What’s in your gut? Termites, for example

Science News has a fascinating short story, Gut bacteria reflect dietary differences, by Gwyneth Dickey, that highlights one of the ecological dimensions of ‘enculturation’ that I think some symbolic models of culture have a hard time grasping. It turns out that a Western diet produces a less-varied gut ecology in Italian children than was found in African children. Moreover, the old adage ‘you are what you eat’ could apply in a particularly interesting way to those who eat termites.

The original article, Impact of diet in shaping gut microbiota revealed by a comparative study in children from Europe (urban Florence) and rural Africa (Boulkiemde province, Burkina Faso), by Carlotta De Filippo and colleagues, is open access on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website, so you should definitely surf over there if you find this interesting.

De Filippo and colleagues discuss the microbiome, the ‘complex consortium of trillions of microbes, whose collective genomes contain at least 100 times as many genes as our own eukaryote genome’ (see also Gill et al. 2006). This enormous, varied ecosystem in the gut, a symbiotic community, supplements human metabolic capabilities, provides a first line of defense against pathogens, modulates gastrointestinal development and even informs the configuration of the immune system (paraphrased from De Filippo et al. 2010).

Different gut ecologies brought about both by environmental factors and by food production techniques, dietary preferences, and even food handling practices are one way that human groups might inadvertently induce biological variation in our species, a subtle culture-biology link through the populations in our gastrointestinal tracts. Now De Filippo and colleagues has gone out and actually demonstrated this variation empirically, using high-throughput 16S rDNA sequencing and biochemical analyses of fecal microbiota.

Continue reading “What’s in your gut? Termites, for example”

Scientopia – A New Platform for Scholarly Blogging

Lots of people are pointing to the new collection of blogs over at Scientopia.org, which came to life in part due to the problems over at ScienceBlogs. Scientopia is ad-free, and also explicitly about science:

Scientopia is a collective of people who write about science because they love to do so. It is a community, held together by mutual respect and operated by consensus, in which people can write, educate, discuss, and learn about science and the process of doing science. In this we explore the interplay between scientific issues and other parts of our lives with the shared goal of making science more accessible.

Scientopia has global categories in Brain & Behavior and in Humanities & Social Sciences, as well as other ones like environment & biology, medicine & pharma, and information & communication. No way (yet, I am hoping) to go directly to those categories – they are simply collections of relevant pieces right there on the front page of Scientopia blogs.

I particularly wanted to do a shout-out to the blog The Urban Ethnographer. It’s fabulous to see anthropology right there in the middle of Scientopia. Krystal D’Costa’s most recent post is Meeting Montauk: The Summer Trade, which takes us out to the eastern tip of Long Island to examine tourism, fishing, and life in a beautiful little town.

On the brain side we’ve got some favorites who’ve migrated over from ScienceBlogs. So Scicurious has her own blog now, Neurotic Physiology, with her most recent post being the irresistible What Is Sweeter Than Cocaine? DrugMonkey is also there, and is looking at the recent debate on synthetic marijuana.

Child’s Play is all about development and cognition, and their latest post is Don’t Bite: A Cognitive Primer, which examines delay of gratification with a focus in this post on cognitive control and neural architecture.

That, and more, over at Scientopia.

Hard Drinkers, Meet Soft Science

By Mark Flanagan

Of the 23 million people who struggle with alcohol or drug abuse on a yearly basis, roughly 1.2 million regularly attend Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings as a way to stop drinking. AA was the first 12-step program to be created. Founded on December 14, 1934 by Bill Wilson and Robert or “Dr. Bob” Smith, AA combines self-assessment, reconciliation, group therapy, and surrendering control to a “higher power” in a progressive plan consisting of 12 distinct steps to combat impulsive cravings to use.

“Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works”, written by Brendan Koerner for Wired, does a thorough job explaining the history and approach of Alcoholics Anonymous in the United States. Koerner writes that, “There’s no doubt that when AA works, it can be transformative. But what aspect of the program deserves most of the credit?… Stunningly, even the most highly regarded AA experts have no idea.”

Koerner then examines how research in the behavioral sciences and neurology can provide insights to AA’s intermittent success. Here we learn that it’s not just the twelve steps but also the power of the group, from the commitment the individual feels to forming close relationships that can provide a sense of security to the opportunity to relearn how to connect to others without alcohol. Koerner also argues that the experience of public confession, both doing it and seeing it, helps individuals strengthen the regulatory powers of their prefrontal cortex, weakened after years of drinking.

However, in trying to account for the modest but significant beneficial effects AA can have for many individuals, Koerner leaves out important “soft sciences”, such as anthropology. Why do people attend AA? It’s not just to strengthen their prefrontal cortices.

