The physicist delusion

I was reminded of this appropriate SMB cartoon by dmgregory while browsing the comments on PZ Myers’ post this morning.

Cancer does not give us a view of a bygone biological age

Scientific enquiry often benefits from outsiders bringing a fresh insight. The awesome success of molecular biology in the second half of the 20th century, for instance, was driven by a significant number of physicists, attracted by the challenge of understanding the answer to the question, posed by Erwin Schrödinger, “What is life?“.

However, outsiders can also arrive ignorant of important background knowledge and thus make contributions that do not advance understanding because they misunderstand, or omit important aspects of a research topic. Often the proponents of these “new hypotheses” are so enamoured with their idea that they ignore all reasoned objections (and evidence that refutes them). This morning’s Comment is Free section of The Guardian contained a good (or rather bad?) example of this: “Cancer can teach us about our own evolution” by the physicist Paul Davies. He wrote a similar article for The Guardian last year, and I remember a rather confused student citing this after one of my lectures on cell division at the time. The latest article offers no new insight, and crucially no actual evidence.

Davies writes, cancer “is embedded in the basic machinery of life”, a statement that few biologists would take issue with. The problems arise when he explains why he thinks this is the case. His hypothesis, co-proposed with Charles Lineweaver (another physicist), is that cancer cells have somehow reverted back to an ancient state resembling aspects of the single-celled life that existed “on Earth before a billion years ago”. He appears to be arguing that cancer cells are activating a set of genetic pathways that are normally silenced in healthy cells, and that these pathways date back from the time when our ancestors were single-celled. There is a grain of truth in this view, all cells are generated by cell division, and so must contain the machinery and pathways that regulate and activate this process. Since these processes are ancient, actively dividing cells, such as cancer cells, maintain active cell division machinery. However, the same is also true of the stem cells in your bone marrow, which must continually divide throughout your life to maintain the cells that make up your blood, but that doesn’t mean these cells are somehow recapitulating the conditions that existed a billions years past.

Also, although it is true that single-celled organisms, by definition, cannot get cancer, they do not “have one imperative – to go on replicating”. Even single-celled organisms must still coordinate cell division with other cellular processes and signals from outside the cell. For instance, beginning cell division when there are insufficient nutrients, or when the cell is too small leads to catastrophe. Thus, in both single and multi-celled organisms, cell division must be tightly controlled.

The article takes several other liberties with biology, but I don’t have time to take issue with all of them. The estimable PZ Myers has previously upbraided Davies for his use of the long discredited view that human embryos recapitulate key events in vertebrate evolution as they develop: Aaargh! Physicists! This erroneous conception appears again here: “Every human, for example, possesses tails and gills for a time in the womb.” No! Both fish embryos and human embryos have the same general structures that become differentially specialised as they develop. At no point does a human embryo develop gills!

Davies uses this erroneous statement to make the leap that because genes active early in embryonic development are also those “reawakened in cancer” (this is true, for the most part), then this must be because the cancer cells are reverting not only to a state that existed in the early embryo, but to an ancestral, single-celled state. This is a curious logical jump made less for the strength of the evidence and more because it fits the author’s hypothesis.

There is more at stake here than simply getting the biology wrong, or proposing hypotheses that don’t advance our understanding of cancer. Davies is the principal investigator of one of twelve Physical Sciences – Oncology Centres launched by funding from the US National Cancer Institute, at approximately $2,000,000 apiece. To be sure, there may be benefits from this multidisciplinary approach, but only if those involved get the biology right.

Update PZ Myers has just posted an excellent take down commentary of the Physical Biology paper that yesterday’s Guardian article was based on. Apparently there was also a Torygraph article earlier in the year that I missed, framing this dog’s breakfast of a “hypothesis” as “The final frontier in the war on cancer”!

Susan Greenfield says that the internet will eat your brains.

“I didn’t say, and I’ve been misquoted universally, that [technology] rots the brain and it’s bad, I’ve never given value judgements, ever,”
Professor Susan Greenfield, 2011.

I’m writing this, my first ever blog entry, after having attended the talk that Professor Susan Greenfield gave as part of the 2012 British Science Festival in Aberdeen, entitled The 21st Century Mind. The topic that she was speaking about, the influence that our increasing use of computer technology might be having on the development and physiology of our brains, is one that she has presented in numerous television, radio and newspaper interviews and articles.

Her opinion (and it is just that) is that our use of screen-based media, such as social networking and video games, is having a detrimental effect on our behaviour. This is obviously a controversial area and also one that the popular press (especially the Daily Mail) is fond of championing. The problem is that there is scant scientific evidence to support such a claim, and Professor Greenfield’s critics have suggested (for some years now) that perhaps, as a neuroscientist, she should try and address this shortfall in evidence. For a nice summary of Professor Greenfield’s view of this topic and her critics response see Happy Science‘s recent post.

Professor Greenfield began her talk by stating that she was merely bringing her concerns to the attention of society to encourage studies that would address the issue; she was definitely NOT scaremongering (lol!). The first third of the lecture was essentially setting out the evidence, for a lay audience, that the brain is plastic: it is remodelled by our experiences (though apparently this is not the case for goldfish brains). So far, so uncontroversial.

She then set out her hypothesis that computer-based media were having a negative effect by remodelling our brains, making us less empathic and less able to handle social interactions. This latter term she defined as being physical social interactions; where we can see and touch one another. Thus, her concern is that our reliance on social networking and mobile devices means that although we are having social interactions, these lack the richness that comes from actually being in the same room as someone.

She then went on to document the types of interaction that people might have online, illustrating them with Powerpoint slides. It was at this point that the lecture became a Daily Mail article. She essentially presented a caricature of social networking, describing it as people posting banal statements about their cats. However, I was particularly struck by her description of a Google search. She described what happens when you search for the meaning of the word “honour” using Google, and presented a collage of the images that such a search returned. Images. Not the text results that one would usually obtain. This for me was key; she used images because these support her claim about the shallowness of the online life. This selectiveness (cherry picking) characterised most of the “evidence” to support her claim.

Throughout her lecture she was essentially making value judgments – books = good, video games/social networking/mobile devices = bad. At one point she cited some research which showed that more children in the study were able to recognise a dalek than they were a magpie; making it clear that, in her view, being able to recognise the latter was more laudable.

She presented a picture of three children sitting around smiling and laughing, each of them talking on their phones, snidely pointing out that these children, although together, were not interacting with each other. But they were at least interacting. What if she’d shown a picture of three children reading (remember, value judgement: “books = good”)? Zero social interaction, so surely books should be tightly regulated too?!

Then she moved on to video games, but I’m not even going to bother describing her line of reasoning here. You already know how that must have played out (though she had one gem of a slide comparing a Japanese RPG (I think; it was a PS2 game) to War and Peace).

She then covered a study showing a generational decline in empathy (not that we know how robust these findings are) and explicitly linked this to increases in the use of digital technology. Really. There was no discussion of being cautious about correlation and causation.

Oh, and she compared her championing of the link between behavioural problems and computer technology use to that of Sir Richard Doll‘s efforts to show the link between smoking and lung cancer!

A summary slide calling for more studies (yes, that would be a good idea) and then it was all over. There were questions (I asked one about why she had used images as an example of the Google search output), but they were not really dealt with with anything other than defensiveness. I was left with the impression that Professor Greenfield was not really interested with obtaining scientific answers that would allow us to determine the actual risks that digital technology pose, or even having a rational debate, but rather her culturally embedded, value-based, dogmatic views about digital technology would not actually be swayed by any kind of evidence. I  wonder if that’s why she doesn’t really seem keen on carrying out a proper scientific investigation into this issue.