In recent years, there has been a small bit of backlash against the ubiquitous use of antibacterial soaps. Indeed, research beginning in 2002 has continued to confirm that based on both effectiveness and potential negative side effects, there really is no reason to use these soaps and plenty of reasons not to.

The active antibacterial agent in question is triclosan. The only real question that can result from numerous scientific studies about triclosan is whether or not its potential negatives are strong enough to stop using it. (Indeed, the only piece (opinion) questioning the validity of the research showing both potential resistance problems and toxic byproducts of triclosan (Swofford, 2005) was written by a member of the soap industry.) However, given unambiguous results showing that soap containing triclosan is indistinguishable in its effectiveness against bacteria as regular soap (and, frankly, given that most illnesses most household users of antibacterial soaps are concerned about are actually caused by viruses, which do not respond to antibacterials) any potentially negative side-effects of its use should be unacceptable.

Here is the problem. Humans are dumping all kinds of chemicals into our (and other organisms') water supply, that are not removed during sewage treatment (even when the water properly goes through sewage treatment). Among these is triclosan (Gomez et al., 2007), which has been found in large proportions of human urinary samples (Calafat et al., 2008). Not only do we know nothing about how ingesting all these various chemicals may be affecting us over the long term, we cannot begin to know the complex ways in which they are interacting with each other to create new, and potentially more toxic compounds. Both laboratory (DeLorenzo et al., 2008) and field research (Kinney et al., 2008) suggests that triclosan bioaccumulates, which means its concentration could increase up the food chain (the same phenomenon responsible for the crash of bald eagle populations a few decades ago, due to DDT). Other laboratory studies suggest that it reacts with light and chlorine (ubiquitous in our drinking water) to form types of dioxin, a toxic compound (Sanchez-Prado et al., 2006). These studies are just scratching the surface of potential interactions between triclosan and other ubiquitous pharmaceuticals such as painkillers and sex hormones from birth control. Laboratory studies have also demonstrated that bacteria such as E coli and Salmonella can become resistant to triclosan (Yazdankhah et al., 2006).

Proponents of antibacterial soaps claim that none of these studies have shown that toxicity is common in the field, and resistance also has only been shown in the laboratory. So, let's get this straight: we should continue to use this completely useless agent, because research has not yet shown that it is definitely harmful in the short term. Brilliant reasoning. The abstract of a recent review paper sums up the state of our knowledge quite nicely:

Abstract (Aiello et al., 2007)
Background. Much has been written recently about the potential hazards versus benefits of antibacterial (biocide)-containing soaps. The purpose of this systematic literature review was to assess the studies that have examined the efficacy of products containing triclosan, compared with that of plain soap, in the community setting, as well as to evaluate findings that address potential hazards of this use-namely, the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Methods. The PubMed database was searched for English-language articles, using relevant keyword combinations for articles published between 1980 and 2006. Twenty-seven studies were eventually identified as being relevant to the review. Results. Soaps containing triclosan within the range of concentrations commonly used in the community setting (0.1%-0.45% wt/vol) were no more effective than plain soap at preventing infectious illness symptoms and reducing bacterial levels on the hands. Several laboratory studies demonstrated evidence of triclosan-adapted cross-resistance to antibiotics among different species of bacteria. Conclusions. The lack of an additional health benefit associated with the use of triclosan-containing consumer soaps over regular soap, coupled with laboratory data demonstrating a potential risk of selecting for drug resistance, warrants further evaluation by governmental regulators regarding antibacterial product claims and advertising. Further studies of this issue are encouraged.

If the only weapon we have to stop this idiotic dumping of even a potentially harmful chemical into our water systems and environment is consumer demand, then let's use it. Stop using anti-bacterial soaps now, and maybe the fools producing them will stop, because it is no longer profitable.

References

Aiello, A.E., Larson, E.L. & Levy, S.B. (2007) Consumer antibacterial soaps: Effective or just risky? Clinical Infectious Diseases, 45:S137-S147.

Calafat, A.M., Ye, X., Wong, L.Y., Reidy, J.A. & Needham, L.L. (2008) Urinary concentrations of Triclosan in the US population: 2003-2004. Environmental Health Perspectives, 116:303-307.

DeLorenzo, M.E., Keller, J.M., Arthur, C.D., Finnegan, M.C., Harper, H.E., Winder, V.L. & Zdankiewicz, D.L. (2008) Toxicity of the antimicrobial compound triclosan and formation of the metabolite methyl-triclosan in estuarine systems. Environmental Toxicology, 23:224-232.

Gomez, M.J., Bueno, M.J.M., Lacorte, S., Fernandez-Alba, A.R. & Aguera, A. (2007) Pilot survey monitoring pharmaceuticals and related compounds in a sewage treatment plant located on the Mediterranean coast. Chemosphere, 66:993-1002.

Kinney, C.A., Furlong, E.T., Kolpin, D.W., Burkhardt, M.R., Zaugg, S.D., Werner, S.L., Bossio, J.P. & Benotti, M.J. (2008) Bioaccumulation of pharmaceuticals and other anthropogenic waste indicators in earthworms from agricultural soil amended with biosolid or swine manure. Environmental Science & Technology, 42:1863-1870.

Sanchez-Prado, L., Llompart, M., Lores, M., Fernandez-Alvarez, M., Garcia-Jares, C. & Cela, R. (2006) Further research on the photo-SPME of triclosan. Analytical And Bioanalytical Chemistry, 384:1548-1557.

Swofford, W. (2005) Triclosan research misreported? Environmental Science & Technology, 39:271A-272A.

Yazdankhah, S.P., Scheie, A.A., Hoiby, E.A., Lunestad, B.T., Heir, E., Fotland, T.O., Naterstad, K. & Kruse, H. (2006) Triclosan and antimicrobial resistance in bacteria: An overview. Microbial Drug Resistance-Mechanisms Epidemiology and Disease, 12:83-90.

Labels: environmental toxins, health, humans

This is a comment, based on personal experience in this area, on the latest news about Vioxx - that Merck hired "ghostwriters" to write the scientific papers about Vioxx and thus were perpetrating "fraud."

A new freely available report (Ross, J.S., MD, MHS; K.P. Hill, MD, MHS; D.S. Egilman, MD, MPH; H.M. Krumholz, MD, SM. 2008. Guest authorship and ghostwriting in publications related to Rofecoxib: A case study of industry documents From rofecoxib litigation. Journal of the American Medical Association 299(15):1800-1812) suggests that methods employed by Merck to use scientific journals to promote its products show just how scummy this company is, in case you didn't already believe it.