In this post I will outline some societal forces that have led to AA’s popularity. I will also argue that the social sciences are integral for crafting new and effective addiction treatments. The ideas and data presented here come in large part from my comparative research on alcohol use and abuse among homeless men, college students, and veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Societal Forces at Play in Biomedicine

AA has been the subject of countless studies, yet reported success rates vary enormously: between 5 and 75 percent. This may be due to AA’s shunning of individual identification and the ease with which members enter and leave the program. However, several studies indicate that AA does not work for everyone and that, for most people, does not work at all.

While scientific support for AA or other 12-step programs is inconclusive, most medical practitioners strongly recommend it as a primary means to treat addiction. In Wired, addiction-medicine specialist Drew Pinsky states: “In my 20 years of treating addicts, I’ve never seen anything that comes close to the 12-steps. In my world, if someone says they don’t want to do the 12-steps, I know they aren’t going to get better.”

This contradiction between the little if any definitive scientific proof that AA reliably treats those suffering from addiction and the wide-spread endorsement of AA by medical and governmental officials raises an important sociological question:

Why do so many science-based medical providers recommend AA?

Continue reading “Hard Drinkers, Meet Soft Science”

Susan Blum, Plagiarism, and Anthropology

Susan Blum, my colleague at Notre Dame, is featured in a NY Times’ article today, Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age. The basic point of the article is that students, in the age of wholesale copying and pasting on the Internet, and a culture with changing notions of authorship, have trouble understanding the academic emphasis on doing one’s work (including writing one’s own words) and citing others for their ideas, data, and other types of work.

Ms. Blum argued that student writing exhibits some of the same qualities of pastiche that drive other creative endeavors today — TV shows that constantly reference other shows or rap music that samples from earlier songs.

In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

“Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” Ms. Blum said.

She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.

Based on her research with Notre Dame undergraduates, Blum published an enticing book in 2009, My Word!: Plagiarism and College.

Professors are reminded almost daily that many of today’s college students operate under an entirely new set of assumptions about originality and ethics. Practices that even a decade ago would have been regarded almost universally as academically dishonest are now commonplace. Is this development an indication of dramatic shifts in education and the larger culture? In a book that dismisses hand-wringing in favor of a rich account of how students actually think and act, Susan D. Blum discovers two cultures that exist, often uneasily, side by side in the classroom.

Relying extensively on interviews conducted by students with students, My Word! presents the voices of today’s young adults as they muse about their daily activities, their challenges, and the meanings of their college lives… Blum suggests, the real problem of academic dishonesty arises primarily from a lack of communication between two distinct cultures within the university setting. On one hand, professors and administrators regard plagiarism as a serious academic crime, an ethical transgression, even a sin against an ethos of individualism and originality. Students, on the other hand, revel in sharing, in multiplicity, in accomplishment at any cost.

Back in 2009, Susan wrote about her work in an article Academic Integrity and Student Plagiarism: a Question of Education, Not Ethics in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Susan outlined the two main approaches to preventing plagiarism, a moral one generally using honor codes and a disciplinary one requiring greater enforcement by faculty and staff.

Traditional efforts by administrators to prevent plagiarism fail for a number of reasons. For starters, students have only a vague sense of what is meant by the moral quality termed “academic integrity.” Also, rules about intellectual property are in flux.

In addition, our notion of the originality of utterance as the product of the unique, isolated, authentic self had its peak in the 1960s and 1970s. Students today have been immersed in a culture that revels in trying on different personae and sharing freely. There is no inviolable connection between words and the self that produces them. Students are not wedded to the integrity of their own writing and do not necessarily assume that others are either.

Moreover, students are mostly focused on success and achievement, a bottom-line mentality that has helped them gain admittance to the highly selective institutions that are, in fact, trying to enforce the norms of academic citation. If students pursued education for its own sake — as do most professors — they would try to produce academic work that increases learning and to model their behavior on their professors’. But many students don’t especially value the process of classroom learning — so, in fact, any process will do.

She outlines a series of practical steps to increase academic integrity by reducing plagiarism and improving students’ approach to citing others. She concludes:

Treating academic integrity as a constellation of skills, taught largely through the long apprenticeship of higher education, is the most promising approach for getting students to follow the rules of academic citation, and the one with the least likelihood of providing a shortcut. That means teaching students what academic integrity involves, why professors value it, and how exactly to carry it out.

Writing: Brains, Science, and Words


As a follow-up to the Virginia Heffernan piece, here’s something in a rather different tone. As I was exploring the reactions to Heffernan’s take on science blogging (a take with numerous faults, yes, yes, but also some valid points), I came across two things that delighted me, as they actually focused on writing.

Livia Blackburne has an engaging blog over at A Brain Scientist’s Take on Writing. Her most recent post, The Power of Touch, moves from touch to the scaffolded mind and onto touch imagery, including coverage of recent experimental data. She’s also has a post on fMRI and reading, which she then uses to discuss how to think about narrative in novel ways. And there’s some good comments on that post as well.

