22.1.05

Natural Criminals

I'm avoiding making any general comments on the Larry Summers controversy (quick summary: Harvard president says one of the reasons there are hardly any women science professors is that females are genetically less likely to be math geniuses). But I did want to make a note on one line in a Summers-defending article linked and quoted by Eugene Volokh:

It's a claim that the distribution of male scores is more spread out than the distribution of female scores—a greater percentage at both the bottom and the top. Nobody bats an eye at the overrepresentation of men in prison. But suggest that the excess might go both ways, and you're a pig.

I think people would bat eyes (the same people batting their eyes over the claim about science professors) if you suggested that the overrepresentation of men in prison is a genetic male trait. Most people take one of two positions on the male prison population -- either men are naturally inclined to crime, and thus there's nothing eye-bat-worthy about that claim, or social factors push men disproportionately into crime. If one were to prominently argue for the first position, holders of the second would not be pleased. Indeed, there would be enough echoes of 19th century social Darwinism and notions of a "criminal class" in the first position (or at least in the way it would be repeated among holders of the second) to generate some righteous outrage.
Stentor Danielson, 17:36, ,

21.1.05

Tropical Drugs

Newspapers and science blogs write a lot about the big new studies that come out in big-name fields like biology and physics, but you rarely hear about the work of geographers. So I thought I'd discuss an interesting article from the latest Annals of the Association of American Geographers that hits on a favorite topic of mine -- the wilderness idea.

Robert A. Voeks writes about the popular idea that tropical rainforests contain plants that could produce miracle cures for a variety of ailments. Despite some harsh words for the "drugs will solve all our problems" theory of medicine, he admits that the sheer biodiversity of the tropics means that if there are miracle cures out there, they'll be found in the tropics. What's interesting is where in the tropics.

The idea of tropical miracle cures has been an effective support for environmentalist campaigns to save the rainforest. People too selfish to care about nature for its own sake and too shortsighted to buy arguments about the importance of ecosystem functions can at least appreciate the possibility that a tropical plant might cure their heart disease. This idea rests, however, on a certain idea of what it means to preserve nature. The tropical rainforest is conceptualized as a primeval wilderness which should be preserved free of human touch.

Yet Voeks argues that it is in disturbed areas that useful drugs are most likely to be found. One reason is biological. Bioactive compounds of the type that make good drugs are more common in fast-growing annuals, which are in turn found more often in disturbed areas, such as along farm fields and around houses.

The other reason is that tne crucial avenue to finding these tropical drugs is talking to the people who have been living in these environments, and thus have already done the grunt work of fining many bioactive compounds. (This has in turn spawned a new crisis in the eyes of more radical environmentalists, who see nature being increasingly commodified and indigenous knowledge being stolen and even patented by transnational pharmaceutical companies.) These indigenous people are more likely to discover drugs in disturbed areas, since that's where they spend most of their time. More interestingly, Voeks compares the medical knowledge of hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. If medicinal plants were common in undisturbed nature but are wiped out by human intervention, we would expect hunter-gatherers -- who disturb their environments less -- to have a wider pharmacopeia. But in fact the opposite is true. Farmers know more medicinal plants because their activities encourage them to grow right next door.

This is emphatically not an argument that we can go ahead and chop down the rainforest. The problem with wilderness ideology is that it collapses all human disturbances into a single "bad" category. Indigenous farming is a far cry from creating pasture to take advantage of tax incentives. The larger point here is that conservation must incorporate both disturbance and human presence. It's too easy to say "just get the people out and let nature do its thing."
Stentor Danielson, 13:15, ,

Zeno's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

Edward_ reminds us of the tragedy (he provocatively, but not altogether inaccurately, decribes it as treason) of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" depriving our military of skilled personnel -- most notably the 20 desperately needed Arabic translators fired since 1998 because they were gay. In the comments, Katherine points out a poll showing that public support for gays serving openly has risen to 74%. (It's even higher in the younger age groups from which most soliders are drawn, though men are marginally less gay-friendly.) She hypothesizes that this surge in support is due to the prominence of gay marriage on the national agenda. Next to same-sex couples marrying, letting gays serve in the military seems moderate and reasonable.

This relates to a larger problem with the modern Democratic party -- or at least the Bill Clinton/John Kerry/Tom Daschle wing that holds the balance of power. Motivated by a desire to do whatever will win votes in the short run, and rationalized by an ideology of grass-roots agenda-setting, they make the mistake of taking the median voter theorem seriously. The median voter theorem states that you'll get the most votes if you take the position at the center of the spectrum of voter opinion. The problem is that the median voter theorem assumes that voter opinions are determined exogenously -- they make up their minds, then look to see what candidate matches their views. But in reality, the positions staked out by politicians are an integral part of the public disourse that helps voters choose their opinions. In a two-party system, the positions of the two parties help to establish what most voters -- particularly those not very interested in an issue -- see as the reasonable range of opinions. They then locate themselves within that scale. Chasing the median voter puts you in a sort of Zeno's paradox* as the positions to your extreme side are abandoned as outside the mainstream.

Thus Gavin Newsom made John Kerry possible. By setting up a firm and visible left border to the range of opinions on gay rights, people like Newsom made Kerry's stance seem like a comforting wishy-washy middle ground. Part of what now feels like the middle is the once-radical idea of openly gay soliders.

*I exaggerate a bit, since the parties' positions are not the sole determinant of voter opinion.
Stentor Danielson, 11:41, ,