This is an issue that interests me because I was once a paid ghostwriter of a paper for a biotech company (which shortly after went belly up, and apparently the paper was never published). Based on the report's definition, ("Ghostwriting has been defined as the failure to designate an individual (as an author) who has made a substantial contribution to the research or writing of a manuscript") it is my impression from my own experience that biotech companies (including pharmaceutical) routinely pay "ghostwriters" to write papers intended for publication in medical journals. In my own case, the doctor whose name was to go on the paper did supposedly collect the data, and I was provided with a brief summary of the findings which I expanded into a full paper, which was then edited further by staff at the company.

Is such a process unethical? The way I saw it at the time, it was more an instance of the doctors collecting the data being too busy and/or subpar writers who could not be depended on to get the research written up and submitted to a journal for review in a timely manner, which is in the interest of the company promoting the product. On the one hand, this didn't seem to be a big deal given that the doctor who "authored" the paper did actually collect the data, and even contributed discussion points in the summary, which made him a valid author on the paper. On the other hand, the experience did make me cynical about papers in medical journals, which from then on I viewed as rather poorly conducted and reviewed advertisements for industry products (a common theme on this blog). In my mind, the question of who actually wrote the words of the paper to present the data is insignificant compared to the fact that papers published in medical journals are held to an incredibly low standard of scientific rigor compared to, say, those published in ecology journals. Part of the reason for this is obvious - scientific rigor is much more difficult in human studies, in which researchers are ethically more limited than ecologists in the types of manipulations available. Somewhat of a lower standard is probably necessary for progress in the field.

But another reason never discussed for poor medical studies is that journals and the medical industry seem to have a reciprocal back-scratching arrangement: the journal gets a lot of press coverage when it publishes yet another "significant" paper, and the biotech industry gets the promotion of their products. The authors and reviewers, by the way, are tied up in the same knot as well; they are scientists who need to publish to progress in their career, and are also often funded by the biotech industry. "Conflict of interest" probably doesn't begin to describe the complex web of interactions among all these parties.

A big problem with this system is that it creates a slippery slope. There certainly may have been instances when Merck's methods were less defensible, for example:

Documents were found describing Merck compensating investigators with honoraria for agreeing to serve as authors on review manuscripts ghostwritten on their behalf by medical publishing companies. Honoraria varied, ranging from $750 to $2500. One author refused his honorarium from Scientific Therapeutics Information stating, "I really do not feel it is appropriate to be paid for this type of effort."

Unfortunately, when you are so close to the line to begin with, crossing it becomes almost unavoidable. Paying the printed authors to put their name on any publication would certainly be crossing it.

Still, one wonders what planet Dr. Ross and the other authors have been on, given that they seem to imply that Merck should be singled out for using these methods to promote its products - they are shocked, shocked! to find what they did. Perhaps their disclosure statement sheds some light:

Although every effort was made to present this information objectively and fairly, it is important to note that all of the authors of this article have been compensated for their work as consultants/expert witnesses at the request of plaintiffs in litigation against Merck related to rofecoxib [Vioxx].

OK, they finally then admit that they may have heard of something like this before:

...it is reasonable to expect that the authorship practices observed in this case study may be used by other pharmaceutical companies as well. A recent press account seems to confirm as much, as does the presence of an industry specializing in medical writing.

They end with the extremely ironic statement, "We are hopeful that our findings encourage discussion of ways in which to improve the integrity of research." Simply, the "integrity" of medical research is a joke, and has been for a long time. Companies and journals will continue this charade as long as it stays profitable.

Labels: health, humans

There is a fallacious argument commonly held and cited by pro-private-property advocates. The argument goes that interested parties having private property results in the reverse of the "tragedy of the commons," which holds that public resources are over-exploited because they belong to nobody, and thus are not worth protecting; if I do not grab the resource now, someone else will. The reverse argument is thus that if I alone hold the resources and their future value is also mine alone, then it is worth my while to protect them and not overexploit them.

Of course the main problem with this argument is that it assumes rational economic behavior by human beings, which over the last decade or so has been increasingly shown to be a false assumption. Economic models thus have to be rewritten to take into account that most of us do not act in our best interest, a lot of the time.

This is true in many arenas. There are many versions of the following experiment:

...the ultimatum game. You are given $100 to split between yourself and your game partner. Whatever division of the money you propose, if your partner accepts it, you each get to keep your share. If, however, your partner rejects it, neither of you gets any money.

How much should you offer? Why not suggest a $90-$10 split? If your game partner is a rational, self-interested money-maximizer -- the very embodiment of Homo economicus -- he isn't going to turn down a free 10 bucks, is he? He is. Research shows that proposals that offer much less than a $70-$30 split are usually rejected.

Meaning: humans are a social species, and no one lives in a bubble. Context is everything, even when it comes to financial gain.

Land-use is a different matter however. Private-property enthusiasts will assert that a rancher will happily overgraze public land he is leasing. But if his ranch is all private, he will manage it to ensure a healthier ecosystem, because this makes sense for the long term, right?

In practice this is not so. Certainly, the tragedy of the commons does hold here; public land is routinely overgrazed. But the opposite is not true, because ranchers routinely overgraze their own land, too, even though that is clearly bad for ranch productivity in the long term. Why does this happen?

It happens because decisions regarding land-use are much more complex than a simple formula for maximizing profits over the long term. First of all, ranchers behave as if their leased public land is private anyway; usually these leases have been in place for generations, and are essentially giveaways (often $1/acre), and thus the ranchers have a strong sense of entitlement to the land. Any attempt by the feds to change anything about how the leases currently work is met with outrage because the government is going to "ruin" the rancher. Nowhere is there any publicly stated acknowledgment that the rancher is getting a great deal.

Second, ranching practices (at least in the northwest) have been handed down for generations after being developed in a much wetter era. Economic theory predicting rational behavior makes the enormous assumption that the knowledge is available to make rational decisions. A few progressive ranchers in this area are waking up to the fact that the "drought" the west is suffering is here to stay, and are learning how to change their methods to keep the land healthy in the current environment. For many ranches, this can be as simple as changing grazing practices from using fences to using herders. But for those who do not have the cultural knowledge, this can be a daunting shift.