Over at Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong started a post where science writers of all stripes have shared their getting-started stories in On the Origin of Science Writers. Ed, whom I admire for how he does science journalism, starts off with his, then Carl Zimmer follows with the next one, and from there you’ve got another 110 stories to explore.

For the anthropologists who might be feeling left out, I wrote a little (well, a lot!) about how we can reach a broader audience, and much of that has to do with the way we write. Some of the ideas are, I hope, equally relevant to science writing.

Virginia Heffernan vs. ScienceBlogs

Virginia Heffernan over at the New York Times has an essay today, Unnatural Science, which launches two strong attacks on science blogging: its naivete and its corruption.

She starts with the recent controvery over at ScienceBlogs, the so-called PepsiGate where the Seed organization gave Pepsi its own blog on par with all the other science blogs there. PepsiGate then led to the departure of many prominent science bloggers from ScienceBlogs. This is where Heffernan calls science bloggers naive, not used to being part of the media:

I was nonplussed by the high dudgeon of the so-called SciBlings. The bloggers evidently write often enough for ad-free academic journals that they still fume about adjacencies, advertorial and infomercials. Most writers for “legacy” media like newspapers, magazines and TV see brush fires over business-editorial crossings as an occupational hazard.

But the heart of Heffernan’s critique is actually the way science bloggers behave – too much vindictiveness and bigotry, not enough science.

But the bloggers’ eek-a-mouse posturing wasn’t the most striking part of the affair. Instead, it was the weird vindictiveness of many of the most prominent blogs. The stilted and seething tone of some of the defection posts sent me into the ScienceBlogs archives, where I expected to find original insights into science… And while I found interesting stuff here and there, I also discovered that ScienceBlogs has become preoccupied with trivia, name-calling and saber rattling. Maybe that’s why the ScienceBlogs ship started to sink… Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd.

She in particular highlights PZ Myers, one of the most popular science bloggers out there:

PZ Myers revels in sub-“South Park” blasphemy, presenting (in one recent stunt) his sketch of the Prophet Muhammad as a cow-pig hybrid excited about “raping a 9-year-old girl.”

And though science bloggers of all stripes are jumping to defend science blogging, and to insist that Heffernan has it wrong (posts at Neuron Culture, WordYard, NeuroDojo, The Thoughtful Animal, Deltoid, A Blog Around the Clock, Pharnygula, Mike the Mad Biologist), Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Brian Switek, and EvolutionBlog; It’s Not a Lecture and Uncertain Principlies say some similar things to here), there is enough ring of truth in what she says.

As Bora has well-described in discussing ScienceBlogs, PepsiGate, and his departure from Seed, science bloggers are now part of the media. I recall very distinctly the thrill of building an audience, of realizing we had an audience beyond the classroom and a small group of colleagues. One way to take that is, yes, scholarship means something! Another is, I mean something! Popularity and arrogance can inflate our own commentary.

Heffernan’s reaction to the content and style of ScienceBlogs came from an outsider’s perspective. As she writes in a comment at Neuron Culture:

I have no training in science. My surprise at ScienceBlogs was akin to the surprise a scientist who might feel if he audited a PhD seminar on Wallace Stevens. Why aren’t they talking about “Anecdote of the Jar”?! Why are they talking about how “misogyny intrinsic to the modernist project”? I saw political axe-grinding bring the humanities almost to a standstill in the 1990s. I thought science was supposed to be above that!

In one sense it’s not at all surprising, science is as political as anything else. But her expectation, and her disappointment, is also part of the story:

With notable exceptions, blogging, as a form, seems to me to have calcified. Many bloggers who started strong 3-5 years ago have gotten stuck in grudge matches. This is even more evident on political blogs than on science blogs. In fact, after being surprised to find the same cycles of invective on ScienceBlogs that appear on political blogs (where they’re well documented), I started to think the problem might be with the form itself.

Grudge matches and invective make for high popularity in our society today. Heffernan’s done some of that herself in kicking up a hornet’s nest from on high. But what she wrote, and why, also deserves attention.

Science does have its problems at multiple levels. Greg took on medioce and bigoted science blogging in Language extinction ain’t no big thing?. I took on the Netporn/FanFiction Survey controversy in Sex, Lies and IRB Tape. Other blogs also do critical inquiry, from Mind Hacks and The Neurocritic on the science side to Somatosphere and Open Anthropology on the anthropology side. But Heffernan adds a new dimension, calling out people who have let themselves get corrupted by being able to shout and undercut and slander without much critique from those who know better.

I do think she misses the point that the problems at ScienceBlogs have been building over time, and that the decision by many bloggers to leave is their own way to protest and to critique what has happened at one of the dominant places in science blogging. They took action. But science is also about discourse by people. Blogs are now one of the most prominent ways that scholars engage in discourse among themselves, with students, and with the wider public. And there Heffernan takes on the role of Marcellus in Shakespeare:

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.