are at the heart of how we navigate through our lives. They bind us with each other, mentally and emotionally." (Iacoboni, Mirroring People, p. 4)

The immediate objections were to the trumpeting of the importance of mirror neurons prior to the discovery of supporting evidence, as well as to the use of the word "miracle" to describe something that's supposed to be science. These objections ran through the seminar, much of which confronted the issue of whether or not mirror neuron claims are scientific at all.

This first objection is closely related to the first red flag of Robert Park's list of "Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science" (2003)--that a claim is pitched directly to the media (or general public) rather than to scientists, and that specific objection was raised about Iacoboni's talk, that he was making grandiose claims to a general (or "naive") audience. This has been a common issue raised in defining the boundary between science and non-science, traceable at least back to the debate between anatomists and phrenologists in Scotland in the early 19th century, where "anatomists accused phrenologists of relying on popular opinion to validate their theories while ignoring opinions of scientific 'experts'" (to quote sociologist of science Thomas Gieryn's 1983 paper on "Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science," p. 789). While it wasn't stated in this case that mirror neuron advocates are appealing to the general public to the exclusion of scientists, they were explicitly criticized for their appeals to the public in order to raise interest in their work, make it easier to get funding, and so forth, and, in the case of Iacoboni's book, for using different language in his book aimed at a popular audience that eliminated qualifiers and wasn't appropriately skeptical.

In my opinion, Iacoboni shouldn't be faulted for popularization of his work or his generation of excitement and funding from public interest--the former criticism seems a bit like sour grapes--but only for the latter, any cases where he presents arguments without proper supporting evidence, or fails to identify theoretical speculation as such. What should be significant is not the mere fact of public appeal, but the extent of the gap between the scientific evidence and the public description. Note that there will always be a gap between evidence and any scientific theory, even where a theory is firmly established, since scientific theories are always subject to further revision--they're not logical proofs. "Tiny miracles," though--I have to agree that's over the top.

Another objection raised to mirror neurons is the wide variety of human behavior that they've been proposed to explain (from the presenters' slides):

"Since their discovery, mirror neurons have been invoked to explain imitation, speech perception, empathy, autism, morality, the appeal of porn, sports team activities, social cognition, self-awareness, yawning, mind reading, action understanding, altruism, etc."

A list of neuroimaging studies purported to provide evidence for a human mirror neuron system was shown, and the question asked was how many of these studies looked at both observation of an action and execution of an action? The answer was very few, likely because observation is much easier to test in an fMRI machine compared to execution. Of those, which found evidence of activation for both observation and execution? The answer was only a single study (Gazzola, et al., 2007).

Further questions raised for discussion (from slide):

• Is there any conceivable way to falsify MN theories?
• As Iacoboni claimed, MNs are not anatomically-defined, and can fire in response to the same, similar, and opposite observations/actions. The whole brain, therefore, comprises the MN system. How is that useful?
• Many researchers have moved away from hypothesizing about “mirror neurons” to “mirror systems.” Must mirror systems necessarily be composed of mirror neurons?
• If not, are mirror neurons the most parsimonious explanation for [insert favorite behavior here]?
• Can you generalize findings from one species to the next when one of the species possesses cognitive capabilities that have never been demonstrated in the original species? Yes, this is a “monkeys don’t have language, nor do they imitate”-based question.
• Can individual neuron activity logically be used as an explanation for higher-order cognitive abilities?
• How do mirror neurons handle sarcasm?

And, though not on the slide, the following claim was noted:

Similarly, a baseball pitcher’s windup is chock full of similar kinetic clues that can activate the batter's mirror neurons and help him predict the kind of pitch he will get. "This may help explain the fact that a great pitcher, Babe Ruth, was also one of the greatest home run hitters of all time," writes John Milton in Your Brain on Cubs.

and the question was asked--if mirror neurons activation is involved in imitation, rather than a complementary activity in this case, why wouldn't the mirror neuron activation interfere with Babe Ruth's ability to hit, rather than improve it? (The answer, it would seem to me, would be a suggestion that his pitching knowledge would allow him to recognize cues about the type of pitch before it happened, that would produce a benefit in hitting performance--but this is a more abstract description that doesn't necessarily require a mirror neuron explanation--another common theme of the discussion.)

This led to a lively discussion, and it seemed to me that the following were some of the most significant arguments, with my commentary on them:

1. It seems highly implausible that single cells are involved in mediating or controlling this behavior, and neither transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) nor fMRI is capable of isolating individual neurons. It is particularly implausible that single cells are implicated regarding a relationship to an action that is similar in that it's directed to the same goal (i.e., a semantic property). I agree, but I'm not sure why mirror neuron advocates should be taken as insisting that single cells are involved, as opposed to the "mirror neuron systems" described in Iacoboni's talk.

2. If assemblies of cells are involved instead of individual cells, how is this a distinctive or interesting theory? Doesn't it then just become a restatement of "neurons work together in the brain to make things happen?" Several people (including the person who asked that question) noted that it's still potentially interesting if these assemblies participate in both observation and action, and may provide support for theories that implicate motor programs of speech generation in speech perception.

3. Some other evidence for mirror neurons from TMS experiments in speech production. Two parts of the speech motor cortex, one active when people produce labial phonemes, and another part active when they produce dentals, were stimulated with TMS in the form of a double-pulse, which tends to provide a stimulative effect similar to priming. The result was that double-pulsing the region associated with labials facilitated the perception of labials, and double-pulsing the region associated with dentals facilitated the perception of dentals.