On top of this, any subsistence ranching or farming is concerned much more with maximizing profits in the immediate future, without worrying about the long term. The most obvious example of this is farms in the deforested tropics. Everyone knows the soil in tropical forests is extremely poor, and after just a couple years of farming, the nutrients are fully depleted and the farms are abandoned. Does this keep people from cutting down forests for subsistence farms? No, because when you are living hand-to-mouth, you are focused on getting through the current year. Economists call this "discounting" the long term effects of decisions, so that a benefit obtained years from now is worth much less than one obtained now. This is a rational position, but it is arguable that for most people (such as those who obtained adjustable-rate mortgages in the last few years) the future is discounted much more highly than is mathematically "rational."

Although the threats facing ranchers are not equally severe, the idea of having to quit production on a family ranch that has been working for generations is nothing less than disaster to those who face it. Their culture and tradition, and thus their entire sense of self, is wrapped up in that ranch. In Texas, for example, it is common for a "rancher" to keep a few cows on an overgrazed piece of family-owned land at a loss, while working a full time job in the city to actually make a living. It makes no financial sense to keep the ranch going, but it saves cultural face which is obviously much more important.

Finally, there is the obvious difference between individuals trying to make a living and corporations which need to maximize short-term profits at all costs. Our financial system seems to reward this corporate strategy, because the actual individual making a decision can jump ship before it is time to pay the piper for a bad one. They themselves do not own the resources they are exploiting, so making the resources privately owned (by the corporation) makes no difference to their protection. It is much easier for a corporation to run a ranch into the ground and then sell it off in parcels for development (although many private ranch owners do the same thing eventually) because a corporation has no cultural connection to the land.

The value of federal lands is that although they can be overexploited, there are mechanisms in place, such as regulation and public comment, to put a halt to their destruction. A hundred years ago, certainly the attitude was that the National Forests were there precisely for maximizing exploitation - after all, some private landowners might not want their land to be logged. Today, though, the ethic is different. Ecosystems have an inherent value to many more people than they once did, and this has changed forest service policy to include preservation as a mandate. Though the inertia to bring it about might be extreme, there is at least the possibility that public pressure can change federal land-use policy to better reflect the majority's conservation values. Naturally, those who make a living exploiting federal land view such policy changes as a "taking." But it is really a taking-back for the taxpayers who supplied that land for free in the first place.

Labels: economics, environment, humans

Our slightly tangential question today is, why are people so irrational about marriage? There have been cultures and times when legal marriage was important, and others when it was not. But there will always be people who are convinced that marriage is somehow a magic bullet for our social problems. Missives such as this one from otherwise intelligent columnists (in this case Emily Yoffe) show how weighed down with the baggage of "morality" the issue of marriage is. Yes, morality is involved; unfortunately, it is the definition of what morality is that gets confused and leads to calls for laws and policy that treat symptoms, rather than the underlying condition.

But perhaps in our desire not to make moral judgments about personal choices, young women wholly unprepared to be mothers are not getting the message that there are dire consequences of having (unprotected) sex with guys too lame to be fathers.

Yes, there are extremist meddlers who think truly personal choices should be legislated because God said so. But anyone who actually thinks that everyone living in society should be free to make all kinds of choices that negatively impact society is an extremist in the opposite direction. After all, morality actually is a mechanism for individuals living in societies to interact positively with other members of society, so that they will interact positively with you, which is all to your benefit. Society breaks down when personal desires and needs always take precedence over those of others. Once a critical number of people ignore the children they have and just keep on making more, there is no incentive to do otherwise because everyone is just out for himself anyway - the mark of a dysfunctional society.

Studies have found that children born to single mothers are vastly more likely to be poor, have behavioral and psychological problems, drop out of high school, and themselves go on to have out-of-wedlock children.

Of course, since we don't have any single-mom laboratory manipulation studies, the only information we have is correlational, not causal. Very likely a lot of the single moms were poor before they had a kid, and in no position to raise one successfully - meaning to produce a contributing member of society, rather than a drain on it who will likely not raise kids successfully because she does not have the experience to know what that means. But the problem is not that the moms aren't married to the kids' fathers, it is that they had kids at all.

Yoffe points out that "one key to effective fatherhood is first becoming a husband." But she is misdirected by her own definition of "husband," which in her mind, means a legally married man. She would be absolutely right if she defined "husband" as a man committed to one woman, emotionally and financially. When two people are able to commit to each other over the long term, they are much more likely to be successful parents, because they understand how society works - through the establishment and maintenance of relationships which in turn produces "moral" behavior. Thus they can raise their children to understand the importance of relationships, which is the key to avoiding dysfunctional behavior.

Marriage itself is actually a different issue altogether - or at least it would be if meddling politicians didn't think it was government's job to legislate morality. But the only true way to legislate morality is to remove dysfunctional people from society - which we pretty much do (albeit imprecisely) with laws against destructive behavior such as murder, theft, etc. Unfortunately tax code, welfare law, benefits rules, etc. put married people in a different economic category than unmarried people, which depending on your situation, either encourages you or discourages you to be married. Thus marriage is often driven by legal rather than personal considerations.

Marriage should be an entirely personal, not legal, decision. All the arguments about gay marriage are absurd because the idea that two people cannot declare themselves "married" if they want to is absurd. The reason that gays feel they have to fight for marriage is because policy makers have forced them to. If people don't want gays to be legally "married" then fine; fix the system so that there is no benefit to being married. If people want to avoid legal problems to do with benefits, alimony, inheritance, end-of-life issues, etc., there is all kinds of paperwork they can fill out. Legal marriage itself does not solve all of these problems anyway, so it is not clear why it exists, other than to legislate someone's particular "morality" that is not true morality.

In any case, you cannot legislate emotional commitment. The fact of "marriage" can make it easier to hide or ignore lack of long term emotional commitment, which can in turn lead to unwanted children anyway. Yoffe, as a child of bitter divorce, understands enough to know that marriage just for the sake of marriage makes no sense; but she seems to think that for a truly emotionally committed couple, marriage will somehow make their kids turn out better. But what is it that the kids have for their role model? The actual day-to-day relationship of their parents, or the certificate in their safe-deposit box? Those who argue that the legal hurdle of divorce will somehow force people to reconcile who might have otherwise split up has not checked divorce rates lately. If the emotional commitment is gone, no mere piece of paper is going to conjure it up again.

Save marriage for a symbol of personal commitment. To ceremonially bond with another human certainly has the impact of saying to society that "we are engaging in society through our relationship to each other." Therefore marriage certainly has societal value. But legally, it continues to be a pointless exercise at best and at worst confuses people about what is actually important.

Don't blame lack of marriage for the plight of poor neglected kids. Blame the parents who should have used birth control. The way to solve a lot of societal problems is to sterilize immediately anyone who has shown him or herself to be an unfit parent after the first kid. But we could never do that. It would be immoral.

Labels: humans, morality, sociality

Apparently it has been an assumption for a long time in some circles that early sex by teenagers results in their later delinquency. Two recent papers demonstrate just how muddled this theory is (along with most theories generalizing about human behavior), because they differ in their conclusions based on how the data were analyzed. The first paper's ( Armour, S. and D.L. Haynie, 2007. Adolescent sexual debut and later delinquency. Journal of Youth Adolescence 36:141-152) purpose was to use data to support the theory, which it does. The second paper (Harden, K.P., J. Mendle, J. E. Hill, E. Turkheimer and R.E. Emery, 2008. Rethinking timing of first sex and delinquency. Journal of Youth Adolescence, in press) uses the same dataset to reach the opposite conclusion, that earlier sex reduces future delinquency.

The second group of authors of course claim that their analysis is the better one, and in this case it is true. These papers, in fact, are a good demonstration of one of the major problems of large-dataset human studies, which is that they only control for factors (in this case, survey responses about race, income, parent's education, GPA, drug use, etc.) that the researchers imagine could affect the data, and not all the other hundreds of factors that also could but are ignored out of practicality or researcher bias. The authors' hope is that their use of a giant dataset will obscure the fact that important information is lacking.

(Once again, we will put aside the first major problem of such studies, the use of self-reporting data. Of course since both groups of authors rely on them, neither mentions how unreliable they are, especially, one might assume, with regard to sexual experience. And one might also imagine that the group of people who are most likely to lie about sexual experience is teenagers.)

The reason the second study is the better analysis is because the authors recognize that pooling all the data loses important information. Meaningless averages are calculated by pooling teenagers from all cultures and walks of life. To a repeat a very nice analogy used by the authors of the second paper: if you wish to correlate meat consumption with life expectancy, and you compare two countries, one primarily meat-eating and another not, you find a positive relationship - higher meat-eating correlates with higher life expectancy. But a third ignored variable also correlates positively with meat-eating, and that is level of industrialization. So to truly understand the relationship between meat-eating and life expectancy, you must control for industrialization. When the analysis is rerun within one country, the correlation between meat-eating and life expectancy is negative.

In addition, what is found in both papers is simply correlation, not causation (a trap that first-year undergraduates are taught to avoid, and yet catches so many human-behavior researchers). That is, the only information one has after the meat study is that meat-eating is associated with lower life expectancy. The study has not shown that meat-eating causes lower life-expectancy.

These were the two main problems with the first paper. The authors pool individuals across a wide range of cultural norms, which gives them a spurious result, and then conclude that early teen sex causes delinquency when the two are only correlated. Even though they use a crude control for cultural influence (average reported age of first sex for a given teenager's high school) they ignore any potential unstudied factor that could cause both (just as industrialization causes both higher life expectancy, and more meat-eating), obscuring the results for individuals.

The second paper solves that problem by analyzing only the identical twins in the dataset (which was large enough for them to have data for 289 twin pairs), and therefore controlling for both genetics (which the twins share exactly) and environment (which twins living in the same household largely share). This is an appropriate twin analysis because (for this main point at least) the authors don't care about trying to separate genetics and environment to answer their question. (Twin studies that do confound objective data with subjective assumptions.)

On top of all this, though, is another major flaw in the dataset, which the second group of authors strangely acknowledge despite their analysis. The supposedly "independent" (time of first sex) and "dependent" (delinquency) variables are by definition related from the start, because in much of American society, teen sex itself is considered delinquent behavior. What they are doing is a bit like asking whether or not shoplifting is correlated with delinquency. This certainly confounds the first study.

What does it mean that the second study found that identical twins who have their first sexual experience earlier than their siblings are less likely to engage in delinquent behavior? The authors seem to feel they have no choice but to conclude that there is probably no relationship between these factors at all. Perhaps that is exactly what they would have found statistically if they had used a Bonferroni correction for their dozen or so analyses. Either that, or delinquency is caused by sexual frustration, and the problem of misbehaving teens is now solved.

Labels: behavior, environment, humans, morality, statistics

One common theme of this blog recognizable to regular readers is that medical studies based on giant data sets, especially those including self-reporting data, are quite limited in their implications for how an individual should live his or her life to promote optimum health. A recent article publicized as linking diet soda consumption to greater risk of diabetes and heart disease, and mortality in general, is a good example of this.

The problem with the study (Lutsey, P.L., L.M. Steffen and J. Stevens, 2008. Dietary intake and the development of the metabolic syndrome: The atherosclerosis risk in communities study. Circulation 117:754-761) is not that it is necessarily wrong. It is that it is too hard to tell what importance the findings have in the context of all the other health information with which we are bombarded daily.

Aside from the problems inherent in self-reporting diet data -- which the authors acknowledge in the discussion but which obviously had no effect on likelihood of publication or promotion of the press release -- the authors reveal a troubling bias in their assumptions and use of terminology. They conducted a factor analysis on dietary components in an attempt to see which parts of a diet are more highly correlated with a condition called metabolic syndrome (fat, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, etc.) or "MetSyn". So far so good. But the next problem here is that human beings had to classify the types of food people ate, and these classifications are based on assumptions already about what foods are good and bad for you. For example, "red meat" of course does not take into account what species of mammal was eaten, or the conditions under which it was raised, which surely affect its nutritional and fat content. They use a category "low-fat diary" because they believe there is a reason to distinguish it from non-low-fat dairy.

The use of categories is necessary for their methodology, but it illustrates the problem with nutritional data collection which to this point is always colored by currently held biases about good and bad food. To make matters worse, when their factor analysis revealed two broad dietary patterns (based on their categories) among the people studied, they chose to label these "Western" and "Prudent" dietary patterns. Guess which dietary pattern they have already decided is bad for you, and likely to cause MetSyn?

Although their results showing more people on the "Western" diet to acquire "MetSyn" show a correlation, they are quick to label certain food groups (e.g. dairy) as "protective". But of course this is based on the studies in the past that have shown certain types of food to have negative effects on human health (usually, though, only when consumed in high quantities). Of course then none of the results were too surprising, except for the finding of diet soda, consumption of which in their model increased risk for MetSyn even more than consumption of sweetened drinks. This was the splashy result that got the newspaper headline.