4. The inference to mirror neurons from fMRI evidence is choosing a single possible explanation without sufficient discriminatory evidence to exclude other explanations, such as priming. This seems like a quite reasonable objection, but one which doesn't preclude further research both within a mirror neuron framework and from outside--a battle between camps is probably a good way to provoke fruitful experimentation and mutual criticism until discriminatory evidence or arguments are obtained. There was some disagreement in the discussion about whether such discriminatory evidence could ever be obtained, but I'm inclined to think that someone will come along and provide some strong reasons to prefer going down one path rather than another.

5. In the cases where only a single or very few cells are measured, isn't that "a colossal sampling error"? One response was that the single-neuron measurement studies may have recorded from as many as 200 neurons, of which 75 showed mirror properties, of which 2/3 showed mirror properties in general (i.e., they matched individual actions and related actions directed at the same goal) and 1/3 only showed activation in response to the same exact action. I think this still presents a significant sampling issue in that there are likely hundreds of thousands of connections implicated for each neuron; I'm also a bit wary of the claims of mirror properties for related actions, where the relations may be semantic rather than simple associations, as there seems to be a potential for creative interpretation in determining what counts or doesn't count as related. That's independent of the implausibility of such properties at the individual neuron level.

6. The mirror neuron evidence and arguments seem to be like a cartoon version of science being presented to scientists and to the public (a criticism that explicitly excluded the original monkey studies). The use of the term "mirror neuron" seems like "a romantic notion that's taken on a life of its own," even though it is descriptive--you see someone else performing the same action, it's like looking in a mirror.

7. This is an unusual case in which, rather than psychology observing a behavior and theorizing neurological activity, the concept has been derived from observed neurophysiological behavior and "pyramided up," presenting challenges for theory comparison. Other competing theories don't have neural-level predictions. Are mirror neuron theories even falsifiable?

The seminar was closed with another quote from Iacoboni's book, from the end: "Mirroring People also ends on a hopeful note, the hope that science and scientific thinking may play an important role in our society."

I found it a fascinating discussion to observe, especially as issues came up pertaining to the norms of science and the demarcation between science and non-science, where scientists often appeal to criteria such as Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion. Most philosophers of science today agree that there is no sharp boundary between science and non-science (though there are certainly things that are clearly science or clearly not science), that the falsifiability criterion doesn't provide such a demarcation (and isn't strictly feasible given the nature of background assumptions and clusters of propositions involved in theory testing), and that the Mertonian norms of science are more of an ideal than reality. Science is a bit messier than that, and it seemed that some of the social aspects of "boundary-work" were in play in the discussion.

UPDATE: I should note that there were two papers of recommended reading for this discussion, which were:

Gregory Hickok, "Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21:7, pp. 1229-1243 (2008).

Giovanni Buccino, Ferdinand Binkofski, and Lucia Riggio, "The mirror neuron system and action recognition," Brain and Language 89 (2004) 370-376.

I didn't get a chance to read those before the seminar, but may update this post with further comments after I do.

UPDATE (September 5, 2013): Alison Gopnik piece on "Cells That Read Minds? What the myth of mirror neurons gets wrong about the brain" on Slate.

ApostAZ podcast #18

The 18th episode of the ApostAZ podcast is available:

Episode 018 Atheism and Free Twizzering in Phoenix! Go to meetup.com/phoenix-atheists for group events! Mark 19? Criticism and analysis. http://arizonacor.org Intro- Immortal Technique- Freedom of Speech from Revolutionary Vol 2. Outro- Greydon Square 'Dream' from the Compton Effect.

Grassroots Skeptics website launched

The grassrootsskeptics.org website officially launches today:

Philadelphia, PA – 9/4/2009: Grassroots Skeptics today announced the official launch of its website, GrassrootsSkeptics.org. The website is the centerpiece of the group's planned outreach and advocacy in the skeptical community.

“There are a lot of passionate advocates and community groups working diligently to advance critical thinking,” said Grassroots Skeptics founder K.O. Myers. “We want to help increase their effectiveness, by making it easier for them to find new members, share resources, and identify methods for getting their message out.”

The group plans to use the site to gather and organize information about skeptical advocacy. At launch, the site will feature an index of local skeptics groups, information on many skeptical blogs and podcasts, discussion forums, and a calendar of skeptical events. The events calendar is a joint project, maintained in collaboration with the prominent skeptical website Skepchick.org.

“There is an amazing amount of information out there that could be helpful for people who want to start or join a skeptical organization,” Myers said. “We want to collect and organize it, to make it more useful for the dedicated individuals who volunteer their time to promote an evidence-based lifestyle.”

“Widespread misinformation about vaccines has lead to a resurgence in preventable illnesses; scam artists posing as 'psychics' prey on the grieving; 'alternative medicine' companies sell billions of dollars of dubious treatments, with almost no government regulation,” said Myers. “Critical thinking is more important than ever, and local skeptics groups are working hard to spread that message. With GrassrootsSkeptics.org, we hope we can make their outreach more effective.”

Future plans for the site include a skeptical speakers' bureau, a searchable map of skeptics groups and skeptic-friendly attractions, and a development kit for skeptics who want to start new groups. “We're excited about this launch,” said Myers, “but we're already looking forward to making GrassrootsSkeptics.org a richer, deeper resource for the organized skeptical community.”

Grassroots Skeptics is a volunteer organization that promotes critical thinking and a reason-centered worldview by helping local skeptics groups to share tools, information and strategies, and connect with skeptical individuals and activists both locally and globally.

You can also follow Grassroots Skeptics on Facebook and Twitter.