I have no problem with their explanation, it makes perfect sense. They first admit that the data might be confounded, because diabetics are more likely to drink diet soda than nondiabetics, so which came first? But they also cite a rat study which suggested that artificial sweetener screws up our body's ability to determine the caloric content of what we are consuming - our mouth says "caloric" and our body says "not" and thus our body may simply stop trusting our mouth. It's a much more interesting explanation, and makes some intuitive sense, so that makes it easy to ignore the explanation that the data are confounded. The study gets published anyway, and promoters at the journal find the line in the results and discussion that will attract media attention, and bingo.

Those of us who think artificial (= man made) sweetners are potentially nasty unknowns to be avoided if possible, love a result like this. But that still doesn't mean that if you drink a lot of diet soda you are doomed to be fat and get diabetes. Even when we really know very little about what we are studying, even when our methods are poor, and the results questionable (in some cases contradicted by other studies, as the authors cite), and based on broad assumptions, these studies get published, because they get headlines. Bad methods are considered acceptable to medical journals because there are not necessarily feasible methods that are valid. Assumptions may be based in part on established medical knowledge, but they are mostly based on previous, poorly conducted studies such as this one, not to mention constant propaganda from our media and government about what is good for us, and which is so obviously correct that they completely revamp the propaganda every couple of decades or so. We think we are learning more and more and more when we "confirm" these same assumptions, yet in truth we haven't even begun to understand the complexity and variation in the human body. Just ask a scientist researching disease cures, who actually has to get it right for anyone to care about her research. Eating dairy products is "protective"? Check that with someone from a genetic heritage of lactose intolerance.

Never forget that these studies are blunt, blunt instruments, that tell us nothing about what works for an individual. A good rule of thumb for most diets is, simply, variety, and not too much of any one thing. That, not forcing down a gallon of skim milk every day, should be the first step for anyone trying to feel better through a diet better suited to his body.

Labels: health, humans

Some researchers (Flegal et al., 2005 and 2007) have claimed, using data for Body Mass Index (BMI) and death rates, that it is somehow beneficial to be "overweight." This is the type of announcement that will always make headlines in the popular press. As usual, these studies are fraught with flaws that would only be accepted in a publication about humans, and are meaningless in the terms that really matter to all of us, which is what decisions individuals should make about their lifestyles in order to have the best chance of living long, healthy lives.

The major reason why studies like these are meaningless is because of the arbitrary nature of definitions: "underweight" = BMI <18.5; "normal" = BMI 18.5-25; "overweight" = BMI 25-30; and "obese" = BMI > 30. There may not be much reason to quibble with the extremes on this scale. As expected, the majority of "excess deaths" were associated with the extremes in weight - both "underweight" and "obesity grade 2" (BMI>35). But of course what makes the headlines is the fact that over the time period studied, "overweight" people had fewer excess deaths of most diseases than "normal" people.

The first question anyone should ask is, what exactly does BMI measure? BMI is nothing more than a ratio of your weight by your height (squared). It takes nothing else into account. As originally conceived, the BMI was not intended for assessing individuals medically. It has become a popular measure in the media because it is somewhat useful for describing population-level trends - such as the well known trend in the U.S. toward more obesity over the last few decades. BMI data in this context can show us that there is something about the lifestyle of Americans which is causing us to gain weight, and in a rational world would lead to measures to provide plenty of decent food and opportunities for reasonable levels of physical activity for everyone in the country.

But for an individual, BMI is not particularly useful, because it does not take into account the individual variation in body type (for example, bone density or muscle density, which contribute far more to weight than fat), not to mention activity level or overall conditioning, or even gender. All the talk of BMI has emphasized calculating one's own BMI, for example at the federal government's CDCsite, which, based on the arbitrary, government-created ranges listed above, spits out an assessment that you are "normal," "overweight," etc. Of course the caveat on most of these sites is given that for "highly trained athletes" BMI may be "high"; it is implied that this condition is sufficiently rare that the great majority of us need not take it into account.

On any football team, even at the lowest level (such as my NAIA college), every player would be considered "overweight," and many are classified as "obese." Perhaps this is a straw man, but I would challenge someone who seriously believes in the BMI as an individual health measure to calculate it for anyone who regularly goes to a gym or just has more than moderate physical activity. Based on my own experience, I suspect that a lot of Americans who ended up in the "overweight" category were fit; hence, the "earth-shattering" results that it is beneficial to be "overweight."

Of course, these papers are indeed using the typical huge sample sizes to make their point, so aren't they using BMI correctly, to study general population trends? If only they said so in the discussion, or at least included the caveat about the arbitrary divisions in BMI classes, one could more easily put these papers into the proper context, which is that there are health risks associated with the extremes of BMI. But of course they don't. The truth is that only you and your doctor can assess your personal health risks and the benefits to changing your lifestyle (if that is even realistically possible for most people). The media saying to everyone, "hey, it's better to be overweight!" are missing the point. If you are interested in maintaining or improving your health, stop using BMI calculators. Just eat well and get enough exercise to feel good.

References

Flegal, K.M., B.I. Graubard, D.F. Williamson, and M.H. Gail, 2005. Excess deaths associated with under weight, over weight, and obesity. Journal of the American Medical Association 293:1861-1867.

Flegal, K.M., B.I. Graubard, D.F. Williamson, and M.H. Gail, 2007. Cause-specific excess deaths associated with under weight, over weight, and obesity. Journal of the American Medical Association 298:2028-2037.

Labels: health, humans, statistics

What do invasive species and chain businesses have in common? They exist in order to economically benefit a few people, at the expense of most people. They kill off local competitors, which has the long-term effect of destroying communities. We invite most of them into our landscapes and communities where they do their damage, and even help them establish, instead of making an effort to keep them out, or at least making them compete on the same terms as the locals. Each time we invite one in we think that this one couldn't possibly make a difference. We then complain and moan to the government to do something when the cumulative effect becomes obvious over time, but much too late to prevent. They homogenize communities, until over time, it's hard to remember where you are, just by looking around you.

Admittedly, these comparisons are apt only for intentionally introduced invasive species, but most of the worst ones are, because we gave them that leg up that helped them establish. Witness the many horticultural escapees, not to mention European starlings, which failed to establish more than once before an introduction finally took.

The ultimate reason that both invasive species and chain businesses exist is money. The few who expect to make a profit moving species around the world, and planting identical businesses around the world, benefit at the expense of the rest of us. We're the ones who have to expend time and money in a fruitless mission to eradicate pests such as purple loosestrife which was recently still available to buy in many states, even as it was belatedly placed on the noxious weed lists of dozens of other states. We're the ones who would prefer to get exercise, save money, and reduce pollution by walking to a nearby downtown to get what we needed, but who more and more every day have to get in the car and drive for miles to get the merest necessity.

The ecological community changes produced by invasive species and the human community changes produced by chain stores are slow in developing, so usually it is too late when we realize it is a problem. For some reason we do not learn from these mistakes, however. We continue to allow, apparently to serve general principles of economic freedom, importation of alien species which could become invasive, and we assign no responsibility to the importer if they do. We continue to compete for chain stores to open into our communities with tax breaks and other incentives because we are naively convinced by big business that the money brought into the community in the form of property taxes and minimum wage jobs from one employer is somehow better than the taxes and jobs provided by local businesses that will often be driven out of business by the chains. Somehow the profit that goes to local business owners, and thus stays in the local economy, versus the profit from chains that flies out of state seems always to be left out of the equation. Lower prices? Well, of course lower prices are necessary when there is less money in the community to spend. These stores don't arrive to serve an existing need; they create their clientele, rather like cheatgrass creates a fire-dependent ecosystem that extinguishes the natives unable to survive in it, but that suits the cheatgrass perfectly.

We need to stop the transformation of our ecological and economic communities. Downtowns are the heart and soul of small communities, and the small town leaders are letting them be gutted because they fear any consideration but short-term economics. This leads to exurb zoning where no one ever goes outside except to get in their cars. It is too late in many towns, but not all. Some are revitalizing city centers. Community leaders need to hear from those who believe that quality of life, including opportunities to walk and talk to other community members, is more important than a surfeit of minimum-wage jobs, just as nurseries need to hear from those of us who believe that it is not right to sell destructive invasives such as Russian olive trees, even if it is legal to do so.

Once the money, or the native species, leave the community, they are never coming back.

Labels: environment, humans, invasive species

A paper discussed in an earlier post (Alford et al., 2005) relies for much of its justification on a series of papers by Thomas J. Bouchard and coauthors. An expansive claim for genetic heritability of all sorts of behavior and attitudes is found in Bouchard and McGue (2003). Frankly, the arguments made are even more disturbing in this paper.

Why disturbing? What is truly the harm in scientifically separating out the genetic and environmental influences on everything from social attitudes to "vocational interests"? The harm is that such papers serve no function other than to fan the flames of bigotry.

We are likely not yet at the crest of the pro-genetics wave. There are more and more studies being published which claim genetic bases for all sorts of traits (e.g. politics, aversion to new foods, obesity). One walks a precarious path interpreting the actual significance of this work for the general public, who is under the mistaken impression that scientists know far more about human genetics than they actually do. The mainstream media certainly tends to work more as a blunt instrument than as a nuanced filter of published scientific studies, happily being used by authors and journals who have a strong self-promotion agenda.

The straw man constructed by the pro-genetics crowd is that obviously genetic variation exists or we would all be the same. But of course it is biological significance of genetic traits that matters, not whether or not the variation actually exists. Even the most rigorous study that shows valid statistical significance for variation in a trait does not necessarily demonstrate biological significance - in fact, the huge sample sizes often used in these studies, which has the intended effect of increasing the chance of reaching statistical significance, undermine arguments for biological significance (see figs. 1 and 2). If it takes a survey of 10,000 people to detect a difference, then there is clearly so much overlap in the groups being compared that the authors should be hard-pressed to convince anyone that it matters. A slight fluctuation about the mean is much more likely to be amplified into statistical significance, although the direction it is significant is determined randomly. This was brilliantly demonstrated in a pair of papers about birth order and IQ.



Where do all the heritability estimates come from? For example, Bouchard and McGue report "heritability of IQ is about 50%." This of course is based on twin studies. But the logic used by all of these authors (none of whom I have encountered so far are actual geneticists) to produce such an exact value of genetic heritability is flawed. They make the assumption that if you compare differences in scores on surveys between fraternal twins with the differences between identical twins, that difference is the genetic component of the trait. This assumes that the environment in which fraternal twins are reared is as similar as the environment for identical twins. This assumption has naturally been both challenged and defended, but for the moment, let us concede it as valid. That leaves us with the corollary assumption that the difference between fraternal differences and identical differences is therefore entirely genetic. This is where the problems with these studies lie (discounting the obvious problems with using tests or surveys - which are biased by authors, affected by mood of the taker, etc. - to make sweeping statements about genetics).

Identical twins not only share a genotype, but also a phenotype - they look the same. As explained in the previous post on this topic, how you look is going to affect your social attitudes, not to mention self image, mostly because of your interactions with other people, who clearly behave differently to people who look different. Until a study is conducted in which one half of 30 identical twin pairs has a dramatically altered appearance (e.g. is in a wheelchair or has had major facial reconstructive surgery), all the twin studies (even those in which the identical twins were reared apart, long a mainstay of the pro-genetics camp) declaring the percent genetic contribution for any subjective phenotypic trait will be meaningless.

These papers harken back to the dark days of phrenology and craniometry - the methods employed are no more scientific, because we know no more about how genetics affects these traits now (more than mere speculation) than we did back then about how the brain functioned. But, the results are used by those who are racist or sexist to defend their views. All traits are a unique combination of usually complex genetics and environment. There is no way to establish that a person a particular "genotype" for intelligence or social attitudes, and even if there were, the expression of that trait will be dependent on the environment in complex ways that are not easily measured. Most important, because of the huge overlap in any trait associated with the brain across all types of people, for any given individual, there is no way to determine what part of their intelligence, personality, or skills are based on their appearance, even if there actually is a true statistical difference in these traits for different races or sexes (Fig 2.). But studies such as these are used by people who wish to have their stereotypes confirmed "scientifically," and frankly one has to wonder if the authors are not such people themselves.


References

Alford, J.R., C.L. Funk, and J.R. Hibbing, 2005. Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99:153-167.

Bouchard, T.J., and M. McGue 2003. Genetic and environmental influences on human psychological differences. Journal of Neurobiology 54: 4–45.

Labels: environment, genetics, humans, statistics

The coqui frog Eleutherdactylus coqui, a native of Puerto Rico, gets its species name from the shrill call produced by males seeking mates, which is surprisingly loud for a beast the size of a quarter. Anyone from a part of the world with native tree frogs generally appreciates the lovely sound of calling peepers in the spring. Unfortunately, when the coqui was introduced to lands without its native predators to keep its populations in check, the lovely peeping sound in the distance was transformed into an overwhelming, piercing cacophony, which can be heard here at the site for Hawaiian Ecosystems at Risk (HEAR), where there is bountiful information on the hundreds of alien invasive species devastating Hawai`i's ecosystems. Listen to the recording. Then imagine playing it through your surround sound system at full wattage, and you will begin to get the idea of one of the problems caused by this species. After dusk, one literally has to yell to carry on a conversation at one house I have visited in Kurtistown (which lies between Hilo and Volcano on the Big Island).

Here is a youtube video of a single calling male. Well, puppies are cute too, but no one wants to live next to a kennel, do they? Even from a purely anthropocentric perspective, this invasive has much more direct effects on property values than any other. Control efforts are detailed at the University of Hawai`i College of Tropical Agriculture site.

While the attempted control of a tiny frog meets with far less opposition than previous plans to kill destructive feral cats in Volcanoes National Park, some PETA-types of course object. But even if you can tolerate the highly unnatural, deafening noise, anyone who cares about the ecological integrity of the Hawaiian Islands understands that coquis are a destructive pest that is incompatible with efforts to conserve endemic Hawaiian species (many of which are of course are living animals also).

Although predators in its native land clearly make an impact on coqui populations, it is remarkable how difficult it is, for humans at least, to localize a single calling frog. Apparently this is what the recent producers of smoke alarms were trying to emulate when they designed the system in which a dying battery causes the alarm to beep at long intervals. If your spouse, like mine, believes him- or herself to be the household's safety police, then you have about a dozen of these things littering your home, in every room. So, being able to find the one whose battery is dying is no trivial task. These contraptions strive to imitate the behavior of chirping frogs: as one attempts to hone in on the sound, they fall silent, in order to confuse and frustrate you, their predator.

As I have stalked around the second floor of the house, frozen for 30 seconds or more at a time, waiting for the next beep, my sympathies fall more into line with my father, who was decidedly not the Safety Monitor of our family. When smoke alarms first became available, my mother, whose very natural fear of house fires was grounded in personal experience, installed a single one in our split-level house. The first time it went off (the usual false alarm, of course, caused by kitchen smoke or whatnot) my father brandished a hatchet at the alarm, threatening over the excruciating whine to chop it to bits. Somehow my mother got the alarm away from him and turned off before he was able to make good.

My patience with the smoke alarms has run thin as well, every time I have to hurl one out the back door because my spouse insists on placing it in the kitchen, in defiance the manufacturer's instructions. "Ever heard of the smoke alarm that cried wolf?!!" I bellow.

But the Chinese-beeping-torture is the worst. I cannot move on with my life until I have ripped the innards from every alarm in the house, looking for the culprit, which is always the sixth or eighth one I've checked. My poor mother though, has seen the karma in her early support of smoke alarms. The Einstein who built the house she moved into several years ago placed a wired-in smoke alarm near the peak on the wall of their two-story living room, with only a narrow stair landing about ten feet below. Wired smoke alarms would seem like a better solution if they too did not have back-up batteries - after all, the power could be out when a fire starts. A note to contractors: even those batteries fail after several years - which my mother and her husband discovered when it started beeping - so, it would be a big help if those alarms were actually ACCESSIBLE! To get to this one required climbing a ladder placed on the landing at an alarmingly steep angle, a task most of us would rather not attempt, given our desire for the smoke alarm actually to save our lives, rather than end it. Thus, the residents had no choice but to wait two days for the services of their local fire department - who sent a fireman to make the climb and deactivate the alarm.

My mother called me shortly after the alarm had been firmly and permanently disconnected, and the haunted tone in her voice made me shudder at her recent trial. "It kept beeping..." she wailed, "Every. Twenty-six. Seconds." Though driven nearly to their wits end, their German short-hair pointer was clearly the most damaged of the three by the experience. Shortly after the beeping began he found the deepest recess of the downstairs guest room and burrowed within it, refusing to come out for anything but the quickest dash outside to relieve himself, after which he returned to his spot, trying, trying but (being a dog of very little brain) not succeeding in escaping the beeping torture. I witnessed his post-traumatic stress disorder on my next visit, when an inadvertent breaker pull caused one stray beep, and the terrified beast nearly knocked me over skidding to his designated burrow. Despite the fact that no more beeps were heard that night, the dog had to be crowbarred out of the corner of the room when I was ready to go to bed.

Really one of the stranger aspects of the low-periodicity beep torture is that it is not recognized as such by all vertebrates alike. Some friends, a family of four, invited us over for dinner once, and I noticed immediately upon crossing their threshold that they had a smoke alarm on the blink. I politely pointed it out to them, and astonishingly, the response I got was, "We know, it's been doing that for weeks now." Agog, I enquired with the grin frozen on my face, how they could stand it, and they just shrugged and said they didn't notice it after awhile. I tried to bear up under the strain, but by halfway through dinner I just couldn't keep myself from blurting out conversationally, "Wow, it's really amazing that the smoke alarm doesn't bother you." Being astute students of the subtleties of human communication, they finally got the hint, and one of them laughed as he went immediately to extract the offending battery.

I suppose that answers my question about why smoke alarms are programmed with predator-avoidance response. Those of us driven crazy by one are as likely to take a hatchet to it as a new battery (until we sigh to ourselves that maybe, just maybe it will save our lives one day), while the rest of everyone out there just can't be bothered to hunt them down (and may be selected out by unalarmed house fires). I just hope the people of Hawai`i have more success with accepting the grating chirp of the coqui than I have had with the grating chirp of a smoke alarm, because they will likely be there forever.

Labels: behavior, environment, humans, invasive species

My last post covered a paper that found brain physiological correlates of political attitudes. That paper did not address the origin of the physiological differences, i.e. whether they might be genetic or environmental. An earlier paper (Alford, J.R., C.L. Funk, and J.R. Hibbing, 2005. Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99:153-167), though, does claim a genetic origin for particular suites of political attitudes. While authors acknowledge that on the surface this seems nonintuitive, they back up their case by citing numerous studies that other social attitudes have a genetic origin.

This is another example of a twin study being used to support genetic causes of differences among people previously assumed to be purely environmental. The survey data used were collected not as part of this study, but recycled from a previous study, and include the usual thousands of twin pairs, because these authors, like so many others, assume that more is better, when that is not in fact true. A weakness of the data set is exposed when they calculate a surprisingly high 40% heritability of educational attainment, without any mention of the demographics of the survey-takers. Could there be any correlation of socioeconomic and education level and the willingness to return an esoteric research survey? It seems likely, but there is no consideration here of the possible effect.

The authors are all political scientists whose paper, published in a political science journal, purports to teach other political scientists how genetics works. (One can't help but wonder how they would react to a bunch of biologists pontificating on a political topic in a biological journal.) It probably does not matter whether or not any biologists actually reviewed this paper; twin studies appear in plenty of biological journals as well.

All the arguments the authors make supporting their assumptions, come from other twin studies, which have the same methodological issues, stemming from the ethical impossibility of manipulating human phenotype and social environment. The most important assumption upon which the results are based is of course the one apparently made in all twin studies: correlation in survey scores between identical twins minus correlation in scores between fraternal twins equals "heritability" of the survey scores. The authors attempt to address the obvious criticism that identical twins are likely to have a more shared environment than fraternal twins by citing studies that assert this is not so. Of course, if a weak study is published, all those that rely on it are weak as well. The problem with all of these studies is that they fail to separate the effects of genotype vs. phenotype. This is the major criticism of "twins reared apart" studies - similarities between identical twins reared apart aren't automatically genetic, because they look the same (and often have similar mannerisms). Researchers seriously underestimate the importance of visual cues in affecting human interpersonal interactions. Hence, their social interactions will have a greater tendency to be similar even when they live in different environments.

In a similar vein, when the authors claim that a majority of political attitudes are genetic, do they honestly think this explains why black women are likely to be more liberal than white men? Clearly phenotype, which drives much life experience, is the important difference here, not genotype. The authors also do not address at all the fact that many peoples' political attitudes change over time, sometimes in an extreme fashion. Yet they assert with a straight face that when children have opposing political beliefs from their parents, it must be due to a genetic mutation. They actually even calculate a heritability for party affiliation at 0.14. Yes, 14% of your choice of party apparently is from those alleles for "republican" and "democrat" you have tucked away.

Oddly, considering the tone of most of the paper, the authors do manage to point out correctly (even going into some depth on the topic) that all people are a product of the interaction of their genotype with their environment. They seem to do this to bolster their point that political attitudes must be partly genetic, but the discussion shows that clearly they think genes are as important as the social scientists they are criticizing think environment is. They go so far as to express regret that the current polarizing political environment will not change because of assortative mating - those with overlapping political views are more likely to reproduce together (true), and thus the "political genes" of their offspring will make them more likely to be polarized. Then they go on to speculate about the evolution of these genes and their effect on society, as if they actually know something about how evolution works, after reading a few papers.

Looks like all of the people with Ph.D.'s in genetics and evolution just wasted their time. They could have had a different career and still published papers on the topic.

Labels: humans, politics, sociality, statistics

A recent paper in Nature Neuroscience (Amodio, D.M., J.T. Jost, S.L. Master & C.M. Yee, 2007. Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nature Neuroscience 10:1246-1247) has been presented as far more controversial than it is - although surely the authors knew they would ruffle a few feathers with their study.

Here is the abstract:

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

The authors give citations to support the claim that "Across dozens of behavioral studies, conservatives have been found to be more structured and persistent in their judgments". I have not read those papers but for the purpose of this commentary will assume that there is indeed scientific support for this conclusion. Though their experimental procedure is clearly one accepted by neuroscientists, the rest of us are expected to take at their word that "responsiveness to complex and potentially conflicting information relates to the sensitivity of this general mechanism for monitoring response conflict." Here is the test:

Go/No-Go task. On each trial of the Go/No-Go task, either the letter "M" or "W" was presented in the center of a computer monitor screen... Half of the participants were instructed to make a "Go" response when they saw "M" but to make no response when they saw "W"; the remaining participants completed a version in which "W" was the Go stimulus and "M" was the No-Go stimulus; assignment to either version of the task was random. Responses were registered on a computer keyboard placed in the participants' laps. Each trial began with a fixation point, presented for 500 ms. The target then appeared for 100 ms, followed by a blank screen. Participants were instructed to respond within 500 ms of target onset. A "Too slow!" warning message appeared after responses that exceeded this deadline, and "Incorrect" feedback was given after erroneous responses.

There is no way here to confirm the authors' interpretation that results obtained on this test are explained by liberals' higher sensitivity to "cognitive conflict" at the level of political decisions, but it is an interesting idea, because it appears both from cited research and probably anyone's observations that conservatives tend to have more of a black-and-white view of the world, while liberals tend see more shades of gray. ("Liberal" here is used in its traditional sense, not the currently distorted media code word for "left wing." Indeed, hard left-wingers are arguably no more liberal than hard right-wingers.)

The paper wisely does not attempt to determine whether this brain-function correlate or political leaning comes first (and they certainly do not at all imply that the response of liberals to this test is "smarter," despite William Saletan's defensive interpretation). It should not be assumed that just because the brain shows a certain physiological response to a stimulus, this response is genetic. Just as the accumulation of memories alters pathways in our neurons, a response such as this may be "learned" by the brain as well, based on experience.

Of course, some people become more conservative with life experience. Here are three competently untested hypotheses for why this can happen (given the conclusion that liberals see more complexity in the world than do conservatives).

1) Often, people become more fiscally conservative as they grow older. Fiscal conservatism is, however, a separate issue from that of "cognitive conflict." Those emphasizing the long term will be more fiscally conservative than those who prefer to live in the moment, which is more correlated with age group than with social or political views. Certainly over the last three decades political conservatives have shown no sign of being fiscal conservatives.

2) Someone who has suffered a traumatic, life-affecting event, such as a death or lost job, or whose loved ones have, might find it simpler to have an easily defined target to blame. Bad economic times had a lot to do with the growth of the Ku Klux Klan.

3) There is really no way to form economic or social policy that takes into account all the complexities that a diverse group of people will experience. Because it is simpler to craft legislation that does not take so many complexities into account, policy makers - and the pundits living in the same beltway world, away from the real one, and those listening to the pundits - come to believe we live in a simple world with easily definable boundaries. Such was one of the major reasons the SCHIP legislation failed. The idea that there is a particular income cutoff, abov